Dead Season

by Christobel Kent

  *

  The internet café off the wide expanse of the Piazza dell’Carmine was where they usually met, not a glamorous place but it suited Giuli fine. It was one of the things she liked about Enzo, that he didn’t notice his surroundings, really. He would sit across the small table and just look at her while he talked, as if nothing else was there. Focused, that was Enzo.

  He wasn’t late – Enzo was never late. Giuli was early, because she simply felt like being alone a bit. Only ten minutes early, that would be plenty.

  Anna Niescu, she had learned, was tougher than she looked. After Sandro had gone, she had stayed, silent, pressed against Giuli on the wide loggia, for ten minutes at least, and Giuli had felt how still she was, like an animal hiding from a predator, conserving her strength. And then, as though something had come to a conclusion, she had quite abruptly stood up.

  Giuli had followed her, not daring to speak because anything might be the wrong thing to say. In the big, old-fashioned hotel kitchen – a dresser, a wide iron range, a big marble-topped table – she had followed helplessly as Anna wiped surfaces and put bread in a cloth bag, cheese in the fridge. Eventually Giuli had been allowed to put away the scoured pans waiting on the draining board and only because she had not been able to watch as Anna staggered under their weight and had physically removed them from her.

  Then at eight Anna had said, ‘I go to bed now.’ As though she was still living out in the countryside with her contadini, and dusk was bedtime.

  Giuli had followed her there, too, without being asked. Her room was at the end of a corridor of guests’ rooms, and might have been mistaken for a cupboard, its door was so narrow; Giuli had to blink to believe that Anna had managed to slip through it herself. It had one small high window, a single bed, a wardrobe and a wooden chair. Looking at the single bed, Giuli had wondered – not for the first time since she’d met Anna Niescu, and uncomfortably – how she had conceived, this child with her little child’s bed. And not so much how – because, she could almost hear Sandro saying wryly, it would be in the usual way – but where.

  Anna had turned and seen her in the doorway behind her, but hadn’t told her to go. She had taken something from under her pillow and gone out, through another door; there had been the brief sound of running water, and cautious, uncertain movements, as though once finding herself alone she had lost all sense of where she was. Giuli had sat down on the wooden chair and waited until Anna came back, in a cotton nightdress with faded flowers, a market-stall thing meant for a woman three times her age that made her look even younger. Without meeting Giuli’s eye, she had got into bed.

  For a long time neither of them had said anything. Moonlight had come through the long window and fallen on the old tile of the floor, turning the deep waxed red to black. Anna had lain quite still, curled on her side. It had taken her breathing a long time to slow, while Giuli listened. Trying not to think of what would be going through Anna’s mind. And then, just as Giuli had thought sleep was overtaking the girl, she had given an awful start. Struggled up on one elbow, as desperately as if she had been drowning, pleading in incoherent half sentences. No, no, she had been saying. No, no, don’t go, don’t.

  Putting out a hand to quiet her, Giuli had said, softly, ‘Anna, shh. Anna.’

  Anna had groped blindly for the hand and Giuli had seen from her face, blank in the moonlight, that she had not quite been awake. She’d wanted to say, it’s all right, but it would have been a lie. So she had said, ‘It’s Giuli. I’m here.’

  ‘Giuli,’ Anna had repeated, first wonderingly, then with dull realization. She had lowered herself back on to the pillow, but held on to Giuli’s hand.

  ‘You’ve got your baby,’ Giuli had said. ‘Think of the baby.’

  On her side and staring into the darkness Anna had moved her free hand down, across her belly, hesitantly, as though it was new to her, this weight she had been carrying around for eight months.

  She had spoken, quietly. ‘He said the nursery would be ready in time.’

  Giuli had seen that the girl’s eyes were open, and that something gleamed on her cheek. Love, she’d thought; Sandro had been right all along. What was I doing, believing in love? And rage had bubbled inside her, at Anna’s man and his lying.

  ‘He wouldn’t have killed himself.’ Anna’s voice had not been defensive, or angry, but calm. ‘I know he wouldn’t. You didn’t know him, none of you did. He was – like a boy, when he heard about the baby. He was so happy.’

