Dead Season (37 page)

Life was too short.

He hadn’t liked the estate agent, he hadn’t trusted him, but the sight of the end of a man’s life, even that of a venal, greedy man with a fussy little beard, was a sad thing. It couldn’t help but turn your mind to how it would look when it was your turn.

Claudio Brunello’s death hadn’t been any prettier. He’d been chucked like a bit of rubbish over a steel crash barrier to lie among fast-food wrappers in the dirt. That had been different, though. It came to Sandro that he’d never believed that the African market was where Brunello had died. It didn’t smell like it, didn’t feel like it, and after thirty years’ experience, you knew. This – and he opened the paper, shook it flat, looked at another photograph – this crime scene held the traces of this man’s last moments. The battered rear end of his car, his body half out of its seat. It was clear where Galeotti had died. But where had Brunello’s last moments come? It mattered. Not just to find his killer, but to reconstruct the man, the manner of his death, to find out
why
.

They were talking, at the bar: Orlando with a squat man in a road sweeper’s fluorescent overalls with his back to Sandro. About the weather, first.

‘My luck,’ the barman was saying, ‘looks like it’s going to break today, you only have to look at the sky. And I’m closing up tomorrow.’

Was tomorrow Saturday? It was. A week since Brunello was killed.

‘Looks like the end of the world,’ said the road sweeper, nodding out through the glass door. He lifted a small glass of something dark red to his lips and tipped his head back.

And that was what it had felt like to Sandro, crossing the endless suffocating expanse of the Piazza Santa Croce as overhead an apocalyptic sky pressed down on him. Turning dark at dawn instead of light.

He looked back at the paper again. Bellosguardo, it said; that was where the man had been found. Not out in some country village. And Bellosguardo was where Sandro was going to meet Pietro – with a little detour to the Carnevale on the way.

LOCAL MAN SOUGHT. Sandro scanned the piece – a double-page spread – in search of the sub-headline, found it, but was not much the wiser.
Police have identified a suspect known to have been in the immediate vicinity at the time of the killing. The man is local to the area and has a previous history of violent crime. His name will be released later today
. Sandro stared.

Could that mean Josef? Was he a local man? Previous history of violent crime – that would still be speculation, wouldn’t it, about Claudio Brunello’s murder? Was that what Pietro was thinking? He hadn’t said that last night.

He tucked the paper under his arm and slapped his coin on the bar, turning to leave.

‘Not many going to cry over the loss of Galeotti,’ said Orlando, and Sandro stopped. He removed the newspaper from under his arm and held it with one hand, tapping it in the open palm of the other.

‘No?’ he said mildly. Frowned down at the headline.

‘He was a crook,’ Orlando said. He folded his short, weathered arms across his apron and eyed Sandro.

‘You knew him?’ Sandro asked.

Orlando gave a faint shrug. ‘A lot of people did,’ he said.

‘I suppose I did, too,’ Sandro replied.

‘Well, then,’ Orlando said. ‘You can tell.’

‘A customer,’ Sandro said.

‘Now and then.’ Orlando was eyeing him narrowly now, and Sandro knew when to change tack.

‘It’s the way of the world,’ he said. ‘Bankers, estate agents. It’s the working man who pays.’ Sandro meant it as a vague gesture towards solidarity that might prompt information, but the barman seemed to take it differently.

‘Galeotti was more of a crook than most.’ Orlando turned his head a little to one side, as if listening for something. ‘And what have bankers got to do with anything?’

Sandro shrugged, watching him.

The barman set wrinkled elbows on the bar. ‘Claudio Brunello wasn’t a crook. If that’s who you mean. Drank his coffee in here every morning,
macchiato in vetro
and a
budino
, wouldn’t have anything else if there were no
budini.
’

There was a pause, in which they both reflected on Claudio Brunello’s taste in breakfast, his restraint, his discriminating tastes.

‘A good man, didn’t line his own pocket, always left a few
centesimi
on the bar. I’ve seen the Guardia in that bank of his – and I’ve seen you. Asking questions. A good man, whatever they say.’

How, wondered Sandro, did we get on to Brunello? ‘No,’ he said, ‘I meant – I meant the big guys, the Banca d’Italia, those American banks. I didn’t mean – the Toscana Provinciale’s not going to bring the sky down on us all, is it? Small-time stuff.’

The barman was watching him.

‘Did he know Galeotti?’ Sandro asked. ‘Claudio Brunello, I mean?’

