Dead Season Page 8

  Mobiles were supposed to be switched off at the door and kept off; if anyone had heard the trill that announced a text message, she would have been reprimanded. But that was because the unspoken rule was: keep the phone on silent. Nobody actually switched them off: not the cleaners, not the doctor on duty, not the nurses, not the security guy. They needed a security guy at the Women’s Centre, not because of the women but because of the men that followed them in: the batterers and stabbers, the ones who branded their wives’ faces on the stove and the ones who told them they loved them. The ones who wanted to force them to have the kid, the ones who slipped abortion drugs into their coffee.

  The heat didn’t help, that was for sure, and their clientele couldn’t afford a month on a sunlounger at Forte dei Marmi either. August wasn’t a quiet month at the Women’s Centre. Anna Niescu’s problem was by no means as bad as it got; Anna had plenty going for her, compared with most of the deadbeats that came through the door.

  The phone bleeped again, and the pale face and lank hair of the doctor on duty appeared at the door of her consulting room. ‘Sarto,’ she said wearily.

  ‘Turning it off,’ said Giuli, smiling shamefacedly, holding the thing up. When the woman’s head disappeared, she took a look. But this one was from Sandro.

  Lunch?

  Sure, she typed, her dark maroon fingernails clicking across the screen, porta romana midday-ish? Giuli could text faster than anyone she knew. ‘Shows your motor skills are intact at least,’ Sandro would say, with wry respect. Because with what she’d put her nervous system through, it was nice to know.

  Sandro wanted something: she was supposed to be in the office this afternoon anyway, at two-thirty. He was going to take her along with him to talk to Anna again.

  Giuli held her finger on the off button until the little screen dwindled and died. Along the corridor in an examining room a woman cried out in pain, a small, hopeless sound, like a cat in a back alley. Giuli thought of Anna’s bright face as she smiled down at that belly. A baby: a joy. The equation was as uncomplicated as that.

  Looking down, Giuli realized she had her hand protectively on her own stomach. As if: the very thought raised the hairs on the back of her neck. Giuli had never wanted a baby; she wasn’t going to start at her age. But the chain of thought, lighting up its path in her brain like the display on an arcade slot machine, was irresistible. Why now – why did Anna Niescu come into her life now? And why did Sandro want to talk to her over lunch?

  But before she even pushed through the door to the modest self-service restaurant – open all year round, on the viale in the great arched shadow of the Porta Romana – Giuli had a pretty good idea why. She could see him through the glass, sitting in a corner, frowning down at his hands tented on the formica table in front of him, beside his old battered panama hat.

  ‘Luisa’s put you up to this, hasn’t she?’ she said, swinging her bag down beside her, admiring in passing the new brown on her arms, the fine bleached hairs from a week in the sun.

  ‘Let’s get something to eat,’ said Sandro, starting up. He piled stuff on her tray: Russian salad, bresaola, two rolls, a piece of cake.

  ‘And she told you to feed me up while you were at it?’ Giuli set down the tray and fastidiously divided the oozing mayonnaise of the salad from the meat.

  ‘You’re going to eat it, aren’t you?’ said Sandro, impatiently.

  She forked up a load, pointed it at his plate, where two sweating slices of pecorino lay unadorned beside some small hard pears. ‘If you do,’ she said, and cheerfully began to chew, hungry after all. Starving, in fact. Sandro eyed her: apparently her appetite was worrying him now, on top of whatever else.

  Giuli decided that if he was going to interrogate her about her private life, he’d get no help from her.

  ‘How’s it going?’ she said. ‘Have you tracked him down yet?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Sandro cautiously. ‘I think he might be up in Monterosso, you know, in the Cinque Terre, with his family. August, you know; at the bank they said he left on Friday.’ Giuli thought she saw a shadow pass over his face as he said it.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘The name’s right,’ said Sandro. He eyed the cheese on his plate, and gingerly cut off a corner. ‘I’m not a hundred per cent sure about the face. Maybe we can get the staff mugshot online, and Anna can take a look.’

