‘Did your boss have affairs?’ he asked, before he could stop himself, ask himself where he was going with this. Just wanted to wipe that look off her face, probably.
‘My boss has nothing to do with you,’ she said levelly.
Yes, thought Sandro, and just from the look she gave him, a whole history unfolded. Yes: he improvised. You and Brunello had a small thing, a few years back, no doubt you engineered it while his wife was pregnant or something, and he regretted it, he wasn’t that kind of man, and you bullied him into giving you this job out of guilt. That’s how it was. Sandro couldn’t have said how he knew it just from the cold flash in her eye, but he did. Sometimes a small gesture told a big story.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ And when she turned her gaze away he knew that she knew that he knew.
And Irene Brunello probably had a pretty good idea too: that woman wasn’t a fool. Did Marisa Goldman offer to take her in after her husband’s body was found, or was she asked? When men died, wives and mistresses often got together, to mourn or to scream at each other, or both. Not these two, though; he could picture them circling, dropping hints, evading, coldly polite. Irene Brunello would get to the truth in the end, he was fairly sure of that; he was also sure he didn’t want to come between them.
Marisa Goldman was watching him; she wasn’t telling him to get out. ‘Show me the piece of paper again,’ she said.
The bank settled into silence around them as she gave the picture another, closer look. She even went so far as to switch on a small anglepoise on her desk and hold the paper under it. Sandro shifted on his chair: he didn’t like it in here. The air seemed thick and sluggish in the heat, the gloom was oppressive, and the outside world, dimly visible through the smoked glass and security doors, far off and inaccessible. It was like being locked in a cave. He pulled at his tie to loosen it.
‘I don’t know,’ said Goldman slowly. ‘I don’t know.’ But there was something in her voice, more doubt than before. Sandro gave her time: his eye roving the room’s neat, minimal decor. Not like her boss’s, no family pictures, just those ones of her, polished and posing.
He noticed that she had a small stack of papers to her left, on the desk. She’d been doing some work. He tilted his head just a degree to get a look. The top page was printed with two colour photographs, a shuttered façade, a garden with some white chairs. His eye travelled to the letterhead: something Immobiliare, it said. Not work then? Galeotti Immobiliare. His head jerked up and he caught her watching him. Galeotti was the name of the estate agent who had shown them the apartment in San Niccolo. Small world.
He smiled.
‘How would I go about getting a loan?’ he asked, just idly, nodding towards the poster on the wall. ‘If it was me, I mean? What would I have to do to get, say, thirty thousand euros?’
Marisa Goldman eyed him narrowly. ‘Proof of earnings, bank statements, credit history,’ she recited distractedly, her eyes once again on the paper, held between both hands now. ‘You’d have to have an interview with our – with. Well …’ She looked back at Sandro, as though he was finally coming into focus. ‘You would have had to talk to Claudio,’ she said. ‘Some banks wouldn’t require that, but he was very hands-on.’ Compressed her lips. ‘And with older customers – it’s more complicated.’
‘Thanks for that,’ said Sandro drily.
She looked down again. ‘Do you think he might be a customer?’ she said. ‘This man you’re after? I really see customers only by appointment. Valentino and Roxana – Miss Delfino – they – ah – they have most of the routine customer interaction.’
Hands-on. Routine customer interaction. Proof of earnings. How could Sandro even contemplate asking to borrow money, here or anywhere else? They didn’t speak his language. But Marisa Goldman was looking at him, calculating.
‘But I might have seen him.’ She spoke stiffly. Was she finally beginning to see the point of them: the human beings who came in and out of here asking for help, asking for money, asking for sympathy? People in trouble.
The sheet of A4 paper was folded now, on her desk. ‘Yes,’ said Marisa Goldman. ‘I think I saw him in with Claudio, in his office. A month ago perhaps? Perhaps more.’
‘So he’s a customer.’
‘It would seem so,’ said Marisa Goldman. ‘I imagine he was asking for a loan. When you mentioned – well. That is generally what people want, here.’
And he saw her eyes shift, professional, cool, to look past him, and she got to her feet. Turning his head, Sandro saw them standing there, just inside the door through which he’d been admitted, Roxana Delfino and the boy who’d been sent to find her. They seemed almost out of breath.
‘Did he appear – this man you saw? Did you notice anything about him? Anything at all?’
