Pietro’s smile faded, but not by much.
‘We’ll find him,’ he said. ‘Kid like Gulli never goes too far from home.’
‘What’s the motive?’ Sandro asked. Something about this wasn’t right. ‘What was it, just a mugging? A bit off the beaten track for that.’
‘And he wasn’t robbed,’ said Pietro. ‘Mobile gone, yes. But a full wallet. Man had seven hundred-odd euros on him, as well. Untouched.’
‘Cash backhander, no doubt,’ pondered Sandro, momentarily sidetracked. ‘Lot of cash. Not like Gulli. Unless-’
‘Unless Gulli’s taking a step up the career path. From violent burglar to hit man.’
‘Incompetent hit man: that would figure,’ Sandro murmured. It had always surprised him how stupid criminals like Gulli could be. ‘Bad luck he was recognized.’ He paused. ‘I wonder where Gulli was on Saturday afternoon?’
He could see Pietro chewing the inside of his cheek gloomily. ‘In custody, as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘I checked arrest reports, first off, to make sure he wasn’t inside and it was mistaken identity. Because Gulli’s been inside more than out, this last ten years.’
Nothing to lose: prison was like home to the likes of Gulli. Get paid plenty to hit someone; the worst that happens is you’re inside another fifteen years. They had no concept of the span of a life, these kids. Of what it might be like to wake up when you’re forty and know it was all gone. The best of it, anyway.
Pietro sighed. ‘He was brought in for trying to pickpocket Saturday morning, released without charge Sunday morning. But we’ll find him. There’ll be DNA, it’ll stick, too.’ But he sounded demoralized.
‘So where are you looking?’ Sandro wanted to keep on this trail. ‘Who might have asked him to hit Galeotti?’
‘Gulli’s gone upmarket,’ said Pietro thoughtfully. ‘He’s been seen in some very smart places.’
‘Smart places?’
‘That bar, by the British Consulate. San Niccolo, up here even.’
The sweat was beading again on Sandro’s upper lip. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Listen. What have we got? A crooked estate agent, a banker, a porn cinema up for redevelopment. A lowlife like Gulli.’
Where, he thought, where had he seen Galeotti’s name? His letterhead.
‘Ah,’ said Pietro, and now a wind got up, fierce and hot, flattening the grass, sweeping across the hillside down to Scandicci. ‘There’s something-’ he said. ‘The cinema, you said? There was something I had to tell you. About Brunello.’
‘Yes?’
‘The ash, on his feet. Celluloid: burned film, old film. Old ash, too, not recently burned, more like dust with traces of the ash in it.’
Film. Sandro had known all along, it seemed to him: had known even before he raised himself up on that pallet. Pietro was still talking, but Sandro’s mind was already elsewhere.
‘The lesion on his leg — a burn, they say, inflicted post-mortem, thought there might be a connection with the ash but-’ A pause. ‘Sandro? Are you listening?’
A big property, up for redevelopment: it was staring him in the face. The Carnevale.
‘You know what I’d like to know?’ he said. ‘I’d like to know who was selling that building, and when that deal went through. And I’d like to know what the Guardia found in that bank.’
Pietro snorted. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘And I’d like early retirement and a Testarossa. Dream on, Sandro.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Sandro. ‘There could be a way.’
*
Luisa heard the wind sweeping over the roofs as she stood at her wardrobe, trying to decide what to wear. And trying not to think about the things that frightened her.
That girl with her great belly. That was the most important thing, and the most urgent. Luisa knew better than anyone that it wasn’t so easy, that little skip from eight months gone to holding the baby safe and new in your arms. There were things that happened out of sight, a cord twisting, too much of this chemical or that, an enzyme malfunctioning. She’d seen the girl trying to batten down, to keep herself safe against everything that was going on, but sometimes that wasn’t enough.
The wind came then, rattling down the street, blowing something ahead of it with a clatter. Something else came loose overhead with a scraping sound.
Giuli. What had that expression been, on the girl’s face last night as she left to go home? Trying to smile as she said goodbye, but she’d only looked haunted, bewildered. Had the man, Enzo, whoever he was, had he said something? Done something?
Luisa reached into the wardrobe: what was the weather going to do? Linen. It would be crumpled in ten minutes with this humidity. She pulled it out anyway, dressed herself with habitual meticulousness. Bathroom. Scent on her wrists, a scrap of make-up. Reaching towards the mirror, Luisa saw she was too thin in the face: her mother had always told her it was a danger, in old age. But she couldn’t eat, in this heat.
Dropping a cotton ball into the wastebasket, she saw it. Leaned down under the sink, pulled the basket out and peered inside. Nothing more than a scrap of thin shiny plastic with some blue letters on it, something clinical about it. GRAV — and the rest was missing. Not a whole wrapper, but a shard of one. Luisa puzzled over it, and looked further in, and there was a small sheet of printed paper, concertinaed to fit in a packet, like a packet that might contain pills. Sandro? She unfolded it and saw that this would be nothing to do with Sandro. It was a set of instructions from a pregnancy testing kit.
Slowly Luisa pushed the paper into her pocket. So that was what Giuli had been doing in the bathroom all that time, last night. And the face she’d left with? The news Giuli had received had not been the news she wanted. Feeling a sudden chill of the kind a fever might give you, Luisa locked up carefully, pulled the shutters closed and secured them. The wind was gone again as suddenly as it had come, but you never knew.
The stairwell was clammy and stifling. Luisa let herself out on to the street and was startled by how dark it had grown, like doomsday. Who would want to go shopping on a day like this? Plenty would; Luisa had been in the business long enough to know that, even when across the world towers were falling, someone would be in Frollini, asking her for a pair of gloves in just the right shade of cream. The door closed behind her, and Luisa looked at her watch: it was nine o’clock in the morning and it looked like dusk.
Anna Niescu: there was a limit to Luisa’s power over the unborn. Giuli: she had to trust that the girl — the woman — was strong enough, and clever enough, to deal with the news she’d received, and to manage a bit of love in her life. But Sandro: that was another matter altogether.
And it was back, the wind, gusting up the street, gathering strength, sandblasting her with dirt from the street, forcing her to tug down her skirt. Luisa turned into it, feeling it pull at her, behind her something crashed to the ground and then the wind was gone again and her hair fell back into place.
Anna; Giuli. They were the young, they would have to manage. But Sandro. She’d been trying to tell herself this case was just a missing fiance, but it wasn’t. A man was dead. A husband, a father, beaten to death and dumped.
She had trained herself during Sandro’s thirty years in the Polizia dello Stato to assume that he was safe. To rationalize: he was thorough, he was careful, he had good reflexes. He would come home.
Until he didn’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Dasha heard something fall from the scaffolding opposite the loggia and leaned out further. The wind excited her: let the whole place blow down, she thought. A bucket that had been used to mix plaster had blown off and was dangling from a shred of frayed rope.
She was looking out for him. She knew he’d come, sooner or later. He’d been there yesterday and the day before, but Dasha wasn’t going to tell anyone. Her own father had been a violent alcoholic who used to sleep in the street outside their apartment block when her mother threw him out. They would step around him on the way to school.