Dead Season (21 page)

The flush in Anna’s cheeks had deepened at his tone; her eyes had grown wider. ‘My Josef was not married,’ she had said, and forced herself on, ‘he didn’t wear a ring, there wasn’t even a mark—’ and hesitated, flushing, ‘and – his skin was different, his skin. He – he—’ She had realized they were staring at her and she had grasped for the words that would convince them. She had taken a breath.

Sandro had been able to sense the deep discomfort of the technician at his side; Pietro had said he would come, when he could. Sandro had wished he had been here.

‘You think I don’t know?’ Anna had said, and Sandro had seen a shift in her that he wished he had not seen. A puzzlement, a tiny diminishing in her faith – in them, in the world, in her Josef. She had shaken her head. ‘No. This is not his face,’ nodding towards the battered, cloth-bound head. ‘And this is not his body. My Josef wasn’t like this, he had hair – on his – his arms. His chest. Very dark, soft. Like an animal, I said to him. We laughed about it.’ Sandro had been aware that he was averting his eyes, the female technician too, both of them staring at the floor as Anna spoke. ‘And his hands, on the back of his hands.’

On the spotless white cloth the arm lay between them, discoloured and battered, but the fine hairs visible: none on the back of the hand. Unasked, the woman in her scrubs had gently tucked the arm back beside the body and covered it.

‘I’m sorry for him,’ Anna had said, turning away. ‘And for his wife – his family. I’m sorry to be glad. But this is not Josef.’

The technician had shown them into the stuffy office, then, with its table-top detritus, the smell of powerful disinfectants even in there.

There was a water dispenser in the corner and Sandro had supposed it couldn’t matter if they used it. Anna had drunk the first glass greedily, in seconds, then another. Sandro had watched her, listening to his heart pound, led her to a chair and she had sat obediently. ‘I’ve just got to make a call,’ he had said.

She had nodded, staring into the distance as the whole thing settled, thinking,
What now? What will they show me next?
Sandro had seen her grasp that it wasn’t over.

He had left her there while he went to phone. His instinct had been to dial Luisa first; he had just wanted to hear her voice. It had rung and rung, then the connection had been abruptly terminated, not even going to answerphone.

Then
he should have phoned Pietro, but being hung up on like that had started his heart pounding all over again. What if she – what if something had happened? An accident, a mugging, a stranger hanging up. So he had punched in the number again, and this time she had answered, and the world had returned to its normal axis.

Pietro had been a different matter. ‘Jesus,’ he had said. A long pause, one in which Sandro had been able to hear him calculate the implications of what he’d just heard. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I had to talk to Brunello’s colleagues. The Guardia wanted a briefing. They’ve gone over to the bank. Is she all right?’

‘Yes,’ Sandro had said, not hearing, really. How would he have been sure, if it had been Luisa on a slab? He just would have been. ‘It’s not him.’

‘Ten minutes,’ Pietro had said urgently. ‘I’ll drop Matteucci first.’

Anna had nodded when he explained the situation, obedient as ever. He had thought, when he first met her, that she’d be so easy to fool, a sitting duck. But having seen her under pressure, in the glare of the autopsy room standing beside the body of a man violently killed, having grasped the clarity with which she understood right from wrong, true from false – he wasn’t so certain any more.

And now they were waiting. He’d heard it in Pietro’s voice. Weariness, fear, adrenaline, in that order, the same old story. Claudio Brunello wasn’t the father of Anna Niescu’s child.

This changed everything.

*

The weird thing was, Maria Grazia was phoning and asking Roxana the question – the same question that had been buzzing just out of Roxana’s reach all morning and had just that moment come into focus.

Maybe it had taken her lunch break, and getting out of the stale gloom of the bank, for Roxana’s head to clear.

It had been a slow, slow four hours: eight to midday. Giorgio Viola had turned up at some time after nine and established himself in Claudio Brunello’s office, the officers of the Guardia wandering in and out, polite, but acting as if the place was theirs, opening cabinets, standing behind Roxana, looking over her shoulder. In with Marisa too, some of the time, asking her questions while she sat, pale and staring, behind the desk.

And all the time Roxana’s headache had grown as she frowned and thought, what was it? What was it bothering her, what was it she was trying to remember?

