‘What do you mean?’ said Giuli, feeling a flutter of panic. ‘What place?’
‘The — the cinema. The Carnevale. He said, We meet there, please, I will explain.’
‘Perhaps — perhaps-’ Giuli felt numb with fear. ‘Perhaps he wanted to come clean. I mean, tell her the truth about everything.’
Dasha laughed harshly. ‘Truth,’ she said. ‘Not always what you need.’
The Carnevale. The place had been a fixture all of Giuli’s life, its grubby facade and its small crowd of men on the streets outside, smoking as they waited to go in, their gaze sliding over any woman who passed.
‘You go after her,’ said Dasha. ‘Yes?’
‘Yes,’ said Giuli.
*
Sandro half expected a liveried butler to come to the door: what he hadn’t expected was Marisa Goldman, looking like this.
Skinny to begin with, she seemed as if she’d dropped another four kilos, a line etched down the sides of her mouth, and she was haggard under the tan. She was wearing some kind of tunic over dark linen trousers that made her legs look very long and lean. It occurred to Sandro that he didn’t like trousers on women. Old-fashioned, Luisa would say, but then again she never wore them, either.
‘It’s you,’ Marisa Goldman said without preamble. ‘All right, come in.’
Stepping across the threshold and into the air-conditioned interior, Sandro felt a sudden perverse regret at the abrupt disappearance of the humid outside air, the smell of roses and jasmine.
She showed him into a spacious ground-floor salotto. Cool and stale and surprisingly empty, the long windows shuttered. There was furniture, all right — three rectangular beige sofas, a sideboard, coffee tables — but every surface seemed too bare, too unadorned. Perhaps that was how the rich did things: he didn’t know, or greatly care.
Marisa Goldman jerked a hand carelessly towards the nearest sofa, and he sat. She remained standing, arms folded across her concave stomach. There were bracelets piled up her slim brown forearms and she wore many rings, silver and gold, and a big square aquamarine on one little finger. The rings seemed to Sandro all to disguise the lack of one ring in particular, but then he was being old-fashioned again.
She didn’t appear frightened. He’d expected her to be hostile or scared or both. But she seemed indifferent.
‘You went to see your boss on Friday evening,’ he said.
‘Can I get you anything?’ she said. Could she be more glacial? ‘A glass of water? A coffee? I have some beer.’
Beer, at this hour? He looked more closely at her and understood that she’d been drinking herself.
He repeated the statement and abruptly she sat down, too close to him. Her face seemed like a mask, her fingers like bones under the rings, an empress exhumed in her finery.
‘You went to see him, although you’d told everyone you were going away on the Thursday night. Out of the city. Where was it you were supposed to be going?’
‘My — my lover has a yacht. We sailed to Elba. He has a cottage there on the cliffs. A private beach.’
Marisa Goldman disdained the word fiance then, did she? Being of more elevated birth than little Anna Niescu, or Giuli.
‘You didn’t go to Elba,’ he repeated patiently. ‘You were here.’
‘It’s a beautiful craft,’ she said, turning away from him and walking to the window with considered elegance, and he wondered if she was actually mad. ‘Built in Genoa in 1932 for the Aga Khan’s son, teak decks and Frette linens and a staff of six. The cottage isn’t much.’ She gave a tiny shrug, her back still turned to him. ‘A simple place. But I don’t really like sleeping on the boat.’
His phone gave a little peal to indicate the arrival of a text. The look Marisa Goldman threw him over her shoulder didn’t deter him from opening the phone and looking. Too soon, surely, for Pietro to have found anything out? It was from Giuli, and he stared at it for too long, because he couldn’t understand it. Sent in haste, full of fumbled abbreviations.
Josef’s boss at Crnvle a wmn. Josef hs txtd Anna, askd hr 2 meet.
What did that mean? Josef’s boss a woman? Suddenly Sandro’s head felt ridiculously overstuffed: too many suspects, too many blind alleys. One thing at a time, please. A woman. He had a woman in front of him.
Asked her to meet? Josef asked Anna to meet him? He couldn’t even think about that.
He looked at Marisa Goldman. He thought of those photographs in her office, the straight back, the tendons in her hands gripping the reins. The gun over her shoulder. He thought of Claudio, battered under the dusty trees.
The big villa seemed very quiet suddenly.
‘Do you have staff here?’ asked Sandro, partly because he wanted to know, and partly because the direct approach did not seem to be working.
Her big, pale, green-gold eyes were turned on him. ‘A housekeeper and a maid and a gardener. The housekeeper and the maid are on holiday.’
‘Did you send them away?’ he asked gently. ‘Did they tell Irene Brunello that you weren’t at Elba after all, that you’d been here all along, and you sent them packing before they could tell anyone else?’
And abruptly the green-gold eyes brimmed with tears. He could hear Luisa’s voice, tough and contemptuous, in his ear. Don’t fall for it.
‘Was Irene Brunello trying to contact you here, too, since Claudio didn’t come home on Saturday evening. And you didn’t answer, you didn’t pick up.’ His voice was soft but not gentle any more. Her face, turned towards him in the window’s pale filtered light, was very still, the brimming eyes did not overflow and she said nothing.
‘Do you know Sergio Galeotti?’ he asked. Her lip just turned downwards, dismissive, the ghost of a shrug. ‘He was an estate agent,’ he said, helpfully. ‘You had some of his material on your desk the other day. He’d just sold the Carnevale cinema, as a matter of fact.’ Sandro still had no proof that this was so. But he had little to lose.
Marisa Goldman seemed to shiver in disgust.
‘Does that offend you?’ He spoke as softly as he could. ‘The mention of that cinema? It’s nothing to do with you, then, the Carnevale? It’s run by a woman, did you know that?’
Her expression darkened, turned mutinous, and Sandro hastily decided to change tack.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I know you had a relationship with your boss. Let me guess. You were bored, or between boyfriends, his wife was busy with the children. You found yourselves alone one evening.’
He tilted his head, appraising her. ‘Let me guess,’ he said, ‘it would be, I’d say, three years ago, something like that? You were probably just a bit prettier, a bit fresher, three years ago. Let’s say. Women reach their prime at a different age, I’m sure you know that. The skinny ones, in my experience, get there a bit earlier than the rest.’ He knew he was sounding coarse; he didn’t care.
She was looking at him with fury now, but the indifference was gone, she was engaged. The truth was building inside her, and soon she wouldn’t be able to keep it quiet. Not yet, though.
‘And on Friday you went to see him. What was that about? Was it about a property deal, was it about your rich boyfriend, was it about money?’
A faint flush appeared on her sallow cheek.
‘Money. Did you need money from him?’
And he knew that was why she’d gone to see him. But triumph remained stubbornly elusive, because Claudio Brunello was dead, and he had no idea where Josef was, and he still couldn’t see where Marisa Goldman fitted in.
‘Was it something to do with the sale of the Carnevale?’ he said. ‘It had been on the market for months, hadn’t it? Something was stopping the deal going through.’
She stalked back across the room towards him, a wraith in her dark linen. ‘I have nothing to do with a pornographic cinema,’ she enunciated, imperious and clear as a bell. ‘Nothing, do you hear? My family-’ and she snorted, ‘if we owned two thousand square metres in the centre of Florence, believe me, we would have sold it years ago. Just like the rest. Sell when it’s worth nothing, then wring your hands as plebs like Galeotti get rich. That’s how it works in my family.’