She stashed it right down in her handbag, wrapped tight, although if you looked hard enough, you could read the lettering through the thin plastic bag. Two minutes, it said, find out today in only two minutes. You could read that quietly, soberly, or ecstatically, depending. On how you felt about it. The trouble was, Giuli didn’t know how she felt about it.
*
Sandro had phoned home, after he’d talked to Pietro, but there’d been no answer. He hadn’t let it ring too long, though, thinking perhaps they were both asleep, in this heat, and he hadn’t tried Luisa’s mobile for the same reason. Nothing more infuriating than an over-anxious, needy husband when peace and quiet was what you were after. He wanted someone to talk to, though. So he’d called Giuli instead and left a message when she didn’t answer either.
‘There’s a bit of a park,’ Sandro said into the phone, leaning on the parapet by the river and looking across at it as he spoke. ‘Between the Ponte Alle Grazie and the Ponte San Niccolo, south side, some trees and a bar right over the water, one of those summer bars.’ He was rambling, he could hear himself, so he cut it short. ‘Meet me over there, if you can? I’ll wait. No need to call back.’
In the event, at least to Sandro, it seemed to take a good half an hour just to walk across the wide, deserted, sunlit bridge of the Ponte Alle Grazie. The heat was like a sledgehammer, out there in the open, and there wasn’t a scrap of shade. People only congregated on the bridges at night-time in August, gulping anything that felt like fresh air; now, there was barely a soul to be seen. Anyone with any sense hid in cool bars or shuttered apartments until the sun set, or merely stayed in the shade of the biggest, gloomiest palazzi in the narrowest streets.
While he waited for Guili, Sandro drank iced tea. He didn’t like it; it wasn’t cold enough, despite the name, and it was too sweet, but the look in the surly, underaged waiter’s eyes had told him ordering water wouldn’t do. Why had he chosen the place? Erected every July on this stubby forested outcrop of the embankment, the bar existed only for stranded tourists; it was packed up at the end of the summer and gone. Below it, on the green riverbank, a kind of beach set-up had been conjured out of grass huts and sunloungers on the sparse grass, and one or two diehard sunbathers were there, staked out.
The sun was low in the sky, and Sandro thought that soon, mercifully, the Guardia di Finanza would pack up and leave that dismal little bank for the day, and those haunted, fearful employees would scatter back to their homes, waiting in the shadow of the axe.
There was supposed to be co-operation between the services — the Guardia di Finanza, the Polizia dello Stato, the Carabinieri, even the Polizia Stradale — that was the theory, anyway. In the real world, though, people were jealous of their territory, they wanted the freedom to work over a job before they went public with it. In the real world, there wasn’t a cat’s chance in hell Sandro would get anything from the horse’s mouth — the horse in question being the Guardia — and even Pietro would be lucky to get the full picture.
Setting his glass down on the sticky table, leaving his briefcase there on the aluminium chair, Sandro wandered to the edge of the abutment, stood under a skinny acacia and surveyed the length of the Arno. A little further down the parapet, a small man with an enormous camera was photographing something down below. Following the angle of the huge zoom, Sandro saw the elegant, snow-white shape of an ibis, its long beak poised to plunge into the green water.
There would be more evidence to gather. God knows how much — or how little — of it would be useful, under the circumstances. Dust full of scraps of cellophane and dead lighters, single shoes and old newspapers, a hundred thousand footprints and DNA traces and a whole lot of them rogue, from unregistered, unmonitored populations, immigrant or otherwise off the radar.
DNA: Pietro had mentioned it in a hurry, knowing full well he shouldn’t be saying anything. A DNA match. As Sandro turned his partner’s words over in his head, something on the far bank caught his eye. A blockish figure walking, just head and shoulders visible, from the direction of the Uffizi and, for that matter, the Banca di Toscana Provinciale. Sandro held a hand up to shade his eyes — there was something about the figure, its size, the shambling walk — and hurriedly he turned to the birdwatcher beside him, who looked alarmed at the abruptness of his approach.
‘Could I borrow that a moment?’ Sandro asked, as polite as he could without allowing any possibility of a refusal, already holding his hand out for the camera and its hefty telephoto lens. And the small man handed it to him, looking bewildered at his own compliance, unable to restrain a small intake of breath as Sandro raised a hand to adjust the focus.
Yes, thought Sandro. Coming into sharp definition, and moving with the slowness of the seriously overweight on the opposite side of the river in the direction of the African market, was Giorgio Viola, the manager of the first branch of the Banca Provinciale di Toscana that Sandro had visited, the station branch in the Vicolo Sant’Angelo that was soon to be closed.
Those were the eyes he’d seen above the computer screen in the office adjoining Marisa Goldman’s, the eyes he had recognized but hadn’t been able to identify before Goldman led him away, anxious, brown and buried in flesh like the sultanas in pane del pescatore.
Slowly he handed the camera back to the birdwatcher, who immediately took out a soft cloth from the camera pack on his back and began polishing and adjusting, emitting small sounds of distress as he did so. Sandro kept looking, calculating, even as Giorgio Viola turned away from the river and disappeared.
What had he been doing there? Helping the Guardia with their enquiries, Sandro assumed, helping Marisa Goldman, offering a semi-objective eye on the whole sorry business. Sandro rocked back on his heels. It was something worth filing away. He remembered the look of appeal in Viola’s eyes in his own dismal, run-down bank; the man’s willingness to help; the understanding of how little he had to lose. The Guardia might not give Sandro the time of day, but Viola probably would.
He turned to the birdwatcher again. The man looked at him now with undisguised apprehension. ‘You come here at night?’ Sandro asked. The apprehension turned to alarm. ‘No,’ said Sandro, wearily. ‘I mean, owls, that kind of thing? Night photography?’
‘Now and again,’ said the birdwatcher cautiously. ‘There are owls, yeah, mostly up there.’ Nodding towards the southern hillside behind San Niccolo, beginning to be defensive now. ‘No law against it, as far as I know.’
‘No, no,’ said Sandro. ‘I’m sure there isn’t, I didn’t mean — sorry to have bothered you. Thanks.’
He raised a hand and hurried back to the table. To his mild surprise, his briefcase was still there. Owls. He’d been told by someone, hadn’t he, that there were owls, below the Piazzale Michelangelo; suddenly he was overcome by a desire to hear them. To hear them every night, from that apartment with its long, rusted balcony, to sit there with Luisa and listen to them. Taking his mobile out of the briefcase, Sandro dialled Galeotti Immobiliare.
When Guili arrived, Sandro was gazing through the trees in a deliberate attempt to set aside the many frustrations and obstacles of his life just now and get on with the job. He was looking across at the far bank and calculating how far it was from Claudio Brunello’s bank to the place his body was found. Two kilometres, perhaps, not even that. A straight line along the river. He heard a sound at his shoulder and there was Giuli.
She didn’t look well.
Sandro jumped up, consternation tugging at him. Selfish old bastard, he could hear the voice in his head reproaching him, leaning on these women.
‘Giuli?’ he said, and at the concern in his voice her eyes flashed, but it was only a shadow of the indignation he would have expected. ‘Sit down, girl.’ He pulled out a chair and practically forced her into it.