He could feel Pietro’s attention.
‘Can you find out who owns that place?’ he said abruptly. ‘Who owns the Carnevale? Or rather, who owned it?’
Pietro shrugged, still watching him. ‘Easily done,’ he said. ‘A phone call.’
Sandro frowned down at the mobile still in his hand, looking at the cluttered little screen. An icon was blinking at him. Would the magic phone Giuli had been so keen on — what seemed like an age ago — would that explain things to him patiently, like the old fool he was? Somehow he doubted it. At random he checked his messages, and there it was. He held the phone to his ear.
Roxana Delfino, sounding hurried and anxious. Telling him she thought Josef Cynaricz was the man who’d been out to her house, telling him she thought somehow the man needed her help, that he’d come to her for help. And another man had come after him, a young man in white trainers. A man her neighbour really hadn’t liked the look of.
Thoughtfully he flipped the phone shut and turned to Pietro. ‘You might send Matteucci down to Roxana Delfino’s place at the Certosa,’ he said. ‘She’s in the phone book.’
‘Delfino? The girl in the bank?’
‘Sounds very much like Gulli’s been out there. You’d think he’d stop wearing those white trainers.’ He frowned. ‘So Gulli’s after — Roxana? No. After Josef. Off his own bat? I doubt it. And how’d he know where to look? How’d he know Josef had been out there?’ He put a hand to his head, perplexed. ‘You think you could — I don’t like to ask. But I think it’s just her and her mother. I don’t like to think-’ He stopped.
Pietro nodded. ‘We’ll get someone out there,’ he said, looking up at Marisa Goldman’s villa. ‘What about this?’ he said.
‘I need you to let me run with this, only for an hour or so,’ said Sandro. ‘Do you trust me? Give me a morning.’ He peered through the windscreen: it looked more like nightfall than morning.
‘I trust you,’ said Pietro, and he leaned across and opened Sandro’s door for him. ‘Get going.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Oh, shit, thought Giuli, tearing around the sweaty room in the half-dark, oh shit, oh shit.
It was ten minutes since Dasha had called her, and she couldn’t find her keys. She heard Luisa’s voice in her head, Turn on the lights, might be an idea. She wanted to cry, but the time for crying was past.
At the Women’s Centre the charge doctor had sounded merely bored when eventually, an hour or so back, out of some last vestige of self-respect, Giuli had roused herself to call in sick.
‘Feeling rough,’ she had managed. ‘I think it’s something I’ve eaten.’ An excuse transparent through over-use, and they had both known it.
‘No problem,’ the doctor, a woman she’d never liked, had said. Giuli had heard the idle calculation in her tone: give her one more chance, maybe, we can get a replacement, plenty more where she came from. Ex-junkie, ex-hooker, waste of space.
The worst of it was, she reminded herself of her own mother, a woman dead more than twenty years but when alive often to be seen lying motionless with self-disgust, face down on the bed. Mumbling incoherently.
You’ve come so far, Luisa would say. This is nothing. This isn’t the end of the world. Giuli tried to hear Luisa’s voice as she lay there with stupid tears leaking from her eyes but it didn’t make it any better. You’ve found a man, you’ve started to hope for something, for a day and a half you wondered if you might be pregnant. And you’re not. You probably never will be: but since when did you want a baby anyway? Get over it.
What would Enzo think, if he could see her? Face swollen with crying, reckless with despair. He’d run a mile.
And the thought of going into the Women’s Centre and seeing those women, pregnant or aborting or begging for contraception, abusing the unborn with drugs or happy and hopeful — well. She couldn’t do it. She had felt poisonous, her head full to bursting with rage and disappointment.
And then Dasha had phoned. Giuli had stared down at the phone and the unfamiliar number, letting it ring a good long time until she picked up. Straight away she had been able to tell something was wrong: Dasha’s Italian had turned ragged, her accent heavier. Not the bored, guarded girl Giuli had last seen.
‘Hold on,’ Giuli had said sulkily, initially resentful of the girl’s intrusion. ‘Talk more slowly. Who called her?’
‘Not called,’ Dasha had said. ‘Sent text message. Him. He sent the message asking her to come to him. She showed me.’
‘Josef?’ The words had drawn Giuli upright, off the bed. She had rubbed at her face. ‘Josef sent her a text message. After all this time?’
‘You knew he was around,’ Dasha had said angrily. ‘I knew, you knew. I don’t know why he didn’t try before. I begin to think, perhaps he is a good guy. He will leave her in peace. To be safe, just want to know she is all right, that is why he is coming every day, here.’
‘Every day?’ Jesus, Giuli had thought. Under our noses. ‘You’ve seen him today?’
‘Not yet,’ Dasha had said. ‘Maybe I won’t see him, if he is meeting her. If he has changed his mind, if he wants her after all.’
Giuli had crossed to the sink, taken her flannel, soaked it and pressed it to her face a moment. Something hadn’t been right about this.
‘Why wouldn’t he come to the hotel? Just walk right in.’
‘I don’t know.’ Dasha had sounded angry. ‘Maybe because he knows we would send him away. Maybe he knows the old woman don’t like him. Since a long time, something with his dirty job and that woman who employ him. Some old problem, between those women.’
‘Woman? A woman runs the Carnevale?’
‘I don’t know everything about it. I think yes.’ Dasha’s voice had turned stubborn and frightened.
‘It’s all right,’ she’d said, conscious that Dasha could clam up at any moment. ‘It’s not your fault, Dasha.’
‘My fault? Who said it is my fault? Is these men.’ She spat out some of her own language, unmistakably a bad word, or series of bad words.
‘Yes,’ Giuli said, trying to stay cool. ‘I know.’
‘I should have kept her here,’ she said through something that sounded harsher and more painful than tears. ‘I should have called the old woman and we could have made her stay. But — I didn’t know. I didn’t know she would — maybe not come back.’
‘Where’s the old woman now?’ asked Giuli. Thinking of the bad business between her and whoever ran the Carnevale. Whatever woman.
‘Out,’ said Dasha. ‘I didn’t tell her. She would be angry. She went out, to talk to someone, she said. Had coat on.’
‘Coat?’
In this heat.
There was a weary exhalation. ‘You can’t talk to her. She don’t listen. She hate everyone, except maybe Anna.’ And an angry sniff, as though to hold back tears. ‘That baby is coming soon. She was walking so slowly, to the lift, like it hurt her.’
How could you let her go? Giuli couldn’t say it: Dasha might go for her, or shut up for good.
‘All right,’ she said carefully. ‘It’s all right. There was nothing you could do. You called me, that’s the main thing.’
There was a silence, but Dasha didn’t hang up.
‘You saw the message,’ she said.
Dasha cleared her throat. ‘Yes.’
‘Can you remember what it said?’
‘She showed me first his name, at the top of the message. Showed me that it came from him: Jo, it said.’ Dasha sighed. ‘So proud of this mobile he give her. His number the first in there.’
Giuli waited: in the pause she became aware of her own breathing, of her own body functioning calmly now that the situation required it. No more panic or self-pity. Good.
‘Then.’ Her voice was tight. ‘It said, Darling. I’m so sorry. All is ready now — something like that. Prepared, ready, something like that. We can start our life together.’ Dasha made a sound of fierce contempt. ‘How could he suggest that place? I don’t understand that.’