Dead Season

by Christobel Kent

  He’d handed the mobile back to her. ‘Have you got anything more – detailed?’ He had spoken as casually as he could manage.

  ‘No,’ she’d said, her face falling. ‘He um – ah, he didn’t like – well.’ Then recovering, the smile back: ‘I’m sure he would have given me a photo if I’d asked.’

  ‘I’m sure he would.’

  They’d looked at each other in silence a moment then; she’d shifted in her chair in some passing discomfort and despite himself Sandro had looked down, at the great round of her belly under the thin cotton. It was too much for her, he’d felt briefly: too big, too portentous, it immobilized her.

  And then he’d seen it move under the fabric: like the quick shadow of something, like a shoal of fish under water. It broke the perfect round of stretched flesh with a limb, the knotted curve of a spine; and, with hands suddenly gripping the chair’s seat on either side of her, Anna Niescu had looked down too and then up at him, half shy, half delighted.

  Now, in the shadow of the brooding statue of Dante outside Santa Croce, Sandro scanned the wide piazza for his old friend. The poet gazed with eyes so darkened now by time and pollution so that they became hooded and sinister, and the statue, the chronicler of the afterlife, more than ever a figure of death. A memory came back to him: of being a boy in the city in the days when this piazza – all the city’s piazzas – had been emptier, the occasional car innocently traversing them, when cars were a marvel and not a curse, and tourists had moved through the streets, awestruck and respectful, carefully consulting their red guide books. A memory of running in a gang of boys wheeling like a flock of birds around the city’s monuments, trying to dodge the great poet’s stern gaze as they headed past him for the market of San Ambrogio.

  Anna Niescu, alone, would bring that child not into the world of his childhood but into this new world, where the hawkers and pimps and drug dealers – he could see them even now – stood back in the shadows of palace buttresses around the lovely piazza. She would love the child, that at least was certain, but would it be enough?

  ‘Sandro!’

  The hand clapped his shoulder, and the face into which he turned to look was beaming from ear to ear. Sandro was surprised by the gratitude he felt at the sight of his old friend’s face, and the happiness he saw there. Pietro Cavallaro, his old friend, his former partner.

  It had been too long: they both agreed on that.

  ‘Not here,’ Sandro said, taking a look around the big bleached piazza, the gaudy frontages of the cheap leather shops and the souvenir sellers stupefied by the heat.

  They ended up in a modest bar in the Piazza San Ambrogio that was still open because the market stayed open through the summer, the butchers and salumifici taking it in turns to get away. The place was quiet and old-fashioned, just what Sandro wanted. A bar of speckled mica, an elderly cold cabinet, a listless overhead fan. The middle-aged barman mopped his neck resignedly with a tea towel and moved with extreme slowness to pour them each a birra media. The beer at least was nice and cold.

  Pietro should have been away on holiday by now. ‘A bit of a crisis with personnel,’ he said, uncomplaining. ‘This flu.’

  Oh, yes, the flu, thought Sandro: interesting how someone like Pietro never gets the flu. Flu in August? Bird flu, swine flu – the world really was going crazy: the hysteria and illogic greeting its every new mutated virus a gift to the new breed of freeloader, his eye on the main chance. I think it might be this new flu, boss. Don’t want to risk my comrades by coming into work, don’t want an epidemic.

  ‘Maybe I’ll get away by the weekend,’ said Pietro, rapping the table with his knuckles, for luck. ‘If it’s quiet.’

  Sandro slid the gift across the table by the door where they sat. ‘It’s a what-d’you-call-it,’ he said. ‘One of those music gizmos. Pod, thing.’

  Pietro drew his head back in surprise and admiration. ‘Sandro,’ he said. ‘That’s generous.’

  Sandro smiled faintly. ‘You thought I’d give her an apron, or a – a crystal punchbowl?’

  Pietro laughed with embarrassment. ‘Well,’ he said, and stopped.

  ‘I did my homework,’ said Sandro. ‘Asked Giuli. And Luisa did warn me. Eighteen-year-old girls are different these days, she said.’ Of course, he thought with abrupt despondency, she’s probably got one already, this pod thing.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Pietro, with emphasis.