  ‘You sickening for something?’ said Giuli. Her own plate seemed to be empty, suddenly. She pulled the cake towards her. ‘Or maybe we could go up to Monterosso and ambush the guy? It’s only a couple of hours on the train.’

  The piece of cheese still on his fork, Sandro appeared depressed. ‘So it’s just the old story,’ he said. ‘Married man, with a bit on the side. A whole family on the side.’

  ‘Is that worse?’ Giuli found herself saying. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s worse. He might have forced her into having an abortion, I think that would have been worse. I think he loves her, even if he is an arsehole.’ And she stopped short at the expression on Sandro’s face. ‘What?’ she said defiantly.

  ‘Since when did you believe in love, Giuli?’

  She laid down her fork, mouth full of chocolate cake. It was hard to fight back under the circumstances and, besides, he was right. Since when did she believe in love and family?

  ‘All your fault,’ she said, swallowing. She wiped her mouth. ‘You and your old-fashioned values. Eat your cheese. What would Luisa say, wasting good food?’

  ‘Are you seeing someone, Giuli?’ he asked abruptly.

  She sighed: that was Sandro. Nowhere to hide. She held up her hands in surrender.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Satisfied? Yes, I’m seeing someone.’

  Sandro pushed the plate aside. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s great, Giuli.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Giuli could not have sounded more sceptical. ‘No way, Sandro, no way are you going to leave it at that.’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s none of my business,’ he said, but he was smiling. Even if it was a funny, twisted, anxious sort of smile.

  Giuli relented. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘It’s serious. I’m not being stupid. I know a bad guy when I see one, these days. Let’s face it, if I don’t, who does?’

  ‘Well,’ said Sandro, ‘he’s certainly given you your appetite back.’

  She eyed him narrowly, and he looked down to examine one of the hard little pears on his plate more closely than was necessary.

  ‘Which is a good thing, right?’

  He sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Where did you meet him?’ Sandro’s voice was lowered almost to a whisper. And when she didn’t answer he said, awkwardly, ‘It is a him, right? Not that – I mean,’ and she saw something like crafty hope dawn in his eyes and burst out laughing.

  ‘That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?’ she said. ‘Oh, Sandro, I love it, how you’re trying to be cool with it. That’d be so easy, you’re thinking, actually, wouldn’t it? Giuli hooks up with a nice girl, a girl to look after her, make her eat, cosy up in the evenings together. Nice and safe.’ Giuli paused, thinking about it. ‘Actually, yes. It would be nice, I might even have wondered about it myself – even if I’m not sure girls are as safe as you think they are. After a year at the Women’s Centre.’ She leaned across the table, right up close, and whispered, ‘Only trouble is, I’m not gay.’

  Sandro was now looking so sheepish she could have kissed him. ‘So where did you meet him?’ he mumbled.

  He’d asked Anna Niescu that, too. Like a kindly father: it was a key question, Giuli understood now. You wouldn’t want your girl hanging out in the wrong places, for a start – I met him in an S & M bar, Dad. Or her boyfriend either, one of those men who comes up to girls in the street and tells them they’ve got beautiful eyes. What had Anna said? She’d looked up at them from her uncomfortable plastic chair, eyes gleaming at the memory, and said, ‘He was buying oranges, at the market in Santo Spirito, I was too, for the hotel. Fi
ve kilos. He carried them back for me.’

  Giuli thought about that market stall. Back in the winter, the stallholder waddling in a padded coat, her stall piled high with black cabbage, artichokes and pyramids of blood oranges from the south. Hard to imagine how cold the city could get, as they all baked and wilted at the other extreme. She thought of Anna’s small frame, trying to stagger back to the hotel under five kilos of Sicilian oranges, a man bending down to offer to help.

  She sighed: her own story was not so romantic, for a start. ‘He’s a computer guy,’ she said. ‘He services the computers at the Centre, once a month, he’s always helping me out. Found me an old laptop for twenty euros on eBay, reconditioned it for me.’ It wasn’t enough for Sandro; she could see that from the set of his mouth. ‘Not much of a looker, a couple of years older than me, very shy. Very, very shy.’

  If you want reasons, she thought, why anyone would look twice at me.

