‘The Galleria Massi,’ he said, gesturing across the road. ‘D’you know him? Paolo Massi?’
She snorted. She was strongly built, a small workhorse of a person, with thick dyed blonde hair and a watchful air that Sandro liked. ‘I know him,’ she said. ‘Or at least, I watch him mess about with that place, if that counts. You can get to know someone that way, I suppose.’
‘Don’t like him much?’ said Sandro, and she inspected him more closely.
‘Not much,’ she said. ‘What business is it of yours?’
He gave her the swift outline of an answer, a private investigation, involving a student of Massi’s. She nodded. Gabriella, but he could call her Gabi, she said. With a sigh she removed her key from the shutter, leaving it up, pushed the door to the shop open again, flicked the light switch. ‘Not as if I’ve got anything else to do,’ she said. ‘After you.’
From here you could see more of the dim interior over the road, he noticed; far down at the back of a shop some kind of security light was on.
‘I only asked him to put some flyers in the gallery,’ Gabi said indignantly, ‘and said I’d reciprocate, and he acted like I was some kind of street trash with my hand out.’
‘Is he there every day?’ She tossed her head. ‘When it suits him. He runs a school too, doesn’t he? He comes down here to play at being a bigshot, or when he has some student show to put up, like last week.’ She peered through the glass. ‘At least, I think that’s what it was; this one must be pretty special. A lot of to-ing and fro-ing all week.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘God knows where he stores all that crap, when it doesn’t sell. Probably takes it to the dump.’
As she spoke they were standing at her desk – like Massi’s, it was stationed at the front of the shop, just inside the door.
‘You like to get a good view of the street?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Who wants to hide away at the back? And it deters shoplifters. Even he likes to look into the street.’ She nodded over the road.
‘Ever been inside his shop?’ Sandro asked.
‘You mean gallery,’ she corrected him, curling her lip. ‘I’m a shopkeeper, he’s a – a patron of the arts.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Just the once, asking that favour; he made it clear he wouldn’t welcome another visit. I thought it was full of rubbish, modern stuff, student exhibitions, hardly worth the storage space. I’d like to know how he makes a living.’ She tapped the side of her nose.
‘Got any ideas?’ It occurred to him that Gabi might be the woman who sold him out to the Guardia; never mind discarded lover, more like retail envy. In this day and age, it was money over sex, every time.
She was talking angrily, staring across the road. ‘Well, the nice shiny SUVs with German plates don’t go away with pigs’ heads in formaldehyde and student artwork, do they? They get their stuff out of the back room in beautiful hand-made portfolios.’
Sandro took a step nearer to the window, the germ of something taking shape in his mind. What had Antonella Scarpa said they sold? Renaissance drawings, that kind of thing?
‘Tuesday,’ he said with an effort, trying to tie this thing together, to get back to facts. ‘Massi says his wife came down, to have lunch with him. Could that be right?’
‘Wife?’ Gabi snorted again. ‘Which one?’ Sandro started back at that, and saw her sourly mischievous expression.
‘Only joking,’ said Gabi. ‘She’s not his wife, is she? The bossy little Sardinian woman, the Sarda with the short black hair. Not his wife, even if she acts like it.’ Antonella Scarpa, thought Sandro. Gabi went on. ‘She’s down here often enough, that one. If I was his wife I’d – well, I wouldn’t like to be his wife, put it that way.’
‘So she – the real wife, I mean – you’re saying she wasn’t here on Tuesday?’
‘Actually,’ said Gabi, wrinkling her brow, ‘Tuesday? I’m not open Mondays so, yes, I came in Tuesday, All Saints or not. Funny thing is, I think you could be right, she was here Tuesday, old number one wife.’ She unfolded her arms, her face relaxed as she pondered. She laughed. ‘I remember now, because it looked like she’d come down to take over from number two wife.’
Antonella Scarpa had been here for a couple of hours in the morning, Sandro remembered him saying that. Massi. Hiding behind his women.
Gabi seated herself at the small desk, as though re-enacting her working day; set her chin in both hands and stared through her rain-spattered window across the grey street.
Sandro found himself holding his breath, although he wasn’t quite sure why; the stocky little woman was so intent, suddenly.
