‘Roxana Delfino. She knows Josef, and she knows where he works.’ Sandro had sipped the tiny glass of clear liquid. ‘Worked, I should say; it’s closed down, since the weekend, and she noticed he’d disappeared. A sharp-eyed girl.’ Another appreciative sip. ‘He worked at the Carnevale.’
A porn cinema. Luisa and Giuli had looked at each other: this didn’t get any better, did it? A man who spent his life sitting in the little glass booth at a porn cinema, taking money, giving tickets, watching the customers shuffle out again into the daylight. Some of them, no doubt, giving every appearance of being upright citizens.
‘No wonder he pretended to be something else,’ she’d said. And Sandro had nodded.
‘I was thinking, can’t be much money in porn cinemas these days, what with the internet.’ His face had clouded a little.
Luisa had shifted uneasily at that. What did Sandro know about the internet?
‘Glad to be out of all that,’ he’d said as if in answer. ‘Major part of police work, web porn. Sifting through images, no thanks.’ He had chewed his lip. ‘But that place — well. That huge place, bang in the centre of town and, she said, his takings were less than a hundred euros some weeks. The girl at the bank said. A trickle.’ His face had still been dark, troubled. ‘It’s being redeveloped now, she said. Builders. A mess inside.’
‘Roxana Delfino,’ Luisa had said very quietly, and he’d looked at her, still distracted, taken in her expression and then quite suddenly he’d laughed out loud, leaned across and put his arm around her shoulders, warm and close. She could smell the liquorice smell of the grappa on his breath and despite herself she had smiled back. Across the table Giuli, frowning into her lap at the thought of Josef working in a porn cinema, had looked up, bemused.
‘I think I know the name,’ Luisa had said, only partly to deflect them. ‘Delfino? I think the mother used to shop with us. In the old days.’
‘I knew she’d come up trumps,’ Sandro had said, ‘first time I saw her.’ He had poured himself another glass, small but brimming, and knocked it back. Luisa had given him a sidelong glance, and suddenly they had both been laughing at her.
‘Not jealous, darling?’ Sandro had said, a look close to pure delight on his face.
And Luisa had not known what to say for a second or two. She had never been jealous in her life.
In the bed now she shifted again, and Sandro turned in unison, and his hand came out to hers, the fingers meeting so precisely in the dark it was like a magic trick, and resting entwined.
She felt herself begin to drift off then, with his touch, and something Sandro had said settled in her cooling brain: all that space there in the centre of town. The Carnevale’s facade appeared as she first had seen it, the coloured lettering of its name, modish then when it had first opened, in 1950-something. Her mother ushering her to the other side of the street and muttering as they passed, Luisa of an impressionable age, thirteen or so, in her school pinafore. All that space, and as she drifted into sleep, the old cinema’s features, the ugly concrete of its facade, the faded letters of its sign, the smoked glass that spanned the entrance, all erased themselves and left only that: a dark space, a black hole.
The phone rang again but she barely heard it; it was too late, Luisa had slipped over the edge into sleep. She might reflexively have put her hand out after him, feeling the fingers slipping away as he left the bed, but by the time he had softly closed the door behind him, picked up the phone and spoken softly, quickly into it, she didn’t hear what he said.
‘There’s something I’d like you to find out for me.’ Then Yes like an endearment, like a secret assignation, Yes, tomorrow, yes. Early. I understand: I know where.
*
In her own bed, sleepless and alone, Giuli lay and stared at the ceiling in the dark.
She had shot home on the motorino; enough of walking — what had she been walking for? She’d sped through the hot, dark streets, down to the river, along the Arno, the city not quite empty, people walking like ghosts, in silence, but desolate, it seemed to her. Desolate as she’d passed the African market, the tattered police ribbon still in place, desolate as she followed the embankment, looking at the necklace of lights reflected in the water. The surface was clogged with waterweed, brought to the surface by the heat, and Giuli had turned her face away so as not to think of the pale-blue sea she and Enzo had lain beside and stared at from their campsite under the umbrella pines, not much more than a week ago.
Giuli had missed a text from Enzo as she’d been leaving Sandro and Luisa’s building. She’d stared briefly at its contents, then climbed on to her moped. She’d known him nearly a year — longer if you counted seeing him, liking him, before exchanging a word — and she had never failed to respond to even a missed call. But what would she say to him? The sense that she was on the point of making a terrible fool of herself — engaged? At her age? — engulfed her, and Giuli had clicked the phone shut, pulled on her helmet and started the moped’s engine.
She’d let herself into the silent building on the Via della Chiesa: even from this quiet, run-down corner of the city people were gone, to the hills or the sea. The stairwell smelled stale, the heat rose with her as she climbed. Key in the door, Giuli forced herself to think of Anna.
Estate agents and their games. She’d known a hooker — once, long ago, in a former life — who’d done it, thought it was all a great game, sneering through a show apartment, posing on the bed. Poor Anna; this was exactly what Giuli had wanted to shield her from, the people who’d think she’d done a dirty thing. How many times had it taken? Anna was young, and innocent; in Giuli’s mind that had somehow made it easier for her to fall pregnant. It might have been just once. It might have been the first time.
‘Did you get the name of the estate agent? For the apartment in the Via del Lazaretto?’
Sandro had asked the question thoughtfully, and Luisa had shaken her head; she hadn’t thought to ask, she’d ask in the morning, and then Sandro had laid a hand on her shoulder and she’d smiled up at him, both of them remembering that precious moment when he’d caught her, jealous of the girl in the bank. Watching them, Giuli had thought only of the impossibilities that lay between her and a future like that, a kitchen of their own and no need to say anything to be understood.
Taking off her clothes, she brushed her teeth and lay down under clean sheets and, closing her eyes, tried to picture Enzo’s face but could not.
Could it really all turn so quickly? But Giuli knew this was what she’d expected all along, that it hadn’t been real, that she’d allowed herself to imagine things that would never happen. Enzo didn’t really want her, wouldn’t really want her. She turned over in the bed, then turned back.
What did it matter? She could live without him, as Anna would live without her Josef. What had she been thinking of? And she lay, staring into the dark until she thought at last of Anna’s baby, the only thing in the end that mattered in all this, and the small cooling wind that came no more than an hour before dawn finally lulled her to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Friday
Waking early and disorientated, Roxana lay with her eyes closed and tried to work out what was different.
At first she could hear nothing, nothing but a little sparse birdsong in the dawn light, not a breath of wind to spur on the defeated chorus. It was no cooler — even swinging her legs off the bed brought a sweat to Roxana’s upper lip — so that wasn’t exactly it, but close. Weather. The light falling through the slats of Roxana’s roller shutters was dull and grey: that was a change. And the air — the air was different. Smelled different.