Luisa lay still. Maybe. Maybe she does.
Anna Niescu, on the other hand. Luisa wished she could believe the girl knew what was coming. The birth was one thing — and Luisa found herself squeezing her eyes shut in the dark in an effort not to remember any detail of how that felt — getting that baby out safely was one thing. Dealing with whatever was waiting out there for her to learn about her beloved fiance was another.
The three of them had sat there under the light as it grew dark outside, Sandro’s scrawled pages of notes between them, shuffled around the table like cards. Each of them thinking silently about Anna, whose fate they were deciding, moving slowly around the old-fashioned kitchen of the Loggiata, trying to get comfortable in her narrow bed.
By nine they still hadn’t eaten anything, so Luisa had sorted out a plate of good market ham, some bread turning hard in the heat, a jar of pickled vegetables, even though no one had asked for food. Sandro had doggedly forked his way through a plateful, only pausing to ask, halfway through, ‘Did they have figs at the market? The black ones?’ Luisa had said she’d get him some tomorrow in her lunch break; they’d eaten those figs when they went away on their honeymoon, and August always reminded him of them. A short season, a week or so, a short life — twelve hours, barely enough to get them to the market before they dissolved into their own juices.
Giuli had only picked at the food, but Luisa had said nothing.
Sandro had set it out for them while they listened in silence, both their hearts sinking, Luisa could tell by looking at Giuli’s face. Anna’s fiance Josef was not a bank manager, of course he wasn’t.
‘We know his name now,’ he’d said.
Anna’s beloved was Josef Cynaricz, a Roma who’d started life in southern Poland and passed through a transit camp outside Ostia three years ago, a gypsy boy whose DNA the police had on file. No one’s idea of the perfect son-in-law. Someone was keeping him quiet with the loan — or promise — of the apartment at Firenze Sud. What was he keeping quiet about?
‘Not for any good reason,’ Sandro had said, frowning. ‘The DNA. There was no evidence of criminal activity, none.’
She’d never known him take issue before, seriously take issue, with some of the sleight of hand carried out by what he’d always thought of as his force, the Polizia dello Stato, one to which, despite the fact it had forced him into early retirement, he had always remained fiercely loyal.
Now, it seemed, his loyalties were beginning to shift.
‘I don’t think she’s stupid,’ Sandro had said stubbornly. ‘He might be a traveller but nothing she’s said about him makes him sound like some fly-by-night, love ‘em and leave ‘em type.’ He had slapped a hand on the table, surprisingly loud. ‘He’d be long gone if he was. He stuck around till the eighth month, for God’s sake. Why go now?’
‘Oh, Sandro,’ Luisa had said. ‘Don’t you read the papers? Men do it all the time. They don’t know how to get out of it, they pretend to themselves it’ll be fine, then she gets bigger and bigger and suddenly the due date’s next week — and they jump. It happens. He’d told lies and he was going to get found out.’
But she hadn’t thought simple Anna was stupid, either.
‘What if they weren’t lies?’
‘What d’you mean? That really Josef and Claudio Brunello are one and the same after all?’ Luisa had shaken her head. ‘Let’s hope not.’
Sandro had shifted, uneasy, but when he had spoken, Luisa had found herself listening.
‘I don’t mean that,’ he had said slowly. ‘I just meant — there was something innocent about it. He didn’t think it would matter, telling a small lie. Maybe he had always looked up to Brunello; say he’s a customer in the bank, say he comes in now and again, say Brunello’s treated him well, because the guy sounds like a thoughtful sort of man. Sometimes — well, there are situations, however honest you are, however well intentioned — sometimes you want something so badly that you fool yourself. Sometimes the thing you want — or the person — seems so necessary to your life that nothing else matters, and the means justify the ends.’
And then he had clamped his mouth shut, speech over, and Luisa and Giuli had just stared at him, Giuli as if she was going to burst into tears.
‘Right,’ Luisa had said, clearing her throat.
‘I mean,’ Sandro had said, suddenly weary, as if the speech had drained him, ‘it’s not as if anyone with an ounce of knowledge of the world would have believed that Josef was a respected bank manager, not for five minutes. And there’s no evidence he was properly trying to — to con anyone. Not even Anna, not really.’
‘And the apartment?’ Giuli’s voice had been tentative.
They’d talked about it: Giuli had put forward her theory already. ‘They’re known for it,’ she’d said, ‘aren’t they? Estate agents have the keys to all sorts of places, wrecks, sure, tenanted places, sure, but also show-homes, model houses, fully furnished empty apartments. They let their married friends use them. For-’
‘Yes,’ Sandro had said, frowning furiously. ‘I know what for. Affairs. Assignations. But there’s no evidence — not any more — that Josef was — is — married, is there? None.’ They hadn’t said anything: he couldn’t have been interrupted. ‘He didn’t take her there to — I don’t think that was what it was about.’
‘Um, she did get pregnant, though,’ Giuli had said, not meeting his eye. ‘So that must have been what it was about. At some point.’
‘All right, all right,’ Sandro had said, sitting down but not admitting defeat, not yet. ‘But if that was what you wanted — only that — would you choose Anna? Of all girls? I think he loved her. I think he sincerely believed he would be getting that apartment. The stuck-up woman manager saw him talking to Brunello. What if he was asking about a loan?’
‘They’d never have given him a loan,’ Luisa had said quietly, and Sandro had pushed his chair away from the table in frustration, letting his clenched fist fall on to the mess of papers, then letting the fingers uncurl.
‘No,’ he’d said.
Then the phone had rung.
Clearing away the plates, Luisa had listened to Sandro answer it in the hall. She could tell it was a woman, even though she could hear nothing of the voice on the other end of the line. And that Sandro was talking to a woman he liked.
‘Right,’ she had heard him say, and heard the alertness in his voice. ‘You’re sure? And not since — when? Right.’
The conversation had lasted perhaps twenty minutes. The woman was asking him questions, too, about Josef, and about Anna. Sandro must have trusted her because, by the time they’d finished, whoever was on the other end of the line had known more or less everything she and Giuli knew about Josef’s disappearance.
There’d been a moment when his voice had changed, and he’d turned his back, instinctively, as if to keep this part of the conversation particularly private.
‘Really? Really?’ she had heard him say. ‘Miss Goldman was here? All weekend. I see. Well, yes. The police should be told. Yes, I will, yes — I’ll be, I hope I’ll be communicating with them in the morning.’
Delfino had been her name; hanging up, Sandro had said it. ‘Thank you, Miss Delfino. Roxana.’
As he had walked back into the room, Luisa had felt a tiny little prick of something at the sight of his face, alive, intent, a kind of pleasure in it. Not jealousy, but edging towards it. Sandro had caught her expression and almost smiled.
‘The girl at the bank,’ he had said, reaching up to the top cupboard for the grappa, a single-grape variety given to them by Pietro at Christmas and reserved for special occasions. Sandro had then fetched one of the liqueur glasses they’d received as a wedding present from the cabinet and sat down. Luisa had cocked her head and stared: he had become a different man. The defeat that had been beginning to settle on his shoulders before they’d heard the phone ring had now evaporated.