Anna frowned at the question, then hesitantly shook her head. ‘We went straight up,’ she said, smiling a little. ‘In the lift. I like to take the stairs, it’s good for me, I said, but he made me take the lift.’
Luisa tried to visualize the apartment building’s lobby. Lift facing as you came through the doors. She hadn’t seen the stairs. They must be round at the back.
‘And then?’ she asked softly. ‘I expect you were excited, weren’t you?’
‘Well, he said, don’t expect too much. He said, it needs work. He tried to keep my hopes down, I think. But I was excited. I haven’t ever had a place of my own.’
Luisa nodded. She knew how that felt. She and Sandro had lived with her mother for three, nearly four years before they got their own place; they’d moved out when she was pregnant. That had been how it was done. And when the baby died, thirty-six hours after she was born, Luisa remembered how that felt too, coming back to the empty apartment, too big for just the two of them.
‘And when you saw it? What did you think?’
Anna turned her head a little, a distant look in her eyes. ‘I don’t know. It was — a bit dusty. I think it had been empty for a long time. Josef kept apologizing for everything, when he couldn’t make the light come on.’
‘Was the flat furnished?’ There was something about Anna’s account that made Luisa uneasily curious.
Anna chewed her lip. ‘There were beds and a couch and a very old kitchen. You could sleep there.’ Luisa saw her glance quickly around herself. ‘Much older than this one, I mean, more like the one at the Loggiata. It would have been fine, of course. I am used to old things. I told Josef, there was no need to change it.’
‘And how was he?’
Anna set her lips together, a small line appearing between her eyebrows. ‘He was — agitated. A bit.’
Luisa nodded. Her unease was not diminishing.
Anna went on, concentrating as she tried to be precise, ‘He — he was excited like me, when we opened the door. Then he grew more — anxious, as we walked around. I think he was worried that I didn’t like it. I kept telling him I liked it.’
‘And did you?’
‘Of course,’ said Anna, still frowning, looking down at her hands. ‘I would have made it our home.’ She looked up. ‘As you said, it is a very nice part of the city. Very quiet, very green.’
Quiet, thought Luisa. Remembering the hum of the motorway as they had exited the bus on the ring road, a different sort of sound, low and constant. She preferred the sounds inside the city. People talking in the street.
The suburbs were an uneasy place to Luisa. A view of the hills was one thing, although you could get a similar, more distant version of that from the city centre if you were high enough. She pondered the slopes of the Mugello that would have comprised the view from that apartment, and below the picture-postcard view, the remains of old farm buildings slowly eroded by the advance of the city. Shacks and old fridges and woodstacks in the lee of the motorway, old lives disintegrating on the dirty verges and beside slip roads.
‘Of course,’ she said gently. ‘Very good for children, especially.’ Anna brightened, and cautiously Luisa proceeded.
‘Did you meet the neighbours?’
‘Not really,’ said Anna, and Luisa heard a defensive note in her voice. ‘I would have liked to. I suppose perhaps people keep themselves to themselves in those places. Do you think so?’
Luisa shrugged. ‘Some do,’ she said cautiously. Thought of Giovanna Baldini. ‘Some don’t. Maybe it was the wrong time of day,’ she went on. ‘People at work.’
‘Maybe,’ said Anna. ‘We didn’t stay long.’ Her head bobbed down. ‘A night. Then later, when I — when I was pregnant. We thought about where we would put the nursery. Two nights. Both times he had to get to work, early. I had to also.’
Luisa nodded, Anna looking away, not wanting to say any more. Two nights together, one to get pregnant, the second to make a home. Decide where to put the baby’s cot. What had they said at the Loggiata, when their little Anna stopped out all night?
‘I have one day off,’ Anna said, her small chin jutting defiantly as if she knew what Luisa was thinking. ‘Monday off.’ Luisa began to murmur something non-committal, only Anna took hold of her hand and with sudden and surprising determination held her eyes. ‘Where is he?’ she said. ‘Where?’
Looking back at her, Luisa waited a moment, concentrating on keeping her expression, her movements, her voice, quite calm. ‘We don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘We will, though.’ Uncertainly Anna nodded, not turning away, and then Luisa asked her, ‘You noticed something, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘When you went to that flat with him. You knew something was wrong, then, didn’t you? You knew even then.’
And keeping her eyes fixed on Luisa, slowly Anna nodded.
*
‘I don’t know who he is,’ said the woman called Marisa Goldman, glancing down at the crumpled paper with a cold stare. ‘No. But it’s a ridiculous question.’
The officers of the financial police might, to Sandro’s relief, have gone out on their lunch break — Sandro had no desire for a run-in with unfriendly authority — but someone was in Claudio Brunello’s office.
The door was firmly closed, but as Goldman had ushered him into her own room, at once impatient and reluctant, he had seen a large head bent over a desk next door. The head had been raised at the sound of Sandro’s entrance, and even though the computer screen on the desk had blocked all but the eyes and a bulky outline from view, there had been something about those eyes, the big rounded shoulders that, had Marisa Goldman not practically shoved him ahead of her into her office, he’d have liked a closer look at. Something familiar.
Sandro knew her type. Bella figura was all she cared about: keeping it together and looking good. Wearing the right kind of shoes. Luisa had a thousand customers like Miss Marisa Goldman, with long brown legs, long aristocratic necks, long noses to look down, women she’d clothed since they were fifteen but who wouldn’t deign to recognize her in the street. Empty-headed, self-absorbed, narcissistic people — they were everywhere — people who regarded things and labels as if they were more important than the human beings holding them out for inspection.
There were two photographs in heavy, discreet frames on the shelf: one of Marisa Goldman somewhere like Scotland, looking charming in a tweed outfit beside a heavy-set, glowering man, gun carelessly over her shoulder. In the other she was on a horse. More of the same: those sports that didn’t mean sport but status.
He kept his smile.
‘I know it’s an awful picture,’ he said patiently.
She thrust it back at him. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s an awful picture,’ and he heard weariness in her voice. Perhaps he’d misjudged her. ‘And it’s a bad time,’ she said.
‘I am aware of that,’ said Sandro earnestly. ‘Please.’
She’d only agreed to talk to him because he’d invoked Pietro and the investigation into Brunello’s death. With arms folded on the other side of the smoked glass, she’d glared at him stony-faced as he pleaded. ‘Call the Polizia dello Stato,’ he’d mouthed. ‘Ask for Pietro, Officer Cavallaro. He’ll tell you.’
‘So this man-’ She gestured at the paper now folded in Sandro’s hand. ‘He was passing himself off as Claudio.’ She shook her head tiredly. ‘I don’t understand. Why? Was it — fraud? Was he trying to — make money in some way?’
Sandro was struck by the fact that he had not considered that possibility; he really hadn’t. It was only at this moment that he thought of what Anna Niescu had said about her adoptive parents leaving her their savings: a few hundred, maybe at a pinch a few thousand, in the bank. A sum, from which Sandro had no intention of taking a penny himself. She was going to need it. But there were plenty of people out there who mugged and murdered for less. Was Josef going to suggest he invest it for her? He cursed himself: it took a money person to ask the money question.