‘Don’t be too long,’ she said shortly to Giusy’s retreating back. The door swung shut after her, letting in a gust of wind that was surprisingly cool, drawn down from some new weather system circling the city.
Luisa shivered and out of instinct moved behind the unprotected till. Always keep the cash desk manned.
‘You all right?’ said Beppe, but Luisa didn’t answer. She was looking down, at the newspaper. ‘Lu?’
She stared at the photograph: estate agent slain, it said. She looked up at Beppe.
‘Oh, yeah,’ he said curiously. ‘Nasty one, that. Nothing to do with — with your Sandro, though, is it?’
Luisa stared back at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly.
‘Nasty one,’ repeated Beppe, who for all his tailored jackets, sleeves pushed up just so, for all his nice aftershave and knife-sharp sideburns, still kept up with the boys he’d run with as a wild teenager, boys from the grimier end of Sesto in the industrial flatlands. ‘I heard it was a hit.’ Modified his language. ‘I mean, someone had him killed. He’d got mixed up in something nasty.’
‘Had him killed,’ she repeated dully. ‘He’s the man who showed us the flat.’
But Beppe wasn’t looking at her any more, his sideburns turned towards the window.
‘Is this a customer?’ he said.
The figure peering through the glass door with her little claw of a hand reaching to push it open was both familiar and unfamiliar. In a faded green gabardine coat perhaps thirty-five years old, shrunken with age, she was of a type, the old women who couldn’t quite believe Frollini wasn’t the old-fashioned haberdashers it had been in 1952, with wooden cabinets and hand-finished cashmere and stacks of lace-trimmed nighties. She was someone’s mother or grandmother, come to give them grief on an already dismal day. At the till Luisa shaded her eyes to get a better look.
Good God, she thought, stepping around the till, just as her phone began to ring in her bag. It’s old what’s her name, Capponi. Serafina Capponi. From the Loggiata.
Hastily she gestured to Beppe to let her in, and with weary resignation he leaned down to pull the door towards him. In the moment that he stood between her and the old woman, Luisa snatched up her phone, gripped suddenly with another of those moments of panic that had been dogging her all morning: Giuli, said the screen. It was Giuli.
‘Darling,’ she whispered briefly into the mouthpiece, ‘look, it’s difficult.’
The signal was terrible, and Giuli was talking fast. Something about Anna.
‘I’m in the shop,’ she spoke through Giuli’s fractured monologue, ‘got a customer. Are you all right?’
Then suddenly, as the old lady approached Luisa, who was smiling apologetically and nodding and holding up a finger to ask her to wait for just one minute, the voice on the mobile was clear.
‘Anna’s gone walkabout, I’m worried about her. She could be — the baby could have started, and she’s gone to meet Josef.’
Luisa looked from the phone to Serafina Capponi trying to establish some connection, concentrating at the same time on the fact that at least Giuli sounded all right. Alive: herself. On the case, as the girl would say.
‘I’ll call you back,’ said Luisa, a snap decision.
There was something about Capponi’s ancient chimpanzee face, dark eyes staring up at Luisa from under the headscarf, over the gabardine buttoned to the chin. Beppe was looking, bewildered, from Luisa to the new arrival, and back. Then he stepped away, retreating to the haven of menswear up the polished iroko stairs.
‘All right,’ said Giuli, taken aback, and Luisa, like a mother, registered and approved the beginnings of sullenness already checked.
‘Five minutes,’ Luisa said. Giuli hung up first. Luisa turned to the old woman who owned the Loggiata.
‘Signora Capponi.’ Slightly inclined her head, waiting for this unexpected customer to speak.
She wasn’t here to ask for woollen vests and trimming ribbon: the brown eyes examined Luisa intently. There was a movement on the stairs, and Beppe was gone: the old woman put a hand to her chin, loosened the knot in her headscarf, just a little. Luisa spread a hand to indicate the small, velvet-covered footstool where customers sat to try on shoes. Serafina Capponi looked at it with hostility, but she sat. She kept her coat on.
‘She was a good girl,’ she said unexpectedly.
‘Anna? Was?’ Luisa felt a tightening under her ribs at the use of the past tense. ‘Where’s Anna, Signora?’
The woman’s mouth tightened.
‘Serafina?’
It was the name her mother would have called her. Luisa remembered her saying, Hard as nails, Serafina Capponi. No children, and it made her hard as nails. Did it do that to me too, wondered Luisa? She didn’t feel hard, though; she felt as soft and helpless as the inside of a sea anemone.
The old woman’s head turned, slowly, she looked at Luisa as if she hadn’t seen her before, and when she spoke her voice was rusty. ‘It’s a long time since I was last in here,’ she said deliberately. ‘I suppose you have forgotten that I was once one of your respected clients?’
Luisa inclined her head. ‘Not at all,’ she said, truthfully.
‘I remember your mother,’ the old woman said.
‘Yes,’ said Luisa, detecting prevarication. ‘Where’s Anna?’
Serafina Capponi shrugged obstinately, drawing her shrunken shoulders up to her neck like an old tortoise. ‘She was a good girl. I had to protect her from that man. It’s not the money.’
‘What money?’
‘Her parents left her their money — well, adoptive parents, of course she had no real parents. She had them, and now she has me.’
Luisa’s head was hurting with the low glare of the light from outside. ‘Do you know where she’s gone?’
‘He must have been after the money. It was my duty to protect her. He worked in that filthy place.’
The mouth turned down, a waterfall of grimy wrinkles. Capponi’s husband would have been one of the Carnevale’s most loyal customers, in its heyday. So what? All Luisa’s dislike of the place had suddenly fallen away; it was nothing more than a shabby little backstreet cinema. There was more at stake than that. ‘He worked for that bitch. That old bitch.’
And then Luisa leaned forward: she didn’t know if it was more than thirty years with Sandro but something had fine-tuned her to notice such things. That note of venom, that new piece of information. He worked for...
‘Who?’ she spoke softly, hardly wanting to alert the woman.
Serafina Capponi’s lip twitched, though Luisa didn’t know if the contempt was for her, or someone else.
‘The old bitch, Margherita Martelli. A dirty business, they tried to hide it, of course they did. Just used her initials for the name of the company, so I believe.’
Luisa stared at her. ‘The edicolaia?’
She was astonished by the sheer, poisonous fluency of the woman who’d sat mumbling at the reception desk in her crumbling, inestimably valuable hotel. Serafina Capponi might be decrepit on the outside, but she’d been all there in the head, all along. It was why you should always treat the elderly with respect, was Luisa’s fleeting thought, though she felt something more ambiguous than respect for the old witch in front of her.
‘Why did you come here, Signora?’ she asked quietly, wanting to separate truth from malice. ‘Why do you come to me, now? Are you worried about Anna?’
Capponi’s chin set, resentful at the directness of the question, and Luisa sensed that like so many of her kind — counting their money, watching their assets decay, fretful over the future and nursing hatreds — Serafina Capponi’s conscience was a dusty, tangled, old spider’s web of contradictions.
‘You came for her, didn’t you? With that husband of yours, that policeman. So he can just find her, if he’s a policeman. That idiot Russian told me she let her go. To him — that place. She must be found, she must be brought back.’