‘Come in,’ said Luisa.
*
The stocky nurse who’d dressed the five-centimetre laceration on one side of Sandro’s neck where Valentino Sordi had gouged him with manicured fingernails clearly also thought that, at sixty-something, Sandro was too old to be spending his Friday nights like this.
Sitting in Pietro’s garden now with his old friend opposite him, Sandro still didn’t know if he’d have been able to do it without Roxana Delfino’s help: perhaps best not to dwell on that. It had seemed an eternity before she did come to his aid, that much was for sure: the younger man writhing like a snake, smaller than him but furiously energetic and alarmingly strong, Sandro had registered immediately. Also weirdly, maniacally unfocused in his movements, though: not a fighter. Valentino Sordi might have honed his body for leisure but he didn’t know what fighting was, and fortunately for him it turned out that Sandro, for all the weight and slackness and age he felt dragging against him, still did.
Even as Roxana unfroze and flung herself on Sordi’s back, he’d felt it come back to him, that trick of twisting an opponent into submission with the right grip on the wrists and a sudden shift of one’s weight, and as Valentino went down underneath them he’d remembered, on a hot summer’s night just like this, perhaps ten years earlier, bringing down a drug-addicted car thief as he tried to flee into the gardens of some apartment blocks in Sesto Fiorentino, cuffing the boy and rising in triumph to meet Pietro’s eye in the dark.
It hadn’t been Pietro who’d finally arrived, with a feebly wailing siren, at the Carnevale. Sandro hadn’t recognized the uniformed officers of the Polizia dello Stato standing uncertainly in the littered lobby as Sandro sat, sweating and dishevelled and, of course, too old for this, beside the sullenly silent Valentino Sordi, bound at the wrists with a plastic tie and bleeding profusely from a jagged wound just below his eye. He supposed he would have to get used to not recognizing members of the Polizia dello Stato.
And Pietro had appeared, in the end, at the police station, with news of Gulli, and Roxana Delfino’s supposedly helpless elderly mother.
‘Unbelievable,’ his old friend mused now, raising a beer to his lips at the garden table. ‘Two old biddies? Had him cornered in the back yard.’
It had rained again that morning but now, at five in the afternoon, the sky was clear and the temperature in Pietro’s pretty garden, lowered by thirty-six hours of storms, was deliciously cool. Sandro could smell roses.
‘Hardly even need to go to the seaside, if it’s like this,’ Sandro mused. He felt wrung out: all those women. All those women depending on him. But he also felt at peace.
And it turned out that two old ladies — Roxana Delfino’s elderly mother and her even more doddering neighbour — had not needed his help, nor anyone else’s. They had felled Gulli with a rusty spade when they spotted him lurking behind their gardens, then tied him up with washing line, for good measure. Wouldn’t have held him for long, but then Pietro and Matteucci had arrived.
‘Matteucci turned almost human,’ said Pietro reflectively. ‘Couldn’t stop laughing when he saw the little ratbag trussed up in white nylon line. And he switched on the charm for the old dears.’ He let out a sigh. ‘I suppose I can put up with him.’
Pietro’s daughter Chiara came out with a tray of coffee, smiling shyly, set it down and went back into the kitchen, where she and her red-headed mother were still going over Sandro’s case, awestruck. They just couldn’t get over it. Signora Martelli had owned the porn cinema, all these years, sitting there in her news-stand, pronouncing on other people’s sins.
‘Someone has to own those places,’ Sandro had said. ‘It’s not always who you expect.’ And in fact, now that it was gone, he almost felt affection for the Carnevale, symbol of a simpler age, and doomed.
They poured the coffee. No sugar for Sandro, on a health kick now, although, as Luisa might have pointed out, if he was serious he’d leave out the coffee, too.
‘He’d never have got away with it,’ said Pietro. ‘That’s the crazy thing. The Guardia might work in mysterious ways but they would have traced the money in the end, Jesus, it’s their job. Hell, I think even that fat guy, Viola, would have got to the bottom of it, in the end.’
Sandro shrugged. ‘Sure. Valentino’s trouble was that he thought he was smart, smarter than everyone else. Maybe the drugs, too — he was on so much shit, that’s what his friends are saying now. Getting more and more obnoxious, thought he could do anything, even hauling Claudio Brunello’s body across town in the middle of the night, strapped to his back on a motorbike.’ Shook his head. ‘I’m astonished he even got as far as the African market without someone seeing him, or flipping the bike.’
‘Explains the lesions on poor Brunello’s leg, though, doesn’t it? Burn from the bike’s exhaust. And the rope marks on the wrists.’
‘Then he went and sold the bike, thinking that would cover his tracks.’ Pietro laughed shortly. ‘Amateur stuff. Gulli, see, he’s a professional, knows the odds, knows the tricks, but young Valentino?’ The smile that crept across Pietro’s face was wry. ‘Uh-huh.’
Sandro was still thinking. ‘Of course, you’re right, he’d have been caught out, the movement of the cash would have been traced in the end, and for my money Viola would have got there before the Guardia. He’s a smart guy. That wasn’t my case, though, was it? I had to find Josef. And Valentino could easily have got to him before me. Almost did.’
The coffee was good. The smell of coffee, and roses after the rain, and a view of the hills up to Fiesole. There was nothing more you could want, thought Sandro. He yawned.
‘Luisa OK?’ Pietro shook his head at the thought. ‘And Giuli. Mamma mia. Turns out she’s cool under pressure, that girl. Delivering a baby in a thunderstorm?’
‘She says she just caught it,’ said Sandro. ‘Right place at the right time.’
‘Well,’ said Pietro, ‘that’s a skill in itself, isn’t it? Not too bad at that yourself. Matteucci, now, that’s a different matter.’
And he looked sidelong at his old friend, and together they laughed.
*
Roxana and Maria Grazia sat on the porch. Ma and Carlotta were next door, thick as thieves, fussing over the handyman, who’d made a reappearance in the wake of all the drama.
‘All they could go on about was the mess,’ said Roxana, smiling. ‘So cross, they were, about having to use the washing line, and the stupid boy falling into one of Carlotta’s big geraniums, and another bit of the fence had gone. So they got him back. The handyman.’
Maria Grazia sat up to get a better look into next-door’s garden. ‘I think they’ve got an ulterior motive,’ she said. ‘He’s quite good-looking, isn’t he?’
Roxana laughed. ‘A bit young for them,’ she said.
Maria Grazia shoved her good-naturedly. ‘Not them, you idiot.’ Roxana didn’t even blush.
‘You lot,’ she said. ‘You never stop.’ She felt as though she was on a different plane altogether. Work, her single status, Ma: none of it a problem any more.
Other priorities: she was working through them. Disposing of them: conscientious, methodical, Roxana had that talent at least. The bit she couldn’t stop rerunning in her head had been not being able to move: watching Sandro Cellini and Valentino struggle as if in slow motion at the centre of the room. It had seemed like an hour, but had probably been thirty seconds, and then she’d flung herself on the thrashing monstrous shape they made together, not knowing which one of them she was clawing at.
He’d collapsed under them quite suddenly in the end, like a child, as though, as with everything in his privileged life so far, Valentino Sordi simply couldn’t be bothered. Sandro Cellini had told her afterwards, still breathing heavily with the effort, that it was a chemical thing: addicts fight like that — like animals with a limitless supply of energy, then suddenly the fuel runs out and they stop dead.