The moustache turned down. ‘Wouldn’t have given him the time of day,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have thought.’ He raised a hand to the road sweeper, trudging out through the door. ‘See you in September,’ he said.

The barman turned back to Sandro; his face seemed somehow to have smoothed, his expression now bland and incurious.

‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.’ And he touched a thumb to his lower lip, superstitiously.

Sandro nodded, watching him as he took Sandro’s cup and stacked it in the dishwasher basket behind the bar. Sandro slid the road sweeper’s sticky shot glass along the bar top, and Orlando took that too, and Sandro headed for the door once more.

‘He was a crook, though, dead or not,’ said Orlando to his back, and in the doorway, feeling the heat outside, Sandro paused.

Behind him, Orlando spoke deliberately. ‘Galeotti had some big deal going down lately. A lot of money involved. And then he gets mugged and killed? Some coincidence.’ And then turned his back, the conversation finally over.

For a moment Sandro stayed there in the doorway. Something had happened to the air, the light. For a moment, in the narrow street, he didn’t recognize it, then he understood that it had been lightning.

Sandro stepped off the pavement, listening for thunder, to gauge the storm’s proximity. None came. To his left was the Via dei Saponai, and the bank.

So Galeotti’d had a big deal going down. Not the flat in San Niccolo; not the apartment in the Via del Lazaretto: they’d be small enough potatoes. Who’d kill a man over a run-down apartment in a condo in Firenze Sud? Unless the secret it was being loaned out for was a big one.

And he went the other way, towards the crumbling brick façade of the church, knowing that the alley beyond it would lead him to the Carnevale. And it was as he turned into the alley that he heard it, an ominous low rumble somewhere far off to the north-west, and over the church the sky darkened perceptibly.

From somewhere a cool breeze came, curling round his ankles, blowing dust in the gutters, then it was gone. Ahead of him was the Carnevale, boarded up in bright pine, half the letters of its vertical neon name already dismantled: ‘—nevale’, it read. Sandro stopped. It was a good-sized building, four storeys, a row of five blind, dirty windows. And as he stared Sandro found himself thinking of those paltry hundred or so euros Josef Cynaricz banked every week and imagining the dusty rooms behind that blind façade.

What was it that Roxana Delfino had said? What had the builder told her, putting up the hoarding?
Not a pretty sight, in there
. There was no sign of any activity today, but Sandro felt a strange reluctance to go any closer. And then he nearly jumped out of his skin as a steel shutter rattled up, shockingly loud, at the foot of one of the buildings between him and the Carnevale. As he watched, a small, two-stroke Ape van of the kind used to transport almost anything almost anywhere in his benighted, low-tech country, edged out, neatly reversing to face him in the narrow alley. Sandro peered through the dusty windscreen, trying to make out who was driving – and then she jumped out. It was Liliana, from the vegetable stall, and she gave him a wary glance on her way round to the back of the van. Sandro hurried towards her, ridiculously pleased to find her here.

Seeing him approach, she stopped, in the middle of fastening down some crates of zucchini-flowers, the delicate furled petals, yellow tinged with green, in neat rows.

‘Liliana,’ he said, and she raised an eyebrow.

‘Sandro Cellini,’ she said. ‘How’s Luisa?’ Everyone always asked him that.

‘She’s good,’ he said.

Beyond Liliana, who stood examining him curiously with folded arms, was the cinema’s blackened, ugly façade, waiting for him. It was as though fate had put Liliana between him and the horrible old place. Only he didn’t believe in fate.

‘Listen,’ he said. She cocked her head. ‘You know little Anna, right? Who works at the Loggiata. Little dark-haired Anna, who’s pregnant? Likes her oranges.’

‘I know her.’ Liliana’s expression darkened a shade. ‘Sweet kid.’

‘And—’ He hesitated. ‘You know her guy. Josef.’ She stiffened, just perceptibly. He persisted. ‘You know he’s disappeared, then?’ Liliana pursed her lips.

‘Disappeared,’ she said. ‘Right.’ Giving nothing away.

‘I’m trying to find him for her. I’m a private detective now, you knew that, right?’

‘I knew that,’ said Liliana, with the faintest sympathetic edge to her voice.

‘There are people,’ said Sandro cautiously, ‘people who think she’s better off without him.’

