‘A lesion?’
‘Like a deep graze, or a burn.’
‘And that stuff on his shoe, that was ash, right?’ Sandro ran his tongue over his teeth, thinking. His mouth was sour. That was the heat too, and last night’s wine. ‘A fire?’ He puzzled over it, thinking aloud. ‘But he wasn’t seriously burned.’
‘No, no,’ said Pietro, distant, not quite answering. ‘They’re analysing the ash. It’s something unusual. Cellulose, celluloid, something like that.’
‘Pietro,’ said Sandro, losing his cool just a bit. ‘Look. Is this a problem? I know he’s not my guy. I know it’s not my case. I know all that. I’m just trying to be thorough.’ He sighed. ‘I just wish we could – I don’t know. Sit down and chew this over. Face to face.’
There was a long silence, and Sandro resigned himself to failure. He had no leverage: he couldn’t ask, he could only wait, and patience wasn’t his strong point.
Then Pietro breathed out explosively. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I know. It’s just delicate, you know? With the Guardia and all. All right. There was some – DNA evidence.’ Again Sandro waited. ‘That blood – it wasn’t all his. We’re checking it against what we’ve got registered. You never know.’
All right. Sandro was keenly aware that Pietro hadn’t told him not to worry, this was fine. But still.
You never knew. There was no national DNA database yet; the legislation was still being wrangled over. So presenting it as evidence was far from being a guarantee of results, unless things were absolutely cut and dried. But there was an embryonic resource, and some regional forces and some individuals were becoming enthusiastic about collecting samples. They could get lucky.
‘I’ll let you know.’ And again that resignation.
‘Thanks,’ said Sandro humbly, staring down at the pavement.
‘Chiara loved the present,’ said Pietro, out of the blue, then hurriedly, ‘I trust you. You won’t let me down on this.’ And he hung up.
It was a warning.
Sandro turned and once again he looked inside the bank. Time to grow some balls, he thought, and rapped on the window; when those inside turned towards him, he took out his badge and held it up against the glass.
*
Why didn’t anyone tell me? This was the thought that ran stupidly through Roxana’s head as she stared at what was left of the Carnevale.
Stupid, because why would anyone?
Oh, by the way, Roxi
, she could just hear Maria Grazia say,
the old porn cinema’s closed down, thought you’d be interested
. Not.
It was hardly dramatic, either. They’d only got around to mounting the board halfway round the frontage. The signage – a vertical strip of coloured neon letters spelling out the name, 1950s vintage – was intact. Gaudy once, never tasteful, maybe they’d even be re-used now that kitsch was in again. When the building became whatever it was going to become, people would walk past, they’d shop there, maybe they’d even live there, and they’d be oblivious to the fact it had once been a porn cinema.
Roxana had never seen a porn movie in her life, nor had she the intention of ever doing so. She came closer to the boarded-up façade, unaccountably depressed. Why? It was a horrible little place. The dark glass, the mealy-mouthed notices forbidding minors entry and, inside, the dirty, dog-eared posters of thonged backsides and plastic breasts – dearly visible to those minors, undiscouraged, who would have had their noses pressed against the glass.
All on computers now. It had to be worse. Millions of images, each one a hundred, a thousand times worse than anything they ever showed in here, and no one to police who saw what. At least with the old cinema in the backstreet there’d always be some old dear leaning out of her window to see whose husband might have been paying a sneaky visit.
There was a door fitted in the hoarding. Roxana stepped closer and out of the shade, feeling a wave of heat rise from the stone.
So this was why the dark-eyed man with his cashbag hadn’t been in: his job was gone. Had whoever owned the cinema found a place for him somewhere else? For some reason, that mattered to Roxana. What would he do? He’d always been so polite. Waited obediently, let old ladies go ahead of him, never grumbled if there was a queue.
You didn’t think customers made any impression, not really, just the same old thing day in, day out, but there they were, the details, they stacked up over the years. Maybe it was the same for someone working in a porn cinema. The shade of lipstick, the dog always tied up outside, the car parked illegally, the particular brand of aftershave. Ma would say it was the OCD. ‘You shouldn’t fill your head with all that stuff,’ she’d say. ‘All those little tiny bits and pieces, a waste of space. Only so much room in your brain.’