  ‘He’s called Enzo. And yes, it was him I went to the seaside with.’ And for a second she closed her eyes, remembering the glitter of the sea. ‘His dad’s a butcher, they used to do the markets selling porchetta in summer, when he was a kid, and since he started work as a computer engineer, well, he says someone’s got to do it. Someone’s got to do emergency cover. He’s that kind of guy.’

  A bit like you, she wanted to say. Doesn’t complain, gets on with it.

  Sandro was thinking about it, she could see, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief to buy himself time. Deciding whether or not to be relieved: it didn’t come naturally to Sandro, though, relief. She looked at the lines in his forehead from all that worrying; she wouldn’t have him any other way. Who else was going to bother?

  ‘Not your problem,’ she said gently.

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Sandro, signalling for a coffee to the tired middle-aged woman behind the heated display. It might be a self-service restaurant, but coffee was coffee. The woman moved to fill the little hand-held filter, and Sandro turned back to Giuli. ‘I don’t suppose you’re going to bring him over to meet us, then?’

  ‘Might do,’ said Giuli warily. ‘Eventually.’

  The coffee arrived, one mouthful of treacly black for each of them; Giuli was suddenly aware of Sandro watching closely as she downed hers straight off.

  ‘What?’ she said. He drank his, looking at her over the top of the tiny cup.

  And then she got it: maybe it was that they were both fretting over Anna Niescu and her troubling condition but it seemed like her mind and Sandro’s were running on the same track today.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘no way. All that stuff about my appetite. You’re checking to see if I’ve gone off coffee, aren’t you?’

  Sandro began to make protesting noises but she cut him off.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ she said, half laughing, half horrified, ‘I’m too old for the birds and bees conversation, Babbo.’ She shook her head. ‘And I’m too old to get pregnant.’

  And twenty-five years of drugs and anorexia and not really caring if you live or die, doesn’t get your body in shape for a baby, either, she didn’t say. And just as well.

  ‘Let’s not go there,’ she said instead.

  There was a sound from Sandro’s pocket: his ringtone was the loud jangle of an old-fashioned telephone bell – hardly, she’d pointed out to him more than once, the discreet choice. He fumbled with reading glasses from his top pocket – since when, Giuli wondered, had he needed them? Could he really be getting old? – then peered over them anyway at the little screen. He lifted a finger to stop her talking.

  ‘Sorry,’ he mouthed, putting the phone to his ear. ‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Hello? Pietro, is that you?’

  There was a clatter from behind the self-service counter, of metal trays being hurled into the sink. Grimacing, Sandro turned away from the sound and put up his hand to block it out from his other ear.

  ‘You’ve found a what?’

  ‘Go, go outside,’ she mouthed, making ushering movements.

  Gratefully Sandro took his hat and got to his feet, stopping to extract a handful of crumpled notes from his pocket and push them at her before hurrying for the door.

  Giuli sat and watched him go, and from behind the counter the worn-out woman in her blue overalls paused, her arms full of greasy trays, and her eyes fastened on Giuli.

  She’s wondering, thought Giuli. She thinks he’s probably my dad, but she’s not sure; for some reason the thought made her heart just a little heavy.

  She took a sip from her glass of water, ran it around inside her mouth. The coffee here wasn’t much good, she decided. It was bitter, but then, it was August. Nothing tasted the same in August.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE SMALL CAR STUTTERED, jerked and nearly stalled as Sandro nudged into the traffic coming off the wide ring road and down from the hills that formed the city’s southern boundary. Half the road was up, down to one lane. At the big roundabout of the Piazza Ferrucci, south of the bridge of San Niccolo, the lights changed to red.

  Is it me? he wondered as he wrestled with the gears. Am I losing it? Surely he couldn’t have actually forgotten how to drive, even if it had been a while. The car – an ancient, unfashionable incarnation of Fiat’s smallest and most economical model – was dusty and unloved, its roof crusted with pigeon shit and last year’s leaves and all the city’s airborne filth. It did not inspire respect among his fellow drivers, which was why he was finding himself squeezed out at every junction and traffic light. He should have walked to lunch with Giuli, only the heat had defeated him, together with the thought of trying to have a fatherly chat when sweating into his suit. Calm, he thought. Pietro’s not going anywhere.

