Dead Season Page 6

Luisa wasn’t starting till midday, she said, padding back into the bedroom in her nightdress with a tray, a napkin on it, two glasses of water, an espresso for him. He had heard her bustling in the kitchen, had smelled the coffee, and had kept his eyes closed in case it might all be a dream.

  It was so unusual for Luisa to start late – her mind was on work the moment she opened her eyes; she was always excited to get into the shop – that it did cross his mind, very briefly, that it wasn’t true. That she was regressing, turning into an idle teenager phoning in sick. Not that Luisa had ever, ever been idle.

  They drank, set the tray aside, slid back under the sheets to talk, side by side. Luisa was holding his hand, quite unconsciously. It was like being newly-weds. Sandro didn’t know if it was due to getting his anxiety over Anna Niescu off his chest and Luisa actually being fine with it – with the discussion of a pregnancy, an imminent birth. Or it could have been the meal at Nello together, just the right amount of wine – his small suggestion of a hangover almost pleasurable in the dim bedroom, a reminder that he wasn’t past having fun.

  Mostly, Sandro decided, it was the house-hunting. They had both, separately and in silence, lain there as the light crept in around the shutters. Enjoying the tiny breath of dawn cool in the air, seeing with new eyes the familiar lines of the room they’d woken up in together for thirty-five years and wondering whether they really could say goodbye to it.

  Yes, was the answer.

  ‘It’s down to money, you know,’ Sandro said. ‘That’s all. Down to how much we can get for this place, how much there is in the bank, how much we can borrow.’

  There was a pause while they considered what a bank manager might say to a modestly employed couple of sixty-something, thinking of taking out a mortgage.

  ‘I’ll make enquiries,’ said Sandro.

  He tried not to listen to the happy, whispering voices that started up in his head, telling him how good it would be to begin again in a quiet street with a view of a green hillside, how good it would be for Luisa, give her something to think about. Boost her immune system.

  ‘But it’s OK, you know, if – if it doesn’t come off,’ said Luisa, as if she knew what he was thinking. ‘This place isn’t so bad. Or somewhere else might come up, somewhere cheaper.’

  He squeezed her hand and, to forestall the disappointment creeping into the conversation, Sandro sat up. ‘OK,’ said Luisa, changing the subject obligingly. ‘So what’s your plan today? This girl, yes? This Anna Niescu.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sandro. He snorted. ‘Actually, maybe I could ask her fiancé for a loan. He’s supposed to be a bank manager, after all.’

  ‘You think he really is?’

  Sandro pondered. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘She believes it, though.’

  Luisa persisted. ‘If there was no answer on his mobile, or at this apartment he’s supposed to be doing up—’ And she paused. ‘Well, why didn’t she just call him at work?’

  Sandro recalled Anna’s eyes, round as saucers in response to this very question. ‘Oh, no,’ she’d said, something of reverence in her voice, and something else too. ‘I’d never call him at work, never. Oh, no, I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘I think he’d warned her off coming to the bank,’ he said warily.

  ‘Well, husbands do,’ said Luisa, getting up, tying her robe tight at her waist and setting her hands on her hips. ‘Don’t they? Not many like the idea of the wife turning up at the office unannounced.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ he agreed. ‘Particularly if she’s pregnant and hasn’t been introduced to anyone and isn’t even your wife yet.’

  Luisa turned towards the kitchen. ‘Never an issue with us,’ she said cheerfully over her shoulder. ‘You out in a patrol car with Pietro half the time, I’d never have known how to find you if I’d wanted to.’

  Reluctantly, Sandro got out of the bed, straightened the pillows and smoothed the single sheet under which they’d slept. At the window he pushed open the shutters and heard the rattle and roar of the garbage truck at the end of the street, smelled the stench from the dumpsters as they were upended into the back of it. There was early morning rubbish collection all over the city, he reminded himself; there were drunks and tourists too. A little apartment south of the river wasn’t the answer to every problem. He leaned on the windowsill. It was hot, already. Eight o’clock. But for the first time in weeks he’d slept soundly.

  ‘Did you?’ he asked absently. ‘Ever want to find me?’

