A current account. The account had been exceptionally active until the late nineties. After that takings had fallen off dramatically, dwindling to less than was required to finance the account’s operation. The sell-off must have come just in time. She wondered why it hadn’t been negotiated sooner; then she saw. A loan taken out against the property a year ago would have had to be repaid before the sale could go through: this was the same debt discharged in the letter she’d found stuffed behind the cupboard. Discharged last Friday. Roxana clicked on the mortgage file for detail, and as she did so she heard something, a small, familiar sound, and she was so absorbed suddenly and the sound so familiar that Roxana overrode it in her head.
Something wasn’t right. She peered at the figures. Something was wrong. And then there was another sound and she looked up.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh.’
*
They were both in the front of Pietro’s car, with the air-con on. It seemed safer there, somehow, the sight of sheet lightning coming down somewhere over by Pistoia had put the wind up both of them.
‘Jesus,’ Pietro had said, awed by the spectacle, the whole sky lit briefly like neon over the Pisan plain. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well we’re not going to the seaside.’
Inside the car it was very hot in spite of the air-con, and horribly humid. From behind the windscreen the sky looked black, but it still wasn’t raining. ‘We can’t stay here,’ said Pietro, starting the engine, glancing up at the trees. ‘Under a tree, on the top of a hill? I’ll take you over there.’
They parked up on the street outside Marisa Goldman’s gate.
‘It’s not money, then,’ said Pietro, nodding at the villa’s expensively pale façade, at the outhouses and the roses, glowing fluorescent in the strange light.
Sandro shook his head. ‘You don’t know that,’ he said. ‘Appearances aren’t everything.’
‘She was here all along,’ said Pietro ruminatively. ‘Do you think – could a woman have done it?’
Sandro had taken out his wallet and was sorting through it. Had he kept the card? Probably not. He raised his head, focused on Pietro. ‘Depends on the woman,’ he said.
‘Nice car,’ said Pietro, nodding at the handsome machine standing on the driveway. A customized Cinquecento, a kept woman’s car. ‘We could get forensics to pull it in. If she moved him in that? A woman?’ He was deeply dubious: the car looked like no more than a toy.
‘Yes,’ said Sandro, ‘just not yet,’ and returned to his task. Patiently he sorted through old receipts, the card for a
rosticceria
around the corner from home, a reminder from the surgery for his prostate check. Damn. He got out the phone and without expectation scrolled through the numbers, but there it was. Giorgio Viola.
As he waited for the connection, he summoned up the man, his pale, sweaty despairing bulk behind that desk north of the station, his defeated look as he walked away from the bank and along the river last night, Sandro watching him through the long lens of the birdwatcher’s camera.
‘You might ask,’ he said as an aside, hand over the mouthpiece, just while he remembered, ‘a guy who takes pictures of birds, down on the river, not far from the African market. You might talk to him.’ Pietro looked bewildered, but before Sandro could explain further, Giorgio Viola answered his phone.
It took five minutes of patient explanation before Viola softened even fractionally. Damn, thought Sandro, why aren’t I better at this? It wasn’t as if he didn’t sympathize with Viola. How could he convey it, that he was on his side? That they were on the side of – what? Of the defeated, the not quite competent, the stupidly soft-hearted. Only the more he wanted to be sympathetic, the gruffer he sounded.
‘I’m only trying to find the father of this woman’s child,’ he said eventually, in despair. ‘I don’t want to do any insider trading. The last thing I want to do is get you into trouble. Just give me a leg-up here.’
There was a silence, the chink in Viola’s frightened obduracy. And then he spoke.
‘There was the transfer of a considerable sum.’ Sandro held his breath, hearing the man’s fear, his voice quick and breathless. ‘Brunello transferred just over a hundred thousand euros from the bank’s reserves, initially into his own account, just before close of business on Friday. His own authorization.’ And then Sandro could almost hear the man clamp his mouth shut.
‘He was defrauding the bank?’
‘I didn’t say that.’ Viola’s voice showed that he still felt unsettled. ‘I don’t know. I just pointed it out to the Guardia, we don’t know yet. But to do that last thing on a Friday night – I don’t know.’
‘You said initially? Initially into his own account? And where subsequently?’
He could see Pietro, head cocked, listening intently.
