‘No,’ he said. ‘So?’
‘So it’s been on the market, half furnished, in a terrible state, for years.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘The builders had been sent in, just today.’
‘Sent in by whom?’ Sandro stared at her, trying to work it out. The timing. When had Josef taken Anna to see this flat?
‘The new owners.’ Luisa sighed. ‘It wasn’t easy. You don’t understand, getting information out of these people.’ She pursed her lips. ‘The concierge took twenty minutes of Giovanna bellowing through his keyhole to even come to the door, then he didn’t want us to come in.’ She shifted in her seat. ‘I thought poor Anna was going to throw up in there. I had to make her sit outside in the end.’
‘Is she all right?’ said Giuli. ‘Anna?’
Sandro saw Luisa’s expression, remorse and apprehension mingled. ‘I think so,’ she said wearily. ‘I tried to get her to come here, but she said home was the Loggiata, that’s where he’d come to find her. She’s stubborn.’
You’re all bloody stubborn, thought Sandro, looking from one woman to the other. ‘What did the concierge say?’
‘Well, he blustered,’ said Luisa. ‘I think he spends too much of the day out of it to know a lot. Said the agent had been round last week with two yuppie types. He didn’t know if they’d agreed a price. So we went up and tried to talk to the builders. Only they were Moroccan and none of us speaks French even, let alone the other language they were speaking.’
‘Berber,’ supplied Giuli. Sandro looked at her. ‘What?’ she said. ‘It’s one of the Moroccan languages. Hassan at the Montecarla, that bar, he speaks it.’ Sandro looked back at Luisa, outdone.
‘She’s an asset,’ said Luisa, smiling wearily at Giuli, who now almost blushed. At least, Sandro thought, it was a considerable improvement on the pallor she’d had since she turned up at the riverside bar. And why had she spent so much time in the bathroom?
‘Agreed,’ said Sandro, temporarily putting his anxiety about Giuli to one side. ‘So. The builders?’
‘And it turns out they got asked to do the work this weekend; the deal went through end of last week. That’s all the builders knew, but the yuppies put down a deposit in cash on Monday and they were in.’
Sandro sat. ‘The concierge,’ he said slowly. ‘You told me he was a drunk — but what kind was he? I mean, just a bit of a slob, or all day every day drunk? So he wouldn’t notice if Anna’s fiance was squatting in one of his apartments?’
‘I talked to Giovanna about that,’ said Luisa. ‘He might be drunk — and she said he usually is out of it — but she’s sharp as a tack. Said she’d definitely have known if someone was living in the flat. But the heating and water were off, for a start. She grumbled about it because it meant she had to turn up the heating in her place to compensate over the winter. It wasn’t habitable.’ She sighed. ‘Giovanna walks past the door a couple of times a day, and she’d never seen Josef.’
But if there was one thing Sandro had learned about the man, he was good at keeping a low profile. It wasn’t easy to fall off the radar like that, just the one sighting. As far as they knew he’d broken cover just the once, at the Loggiata, trying to get to Anna? That told Sandro that he was desperate, and scared. Where had he been hiding?
‘You showed her a picture?’
‘Anna had her phone,’ said Luisa, rubbing her eyes. ‘She showed Giovanna.’ Her voice was muffled.
She raised her head, and looked so tired Sandro said gently, ‘All right, angel. You need some rest.’
‘It’s not much of a mugshot,’ said Luisa, ignoring him. ‘But Giovanna was pretty certain. She told Anna off for losing weight since the picture, so she could tell that much.’
‘She has lost weight,’ Giuli put in, frowning. ‘Off her face, for sure.’
Patiently Sandro looked at the two of them, and waited for them to return to the point.
‘So he wasn’t living there,’ he prompted eventually. ‘But he got the keys — from somewhere, for at least two visits, with Anna, maybe more.’
They looked at him, and Sandro got up and went to the window, pushing back the shutters. They thought it was hot inside, but the air that entered was as humid, hot and stagnant as if he’d opened the door on a Turkish bath.
‘Who owned the place, then? Who sold it to the yuppies?’ He looked down along the dirty street, where the lights were beginning to blink yellow. They were beginning to congregate, on the corner: three dreadlocked kids, one dog. As he watched, one of them dropped a can to the pavement and stamped on it with a crack. Not too many yuppies here.
‘Some old couple, years back,’ Luisa said promptly. ‘Bought as an investment, hardly lived in recently, she’s widowed.’
She was watching him. For a moment, the pale, attentive oval of her face looked like a painting to Sandro in the circle of light falling from the wide, low shade.
‘Can’t see an old couple being anything but suspicious of a young Roma,’ he said thoughtfully. Thinking of the old lady at the Loggiata. Reading his mind, Giuli grunted agreement. ‘So how’d he get the keys?’ said Sandro.
‘The keys,’ said Luisa, sitting up straighter, a hand on the table and tapping as she did when she was thinking hard. ‘They were what worried her. Worried Anna. They were wrong.’
‘Maybe he stole them,’ said Giuli.
‘Maybe they were lent to him,’ said Luisa thoughtfully.
Sandro crossed from the window and leaned down over the table, feeling something take shape.
‘By the owner?’
Luisa shook her head slowly. ‘The keys he had weren’t the owners’ set, were they? A Ferrari keyfob? For an old widow?’
Sandro thought of Galeotti showing them round the flat in San Niccolo. His personalized number plate. His Maserati.
Giuli butted in. ‘I’ve heard stories,’ she said.
‘Stories?’ said Sandro.
‘Stories about estate agents,’ she said. ‘And what they get up to in those empty apartments they’re selling.’
‘Yes,’ said Sandro, more tetchily than he meant. ‘We’ve all heard those stories. But what’s the connection with Josef? Where’s he been hiding? And what has he done?’
*
Bitch, thought Roxana, following her superior’s customized Cinquecento — stripes from end to end, red on white — through the automatic gate. Where did Marisa Goldman get off? Bitch.
It had had Val shaking his head all over again; Marisa was a weird one, all right. It was as if she had no need to make people like her, she was above all that. Even if Maria Grazia was right and she wasn’t as wealthy as she wanted people to think, she certainly acted like it. Entitled, that was the word for the way Marisa acted.
And here was Roxana, doing her a favour, regardless.
‘No,’ Marisa had said, watching Roxana and Val.
‘But it’s him,’ Roxana had said.
‘Yeah, it is,’ Val had said, looking at Marisa curiously. ‘It’s Gio. Josef, from the Carnevale.’
Roxana had felt her brain whir as she said it. I knew it, a small voice was insisting, I knew there was a connection. But the rest of it was just crazy static. It didn’t make sense.
‘Seems like it,’ Val had said. He had shrugged. ‘Weird, huh?’ Giving every impression of not understanding the weirdness of it at all.
‘We should call him,’ Roxana had said decisively, and that was when Marisa had been galvanized into action. ‘Cellini. I have his number somewhere.’
‘No,’ she’d said. ‘No way, not on company time, not on company phones.’
‘But it’s him,’ Roxana had said.
‘You didn’t recognize him?’ Val had been looking curiously at Marisa.
Marisa’s jaw had set. ‘A guy from the porn cinema,’ she had said, her voice flat and cold, not even a raised eyebrow.
‘I didn’t mean-’ Val had looked alarmed. ‘No, I just meant, he’s in once a week, you must have seen him.’
‘I don’t give a damn,’ she had said. ‘He could be Il Cavaliere, Berlusconi, for all I care. I’ve given that detective enough of my time; I told him I might have seen him in with Claudio. Is it going to help the bank, looking for this — this guy? No.’