Dead Season (36 page)

Her. ‘Your client.’ Roxana couldn’t very well ask who she was. But he had told her anyway. ‘Josef’s – ah – his fiancée,’ he had said, and his sigh spoke volumes. ‘She’s looking for him, too.’

‘Fiancée.’

With a flush of obscure shame Roxana had realized that, of course, she knew nothing about him, that narrow-faced, polite man with his takings; she had never seen him in the street, he was one of those people who knew how to make themselves invisible. She only knew he was from the Carnevale because Val had told her, or maybe Claudio. So the bagman
had
had a girlfriend – more than that. A fiancée was more than a girlfriend. ‘Is she – they were going to get married. Is she pregnant?’

There had been a hint of reproof in Sandro Cellini’s reply. ‘I can’t say,’ he had said. ‘Obviously.’

‘I’m sorry.’ And Roxana had felt sorry, she had felt crass and nosy and thoughtless, almost tearful. ‘None of my business.’

She hadn’t known what to think then, either. She’d liked Josef, but he’d got a girl pregnant, lied to her, and disappeared. Open and shut case, if you weren’t being daft and sentimental.

‘You think he’s just – a bad guy.’ Roxana had heard the flatness in her voice.

‘You don’t?’

‘I told you,’ she had said. Hadn’t he been listening? ‘I told you what I thought, I liked him. There was – I don’t know. Mutual respect: he was respectful.’

‘He trusted you,’ said Cellini. And she could hear him pondering that. ‘Trusted Brunello.’ He cleared his throat at the end of the line.

‘Yes,’ said Roxana: it hadn’t occurred to her before. ‘I didn’t even know I liked him until he disappeared, but I did.’

There had been another thoughtful silence. ‘I don’t discount that, Miss Delfino,’ Sandro Cellini had said.

And with that dry, considered sentence, Roxana had known. She could trust him; he might only be a private detective as opposed to a police officer, but she knew she could trust him.

‘Roxana,’ she had said. ‘You can call me Roxana.’

‘If you like,’ he had said. ‘I’m Sandro.’

It hadn’t been in her mind to tell him about Marisa. He wasn’t investigating Claudio’s death, was he? He was looking for Josef.

‘I think there’s a connection, too,’ he had said abruptly, just as she was wondering what was the right thing to do. Did she really want to snitch on Marisa? ‘A connection between Josef disappearing and your boss’s murder.’

Murder. ‘That’s what they think it was? Not a – a suicide?’

‘They’re coming round to it.’

There’d been a pause, then she had spoken. ‘The thing is,’ she had said carefully, ‘it’s my boss. My other boss, Marisa.’

‘Miss Goldman.’ He had waited. Patient, courteous. Like – like someone else. Like Josef.

‘Yes. Miss Goldman. The thing is, she told the police – she told everyone, she was away, from Thursday afternoon, away at the seaside with her boyfriend Paolo, on his yacht. Only someone told me she wasn’t.’

‘Someone.’

‘Valentino,’ she had said. ‘My colleague. Saw her being let into the building where Claudio lives, early on Friday evening.’ Paused. ‘But it’s not just Valentino.’ And she had told him what Irene Brunello had said, about the maid at Marisa’s house.

‘So it looks like she was here in Florence all the time,’ he had said. ‘Why would she lie about that?’

‘I don’t know,’ Roxana had said uncomfortably. ‘She hasn’t told the police,’ she had added, belatedly. ‘Irene hasn’t. I don’t know why.’

And she had pondered that a moment. Had she been biding her time? Had Irene wanted to have something of her own over Marisa, some secret advantage to hold in reserve for future use?

‘Should I tell them that too? Only I don’t know – is it the Guardia? Or that Pietro Cavallaro, from the Polizia dello Stato?’

She’d felt sick, then. Telling the police would make it official. They’d arrest Marisa, or something. Call her in for questioning. And sitting there in the dark, she had pictured Marisa on her doorstep, whisky in hand, waiting for the axe to fall.

‘It’s all right,’ Sandro had said wearily. ‘I’ll tell them.’

And the burden had passed, from her to him. Then Roxana had heard Ma moving slowly upstairs in her bedroom, she had smelled the frangipani and tobacco plants and jasmine. ‘Thank you,’ she’d said.

Now she stepped out of the shower and stood a second, feeling the brief moment of cool already ebbing as the water dried. She hadn’t told him about the footprints. The stalker. Well, she thought, never mind. She wrapped herself in her towel and went to the window, hair still wet, and looked down, next door.

