They ended up in a modest bar in the Piazza San Ambrogio that was still open because the market stayed open through the summer, the butchers and salumifici taking it in turns to get away. The place was quiet and old-fashioned, just what Sandro wanted. A bar of speckled mica, an elderly cold cabinet, a listless overhead fan. The middle-aged barman mopped his neck resignedly with a tea towel and moved with extreme slowness to pour them each a birra media. The beer at least was nice and cold.
Pietro should have been away on holiday by now. ‘A bit of a crisis with personnel,’ he said, uncomplaining. ‘This flu.’
Oh, yes, the flu, thought Sandro: interesting how someone like Pietro never gets the flu. Flu in August? Bird flu, swine flu — the world really was going crazy: the hysteria and illogic greeting its every new mutated virus a gift to the new breed of freeloader, his eye on the main chance. I think it might be this new flu, boss. Don’t want to risk my comrades by coming into work, don’t want an epidemic.
‘Maybe I’ll get away by the weekend,’ said Pietro, rapping the table with his knuckles, for luck. ‘If it’s quiet.’
Sandro slid the gift across the table by the door where they sat. ‘It’s a what-d’you-call-it,’ he said. ‘One of those music gizmos. Pod, thing.’
Pietro drew his head back in surprise and admiration. ‘Sandro,’ he said. ‘That’s generous.’
Sandro smiled faintly. ‘You thought I’d give her an apron, or a — a crystal punchbowl?’
Pietro laughed with embarrassment. ‘Well,’ he said, and stopped.
‘I did my homework,’ said Sandro. ‘Asked Giuli. And Luisa did warn me. Eighteen-year-old girls are different these days, she said.’ Of course, he thought with abrupt despondency, she’s probably got one already, this pod thing.
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Pietro, with emphasis.
Another memory came to Sandro unbidden, of Pietro walking his little chubby toddler in her lace socks into the police station, the girl beaming up at each officer as he passed his hands over her red-gold head, trailing her favourite toy through the corridors. Sixteen, seventeen years ago.
The last time he’d seen Chiara, walking with her friends in the Cascine, she’d had her hair dyed black and shorter than a boy’s and had been wearing jeans with careful slashes cut across each thigh. When Luisa had been eighteen, thought Sandro, she’d have worn the same clothes as her mother before her, good handmade leather shoes, neat skirts, white blouses. By the time she got to twenty-one they’d been engaged already: walking hand in hand across the Ponte Vecchio and looking at rings. But Chiara had smiled to see him, despite the clothes. He had wanted to get her something nice.
‘Well,’ said Sandro, clearing his throat. ‘And maybe I’m not such an old fart as you think I am.’
‘Yes, you are,’ said Pietro. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of: I am too. How’s work, anyway? You going to have room for an unpaid helper, when I’m retired?’
Sandro looked at him sharply and understood that he was joking. Pietro would have plenty to keep him busy on early retirement, otherwise why was he going for it? The wife, the kid, the little holiday house in the mountains. Fishing.
‘Work’s fine,’ he said, hearing the dullness of disappointment in his own voice and making an effort to brighten. ‘New client today.’
By the time he finished telling Pietro about Anna Niescu, both their glasses were drained and sticky and the place was empty.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Pietro, momentarily dejected. ‘That’s not going to be a happy ending, is it?’ Turned the empty glass in his hands. ‘Man lets woman down: not a new story, that one. He’s the bastard, not the poor unborn kid.’ He glanced up at the barman, slumped now on his stool, defeated by the heat. Raised a finger and after a long moment’s consideration the man eased himself off his perch.
‘This heat.’ And they shook their heads in unspoken agreement, on any kind of madness licensed by the inhuman temperatures, the boiling nights, the abandonment of the unborn included.
Pietro tipped his head back. ‘Plenty of men run scared, don’t they? When it dawns on them. The thought of that responsibility.’ He gave Sandro a glance, chewed his lip, knowing that Sandro would have laid down his life for the chance of a child of his own. Sandro just shook his head, almost smiling, and Pietro went on, thoughtfully, ‘Or he could have been married already, leading a double life. Nodded. ‘That happens.’
‘Yes’, Sandro said frowning. Did that fit? Maybe. She’d seen his apartment only once, she said. Once.
‘And what about the bank? That thing about him working in the bank?’
Pietro was still puzzling away at it with that way he had; it was like watching him disentangle his wife’s jewellery, no rush, patience itself, until finally with quiet satisfaction he would hold the unknotted chain up to the light. Sandro had to resist a rush of warm feeling: it would be so easy just to settle back in with Pietro, to pretend they were still partners. But that part of his life was over. Pietro was a state policeman, and Sandro would never put his old friend in a compromising situation.
‘The Banca di Toscana Provinciale,’ he said with a sigh. ‘The branch by the station, so he’s hardly a big wheel.’
‘No,’ agreed Pietro. ‘Didn’t some big bank try to buy it up last year?’
Sandro shrugged; he was having trouble trying to believe any of Anna Niescu’s fiance’s story, let alone get a handle on the latest developments in the banking crisis.
He sighed. ‘I’m going to talk to her again tomorrow. At the Loggiata, where she works. There’s more, I’m sure, she — she just couldn’t think straight, she said.’
She’d been flustered, in the office, poor child. As it had dawned on her that her faith might have been misplaced, that Sandro and Giuli were going down a different path than the one she’d envisioned, where her beloved was in a hospital with memory loss from a car accident, perhaps, and when they found him all would be well. Other women might have been frightened, resentful, angry; she was just so certain that he wouldn’t want to miss it all. The birth, the uncomplicatedly joyful event. She was so sure that he must want to be found.
Pietro was still musing. ‘Responsible job — doesn’t fit with the guy who takes fright, does it? To run out on all that?’
Sandro frowned, thinking of the way she’d talked. Telling him about the man who took her for her first prenatal scan and held her hand, the man who came to see her after his day’s work, to bring her cakes. ‘She really loved him,’ he said.
Pietro shook his head, sad but curious. ‘To think there are still girls like that around. Where does she come from?’
‘She was adopted herself,’ said Sandro, gazing out through the window at the shuttered market building. ‘Looks as if she’s got some Roma blood to me. Found abandoned and adopted by an elderly couple, religious by the sound of it; the old man died before she’d left junior school, and mother when Anna was eighteen. She was devoted to them.’
She’d shown him a dog-eared photograph of the old couple, a pair of contadini from a village up in the Apennines. When they’d died she’d gone to the city to look for a job; someone at her school has suggested it, perhaps out of misplaced kindness, knowing the girl would never be academic.
‘I’ve got some savings,’ she’d said, looking up at him. ‘I can pay you.’
Sandro had just looked at her. ‘Let’s see how we go,’ was all he’d said. Savings: how much could you save living in as a chambermaid at the Loggiata? They probably even deducted her board.
‘So, first stop, the bank?’ said Pietro. ‘Or this apartment he’s supposed to be doing up for them, his little family?’
‘Yes,’ said Sandro, ‘I think, the bank.’
And something stirred at last in his sluggish, heat-stupefied veins. The need for action, the chance that maybe tomorrow morning there’d be a breath of air, in the early hours. The Banca di Toscana Provinciale, then, first thing. He stood up.