They were talking, at the bar: Orlando with a squat man in a road sweeper’s fluorescent overalls with his back to Sandro. About the weather, first.
‘My luck,’ the barman was saying, ‘looks like it’s going to break today, you only have to look at the sky. And I’m closing up tomorrow.’
Was tomorrow Saturday? It was. A week since Brunello was killed.
‘Looks like the end of the world,’ said the road sweeper, nodding out through the glass door. He lifted a small glass of something dark red to his lips and tipped his head back.
And that was what it had felt like to Sandro, crossing the endless suffocating expanse of the Piazza Santa Croce as overhead an apocalyptic sky pressed down on him. Turning dark at dawn instead of light.
He looked back at the paper again. Bellosguardo, it said; that was where the man had been found. Not out in some country village. And Bellosguardo was where Sandro was going to meet Pietro — with a little detour to the Carnevale on the way.
LOCAL MAN SOUGHT. Sandro scanned the piece — a double-page spread — in search of the sub-headline, found it, but was not much the wiser. Police have identified a suspect known to have been in the immediate vicinity at the time of the killing. The man is local to the area and has a previous history of violent crime. His name will be released later today. Sandro stared.
Could that mean Josef? Was he a local man? Previous history of violent crime — that would still be speculation, wouldn’t it, about Claudio Brunello’s murder? Was that what Pietro was thinking? He hadn’t said that last night.
He tucked the paper under his arm and slapped his coin on the bar, turning to leave.
‘Not many going to cry over the loss of Galeotti,’ said Orlando, and Sandro stopped. He removed the newspaper from under his arm and held it with one hand, tapping it in the open palm of the other.
‘No?’ he said mildly. Frowned down at the headline.
‘He was a crook,’ Orlando said. He folded his short, weathered arms across his apron and eyed Sandro.
‘You knew him?’ Sandro asked.
Orlando gave a faint shrug. ‘A lot of people did,’ he said.
‘I suppose I did, too,’ Sandro replied.
‘Well, then,’ Orlando said. ‘You can tell.’
‘A customer,’ Sandro said.
‘Now and then.’ Orlando was eyeing him narrowly now, and Sandro knew when to change tack.
‘It’s the way of the world,’ he said. ‘Bankers, estate agents. It’s the working man who pays.’ Sandro meant it as a vague gesture towards solidarity that might prompt information, but the barman seemed to take it differently.
‘Galeotti was more of a crook than most.’ Orlando turned his head a little to one side, as if listening for something. ‘And what have bankers got to do with anything?’
Sandro shrugged, watching him.
The barman set wrinkled elbows on the bar. ‘Claudio Brunello wasn’t a crook. If that’s who you mean. Drank his coffee in here every morning, macchiato in vetro and a budino, wouldn’t have anything else if there were no budini.’
There was a pause, in which they both reflected on Claudio Brunello’s taste in breakfast, his restraint, his discriminating tastes.
‘A good man, didn’t line his own pocket, always left a few centesimi on the bar. I’ve seen the Guardia in that bank of his — and I’ve seen you. Asking questions. A good man, whatever they say.’
How, wondered Sandro, did we get on to Brunello? ‘No,’ he said, ‘I meant — I meant the big guys, the Banca d’Italia, those American banks. I didn’t mean — the Toscana Provinciale’s not going to bring the sky down on us all, is it? Small-time stuff.’
The barman was watching him.
‘Did he know Galeotti?’ Sandro asked. ‘Claudio Brunello, I mean?’
The moustache turned down. ‘Wouldn’t have given him the time of day,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have thought.’ He raised a hand to the road sweeper, trudging out through the door. ‘See you in September,’ he said.
The barman turned back to Sandro; his face seemed somehow to have smoothed, his expression now bland and incurious.
‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.’ And he touched a thumb to his lower lip, superstitiously.
Sandro nodded, watching him as he took Sandro’s cup and stacked it in the dishwasher basket behind the bar. Sandro slid the road sweeper’s sticky shot glass along the bar top, and Orlando took that too, and Sandro headed for the door once more.
‘He was a crook, though, dead or not,’ said Orlando to his back, and in the doorway, feeling the heat outside, Sandro paused.
Behind him, Orlando spoke deliberately. ‘Galeotti had some big deal going down lately. A lot of money involved. And then he gets mugged and killed? Some coincidence.’ And then turned his back, the conversation finally over.
For a moment Sandro stayed there in the doorway. Something had happened to the air, the light. For a moment, in the narrow street, he didn’t recognize it, then he understood that it had been lightning.
Sandro stepped off the pavement, listening for thunder, to gauge the storm’s proximity. None came. To his left was the Via dei Saponai, and the bank.
So Galeotti’d had a big deal going down. Not the flat in San Niccolo; not the apartment in the Via del Lazaretto: they’d be small enough potatoes. Who’d kill a man over a run-down apartment in a condo in Firenze Sud? Unless the secret it was being loaned out for was a big one.
And he went the other way, towards the crumbling brick facade of the church, knowing that the alley beyond it would lead him to the Carnevale. And it was as he turned into the alley that he heard it, an ominous low rumble somewhere far off to the north-west, and over the church the sky darkened perceptibly.
From somewhere a cool breeze came, curling round his ankles, blowing dust in the gutters, then it was gone. Ahead of him was the Carnevale, boarded up in bright pine, half the letters of its vertical neon name already dismantled: ‘-nevale’, it read. Sandro stopped. It was a good-sized building, four storeys, a row of five blind, dirty windows. And as he stared Sandro found himself thinking of those paltry hundred or so euros Josef Cynaricz banked every week and imagining the dusty rooms behind that blind facade.
What was it that Roxana Delfino had said? What had the builder told her, putting up the hoarding? Not a pretty sight, in there. There was no sign of any activity today, but Sandro felt a strange reluctance to go any closer. And then he nearly jumped out of his skin as a steel shutter rattled up, shockingly loud, at the foot of one of the buildings between him and the Carnevale. As he watched, a small, two-stroke Ape van of the kind used to transport almost anything almost anywhere in his benighted, low-tech country, edged out, neatly reversing to face him in the narrow alley. Sandro peered through the dusty windscreen, trying to make out who was driving — and then she jumped out. It was Liliana, from the vegetable stall, and she gave him a wary glance on her way round to the back of the van. Sandro hurried towards her, ridiculously pleased to find her here.
Seeing him approach, she stopped, in the middle of fastening down some crates of zucchini-flowers, the delicate furled petals, yellow tinged with green, in neat rows.
‘Liliana,’ he said, and she raised an eyebrow.
‘Sandro Cellini,’ she said. ‘How’s Luisa?’ Everyone always asked him that.
‘She’s good,’ he said.
Beyond Liliana, who stood examining him curiously with folded arms, was the cinema’s blackened, ugly facade, waiting for him. It was as though fate had put Liliana between him and the horrible old place. Only he didn’t believe in fate.