The street had been empty. Liliana and her little van had disappeared around the corner, leaving no more than a bluish tinge to the air. The Carnevale was boarded up, the fencing smooth and impenetrable, new pine and padlocks and signage with a drawing of an Alsatian. Above the glaring wood, the dirty facade looked even bleaker and uglier than ever; how could it have survived so long? Only the complacency of the city’s surveyors and assessors, the academicians and bureaucrats who refused to allow even a new shutter to be erected, could have allowed this canker of a place. Sandro had skirted the pine boarding, round to the alley — no more than a man’s width — that ran alongside the cinema.
The flank of the building was big and blind — a characteristic of theatres generally, Sandro acknowledged. A high, almost blank wall with the stinking alley underneath it — and it had stunk. Dog faeces and urine, intensified by the heat and the confined space. Moving along it with extreme reluctance, Sandro had came to a door and stopped. A plain, small door in the blackened wall, and the lock and doorknob were shiny with use. Sandro had taken the single step back that the space allowed. Narrow, featureless and dirty, the door could not have been more banal — but it was something else. It was the real point of entry, it was the secret life of this building. That had been when it had started up inside him, the slow tightening of that obscure and dangerous muscle: fear. He had pushed the door; it had resisted. Of course.
Further along the alley, something had gleamed on the ground, some stinking liquid, and there had been a pallet propped against the wall. Beyond it, a couple of metres up, he had noticed a small makeshift window of the sort inserted illegally all over the city, on the cheap and out of sight, to provide the bare minimum of light and ventilation. Holding his breath, Sandro had moved on.
Stopping below the small, high, broken window, the pallet at his feet, a feeling of aversion as strong as he had ever experienced had come over Sandro. There was a protruding overflow pipe of some kind to the right of the window, offering itself as a handhold: Sandro had set his foot on the pallet, tested it, reached up and taken hold of the pipe. As he had pulled himself up in the cramped space, the sudden sense of his own sagging weight, his singular uselessness and vulnerability, had pressed in on him like gravity, a choking sensation that he had had to fight to overcome, to continue upwards, inching until his face was there, his arm already aching, the ridiculous old man that he was turning out to be.
And at first, he had seen nothing anyway. The glass was filthy and behind it all was dark.
The pane had been cracked and a triangular segment had fallen away. Gingerly Sandro had pushed at it with his free hand, dust on his fingertip, and the old dried putty had given way, the glass moving inwards. He had eased his head sideways so as to see in without blocking the light.
What was there? Almost nothing. But Sandro had had the terrible sensation of being about to fall, whether backwards or forwards he didn’t know, and of wanting, suddenly, urgently wanting to be back at home with Luisa in his kitchen and not here: the last place he had wanted to be was here, or perhaps worse than here was the next step, to be inside this building against whose wall he was so unwillingly pressed.
He had glanced into a small, empty room. A mattress on the floor in one corner, the dirty inside of a duvet, thin with age, bundled on it, shadowed and crumpled. Stained: worse than stained. An old cooker that might have come out of a dumpster, askew in one corner. Something on the wall. All up the wall. And the smell.
Head down now and plodding in the grey heat of the hillside with the rhythmic saw of the cicadas resonating among the trees, Sandro found himself pinching his nostrils against even the memory of the smell he’d left below him in the city. The ammoniac secretions of that alley and something thicker, dirtier, coming up at him from inside the Carnevale. Still climbing towards Bellosguardo, not far now, he heard a voice calling him from higher up; he kept his head down just a moment longer, told himself to keep moving. He had thought that he would vomit, there in the alley, make his own sour contribution to the stench. He had swayed, his grip had loosened a moment on the piece of dirty pipe, his foot had slipped and clattered. But he had not fallen; he hadn’t vomited.
‘Hey, pal,’ came the voice again, concern creeping in, and Sandro raised his head and saw his oldest friend standing in the lee of a building, the low, square shape of a farmhouse behind him.
He was drenched in sweat, quite suddenly, and Pietro’s hand encountered a sopping sleeve.
‘You didn’t bring the car?’ Pietro was aghast. ‘Madonna, Sandro. What are you thinking?’ From the far side of the hill, down towards Scandicci, there was an ominous rumble.
‘I’m fine,’ Sandro muttered, feeling the reassuringly regular thump of his poor old heart. He mopped his forehead, leaned against the rough brick. The city was hazed below him now; was that the light, or were his eyes doing something funny? He took a moment. Pietro remained silent, watching him.
‘No need to ask why here, then,’ Sandro said when he began to feel more normal, although the light was still strange and thick. Pulling out the newspaper. This was the farmhouse in the picture, with Galeotti’s car in the foreground, the body under its sheeting. Car and body gone, now.
‘No,’ Pietro said shortly. ‘The girls are cursing me. This job. Now another murder. And we were hoping to get away.’
‘It’s connected,’ Sandro said. Both had their eyes on a bleached stretch of road towards the mulberry trees.
Pietro looked at him curiously. ‘They found a cutting in his pocket,’ he said. ‘About Brunello’s body being found. But you didn’t know that.’
Sandro nodded towards the trees. ‘Come on,’ he said, and together they set off, towards the crime scene. Pietro’s car was parked in the shade of the farmhouse: his own vehicle. They walked past it and carried on.
‘Where’s Matteucci?’ Sandro said. ‘Your shadow?’
Pietro chewed his lip. ‘He’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘Just young. Following something up this morning. I’ll tell you about it.’
The short row of manicured mulberry trees, and a view down towards the white tower blocks of Scandicci, glittering in a distant shaft of sun cast down from a heavy sky. Meadow grass and the dried heads of wild iris: the cicadas, he realized, had fallen silent.
‘Storm coming,’ he remarked.
‘Oh, yes,’ Pietro said. ‘The forecast was crazy, this morning. They said there was a mini-tornado on the Po plain last night. A lot of damage.’
Below them lay the foothills of the Alps, visible on a good day. This was not a good day: a thunderhead a couple of kilometres high was spread across the entire western horizon, darkening by the minute.
They stood quite still. ‘Better out here,’ Sandro said, feeling his head clear. ‘Sometimes you need to get out of the city.’ But he felt exposed; what was the rule about lightning? Don’t stand under a tree.
There was a silence. ‘Oh,’ said Pietro suddenly. ‘We found Brunello’s car. It had been towed away on Monday when the street-cleaning vehicles came through. It had been by the river, just down from the bank; where he always parked it for work, according to the woman.’
‘What woman?’ Sandro was alert, thinking of Roxana Delfino.
‘What’s her name? Goldman: his second-in-command.’
Another silence. ‘Yes’, Sandro said slowly. ‘About her. About Marisa Goldman. Did she tell you where she was, that weekend?’
Pietro eyed him warily. ‘She did,’ he said. ‘She was away with her boyfriend. On his yacht.’
Sandro nodded. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You might want to corroborate that. With the boyfriend, to begin with.’