Dead Season (47 page)

And the voice, hoarse and urgent, reached her through the blind passageways and partitions of the hideous building, she knew that voice.

‘Where are you?’

Help
, she meant to scream, but nothing emerged, no more than a whisper, as if she’d lost breath and voice at once. Opened her mouth again and this time it came, the air whistled back into her lungs, her larynx opened like an instrument and she bellowed, she didn’t even know what.
Here
.

At her feet Valentino was curled in a foetal position, whimpering. Pressed against the wall, Roxana looked down on him as if from a great height, and knew she should do something else. She should get something heavy and hit him hard before he got up again.

She didn’t move.

Is he coming
?

There was nothing else she could do.

*

In the stinking dark Sandro’s hands were bleeding from the splintered wood of the cheap pine door he’d broken down. There’d be a price to pay for the damage, Tyrrhenian Properties would exact it, he’d known with dull certainty as he pounded away at the wood with his battered knuckles. But mostly he could only think, I’m too late. Again, as always, too late.

He’d nearly dislocated his shoulder as the boarding finally gave way under his weight. Astonishingly, behind the hoarding the glass door to the cinema’s littered lobby had stood ajar. Three doors led off the back of it, one a double set leading into the auditorium. He’d decided against that one, taken another at random and found himself in the muffled darkness of a corridor, walls padded with fake leather, sticky carpet underfoot.

Confined spaces had never been one of Sandro’s phobias – or at least he’d never thought so. But in that corridor, straining for a sound, any sound to give him a clue that he was there for a reason, he felt the certain signs of rising panic, an inability to fill his lungs or expel air from them, a drumming in his skull.

The walls were coated with something gritty, and Sandro didn’t like to touch them but had no choice, and the greasy carpet clung to the soles of his shoes. The first door he pushed at was a cupboard, and he cursed. He didn’t want to go further into the building – there was no light. He kept moving in the dark and when he came to another door he opened it and stepped through.

Pitch black: Sandro blinked and waited in vain for his eyes to adjust. But at least there was some air in here, some elusive draught from somewhere, and he let the door to the suffocating corridor close behind him. He shouted in the thick darkness, and as he waited he thought he did, finally, hear something, a scuffling, and a soft ugly thump in answer. Emboldened, he moved into the room, sniffing for a way through, like a trapped potholer following a breath of air from the outside. And banged his shin hard and painfully on something. He cursed again, louder and more profane this time,
cazzo, cazzo
, blinking not so much at the pain as in furious disgust at his own clumsy incompetence.

With his hand pressed against his shin in a pointless attempt to dull the pain, he heard the scream. And didn’t know whether it was a man or a woman, almost gagging against the layered smells, fresh pine and latrine and old sweat. For a moment Sandro thought he might choke on it and die right there but his heart kept on thumping steadily, against all reason.

‘Who’s there?’

A silence and then he heard her cry out, he didn’t know whether it was the same voice, but he could tell this time that it was a woman, and turned towards the sound. Tripped and stumbled through the cluttered blackness of the room, feeling that draught freshen and pick up as though, miraculously, it was leading him towards the sound. There was another door. Another corridor, so dark, so dark he had to put out his hands and feel his way.

She shouted again.
Here
.

And a door gave under his hands and he was in there with them. Some thin grey light in here, though barely enough to see in the few seconds Sandro had to gather himself that at his feet a crouched form was struggling upright.

‘Watch out,’ a woman’s voice said sharply, from somewhere else, and Sandro could only think, as the shape on the floor launched itself at him,
Oh, Jesus. I’m too old for this
.

*

Giuli heard the ambulance’s siren from a long way off, getting louder. She heard the rattle as the shutter came up and saw Luisa standing there.

‘Oh my God, Giuli,’ she said, staring. ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’ In a voice Giuli had never heard Luisa use before, tremulous under huge pressure, a dam holding back some great flood.

It’s all right
, Giuli wanted to say, only she didn’t know if it was. There was blood on her hand, and on her jeans. Heard the siren become deafening and abruptly stop, then saw the ambulance men crowd into the space with their bulky jackets and a bag of something and a cylinder of something else.

And then one last face appeared, a narrow, battered face belonging to a man with dark eyes and an expression of anguish and fear and desperation who edged to the door frame and stopped, and stared. Josef.

