‘She phoned me. Irene Brunello called me …’ She looked at her watch, staring as if her life depended on it. ‘A bit more than an hour ago.’
‘You got here quick,’ said Roxana. An hour? From Elba?
‘I took the helicopter,’ said Marisa, distractedly.
‘She was calling here yesterday,’ said Roxana, hearing the foolish eagerness in her voice. ‘She even called me at home-’ But then she faltered, seeing the look of dull fear on Marisa’s face.
‘Yesterday?’ Marisa sounded bewildered. ‘She knew yesterday?’
‘Knew what?’
And then Marisa seemed to crumple, with a small sound of distress, her long angular body collapsing into the uncomfortable leather sling of her office chair.
‘She’s been asked to — they need her to identify-’ She stopped, swallowed. ‘He’s dead,’ she said, barely whispering. ‘Claudio’s dead.’
Roxana stood over her superior, and stared. With one part of her brain all she could think of was that she should take the woman’s hand, rub some colour back into her cheeks, fetch a glass of water — but the rest of her head was suddenly filled to painful bursting with that awful word.
‘Dead?’
And the flood of images, unstoppable, came: Claudio Brunello giving her a quizzical, serious, calculating look over his screen; the fastidious movement with which he adjusted the sleeves of his jacket; the look — impatient, fond, superstitious — he would shoot at the photograph on his shelf. And more than images: his soft, considered, evasive voice, murmuring behind his closed door; the smell of sandalwood and polished leather that entered a room with him.
Marisa looked up at her and jerked her head in a nod that was more like a spasm.
Abruptly Roxana sat down. ‘But what-’ And then she stopped. Of course. ‘An accident,’ she said, almost relieved. How could it have been anything else? ‘And she’s been trying to get hold of us. Oh, God. In the car?’ The boss drove that car so fast, it was so unnecessarily powerful, and the coast road-
Somewhere off beyond the office door there was a noise, the sound of Valentino back from his lunch break, the hiss of the door and his idiotic friendly voice calling out.
But Marisa was shaking her head. Roxana’s thoughts whirled — a drowning, the currents up there, a body pulled out of the sea — until at last Marisa spoke, with what seemed like a terrible effort.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t an accident.’
*
‘Anna’s on her way,’ said the tough, skinny Russian girl on reception at the Loggiata.
She eyed Sandro with deep suspicion, before adjusting it to a look of contempt for Giuli, at his side.
‘She’s laying up for tomorrow’s breakfast. She’s a bit slow on her feet these days.’ Sarcastic, with it: Sandro just smiled and nodded. A violent death put things in perspective. Like childbirth, no doubt: the surly Russian was the least of their worries.
Outside there was the soundtrack of August: cicadas in the garden below them, starting up as the sun went down, and the sullen banging of builders at work, the crash of falling plaster. They might work at half-speed in August, but the city was full of them. The skies were clear, people were away, businesses shut for a month — so they called in the builders. Scaffolding everywhere, skips and rubble, and that infernal banging.
He turned to Giuli and whispered, ‘Thanks for coming.’
She looked at him with weary amusement. ‘No problem,’ she said.
The Loggiata was, as Pietro had said in what now seemed like another world but was only that tired bar in San Ambrogio last night, an old-fashioned sort of place. If old-fashioned meant it hadn’t been redecorated in thirty-five years and smelled of decades of cat. The hotel occupied the top floor of a crumbling palazzo behind Santo Spirito, and the foyer opened through a long, glazed door on to the loggia that gave it its name. The veneer reception desk was surmounted by a frayed square of orange hessian and the upholstered chairs in which he and Giuli sat were shiny with age. But the foyer was vast, the polished cotto of the floor undulating and ancient and the tall windows were original, with delicate glazing bars and wobbly old glass.
Outside the light was turning yellow and hazy in the late afternoon; the Loggiata had no air-conditioning but relied on the time-honoured methods of fans and shutters and damp cloths hung in strategic places. They sat very still and breathed shallowly in the heat, he and Giuli and the wary Russian, and they waited.
Take your time, Sandro thought. Don’t hurry down, little Anna Niescu, don’t worry that child you’re protecting so carefully, don’t raise your heartbeat. Give me time to think about how I’m going to give you this news.
He had waited in a bar in a backstreet, a dirty little place. ‘I’ll be there in a bit,’ Pietro had said, rolling his eyes and dismissing Sandro. ‘Wait for me.’
He’d walked in ten minutes later, frowning down at his mobile, and had called right there and then, from the bar. The seedy barman had eyed Pietro as he talked, his voice hushed and careful. Sandro had listened to one half of the conversation — the other half he could reconstruct on his own, from long familiarity and the occasional loud, gasping exclamation audible even from where he stood, a discreet metre from his old friend.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he’d heard Pietro say, again and again. He was better at this than Sandro ever had been; Pietro had a natural gentleness, where Sandro became gruff and brusque when he felt emotion struggling inside him.
‘I’m so sorry, Signora Brunello. Yes, yes — you need to have someone take care of the children, I don’t advise — no. Is there any relative you could leave them with? And perhaps someone to accompany you? It can be a very overwhelming experience.’
You can say that again, Sandro had thought. For the police — on nodding acquaintance with the morgue, its smells and sounds, the unmistakable grey pallor of a dead face, the particular lividity of a bruise on dead flesh — it was bad enough. But for most bereaved fathers, wives, mothers, it was the first and only time. For Signora Brunello and those like her, this would be the single worst moment of their lives.
She would come back into the baking city from the fresh salt air of the seaside, she would drive closer and closer, winding her window down to pay the toll that marked her entry into the inferno, and the choking, intolerable heat would roll in like poison gas. Coming back for this.
Pietro had hung up, looking grave.
‘Glad I don’t have to do that any more,’ Sandro had said, to comfort him, before realizing that that was just what he would have to do, and soon.
Now the Russian looked up from her magazine, sharp-eared as a cat, and Sandro turned to follow her glance. Anna Niescu came towards them through the glazed door from the loggia lopsidedly carrying a mop-bucket, and the eagerness in her face made Sandro scowl. Giuli, who knew what that scowl meant, nudged him sharply.
‘Miss Niescu,’ he said, getting to his feet. She set the mop-bucket down, searching his face, and Sandro took her hand in both his. It felt as small as a child’s, and hot.
The Russian girl muttered something that sounded like a curse in her own language and hauled the mop-bucket behind the desk. ‘Too heavy,’ she said in her accented Italian. ‘I tell you, I will carry this for you.’
‘Can we talk somewhere — private?’ asked Sandro, looking from Anna to the receptionist. The Russian nodded towards the door through which Anna had arrived.
‘Outside,’ she said.
Anna kept looking up at Sandro as they walked, but he couldn’t look back. He tried not to think of Claudio Brunello, of the Claudio Brunello he had seen, stiffened and bloodless and insulted by the elements, inhuman behind the soiled oleanders as cars roared past. He pushed open the door to let her through ahead of him.