  Giuli had held still, keeping back her anger.

  ‘Where was it?’ she had asked softly. ‘The apartment? The – the nursery?’

  By way of distraction but also because it had niggled at her. Was this bank manager a man so wealthy he could set up another home? Would it be a mistress’s penthouse, or would he park Anna, too naive to know any better, in a tenth-floor monolocale overlooking a trailer park? She’d said, like a boy; boy wasn’t a bank manager. And all this talk of a pay rise coming his way? He was into something dodgy, one way or the other.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ Anna had said, her voice drifting. ‘I’ll take you there.’

  ‘You sleep,’ Giuli had said.

  ‘You could see the hills,’ Anna had murmured. ‘A beautiful view. Needed some work, he was going to do the work, just to make the nursery, that was all it needed. The bathroom had marble tiles and the bed had a blue cover. He couldn’t find the light switch.’

  She’d turned a little in the bed, and her grip on Giuli’s hand had loosened.

  Giuli had wondered if it was wrong to let her go to sleep, dreaming of this house in the hills that would never be. ‘Yes,’ she had said.

  ‘You can go now,’ Anna had said, faraway now. ‘You can go, and I’ll take you there in the morning. I remember the way.’ Her eyes had drooped. ‘I remember the way.’

  The reception desk had been unattended as Giuli had passed on her way out; she’d found the Russian on the terrace under the loggia, smoking. Her eyes were blue as ice under black eyelashes, and she’d still looked angry.

  ‘I’ll come back in the morning for her,’ Giuli had said.

  She’d fished in her pockets for one of Sandro’s cards; he’d put her mobile number on it when they had them reprinted at the beginning of the year. She’d held it out, and the Russian had taken it, in the same hand as the cigarette, held it disdainfully between thumb and little finger. She hadn’t looked at it.

  ‘Call either one of us, if she – well, if she needs us. If she wakes in the night, or anything.’

  The Russian had looked at Giuli levelly. ‘My name is Dasha,’ she had said. ‘I don’t have card.’

  Despite herself, Giuli had smiled; Dasha hadn’t quite smiled back, but almost.

  At the rickety lift in the corner of the room Giuli had turned. ‘Did you meet him?’

  ‘Him?’ Still standing in the door to the loggia, Dasha had leaned back to stub out the cigarette on one of the terrace’s ashtrays.

  ‘The baby’s father.’ Giuli had watched her. ‘I mean – he’s real?’ Stupid thing to say. What was this, the immaculate conception? But there was something unreal here.

  ‘Real?’ The Russian had looked almost amused. ‘I suppose. Not meet him, no. Not an introduction. I see him in the street with her once or twice. Not ghost, if that is what you mean.’ And she let out a surprising cackle. ‘Not Holy Ghost.’

  ‘He didn’t mind being seen?’ Giuli had turned right around to face the girl, and she’d been able to hear the lift cranking wheezily up behind her. Dasha had shrugged.

  ‘Not so much, no. On Piazzale Michelangelo, out in open, sure. They were not hiding.’

  There had been something in her eyes, though: something. She had shifted, looked away. Hiding something.

  The internet café had fierce air-con, and now Giuli shivered, remembering. There was something not right about this, the married bank manager holding hands with his pregnant mistress on the Piazzale Michelangelo, among the thronging tou
rists. Was that it? Tourists were strangers, here today, gone tomorrow. Or because his wife was safely stowed at the seaside, along with most of his colleagues, no one to catch them? She got out her phone and texted Sandro, quickly. Shd talk 2 Russian at hotel?

  But the case was closed, wasn’t it? Give or take a few loose ends.

  Enzo would be here soon, and Giuli was glad. She was hungry, all over again.

  In the café’s lurid red and green evening lighting, heads bowed intently over computer screens, a couple in a corner, she looked up and there he was, at the door, her sweetheart. She watched his face light up as he saw her; she checked her watch. Ten o’clock, bang on.

