Ma had called mid-morning, during a lull, fortunately. ‘There’s a man,’ she had complained, ‘phoned. He says he’s coming to fix the gate and can he come a bit later? He telephoned.’ She didn’t sound even slightly anxious about this man: Roxana sighed. Just when she thought she’d worked out what Ma’s problem was, it seemed to turn into something else.
‘Yes, I arranged it,’ she had said. ‘It needs a bit of TLC, that’s all. I’ll deal with it.’
Listened to Ma grumble on a bit more; those footprints by the broken back gate came into focus as she half listened. She’d put them out of her mind, overnight; something that had seemed alarming in the dark would turn out to be innocent enough by daylight. Only she couldn’t quite think of an innocent explanation.
‘I won’t be late,’ she had finished: too many things competing for her attention.
Not only the horrible fact of Brunello’s body, lying there two, three days in the heat — but something more amorphous that came with it. The feeling, something invisible as gas that had crept in here with the news and settled in corners, that things weren’t what she’d thought. That this place she came to every day — suffocatingly dull and reliable as clockwork — had secrets these men were trying to root out. And it had changed, in subtle and frightening ways that she couldn’t even put her finger on.
Roxana had stood up the next time Marisa appeared.
‘What are they doing?’ she had hissed. ‘This can’t go on, can it? They’ll have to close us for a bit.’
And at some movement beyond the door she had looked out to the street; you could never quite make out who it was out there, until you got up close. She had seen a flash of white trainers: kids.
‘It’s not good for business, is it? Having those guys here.’
‘They’re just doing their job,’ Marisa had said stiffly. ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’ Roxana had eyed her flatly: she was worried all right.
‘Have they found anything?’ They had both turned their heads towards the closed door that the three men hadn’t opened in some time.
‘They wouldn’t tell me if they had,’ Marisa had said, arms folded across her body and hugging herself. ‘I’m sure there’s nothing to find. You knew Claudio. Claudio wasn’t dishonest.’ She had sounded like she was trying to keep up her own morale.
‘Are we going to — what’s going to happen to us? Are we going to lose our jobs?’ Roxana had been surprised by how little she cared.
Marisa’s face had frozen. ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate — ah — that kind of talk isn’t appropriate, under the circumstances.’ She had drawn herself up. ‘Of course not. This is routine.’
As if he’d heard, or sensed, what they were talking about, Val had suddenly appeared in the doorway, at Roxana’s shoulder, hands in his pockets.
‘You’ll be all right, Roxi,’ he had said. ‘Girl like you.’ He had been leaning his head against the door jamb looking at Marisa, and the look she had given him back had been startlingly hostile.
‘You tell her, Marisa,’ he’d gone on. ‘She’s employable anywhere. She’s a grafter. Work ethic.’
Roxana had stared at him. He’d seemed to mean it.
‘Unlike you?’ Marisa had said, steely.
‘If you like,’ Val had said.
Roxana hadn’t been able to work out what was going on, exactly: a kind of face-off. They had glared at each other a long moment and in the end, it was Marisa who had blinked first. ‘Back to your desk,’ she had said to Val. ‘This is a bank, remember?’ He had smiled and turned on his heel.
‘You can take an early lunch,’ Marisa had said peremptorily, turning to Roxana. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’
Which was as close as she was going to get, Roxana had thought, to saying anything nice at all.
The phone went within minutes of her getting out of there, walking away from the bank towards the river and just as the heat, shocking at first and then overwhelming, brought a sudden sweat to every pore of her body. Roxana stopped, dripping now with the effort of rummaging through her bag, overtaken by a stupid panic that was about nothing and everything. What had she spent all morning trying to put her finger on? What was she trying to remember? What was wrong, what was different? Was she losing it?
This must be what it was like for Ma was the thought that came to her just before she saw the phone, glowing in the portable rubbish dump that was her handbag.
‘Maria Grazia.’
She exhaled with sudden relief, her back against the warm flank of the nearest building, in the shade, looking down the length of a filthy, sunlit alley, the blank and crumbling facade of a church halfway down it, the lopsided sign of a boarded-up grocery. Just out of sight at the end of that alley was the porn cinema, one street back from the river. And then it came to her.
‘He turned up, then?’ Maria Grazia asked, her voice crackling and distant, people shouting in the background. ‘Your boyfriend with his cashbag? Or has he done a runner with the takings?’
For a moment Roxana didn’t know what to say, so abrupt was the coincidence. Then she said, ‘No.’ She pressed her forearm against her forehead: could she seriously go back to work like this? She was drenched. ‘I mean, no, he never turned up.’
‘Well, if it was a movie,’ Maria Grazia said cheerfully, ‘he’d have done a runner with the takings.’
‘Life’s not like a movie,’ Roxana said automatically: an old joke between them, she the bank teller, her friend in the glamorous business of films. And besides, what takings? A couple of hundred euros on a good week.
‘Where are you, anyway?’ she went on.
‘Oh, just work,’ said Maria Grazia, sounding uncharacteristically vague. There was a pause. ‘I was a bit worried about you, to tell the truth. Are you OK? You don’t really sound OK.’
Roxana sighed, reluctant, suddenly, to go into the whole horrible mess. ‘I’m hot. The city’s a nightmare in August.’
Maria Grazia’s voice sharpened. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s more than that.’
‘Brunello’s dead,’ said Roxana abruptly. ‘My boss. They found him dead. The Guardia’s in the bank, looking at the books.’
‘What?’ An intake of breath. ‘What does that mean, they found him dead? What — suicide?’
Roxana found herself shaking her head. Why was that everyone’s assumption? Because it was more probable than — the alternative? Or more acceptable?
‘An accident?’ Maria Grazia corrected herself.
‘They don’t know.’ Roxana heard the dullness in her voice. ‘Looks like he was hit by a car — or something. Look, I don’t know the details, I–I-’ And then she couldn’t help herself. ‘It’s — it’s scary, to tell the truth.’ She didn’t even know it, until she said it.
There was a silence: she could almost hear Maria Grazia thinking. ‘Yes,’ she said eventually. ‘I can imagine.’
‘The branch is all over the place, uniforms looking at everything, shut in his office and telling no one anything. We get a private detective in one day, looking for Claudio — next thing we know, he’s dead and the Guardia are turning the place upside down.’
‘Hold on,’ said Maria Grazia. ‘What private detective?’
Roxana sighed as her thoughts settled on the man who reminded her of her dad. A nice guy, in all this. He’d given her his card. Could a private detective really be a good guy? Other than in the movies.
‘He was looking for Claudio.’ She frowned. ‘Someone — some client was trying to track him down. I had the impression it might be a woman, though he didn’t say that. It doesn’t seem — maybe it was just a coincidence.’ His name came to her. ‘He was called Sandro Cellini. The private detective, I mean, though, God knows, that’s the least of our troubles, if Claudio was having an affair.’
‘Wow,’ said Maria Grazia reverently. ‘And I always thought that place was so sleepy.’
Roxana went on, ‘No one knows what’s going to happen next, I’m even feeling sorry for Val, you know? And Marisa looks freaked. Completely terrified.’