‘Notice anything? No,’ she said. ‘People asking for money all look the same. They want to please you, they are a little nervous perhaps. They don’t know: in the end it’s all down to the figures.’ She compressed her lips. ‘He wasn’t our sort of – well. Claudio let him down gently, told him, “here’s my card, let me know if anything changes.” You know the sort of thing.’ She flicked her hair back. She’d have shown no such civility. The smile she turned on him was chilly. ‘Look, if you’ll excuse me now. We’ve got to open up.’
And she was brushing past him, out into the bank’s foyer. Feeling himself dismissed, Sandro followed her.
‘Roxana, your mother called.’ Marisa Goldman had already moved on, and as he edged around her to the door, she was talking to the Delfino girl in a tone that set Sandro’s teeth on edge. ‘Several times. I would like to remind you that this is your place of work.’
‘I—’ Roxana Delfino looked very pale. ‘My mother?’
Sandro hesitated at the door. His phone bleeped in his pocket and surreptitiously he stole a look at it. Three missed calls, it said, one from Pietro, two from Luisa.
‘It’s all right,’ said Valentino, darting a glance from Roxana to Sandro and back. ‘I’ll get opened up.’ And he hurried to a panel beside the security door.
Sandro felt Roxana Delfino’s eyes on him. ‘Miss Delfino,’ he said.
‘You’re back,’ she said, distractedly. She didn’t look as though her lunch break had done her much good. ‘Maybe you’re what we need,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘Maybe my mother needs a private detective, not a carer.’ Her troubled expression intensified.
‘Is everything all right?’ he asked, feeling his hand curl around the mobile, wanting to look at it, but something about Roxana Delfino detaining him.
‘Roxana,’ said Marisa Goldman sharply.
‘Back to work,’ said Roxana, meeting his gaze directly. ‘I’m fine, thank you, Mr Cellini.’
She remembered my name, he thought as he passed out through the security door, its strident mechanical voice lecturing him, unheeded.
Please step back and remove all metallic objects
. Well, that’s something. She remembered my name.
Out on the street, Sandro had to walk quickly away from the bank’s window as it was in full sun, the suffocating heat of a long afternoon hitting him like a wall. This could go on another month – that would kill him.
There was no sign of the returning Guardia di Finanza. Walking as far as the river, Sandro found some decent shade before he dialled the familiar number. As it rang, Sandro realized he’d left the picture of Anna Niescu and her Josef behind on Marisa Goldman’s desk. The only image of the man whose name they still didn’t know, a sheet of crumpled A4. Of course, it still existed, in theory. It was on the phone, they could print another off, it existed – digitally. But Sandro didn’t like digital, Sandro liked the real thing, even if the real thing was only a blurred image on cheap paper. He felt uneasy.
Looking along the river with the phone to his ear, down to where the grassy terrace of the city’s prestigious rowing club glowed in the late-afternoon light, Sandro saw a man in a singlet, with the deep tan and air of ease of the very wealthy, lifting the long fibreglass hull of a boat into the green water.
The voice answered, and not as wearily as the last time they’d spoken.
‘Pietro,’ said Sandro. ‘What’s new?’
C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN
W
ALKING HAD SEEMED A
good idea when Giuli left the apartment – no more than a kilometre; the Via dei Serragli was being dug up so she’d have had to make a long detour on the moped – but by the time she reached the vast and peeling front door of the Loggiata, she was exhausted. The heat thickened the air, somehow, so even moving through it seemed to use up extra energy. What was wrong with her? Getting old, old and heavy and slow, and her stomach bothering her to boot. Wouldn’t it be typical if she turned out to have some new type of hepatitis, or something, after all this time, after cleaning up? They’d had her tested for one or two things when she’d gone to prison and she’d been so surprised that she cared at all when she’d been clear. No HIV, no Hep C.
This heat.
And it wasn’t only her moving slowly today, it turned out. It took a good ten minutes before Giuli got an answer through the intercom, and another lengthy pause before the buzzer sounded and the latch clicked to allow her in.
Behind the door, the entrance hall – wide, dark and cool – was so deliciously refreshing that for a moment Giuli was tempted to just stay there a while, leaning against the crumbling plaster. But she went on up.
The grey ghost of a cat slunk noiselessly away at the opening of the hotel’s door, squeezing through the glass doors that stood ajar and gave on to the long
loggia
. At the reception desk Dasha hardly glanced up. She was reading a fat, cheap paperback, its spine cracked ruinously.