  Luisa was back beside him, leaning out, wrinkling her nose at the smell. ‘Now and again,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Mostly not. Mostly I didn’t want to know what you were up to, cleaning up car wrecks, taking dead junkies to the morgue. Getting shot at by armed robbers. Maybe I should have.’

  Sandro tipped his head from side to side, considering the matter. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. And I never actually did get shot, did I?’

  They both knew that this was an evasion: he’d been shot at, during a raid on a warehouse in Prato, but they’d missed. He’d been stabbed three times – once in the arm, once in the thigh and once near a lung; he’d nearly bled to death. An HIV-positive hooker had bit him, twenty years earlier, when no one had known anything about the disease and it had taken nearly a year to have final confirmation that he was clear.

  ‘But one thing’s for sure,’ he said. ‘If her Josef was not the manager of the station branch of the Banca di Toscana Provinciale, he would make damn sure she never turned up there asking for him.’

  ‘Funny bank to choose, if he was just making it up on the spur of the moment,’ mused Luisa, head cocked as she looked at him. ‘Don’t you think? I mean, it’s such a dodo. Old-fashioned, obscure – I keep expecting it simply to vanish.’

  ‘That occurred to me, too,’ said Sandro thoughtfully. ‘And Pietro, for that matter.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe he picked it at random, or maybe he has some other connection with the bank we don’t know about.’

  With the departure of the garbage truck, the street was abruptly, albeit temporarily, deserted. Sandro blocked out the thought of that rusting wrought-iron balcony, on which they might both be sitting now, looking out towards the Casentino. ‘Although,’ he said, ‘the station branch is probably as far away from the Loggiata Hotel as you can get.’

  Chin in her hands on the windowsill, Luisa just nodded. ‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘But I still think it’s strange.’ Then she straightened. ‘I’m starving,’ she announced cheerfully. ‘Let’s go and get some breakfast.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  EVEN IN AUGUST, THE Piazza Stazione was never deserted. Nor was it much of a piazza, surmounted by the low, modernist bulk of the Fascist-era station that overlooked a patch of sparse and scrubby grass. The blackened concrete façade of an ugly 1970s hotel to one side, the shabby bus station, a busy roundabout. Not much of a piazza at all.

  Where the hell was it? Sandro stood at the taxi rank and pondered. In front of him a group of foreign teenagers lounged on the ground, leaning on their backpacks. One of the girls – pudgy, pale, pretty – had taken off her T-shirt and was sunbathing in a bikini top; Sandro stared, so dispirited by the sight that momentarily he forgot why he was there.

  All right. He passed a hand over his sweating forehead. He’d looked up the branches of the Banca di Toscana Provinciale: there were three in the city, three more in the suburbs. The nearest one to the station was in a road called the Vicolo Sant’Angelo, but although he had lived in the city more or less his whole life, Sandro didn’t know it. Nor, it turned out, did any of the taxi drivers, but then again, in August, what did you expect? Those left in the city were the no-hopers, half of them probably didn’t even have driving licences.

  One of the news vendors inside would have a map he could look at; he knew most of them. But for the moment he stood, under the shade of the station’s portico, watched another girl from among the backpackers feed a piece of fruit into a boy’s mouth, and thought about Giulietta.

  He and Luis
a had gone for breakfast to one of the big, gleaming, businesslike bars in the Piazza Signoria, a few metres from the shop and therefore very much on Luisa’s turf. Never mind that it was expensive, never mind it catered largely to tourists: the bar made its own pastries, it was clean and sparkling – marble, polished glass and yellow cloths – and there was the view. Not even the heat and the querulous voices of tired tourists shuffling past could spoil that: the fine turreted tower of the Palazzo Vecchio silhouetted against the glaring sky, the pale arcades of the Uffizi leading off to the river. Luisa had settled them on a corner of the wide terrace; the waiter had bowed to her because here she was royalty.

  Briskly Luisa had given their order: caffe macchiato, pastries filled with custard, a budino of sweet cooked rice, two glasses of water. Then folded her hands in her lap.

  ‘You know where you’re going?’ she’d said.

  Sandro had glanced sidelong at her and shrugged. ‘Of course.’

