And now she had a boyfriend?
Sandro had put his face in his hands, feeling Luisa’s testing gaze on him. Because with Giulietta Sarto men had always been the biggest problem. If you asked Sandro — not that the psychotherapist ever had, not that Sandro had ever volunteered his opinion either — the self-mutilation, the drink, the anorexia, the drugs, had been the symptoms; men had been the problem.
‘It really hadn’t occurred to you?’ Luisa had asked.
‘Why?’ he’d replied, despairingly. ‘What makes you think she’s got — someone?’ But even as he’d said it, he knew, there’d been all sorts of clues.
‘That week away, last week,’ Luisa had said. ‘A week camping by Monte Argentario? Do you think she did that alone?’
Slowly Sandro had shaken his head. ‘No. No — but-’
‘But what?’
‘But she might have gone with a girlfriend.’ Sandro had stared down at the glaze on his pastry, still warm when it had been set in front of him.
‘Might have. But she didn’t, did she?’
When she had got back from Castiglione della Pescaia, a pretty fishing village in the shadow of the big forested mountain that ended in the gleaming sea, the last place on earth the old Giuli would have wanted to go to, to be among the happy families and the old couples in their caravans, Giulietta had come straight round to Sandro and Luisa’s apartment. She was paying rent on a bedsit in San Frediano now, but their place was home.
It had dawned on Sandro as he’d ushered her inside that this was probably the first time in her life that Giuli had been on holiday; she certainly hadn’t had a childhood brightened by family trips to the seaside. It had agreed with her, though; she had looked great. Brown as a nut, a hint of a belly from the good food, wearing some crazy batik wraparound thing she’d bought from a Senegalese on the beach and a smile that had split her sharp little face. She’d given him a bottle of wine from Pitigliano and Luisa a reproduction of an Etruscan statue, plonking them proudly on the kitchen table.
When Luisa had asked her whom she’d gone away with Sandro had turned quickly and gone into the kitchen, so as not to hear her reply. But he had — he’d heard her conspiratorial laugh, too, as she’d answered, Nobody. The thought of Giuli getting herself a man was too complicated, and not just because Sandro was her father by default, in the absence of anyone better.
‘Just have a word,’ Luisa had said. ‘Make sure she’s — being sensible.’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier coming from you?’ Pathetic, Sandro had thought, hearing the wheedling in his voice.
Luisa hadn’t been listening. ‘She’s forty-three,’ she’d said, looking away from him to take in the piazza. A pale, exhausted-looking foreign woman was pushing a buggy diagonally across it, doggedly negotiating a listless cruise-ship group, in off the coast for a sweltering day.
With a sinking heart, Sandro had understood her intonation: remembered Luisa at forty-three. The outer limit of fertility. Had thought of Giuli tenderly shepherding Anna Niescu up the stairs, as the girl’s belly preceded them.
‘It’s a dangerous age,’ Luisa had said. ‘She-’
‘No,’ Sandro had said sharply. ‘Don’t. All right. I’ll talk to her.’
Though God knows, he thought now as he surveyed the bleached piazza, God only knows what I’ll say. And turned to hurry inside.
The newspaper kiosk right inside the station’s echoing ticket hall was open. The young guy behind the counter — Sandro reflected wryly that he didn’t know him, after all, but knew his father, a sign of how things were, these days; next it would be the grandfather you knew — gave him a bit of a sideways look at first but grudgingly shook his hand, thus acknowledging there was sufficient connection between the two of them to permit him to hand over a dog-eared display copy of a city map.
The Vicolo Sant’Angelo wasn’t even on the map, nor on being questioned did the boy know where it was at first. But then he brightened and got out his magic phone.
The street turned out to be on the far side of the viale, the roaring six-lane ring road behind the station. As Sandro waited patiently for the lights, it seemed to him that everything — traffic, technology, other people — was moving too fast for him.
The walk sign came up but there was a siren approaching from the east and instinctively Sandro hung back; he could tell it was coming fast. The girl beside him, impatient, took a step into the road but he put out a hand and firmly kept her where she was. A pale-blue Polizia dello Stato vehicle hurtled past — too fast to see who was driving it — and an ambulance came in its wake, rocking slightly as it moved between lanes. Sandro waited, watching to see where they went, his hand still on the girl’s arm. Heading southeast, towards Fiesole perhaps, or down to the Ponte San Niccolo and Firenze Sud. The girl shook him off, shooting him a resentful look as she hurried across before the lights could change again.
The Vicolo Sant’Angelo was a dingy street that ran between two faceless, traffic-choked, residential boulevards. A mix of big, grimy apartment blocks from the turn of the century — well, thought Sandro, turn of the last century, these days — and a newish, rather ugly residential development, all exposed brick and coloured panelling, already down at heel. Sandwiched between a boarded-up kitchen showroom and the dusty window display of an ancient hardware store, this branch of the Banca di Toscana Provinciale was not a good advertisement for the business.
Standing a moment on the pavement outside, Sandro surveyed the place. The hole-in-the-wall cash dispenser looked as if it had recently been vandalized, and a large, grubby piece of chewing gum was stuck to the screen. The smoked-glass windows of the bank’s narrow frontage were dirty. No wonder the guy didn’t want his sweet young bride-to-be coming up here. Sandro, thinking of the reverence in her voice, tried not to visualize Anna’s small, brave face absorbing the disappointment, turning it around, but the picture was there anyway. He stood at the revolving security door and waited to be admitted.
There was no air-conditioning, and the place was stifling; it was also unkempt, the polished marble of the floor was scuffed and dirty, and the strip lighting blinked and fizzed. A row of four cashiers’ desks occupied the rear wall but only one was occupied, by a bored-looking middle-aged woman with a frizz of bleached hair, chin in her hands as she contemplated him without curiosity. Eventually she leaned towards the glass of her screen and tapped it.
‘Take a ticket,’ she said. And pointed towards a plastic dispenser on the wall, the tongue of a numbered paper ticket protruding limply from it. Sandro looked around in disbelief, in case there might in fact be a small crowd of customers behind whom he would need to wait in line, but the place was still empty. He cleared his throat and stepped gingerly closer.
‘I’d like to see the manager,’ he said, and the teller pursed her lips, as if offence had been given. Her eyes flicked briefly to a spot over Sandro’s shoulder, then back.
‘He’s not here,’ she said, and Sandro sighed. She was lying.
‘You’re here alone?’ he said. She shrugged. Sandro dispensed with respect and walked straight up to her glass screen. He took out his identification and slid it across to her, but she ignored it. ‘I’m a private detective,’ he said wearily. And before he could stop himself, ‘Retired police officer.’
The look she gave him conveyed only indifference. He could smell cigarette smoke on her clothes, even from behind the glass, and he said, keeping his voice pleasant and even, ‘What happens when you need — a break, then?’ Looked at her name tag. ‘Signorina Fano?’
‘We’re not exactly run off our feet,’ she said, eyeing him. ‘And it’s Signora Fano.’ Then finally, abruptly, she relented, nodding over her shoulder and lifting a telephone receiver beside her to punch in three digits. Sandro turned to see a door set with sandblasted glass, with a small plastic nameplate uncertainly attached. G. Viola Direttore.