And then, ‘You’re just like your father.’ With his labelled jars and drawers in the shed, his tools laid a certain way in the box, his folding and refolding of shirts.
She should have gone and got that toolbox and fixed the gate herself, shouldn’t she? Roxana realized she was dreading going home, talking to the handyman about the gate. What if he wasn’t trustworthy? What if he preyed on vulnerable women?
Stop it.
Roxana looked up at the building: like the signage, it dated from the 1950s, and it was drab and filthy. It would have sprung up after the war; this close to the Ponte Vecchio, a lot of buildings were just as ugly, the originals having been blown up by the retreating Germans. The plaster was black with decades of grime and exhaust fumes. The windows were thick with dust, inside and out. There was a sign up, too high for her to read: an artist’s impression of balconied apartments and people – those blissfully ignorant people – walking by. Redevelopment: of course. The only mystery was that it had taken until now.
How long since she last walked down here? How long had it been boarded up like this? The man had brought in takings only ten days ago. She moved closer to look at the pine boarding: it was still tacky with resin and smelled of the forest. Then she put her hand against the door that had been cut into the tongue and groove, and it swung open under her hand. Without thinking, she stepped through, and the door banged shut behind her.
She stood on the pavement, hidden by the boarding from the street. The steel fishnet security shutters were still intact. Stepping up, she peered through. Between the shutters and the smoked-glass doors, the floor was ankle-deep in a slurry of junk mail and other flotsam: Roxana could see the polystyrene of a fast-food container, with the shrivelled remains of its contents. A number of envelopes she recognized, the little paned ones with the mark of the bank’s franking machine, then she turned her head sideways to see better. MM Holdings: that was the name of the addressee. No surprise there: the company was a customer of the bank.
One of the darkened glass doors was ajar behind the shutters and with some displacement of air, from inside or out, perhaps even the delayed effect of her own entrance, a gust of something reached her. It was not clearly identifiable, that smell: it was some combination of dark things, of staleness and damp, rotting carpet, the sharp stink of urine and something chemical too, something sulphurous, but Roxana, even having grown up in the city with its overflowing dumpsters and leaking drains, found herself putting a hand to her mouth and nose and holding it there.
There was a sound from behind her. The flimsy door wrenched open and as she turned a voice, deep, angry and suspicious, and not quite Italian.
‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’
A man in a torn T-shirt under overalls, wiry and unshaven. He carried a hammer.
‘Sorry,’ said Roxana, ‘I’m sorry,’ and saw him looking her up and down in silence, the shirt and jacket and tights. She didn’t belong here.
‘I – I was looking for someone,’ she stammered, and his stare hardened.
‘There’s no one here,’ he said curtly. He was from the East, she thought, Romanian or Polish or Bosnian, one of those. ‘The place is empty. We’ll be getting guard dogs in next week; you’re lucky you didn’t come looking then.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘The door wasn’t locked, I just thought – he might still be here.’
‘Who?’ said the man, folding his arms aggressively.
Roxana darted a glance over her shoulder into the dim, fetid interior beyond the wire shuttering. ‘He used to work here,’ she said. ‘That’s all. He just – just disappeared. I wanted to know where he’d gone.’
Something dawned behind the man’s eyes, no more than a crafty glimmer. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘What d’you want him for, exactly? Girl like you.’
Roxana swallowed: she didn’t like being called a girl, suddenly.
‘Nothing,’ she said, involuntarily taking a step backwards, feeling the stinking dark behind her. ‘It’s all right, it doesn’t matter.’
‘Let me tell you,’ said the builder, and a smile widened, without warmth. As he uncrossed his arms, she saw the veined flexing of biceps, despite his leanness. ‘It was disgusting in there. Whoever he was – he didn’t live like a king. That little hole of his.’
She couldn’t stop herself; incredulously she blurted, ‘He
lived
in there?’
The man with his hammer grunted, rocking on his heels. ‘You can call it living,’ he said. ‘This city,’ and he smiled again. ‘You seen them? It’s not all rich, with the swimming pool and the garage. In the basement, in the attic, they live like rats, no one can see.’ And the arm with the hammer relaxed and the hand swung down loose at his side. ‘Should have got started months ago,’ he said. ‘Come looking in September, no more pigsty. You find someone your type.’