  Another memory came to Sandro unbidden, of Pietro walking his little chubby toddler in her lace socks into the police station, the girl beaming up at each officer as he passed his hands over her red-gold head, trailing her favourite toy through the corridors. Sixteen, seventeen years ago.

  The last time he’d seen Chiara, walking with her friends in the Cascine, she’d had her hair dyed black and shorter than a boy’s and had been wearing jeans with careful slashes cut across each thigh. When Luisa had been eighteen, thought Sandro, she’d have worn the same clothes as her mother before her, good handmade leather shoes, neat skirts, white blouses. By the time she got to twenty-one they’d been engaged already: walking hand in hand across the Ponte Vecchio and looking at rings. But Chiara had smiled to see him, despite the clothes. He had wanted to get her something nice.

  ‘Well,’ said Sandro, clearing his throat. ‘And maybe I’m not such an old fart as you think I am.’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ said Pietro. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of: I am too. How’s work, anyway? You going to have room for an unpaid helper, when I’m retired?’

  Sandro looked at him sharply and understood that he was joking. Pietro would have plenty to keep him busy on early retirement, otherwise why was he going for it? The wife, the kid, the little holiday house in the mountains. Fishing.

  ‘Work’s fine,’ he said, hearing the dullness of disappointment in his own voice and making an effort to brighten. ‘New client today.’

  By the time he finished telling Pietro about Anna Niescu, both their glasses were drained and sticky and the place was empty.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Pietro, momentarily dejected. ‘That’s not going to be a happy ending, is it?’ Turned the empty glass in his hands. ‘Man lets woman down: not a new story, that one. He’s the bastard, not the poor unborn kid.’ He glanced up at the barman, slumped now on his stool, defeated by the heat. Raised a finger and after a long moment’s consideration the man eased himself off his perch.

  ‘This heat.’ And they shook their heads in unspoken agreement, on any kind of madness licensed by the inhuman temperatures, the boiling nights, the abandonment of the unborn included.

  Pietro tipped his head back. ‘Plenty of men run scared, don’t they? When it dawns on them. The thought of that responsibility.’ He gave Sandro a glance, chewed his lip, knowing that Sandro would have laid down his life for the chance of a child of his own. Sandro just shook his head, almost smiling, and Pietro went on, thoughtfully, ‘Or he could have been married already, leading a double life. Nodded. ‘That happens.’

  ‘Yes’, Sandro said frowning. Did that fit? Maybe. She’d seen his apartment only once, she said. Once.

  ‘And what about the bank? That thing about him working in the bank?’

  Pietro was still puzzling away at it with that way he had; it was like watching him disentangle his wife’s jewellery, no rush, patience itself, until finally with quiet satisfaction he would hold the unknotted chain up to the light. Sandro had to resist a rush of warm feeling: it would be so easy just to settle back in with Pietro, to pretend they were still partners. But that part of his life was over. Pietro was a state policeman, and Sandro would never put his old friend in a compromising situation.

  ‘The Banca di Toscana Provinciale,’ he said with a sigh. ‘The branch by the station, so he’s hardly a big wheel.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Pietro. ‘Didn’t some big bank try to buy it up last year?’

  Sandro shrugged; he was having trouble trying to believe any of Anna Niescu’s fiancé’s story, let alone get a handle on the latest devel
opments in the banking crisis.

  He sighed. ‘I’m going to talk to her again tomorrow. At the Loggiata, where she works. There’s more, I’m sure, she – she just couldn’t think straight, she said.’

  She’d been flustered, in the office, poor child. As it had dawned on her that her faith might have been misplaced, that Sandro and Giuli were going down a different path than the one she’d envisioned, where her beloved was in a hospital with memory loss from a car accident, perhaps, and when they found him all would be well. Other women might have been frightened, resentful, angry; she was just so certain that he wouldn’t want to miss it all. The birth, the uncomplicatedly joyful event. She was so sure that he must want to be found.

  Pietro was still musing. ‘Responsible job – doesn’t fit with the guy who takes fright, does it? To run out on all that?’

