Back past the workstations, out to the silent, dusty lobby: Roxana knew where she was going. She ducked under the tape and into Claudio Brunello’s office.
Slowly she seated herself behind her dead boss’s computer and switched it on.
What if someone caught her? The Guardia? The police? Or whoever it was who had killed Claudio? She told herself, she couldn’t think about that.
Even as she typed in Claudio’s user name and code — she’d observed him do it often enough, taken it as a sign of the trust he placed in his employees — a part of her brain was wondering, How much would you need to know about Claudio to guess it? The name of his first-born child and the date of her birth. Even Roxana knew that you were supposed to be an awful lot more cryptic than that, and a lot less sentimental. Was it his soft heart that had killed Claudio?
MM Holdings. It came up quickly, everything she wanted, plain as day. It was a very old client, and a lot of the early business was summarized; this must have been done when computerization came in twenty years earlier. Some scanned-in microfiche records, deeds and contracts — MM Holdings had been operating under that name since 1967, when it had been formed as a limited company. The directors were listed. Of the founding three, only one remained, the other names had changed three or four times. In surprise Roxana pushed the chair back. Good God, she thought, as she stared at the name. Her. Really?
A current account. The account had been exceptionally active until the late nineties. After that takings had fallen off dramatically, dwindling to less than was required to finance the account’s operation. The sell-off must have come just in time. She wondered why it hadn’t been negotiated sooner; then she saw. A loan taken out against the property a year ago would have had to be repaid before the sale could go through: this was the same debt discharged in the letter she’d found stuffed behind the cupboard. Discharged last Friday. Roxana clicked on the mortgage file for detail, and as she did so she heard something, a small, familiar sound, and she was so absorbed suddenly and the sound so familiar that Roxana overrode it in her head.
Something wasn’t right. She peered at the figures. Something was wrong. And then there was another sound and she looked up.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh.’
*
They were both in the front of Pietro’s car, with the air-con on. It seemed safer there, somehow, the sight of sheet lightning coming down somewhere over by Pistoia had put the wind up both of them.
‘Jesus,’ Pietro had said, awed by the spectacle, the whole sky lit briefly like neon over the Pisan plain. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well we’re not going to the seaside.’
Inside the car it was very hot in spite of the air-con, and horribly humid. From behind the windscreen the sky looked black, but it still wasn’t raining. ‘We can’t stay here,’ said Pietro, starting the engine, glancing up at the trees. ‘Under a tree, on the top of a hill? I’ll take you over there.’
They parked up on the street outside Marisa Goldman’s gate.
‘It’s not money, then,’ said Pietro, nodding at the villa’s expensively pale facade, at the outhouses and the roses, glowing fluorescent in the strange light.
Sandro shook his head. ‘You don’t know that,’ he said. ‘Appearances aren’t everything.’
‘She was here all along,’ said Pietro ruminatively. ‘Do you think — could a woman have done it?’
Sandro had taken out his wallet and was sorting through it. Had he kept the card? Probably not. He raised his head, focused on Pietro. ‘Depends on the woman,’ he said.
‘Nice car,’ said Pietro, nodding at the handsome machine standing on the driveway. A customized Cinquecento, a kept woman’s car. ‘We could get forensics to pull it in. If she moved him in that? A woman?’ He was deeply dubious: the car looked like no more than a toy.
‘Yes,’ said Sandro, ‘just not yet,’ and returned to his task. Patiently he sorted through old receipts, the card for a rosticceria around the corner from home, a reminder from the surgery for his prostate check. Damn. He got out the phone and without expectation scrolled through the numbers, but there it was. Giorgio Viola.
As he waited for the connection, he summoned up the man, his pale, sweaty despairing bulk behind that desk north of the station, his defeated look as he walked away from the bank and along the river last night, Sandro watching him through the long lens of the birdwatcher’s camera.
‘You might ask,’ he said as an aside, hand over the mouthpiece, just while he remembered, ‘a guy who takes pictures of birds, down on the river, not far from the African market. You might talk to him.’ Pietro looked bewildered, but before Sandro could explain further, Giorgio Viola answered his phone.
It took five minutes of patient explanation before Viola softened even fractionally. Damn, thought Sandro, why aren’t I better at this? It wasn’t as if he didn’t sympathize with Viola. How could he convey it, that he was on his side? That they were on the side of — what? Of the defeated, the not quite competent, the stupidly soft-hearted. Only the more he wanted to be sympathetic, the gruffer he sounded.
‘I’m only trying to find the father of this woman’s child,’ he said eventually, in despair. ‘I don’t want to do any insider trading. The last thing I want to do is get you into trouble. Just give me a leg-up here.’
There was a silence, the chink in Viola’s frightened obduracy. And then he spoke.
‘There was the transfer of a considerable sum.’ Sandro held his breath, hearing the man’s fear, his voice quick and breathless. ‘Brunello transferred just over a hundred thousand euros from the bank’s reserves, initially into his own account, just before close of business on Friday. His own authorization.’ And then Sandro could almost hear the man clamp his mouth shut.
‘He was defrauding the bank?’
‘I didn’t say that.’ Viola’s voice showed that he still felt unsettled. ‘I don’t know. I just pointed it out to the Guardia, we don’t know yet. But to do that last thing on a Friday night — I don’t know.’
‘You said initially? Initially into his own account? And where subsequently?’
He could see Pietro, head cocked, listening intently.
‘I don’t know. They don’t know yet. It looks as though there have been attempts — to conceal the eventual transfer. The Guardia di Finanza are the experts — there are so many ways, you know. To launder money, to disguise the disbursement of funds. They’re taking their time — look. Look. I have a pension, if I play my cards right. Please. I can’t say any more. The Guardia will share the information with the authorities in due course. Won’t they?’
Like hell — and he wasn’t the authorities, anyway. But the man’s manifest terror defeated him, he let him go. ‘You’re one of the good guys,’ he said, and as he hung up he heard Giorgio Viola sigh, a small, unhappy sound that somehow encompassed all they shared.
They sat in silence in the car a moment: this was how he and Pietro had spent their every waking hour, side by side in the front seat of a stale-smelling vehicle, adjusting the air-con or the heating, saying nothing. Watching, or thinking, or preparing to get out and deal with something they didn’t want to deal with. A little over a hundred thousand euros: Sandro’s mind wandered over the figure, imagined Brunello in his office, Friday night, on the way to the seaside to his wife and children. Transferring money — for what? Hold on. Hold on. He turned to Pietro.
‘So he was stealing,’ said Pietro, suddenly despondent, before Sandro could say anything.
‘That’s what it looks like,’ said Sandro slowly. ‘Just over a hundred thousand euros.’
‘A lot of money,’ said Pietro, leaning his head back.
‘Yes,’ said Sandro thoughtfully. ‘Or perhaps not enough. If you were going to disappear and spend the rest of your life on the run, say. Not enough.’