‘He arrived first,’ she began, slowly. ‘Bright and early, for him, I remember wondering if today was the day, only the student show’s always on a Saturday. He had a coffee in a take-away cup, let himself in. He was. . .’ she frowned. ‘Let me think, he had something with him, more than the usual – he often has a document case or such like. Tuesday he had – what was it? He was having difficulty with the door, what with the takeaway cup, carrying it all. More like a weekend bag type of thing, fancy designer one. He went straight in the back, and left it there.’
Sandro followed her gaze, fixing on the glow of the security light visible at the back of the gallery. Once his eyes adjusted, he could see that it illuminated a wall of storage, and a door out to the back.
‘Then he came back to his desk, sat right down, didn’t really move.’ She smiled to herself. ‘Sometimes I just stare at him, waiting for him to give in and meet my eye, but it’s like I don’t exist, you know? He was on the phone a bit, then did some paperwork.’
‘And Antonella Scarpa? His assistant? When did she arrive on the scene?’
There had been something about Antonella, thought Sandro, hadn’t there? Tougher than him, by a long way. A worker, tenacious, prickly. How did she feel about being number two wife? Number three, maybe, after Veronica Hutton.
Pursing her lips, Gabi pronounced, ‘She turned up, oh, must have been ten? I’d nipped down the road for a coffee myself around then, and she was arriving just as I was letting myself back in.’
‘Was that the only time you left the shop?’ he asked.
Gabi looked at him, affronted. ‘It was,’ she said with dignity. ‘I bring myself a sandwich, generally. No such thing as a lunch break, these days.’
‘And when the wife arrived?’
She frowned again, concentrating hard. ‘An hour or so later? Eleven, eleven-thirty sort of time?’
‘A bit early for lunch,’ mused Sandro, half to himself. And a bit of a coincidence, anyway, if the wife hardly ever went down there, for her to turn up just out of the blue.
‘Lunch? I didn’t see much sign of lunch,’ said Gabi, chin still in her hands. ‘Not then, anyway, too early for lunch.’ She frowned. ‘I think she went out a bit later, when I was eating my own lunch, half one or so. First off, though, she saw number two wife off the premises pretty quick, literally took her place, rolled up her sleeves and got down to messing about with the pictures, like she was his assistant now. Fireworks, I’d say. Surprised to see her wasn’t in it.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Sandro, carefully.
Gabi laughed to herself meanly. ‘Whatever they were saying to each other, between the three of them, they scared off the only customer I’ve seen put a head around that door in months, poor thing ran off like a scalded cat.’
‘And Scarpa left then? The Sardinian woman? At around –’ he tried to sound casual – ‘eleven-thirty?’
‘She did. Around then, yes. Although I had a customer myself at that point. It was a good day, Tuesday, the sun brings ’em out, you know.’ At which they both gazed into the street, the sun a distant memory. A car drew up slowly on to the kerb opposite, two figures seated in the front.
‘So you weren’t looking over the road?’
‘Oh, yes, I kept an eye,’ said Gabi. ‘I was interested, by then, you know? There’s days and days go by, sitting here, and they don’t often put on that kind
of a show. Half the time the place is closed.’
‘Thing is,’ said Sandro, aware that this was the six-million-dollar question, ‘Massi says he was there all day. Says his wife can vouch for that, she was there all day with him.’
Gabi grimaced. ‘Well,’ she said reluctantly, ‘I got to say, he really was there the whole day, I can see him, you see, at that desk. Though they left a bit early, around four. I saw them locking up, the full works, shutters down. You’d think they had a couple of Leonardos in there instead of some student sketches.’
‘And he couldn’t have, say, slipped out for half an hour, while you were serving?’
This was getting too far-fetched, wasn’t it? So it was no surprise when Gabi shook her head. ‘Well, no,’ she said with regret. ‘Sorry, caro. He was sitting at that desk like she’d glued him down; she was out the back somewhere, she didn’t reappear for a while, then when she did she went off in the car and came back with a sandwich bag, and he was there the whole time. He didn’t even go out into the yard for a smoke; I’ve seen him do that, when he’s under pressure. A couple of minutes? Well, possibly. But not half an hour, not even ten minutes. Nope.’