  ‘You should get one of those new phones,’ Luisa had said pensively. ‘You just key in an address, or the name of a restaurant – or a bank, for that matter – and eccolo! All up on that little screen, telephone numbers, map, everything. I’d like one. Beppe in menswear has one.’

  Sandro had snorted explosively. As if he would want to emulate Beppe in menswear. An amiable enough young man, handsome, fit, polite, but interested in nothing but his own reflection in the shop’s many mirrors. An airhead, as Giuli would say. Although Giuli had been known to harp on this particular string too: the magic telephone with all the answers. I know this city already, was all he’d say to her, or to Luisa come to that. I don’t need a map or a telephone directory; there’s no substitute for getting out there and talking to people.

  And as if on cue had come Luisa’s next question; Sandro had begun to suspect her of having a strategy, and that this loving breakfast together was a part of it.

  ‘Are you – um, are you seeing Giuli today?’

  The coffee arrived; just from the smell Sandro had been able to tell it was good. These days – well. August. He’d had a really horrible cup on Monday morning in the only bar still open in San Frediano, not his regular place: he’d had to push it back across the bar in disgust.

  ‘She’s coming over later,’ he’d said warily. He’d been beginning to think that, when she finished at the Women’s Centre, he might send her over to the Loggiata to talk to the girl again. ‘This afternoon. Why?’

  Luisa had carefully dissected the budino, looking down at the plate. When it was done, four neat quarters of sticky golden rice and pastry, she had looked up again and said, ‘I think she’s seeing someone.’ Sandro had felt his mouth hang open and Luisa had sighed. ‘I want you to talk to her about it.’

  ‘What?’

  Why should he be surprised? Giuli was only forty-three. Was she attractive? Hard for Sandro to judge. He’d first encountered her as a damaged teenager, long ago and briefly, then found her again, now a stringy, desperate, drug-addicted hooker, before prison and rehab shook her up and set her straight, or straight enough. She looked pretty good to him these days; every time he looked at the girl he marvelled at the strength of will that had pulled her back. She got her hair done every six weeks, had her clothes dry cleaned, was at work five minutes early. And as Sandro had observed, she had even mastered her quick temper – the long-suppressed rage of a neglected child.

  She had begun to care about others, and in a constructive way, too. Giulietta had learned to consider their problems in detail and work towards a solution; Anna Niescu was a case in point.

  And now she had a boyfriend?

  Sandro had put his face in his hands, feeling Luisa’s testing gaze on him. Because with Giulietta Sarto men had always been the biggest problem. If you asked Sandro – not that the psychotherapist ever had, not that Sandro had ever volunteered his opinion either – the self-mutilation, the drink, the anorexia, the drugs, had been the symptoms; men had been the problem.

  ‘It really hadn’t occurred to you?’ Luisa had asked.

  ‘Why?’ he’d replied, despairingly. ‘What makes you think she’s got – someone?’ But even as he’d said it, he knew, there’d been all sorts of clues.

  ‘That week away, last week,’ Luisa had said. ‘A week camping by Monte Argentario? Do you think she did that alone?’

  Slowly Sandro had shaken his head. ‘No. No – but—’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But she might have gone with a girlfriend.’ Sandro had stared down at the glaze on his pastry, still warm when it had been set in front of him.

  ‘Might have. But she didn’t, did she?’

  When she had got back from Castiglione della Pescaia, a pretty fishing village in the shadow of the big forested mountain that ended in the gleaming sea, the last place on earth the old Giuli would have wanted to go to, to be among the happy families and the old couples in their caravans, Giulietta had come straight round to Sandro and Luisa’s apartment. She was paying rent on a bedsit in San Frediano now, but their place was home.

  It had dawned on Sandro as he’d ushered her inside that this was probably the first time in her life that Giuli had been on holiday; she certainly hadn’t had a childhood brightened by family trips to the seaside. It had agreed with her, though; she had looked great. Brown as a nut, a hint of a belly from the good food, wearing some crazy batik wraparound thing she’d bought from a Senegalese on the beach and a smile that had split her sharp little face. She’d given him a bottle of wine from Pitigliano and Luisa a reproduction of an Etruscan statue, plonking them proudly on the kitchen table.

