The open loggia, stretching perhaps twenty metres of dusty cotto under its beamed and tiled roof, was set with groupings of old cane chairs and low tables. The furthest of them were laid for tomorrow’s breakfast. A table for four and one for two; August was a quiet month, but even so. Six guests were not enough to support a place like this.
‘It’s cool in the mornings,’ said Anna, seeing him looking. ‘All of our guests like to have their breakfast here.’ She gestured for him to sit, pulled out a chair for him, and he came around behind her and did the same for her. Giuli managed on her own.
And then they were seated, and it had to be said.
‘Anna,’ he said, as gently as he could, ‘I’m afraid there’s some bad news.’
She stared, and her soft brown eyes seemed to darken, and there came into them an awful knowingness that perhaps had always been there, the last vestige of the abandoned child she had once been.
‘Bad news?’ she said quietly, and her small hands sat on either side of her belly, stilling it.
‘An accident,’ said Sandro, the dreadful deceitfulness of the word sour in his mouth. Giuli leaned across and took Anna’s hand, and the girl’s head tilted back just a little, her hand came up to cover half her face.
Sandro leaned close, to draw her back to him. ‘A man was — the police think he was struck by a car, out — out near the Viale Amendola. The African market: do you know the African market?’ He saw her face bleach with fear and confusion. ‘We think he may be your fiance. He had some documentation on him.’
And Anna Niescu let her hand fall and looked into his eyes. Her mouth was trembling and she began to shake her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, I — no. The African market? Why would he be there? On the viale?’
And Sandro had nothing to say to that, because she must know by now, mustn’t she? That her beloved Josef wasn’t what he seemed. Anna Niescu was not stupid. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all he could think of. And then, ‘I’m afraid we will need you — to identify him. To come and make sure.’
And then the hand flew to her mouth to stifle an awful sound, because now she understood. That this was reaclass="underline" there was a body, and she must look at it.
‘Yes,’ she said, eyes wide, blinking to stifle the tears, but Sandro could see them.
They had talked about this. He and Pietro.
‘The wife, first, of course,’ Sandro had said, and silently Pietro had compressed his lips in agreement. Not a matter of the law, but of propriety. It wasn’t for them to judge the rights and wrongs in Brunello’s marriage.
‘She said she would probably be able to get here by six,’ Pietro had said. ‘She’s leaving the children in Monterosso, with their grandmother.’
‘His mother?’
Sandro had been aghast: first one, then others, the bereaved always multiplied like this. Pietro had shaken his head. ‘Hers.’
Was that a mercy? Silently they had agreed that it was.
And then, drily, reluctantly, because it was almost certainly in defiance of protocol, Pietro had said, ‘I imagine you would like — to be there?’
And, as reluctantly, Sandro had said that he would. Tried to calculate the horrible logistics of talking to Anna, getting over to the morgue to observe the wife and her reactions, and then bringing Anna herself, the pregnant lover, to take her turn identifying the body.
‘Do you want me to come now?’ said Anna, and her hands moved, reaching about her pointlessly for something that might aid her: handbag, cardigan.
‘Not quite now,’ said Sandro. ‘There are — procedures first, that the police have to carry out.’
She looked at him blankly, but nodded. Ever obedient. Sandro felt a pang, because it was nonsense, wasn’t it? Procedures? Lies, was more like it. Lies and evasions: when would it end? When Brunello’s widow came face to face with this girl? Would they be able to avoid that?
Almost certainly they would not. If they wanted to make a case for suicide, then they would have to produce something beyond the happy family, on holiday by the sea, the comfortable job. The expensive car.
Where was it, that car?
‘He took the car,’ Pietro had said shortly. ‘I didn’t want — to go too much further. On the phone. But she said, he took the car, she’d been using the little runaround they keep by the sea.’
‘Little runaround,’ Sandro had repeated. It said everything.
Outside the Loggiata, the builders’ noise had started up again, although the light was mellowing as the afternoon wore on. Bang, bang, bang: there was something vicious about it, something sullen and monotonous and horrible. With every report Anna Niescu’s shoulders contracted, like an animal drawing into itself under attack.
‘I don’t think it can be until tomorrow morning,’ said Sandro on impulse, seeing a way through those logistics. He knew what it would mean for her, but it was suddenly imperative that Brunello’s wife — widow — should be long gone before Anna got there. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Tomorrow?’ Her voice was an anguished, disbelieving whisper.
‘I’ll come back for you,’ said Sandro. ‘You should rest, if you can.’
She looked at him vaguely: she was pale and her skin gleamed with sweat. Sandro was brought up short by the realization that, whatever happened, within a month this child would be giving birth to another. Perhaps sooner than that.
‘I’ll stay with you,’ said Giuli to Anna gently, arm around her shoulders.
‘Oh, no,’ said Anna quickly, vaguely, ‘I’ve got work to do. The kitchen has to be ready for the morning.’
‘Anna,’ said Sandro, ‘I know you would like to keep busy, perhaps. But think of your baby. Concentrate on your baby: that’s the important thing.’ He saw her mouth form a little ‘O’ as she breathed, saw her place a hand between her breasts to calm herself.
‘Yes,’ she said. A little colour returned to her face as she stayed very still.
‘Let me stay,’ said Giuli again. ‘Just see how we go. I can help you, in the kitchen, if that’s what you want to do.’ She darted a glance at Sandro. ‘All right?’
He nodded just once, quickly. Giuli took Anna by the wrists gently and held her gaze. ‘All right?’
‘Yes,’ said Anna and, as so often happened, it was the kindness that brought the tears. The bad news shattered them, dried their eyes and mouths, paralysed them, but it was the arm around the shoulder that made them cry.
Below the lovely, crumbling loggia, the builders had at last stopped banging; they were slinging scaffolding joints into a barrow instead, on their way out. The three sat without speaking until at last the noise was no more than the echo of the final steel-capped boot. Sandro left the two women there, so close they were almost one, the neat black cap of hair pressed in under Giuli’s chin.
As he left, Sandro nodded his brief thanks to the Russian. She looked up, beady-eyed as a bird.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Is bad news?’ She spoke warily, wanting information, prepared to give nothing away herself.
‘Bad news,’ said Sandro. ‘Yes.’
‘She don’t deserve it,’ said the girl. It was delivered bluntly, but contained within it also the fatalistic recognition that rarely are the good rewarded.
She might have been beautiful, with her thick black brows and her white, white skin, if she didn’t seem so angry, angry even before she knew why they were here. What was she angry about? Being here, in August, being far from home? Perhaps it was just a Russian characteristic. Defiance and anger.
‘No,’ Sandro said. ‘She deserves better.’
CHAPTER TEN
There was a suite of rooms at the police morgue, for the receiving of family members; one of them had a viewing room behind a one-way mirror. Behind it Sandro sat and watched Pietro as he stood beneath a large and ornate black crucifix, his hands clasped earnestly, talking to Claudio Brunello’s wife — widow. Sandro knew they wouldn’t let him in the room, although he’d tried.