‘Listen,’ he said. She cocked her head. ‘You know little Anna, right? Who works at the Loggiata. Little dark-haired Anna, who’s pregnant? Likes her oranges.’
‘I know her.’ Liliana’s expression darkened a shade. ‘Sweet kid.’
‘And-’ He hesitated. ‘You know her guy. Josef.’ She stiffened, just perceptibly. He persisted. ‘You know he’s disappeared, then?’ Liliana pursed her lips.
‘Disappeared,’ she said. ‘Right.’ Giving nothing away.
‘I’m trying to find him for her. I’m a private detective now, you knew that, right?’
‘I knew that,’ said Liliana, with the faintest sympathetic edge to her voice.
‘There are people,’ said Sandro cautiously, ‘people who think she’s better off without him.’
Liliana gave him a quick, hard look before turning away abruptly, reaching up for the roll-down shutter to her lock-up. Following the movement, Sandro saw the flash of a big shiny padlock and, as the shutter came down, a broad scrape across the articulated metal slats above the lock. He noticed that although she pulled the shutter down, she didn’t secure it.
‘That could be true,’ she said. ‘All things considered. But that doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy.’
Sandro took a step to the side, leaned down to peer behind her at the shutter again.
‘Have you seen him?’ he asked quietly. ‘You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’
Liliana stood, and tugged at the door of the Ape. She climbed inside, but left the driver’s door open. She’d had a husband once. He helped on the stall. An old drunk; everyone thought she was well rid of him when he died, everyone except Liliana. She kept going without him, as you do.
‘You can’t tell her,’ she said, steely. ‘If I tell you. He said, look after her. Keep her out of it.’
‘Out of what?’
‘Out of whatever shit he’s in. Up to his neck.’
‘But he’s a good guy,’ said Sandro. ‘That’s what you said.’
She sighed. ‘What do you know about him? Josef? That he worked here?’ Nodding towards the cinema. ‘That he worked hard, taking the money, projecting the films, sweeping up after, getting the takings to the bank? That he had no one, until he met the girl? That job was the only security he had, the only family, the only home.’
And now the job was gone, the home was gone. ‘You knew him. You talked to him.’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’m a soft touch.’
Sandro snorted. Nothing could be further from the impression Liliana generally gave to the outside world.
‘The lock-up’s here,’ she went on, eyes distant. ‘He came to my stall for fruit, then now and again I saw him here. He helped me with the crates a time or two. I don’t think people talked to him, he was so clearly a Roma, and usually they come with baggage, family. He was trying to make it on his own.’
‘You know he told her he worked in a bank?’
Liliana’s eyes slid away, her hand moved down to the key in the ignition but she didn’t turn it.
‘I–I got some of that, yes. She mentioned it on the stall one day.’
‘And you didn’t set her straight?’ Sandro could just picture Liliana, raising an eyebrow, in the middle of throwing oranges into a bag. ‘How did he think he’d get away with it?’
‘Look,’ said Liliana, ‘he doesn’t have — friends. Doesn’t have family. Just like her. He loves her. Sometimes people are meant for each other. Sometimes they deserve a break. He’d have told her eventually.’ She frowned fiercely. ‘He had a plan.’
Sandro remembered Anna saying something of the sort.
‘I see.’ Sandro leaned back against the shutter, looking at the Carnevale. ‘So you gave him the benefit of the doubt, then. And now you think she’s better off without him? What kind of shit is it you think he’s up to his neck in, and why?’
In the Carnevale’s facade a window stood open, the ragged tail of a curtain flapping through it. Sandro shifted his gaze back to Liliana, and he saw her calculating. Judging something about him. She took her hand from the ignition key and leaned back in her seat.
‘See that?’ she said, nodding down at the metal shutter he was leaning against.
He followed her gaze to the deep bright scrape on the metal, and looked back at Liliana.
‘Tuesday morning, I come here to find the lock’s been forced. I thought — well. Junkies. People don’t thieve from vegetable lockups. I pulled up the shutter expecting some little scumbag sleeping it off, and there he was. Jumped out at me looking like-’ And she shivered, just a little. ‘Looking like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Like he’d been — been beaten half to death, or hit by a car. Blood in his hair. One hand all broken, and marks on him.’
‘Did he tell you what had happened?’
She shook her head. ‘He tried, but I didn’t really get it. He was shaking so hard, I could hardly understand him. He said he had to get out of sight before they found out. Found him gone. He did say over and over, don’t tell Anna. I’ll sort it out myself, he said, don’t tell her. Keep her out of it.’
‘Right.’ Protecting her. That was what Giuli and Luisa had thought.
‘He asked me for clothes, and I gave him the old man’s overalls, I keep them in the back. I gave him bananas. He wolfed them down, then he asked me for my mobile.’ Her voice went flat.
Sandro frowned. ‘You gave him your phone?’
Liliana looked away. ‘I — no. I kind of flipped out a bit. I thought, oh, that was all he was all along. Small-time rip-off merchant, only chats to me because he wants something, I–I don’t know what got into me. I’d had a bad night, sometimes — this heat. I don’t sleep, thinking.’ Sandro nodded. ‘I got angry,’ she went on, flatly. ‘I told him to get out of there. And then he just ran off.’
‘That’s why you haven’t locked up, just now?’
She shrugged. ‘He might still need somewhere.’
‘But you haven’t seen him since?’
She shook her head.
There was a silence. Sandro was thinking. ‘Tuesday morning. The bruises — purple, green?’
Liliana frowned. ‘Purple going yellow.’
‘You weren’t here Saturday, were you?’
‘The usual,’ she said. ‘Six in the morning, then three in the afternoon putting the stuff away.’
‘Anything going on? Here?’
She shook her head slowly, still frowning.
‘Not that I can remember.’
‘Nothing unusual?’
‘I’d have to think,’ she said, her mouth set. ‘I’ve got to go, Sandro,’ she said. ‘I’ve the stall to set up and I’m running late already.’
‘If you remember anything,’ said Sandro, stepping back from the little van’s window as she turned the key and the shrill engine spluttered into life.
‘Say hello to Luisa,’ she called as she moved off.
He watched her disappear around the corner in a blue haze of exhaust, and felt something, a spot of rain on his cheek. Then nothing. He looked up at the purpling sky. Not yet.
Claudio Brunello, battered and dumped in the African market; Galeotti, his skull fractured, his body half out of his car at the roadside. Josef bruised and bloodstained — what had Liliana said? — as if he’d been hit by a car.
Suddenly decisive, Sandro turned and hurried towards the Carnevale.
*
In the stifling shuttered darkness of her room off the Via della Chiesa, Giuli lay on the bed with barely the will to move. She didn’t even know whether she could get it together to call in sick, but then again, did it really matter? If she didn’t call in, they’d just chalk it up to experience, another mistake, another lazy, backsliding ex-con who couldn’t hack it in the real world, without the drugs.
If you asked her, she’d have said she hadn’t thought about it at all, not her whole life. Who wanted a baby, this day and age? She hadn’t thought it would feel like this. Slowly she rolled over and faced the wall, pulled her arms in between her thin breasts. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.