Eight or nine customers: first old Signora Martelli with her newspaper trolley. Haranguing Val, then asking for a new chequebook. Theirs practically the only bank left issuing chequebooks, their customers the only ones ancient enough to rely on them, but all the same the demand had dwindled, so they held blanks and stamped the number on by hand.

Roxana had had to watch, helpless, as the old woman grumbled and a queue built up and eventually Roxana offered to look for her stamp, unearthing a small stack of correspondence while she did so. Jesus, this place was a mess. Since they had dispensed with secretaries, most of the statements and such were now centrally printed and dispatched. With only cashiers and managers and no one actually to clear the decks, stuff got overlooked. No way to run a business: was that what the Guardia were thinking, too? Behind Brunello’s office door Marisa had paced, on the phone as she’d been all morning.

A young Eastern European girl from the leather shop on the corner had come in wanting bags of change. She looked startled at the Guardia uniform that appeared behind Roxana and stood there a moment with his arms crossed. This couldn’t go on, thought Roxana. They’d have to close.

The old guy who sold tourist knick-knacks in the Piazza Signoria had deposited his takings, and hadn’t batted an eyelid at the presence of officialdom. Surprisingly substantial takings: people were obviously out there, buying tat as if their lives depended on it, stuck in the boiling city. A young couple had come in with a baby, wanting to open a savings account for him. Go somewhere else, Roxana had wanted to say to them. Go to a bank that’s still likely to be around for his eighteenth birthday. And take him to the seaside, on a day like this. In a month like this: peering over the counter, she had seen the baby’s pale and perfect skin dewy with the heat.

But all she had said was, nodding towards Marisa’s office, its door firmly closed, ‘Why don’t you come back after the holidays, and talk to our
Gestore, Family e Business?
She’ll come up with the right account for you.’

The couple beamed down at the little head, nestled in a sling between them, and she understood that, really, they’d just been bringing him out to show him off.

‘I expect it’s hard to keep him cool, this weather,’ she’d said, then regretted it as they fell over each other to reassure her, they had air-conditioning, they’d read all the books, damp flannels to cool him, one thin sheet at night. If only they had anywhere else to go. They had all agreed it was too much, this heat, ninety-eight per cent humidity, it said in the paper.

There had been a tiny paragraph in the paper, about Claudio Brunello’s death. Strange to see it there, so discreet a mention, with so little detail.
The body of a man. The family have been informed
. And then:
The police are actively seeking anyone who might have been a witness to the accident, which is believed to have occurred between midday on Saturday and Sunday night
.

The bank closed at one p.m. on Saturday. Roxana now tried to bring the day back, to get more detail than she’d come up with for the police, but it was fuzzy. A phone ringing, early. Locking up, Val hurrying away to the river in his rowing vest, smiling up at the sun, the weekend awaiting them. The heat.

Things had settled: the Guardia went into Claudio’s office to talk to sad, fat Giorgio Viola for half an hour that turned into an hour, then more. Weren’t they going to ask her any questions? Any real questions, not just, ‘where’s the coffee?’ It would appear not. Her headache had grown.

Ma had called mid-morning, during a lull, fortunately. ‘There’s a man,’ she had complained, ‘phoned. He says he’s coming to fix the gate and can he come a bit later? He telephoned.’ She didn’t sound even slightly anxious about
this
man: Roxana sighed. Just when she thought she’d worked out what Ma’s problem was, it seemed to turn into something else.

‘Yes, I arranged it,’ she had said. ‘It needs a bit of TLC, that’s all. I’ll deal with it.’

Listened to Ma grumble on a bit more; those footprints by the broken back gate came into focus as she half listened. She’d put them out of her mind, overnight; something that had seemed alarming in the dark would turn out to be innocent enough by daylight. Only she couldn’t quite think of an innocent explanation.

‘I won’t be late,’ she had finished: too many things competing for her attention.

Not only the horrible fact of Brunello’s body, lying there two, three days in the heat – but something more amorphous that came with it. The feeling, something invisible as gas that had crept in here with the news and settled in corners, that things weren’t what she’d thought. That this place she came to every day – suffocatingly dull and reliable as clockwork – had secrets these men were trying to root out. And it had changed, in subtle and frightening ways that she couldn’t even put her finger on.