  When Luisa had asked her whom she’d gone away with Sandro had turned quickly and gone into the kitchen, so as not to hear her reply. But he had – he’d heard her conspiratorial laugh, too, as she’d answered, Nobody. The thought of Giuli getting herself a man was too complicated, and not just because Sandro was her father by default, in the absence of anyone better.

  ‘Just have a word,’ Luisa had said. ‘Make sure she’s – being sensible.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier coming from you?’ Pathetic, Sandro had thought, hearing the wheedling in his voice.

  Luisa hadn’t been listening. ‘She’s forty-three,’ she’d said, looking away from him to take in the piazza. A pale, exhausted-looking foreign woman was pushing a buggy diagonally across it, doggedly negotiating a listless cruise-ship group, in off the coast for a sweltering day.

  With a sinking heart, Sandro had understood her intonation: remembered Luisa at forty-three. The outer limit of fertility. Had thought of Giuli tenderly shepherding Anna Niescu up the stairs, as the girl’s belly preceded them.

  ‘It’s a dangerous age,’ Luisa had said. ‘She—’

  ‘No,’ Sandro had said sharply. ‘Don’t. All right. I’ll talk to her.’

  Though God knows, he thought now as he surveyed the bleached piazza, God only knows what I’ll say. And turned to hurry inside.

  The newspaper kiosk right inside the station’s echoing ticket hall was open. The young guy behind the counter – Sandro reflected wryly that he didn’t know him, after all, but knew his father, a sign of how things were, these days; next it would be the grandfather you knew – gave him a bit of a sideways look at first but grudgingly shook his hand, thus acknowledging there was sufficient connection between the two of them to permit him to hand over a dog-eared display copy of a city map.

  The Vicolo Sant’Angelo wasn’t even on the map, nor on being questioned did the boy know where it was at first. But then he brightened and got out his magic phone.

  The street turned out to be on the far side of the viale, the roaring six-lane ring road behind the station. As Sandro waited patiently for the lights, it seemed to him that everything – traffic, technology, other people – was moving too fast for him.

  The walk sign came up but there was a siren approaching from the east and instinctively Sandro hung back; he could tell it was coming fast. The girl beside him, impatient, took a step into the road but
he put out a hand and firmly kept her where she was. A pale-blue Polizia dello Stato vehicle hurtled past – too fast to see who was driving it – and an ambulance came in its wake, rocking slightly as it moved between lanes. Sandro waited, watching to see where they went, his hand still on the girl’s arm. Heading southeast, towards Fiesole perhaps, or down to the Ponte San Niccolo and Firenze Sud. The girl shook him off, shooting him a resentful look as she hurried across before the lights could change again.

  The Vicolo Sant’Angelo was a dingy street that ran between two faceless, traffic-choked, residential boulevards. A mix of big, grimy apartment blocks from the turn of the century – well, thought Sandro, turn of the last century, these days – and a newish, rather ugly residential development, all exposed brick and coloured panelling, already down at heel. Sandwiched between a boarded-up kitchen showroom and the dusty window display of an ancient hardware store, this branch of the Banca di Toscana Provinciale was not a good advertisement for the business.

  Standing a moment on the pavement outside, Sandro surveyed the place. The hole-in-the-wall cash dispenser looked as if it had recently been vandalized, and a large, grubby piece of chewing gum was stuck to the screen. The smoked-glass windows of the bank’s narrow frontage were dirty. No wonder the guy didn’t want his sweet young bride-to-be coming up here. Sandro, thinking of the reverence in her voice, tried not to visualize Anna’s small, brave face absorbing the disappointment, turning it around, but the picture was there anyway. He stood at the revolving security door and waited to be admitted.

  There was no air-conditioning, and the place was stifling; it was also unkempt, the polished marble of the floor was scuffed and dirty, and the strip lighting blinked and fizzed. A row of four cashiers’ desks occupied the rear wall but only one was occupied, by a bored-looking middle-aged woman with a frizz of bleached hair, chin in her hands as she contemplated him without curiosity. Eventually she leaned towards the glass of her screen and tapped it.