She fished a key out of her shorts pocket and pushed open the door. As they went through, Luisa paused to study the panel of bell-pushes again. ‘How does this system work, then?’ she asked. The flats were numbered, but Anna Niescu had written no number on the piece of paper, just as she had no code.
Giovanna Baldini was patient. ‘Four flats per floor. Nothing on the ground but the concierge, first is one to four, second five to eight, third nine to twelve. And so on. You get that?’
‘I get that,’ said Luisa, ‘yes.’ She scanned the names against apartments nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Names faded and stuck over, but no Brunello.
‘Well?’ With the woman’s face up close, there was suddenly something familiar about Giovanna Baldini. The tiny gold hoop earrings, each with a garnet. ‘I was at school with you,’ Luisa said, studying the names of the third-floor apartment owners. No Brunello. ‘In the Via Colonna. 1961?’
A faint smile appeared on the weatherbeaten face, the ghost of a girl behind it. ‘You weren’t Cellini then,’ she said.
‘Venturelli,’ supplied Luisa, staring: they might be everywhere, the kids she was at school with, mightn’t they? Become invisible with age: you’d have to get right next to them to see any trace of what they once were. And Giovanna Baldini nodded.
‘Venturelli. You married a policeman, I heard,’ she said. ‘Straight out of school.’
‘Can we get on with this?’ said Giuli with gathering impatience, from the polished marble interior of the dim hallway.
And Giovanna Baldini seemed to take the words as her cue because quite suddenly she had slipped between them and was off, hauling her shopping trolley up the stairs. She paused only when she’d reached the landing, opened her mouth and said, ‘Four five nine one. The entry code outside.’ And she nodded back down towards a shadowy corridor that led off the hallway, rounded the corner and was gone.
As the rattle of the trolley receded, outside the scuffed doorway at the end of the corridor, Luisa and Giuli looked at each other. Whatever lay behind the door wasn’t an alluring prospect.
Luisa rang the bell, a long peal. Then rapped, very sharply, on the wood, barking her knuckles. ‘Hello?’ she said, in her very sharpest tones. ‘Hello there. I need help. Concierge?’ She saw a faint smile on Giuli’s face.
‘Portiere
!
’
she bellowed.
And finally, there was the sound of slow footsteps, and the door opened.
Concierge was a grand name for it: the man who stood in the doorway – unshaven, balding, in a brown cotton overall half unbuttoned to reveal a grubby vest – was more what Luisa would have called a janitor.
The man made no move to admit them to his rooms, but stood in the doorway, lumpen and immovable. ‘What’s this all about?’ he said, surly. ‘All this racket.’ He smelled strongly of sweat and cheap spirit. Giovanna Baldini’s account of the man was accurate, so far.
He let Luisa talk for some time, listening with a vaguely contemptuous smile as she produced an explanation of their presence in her softest and most reasonable voice. She could smell the staleness of the room behind him, as the door stayed open: the smell of a man unloved and alone. At her side Giuli had a hand covering her mouth and nose; Luisa could feel her itching to take the man by the collar and threaten him, and hoped she would keep her cool.
The porter let her finish, still smiling. ‘I cannot give away details of our residents’ private circumstances,’ he said with a drunk’s heavy precision.
‘How much?’ said Giuli. ‘Twenty?’
Luisa saw greed chasing false indignation off the man’s face. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I can see that you might need some – compensation.’ She tried not to show her disgust. Was this how Sandro would deal with the man?
‘Twenty euros?’ he said. ‘Hardly.’
Luisa took the coin purse from her pocket; she’d put a few notes in there for the dry cleaning and hoped they weren’t fives. Thirty. She handed them to the man, trying to suppress the sinking of her heart as she understood there’d be no repayment of expenses on this job. Anna Niescu probably lived for a week on thirty euros.
But the dry cleaners would probably be closed, anyway. August: hateful month.
The porter still made no move to admit them. ‘So what exactly is it you want to know?’ he asked, leaning against the doorframe, insultingly at ease.
Giuli opened the briefcase against her knee and brought out a sheet of paper on which a blown-up, pixellated photograph appeared, of Anna Niescu and a man: his face blurred, his body language uneasy. She held it in front of the porter’s eyes. Luisa felt a pang of pity at Giuli’s determination, her readiness to work, the briefcase whose stitching was already fraying.