Beside her Anna lay half-collapsed on her front, still warm, still breathing, holding tight and alive to Giuli’s hand and making a small sound, over and over again. Giuli heard all this and saw all this and felt all this but really she heard and felt and saw none of it. All she saw was the child, the new child in her lap, her free arm around it, the child warm and bloodstained and covered with some waxy stuff, its eyes glued shut, its body folded and naked as a puppy’s, on the skull the skin still transparent with newness. And the child – the new girl, the new being among them – opened her mouth, and made herself heard.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-O
NE

Saturday

H
E HAD APPEARED ON
the Saturday morning, nine o’clock, which would have been a decent hour on any other day. At least they’d slept well, like the dead, for the first time in what seemed like months. But they hadn’t set an alarm, and the sound of the street bell woke them.

As she padded through the flat to answer the intercom Luisa registered the new cold in the air as a benediction. Summer would end.

‘Who?’ she said, not understanding. Then she got it, and put a hand to her breastbone. Please God. Not Giuli, now. She buzzed him in.

She stood at the top of the stairs in her nightgown and slippers, aware of her face crumpled from sleep, her unbrushed hair. She listened to the slow climb of footsteps and it occurred to her that this was a brave step for the boy to take.

Boy? The man who raised his head to hers as he climbed the last flight was about forty. And she needn’t have worried about her hair; Enzo, Giuli’s
fidanzato
, looked as though his mother cut his for him. An open face: kind.

He stopped on the landing, hesitant.
‘Permesso?’
Polite, too.

‘Is Giuli all right?’ she asked, unable to keep the anxiety out of her voice. Remembering the astonishment in Giuli’s face as she held the bloodstained bundle in her lap, could it only have been yesterday afternoon? It might have been too much for her.

But Enzo’s face split in a shy smile even at the mention of her name and Luisa saw it all in that instant, and relaxed.

‘Yes,’ he said, ducking his head then raising it again to meet her eye. ‘I – I – she didn’t call me, all yesterday.’ The ghost of that anxiety clouded his open face. ‘But last night – then last night—’

Luisa nodded. They’d been at the hospital, waiting uselessly on plastic seating, not relatives, barely friends, to be told everything was all right with the baby. And then Giuli had started up and said, there’s something I’ve got to do.

‘So she’s fine,’ said Enzo, looking down again. He stood there waiting to be invited over the threshold, holding a bike helmet between his hands. He mumbled. ‘I’ve come to ask you – to ask you—’

‘Come in,’ said Luisa.

*

The stocky nurse who’d dressed the five-centimetre laceration on one side of Sandro’s neck where Valentino Sordi had gouged him with manicured fingernails clearly also thought that, at sixty-something, Sandro was too old to be spending his Friday nights like this.

Sitting in Pietro’s garden now with his old friend opposite him, Sandro still didn’t know if he’d have been able to do it without Roxana Delfino’s help: perhaps best not to dwell on that. It had seemed an eternity before she did come to his aid, that much was for sure: the younger man writhing like a snake, smaller than him but furiously energetic and alarmingly strong, Sandro had registered immediately. Also weirdly, maniacally unfocused in his movements, though: not a fighter. Valentino Sordi might have honed his body for leisure but he didn’t know what fighting was, and fortunately for him it turned out that Sandro, for all the weight and slackness and age he felt dragging against him, still did.

Even as Roxana unfroze and flung herself on Sordi’s back, he’d felt it come back to him, that trick of twisting an opponent into submission with the right grip on the wrists and a sudden shift of one’s weight, and as Valentino went down underneath them he’d remembered, on a hot summer’s night just like this, perhaps ten years earlier, bringing down a drug-addicted car thief as he tried to flee into the gardens of some apartment blocks in Sesto Fiorentino, cuffing the boy and rising in triumph to meet Pietro’s eye in the dark.

It hadn’t been Pietro who’d finally arrived, with a feebly wailing siren, at the Carnevale. Sandro hadn’t recognized the uniformed officers of the Polizia dello Stato standing uncertainly in the littered lobby as Sandro sat, sweating and dishevelled and, of course, too old for this, beside the sullenly silent Valentino Sordi, bound at the wrists with a plastic tie and bleeding profusely from a jagged wound just below his eye. He supposed he would have to get used to not recognizing members of the Polizia dello Stato.