‘Ciao,’ said Giuli, cursing herself for sounding ingratiating. ‘How you doing?’
‘You again,’ said the girl, elbows on the desk, settling her chin in her cupped hands and looking at Giuli. ‘Kidnap, is it?’
‘What d’you mean?’ Giuli looked at her, expressionless.
‘You have our girl. Who do you think is doing the work, the chambermaid? Have you come for – for ransom?’ It was her idea of a joke, delivered without any more malice than usual, but it put an idea in Giuli’s head that she didn’t like.
‘Well, had anyone thought about what was going to happen when the baby came?’ she said, and thought, hark at me. Giuli the responsible, the foresighted, as if she hadn’t misspent her own youth more comprehensively than anyone she’d ever met. More than Dasha, whose eyes had returned to her book.
‘Not my problem,’ she said, chewing ruminatively as she turned a page.
Giuli gazed around. ‘And it’s not as if you’re busy, is it? Have you got any customers at all?’ She thought of something: two birds with one stone. ‘Is the old lady around?’
‘No,’ said Dasha, still not looking up. Giuli crossed over to the desk and placed her hand on the pages. Dangerously, Dasha raised her head, stared Giuli in the eye.
‘No to what?’ said Giuli, politely, meeting her black-lashed blue gaze. And Dasha laughed, unexpectedly.
‘You are like me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know there are any Italian girls like me.’
‘I’m older than you,’ said Giuli, stony-faced. Then cracked a smile. ‘And there’s a few like us. No to what?’
‘No customers,’ said Dasha, and stretching a thin pale arm over her head, she yawned. ‘And the old woman is not here either; she is asleep.’ Jerked her head. ‘Upstairs. Siesta she call it. Looks like she is practising for being dead, to me.’ She closed the book. ‘So what do you want?’ she said.
‘You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’ said Giuli, because then it came to her, what Dasha had been hiding, that last time. The girl’s smile faded and she was stilled, watching. She said nothing.
Giuli persisted. ‘I mean, since, you’ve seen him since he was supposed to have disappeared. Since Anna last saw him.’
She held her breath. Dasha looked around as if someone might suddenly materialize in the dead and silent space. She said nothing.
Giuli shrugged. ‘People aren’t as clever as they think they are,’ she said. ‘I knew something was bothering you. Why didn’t you tell me?’
The dark-blue eyes narrowed, the pale pretty face turned stubborn. ‘She’s better without him,’ she said, and folded her arms. Something in Dasha’s set jawline told Giuli to work around to it slowly. Not barge straight in there.
‘Anna is – better off without him?’
Dasha nodded, her mouth set in a line.
‘Why? What do you know about him?’
‘She don’t like him,’ said Dasha, her eyes flicking up to the floor above.
‘She. The old lady?’ It seemed to Giuli that Dasha was prevaricating. ‘And she’s always right about people, is she? About – foreigners, for example? About you?’
‘She’s – what you say – she is racist, yes,’ said Dasha equably, as if she was saying, she’s vegetarian. ‘She don’t like foreigners too much, but I am cheap. She even say I am clean, like usually Russians are not.’ Her smile didn’t reach her eyes.
‘That’s the only reason she doesn’t like him, that he’s foreign?’
‘Not only reason. She says he has a dirty job.’
Giuli sat back, looking up at the ceiling, thinking of the old woman lying like a corpse up there, chewing over ancient hatreds. ‘A dirty job. You know what his job is?’
Stiffly Dasha shook her head. Giuli leaned towards her, feeling queasiness stir low in her gut, feeling a little sweat break on her upper lip. A tiny frown appeared on Dasha’s face as if to say, don’t ask for sympathy. Don’t ask for sympathy from me.
‘Where did you see him?’ Giuli hadn’t intended to whisper, but a hoarse whisper was what came out.
‘You all right?’ asked Dasha warily.
‘This heat,’ said Giuli. It passed. ‘Where did you see him, Dasha? Did he come here? When?’
Abruptly Dasha stood up, paced to the glass doors leading on to the wide
loggia
and pushed through them. After a moment’s indecision Giuli followed her.
It was better outside; they both felt it. The
loggia
faced north-east and was in shade. It was probably hotter than inside but less stifling, the air less still. Dasha rested her forearms on the waist-high parapet and looked down into the street, Giuli beside her. Her phone blipped: damn. She took it out, glanced at the screen, turned it off. Damn: she waited a moment for the silence to re-establish itself.