  Sandro frowned, thinking of the way she’d talked. Telling him about the man who took her for her first prenatal scan and held her hand, the man who came to see her after his day’s work, to bring her cakes. ‘She really loved him,’ he said.

  Pietro shook his head, sad but curious. ‘To think there are still girls like that around. Where does she come from?’

  ‘She was adopted herself,’ said Sandro, gazing out through the window at the shuttered market building. ‘Looks as if she’s got some Roma blood to me. Found abandoned and adopted by an elderly couple, religious by the sound of it; the old man died before she’d left junior school, and mother when Anna was eighteen. She was devoted to them.’

  She’d shown him a dog-eared photograph of the old couple, a pair of contadini from a village up in the Apennines. When they’d died she’d gone to the city to look for a job; someone at her school has suggested it, perhaps out of misplaced kindness, knowing the girl would never be academic.

  ‘I’ve got some savings,’ she’d said, looking up at him. ‘I can pay you.’

  Sandro had just looked at her. ‘Let’s see how we go,’ was all he’d said. Savings: how much could you save living in as a chambermaid at the Loggiata? They probably even deducted her board.

  ‘So, first stop, the bank?’ said Pietro. ‘Or this apartment he’s supposed to be doing up for them, his little family?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sandro, ‘I think, the bank.’

  And something stirred at last in his sluggish, heat-stupefied veins. The need for action, the chance that maybe tomorrow morning there’d be a breath of air, in the early hours. The Banca di Toscana Provinciale, then, first thing. He stood up.

  ‘I hope you do get away,’ he said, anxious suddenly, prey to some foreboding he didn’t want to acknowledge.

  And at the door he turned back. ‘Give Chiara my love,’ he said. ‘Tell her I remember that day you brought her into the station. Tell her I remember that rabbit she brought with her, trailing around, holding it by the ear.’

  And Pietro’s expression – the same combination of affection, respect and bewilderment he’d known for twenty years – followed him out on to the street and stayed with him all the way home to Luisa.

  Who had a surprise waiting for him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ONE ADVANTAGE OF AUGUST, Roxana had to admit, as she urged her little motorino up the Via Senese, between the handsome façades of art-nouveau villas blackened by seventy years of exhaust fumes, was that the traffic was barely non-existent. No rushhour to speak of – even if you still got hassled by the buses; one driver in particular seemed to follow her home every night, serenading her by releasing his brakes with a sharp puff on every bend. Over the houses a ridge of grey-green came into view in the dusk: olive trees, and the beginning of the end of the city.

  It had been a strange day, even for August. As the hours had passed, the absence of one particular customer had faded in significance. There could have been any number of reasons; maybe the heat got too much even for Albanians, sometimes.

  Someone had phoned for the boss, which might not have been out of the ordinary in the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze on a sweltering August Tuesday, but here? The phones hardly rang at the best of times.

  ‘No,’ she’d heard Val say, loitering behind the boss’s desk; had he even had his feet up on it? Pretending to be in charge. A good telephone voice, thoughtful, concerned. ‘No, he’s not here.’ Sauntering out through the door with a smile to Roxana that perhaps he thought was inscrutable, that certainly was ridiculously superior, as if merely answering the boss’s phone was promotion.

  She hadn’t bothered to go out for lunch, and Val, as usual, had taken advantage. Got back at four. The scream of fire sirens again that had seemed to go on all afternoon, people grilling food outside, even in the heat, and getting careless with matches and accelerants.

  And then towards the end of the day there’d been a guy on the pavement outside, idling. White trainers, greased back hair, skinny, hopping from one foot to the other. The police so dozy in the heat the drug dealers could come right out on the streets, was that it?

  If anything, it was hotter than yesterday; as the sky turned luminous over the ridge with the setting sun, Roxana, in her thin jacket with a day’s sweat and grime under it, didn’t know how she was going to stand it. The weather rarely broke before the end of August. Sun, sun, sun, merciless sun. And the tropical thunderheads building over the city to hold the heat in, for another sweltering night.

