Anna frowned at the question, then hesitantly shook her head. ‘We went straight up,’ she said, smiling a little. ‘In the lift. I like to take the stairs, it’s good for me, I said, but he made me take the lift.’
Luisa tried to visualize the apartment building’s lobby. Lift facing as you came through the doors. She hadn’t seen the stairs. They must be round at the back.
‘And then?’ she asked softly. ‘I expect you were excited, weren’t you?’
‘Well, he said, don’t expect too much. He said, it needs work. He tried to keep my hopes down, I think. But I was excited. I haven’t ever had a place of my own.’
Luisa nodded. She knew how that felt. She and Sandro had lived with her mother for three, nearly four years before they got their own place; they’d moved out when she was pregnant. That had been how it was done. And when the baby died, thirty-six hours after she was born, Luisa remembered how that felt too, coming back to the empty apartment, too big for just the two of them.
‘And when you saw it? What did you think?’
Anna turned her head a little, a distant look in her eyes. ‘I don’t know. It was – a bit dusty. I think it had been empty for a long time. Josef kept apologizing for everything, when he couldn’t make the light come on.’
‘Was the flat furnished?’ There was something about Anna’s account that made Luisa uneasily curious.
Anna chewed her lip. ‘There were beds and a couch and a very old kitchen. You could sleep there.’ Luisa saw her glance quickly around herself. ‘Much older than this one, I mean, more like the one at the Loggiata. It would have been fine, of course. I am used to old things. I told Josef, there was no need to change it.’
‘And how was he?’
Anna set her lips together, a small line appearing between her eyebrows. ‘He was – agitated. A bit.’
Luisa nodded. Her unease was not diminishing.
Anna went on, concentrating as she tried to be precise, ‘He – he was excited like me, when we opened the door. Then he grew more – anxious, as we walked around. I think he was worried that I didn’t like it. I kept telling him I liked it.’
‘And did you?’
‘Of course,’ said Anna, still frowning, looking down at her hands. ‘I would have made it our home.’ She looked up. ‘As you said, it is a very nice part of the city. Very quiet, very green.’
Quiet, thought Luisa. Remembering the hum of the motorway as they had exited the bus on the ring road, a different sort of sound, low and constant. She preferred the sounds inside the city. People talking in the street.
The suburbs were an uneasy place to Luisa. A view of the hills was one thing, although you could get a similar, more distant version of that from the city centre if you were high enough. She pondered the slopes of the Mugello that would have comprised the view from that apartment, and below the picture-postcard view, the remains of old farm buildings slowly eroded by the advance of the city. Shacks and old fridges and woodstacks in the lee of the motorway, old lives disintegrating on the dirty verges and beside slip roads.
‘Of course,’ she said gently. ‘Very good for children, especially.’ Anna brightened, and cautiously Luisa proceeded.
‘Did you meet the neighbours?’
‘Not really,’ said Anna, and Luisa heard a defensive note in her voice. ‘I would have liked to. I suppose perhaps people keep themselves to themselves in those places. Do you think so?’
Luisa shrugged. ‘Some do,’ she said cautiously. Thought of Giovanna Baldini. ‘Some don’t. Maybe it was the wrong time of day,’ she went on. ‘People at work.’
‘Maybe,’ said Anna. ‘We didn’t stay long.’ Her head bobbed down. ‘A night. Then later, when I – when I was pregnant. We thought about where we would put the nursery. Two nights. Both times he had to get to work, early. I had to also.’
Luisa nodded, Anna looking away, not wanting to say any more. Two nights together, one to get pregnant, the second to make a home. Decide where to put the baby’s cot. What had they said at the Loggiata, when their little Anna stopped out all night?
‘I have one day off,’ Anna said, her small chin jutting defiantly as if she knew what Luisa was thinking. ‘Monday off.’ Luisa began to murmur something non-committal, only Anna took hold of her hand and with sudden and surprising determination held her eyes. ‘Where is he?’ she said. ‘Where?’
Looking back at her, Luisa waited a moment, concentrating on keeping her expression, her movements, her voice, quite calm. ‘We don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘We will, though.’ Uncertainly Anna nodded, not turning away, and then Luisa asked her, ‘You noticed something, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘When you went to that flat with him. You knew something was wrong, then, didn’t you? You knew even then.’
And keeping her eyes fixed on Luisa, slowly Anna nodded.