  *

  In her bedroom, Roxana lay very still and listened. This was the room she had slept in for her entire childhood – and now, it felt, most of her adult life too. She should feel safe here, if she felt it anywhere. She knew the sounds – the cicadas, the river, the distant roar of the motorway interchange. She even knew what it sounded like when someone broke through the downstairs bathroom window, and knew what to do. She wasn’t stupid, but she wasn’t neurotic, whatever Ma said. The trouble was, Ma had gone through her life thinking – knowing – that there was always someone else to deal with stuff like this. There had always been Dad, and now there was Roxana, and Roxana had no one.

  A man would be coming out from Prato tomorrow evening to sort out the back gate. Some handyman-cum-locksmith, she’d been all through the Yellow Pages and hadn’t been able to find one closer, not at nine at night in August.

  Of course, she had had to wait until Violetta was asleep and snoring first; Ma had a bat’s ear for panic. Roxana had come back in from the garden with the dead torch, pausing for a long moment on the veranda to collect herself, to put an expression of wry irritation on her face.

  ‘Bloody thing,’ she’d said, setting the torch down on the kitchen table. ‘My fault, I should have bought batteries.’

  Ma had looked at her oddly, as if she had decided to wipe the whole thing from her mind and didn’t want to hear otherwise. ‘Yes,’ she had said, complacently, setting down a bowl of salad with tuna and sweetcorn. And that had been that: they’d eaten stolidly in the heat. Although when a car had backfired a couple of streets away, Ma had looked wild-eyed, just for a second.

  ‘I’ll make you a camomile,’ Roxana had said, to hasten her to bed, and obediently she had padded upstairs. Roxana had heard the creak of the old fan coming on.

  She could hear it now, whirring across the landing, and Ma’s soft snore behind it. From somewhere on the slopes below the Certosa, the soft warning hoot of an owl.

  She had made herself stay and listen long and hard. Was there someone there? She would not have let Ma think everything was well otherwise; she would, whatever her low opinion of their capabilities, have called the police and not a locksmith if she had had a single doubt. Wouldn’t she?

  But as she lay stiff in bed under the smooth sheet, she knew she was on full alert: all her senses straining. She had to switch them off, one by one; there were techniques she’d learned, an age ago, when studying for her final exams. Tense, then let go, each muscle, one after the other. The last to go were the fine muscles of the face. She could picture herself frowning fiercely in the dark, brows knitted. She ordered them to relax.

  And she lay, her features smoothed out, perfectly still. But Claudio Brunello was dead. Why?

  All was not well, out there in the world. Along the dark highway into town, behind the shuttered glass of the bank, up on the hillside overlooking the sea where Brunello’s kids were sleeping. It was all wrong.

  There was no reason. Roxana had always believed Claudio Brunello to be a good man, a decent person. People like him did not die like this, suddenly, violently, bizarrely. Either she had been wrong about him or – something else was involved. There were things she didn’t know yet, but she would find out, that was all. There were questions to ask Marisa, there were people she needed to find. Against all the odds, Roxana felt the relaxation technique begin to work. She let her mind drift, so as not to fight it.

  And so she didn’t recognize him, when his face appeared to her, just as she edged over the border between sleep and wakefulness, just an agglomeration of shade and light, like the image of Christ on the Turin Shroud, pale cheekbones and pools of dark for eyes. She didn’t know him at first, and by the time she did, it was too late, and she was asleep.

  *

  On her bed in the moonlight, Anna Niescu came gradually upright, her small hands flat on either side of her belly. She breathed out, slowly, through a mouth set with some indeterminate effort. In the pale, flat light it was hard to tell whether she was awake or asleep as she looked around her, searching the room’s shadowy corners for something, or someone. Don’t go, she murmured. Don’t.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Thursday

  AT THE KITCHEN WINDOW, dressed only in undershorts at six-thirty in the morning, Sandro frowned down at the mobile, handed to him by Luisa.

  He had heard her on the landline earlier, which was why he was out of bed.