‘I don’t know. They don’t know yet. It looks as though there have been attempts – to conceal the eventual transfer. The Guardia di Finanza are the experts – there are so many ways, you know. To launder money, to disguise the disbursement of funds. They’re taking their time – look. Look. I have a pension, if I play my cards right. Please. I can’t say any more. The Guardia will share the information with the authorities in due course. Won’t they?’
Like hell – and he wasn’t the authorities, anyway. But the man’s manifest terror defeated him, he let him go. ‘You’re one of the good guys,’ he said, and as he hung up he heard Giorgio Viola sigh, a small, unhappy sound that somehow encompassed all they shared.
They sat in silence in the car a moment: this was how he and Pietro had spent their every waking hour, side by side in the front seat of a stale-smelling vehicle, adjusting the air-con or the heating, saying nothing. Watching, or thinking, or preparing to get out and deal with something they didn’t want to deal with. A little over a hundred thousand euros: Sandro’s mind wandered over the figure, imagined Brunello in his office, Friday night, on the way to the seaside to his wife and children. Transferring money – for what? Hold on. Hold on. He turned to Pietro.
‘So he was stealing,’ said Pietro, suddenly despondent, before Sandro could say anything.
‘That’s what it looks like,’ said Sandro slowly. ‘Just over a hundred thousand euros.’
‘A lot of money,’ said Pietro, leaning his head back.
‘Yes,’ said Sandro thoughtfully. ‘Or perhaps not enough. If you were going to disappear and spend the rest of your life on the run, say. Not enough.’
He could feel Pietro’s attention.
‘Can you find out who owns that place?’ he said abruptly. ‘Who owns the Carnevale? Or rather, who owned it?’
Pietro shrugged, still watching him. ‘Easily done,’ he said. ‘A phone call.’
Sandro frowned down at the mobile still in his hand, looking at the cluttered little screen. An icon was blinking at him. Would the magic phone Giuli had been so keen on – what seemed like an age ago – would that explain things to him patiently, like the old fool he was? Somehow he doubted it. At random he checked his messages, and there it was. He held the phone to his ear.
Roxana Delfino, sounding hurried and anxious. Telling him she thought Josef Cynaricz was the man who’d been out to her house, telling him she thought somehow the man needed her help, that he’d come to her for help. And another man had come after him, a young man in white trainers. A man her neighbour really hadn’t liked the look of.
Thoughtfully he flipped the phone shut and turned to Pietro. ‘You might send Matteucci down to Roxana Delfino’s place at the Certosa,’ he said. ‘She’s in the phone book.’
‘Delfino? The girl in the bank?’
‘Sounds very much like Gulli’s been out there. You’d think he’d stop wearing those white trainers.’ He frowned. ‘So Gulli’s after – Roxana? No. After Josef. Off his own bat? I doubt it. And how’d he know where to look? How’d he know Josef had been out there?’ He put a hand to his head, perplexed. ‘You think you could – I don’t like to ask. But I think it’s just her and her mother. I don’t like to think—’ He stopped.
Pietro nodded. ‘We’ll get someone out there,’ he said, looking up at Marisa Goldman’s villa. ‘What about this?’ he said.
‘I need you to let me run with this, only for an hour or so,’ said Sandro. ‘Do you trust me? Give me a morning.’ He peered through the windscreen: it looked more like nightfall than morning.
‘I trust you,’ said Pietro, and he leaned across and opened Sandro’s door for him. ‘Get going.’
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-S
IX
O
H
,
SHIT
,
THOUGHT GIULI
, tearing around the sweaty room in the half-dark, oh shit, oh shit.
It was ten minutes since Dasha had called her, and she couldn’t find her keys. She heard Luisa’s voice in her head,
Turn on the lights, might be an idea
. She wanted to cry, but the time for crying was past.
At the Women’s Centre the charge doctor had sounded merely bored when eventually, an hour or so back, out of some last vestige of self-respect, Giuli had roused herself to call in sick.
‘Feeling rough,’ she had managed. ‘I think it’s something I’ve eaten.’ An excuse transparent through over-use, and they had both known it.
‘No problem,’ the doctor, a woman she’d never liked, had said. Giuli had heard the idle calculation in her tone: give her one more chance, maybe, we can get a replacement, plenty more where she came from. Ex-junkie, ex-hooker, waste of space.
The worst of it was, she reminded herself of her own mother, a woman dead more than twenty years but when alive often to be seen lying motionless with self-disgust, face down on the bed. Mumbling incoherently.
You’ve come so far
, Luisa would say.
