CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It turned out to be surprisingly easy to get Carlotta to talk. Almost as if all she’d needed was to be asked. A slight show of surprise, suspicion, then she jumped at the chance.
The house inside was identical in layout to Ma’s, only the smells were different. She was older, of course, and lonelier. She had a son but he didn’t live with her, hadn’t done so for years, not since he’d married an Abruzzese. No one to cook or clean for, so it was fustier, sourer. A smell of cat. But everything was neat and dusted, and she led Roxana straight on to the back porch.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said immediately with relish, standing with her wiry old arms folded as Roxana squeezed herself on to a chair beside the clothes airer. ‘I saw him all right. Or them, I should say.’ And narrowed her eyes to observe Roxana’s reaction.
Another one like Ma: all fuddlement and slow steps on the outside, but inside things were working perfectly.
‘Them?’
Carlotta craned her neck to look over into their garden next door. ‘Where’s your mother?’ she asked. ‘How come she doesn’t ask?’
‘Oh, Carlotta,’ said Roxana, ‘you know Ma.’
And the old woman just raised her sharp chin in acknowledgement. They both turned to look out across the garden.
Carlotta’s little patch was much neater, more cut back than Ma’s. Her son came out to do it once in a while. Three rows of tomatoes growing against the left-hand wall, some sparse flowerbeds edged in decorative terracotta, an abundance of hideous ornaments. Cherubs with watering cans, miniature wooden houses, that kind of thing. But nothing tall, not like Ma’s loquat and banana palm, to block out the world and the view. You could see straight to the back fence, and beyond it.
‘We talking about Tuesday?’ Carlotta said. She leaned on the veranda’s balustrade with both stringy arms. ‘Mid-morning, I heard the doorbell go. So of course I went to the front and looked. Didn’t get much of a look, but I could see his shoulder.’ She frowned. ‘Some kind of boiler suit, he was wearing. Overalls. Too big for him.’
‘Like a delivery man?’
Decisively Carlotta shook her head. ‘More like — a mechanic, kind of thing your Dad would have put on, to tinker with the car.’ She gave Roxana a quick, sly glance. ‘Anyway. His voice. I listened. He was pleading. He sounded-’ She shook her head. ‘Sounded funny.’ She was frowning fiercely.
‘Funny?’
‘Well. Foreign. And — not normal. I thought — well, drugs, you know.’
‘Foreign,’ Roxana said slowly. ‘But you didn’t get a look at him.’
‘Oh, I did, later,’ Carlotta said, folding her arms. ‘That’s when I sent him packing.’
‘Hold on,’ Roxana said. ‘So what happened, exactly?’
‘He stayed at the front door a while, just talking to her in this voice, through the door. Soft, begging her.’ Pursed her lips. ‘Sounded like he knew her. Or knew you.’
‘You just listened.’
Of course she did. Roxana tried to moderate her resentment, thinking of Ma behind her door, frightened. Tried to remind herself that Carlotta was scared, too. Carlotta just shot her a glance that said, What did you want me to do?
‘Then he came round the back,’ she said. ‘He disappeared, then came round the back, in the alley. Couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there.’
Two terrified old women.
‘He called Ma by name?’
‘I thought he was saying, Signorina Delfino.’
Roxana inhaled, holding it.
‘A small man, dark. Dark eyes. Like a Roma. A gypsy.’ She spoke slowly. Carlotta was staring at her.
‘Josef,’ Roxana said.
He came looking for me. She heard Sandro Cellini’s words: he trusted you. A bad feeling, a worse feeling than the one she’d had when she first saw the smashed back gate, rose in her.
‘You said you sent him packing.’
‘He was there all day. I heard him.’ Ma had said the same thing, and Roxana had disbelieved her. ‘Making sounds, at the back gate, like he was trying to get through.’
‘You didn’t call the police.’
Carlotta gave her a look — stubborn, suspicious, weary — that conveyed all Roxana needed to know about being a lonely old woman.
‘I wanted a look at him,’ she said. ‘That was what I was waiting for. I went to the back of the garden, very quiet. He’d got in, he was inside, watching, crouched down, I think, and he stood up suddenly and he was right there. Face to face.’ Carlotta’s woman’s face was alive at the memory, her old mouth quivering. ‘I shouted at him then, I’m calling the police!’
‘He scared you.’
Carlotta refocused on her, and Roxana saw her relive it. ‘He was — it was his face. It wasn’t even human. Looked like he’d been beaten half to death.’ She pursed her lips. ‘It was a shock.’
Roxana didn’t say anything, didn’t suggest the man might have needed help. She could hear Carlotta’s angry guilt in her next words. ‘He ran off, then.’ The old woman turned back to her stubbornly. ‘Well, what was I to do?’
Roxana nodded, not listening. Josef Cynaricz had come to her for help. She looked up. Or had he come after her? Was he a victim, or — had Claudio fought back? There was a connection. Absently she felt in her pockets, thinking, I must tell Sandro Cellini this, where’s that mobile? Then she remembered where it was. Call him now, from the house phone. Or go and get the mobile? What if — what if people had been trying to get hold of her? What people? She could hear Ma’s scornful voice in her head. Ten minutes on the motorino, and she’d have it back in her pocket.
She stood up. ‘Thanks, Carlotta,’ she said, trying to contain a stupid, pointless panic rising in her, just because she didn’t have her phone. Patted her neighbour’s hand in a belated gesture of pity.
‘What about the other one, though?’ the old woman said slyly, detaining her.
‘The other one?’
‘The one that came after,’ said Carlotta. ‘Came yesterday. The kid. He came looking, too. White — sports shoes. Bright white.’
White shoes. And into Roxana’s head came the image of a kid in low slung jeans she’d mistaken for a drug dealer. Hopping up and down outside the bank in white trainers.
*
Walking up the hill towards Bellosguardo, Sandro cursed himself for an idiot, for not bringing the car. His breath was laboured, and the humidity was intense as he climbed towards the grey-lidded sky. It was a bloody long way.
Time to think? How could anyone think, in heat like this? He paused to lean against a low wall, and looked back.
The patchwork of roofs spread out before him, intensely red in the strange, lowering light, and it occurred to Sandro that this was where you would come to see the facade of every church in the city. He ticked them off for a while, waiting for his breath to ease, Santa Maria Novella, Santo Spirito, Santa Croce, took in the aggressively pointed bulk of the new university development on the north of the city, the muddle of light industrial units and pylons where the city dissolved into ugliness at Sesto. Thought of the secret places hidden under the red roofs, the loggias and marble porticoes. The dusty streets around the synagogue, the grimy bars, the dumpsters. The Carnevale.
Nearly there. Sandro mopped his forehead, pushed off from the wall and doggedly walked on: he had no idea if his heart was up to this, at his age. Never having had any kind of check-up, just assuming that, if there was a weakness there, thirty years of police work would already have finished him off. Did he exercise? If walking very slowly counted. Did he drink? Yes. Smoke? No. But it didn’t always work like that, did it? There were risk factors, of course he knew there were, but even so. Sometimes you got no warning.
It wasn’t the climb, either. The horrible feeling, hardening to stone somewhere below his ribs, didn’t come from mere exertion of his ageing muscles; he wasn’t frightened of what his heart might do, he was frightened of something else. Risk factors. Did these include climbing on a piece of packing case to peer in at a cracked and filthy window round the side of a derelict porn cinema?