Reaching the new boarding outside the cinema, Giuli stopped and looked back along the street. Was it empty, after all? It was one of those streets where no one seemed actually to live; the centre of town was full of them. Owned by foreigners who were never there, the odd fondo still used for storage or garaging, the occasional old woman on a controlled rent. A crumbling bit of frontage that, on closer inspection, was a semi-derelict church. Quiet, but not quite silent: somewhere not too far off she could hear voices, or perhaps one voice, raised in complaint. The metal shutter was not quite closed on a fondo. The knot in her stomach loosened fractionally at the thought that she wasn’t alone.
A door was cut into the boarding: close up, you could see that the pine was already beginning to discolour. Giuli rapped hard on the wood. Nothing happened, but then what did she expect? This wasn’t the place’s entrance. She tried to think. The tongue and grooved door was padlocked. Josef wouldn’t have a key to it, either; the door would have been put in for the new owners or their representatives. Tyrrhenian Properties. There was an artist’s drawing of modern apartments stapled to the pine, along with the name of the developer. The people who bought those apartments were not going to be told what the site had once been, were they?
There must be another door. Walking to the corner of the building, Giuli felt her reluctance grow, slowing every step. There was something wrong here.
Would you invite someone you loved to meet you in such a place? If you knew anything at all about little Anna Niescu, would you bring her here? Josef had gone to such lengths to keep her away, so why bring her here now?
He needed to hide. Could that be it? This place was out of sight. Had he been in here all along, hiding in some secret corner as the demolition men moved in?
The board was brought up dose against the edge of the building, where it stopped, and then there was a long stretch of blank side wall down a narrow alley. It smelled: no worse, perhaps, than most of the city’s alleys, but it was not inviting. Piss and garbage, but there was another door. She banged on it again, then again. Then again, feeling her knuckles bark and skin against the flaking paint.
‘Anna,’ she called, loud then louder. ‘Anna!’
The sound echoed strangely in the cramped space, bouncing back at her. She thought she heard a cry back in the street, far back where she’d come from, so thin it might have been nothing more than an echo, or an animal. The building sat tight, providing no answers. Further on she saw a pallet leaning against the wall, above it a small plain window, as though someone had stood on it to look in. Or climb in? Not Anna, not that little barrel of a body: again Giuli felt the fear. She stood on the pallet.
No one inside. It looked like a dirty, abandoned kitchen. With extreme unwillingness, Giuli pressed her lips to a hole in the dirty glass and called Anna’s name. Hissed it, as though now she didn’t want to be overheard. No answer. And abruptly Giuli understood that the place was empty. She jumped down from the pallet, the narrowness of the alley and its stink getting to her at last, and, choking, she came back out in the street.
Which was no longer empty. A couple had turned the corner, leaning into each other. The sight of them turned Giuli’s stomach: couples. The sentiment of it, the dependence seemed to her nothing but weakness. She just needed to find Anna and she could tell her that. You, me, Dasha, we’ll manage the kid. Leave Josef. But her heart sank at the total failure of her mission. What could she do now? She pulled out her phone. Call Sandro, or Luisa. That was all she could do.
No signal here, though. This city: there was no knowing where you’d find your signal, or lose it. The river was the only safe bet. Feeling her head clear just fractionally, Giuli had a plan: she hurried south, every step taking her away from the Carnevale was a step in the right direction. She came past the fondo whose shutter was not quite closed and heard something shuffle, a mew.
She passed the couple. The man’s hand was tight on the woman’s shoulder, and Giuli looked away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The city was dead. Luisa stood at the door of Frollini, her cheek against the glass, and looked out into the street.
She couldn’t relax: something was wrong. Everything was wrong.
The street was dark and deserted. The bags on the few tourist stalls that had bothered to set up under the arcaded straw market were being whipped and flung about by the wind, and there was not a potential customer in sight. Luisa turned her head slightly to look down the street towards the Ponte Vecchio, for a glimpse of sky. It was a nasty yellow with a bank of darker cloud pushing up over the southern hills.
In the shop window before her, Luisa’s display of mannequins, in expensive nylon parkas trimmed with fur, pouted blankly, hands on hips. At their feet was an artful tumble of cashmere scarves and lace-up suede boots. It was madness, she knew that, but it was how it was done. Autumn-winter stock had been in the windows since the July shows, staring out at the palely sweating tourists. There were people who bought the stuff, too, in among the bargain hunters who wanted only to know where the sale rail was. For the first time since she had started on the shop floor in 1969, Luisa wondered about the business she was in. It had never looked so much like foolishness to her, and perhaps she was getting too old for it.
Giuli hadn’t answered her phone when Luisa had called, perhaps an hour back. Giuli didn’t want to talk about it, whatever it was. She knew she shouldn’t, but she’d called the Centre, knowing Giuli was on duty this morning.
‘Called in sick,’ the woman who answered the phone had said, her voice expressing at once indifference and cynicism. Luisa had thanked her politely, rung off, called Giuli again.
Giuli might be throwing up out of morning sickness, or lying in the dark unable to get out of bed with the old, old trouble. She wished she’d just got a look at this Enzo, to know whether he was worth it or not. To know whether they could rely on him to get Giuli out of this, one way or the other.
She tried dosing her eyes and thinking, for the hundredth time, of that apartment to the south of the city. Her touchstone, in the August sun: the long balcony, the view of hills, the wide, spacious rooms under their pall of dust and rubble. One day, she repeated silently like a mantra. One day. We could buy a new bed; they say you need one every fifteen years. Her kitchen table in that bright space.
At the cash desk, Giusy sighed and shook out her paper with a crack and Luisa opened her eyes again; the spell was too weak.
Beppe from menswear was standing on the stairs, arms folded. ‘What’s the point?’ he said, bad-tempered under his carefully maintained crew-cut and trimmed sideburns, wasted on an empty shop and two middle-aged women. Fond though he was of them. ‘The place is dead. Who’s going to come out, in this weather?’
‘Look,’ said Luisa, calculating, ‘we don’t all have to be here. We can rotate. Coffee break, yes?’
Thinking, fifteen minutes, down to Giuli’s flat in the Via della Chiesa, bang on the door till she has to let me in. She looked around for her jacket — she’d left it down in the stock room. But Giusy was already out from behind her till, laying down her paper, reaching for her bag.
‘Thought you’d never ask,’ she said, her heavy-lined eyes already looking past Luisa to the street. ‘I’m desperate for a coffee. Bit of a late one last night.’
Giusy and her husband had no children, never wanted them, or not enough. They liked going out, instead: tango classes, dinner dances, clubbing, though sometimes Luisa did wonder if it wasn’t taking its toll. Giusy was getting old, just like the rest of them.
Beppe rolled his eyes. ‘Just you and me then, Lu,’ he said, taking in her expression with an amusement Luisa felt unable to share.