‘He knows what he’s doing, old Frollini,’ said Sandro mildly. Frollini — not much older that Sandro if truth be told — Luisa’s suave boss, was a bone of contention between them. Too fond of Luisa for Sandro’s comfort, too smooth, too rich. ‘The world’s changing. People want to shop in August.’
‘For ski jackets? For the dregs of last season’s things in the sale? Dragging round a city when there are woods and rivers and seaside? It’s not changing for the better.’
Sandro smiled to himself: she knew how to soothe him, with her indignation. Luisa could tell even with her back turned what kind of a day he’d had and the way he was this evening; she wouldn’t stand in front of him in the doorway and say, Well? Did you ask about a mortgage?
And he’d even been in a bank, too. Not, he thought, that he would go to the Toscana Provinciale for money, not even if that clever, watchful girl in the glasses — what had been her name? — was the manager rather than just a sportellista. What was she doing in such a place?
With a wrench he tore himself away from his memory of the wary bank teller — Delfino, that was it, DELFINO Roxana on her little badge — unwilling, back to the matter in hand.
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said to Luisa’s broad back, as she lit the gas under the chopped vegetables. ‘I — it slipped my mind. The bank.’ A battered fan stood on the counter beside her, wafting the scent of onions.
She washed her hands under the cold tap, rubbing them over and over, before she turned back to him.
‘It’s all right,’ she said easily, and he saw her look quickly around the room, taking in the old melamine-fronted cabinets, the dent in the stainless-steel sink. It showed all the signs of having been thoroughly cleaned; getting home from work an hour before him, at six-thirty, she must have set to straight away. To reassure herself that, with a quick brush-up, this place wasn’t so bad after all, they could stick it out?
Or perhaps the first step towards getting it spruced up for sale. Probably both: that’d be like his little strategist, to kill two birds with one stone.
‘Tough day?’ she asked, sitting down and taking a sip of the drink he’d poured her, a glass of Crodino in which the ice had already melted to slivers; she tipped the glass from side to side, to hear them chink.
He nodded, hesitating. Not quite ready to tell it all. Then remembered: he’d done something right.
‘I spoke to Giuli, though,’ he said.
‘And?’ Luisa set her hands on her hips.
‘And you were right, she’s got a boyfriend, and it was him she went to the seaside with. Computer geek, by the sound of it. A technician.’
‘Well,’ said Luisa drily. ‘That’s better than — it might be.’
Better than nightclub bouncer or pimp or debt collector or homeless junkie, was what she meant. The choices Giuli had made in her previous life did not bear too much contemplation.
Sandro frowned. Lunch with Giuli seemed a long time ago, eclipsed by the memory of that battered body decaying in the gaseous heat of the ring road. He remembered her saying, I know a bad guy when I see one.
‘Actually,’ he said cautiously, ‘I think we should — well, maybe not stay out of it completely, but at least — give her the benefit of the doubt. I think she knows what she’s doing.’
Luisa gave him a long look. ‘Fine,’ she said at last, and he saw her struggle to say it. She sighed, said it again. ‘Fine. You’re probably right.’
‘His name’s Enzo,’ he said. ‘I think she’ll bring him over, eventually. For inspection.’
‘Right,’ said Luisa, and he could see that for the moment, she had decided to be satisfied. ‘So tell me,’ she said. ‘About the bad day. Did you find him?’
‘Ah.’ Sandro rubbed his eyes, suddenly exhausted, and smelled the day on his hands. Traces that stirred disquiet in him: aftershave and disinfectant, soot and car exhaust and latex gloves. Traces of the old life; him and Pietro shoulder to shoulder, looking down at human remains. ‘Well, it’s complicated.’
Luisa cocked her head, a gesture he knew of old, that meant, So tell me.
And he told her, leaving nothing out. As he described Brunello’s wife, dignified in her crumpled linen shift, he saw Luisa’s mouth twist. Whose side could you come down on, after all?
‘Bring her here,’ she said, getting to her feet, rubbing her back. She had grown stiff and sore listening to the story, and the air was rich with the scent of the meat sauce that had cooked while they talked. Luisa crossed to the window and leaned out, looking for a breath of air. ‘Bring the girl here, after. I’ll take the day off.’
*
The internet cafe off the wide expanse of the Piazza dell’Carmine was where they usually met, not a glamorous place but it suited Giuli fine. It was one of the things she liked about Enzo, that he didn’t notice his surroundings, really. He would sit across the small table and just look at her while he talked, as if nothing else was there. Focused, that was Enzo.
He wasn’t late — Enzo was never late. Giuli was early, because she simply felt like being alone a bit. Only ten minutes early, that would be plenty.
Anna Niescu, she had learned, was tougher than she looked. After Sandro had gone, she had stayed, silent, pressed against Giuli on the wide loggia, for ten minutes at least, and Giuli had felt how still she was, like an animal hiding from a predator, conserving her strength. And then, as though something had come to a conclusion, she had quite abruptly stood up.
Giuli had followed her, not daring to speak because anything might be the wrong thing to say. In the big, old-fashioned hotel kitchen — a dresser, a wide iron range, a big marble-topped table — she had followed helplessly as Anna wiped surfaces and put bread in a cloth bag, cheese in the fridge. Eventually Giuli had been allowed to put away the scoured pans waiting on the draining board and only because she had not been able to watch as Anna staggered under their weight and had physically removed them from her.
Then at eight Anna had said, ‘I go to bed now.’ As though she was still living out in the countryside with her contadini, and dusk was bedtime.
Giuli had followed her there, too, without being asked. Her room was at the end of a corridor of guests’ rooms, and might have been mistaken for a cupboard, its door was so narrow; Giuli had to blink to believe that Anna had managed to slip through it herself. It had one small high window, a single bed, a wardrobe and a wooden chair. Looking at the single bed, Giuli had wondered — not for the first time since she’d met Anna Niescu, and uncomfortably — how she had conceived, this child with her little child’s bed. And not so much how — because, she could almost hear Sandro saying wryly, it would be in the usual way — but where.
Anna had turned and seen her in the doorway behind her, but hadn’t told her to go. She had taken something from under her pillow and gone out, through another door; there had been the brief sound of running water, and cautious, uncertain movements, as though once finding herself alone she had lost all sense of where she was. Giuli had sat down on the wooden chair and waited until Anna came back, in a cotton nightdress with faded flowers, a market-stall thing meant for a woman three times her age that made her look even younger. Without meeting Giuli’s eye, she had got into bed.
For a long time neither of them had said anything. Moonlight had come through the long window and fallen on the old tile of the floor, turning the deep waxed red to black. Anna had lain quite still, curled on her side. It had taken her breathing a long time to slow, while Giuli listened. Trying not to think of what would be going through Anna’s mind. And then, just as Giuli had thought sleep was overtaking the girl, she had given an awful start. Struggled up on one elbow, as desperately as if she had been drowning, pleading in incoherent half sentences. No, no, she had been saying. No, no, don’t go, don’t.