  He’d left the restaurant to stand under the huge portal to the city, the massive stone arch at the head of the artery that was the Via Romana, and tried to understand what Pietro was saying. Would the famous magic phone solve this problem he had of not being able to hear a damn thing on his mobile? Or perhaps he was just going deaf, along with everything else.

  ‘We’ve got a body,’ Pietro had seemed to be saying. ‘And I thought you might want a look at it.’

  ‘A body.’

  For a moment Sandro had stood very still as the world seemed to whirl on around him, the traffic, the dusty trees along the viale, a gang of tourists just brought up under the arch and their guide gesticulating upwards.

  In thirty years as a serving police officer in a big metropolis – most of those with Pietro beside him – Sandro had seen bodies before; he’d dealt with murders, but not so many that death meant nothing. That had been some time back, too: six months ago he’d investigated the death of a woman in a car accident, but by the time he’d seen her she’d been cleaned up, put back together and laid out on a refrigerated drawer under a sheet. It had been years – three, or was it four? – since he’d been first to a fatality and had to take the impact of it.

  ‘We’re at the scene,’ Pietro had said, and from his tone Sandro had known, even down a crackling mobile line with traffic noise in the background, that it was nasty. Pietro had spoken quietly – he’d never heard his old friend raise his voice – but there was just the trace of a shake, of hoarseness in the lower registers, that Sandro knew very well.

  ‘You OK, Peet?’ he had said, quietly in his turn. ‘Sounds like a bad one.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Pietro had said, and he had cleared his throat. ‘Not pretty. But he’s got ID on him, in the name of Claudio Brunello. A staff pass card, too, that says he’s the manager of a branch of the Banca di Toscana Provinciale.’

  ‘You remembered the name?’ he had said. ‘You haven’t lost your touch, Pietro.’

  ‘The story stuck,’ Pietro had said. ‘Sad one.’

  And it had looked like a sad ending.

  The lights turned green and this time Sandro scraped through on to the roundabout and into more stationary traffic. A people carrier came up alongside, bicycles on the roof-rack, and first a mother’s harassed face glanced in his direction
, then her child’s, smeared and red, turned towards him from a babyseat in the back. Another child, bigger, was reading determinedly on the other side. Sandro shifted his eyes back to the road ahead and the big car moved on past. The rear window was crammed to the roof with stuff: supermarket carrier bags bulging with food, brightly coloured beach towels, the wheels of a folded buggy.

  Claudio Brunello. With cold dread Sandro found himself back in that office where a framed photograph of a woman and three children sat on a shelf; where Roxana Delfino had told him her boss was away on holiday, with his family. A place in Monterosso: perhaps the people carrier that had just overtaken him was on its way to somewhere similar.

  It pulled away from him, the father changing lanes impatiently; they’d been in the car an hour already and they weren’t out of Florence yet. Dangerous, though, to have the rear view blocked like that.

  Sandro came up on to the wide bridge. Ahead lay the dusty trees of the African market’s sprawl, a splash of red oleanders, and the small tented structure that – unmistakable to Sandro – indicated the presence of a body. They’d cordoned off one lane to accommodate the pale-blue police vehicle parked at the roundabout, and the traffic was a nightmare.

  Sandro parked under the forbidding, barbed wire topped wall of the military barracks, on the Viale Amendola, and walked back. Holiday traffic squeezed into the narrow confines of one lane, and rubberneckers. As he edged on foot between the cars, breathing the oily fumes, Sandro could see the faces. Turned in their seats and pressed to the glass, pointing at the forensic scientist in his long coat and latex gloves standing incongruously beside a busy roundabout like some postmodern civic sculpture, talking to a policeman. Just for a ghoulish moment or two they’d stare as they crept past, then they’d turn away, towards their holiday.

  Sandro reached the crash barrier and climbed over, again feeling his age. Pietro, whom he’d observed discreetly monitoring his approach, tipped him a warning nod over the technician’s shoulder and Sandro stopped where he was.