Roxana had stood up the next time Marisa appeared.

‘What are they doing?’ she had hissed. ‘This can’t go on, can it? They’ll have to close us for a bit.’

And at some movement beyond the door she had looked out to the street; you could never quite make out who it was out there, until you got up close. She had seen a flash of white trainers: kids.

‘It’s not good for business, is it? Having those guys here.’

‘They’re just doing their job,’ Marisa had said stiffly. ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’ Roxana had eyed her flatly: she was worried all right.

‘Have they found anything?’ They had both turned their heads towards the closed door that the three men hadn’t opened in some time.

‘They wouldn’t tell me if they had,’ Marisa had said, arms folded across her body and hugging herself. ‘I’m sure there’s nothing to find. You knew Claudio. Claudio wasn’t dishonest.’ She had sounded like she was trying to keep up her own morale.

‘Are we going to – what’s going to happen to us? Are we going to lose our jobs?’ Roxana had been surprised by how little she cared.

Marisa’s face had frozen. ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate – ah – that kind of talk isn’t appropriate, under the circumstances.’ She had drawn herself up. ‘Of course not. This is routine.’

As if he’d heard, or sensed, what they were talking about, Val had suddenly appeared in the doorway, at Roxana’s shoulder, hands in his pockets.

‘You’ll be all right, Roxi,’ he had said. ‘Girl like you.’ He had been leaning his head against the door jamb looking at Marisa, and the look she had given him back had been startlingly hostile.

‘You tell her, Marisa,’ he’d gone on. ‘She’s employable anywhere. She’s a grafter. Work ethic.’

Roxana had stared at him. He’d seemed to mean it.

‘Unlike you?’ Marisa had said, steely.

‘If you like,’ Val had said.

Roxana hadn’t been able to work out what was going on, exactly: a kind of face-off. They had glared at each other a long moment and in the end, it was Marisa who had blinked first. ‘Back to your desk,’ she had said to Val. ‘This is a bank, remember?’ He had smiled and turned on his heel.

‘You can take an early lunch,’ Marisa had said peremptorily, turning to Roxana. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’

Which was as close as she was going to get, Roxana had thought, to saying anything nice at all.

The phone went within minutes of her getting out of there, walking away from the bank towards the river and just as the heat, shocking at first and then overwhelming, brought a sudden sweat to every pore of her body. Roxana stopped, dripping now with the effort of rummaging through her bag, overtaken by a stupid panic that was about nothing and everything. What had she spent all morning trying to put her finger on? What was she trying to remember? What was wrong, what was different? Was she losing it?

This must be what it was like for Ma
was the thought that came to her just before she saw the phone, glowing in the portable rubbish dump that was her handbag.

‘Maria Grazia.’

She exhaled with sudden relief, her back against the warm flank of the nearest building, in the shade, looking down the length of a filthy, sunlit alley, the blank and crumbling façade of a church halfway down it, the lopsided sign of a boarded-up grocery. Just out of sight at the end of that alley was the porn cinema, one street back from the river. And then it came to her.

‘He turned up, then?’ Maria Grazia asked, her voice crackling and distant, people shouting in the background. ‘Your boyfriend with his cashbag? Or has he done a runner with the takings?’

For a moment Roxana didn’t know what to say, so abrupt was the coincidence. Then she said, ‘No.’ She pressed her forearm against her forehead: could she seriously go back to work like this? She was drenched. ‘I mean, no, he never turned up.’

‘Well, if it was a movie,’ Maria Grazia said cheerfully, ‘he’d have done a runner with the takings.’

‘Life’s not like a movie,’ Roxana said automatically: an old joke between them, she the bank teller, her friend in the glamorous business of films. And besides, what takings? A couple of hundred euros on a good week.

‘Where are you, anyway?’ she went on.

‘Oh, just work,’ said Maria Grazia, sounding uncharacteristically vague. There was a pause. ‘I was a bit worried about you, to tell the truth. Are you OK? You don’t really sound OK.’

Roxana sighed, reluctant, suddenly, to go into the whole horrible mess. ‘I’m hot. The city’s a nightmare in August.’