  The road opened briefly after it joined the Via del Gelsomino, a straight stretch with a row of farmhouses along a ridge to the left, the thickly planted cypresses of the cemetery to the right. The green didn’t last: beyond the cemetery was a long row of petrol stations, luring holidaymakers and commuters.

  Not the prettiest part of Tuscany, that was for sure: the road was generally choked at the end of the day; once, as she hummed past on her motorino, Roxana had seen an overheated car burst into flames, a man running out of it holding a baby. Tonight it was quiet; the heat lay over everything like a blanket. The sun was dipping behind the hills now and the electric-blue sky was streaked with neon pink; funny, thought Roxana, allowing herself a brief moment of delight, how a sunset can be so cheesy in art, but never cheesy in real life.

  The cluster of modest villas that was Galluzzo stood ahead of her. Roxana’s heart dipped and she told herself, not for the first time, that it was no good. She dreaded work and she dreaded getting home again: freedom was this brief moped ride between the two. She could hear Maria Grazia nagging her cheerfully down a telephone line, ‘Something’s got to change, Roxi.’

  It would be fine, she told herself, wheeling the motorino in through the gates and under the house. It is what it is. Pushed open the door and called, ‘Ma?’ And when her mother came slowly through the door from the kitchen, that twisted, rueful smile on her face, the relief behind it probably visible only to Roxana – relief and the lingering trace of a fear that no one might come.

  ‘Hey, Violetta.’ She called her mother by her name as often as she remembered to these days, hoping to establish a grownup relationship, hoping belatedly to bestow on her mother the adulthood she so feared she might lose.

  Kissing her mother on the cheek, Roxana smelled face powder, the faint tang of sweat underneath it. No air-conditioning, of course, in the little old-fashioned villa; Dad hadn’t wanted it. ‘We’re practically in the countryside here,’ he’d say, brooking no argument. ‘I don’t want one of those ugly great boxes whirring away on my lovely terrace.’ The terrace he hadn’t been on in years, which Ma used only to hang out washing, a broom long idle in one corner, old cat-box in the other. A bedraggled plumbago. ‘The fan’s good enough.’

  Dinner was on the table, even though it was barely seven-thirty. Without Roxana’s father Violetta Delfino seemed to have lost track of her days, there was so little to fill them. Only Roxana’s return from the bank marked a fixed point, and the table was laid to hasten her home.

  It was ribollita: delicious, under the right conditions – and Roxana knew Ma had made it because it was her favourite – but the most unsuitable
dish you could imagine in the heat, thick cabbage and beans.

  ‘My favourite,’ she said. ‘Sit down, Ma.’ Her mother hovered uncertainly.

  ‘Someone called, today,’ she said, frowning, anxious. ‘For you.’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Roxana again, fork in hand. ‘I can’t eat until you sit down, cara.’

  It could have been anyone; it was most probably a mobile service provider, wanting to sell her a contract. One conversation with Ma was usually enough to deter cold callers: she’d keep them on the line for hours. Asking advice, what broadband was, whether they thought it might be useful for calling her brother in Argentina. Who had been dead five years, but Ma regularly forgot that, or perhaps didn’t want to sound as alone in the world as she actually was. Once Roxana had caught her talking to a timeshare saleswoman about her daughter who had an important job in a big bank. Because to say an unimportant job in a small bank would have been shameful? Or because she had persuaded herself it wasn’t so?

  ‘Oh, I was so worried I’d forget,’ said Ma, lip trembling.

  Roxana took her hand, stilled it. ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t important, anyway. Did you drink enough water today?’

  Ma had been admitted to hospital for dehydration last summer, just after Dad died. Surprised herself by how urgently she wished him back, Roxana just hadn’t been quite on the case; she had tried to make Ma eat, but she hadn’t thought it was liquids she needed.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ma vaguely.

  Roxana poured her a glass, and spooned some of the ribollita on to her plate. Took a mouthful herself: it was practically cold, which was a blessing. Roxana thought she detected a rogue ingredient; Ma’s recipes had gone off kilter, too, every meal an adventure now. Mentioning it, though, would lead to Ma telling her she had OCD, again.