‘Carlotta,’ she said, and the old lady looked up, alert, suspicious, waiting to disapprove. ‘Can I have a word?’

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-T
HREE

‘E
ARLY
,’ P
IETRO HAD SAID
on the phone. ‘I’m on at ten, it’ll have to be early.’

‘As early as you like,’ Sandro had said in an undertone, feeling a flood of gratitude as he sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and listened with half an ear for Luisa’s breathing behind him as it slowed and evened. It was late, but the exhaustion in his old friend’s voice spoke of more than just late nights.

‘Does it have to be about something?’ Pietro had said when Sandro had asked him. Of course it had to be about something: they both knew it was this damned case that had them entangled, conjoined twins fighting to be free. But Sandro had believed him when he had gone on, ‘I just thought I should see you. Face to face, like you said. Enough of this – this phone crap.’

Only now, slipping out of the house at six-thirty to walk across town to where he’d agreed to meet Pietro, did he wonder. Face to face: for breaking bad news?
Listen, this is it, you’re pushing our friendship too far
.

It was probably an hour on foot, but Sandro wouldn’t take the car. Climbing into their dusty little Fiat suffocated him, parking was a nightmare and he used the car so little that he had a tendency to forget where he’d left it, but it wasn’t just that. There was something about a walking pace that suited him, gave him time to think: that said it all, didn’t it? There were detectives who operated at the speed of a high-performance car, no doubt, but not Sandro.

Besides, he liked walking and, more than anything, walking in the early morning. He could nod to his surroundings, his city. He could register the gargoyles on a fourteenth-century palace, a fig tree in heavy fruit leaning over a garden wall; he could see where the junkies were sleeping these days, who’d shut up shop and who was clinging on, who was up early with a guilty conscience or something else. Old widows leaning out of their windows after another sleepless night in the heat, surprised by their loneliness after a lifetime of grumbling at their husbands. Too poor to get out of the city, their children grown and gone, just putting up with it.

Closing the door behind him, Sandro lifted a hand to Signora Kraskinsky leaning on her folded arms, in the building opposite. She simply pursed her lips in response, and he moved on, wanting to shake his head at her comical misanthropy but thinking better of it.

Down the quiet street towards Santa Croce. Quiet but not silent, behind him Sandro could hear the distant clatter of the
furgoni
being unloaded at the market of San Ambrogio. The baker talking sleepily behind his shuttered shopfront; he’d be closed by the weekend – August was no time to be sticking your head into a furnace, and who needed bread, in the heat? Ahead, a Filipina in a pink overall hurried around a corner and into the street ahead of him, carrying a bucket filled with cleaning products. Out they came at this hour, the illegals, the immigrant workers who lived in basements and windowless rooms, without so much as a fan.

Like Josef Cynaricz, in the city somewhere, with no one he could trust, scared. Scared of what? Of the police, for a start, regardless of whether he had or hadn’t killed Brunello. Because who would be easier to pin it on, if it turned out he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time?

And could he be scared of Marisa Goldman? She was supposed to have been long gone on some yacht, but was not. Sandro thought of the woman, looking down her long nose at him. Why had she lied?

But then again, if Josef had killed Brunello, battered that handsome cropped head into a pulp in some deranged frenzy – of what? Jealousy of the man’s life, hatred, greed? – not only would he not be the man Anna Niescu had fallen in love with, but he’d have disappeared into some Roma camp hundreds, maybe thousands, of kilometres away, he’d be buried away down in Campania or up in Trieste, across the Brenner and into Austria, or on a boat to Dubrovnik. But he was still here, in the city somewhere; he was looking out for his girl.

She hadn’t been wrong about him: Sandro clung to that. He’d thought Anna Niescu was a kind of holy simpleton when he’d first met her, like one of those country saints, but she wasn’t. She was flesh and blood, and she wasn’t stupid.

Where had he been, since whatever happened on Saturday afternoon? Who would have given him shelter?

Not Anna: he hadn’t asked her to help him, to hide him. He hadn’t contacted her directly. He was protecting her. From what? Not the police, because in fact it wasn’t the police he was afraid of.

The edifice built itself in Sandro’s head: wobbly, imprecise, a lopsided building of a theory, precariously balanced on a single assumption, of Anna’s instinct for a good man.

