‘Will you tell the police?’
‘I used to be a police officer,’ he had said, distant for a moment, and, in Roxana’s opinion, not answering the question at all. Then he had said, ‘I will tell them, yes. Of course. It’s just that I’d like a look myself first. It’s my client, you see. I have to think of her. I have to — act in her interests. The police barging in and digging things up and drawing their own conclusions — well, that might not be in her interest.’
Her. ‘Your client.’ Roxana couldn’t very well ask who she was. But he had told her anyway. ‘Josef’s — ah — his fiancee,’ he had said, and his sigh spoke volumes. ‘She’s looking for him, too.’
‘Fiancee.’
With a flush of obscure shame Roxana had realized that, of course, she knew nothing about him, that narrow-faced, polite man with his takings; she had never seen him in the street, he was one of those people who knew how to make themselves invisible. She only knew he was from the Carnevale because Val had told her, or maybe Claudio. So the bagman had had a girlfriend — more than that. A fiancee was more than a girlfriend. ‘Is she — they were going to get married. Is she pregnant?’
There had been a hint of reproof in Sandro Cellini’s reply. ‘I can’t say,’ he had said. ‘Obviously.’
‘I’m sorry.’ And Roxana had felt sorry, she had felt crass and nosy and thoughtless, almost tearful. ‘None of my business.’
She hadn’t known what to think then, either. She’d liked Josef, but he’d got a girl pregnant, lied to her, and disappeared. Open and shut case, if you weren’t being daft and sentimental.
‘You think he’s just — a bad guy.’ Roxana had heard the flatness in her voice.
‘You don’t?’
‘I told you,’ she had said. Hadn’t he been listening? ‘I told you what I thought, I liked him. There was — I don’t know. Mutual respect: he was respectful.’
‘He trusted you,’ said Cellini. And she could hear him pondering that. ‘Trusted Brunello.’ He cleared his throat at the end of the line.
‘Yes,’ said Roxana: it hadn’t occurred to her before. ‘I didn’t even know I liked him until he disappeared, but I did.’
There had been another thoughtful silence. ‘I don’t discount that, Miss Delfino,’ Sandro Cellini had said.
And with that dry, considered sentence, Roxana had known. She could trust him; he might only be a private detective as opposed to a police officer, but she knew she could trust him.
‘Roxana,’ she had said. ‘You can call me Roxana.’
‘If you like,’ he had said. ‘I’m Sandro.’
It hadn’t been in her mind to tell him about Marisa. He wasn’t investigating Claudio’s death, was he? He was looking for Josef.
‘I think there’s a connection, too,’ he had said abruptly, just as she was wondering what was the right thing to do. Did she really want to snitch on Marisa? ‘A connection between Josef disappearing and your boss’s murder.’
Murder. ‘That’s what they think it was? Not a — a suicide?’
‘They’re coming round to it.’
There’d been a pause, then she had spoken. ‘The thing is,’ she had said carefully, ‘it’s my boss. My other boss, Marisa.’
‘Miss Goldman.’ He had waited. Patient, courteous. Like — like someone else. Like Josef.
‘Yes. Miss Goldman. The thing is, she told the police — she told everyone, she was away, from Thursday afternoon, away at the seaside with her boyfriend Paolo, on his yacht. Only someone told me she wasn’t.’
‘Someone.’
‘Valentino,’ she had said. ‘My colleague. Saw her being let into the building where Claudio lives, early on Friday evening.’ Paused. ‘But it’s not just Valentino.’ And she had told him what Irene Brunello had said, about the maid at Marisa’s house.
‘So it looks like she was here in Florence all the time,’ he had said. ‘Why would she lie about that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Roxana had said uncomfortably. ‘She hasn’t told the police,’ she had added, belatedly. ‘Irene hasn’t. I don’t know why.’
And she had pondered that a moment. Had she been biding her time? Had Irene wanted to have something of her own over Marisa, some secret advantage to hold in reserve for future use?
‘Should I tell them that too? Only I don’t know — is it the Guardia? Or that Pietro Cavallaro, from the Polizia dello Stato?’
She’d felt sick, then. Telling the police would make it official. They’d arrest Marisa, or something. Call her in for questioning. And sitting there in the dark, she had pictured Marisa on her doorstep, whisky in hand, waiting for the axe to fall.
‘It’s all right,’ Sandro had said wearily. ‘I’ll tell them.’
And the burden had passed, from her to him. Then Roxana had heard Ma moving slowly upstairs in her bedroom, she had smelled the frangipani and tobacco plants and jasmine. ‘Thank you,’ she’d said.
Now she stepped out of the shower and stood a second, feeling the brief moment of cool already ebbing as the water dried. She hadn’t told him about the footprints. The stalker. Well, she thought, never mind. She wrapped herself in her towel and went to the window, hair still wet, and looked down, next door.
‘Carlotta,’ she said, and the old lady looked up, alert, suspicious, waiting to disapprove. ‘Can I have a word?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
‘Early,’ Pietro had said on the phone. ‘I’m on at ten, it’ll have to be early.’
‘As early as you like,’ Sandro had said in an undertone, feeling a flood of gratitude as he sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and listened with half an ear for Luisa’s breathing behind him as it slowed and evened. It was late, but the exhaustion in his old friend’s voice spoke of more than just late nights.
‘Does it have to be about something?’ Pietro had said when Sandro had asked him. Of course it had to be about something: they both knew it was this damned case that had them entangled, conjoined twins fighting to be free. But Sandro had believed him when he had gone on, ‘I just thought I should see you. Face to face, like you said. Enough of this — this phone crap.’
Only now, slipping out of the house at six-thirty to walk across town to where he’d agreed to meet Pietro, did he wonder. Face to face: for breaking bad news? Listen, this is it, you’re pushing our friendship too far.
It was probably an hour on foot, but Sandro wouldn’t take the car. Climbing into their dusty little Fiat suffocated him, parking was a nightmare and he used the car so little that he had a tendency to forget where he’d left it, but it wasn’t just that. There was something about a walking pace that suited him, gave him time to think: that said it all, didn’t it? There were detectives who operated at the speed of a high-performance car, no doubt, but not Sandro.
Besides, he liked walking and, more than anything, walking in the early morning. He could nod to his surroundings, his city. He could register the gargoyles on a fourteenth-century palace, a fig tree in heavy fruit leaning over a garden wall; he could see where the junkies were sleeping these days, who’d shut up shop and who was clinging on, who was up early with a guilty conscience or something else. Old widows leaning out of their windows after another sleepless night in the heat, surprised by their loneliness after a lifetime of grumbling at their husbands. Too poor to get out of the city, their children grown and gone, just putting up with it.
Closing the door behind him, Sandro lifted a hand to Signora Kraskinsky leaning on her folded arms, in the building opposite. She simply pursed her lips in response, and he moved on, wanting to shake his head at her comical misanthropy but thinking better of it.
Down the quiet street towards Santa Croce. Quiet but not silent, behind him Sandro could hear the distant clatter of the furgoni being unloaded at the market of San Ambrogio. The baker talking sleepily behind his shuttered shopfront; he’d be closed by the weekend — August was no time to be sticking your head into a furnace, and who needed bread, in the heat? Ahead, a Filipina in a pink overall hurried around a corner and into the street ahead of him, carrying a bucket filled with cleaning products. Out they came at this hour, the illegals, the immigrant workers who lived in basements and windowless rooms, without so much as a fan.