Across the road the couple climbed out of the car; they’d been sitting there like they were having a lover’s tiff, but then Sandro saw that they weren’t a couple but Paolo Massi and Antonella Scarpa.
Gabi stood up, and folded her arms back across her chest.
‘Looks like number two wife’s back in charge, hey,’ she said.
The Via dei Bardi, where Fiamma DiTommaso supposedly lived at number twelve and which was usually the most tomblike of streets with its high stone walls and deep gloom, found itself in noisy chaos. Cars were backed up in the rain and people smoking angrily on the pavements.
The two women edged along the narrow thoroughfare under the gardens of the Costa Scarpuccia, which were banked up and held in place by an ancient and bulging wall.
‘They’re closing the bridges,’ said Giulietta, helpfully, to a man standing under the dripping foliage, as they skirted him. He scowled, more at the world, thought Luisa, than at Giuli. The world’s not so bad, she wanted to say, even the rain on her face seemed a kind of blessing, even the chaos and the flooding were better than nothing.
They trudged on towards their goal. Most people who lived on this street were very wealthy indeed and the facades were well maintained, but there were pockets of poverty and dereliction. Lead-blackened plaster, cheap and shabby windows, disintegrating stonework. They were everywhere in the city, rent-controlled buildings where the landlords were trying to starve their stubborn, ancient tenants out by refusing to carry out repairs or modernize the properties. Sometimes they held whole families of immigrant workers, revealed only in summer when their ground-floor shutters would be thrown open in the gasping heat to expose a wall full of bunk beds, like a termite mound exposed.
Fiamma DiTommaso’s place, unsurprisingly, was one of these. It was at the foot of the Costa Scarpuccia, which made sense; the wild triangle of garden supported by its crumbling wall was home, Luisa knew, to another colony of cats; you couldn’t walk up the Costa Scarpuccia without tripping over a dish encrusted with rotting food.
It wasn’t that Luisa didn’t like cats, she told herself. She had nothing against them, even if they did make her sneeze; she could see that a nice well-fed animal curled up on an old lady’s balcony could be a source of comfort in old age or widowhood. But en masse, the itinerant packs of half-wild ones, slipping through the shadows of the Boboli, shying from human contact, all shades of camouflage, grey and tabby and tortoiseshell? Downright spooky, and unhygienic to boot.
But, then, she realized, even before Fiamma DiTommaso finally allowed them entry to her own den, there was something half-feral about the woman herself.
They rang the doorbell, and predictably enough there was no answer. They stood in silence, watching the facade; on the first floor the shutters were so warped that they curled outwards from the wall like a stale sandwich. There was someone behind them, watching.
‘Please, Signora DiTommaso,’ Luisa called. ‘It’s either talk to us, or to the police, isn’t it? Give us a chance?’ Behind her on the pavement a woman in her car, stuck with engine idling, put her head out of the driver window and gave them a curious look. Behind the shutters there was a shifting of light and then, abruptly, the front door opened.
‘Inside,’ hissed Fiamma DiTommaso. Even in the hallway there was the overpowering reek of cat. Luisa sneezed.
It was two rooms on the first floor, one leading off another. There was a sink at the back beside an ancient electric cooker, and a crude cupboard in one corner that must, Luisa deduced, constitute Fiamma DiTommaso’s facilities. No cats were actually in evidence, although the blanket that had been thrown over a small sofa was thick with silvered hairs.
Fiamma DiTommaso was wearing thick-soled sandals, despite the season, from which thin, bare, sun-spattered legs protruded, voluminous, gathered cotton trousers, and a faded sweatshirt. A thin scarf was wound around her head. DiTommaso was a name as old as Massi or Badigliani but this woman had taken a decidedly different route in life – no lipstick, no handbag to match the shoes: no greed. Despite a distaste born of the decades she had spent striving for elegance, to her surprise Luisa found herself admiring the woman.
It was impossible to say how old Fiamma DiTommaso was. Perhaps fifty, perhaps sixty; not far off Luisa’s own age.
‘Sit down,’ she said, and gestured towards the hairy sofa. Luisa sat, and even before her behind came into contact with the blanket she could feel her nose and throat swell in response to the allergens.
