And they were beautiful; Roxana had a picture of them at work, stuck under the counter where the customers wouldn’t see it. She looked down now, no need to be furtive, the place was as quiet as the grave. Paolino was one and a half and had his dad’s dark red hair and a fierce little face; Rosa, three, black-eyed and cherubic, took after her grandmother.
Not that easy though, Mamma. As if she could just nip out of the bank and on to the Via del Corso in her lunch break and nab a man with I want kids tattooed on his forehead.
Mamma had this theory that if women lived alone too long — chance would be a fine thing: what she meant was, lived without a man too long — they turned strange and fussy, liked their own little way of doing things too much. They turned into spinsters, and according to Mamma, Roxana was a prime example. ‘Sometimes,’ she’d pronounce, watching Roxana restack the dishwasher or order the cupboards or check they’d double-locked the door, ‘I wonder if you’ve got that thing. That obsessive-compulsive whatsit.’
Sliding her neat little motorino into the space under the embankment wall that was unofficially reserved for it next to Valentino’s fat, shiny, show-off Triumph motorbike, Roxana had climbed off gingerly, not wanting to raise a sweat, not before a day’s work. She unclipped her helmet, eased off the thin cotton jacket and stowed them away in the pillion box. Removed her handbag and locked the box, fastened the big yellow steel immobilizer and set off for the bank. Even then as she turned off the river into the warren of streets east of the Uffizi, she looked back over her shoulder, to be sure.
The city seemed so empty, bathed in heat and desolate, but there were always thieves: always. Roxana was a Florentine through and through, born in the hospital of Careggi that sat on the hills to the north; she’d been knocked off her motorino twice — a broken wrist the first time, a collarbone the second — and mugged seven times. Not in the last couple of years, though: she was careful these days. Her mother’s little villa in Galluzzo, where they had both lived since her father had died last year of a heart attack at fifty-eight, had been burgled three times. The thieves came in the early hours, high on something: you woke up in the morning to find wires where the flatscreen TV had been (My only pleasure, these days, Ma had wheedled to get her to buy it) and her handbag gone.
Now the revolving security airlock hissed, the mechanical voice instructed the new arrival to turn around and remove all metallic objects from all pockets, as it always did. Only the odd flustered tourist, having strayed off the beaten track, ever complied; the security capsule’s early morning occupant stood patiently and waited for the door to open.
Here he is, thought Roxana, almost with disappointment. The bank’s most reliable customer, not quite regular as clockwork any more — it was close to ten by now, rather than the usual eight-fifteen — but-
It wasn’t him. Signora Martelli, proprietress of the newspaper stand in the tiny Piazza Santa Felicita shuffled through the door, dragging her shopping trolley after her, pale and sweaty with the heat under her habitual full make-up, to deposit her meagre takings. The typical customer: on her last legs, heart trouble, swollen ankles, the summer would probably see her out. Roxana eyed her. She didn’t envy the executors of that will. The old lady wasn’t letting ill health mellow her — she was one of those who had her favourites, Roxana theorized, a working woman who disapproved of other working women. Yet, with a disdainful sniff, she eventually allowed Roxana to investigate the failure of a standing order to pay her water bill. Not quite satisfied by the explanation that an annual review had been specified on the standing order and it had lapsed, she had shuffled off again, leaving the place to return to glum silence, dust motes hanging in the murk.
The last time they’d been burgled, Roxana had been woken by the intruders and she’d got up, bleary with rage, the heavy immobilizer for the Vespa in her hand, only Ma had appeared in her bedroom doorway white with terror and clung on to her. Roxana had had to stand there, stupid big piece of plastic-sheathed metal in her hand, and do absolutely nothing. Nothing but stroke Mamma’s hair to calm her. They hadn’t even claimed, not wanting the insurance to go higher: Roxana had gone for the cheapest TV she could find this time.
Too many drugs, too many desperate types, too little respect. Easy pickings from the wealthy tourists bred crime as uncleared garbage bred rats.
Obsessive-compulsive? Roxana didn’t know where Ma had picked up that little bit of psycho-babble. It was simply that the answer was to be wary, and to pay attention to the detail.
The boss would laugh at her, gently, for this tendency, but then he’d reassure her that this was precisely why he’d employed her. It was why she was such an asset to the bank, with her thoroughness, her conscientiousness.
In the silent interior, Roxana couldn’t suppress a sigh. It was also why she was left holding the fort for most of August — that big mummy’s boy Valentino Sordi, currently messing about happily with the coffee machine in the little staff room.
The offices behind her were dark and empty: the boss’s sanctum — with Direttore in big letters on the frosted glass — and that of his deputy Marisa, who could do no wrong as Gestore, Business e Family with special responsibilities for bringing in commercial customers. The use of English words in Marisa’s title was intended to indicate modernity.
Were they having an affair? Roxana mused, with nothing better to do than indulge in flights of fantasy. Their holidays were more or less coinciding, even if Marisa had been away a day or two longer than him, and since the boss was supposed to be at the seaside with his family, would he even have time for an affair? Not to mention the fact that Marisa, with her designer clothes and her evenings at the Gallery Hotel drinking cocktails, had a wealthy boyfriend already. But still …
Could Roxana have been appointed Gestore, Business e Family if she’d played her cards right? Marisa Goldman, the daughter of a Swiss banker and a Torinese countess, had nothing but good breeding and the right wardrobe, a certain aristocratic way with customers. Whereas despite her degree in economics and accounting, and her thesis on the decline in small-scale manufacturing in rural northern Italy, Roxana was still only a sportellista. A teller, a bank clerk, after three years behind the plexiglass, for all the boss’s professions of enthusiasm for her attention to detail.
And it wasn’t as though the Banca di Toscana Provinciale was one of the big names. No, it was a small, old-fashioned bank, a niche bank, if you wanted to put it kindly, with just ten branches, three of them in Florence. It was her mother’s bank, though, which was more or less why she’d ended up here. It had been where her father had brought her to open her own first bank account — now a source of constant frustration to her because the bank was too small, too obscure, and too backward to have its own cash machines anywhere but in the city, so every time she took money out she had to pay some other bank’s whopping charge and feel a mug all over again. The Banca di Toscana Provinciale wasn’t ready for the modern world, and Roxana had always thought that she was, more than ready. So what was she still doing here?
She stared at a terrible poster, dog-eared on the outside of the boss’s office. A man with a white grin and a sharp suit, holding out his hand, and customers queueing in the bank, a dream bubble over each one’s head. Kids playing in the garden, a shiny car. Look ahead! the man was saying. Get in line! Who’d come up with that one? Queue up like a drone, borrow more than you can afford, don’t bother to read the small print.