Sandro was now looking so sheepish she could have kissed him. ‘So where did you meet him?’ he mumbled.
He’d asked Anna Niescu that, too. Like a kindly father: it was a key question, Giuli understood now. You wouldn’t want your girl hanging out in the wrong places, for a start — I met him in an S amp; M bar, Dad. Or her boyfriend either, one of those men who comes up to girls in the street and tells them they’ve got beautiful eyes. What had Anna said? She’d looked up at them from her uncomfortable plastic chair, eyes gleaming at the memory, and said, ‘He was buying oranges, at the market in Santo Spirito, I was too, for the hotel. Five kilos. He carried them back for me.’
Giuli thought about that market stall. Back in the winter, the stallholder waddling in a padded coat, her stall piled high with black cabbage, artichokes and pyramids of blood oranges from the south. Hard to imagine how cold the city could get, as they all baked and wilted at the other extreme. She thought of Anna’s small frame, trying to stagger back to the hotel under five kilos of Sicilian oranges, a man bending down to offer to help.
She sighed: her own story was not so romantic, for a start. ‘He’s a computer guy,’ she said. ‘He services the computers at the Centre, once a month, he’s always helping me out. Found me an old laptop for twenty euros on eBay, reconditioned it for me.’ It wasn’t enough for Sandro; she could see that from the set of his mouth. ‘Not much of a looker, a couple of years older than me, very shy. Very, very shy.’
If you want reasons, she thought, why anyone would look twice at me.
‘He’s called Enzo. And yes, it was him I went to the seaside with.’ And for a second she closed her eyes, remembering the glitter of the sea. ‘His dad’s a butcher, they used to do the markets selling porchetta in summer, when he was a kid, and since he started work as a computer engineer, well, he says someone’s got to do it. Someone’s got to do emergency cover. He’s that kind of guy.’
A bit like you, she wanted to say. Doesn’t complain, gets on with it.
Sandro was thinking about it, she could see, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief to buy himself time. Deciding whether or not to be relieved: it didn’t come naturally to Sandro, though, relief. She looked at the lines in his forehead from all that worrying; she wouldn’t have him any other way. Who else was going to bother?
‘Not your problem,’ she said gently.
‘Maybe not,’ said Sandro, signalling for a coffee to the tired middle-aged woman behind the heated display. It might be a self-service restaurant, but coffee was coffee. The woman moved to fill the little hand-held filter, and Sandro turned back to Giuli. ‘I don’t suppose you’re going to bring him over to meet us, then?’
‘Might do,’ said Giuli warily. ‘Eventually.’
The coffee arrived, one mouthful of treacly black for each of them; Giuli was suddenly aware of Sandro watching closely as she downed hers straight off.
‘What?’ she said. He drank his, looking at her over the top of the tiny cup.
And then she got it: maybe it was that they were both fretting over Anna Niescu and her troubling condition but it seemed like her mind and Sandro’s were running on the same track today.
‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘no way. All that stuff about my appetite. You’re checking to see if I’ve gone off coffee, aren’t you?’
Sandro began to make protesting noises but she cut him off.
‘Don’t bother,’ she said, half laughing, half horrified, ‘I’m too old for the birds and bees conversation, Babbo.’ She shook her head. ‘And I’m too old to get pregnant.’
And twenty-five years of drugs and anorexia and not really caring if you live or die, doesn’t get your body in shape for a baby, either, she didn’t say. And just as well.
‘Let’s not go there,’ she said instead.
There was a sound from Sandro’s pocket: his ringtone was the loud jangle of an old-fashioned telephone bell — hardly, she’d pointed out to him more than once, the discreet choice. He fumbled with reading glasses from his top pocket — since when, Giuli wondered, had he needed them? Could he really be getting old? — then peered over them anyway at the little screen. He lifted a finger to stop her talking.
‘Sorry,’ he mouthed, putting the phone to his ear. ‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Hello? Pietro, is that you?’
There was a clatter from behind the self-service counter, of metal trays being hurled into the sink. Grimacing, Sandro turned away from the sound and put up his hand to block it out from his other ear.
‘You’ve found a what?’
‘Go, go outside,’ she mouthed, making ushering movements.
Gratefully Sandro took his hat and got to his feet, stopping to extract a handful of crumpled notes from his pocket and push them at her before hurrying for the door.
Giuli sat and watched him go, and from behind the counter the worn-out woman in her blue overalls paused, her arms full of greasy trays, and her eyes fastened on Giuli.
She’s wondering, thought Giuli. She thinks he’s probably my dad, but she’s not sure; for some reason the thought made her heart just a little heavy.
She took a sip from her glass of water, ran it around inside her mouth. The coffee here wasn’t much good, she decided. It was bitter, but then, it was August. Nothing tasted the same in August.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The small car stuttered, jerked and nearly stalled as Sandro nudged into the traffic coming off the wide ring road and down from the hills that formed the city’s southern boundary. Half the road was up, down to one lane. At the big roundabout of the Piazza Ferrucci, south of the bridge of San Niccolo, the lights changed to red.
Is it me? he wondered as he wrestled with the gears. Am I losing it? Surely he couldn’t have actually forgotten how to drive, even if it had been a while. The car — an ancient, unfashionable incarnation of Fiat’s smallest and most economical model — was dusty and unloved, its roof crusted with pigeon shit and last year’s leaves and all the city’s airborne filth. It did not inspire respect among his fellow drivers, which was why he was finding himself squeezed out at every junction and traffic light. He should have walked to lunch with Giuli, only the heat had defeated him, together with the thought of trying to have a fatherly chat when sweating into his suit. Calm, he thought. Pietro’s not going anywhere.
He’d left the restaurant to stand under the huge portal to the city, the massive stone arch at the head of the artery that was the Via Romana, and tried to understand what Pietro was saying. Would the famous magic phone solve this problem he had of not being able to hear a damn thing on his mobile? Or perhaps he was just going deaf, along with everything else.
‘We’ve got a body,’ Pietro had seemed to be saying. ‘And I thought you might want a look at it.’
‘A body.’
For a moment Sandro had stood very still as the world seemed to whirl on around him, the traffic, the dusty trees along the viale, a gang of tourists just brought up under the arch and their guide gesticulating upwards.
In thirty years as a serving police officer in a big metropolis — most of those with Pietro beside him — Sandro had seen bodies before; he’d dealt with murders, but not so many that death meant nothing. That had been some time back, too: six months ago he’d investigated the death of a woman in a car accident, but by the time he’d seen her she’d been cleaned up, put back together and laid out on a refrigerated drawer under a sheet. It had been years — three, or was it four? — since he’d been first to a fatality and had to take the impact of it.