Liliana gave him a quick, hard look before turning away abruptly, reaching up for the roll-down shutter to her lock-up. Following the movement, Sandro saw the flash of a big shiny padlock and, as the shutter came down, a broad scrape across the articulated metal slats above the lock. He noticed that although she pulled the shutter down, she didn’t secure it.

‘That could be true,’ she said. ‘All things considered. But that doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy.’

Sandro took a step to the side, leaned down to peer behind her at the shutter again.

‘Have you seen him?’ he asked quietly. ‘You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’

Liliana stood, and tugged at the door of the Ape. She climbed inside, but left the driver’s door open. She’d had a husband once. He helped on the stall. An old drunk; everyone thought she was well rid of him when he died, everyone except Liliana. She kept going without him, as you do.

‘You can’t tell her,’ she said, steely. ‘If I tell you. He said, look after her. Keep her out of it.’

‘Out of what?’

‘Out of whatever shit he’s in. Up to his neck.’

‘But he’s a good guy,’ said Sandro. ‘That’s what you said.’

She sighed. ‘What do you know about him? Josef? That he worked here?’ Nodding towards the cinema. ‘That he worked hard, taking the money, projecting the films, sweeping up after, getting the takings to the bank? That he had no one, until he met the girl? That job was the only security he had, the only family, the only home.’

And now the job was gone, the home was gone. ‘You knew him. You talked to him.’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’m a soft touch.’

Sandro snorted. Nothing could be further from the impression Liliana generally gave to the outside world.

‘The lock-up’s here,’ she went on, eyes distant. ‘He came to my stall for fruit, then now and again I saw him here. He helped me with the crates a time or two. I don’t think people talked to him, he was so clearly a Roma, and usually they come with baggage, family. He was trying to make it on his own.’

‘You know he told her he worked in a bank?’

Liliana’s eyes slid away, her hand moved down to the key in the ignition but she didn’t turn it.

‘I – I got some of that, yes. She mentioned it on the stall one day.’

‘And you didn’t set her straight?’ Sandro could just picture Liliana, raising an eyebrow, in the middle of throwing oranges into a bag. ‘How did he think he’d get away with it?’

‘Look,’ said Liliana, ‘he doesn’t have – friends. Doesn’t have family. Just like her. He loves her. Sometimes people are meant for each other. Sometimes they deserve a break. He’d have told her eventually.’ She frowned fiercely. ‘He had a plan.’

Sandro remembered Anna saying something of the sort.

‘I see.’ Sandro leaned back against the shutter, looking at the Carnevale. ‘So you gave him the benefit of the doubt, then. And now you think she’s better off without him? What kind of shit is it you think he’s up to his neck in, and why?’

In the Carnevale’s façade a window stood open, the ragged tail of a curtain flapping through it. Sandro shifted his gaze back to Liliana, and he saw her calculating. Judging something about him. She took her hand from the ignition key and leaned back in her seat.

‘See that?’ she said, nodding down at the metal shutter he was leaning against.

He followed her gaze to the deep bright scrape on the metal, and looked back at Liliana.

‘Tuesday morning, I come here to find the lock’s been forced. I thought – well. Junkies. People don’t thieve from vegetable lockups. I pulled up the shutter expecting some little scumbag sleeping it off, and there he was. Jumped out at me looking like—’ And she shivered, just a little. ‘Looking like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Like he’d been – been beaten half to death, or hit by a car. Blood in his hair. One hand all broken, and marks on him.’

‘Did he tell you what had happened?’

She shook her head. ‘He tried, but I didn’t really get it. He was shaking so hard, I could hardly understand him. He said he had to get out of sight before they found out. Found him gone. He did say over and over, don’t tell Anna. I’ll sort it out myself, he said, don’t tell her. Keep her out of it.’

‘Right.’ Protecting her. That was what Giuli and Luisa had thought.

‘He asked me for clothes, and I gave him the old man’s overalls, I keep them in the back. I gave him bananas. He wolfed them down, then he asked me for my mobile.’ Her voice went flat.

Sandro frowned. ‘You gave him your phone?’

Liliana looked away. ‘I – no. I kind of flipped out a bit. I thought, oh, that was all he was all along. Small-time rip-off merchant, only chats to me because he wants something, I – I don’t know what got into me. I’d had a bad night, sometimes – this heat. I don’t sleep, thinking.’ Sandro nodded. ‘I got angry,’ she went on, flatly. ‘I told him to get out of there. And then he just ran off.’