‘All right,’ said Luisa warily. ‘So you didn’t see the girl. You wouldn’t have — recognized her. From a previous visit?’ Giovanna Baldini was obviously someone who kept her eyes open, but it was best to proceed with caution.
The woman regarded her. She shook her head. ‘I haven’t seen any pregnant women calling here. Who was she looking for, then? Who’s the father?’ She looked through the smoked-glass door after the young suited man, long gone by now. ‘Not him. Sixth floor, him. Not to mention gay.’
Luisa shifted her gaze discreetly to the bell-pushes beside the door, each with its own nameplate. There were something like thirty of them, and at first glance she saw no Brunello.
‘Well?’ said Giovanna Baldini, amused. ‘Found him?’
‘He’s called Claudio Josef Brunello,’ said Giuli curtly, clearly not interested in dragging this out.
‘Never heard of him,’ said Giovanna Baldini promptly. ‘But then people do come and go. Some of these nameplates are ten years out of date. Did you say third floor?’
‘Can you let us in?’ said Giuli.
Luisa began to shake her head at the girl but then Giovanna Baldini laughed abruptly. ‘Impatient, huh?’ she said. ‘I’ll let you in, but that’s it, you’re on your own. See if you can get any sense out of our estimable concierge.’
She fished a key out of her shorts pocket and pushed open the door. As they went through, Luisa paused to study the panel of bell-pushes again. ‘How does this system work, then?’ she asked. The flats were numbered, but Anna Niescu had written no number on the piece of paper, just as she had no code.
Giovanna Baldini was patient. ‘Four flats per floor. Nothing on the ground but the concierge, first is one to four, second five to eight, third nine to twelve. And so on. You get that?’
‘I get that,’ said Luisa, ‘yes.’ She scanned the names against apartments nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Names faded and stuck over, but no Brunello.
‘Well?’ With the woman’s face up close, there was suddenly something familiar about Giovanna Baldini. The tiny gold hoop earrings, each with a garnet. ‘I was at school with you,’ Luisa said, studying the names of the third-floor apartment owners. No Brunello. ‘In the Via Colonna. 1961?’
A faint smile appeared on the weatherbeaten face, the ghost of a girl behind it. ‘You weren’t Cellini then,’ she said.
‘Venturelli,’ supplied Luisa, staring: they might be everywhere, the kids she was at school with, mightn’t they? Become invisible with age: you’d have to get right next to them to see any trace of what they once were. And Giovanna Baldini nodded.
‘Venturelli. You married a policeman, I heard,’ she said. ‘Straight out of school.’
‘Can we get on with this?’ said Giuli with gathering impatience, from the polished marble interior of the dim hallway.
And Giovanna Baldini seemed to take the words as her cue because quite suddenly she had slipped between them and was off, hauling her shopping trolley up the stairs. She paused only when she’d reached the landing, opened her mouth and said, ‘Four five nine one. The entry code outside.’ And she nodded back down towards a shadowy corridor that led off the hallway, rounded the corner and was gone.
As the rattle of the trolley receded, outside the scuffed doorway at the end of the corridor, Luisa and Giuli looked at each other. Whatever lay behind the door wasn’t an alluring prospect.
Luisa rang the bell, a long peal. Then rapped, very sharply, on the wood, barking her knuckles. ‘Hello?’ she said, in her very sharpest tones. ‘Hello there. I need help. Concierge?’ She saw a faint smile on Giuli’s face. ‘Portiere!’ she bellowed.
And finally, there was the sound of slow footsteps, and the door opened.
Concierge was a grand name for it: the man who stood in the doorway — unshaven, balding, in a brown cotton overall half unbuttoned to reveal a grubby vest — was more what Luisa would have called a janitor.
The man made no move to admit them to his rooms, but stood in the doorway, lumpen and immovable. ‘What’s this all about?’ he said, surly. ‘All this racket.’ He smelled strongly of sweat and cheap spirit. Giovanna Baldini’s account of the man was accurate, so far.
He let Luisa talk for some time, listening with a vaguely contemptuous smile as she produced an explanation of their presence in her softest and most reasonable voice. She could smell the staleness of the room behind him, as the door stayed open: the smell of a man unloved and alone. At her side Giuli had a hand covering her mouth and nose; Luisa could feel her itching to take the man by the collar and threaten him, and hoped she would keep her cool.
The porter let her finish, still smiling. ‘I cannot give away details of our residents’ private circumstances,’ he said with a drunk’s heavy precision.
‘How much?’ said Giuli. ‘Twenty?’
Luisa saw greed chasing false indignation off the man’s face. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I can see that you might need some — compensation.’ She tried not to show her disgust. Was this how Sandro would deal with the man?
‘Twenty euros?’ he said. ‘Hardly.’
Luisa took the coin purse from her pocket; she’d put a few notes in there for the dry cleaning and hoped they weren’t fives. Thirty. She handed them to the man, trying to suppress the sinking of her heart as she understood there’d be no repayment of expenses on this job. Anna Niescu probably lived for a week on thirty euros.
But the dry cleaners would probably be closed, anyway. August: hateful month.
The porter still made no move to admit them. ‘So what exactly is it you want to know?’ he asked, leaning against the doorframe, insultingly at ease.
Giuli opened the briefcase against her knee and brought out a sheet of paper on which a blown-up, pixellated photograph appeared, of Anna Niescu and a man: his face blurred, his body language uneasy. She held it in front of the porter’s eyes. Luisa felt a pang of pity at Giuli’s determination, her readiness to work, the briefcase whose stitching was already fraying.
‘This man,’ Giuli said earnestly. ‘We — have reason to believe he was renting an apartment on the third floor. Renovating it.’
The concierge took the paper and pretended to scrutinize it. Then snorted. ‘His own mother couldn’t identify the man from this,’ he said. Luisa saw his gaze linger just fractionally on Anna’s beaming face, then he shoved the paper back towards Giuli.
‘What about her?’ Luisa said quickly.
‘Never seen either of them before,’ said the porter, folding his arms.
‘So who does live on the third floor?’ said Giuli.
Good girl, thought Luisa. Only then, from her handbag, her phone began to ring. The porter looked on with malicious amusement as she scrabbled to find it. Luisa saw it was Sandro and, not even knowing if it was what she’d meant to do, cut him off.
‘Smithson, Grasso, Martelli, de — de something or other,’ recited Giuli, ending a little lamely.
‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ said the porter. ‘Half the time people don’t bother to change the nameplates.’
‘Call yourself a porter?’ said Luisa. ‘You mean you don’t know who’s up there?’ A mistake, she thought almost immediately, but it turned out she was wrong. The porter drew himself up.
‘Smithson’s long gone, he worked for the British Council,’ he said, spite making him sound almost sober. ‘They use the flat for visiting artistic types. The last one left two days ago. De Tedesco is a Torinese comes here for business once a month, there’ve been ten or so tenants since the original Martelli, ditto Grasso, currently — respectively — a fashionable young couple abroad since last September, and an old bitch with a nasty little dog.’
The little dog Giovanna Baldini had been blowing kisses to. Luisa wished she’d followed Giovanna up those stairs instead of standing here inhaling the porter’s stink of unwashed clothes and booze.