‘This man,’ Giuli said earnestly. ‘We – have reason to believe he was renting an apartment on the third floor. Renovating it.’
The concierge took the paper and pretended to scrutinize it. Then snorted. ‘His own mother couldn’t identify the man from this,’ he said. Luisa saw his gaze linger just fractionally on Anna’s beaming face, then he shoved the paper back towards Giuli.
‘What about her?’ Luisa said quickly.
‘Never seen either of them before,’ said the porter, folding his arms.
‘So who does live on the third floor?’ said Giuli.
Good girl, thought Luisa. Only then, from her handbag, her phone began to ring. The porter looked on with malicious amusement as she scrabbled to find it. Luisa saw it was Sandro and, not even knowing if it was what she’d meant to do, cut him off.
‘Smithson, Grasso, Martelli, de – de something or other,’ recited Giuli, ending a little lamely.
‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ said the porter. ‘Half the time people don’t bother to change the nameplates.’
‘Call yourself a porter?’ said Luisa. ‘You mean you don’t know who’s up there?’ A mistake, she thought almost immediately, but it turned out she was wrong. The porter drew himself up.
‘Smithson’s long gone, he worked for the British Council,’ he said, spite making him sound almost sober. ‘They use the flat for visiting artistic types. The last one left two days ago. De Tedesco is a Torinese comes here for business once a month, there’ve been ten or so tenants since the original Martelli, ditto Grasso, currently – respectively – a fashionable young couple abroad since last September, and an old bitch with a nasty little dog.’
The little dog Giovanna Baldini had been blowing kisses to. Luisa wished she’d followed Giovanna up those stairs instead of standing here inhaling the porter’s stink of unwashed clothes and booze.
‘Right,’ said Giuli with relief. ‘Well, that’s something,’ fumbling in the briefcase for God knew what else. Although she didn’t get time to find it.
‘Good,’ said the porter. ‘Because it’s all you’re getting.’ And lurching round, he turned his back on them and slammed the door.
Luisa’s phone began to ring again.
‘Hold on,’ pleaded Giuli, cupping her hands to the closed door. ‘Hold on. Which apartment faces the hills?’ There was a kick against the door from inside and Giuli stepped back.
Luisa retrieved the phone and this time managed to answer it.
‘Caro,’
she said, and her heart sank as she remembered where he was and what he was doing. ‘How is she? Is she all right?’
Sandro’s voice was high-pitched but intermittent, and she moved back down the corridor, towards the light.
‘Say that again,’ she said. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ She was at the smoked-glass front door now and she pushed it open, wanting to get out, even into the scalding air. Wanting to get to the light.
Holding the door open, Luisa looked up, looking for the hills as she tried to make sense of the snatches of Sandro’s voice. The builder’s banging had stopped, thank God. The apartments with a view of the hills would be around the other side of the building and out of sight, at right angles to the balcony where the little dog’s paws and snout were still visible. With some instinct for the smallest movement below it, the animal barked, questioningly, just once.
Leaning out, one foot keeping the door open, and Giuli coming towards her from the gloom of the hallway, something about her angle brought her into a clear line with some transmitter or other, no doubt up in those very hills, and Sandro’s voice was abruptly as clear as a bell, midway through a sentence.
‘… no idea what the hell’s going on, now,’ he said.
‘Say that again,’ she said. ‘What’s happened?’
‘I said, this has thrown everything,’ said Sandro. ‘It’s crazy. I practically had to pick her up off the floor, poor kid.’ He paused, and she heard exhaustion in the silence. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to bring her back with me. Once we’ve – well, soon. She really needs looking after – I’m worried she might—’
‘Hold on,’ said Luisa, ‘I don’t understand.’ Her back was aching from the position she was having to maintain, half in, half out of the building. ‘What’s thrown everything?’
There was a silence, and into it Sandro spoke quietly. ‘It’s not him,’ he said.
‘Not him?’
‘The body. She says, it’s not him.’
And as if on cue, overhead the dog’s shrill and desperate yapping began again.
C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN
T
HEY WERE SITTING IN
someone’s office, at the pathology lab, which was where the body had come from the morgue. There were no visitors’ rooms here, not really; it wasn’t a place for the general public. The room was untidy, with an overstuffed in tray and a dirty coffee cup on the desk, as though it had been abruptly vacated for them.