Gingerly Giulietta sat down beside her; if anything she seemed more uneasy than Luisa. Looking around the sparse, dismal flat – one of the walls was in fact bare of plaster and showed exposed brick – Luisa realized that it probably resembled more or less every miserable, condemned squat and prostitute’s walk-up in which Giuli had spent her formative years. There were small touches of home – a framed photograph over the sink, a can of coffee, a small Buddha in front of a cheap mirror.
Fiamma DiTommaso had her arms folded tightly across her grey-sweatshirted chest; she was thin, under all that voluminous cotton, Luisa saw. ‘Just ask what you want to ask,’ she said, her voice rusty, as if she didn’t use it much.
The flat was dark, the shutters closed. A single lamp was lit, with a dim bulb, beside the sofa. Luisa kept her voice gentle.
‘It’s about the girl,’ she said, surprising herself by beginning that way, but it was true, wasn’t it? ‘The girl you saw, the girl who threw her bag away.’
‘Who says I saw her?’
‘When did you find the bag, Fiamma?’ asked Luisa.
‘Evening time,’ said Fiamma DiTommaso, a little too quickly. ‘Handed it straight in, didn’t I? Took it to the pigs at the Carabiniere station, though I got no thanks for it.’
Pigs; the woman was an old radical, that was it. ‘How did you find it?’ Luisa asked, patiently.
‘Just lying there,’ she said stubbornly.
‘It must have been dark,’ said Luisa.
‘Closes at four,’ Giulietta butted in, ‘the park. Not usually there that late, are you?’ Luisa looked at her, looked back at DiTommaso; there were similarities, weren’t there? For a second it seemed to Luisa that DiTommaso might be Giuli’s mother, if Giuli’s mother weren’t dead. She let Giuli go on. Good cop, bad cop, was that the phrase?
‘You found it at midday, didn’t you?’ said Giulietta, as calm as if she’d thought this all out beforehand. Perhaps she had. ‘You took it home, thinking you might take the money, because you’re not exactly loaded, are you? And it wasn’t as if you’d stolen it. Finders keepers.’
DiTommaso stared back at her sullenly, and said nothing.
‘What made you bring it back?’ said Luisa gently. ‘It’s all right, we’re not the police, are we? Not going to tell them, either, if we can help it. But the girl – the girl’s gone miss
ing. Did you know that? We don’t know if she’s alive or dead.’ There was a silence. ‘What made you bring it back? Did you start to think? Was there something you saw, or heard?’
‘You could help us find her,’ said Giulietta. ‘You could save her.’
‘I didn’t see anything,’ said DiTommaso, at last. ‘I only heard, I heard them shouting.’ Her jaw set, mulish, like a child’s. ‘I didn’t take the money, did I? I brought it all back. I was going to tell ’em, the pigs, the bloody police, only they treated me like – like I was dirty.’
Luisa nodded; she felt ashamed. ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘You’re not dirty. You can tell me, can’t you?’
For a moment she didn’t know which way it was going to go, but then DiTommaso sank down on to the sofa and made a soft clucking noise. From nowhere a huge tomcat appeared and leapt silently on to her knee. ‘All right,’ she said roughly. ‘I’ll tell you.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Sandro Didn’t Know What he was going to say until he said it, although at least he had the instinct to say nothing at all until they’d let him through the door.
Massi had clearly brought Antonella Scarpa along as back-up; typical, Sandro thought, as they busied themselves nervously around the lock. Hiding behind a woman. The security shutter was a wire mesh, he noticed; was this because they intended the place to be a showroom, a kind of advertisement? No point in hiding the wares from the public.
Massi was complaining about the traffic; Sandro kept the information that the bridges were going to be closed to himself. He had turned up, at least, the great Direttore; Sandro’s ineradicable instinct for fear told him the man was very nervous: what had changed? Sandro had forced him out of his comfort zone, was that it? But this was his gallery.
‘It’s kind of you,’ was all Sandro said. ‘I don’t think this will take long.’ When he had made this arrangement, he marvelled, he had had no idea, none at all. But now he was here, now he could smell the air in this place, he knew he was on to something.
The Drowning River Page 28