*
‘I don’t know who he is,’ said the woman called Marisa Goldman, glancing down at the crumpled paper with a cold stare. ‘No. But it’s a ridiculous question.’
The officers of the financial police might, to Sandro’s relief, have gone out on their lunch break – Sandro had no desire for a run-in with unfriendly authority – but someone was in Claudio Brunello’s office.
The door was firmly closed, but as Goldman had ushered him into her own room, at once impatient and reluctant, he had seen a large head bent over a desk next door. The head had been raised at the sound of Sandro’s entrance, and even though the computer screen on the desk had blocked all but the eyes and a bulky outline from view, there had been something about those eyes, the big rounded shoulders that, had Marisa Goldman not practically shoved him ahead of her into her office, he’d have liked a closer look at. Something familiar.
Sandro knew her type.
Bella figura
was all she cared about: keeping it together and looking good. Wearing the right kind of shoes. Luisa had a thousand customers like Miss Marisa Goldman, with long brown legs, long aristocratic necks, long noses to look down, women she’d clothed since they were fifteen but who wouldn’t deign to recognize her in the street. Empty-headed, self-absorbed, narcissistic people – they were everywhere – people who regarded things and labels as if they were more important than the human beings holding them out for inspection.
There were two photographs in heavy, discreet frames on the shelf: one of Marisa Goldman somewhere like Scotland, looking charming in a tweed outfit beside a heavy-set, glowering man, gun carelessly over her shoulder. In the other she was on a horse. More of the same: those sports that didn’t mean sport but status.
He kept his smile.
‘I know it’s an awful picture,’ he said patiently.
She thrust it back at him. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s an awful picture,’ and he heard weariness in her voice. Perhaps he’d misjudged her. ‘And it’s a bad time,’ she said.
‘I am aware of that,’ said Sandro earnestly. ‘Please.’
She’d only agreed to talk to him because he’d invoked Pietro and the investigation into Brunello’s death. With arms folded on the other side of the smoked glass, she’d glared at him stony-faced as he pleaded. ‘Call the Polizia dello Stato,’ he’d mouthed. ‘Ask for Pietro, Officer Cavallaro. He’ll tell you.’
‘So this man—’ She gestured at the paper now folded in Sandro’s hand. ‘He was passing himself off as Claudio.’ She shook her head tiredly. ‘I don’t understand. Why? Was it – fraud? Was he trying to – make money in some way?’
Sandro was struck by the fact that he had not considered that possibility; he really hadn’t. It was only at this moment that he thought of what Anna Niescu had said about her adoptive parents leaving her their savings: a few hundred, maybe at a pinch a few thousand, in the bank. A sum, from which Sandro had no intention of taking a penny himself. She was going to need it. But there were plenty of people out there who mugged and murdered for less. Was Josef going to suggest he invest it for her? He cursed himself: it took a money person to ask the money question.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, aware how lame this sounded. Then sat upright. ‘At least, I believe he only passed himself off as Claudio Brunello to one person. A limited deception.’
So far that was true, but then again he had not so far tracked down another human being who had been introduced formally to Anna Niescu’s fiancé. His spirits sagged further: so what if he was only thirty-six hours into this investigation? He’d got nowhere.
The young – well, youngish – man put his head around the door. Sandro had glimpsed him on the way in. The male version of Miss Goldman, perhaps, glossy hair, crisp collar.
They’d been in the middle of something when he’d knocked at the window, no doubt prompted by the Guardia di Finanza’s disappearance for lunch, and after reluctantly allowing him in, Marisa Goldman had concluded their talk without reference to Sandro, who was standing there like a fool. It had turned out to be nothing to do with officialdom, as far as he could tell – more like the usual office bitching.
‘It’s too much,’ Marisa Goldman had been saying. ‘If her mother needs – care, well, she should organize that. If she wants to be a professional. Calling her at work, God knows how many times a day, saying her mobile’s engaged and where is she? Rabbiting on to me about God knows what. Intruders? Delivery men?’
This woman, this Marisa Goldman, obviously had no time for mothers. Had she not had one of her own? Sandro had stayed silent, trying not to think about what would happen to his country if old women, old mothers, were no longer given respect.
The young man, retreating behind his cash desk, had looked pained, to his credit: had tried to defend whoever it was needed defending. Sandro saw a photograph of a motorbike pinned up behind the boy’s workstation. That was what they called them, workstations. The word made Sandro feel ill. He was beyond it now, wasn’t he? He’d never be able to knuckle down to office life again.