This is nothing. This isn’t the end of the world
. Giuli tried to hear Luisa’s voice as she lay there with stupid tears leaking from her eyes but it didn’t make it any better.
You’ve found a man, you’ve started to hope for something, for a day and a half you wondered if you might be pregnant. And you’re not. You probably never will be: but since when did you want a baby anyway? Get over it
.
What would Enzo think, if he could see her? Face swollen with crying, reckless with despair. He’d run a mile.
And the thought of going into the Women’s Centre and seeing those women, pregnant or aborting or begging for contraception, abusing the unborn with drugs or happy and hopeful – well. She couldn’t do it. She had felt poisonous, her head full to bursting with rage and disappointment.
And then Dasha had phoned. Giuli had stared down at the phone and the unfamiliar number, letting it ring a good long time until she picked up. Straight away she had been able to tell something was wrong: Dasha’s Italian had turned ragged, her accent heavier. Not the bored, guarded girl Giuli had last seen.
‘Hold on,’ Giuli had said sulkily, initially resentful of the girl’s intrusion. ‘Talk more slowly. Who called her?’
‘Not called,’ Dasha had said. ‘Sent text message. Him. He sent the message asking her to come to him. She showed me.’
‘Josef?’ The words had drawn Giuli upright, off the bed. She had rubbed at her face. ‘Josef sent her a text message. After all this time?’
‘You knew he was around,’ Dasha had said angrily. ‘I knew, you knew. I don’t know why he didn’t try before. I begin to think, perhaps he is a good guy. He will leave her in peace. To be safe, just want to know she is all right, that is why he is coming every day, here.’
‘Every day?’ Jesus, Giuli had thought. Under our noses. ‘You’ve seen him today?’
‘Not yet,’ Dasha had said. ‘Maybe I won’t see him, if he is meeting her. If he has changed his mind, if he wants her after all.’
Giuli had crossed to the sink, taken her flannel, soaked it and pressed it to her face a moment. Something hadn’t been right about this.
‘Why wouldn’t he come to the hotel? Just walk right in.’
‘I don’t know.’ Dasha had sounded angry. ‘Maybe because he knows we would send him away. Maybe he knows the old woman don’t like him. Since a long time, something with his dirty job and that woman who employ him. Some old problem, between those women.’
‘Woman? A woman runs the Carnevale?’
‘I don’t know everything about it. I think yes.’ Dasha’s voice had turned stubborn and frightened.
‘It’s all right,’ she’d said, conscious that Dasha could clam up at any moment. ‘It’s not your fault, Dasha.’
‘My fault? Who said it is my fault? Is these men.’ She spat out some of her own language, unmistakably a bad word, or series of bad words.
‘Yes,’ Giuli said, trying to stay cool. ‘I know.’
‘I should have kept her here,’ she said through something that sounded harsher and more painful than tears. ‘I should have called the old woman and we could have made her stay. But – I didn’t know. I didn’t know she would – maybe not come back.’
‘Where’s the old woman now?’ asked Giuli. Thinking of the bad business between her and whoever ran the Carnevale. Whatever woman.
‘Out,’ said Dasha. ‘I didn’t tell her. She would be angry. She went out, to talk to someone, she said. Had coat on.’
‘Coat?’
In this heat.
There was a weary exhalation. ‘You can’t talk to her. She don’t listen. She hate everyone, except maybe Anna.’ And an angry sniff, as though to hold back tears. ‘That baby is coming soon. She was walking so slowly, to the lift, like it hurt her.’
How could you let her go? Giuli couldn’t say it: Dasha might go for her, or shut up for good.
‘All right,’ she said carefully. ‘It’s all right. There was nothing you could do. You called me, that’s the main thing.’
There was a silence, but Dasha didn’t hang up.
‘You saw the message,’ she said.
Dasha cleared her throat. ‘Yes.’
‘Can you remember what it said?’
‘She showed me first his name, at the top of the message. Showed me that it came from him: Jo, it said.’ Dasha sighed. ‘So proud of this mobile he give her. His number the first in there.’
Giuli waited: in the pause she became aware of her own breathing, of her own body functioning calmly now that the situation required it. No more panic or self-pity. Good.
‘Then.’ Her voice was tight. ‘It said,
Darling. I’m so sorry. All is ready now –
something like that. Prepared, ready, something like that.
We can start our life together.’
Dasha made a sound of fierce contempt. ‘How could he suggest that place? I don’t understand that.’