Luisa looked from one to the other, knowing when she was beaten. Set two hands on the table, indicating the places laid to either side of her. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘This veal doesn’t look bad, for August. Are you going to eat, or not?’
And it was when they’d sat down, obedient at last, that she got to it. Her eyes were on Giuli first, who was lifting a forkful of salad to her lips, a look that meant something and the fork stopping in mid-air.
‘Giuli’s got something to tell us,’ she said. ‘Well, something to tell you.’
‘Oh, yes?’ said Sandro. Oh, no, was what he was thinking.
‘Yes,’ said Luisa, and she raised her water glass. ‘Giuli’s got some good news.’
*
The city glittered under the late-afternoon sun.
He parked up under some trees, his preferred spot, known only to the select few. A neatly kept row of mulberry trees on a ridge overlooking Scandicci, a stone bench. Someone could be bothered to tend the trees but he never saw them do it: he never saw anyone here, perhaps because the view — below, the sprawling suburb’s tower blocks baking in the heat, the distant industrial profile of the Pisan plain fell far short of Tuscan perfection. But the trees’ big, glossy leaves and heavy canopies gave excellent shade, and the ridge got a nice breeze.
Not that the breeze touched him today. He sat with the engine running and the air-con going full blast. Top-of-the-range climate controclass="underline" this car had everything: WiFi, Bluetooth, seats that remembered your shape and massaged you in just the right places, two months old and his pride and joy. He could have gone back to the office — but he liked his car better. The furnishings were more tasteful — and there was no one in his car to tell him where he should be, no interfering menial to ask him had he called so-and-so yet, frown at him every time he stepped outside for a cigarette.
A cigarette, that was it. That was what was lacking. He felt in his breast pocket: the pack of Marlboro Lights was reassuringly full. Save it. He wouldn’t smoke in the car: save it, luxuriate in the delicious blast of cold air a while longer.
August. He shouldn’t be working in August anyway. Did anyone? No one but losers, and he wasn’t a loser. Could sell ice cream to a Sicilian, snow to an Eskimo. There was no one to sell anything to, though, in August. Only losers, who didn’t have the money for what he was selling anyway. Go away, he should have told them, you can’t afford it. It would have been a mistake to have kept the office open if there hadn’t been the one big sale that would justify it.
He put two fingers inside his shirt collar to ease it. Trouble? Maybe. The single glass of Friulian Chardonnay glowed comfortably in his stomach, complementing the salade nicoise. His favourite, on a hot day: he’d choose a nice salad nicoise over a bistecca fiorentina as his last meal, any day of the week, not to mention salad was better for the maintenance of the six-pack. Any day. A ristretto with a shot of grappa, and all it needed was that cigarette to top it off. He could almost taste it now. His last meal.
Turning up the stereo, he settled back, dreaming. Search for the hero inside yourself.
Just as well he had sidelines, he didn’t rely on the office. There were ways of making money in this business. If you knew what you were doing. He’d have this car paid off in no time at alclass="underline" no time. Might even trade up, for the real thing, the big red beast with its leaping horse. He felt for the pack of cigarettes again, sat up, rubbed his eyes.
Even with the breeze, was he ready for the heat, out there? It was just right in here, the suit sat comfortably on him in this temperature, the shirt crisp, collars sharp. Two minutes out there and he’d be sweating into a thousand-euro suit. He pictured himself, blowing smoke rings under the trees. The music slowed, coming to the end of a track. He heard something.
Outside, something.
What? A stone displaced? He turned his head, squinting into the sun back along the road, but all he saw were the thick, rough-barked trunks of the mulberries, the dry seedheads along the verge, further off the squat shapes of a couple of ugly semidetached villas. Nothing. No one. The sun bleached the road out to nothing.
It unsettled him: this was his place. He didn’t want to have to find somewhere new for his illicit afternoons, when he was supposed to be with clients. He almost started the car up to head back to the office after all. Just to show the girclass="underline" he liked to pull up alongside it, slowly, the gleaming length of the car, the music booming. But it was the cigarette that did it. He took out the pack with his right hand and with his left tugged on the door handle, listening, without knowing he was doing it, in pleasurable anticipation of the central locking system’s heavy, expensive click at his command. Open Sesame.
But he never heard it.
He thought for an instant that the sound he heard instead might stop his heart, the horrible sledgehammer crunch of metal on metal, of irresistible force meeting the beautiful immovable object that was his pristine company car. He whirled his head, thinking, What the fuck? thinking someone had rammed him, but there was no car behind him. But it wasn’t the sound that stopped his heart.
Someone was there all the same, at the driver’s window now, he just got a glimpse of dark midriff at eye level, a centimetre of tattoo as the door was pulled from his grasp. Then a blinding pain as the door was swiftly slammed back, trapping his left hand; he twisted against its upholstery, trying to see up and out of the window, trying to work out what was going on. Oh, shit, he thought, as the door, pulled sharply open again, gave way beneath him and, now freed, he fell heavily to the gravel, head first. A glimpse of white trainers. Oh, shit. And someone’s foot stamped hard on his ear, fracturing his skull, and his last living thought, profane, astonished, disbelieving, was just that. Oh, shit.
White wine, olives, tuna, lattuga romana. Consumed approximately one and a half hours before death. His last meal.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Good news. Well, he’d be the judge of that.
Sandro mopped his brow, walking more slowly than he had thought possible so as to keep the clammy heat at bay. Without success: the Banca di Toscana Provinciale was in sight but he still had to stop.
For the second time that day, Sandro had found himself rolling his eyes in a frustrated attempt to communicate silently with one of the only two people he had ever been able to trust. First Pietro, when Anna Niescu’s presence had prevented them getting down to the important question as to why, if Claudio Brunello was not Anna’s lover, her lover was using his name? And then Luisa, her eyes boring into him and commanding him to keep silent as Giuli beamed up at them like a child taking a bow at the school play. Bursting with pride.
‘You’re what?’ Sandro had said, modifying his tone only just in time from appalled to merely startled.
‘Engaged,’ Giuli had said. And she had put out her right hand, on the ring finger a diamond so modest he had had to resist the impulse to pull her fingers up to his face to squint at it.
‘Isn’t that lovely?’ Luisa had said, a warning note in her voice.
He had looked from one of them to the other, knowing when he was beaten. What was this Enzo after? He had to be after something.Lovely?
He hadn’t listened as they started murmuring on about how long it would be till the wedding, what his family thought, what Giuli would wear.
‘Not white,’ Giuli had said — he’d heard that much.
Sandro had just needed to get Luisa on her own. And then Pietro. But instead he’d said, ‘I think I might just get off down to the bank.’