‘We’ve got ten minutes,’ the young man said now, looking earnestly at his boss. ‘Then I’ll open up, right? Do you – um – need me in here?’
And the penny dropped: Sandro remembered. This was the guy he was going to talk to when he got back from his lunch break, the one Roxana Delfino said spoke to a woman calling for Claudio Brunello. What was his name?
‘No, Valentino,’ said Marisa Goldman impatiently. Val, Roxana Delfino had called him. That would be him. Sandro eyed him covertly. ‘We don’t need you.’
‘Well, I—’
Sandro interrupted diffidently. ‘There was a phone call, wasn’t there? Miss, ah, Miss Delfino said you took a call.’
‘A call?’
Slowly something dawned in Valentino’s eyes. Could this boy be as dozy as he looked? Sadly, Sandro suspected that he could. Pampered kid: if you rated witnesses on a scale of one to ten, well-bred young men would be about a one and a half. They could hardly see further than the shine on their own shoes. Mean old ladies: now, they’d be up in the nines.
‘A call,’ he repeated patiently. ‘On Monday? From a woman?’
‘Yeah, that was stupid,’ Valentino said, almost but not quite shamefaced. You could say that, thought Sandro. How come this guy has a job? It occurred to Sandro that there might be circumstances in which you would need your employees not to notice stuff.
‘I guess it was his wife, trying to track him down,’ Valentino faltered. ‘Poor lady.’ He grimaced.
‘You guess?’ Marisa Goldman looked at the limits of her patience, staring at Valentino.
‘Well, she was pretty over the top. Is
Claudio there? Just tell me if Claudio’s there
, she kept saying. She didn’t actually say who she was before she hung up. I suppose maybe she thought I knew.’
Sandro looked at him. Trying to decide whether anyone could really be so dumb, or so uninterested. And found that the thing he didn’t want to think about was that calm and dignified woman, screaming down the phone.
Marisa Goldman turned to Sandro. ‘It was his wife. Irene Brunello is staying with me, now. She told me that she was phoning all over the place to try to track him down.’ She spoke stiffly.
‘She’s staying with you?’ Sandro could not stop himself raising his eyebrows at that. But Marisa Goldman was frowning as if already regretting saying anything at all, turning away from Sandro to the door.
‘Valentino, go and find Roxana, will you? We can’t open like this. Where on earth has she got to?’
The head withdrew, the door closing smartly behind him. And there was the poster again:
Look ahead! Get in line!
Sandro remembered with a sinking heart that he had still to ask his own bank manager about a mortgage.
‘Perhaps I could talk to him when he gets back,’ said Sandro, almost to himself.
‘Perhaps,’ said Marisa Goldman. ‘But perhaps he will be otherwise engaged.’
‘Miss Delfino was exceptionally helpful,’ said Sandro and immediately regretted it when Marisa Goldman’s eyes narrowed. Was she wondering how many of the bank’s secrets her colleague might have given away? ‘Look,’ he heard himself pleading now. ‘I understand this is a difficult time. Of course I am acting in my client’s interests but –’ and he held up a hand as she opened her mouth to protest ‘–but it is possible there may be a connection. With your boss’s death. It may help the police if we can trace this man. Don’t you see?’
‘You think he has something to do with Claudio’s death?’ Marisa Goldman’s whole stance had changed, become stilled, intent. Arms on the desk, she leaned forwards, closer to him. ‘Who is your client?’
‘I-I don’t think—’
‘Look,’ said Marisa Goldman, speaking carefully. ‘If you want me to respond to your questions –’ and she darted a glance at the office next door ‘–now of all the moments to choose, you must at least answer mine.’
Sandro regarded her, thinking furiously. ‘There is such a thing as client confidentiality,’ he said.
‘Like with doctors?’ Marisa Goldman replied, raising her eyebrows sardonically. This was better than her coldness, but Sandro still couldn’t bring himself to like her.
‘That kind of thing,’ he said. Then sighed. ‘Look, I can’t tell you her name. But I can tell you that it’s to do with a personal situation. She’s trying to find this man for private reasons. It is not a financial investigation.’
Marisa Goldman sat back in her chair, and he didn’t like her expression at all. Something like satisfaction, something like disdain. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said.