  ‘What on earth are you up to?’ he’d said, padding into the salotto, cold as the grave in winter, clammy this morning, but a degree or two cooler, at least, than the bedroom. We should sleep in here, he thought, looking blearily around the good furniture, the shiny silk of the hard sofa and upholstered chairs. Like a dream half remembered, the slideshow image of a balcony and hills seen through a lopsided window came to him, and he had the impulse to junk all this, mirror, uncomfortable chairs, sideboard: the lot. Luisa stood by the small round polished table, her hand on the receiver she had just replaced.

  ‘I’m calling in sick,’ she said.

  ‘At this hour?’

  ‘There’s an answering machine,’ she said, and then he noticed the dark circles under her eyes.

  ‘You’re not really sick,’ he said, fear ballooning inside him.

  His wife folded her arms. ‘I said I’d stay home today, didn’t I?’

  ‘You look wiped out,’ he said. He could feel sweat between his shoulder blades.

  And then Luisa sighed. ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘That’s all?’ He didn’t move, daring her to look away.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and the trace of impatience calmed him. ‘The heat, you know. And – what you told me. This girl. The father of her child.’

  ‘Hell,’ said Sandro, ‘I should never have told you.’

  He himself had slept for the first night in weeks: accumulated exhaustion, perhaps. Or having a job to do, again. It looked as if he’d managed somehow to shift the fallout directly to Luisa: his better half.

  ‘That was stupid of me,’ he said, properly contrite, and she let him put his arms around her briefly. He breathed in the musk smell of her sweat. When she pushed him away, she caught him smiling, foolishly.

  Sandro shrugged under her gaze. And she clicked her tongue, turning for the door, but he could see she didn’t mind, not too much.

  ‘It’s been pinging away,’ she said, picking up the phone from the fruit bowl in the kitchen. ‘That didn’t help, during the night.’

  He must have slept like a log. The phone was set to keep bleeping intermittently to let him know he hadn’t read a message. He had no idea how to change it, just as he had no idea why it was on that setting in the first place. People got their children to sort stuff like that out – people like him did, anyway. Old farts. He’d ask Giuli.

  He frowned down at the message. Shd talk 2 Russian at hotel. He had no idea what she was on about.

  ‘Give it here,’ said Luisa, reading his thoughts, or some of them. Deftly she moved her thumb over the screen, before giving it back.

  ‘The message was from Giuli,’ he said slowly.

  ‘You’re meeting her at the hotel,’ said Luisa.

  Right, thought Sandro, OK. That hotel. That Russian. And the grim day loomed ahead; he sat down at the kitchen table, weary already.


  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She thinks I should talk to the receptionist there.’ Perhaps she’d seen them together; but it was too late for all that now. He sighed.

  Luisa set two glasses of water on the table and sat next to him. By the sink he could see the remains of the bottle of wine he’d drunk last night; he could feel it behind his eyes, too.

  ‘Want me to come?’ she asked.

  The light was better in here and he could see that she was all right. She put out a bare arm; the soft skin above the elbow looked vulnerable to him, and for a second he wanted to put his face against it. ‘You get some sleep,’ he said.

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Luisa. ‘Me, sleep in the day?’

  He smiled at that. Luisa had never even taken a siesta, in all the time they’d been together. Not even when she’d been pregnant. Early to bed, early to rise, but no lying about while the sun was up.

  Giuli smiled broadly when she saw it was both of them. They’d arranged to meet at a bar called Ricchi in Santo Spirito. There were barely half a dozen market stalls in the piazza, but the bar was busy enough, just because it was open. It would close next week, announced a sign on the door, until i September, but for the moment its metal tables were laid out under the square’s dusty elms. A few old ladies sat out there, with hardly enough energy between them to gossip, but gamely trying all the same. Gossip being like coffee or wine: what was the point in breathing if you couldn’t indulge in life’s pleasures?

  Ricchi didn’t wait on its tables, so you didn’t get charged extra to sit at them, and Giuli was parked in a corner, as far as she could get from the beady-eyed senior citizens.

  Her bag on her knee, Luisa ran a finger over the unwiped tabletop, and with a roll of her eyes Giuli went inside to order.

  ‘What?’ said Luisa, defensively.

  ‘Give them a break,’ said Sandro, smiling. ‘It’s August. A public service to stay open at all. We can’t all have your standards.’