Roxana’s friends — friend, really, Maria Grazia, whom she hardly saw now she’d moved to Rome to work in film production — told her, get out, the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze had vacancies, a big shiny new building in the north of the city; get an apartment up there, there are some great offers on the new developments. Break free.
And she would. Roxana told her — over a snatched coffee the last time she visited, Maria Grazia with that worried look in her eyes — she would, only for the moment, there was that tug at her heart that was Mamma.
‘She’s only sixty,’ Maria Grazia had said in an exasperated outburst. Then hissed, ‘She could live another thirty years, Roxi. Getting more cranky and ill every year.’
It was all right for Maria Grazia; her mother, long divorced, was a journalist, she prided herself on being modern, didn’t want her kids hanging on to her apron strings until they were forty or married.
Suddenly, unwatched, unsupervised, Roxana felt like calling up Maria Grazia and telling her. Asking her what she thought about the only interesting thing that had happened in the bank for months.
If Maria Grazia was even there. She hadn’t been, Roxana had found with a sense of obscure humiliation, on the last couple of times she’d called — out on location, a kindly, condescending assistant had said. As if the girl knew that Maria Grazia’s best friend from school was stuck in a dead-end job while the fledgling production director was hanging out with a film crew in Romania.
And if she was there, she’d think her old friend was losing it. Roxana could imagine the intake of breath, the disbelieving laugh. ‘You mean, that’s the highlight of your day, Roxi?’ she’d say. ‘Some old guy failing to turn up to deposit his takings?’
Not old, at least, not very, not much older than Roxana. Deep lines around his eyes, but then working at the Carnevale might have that effect on you. Not her type, even in a different line of work, she’d have to make that clear to Maria Grazia or she’d start matchmaking straight away. Though there was something about him … Otherwise why would his absence keep nagging at Roxana? Dark hair. Black, black eyes. Not always quite clean, not always close-shaven; there was nevertheless something about the Carnevale’s bagman, who no doubt had a name but Roxana had never learned it, that made you think twice. Something that made you wonder, or maybe, as Maria Grazia would undoubtedly say, You’ve got a bit too much time on your hands, Roxi, if you’re wondering about every customer that comes through the door. A tendency to daydream: perhaps that was why Roxana had never been promoted.
There was a clatter at the little staff door behind Roxana, and a grunt, and Val was back, a tiny tin tray in his hand with two coffees on it and a ridiculously pleased expression on his big, stupid, handsome face. The coffee smelled good, Roxana had grudgingly to admit. She hadn’t felt like breakfast this morning, waking in a sweat after a night of broken sleep, that neighbouring baby crying, the suffocating humidity, Mamma’s grumbling still turning over and over in her head, and a bitter taste in her mouth.
‘Thanks,’ she said, downing the thimbleful and pushing back her chair. ‘God,’ she sighed, ‘I don’t remember it being this quiet last year.’
Val shrugged. ‘Don’t knock it,’ he said with indifference, stacking the cups carelessly back on the tray, setting it down on her neat working surface and parking himself beside her. Spinning on the adjustable seat like a child at the barber’s. Roxana retrieved one of the cups as it tipped and threatened to spill its dregs. He set his big feet up on the counter in a parody of insolence. Val didn’t have a thesis or even a degree; he’d scraped through the Liceo Scientifico with a decent grade thanks to private tuition but had dug his heels in when university was suggested. He was simply too lazy.
Val had got his job at the Banca di Toscana Provinciale because he was connected: his uncle was one of the directors. He might stay a sportellista all his life, too, but the thing was, Val didn’t really care. His mother — who worked all the hours God sent running a grocery-cum-wine bar — would keep him supplied with money, and business was booming, if Val’s appearance was any guide. All Val cared about was how he looked. He would spend the first half an hour of each morning brushing himself down after the ride in on his big Triumph, examining the creases in his sharp wool trousers, adjusting the angle of his tie.
Roxana stood up abruptly, the tray in her hand: she’d wash up. She always did.
‘He hasn’t been in,’ she said, and even as she said it, she experienced a minute, sudden, unexpected nudge of panic. As if shining a light on this small and apparently inconsequential mystery might conjure up a whole world of unforeseen consquences: one tiny thing out of place, one idle, curious question asked.
‘Hasn’t been in?’ repeated Val stupidly. ‘Who hasn’t been in?’
Dimwit. Val dealt with the bagman just as often as Roxana.
‘The Albanian.’ To her he was an ‘Albian’ — he might have been anything Eastern European. ‘From the — the cinema, with his cashbag. It’s Tuesday, and he hasn’t been in.’ Then, patiently as if she was talking to a slow child, ‘Every Tuesday since I’ve been here, eight-fifteen — or at least, between eight-twelve and eight-twenty — he comes in to make his deposit.’
Val stared back at her. ‘Dunno,’ he said, and shrugged, but he was frowning. So maybe it really was odd if it had penetrated Val’s thick skull. Or maybe he just didn’t know what she was talking about.
‘Really,’ said Roxana, turning away with the tray but she felt that sharp little tweak of anxiety again. Kept her face impassive, shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s just that it’s August.’
A porn cinema, in this heat. And these days there was the internet. Ugh.
‘Yeah,’ said Val indifferently. Then, with a child’s expression of transparent craftiness, ‘How about we bunk off early, then?’
CHAPTER THREE
Even later as the light faded and the heat refused to die in the stifling streets, as Sandro waited on the corner for Pietro, standing awkwardly with the gift in his hands, trailing gold ribbon and all, he couldn’t get her out of his head.
Anna Niescu had not been what he expected.
He had felt Giuli’s eyes on them every time she came back into the room, on one pretext or another; it had been like being a teacher or a doctor trying to coax a word out of a child, with a pushy parent hovering nearby.
‘Giuli,’ he’d said in exasperation on something like the fourth interruption — looking for the tax forms, she’d said, as if Giuli had any interest in her own tax code, let alone anyone else’s. Anna Niescu had stopped what she was saying and turned to smile that innocent, trustful smile at Giuli as she entered — as she’d done on the previous three occasions. Giuli her protector.
A bit too protective. It was as if Giuli thought she needed an interpreter, as if she didn’t trust the girl — woman, Sandro supposed, as he now knew her to be twenty-eight years old, despite appearances — to speak her own mind, or possibly to be able to form a coherent sentence. Sandro himself, he had to admit, had had the impression before Anna Niescu spoke that she might be — simple. Too good for this world, as had used to be said of the backward child of every village; no doubt there was a term in modern psychology for it, but Sandro was quite happy not to know it.
‘Giuli tells me you can find him,’ Anna Niescu had said, smiling from Giuli to Sandro and back again, apparently unable to see the reluctance in his eyes, the anxiety in Giuli’s.
Ironic, Sandro had thought, that these days such trustfulness is assumed to be the symptom of a psychiatric disorder of some kind. Faith. Sandro himself was long past churchgoing: he felt himself to be too dirtied by a life of policing — public servant, then private investigator, and he couldn’t have said which was dirtier — to summon up sufficient belief in a benevolent creator. Too much of a sinner himself, too. It wasn’t quite the same thing as being an atheist, though.