And Pietro had appeared, in the end, at the police station, with news of Gulli, and Roxana Delfino’s supposedly helpless elderly mother.

‘Unbelievable,’ his old friend mused now, raising a beer to his lips at the garden table. ‘Two old biddies? Had him cornered in the back yard.’

It had rained again that morning but now, at five in the afternoon, the sky was clear and the temperature in Pietro’s pretty garden, lowered by thirty-six hours of storms, was deliciously cool. Sandro could smell roses.

‘Hardly even need to go to the seaside, if it’s like this,’ Sandro mused. He felt wrung out: all those women. All those women depending on him. But he also felt at peace.

And it turned out that two old ladies – Roxana Delfino’s elderly mother and her even more doddering neighbour – had not needed his help, nor anyone else’s. They had felled Gulli with a rusty spade when they spotted him lurking behind their gardens, then tied him up with washing line, for good measure. Wouldn’t have held him for long, but then Pietro and Matteucci had arrived.

‘Matteucci turned almost human,’ said Pietro reflectively. ‘Couldn’t stop laughing when he saw the little ratbag trussed up in white nylon line. And he switched on the charm for the old dears.’ He let out a sigh. ‘I suppose I can put up with him.’

Pietro’s daughter Chiara came out with a tray of coffee, smiling shyly, set it down and went back into the kitchen, where she and her red-headed mother were still going over Sandro’s case, awestruck. They just couldn’t get over it. Signora Martelli had owned the porn cinema, all these years, sitting there in her news-stand, pronouncing on other people’s sins.

‘Someone has to own those places,’ Sandro had said. ‘It’s not always who you expect.’ And in fact, now that it was gone, he almost felt affection for the Carnevale, symbol of a simpler age, and doomed.

They poured the coffee. No sugar for Sandro, on a health kick now, although, as Luisa might have pointed out, if he was serious he’d leave out the coffee, too.

‘He’d never have got away with it,’ said Pietro. ‘That’s the crazy thing. The Guardia might work in mysterious ways but they would have traced the money in the end, Jesus, it’s their job. Hell, I think even that fat guy, Viola, would have got to the bottom of it, in the end.’

Sandro shrugged. ‘Sure. Valentino’s trouble was that he thought he was smart, smarter than everyone else. Maybe the drugs, too – he was on so much shit, that’s what his friends are saying now. Getting more and more obnoxious, thought he could do anything, even hauling Claudio Brunello’s body across town in the middle of the night, strapped to his back on a motorbike.’ Shook his head. ‘I’m astonished he even got as far as the African market without someone seeing him, or flipping the bike.’

‘Explains the lesions on poor Brunello’s leg, though, doesn’t it? Burn from the bike’s exhaust. And the rope marks on the wrists.’

‘Then he went and sold the bike, thinking that would cover his tracks.’ Pietro laughed shortly. ‘Amateur stuff. Gulli, see, he’s a professional, knows the odds, knows the tricks, but young Valentino?’ The smile that crept across Pietro’s face was wry. ‘Uh-huh.’

Sandro was still thinking. ‘Of course, you’re right, he’d have been caught out, the movement of the cash would have been traced in the end, and for my money Viola would have got there before the Guardia. He’s a smart guy. That wasn’t my case, though, was it? I had to find Josef. And Valentino could easily have got to him before me. Almost did.’

The coffee was good. The smell of coffee, and roses after the rain, and a view of the hills up to Fiesole. There was nothing more you could want, thought Sandro. He yawned.

‘Luisa OK?’ Pietro shook his head at the thought. ‘And Giuli.
Mamma mia
. Turns out she’s cool under pressure, that girl. Delivering a baby in a thunderstorm?’

‘She says she just caught it,’ said Sandro. ‘Right place at the right time.’

‘Well,’ said Pietro, ‘that’s a skill in itself, isn’t it? Not too bad at that yourself. Matteucci, now, that’s a different matter.’

And he looked sidelong at his old friend, and together they laughed.

*

Roxana and Maria Grazia sat on the porch. Ma and Carlotta were next door, thick as thieves, fussing over the handyman, who’d made a reappearance in the wake of all the drama.