‘It – it was a business matter,’ Roxana improvised, wanting to shut him up, wipe that smile off his face, wanting to push past him and run.
‘Business?’ and he cocked his head, suddenly quite still: it was as if the word had sent an alert somewhere. ‘What kind of business?’ And then, pushing his angry face close to hers so she could see the trace of white in his stubble and smell the cigarettes on his breath. ‘You tell me your name, please.’ And his hand was on the strap of her handbag, and holding.
‘Roxi?’
And she felt her knees almost buckle with relief at his voice, coming from the other side of the tongue and groove boarding. High-pitched, a bit panicky, a bit useless, but she’d never been so happy to hear it in her life.
‘Are you in there? The security guard said – Roxi?’
It was Val, come to find her.
C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN
S
HE APPEARED IN THE
kitchen doorway, padding on bare feet, pale but not sick, not any more. The ghost of colour in her cheeks.
From the kitchen table Luisa smiled at Anna tentatively. The tabletop was scattered with pages of notes: Sandro’s notes. She hastily pushed them into a pile and pulled out a chair beside her. Moving gingerly under her own weight, Anna lowered herself obediently into the seat.
Without asking, Luisa put water on to boil. Camomile tea, the answer to everything and nothing. Sweet biscuits: she wished she had something better than the plain ones she kept as a last resort. She would buy something with chocolate, Luisa decided. She should also get something more tempting and began to wonder where she might get a decent chicken in August; chicken would be good for the baby.
Telling herself not to be daft, that Anna Niescu would probably have fled before she got back from the butcher’s, Luisa turned from the stove to see the girl studying a page covered in Sandro’s scrawl. He’d written down what they told him about the apartment. It was headed,
Via del Lazaretto
. It was about the only thing on the page that was legible, but it was enough. Anna turned her head sideways to meet Luisa’s gaze.
‘You went there?’ she said, and at the trace of pride in the girl’s voice, Luisa’s heart sank. ‘Did you see it? Did you see our apartment?’
Carefully, Luisa set the cup in front of her and the plate of biscuits. She sat down.
‘It’s a lovely area,’ she said. ‘Close to the countryside, isn’t it? Very nice.’
Anna set her chin in her hands and gazed off into the distance. ‘You think I’m an idiot,’ she said simply. ‘You think he deceived me.’ She sat up and looked into Luisa’s face, hands folded on top of her belly. She didn’t even glance at the biscuits.
‘I don’t know,’ said Luisa, and it was the truth. However bad it looked, she still clung to the belief that the man had at least loved Anna Niescu. What kind of human being could deceive this child, in that way? If Sandro were here, he would tell her,
Plenty. There are plenty of them out there
. Luisa knew as much herself, if she was being sensible, only she wasn’t being particularly sensible at the moment. Going to see that apartment with the balconies in San Niccolo had only been the start of Luisa not being sensible.
‘We couldn’t get inside the apartment,’ she said with a sigh and pushed the plate closer to Anna. ‘Eat. For the baby.’
Anna contemplated the biscuits, which Luisa had arranged in a star shape, and picked one up. ‘No,’ she said, nibbling, the food held in her little paw of a hand. ‘I couldn’t get inside either. No one would let me in. That porter knew I was there but he hid from me.’
‘Did you see him when you went there with your – with Josef?’ asked Luisa. ‘The porter?’
‘He spied on us,’ said Anna, still nibbling, to Luisa’s satisfaction. ‘I saw that the door was open a crack.’
‘But he didn’t come out? He didn’t speak to you?’
Anna shook her head and laid the biscuit down. It looked as if a mouse had been at it. Luisa gestured towards the tea and Anna drank. Luisa waited; Anna was defensive enough as it was. If there was doubt in her mind, somehow it seemed important to Luisa that she realize it for herself.
Eventually Anna spoke. ‘Josef had the keys.’ She frowned. ‘Three or four keys on a keyring: a big Ferrari keyring, red with the horse. A small one for the front gate, a medium-sized one for the front door, a long one for the apartment door, a tiny one for the postbox.’
She was observant. That hadn’t really occurred to Luisa before. ‘Did he look in the postbox?’ she asked, more out of idle interest than anything else. It was the first thing she would do herself, on returning home.