It was the waiting that had raised Sandro’s heart rate, more than the final shock. The waiting and the watching. She looked pale enough now, but while they had waited – forty-five long minutes – to view the body, as he had watched her Sandro had feared for Anna Niescu’s health. She had been so silent and staring and blank, her breathing shallow with apprehension. It was as if she had gone into suspended animation, until she received the answer to this one question.
And when at last someone had come – a woman in operating scrubs, mask slung around her neck and a plastic bonnet – and told them to follow her, Sandro had been startled to be shown directly into the autopsy room.
‘Is the autopsy completed?’ he had asked. ‘Are you the pathologist?’
‘I’m just a tech,’ the woman had said, looking nervous. Her face was clean and very young under the scrubs cap. ‘I assist. We’re not done yet, no. We’ve just done the preliminaries. Skin samples, last night.’ She had glanced at the clock. ‘We’re due to get going in half an hour, look—’ she had hesitated, ‘I was told this was strictly for identification, nothing more. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
Sandro knew what strings Pietro would have pulled to get them in here, and he hadn’t been surprised at her expression.
The room, its lighting painfully bright, its surfaces coldly reflective, had been dominated by the central steel table, gutters running each side, and the shrouded shape that lay on it. Watching Anna Niescu, as close as he could come without touching her, Sandro had seen her pupils contract against the light: she had taken in the shape, then looked away. He had seen her eyes run around the room, helpless, alighting on one dreadful apparatus after another: an extendable drill, a handsaw, a machine providing suction, a metal tray of instruments. And back to the table, where the technician had then stood, waiting for them. Sandro had put an arm around Anna’s shoulders.
‘That’s him?’
Her voice had been almost inaudible. She had stared. Sandro had nodded, and step by slow step they had approached the table, walked up the shrouded length of the body. The torso had had a diminished look under the sheet. He had hoped Anna didn’t notice.
And then the time had come: Anna had put out her own hand to take the sheet off his face but the technician had shown alarm. ‘Let me,’ she had said.
Beneath his arm Sandro had felt Anna go, collapsing out from under his embrace like a deflated balloon. He had caught her and felt her brace against him, but when he looked down something unexpected had happened. She had duly struggled back up, turning warm and solid again as her weight came to bear on him.
‘I knew it,’ she had said then, transcendent with relief, searching his face. ‘I knew it.’
‘Knew what?’ Sandro had said, faltering.
‘This isn’t him,’ she had said. ‘This isn’t my Josef.’
At first he had thought she must have been deluding herself: it would not be the first time. People sometimes don’t see what they don’t want to see, they hear only what they want to hear; patients with an unequivocally terminal diagnosis leave the consulting room believing there is a cure. Others, Sandro knew, heard only the bad news. Himself, Sandro was one of those.
Sandro’s eyes had swung from Anna’s face to Claudio Brunello’s: was he so mutilated that she might be mistaken? Yes – but his wife had been sure it was him. The trauma to his forehead was unavoidably still there but now that it had been cleaned up, the face did look more human. His eyes had slid to the young technician: had she done this? Cleaned and smoothed and settled the dead body, restoring to it a shred or two of dignity? His gaze went back to Anna. She had been lifting the cloth, focusing on the body.
‘You don’t believe me,’ she had said, eyes down, euphoria evaporating, and Sandro had felt his own certainty ebb. If Claudio Brunello was not Anna’s lover – then what?
Taking the sheet from Anna, the technician had made a sound of gentle reproof.
‘Can you show me his hands, please?’ Anna had asked, a flush on her cheeks. Latex-gloved, the woman withdrew an arm, half-blackened from exposure and decomposition, the right arm, and laid it on the cloth. The hand, upturned, fingers swollen but human.
‘Can you turn it over, please?’ Anna had asked politely. ‘The hand?’
Abrasions on the knuckles and a ring embedded in the flesh. Claudio Brunello had been married twenty years. Sandro supposed they would get it off, somehow, and give it back to his wife. Sandro had seen Anna gaze at it.
‘This man was married,’ she had said, with innocent earnestness. Sandro and the technician had exchanged glances.
‘Yes,’ Sandro had begun. ‘Brunello was married.’ And had stopped.