You’ll be fine, she wanted to say to Anna Niescu, you’ll toughen up, like the rest of us. The old woman’ll keep you on, find you some cot a friend of hers is throwing out. You’ll be fine without him. She squeezed her eyes shut, thinking about what kind of life that would be, for Anna, for the child. There was worse, out there; the Loggiata was a roof over her head at least. She opened her eyes and looked back down.
The street below held a line of cars, dusted with pollen and something else sticky that came off the lime trees in an adjoining walled garden. A walled garden, an alley, a row of blue dumpsters, overflowing as they awaited the morning’s collection. That’s where he would hide, coming to find Anna. She’d thought of chucking a bucket of water over him, as you would a cat, only something’d stopped her. Didn’t want him to know she’d seen him, although she had, three times: she’d almost told the girl, Giuli, whose dog-eared card she fingered in her pocket from time to time, only then she’d decided against it. Softer than she looked, with her boyfriend and her job.
How long would he keep on coming back? In the end, he’d give up and disappear, off to find an easier life. Or someone would get him. Whoever was after him would get him and it would all be a whole lot simpler. Let her just think he’s done a runner. Simpler.
They were all on his side, weren’t they? These people coming looking, detectives and that. They all thought they knew what was best for Anna, they wanted to believe in her fiance, they wanted a happy ending. But what if they’d got it wrong?
He wasn’t coming today. Maybe it was all over already. Dasha turned her back on the street, perfectly cool. She didn’t feel the heat, that was what came of being born in the Caucasus; like a lizard, you just soaked up the heat, after a winter on those plains. She could hear Anna, singing breathlessly inside, her little lungs squeezed up inside her so she could barely speak any more. Then there was another noise, a tinkle, a bell or an alarm. She came to the glass door and pushed it open.
‘All right?’ she said, and the girl’s lips stopped moving. She seemed dazed with something, sleeplessness perhaps. Dasha had heard her moving about, unable to settle, until the early hours. Now she had a hand in her pocket, as if she’d just put something away, and there was a flush on her cheek.
‘Yes, all right?’ Anna repeated the words back to her, the other hand moving to her stomach. ‘All right. Just need a lie-down, for a bit.’
*
Forcing herself to take things one at a time Roxana called Cellini from the home phone twice, and twice found his line engaged. She left a message. She could hear how it sounded, too: crazy old ladies with nothing better to do than imagine intruders. She tried to sound considered, thoughtful.
I think it was Josef; I think he’d come to find me but I don’t know why. Serves me right for having my name and address in the book, I suppose. And paused, as if his answerphone might be in a position to reassure her, No, don’t worry. And then someone else came, after him. Maybe — and she heard her voice falter — Maybe he was looking for him. Carlotta said he wore white trainers. The second guy.
She went through to the back and they turned towards her in mid-conversation as if she was an intruder, Ma amused, Carlotta peering across her, the Persian between them on the fence even less welcoming, its tail fiercely upright.
‘Ma,’ she said warily, ‘I think you should get that handyman back out here. There’s so much needs doing.’
The two old women exchanged a look. ‘Fine,’ said Ma comfortably. ‘He’s a nice young man. I don’t mind.’
‘Today,’ said Roxana.
Climbing on to the motorino, Roxana told herself, that would do it, a handyman on the premises would surely deter this — this guy in the white trainers, whoever he was. Could he be after Josef? Wasn’t she being — hysterical? Some feral kid, that’d be all. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to exaggerate the danger. They’d be all right; she wouldn’t be gone long.
And she needed her phone.
The Via Senese was choked with cars heading the other way, south to the seaside. Friday: she could see anxious faces hunched over steering wheels as the holidaymakers peered up at the dark sky. The storm was coming down from the Alps, chasing them. If there was one thing worse, they were thinking, than boiling to death in the city in August, it was getting to the beach just as the weather broke.
She left the Vespa carelessly in the street outside the bank. The closer to the centre she’d come, the emptier it seemed, Roxana’s sometimes the only vehicle in the street, the bar she’d lunched in days ago shuttered up. It didn’t mean the traffic wardens had gone too, but Roxana didn’t plan on being inside too long. A wind had got up, a weird mixture of scalding Saharan gusts and colder air sucked up from somewhere else, and for a moment Roxana had a vision of some great massing swirl of air currents overhead, portending disaster.
She punched in the access code at the side door without thinking, only in the pause while she waited for it to work did she wonder whether the numbers might have been changed already. She was surprised by the exhilaration she felt at the thought. And then the muted buzz indicated that the code had been accepted and the door slid back and, with only a moment’s hesitation, Roxana went inside.
It was as if the place was already abandoned, as derelict as the Carnevale: a musty smell, as from an old cellar or the rowing club’s boat house as you passed, a whiff of the river. Somebody had been back, after they’d left. There was a strip of plastic tape across the door to Claudio’s office. Roxana peered over it.
Empty shelves, already gathering dust. The desk was still there, lonely at the centre of the room, and the computer.
Roxana had a sudden, powerful sense that she shouldn’t be there. She took a hasty step backwards, away from the open doorway, and for a second she couldn’t remember why she was there. The phone: and then she struggled to remember where she would find it. Not Ma losing her marbles, this time; Roxana had a glimpse of what that kind of confusion must feel like. Pull yourself together.
She threaded past the empty workstations. When she’d started at the bank, there’d been a couple of other tellers on a job-share, half the week each, and a part-time secretary. It had all dwindled without her noticing. She pushed open the door to the tiny kitchen, the only bright space in the bank with its frosted window facing south, a little patch of normality. The electric ring, the microwave, the coffee machine. A socket, and in it the charger to her phone, the wire leading off behind the cabinet. She reached down and pulled on the cord: the phone came up from where it had been hiding behind the toaster. She heard something else fall.
Two missed calls: Ma, Maria Grazia. She listened to the second message: Coming home, should be back tomorrow on the train. Hope you’re all right. Meet me at the station? Absently she peered down to where whatever it was had fallen, and hung up. It would be nice to see her. A new start; she could tell her the bank was finished. They could plan — she leaned down. There was something down there. It looked like some correspondence. An envelope. Delicately she fished with her fingers, but the space was too narrow. Pulled open the drawer and took, at random, a kitchen knife, and poked. Got it: eased the envelope up with the point of the knife. She put it in her handbag.
MM Holdings, it said. This was the account into which Josef paid his weekly takings, and this was the name on those envelopes she’d seen littering the lobby of the cinema. She slit the envelope and stared down, frowning. A form letter, confirming the discharge of a debt against the property: it had been copied to Tyrrhenian Properties. She looked at the date on the letter and the signature, then thrust it all down into her bag. Slowly she turned and walked to the door.