One of the darkened glass doors was ajar behind the shutters and with some displacement of air, from inside or out, perhaps even the delayed effect of her own entrance, a gust of something reached her. It was not clearly identifiable, that smelclass="underline" it was some combination of dark things, of staleness and damp, rotting carpet, the sharp stink of urine and something chemical too, something sulphurous, but Roxana, even having grown up in the city with its overflowing dumpsters and leaking drains, found herself putting a hand to her mouth and nose and holding it there.
There was a sound from behind her. The flimsy door wrenched open and as she turned a voice, deep, angry and suspicious, and not quite Italian.
‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’
A man in a torn T-shirt under overalls, wiry and unshaven. He carried a hammer.
‘Sorry,’ said Roxana, ‘I’m sorry,’ and saw him looking her up and down in silence, the shirt and jacket and tights. She didn’t belong here.
‘I–I was looking for someone,’ she stammered, and his stare hardened.
‘There’s no one here,’ he said curtly. He was from the East, she thought, Romanian or Polish or Bosnian, one of those. ‘The place is empty. We’ll be getting guard dogs in next week; you’re lucky you didn’t come looking then.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘The door wasn’t locked, I just thought — he might still be here.’
‘Who?’ said the man, folding his arms aggressively.
Roxana darted a glance over her shoulder into the dim, fetid interior beyond the wire shuttering. ‘He used to work here,’ she said. ‘That’s all. He just — just disappeared. I wanted to know where he’d gone.’
Something dawned behind the man’s eyes, no more than a crafty glimmer. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘What d’you want him for, exactly? Girl like you.’
Roxana swallowed: she didn’t like being called a girl, suddenly.
‘Nothing,’ she said, involuntarily taking a step backwards, feeling the stinking dark behind her. ‘It’s all right, it doesn’t matter.’
‘Let me tell you,’ said the builder, and a smile widened, without warmth. As he uncrossed his arms, she saw the veined flexing of biceps, despite his leanness. ‘It was disgusting in there. Whoever he was — he didn’t live like a king. That little hole of his.’
She couldn’t stop herself; incredulously she blurted, ‘He lived in there?’
The man with his hammer grunted, rocking on his heels. ‘You can call it living,’ he said. ‘This city,’ and he smiled again. ‘You seen them? It’s not all rich, with the swimming pool and the garage. In the basement, in the attic, they live like rats, no one can see.’ And the arm with the hammer relaxed and the hand swung down loose at his side. ‘Should have got started months ago,’ he said. ‘Come looking in September, no more pigsty. You find someone your type.’
‘It — it was a business matter,’ Roxana improvised, wanting to shut him up, wipe that smile off his face, wanting to push past him and run.
‘Business?’ and he cocked his head, suddenly quite stilclass="underline" it was as if the word had sent an alert somewhere. ‘What kind of business?’ And then, pushing his angry face close to hers so she could see the trace of white in his stubble and smell the cigarettes on his breath. ‘You tell me your name, please.’ And his hand was on the strap of her handbag, and holding.
‘Roxi?’
And she felt her knees almost buckle with relief at his voice, coming from the other side of the tongue and groove boarding. High-pitched, a bit panicky, a bit useless, but she’d never been so happy to hear it in her life.
‘Are you in there? The security guard said — Roxi?’
It was Val, come to find her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
She appeared in the kitchen doorway, padding on bare feet, pale but not sick, not any more. The ghost of colour in her cheeks.
From the kitchen table Luisa smiled at Anna tentatively. The tabletop was scattered with pages of notes: Sandro’s notes. She hastily pushed them into a pile and pulled out a chair beside her. Moving gingerly under her own weight, Anna lowered herself obediently into the seat.
Without asking, Luisa put water on to boil. Camomile tea, the answer to everything and nothing. Sweet biscuits: she wished she had something better than the plain ones she kept as a last resort. She would buy something with chocolate, Luisa decided. She should also get something more tempting and began to wonder where she might get a decent chicken in August; chicken would be good for the baby.
Telling herself not to be daft, that Anna Niescu would probably have fled before she got back from the butcher’s, Luisa turned from the stove to see the girl studying a page covered in Sandro’s scrawl. He’d written down what they told him about the apartment. It was headed, Via del Lazaretto. It was about the only thing on the page that was legible, but it was enough. Anna turned her head sideways to meet Luisa’s gaze.
‘You went there?’ she said, and at the trace of pride in the girl’s voice, Luisa’s heart sank. ‘Did you see it? Did you see our apartment?’
Carefully, Luisa set the cup in front of her and the plate of biscuits. She sat down.
‘It’s a lovely area,’ she said. ‘Close to the countryside, isn’t it? Very nice.’
Anna set her chin in her hands and gazed off into the distance. ‘You think I’m an idiot,’ she said simply. ‘You think he deceived me.’ She sat up and looked into Luisa’s face, hands folded on top of her belly. She didn’t even glance at the biscuits.
‘I don’t know,’ said Luisa, and it was the truth. However bad it looked, she still clung to the belief that the man had at least loved Anna Niescu. What kind of human being could deceive this child, in that way? If Sandro were here, he would tell her, Plenty. There are plenty of them out there. Luisa knew as much herself, if she was being sensible, only she wasn’t being particularly sensible at the moment. Going to see that apartment with the balconies in San Niccolo had only been the start of Luisa not being sensible.
‘We couldn’t get inside the apartment,’ she said with a sigh and pushed the plate closer to Anna. ‘Eat. For the baby.’
Anna contemplated the biscuits, which Luisa had arranged in a star shape, and picked one up. ‘No,’ she said, nibbling, the food held in her little paw of a hand. ‘I couldn’t get inside either. No one would let me in. That porter knew I was there but he hid from me.’
‘Did you see him when you went there with your — with Josef?’ asked Luisa. ‘The porter?’
‘He spied on us,’ said Anna, still nibbling, to Luisa’s satisfaction. ‘I saw that the door was open a crack.’
‘But he didn’t come out? He didn’t speak to you?’
Anna shook her head and laid the biscuit down. It looked as if a mouse had been at it. Luisa gestured towards the tea and Anna drank. Luisa waited; Anna was defensive enough as it was. If there was doubt in her mind, somehow it seemed important to Luisa that she realize it for herself.
Eventually Anna spoke. ‘Josef had the keys.’ She frowned. ‘Three or four keys on a keyring: a big Ferrari keyring, red with the horse. A small one for the front gate, a medium-sized one for the front door, a long one for the apartment door, a tiny one for the postbox.’
She was observant. That hadn’t really occurred to Luisa before. ‘Did he look in the postbox?’ she asked, more out of idle interest than anything else. It was the first thing she would do herself, on returning home.