As he skirted the arcaded golden stone of Santa Croce’s northern flank, in his head Sandro mapped a route. He checked his watch: he had time, too. There were things he wanted to see along the way. He came out into the piazza and slowed as the heat hit him like a wall. Six-thirty-five, and he was sweating, the sweat that comes before the weather breaks. Overhead the sky was low and purplish-grey with cloud, a thick blanket smothering the city. He crossed the piazza – empty but for a couple of motionless figures on the stone benches – in a slow, precise diagonal, heading for the newspaper stand on the far corner.

Three streets fanned out from the Piazza Santa Croce’s western side, beyond them and overhead stood the crenulated tower of the Palazzo Communale, and there was something faintly surreal about the perspective, something puzzling to the eye in this heat. As he walked – almost swam in the terrible, humid air – in the wide empty space under the lidded sky, Sandro was for a moment assailed by the most awful feeling of being alone. And not only alone, but walking into a day he might never walk out of, walking to his own death, alone. The feeling was so powerful that if he hadn’t been more than halfway across, he might almost have turned and gone back, home to Luisa still mounded under the covers, and reached under for her warm hand, and stayed there.

But his feet continued as if he had no say in the matter, one in front of the other, and then the newspaper stand was in view and he could even read the day’s headlines on the placard the
edicolaio
was kneeling to fit into its wire frame.

ESTATE AGENT SLAIN IN BEAUTY SPOT

LOCAL MAN SOUGHT

CRIME RATE A SCANDAL, COUNCILLOR SAYS

His brain focused on the headlines, his feet kept moving and the streets leading off the square at an angle somehow regularized themselves. Sandro felt as though he had managed to fight off a kind of madness by purely mechanical means. By keeping on walking. At the
edicola
he reached over, the coin ready in his hand, and picked up an early edition of
La Nazione
. He crossed the road, his eyes on the paper.

The story was on the front page. He stopped. Someone hooted, someone else shouted. Sandro looked up, blinked, saw a guy on a
motorino
shaking his fist, and walked on. Reaching the pavement, he leaned against the nearest wall.

He hadn’t even read the words: the photograph had done it. A sleek Maserati – not quite so sleek as when he’d last seen it parked up under the city wall in San Niccolo. It was pictured at the side of what looked like a country lane, the low, square shape of a farmhouse some way off and out of focus, a verge of long, dry grass and seedheads, a neatly trimmed mulberry tree. And a vicious dent in the rear-wheel arch, very much as if someone had slammed it with a tyre lever. The personalized number plate: GALIMM.

Beside the open driver’s door, a forensics nylon tarpaulin covered an elongated, body-sized shape, almost but not quite out of the car. A dark stain not quite covered by the sheet, where the tarmac met the summer verge. And one shoe.

Slowly, Sandro pushed himself away from the wall, folded the paper and stuck it in his battered briefcase. He took the nearest exit from the piazza, which turned out to be the Borgo de’ Greci, then turned off to the left down a narrower street whose name he didn’t know. His general direction was fine, for the moment anyway, he was heading for the Carnevale, even if all thoughts as to what he might do when he got there had temporarily deserted him.

That little, sharp-faced, chiselling estate agent, Galeotti, impatient while they looked around the flat in San Niccolo. For a brief, mad moment Sandro thought, does this mean we don’t get a deal on that place? The man Sandro hadn’t trusted for a minute, with his goatee and his constant glancing at his watch and his flash car. Flash car: the keys to the flat in Via del Lazaretto, Sandro recalled instantly, had had a Ferrari fob, but he already knew, he had known from his first glance at the photograph, that when Luisa spoke to her old school friend in the condominium, she’d confirm as much. That Galeotti Immobiliare was the agency selling the Via del Lazaretto flat.

Coffee: that was what Sandro’s body instructed him. Before you open that newspaper again, you need a kick-start. He passed at least three bars that were shuttered up, scraps of paper posted on their doors carrying cheerful messages about when the
direzione
would be back from the seaside, and by the time he found one that was open, he was a street away from the Via dei Saponai, the bank and the Carnevale.

A dim little place under an archway, a tiny barman with a big handlebar moustache whom Sandro vaguely recognized: Orlando, was that the name? He didn’t ask, because if he knew Orlando from somewhere, then Orlando might know him. If they didn’t trust you when you were a policeman, they trusted you even less when you’d been kicked off the force. He got a coffee –
lungho macchiato
, he specified after a brief struggle with his conscience; less coffee, Luisa had said, think of your heart, consider a camomile now and then – and moved off to one of a handful of high, zinc-topped tables. He downed the coffee in one and when it kicked in, he felt the smooth acceleration behind his chest wall as something entirely health-giving and pleasurable.