Dead Season

by Christobel Kent

  ‘Well,’ Roxana spread her hands, trying not to shrug. ‘What else?’

  Marisa passed a hand over her forehead, and her hair – expensive, tawny, usually not a strand out of place – was ruffled by the unguarded movement, briefly giving her the appearance of a disturbed person. ‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘What if Paolo hears about this?’

  ‘So you were? Having an affair?’

  Would her billionaire kick her out? Marisa, homeless: she could always go back to her mother in Turin. Roxana couldn’t be even a tiny bit gleeful. It was all too grim.

  ‘I was not,’ said Marisa, turning on her. ‘No, no, no. That is not what I meant. He and I never, ever – there was nothing.’

  So all she was worried about was that there should even be such a rumour, was it? Roxana didn’t know what to think. If something had ever happened – well. He was too much of a family man not to have regretted it pretty quickly. Expressionless, Roxana stared at her boss, feeling that things had shifted, somehow. That if she were a different person, this might be her chance, to seize power, or at least to take a step towards it.

  Behind them in Claudio’s office there was a scraping, the sound of chairs pushed back. The clock said eight: they should have opened ten minutes ago. Everything was going to pot.

  ‘We should open up,’ Roxana said.

  Marisa stared at her uncomprehending, then her expression cleared. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Well, I can do that.’

  ‘There’s the cash delivery to receive,’ Roxana said. ‘It should come in fifteen minutes or so, and the ATM’s been playing up.’

  Marisa’s expression hardened, as if she suspected Roxana of twisting the knife. Had she ever had to do anything so menial as signing off a cash delivery?

  Beside them, the door opened to Claudio’s office and out came Valentino, looking subdued. Nothing like an interview with police officers to help you grow up, Roxana supposed. She smiled tentatively and, clearly anxious, he stared back at her for a long moment. Claudio was dead: it still hadn’t sunk in, not for any of them.

  ‘Miss Delfino?’

  Roxana straightened, held out a hand.

  The older policeman regarded her levelly, unsmiling. ‘Might we have a few moments?’

  She sat where Valentino had sat, the seat still warm. The crew-cut younger man was on her left, watching her intently, the baggy-eyed policeman across the desk. He appeared to be exhausted. Roxana remembered that she’d wanted to be a police officer once, when she was still a child, as a result of some TV show with female detectives. She hadn’t imagined it would be about telling people someone they loved was dead, and not being able to sleep for what you’d seen. But she didn’t know whether she felt relieved she’d gone into banking instead.

  The older policeman explained in a soft monotone why they were there, as if she didn’t know. She gazed at him earnestly, wanting to be helpful.

  ‘There’d been nothing unusual,’ she said. ‘There was the talk of being bought by the Banca d’Italia a couple of months ago, six months, that made him anxious, made us all anxious but then it blew over. He loved this place.’ She realized it was true only as she spoke, and she felt her eyes burn. ‘We stayed independent. It’s not the – the highest-flying bank in the world. But he knew his customers, and his staff. He looked after us all.’

  Her eyes dropped to her lap. He was the reason she was still there, she wanted to say, even when she shouldn’t be: that, too, came to Roxana for the first time. Loyalty, just like her and Ma, a double-edged sword. And now? She could leave.

  ‘Right.’

  She thought something softened behind the old policeman’s eyes. Beside her the younger man was checking his watch, trying to catch his superior’s eye. The older man didn’t seem to see.

  ‘Saturday,’ he said, thoughtfully.

  ‘Saturday?’

  ‘It seems that on Saturday morning someone telephoned Claudio Brunello at the seaside. And shortly afterwards he came back into the city.’

  ‘Right.’

  The day after leaving for his holiday, he had come back. Roxana frowned.

  ‘That surprises you?’

  ‘His holidays were sacrosanct. We weren’t even allowed to call him.’

  ‘So the telephone call didn’t come from here?’ The policeman raised his head, just a fraction, to look beyond her, through the glass and into the bank. ‘No one phoned him, on Saturday morning?’

  Roxana shook her head, uncertain. ‘I didn’t. And I’m pretty sure Valentino didn’t. Saturday’s a short working day and it was busy. A lot of small traders cashing up before the holiday, I suppose. We didn’t take a break, not even for a coffee. Valentino sits a metre away from me. There’s no signal on the mobile in here, which the bank’s fairly pleased about. No time-wasting.’ She frowned, trying to think. Something – had there been something? A call? No, she was mixing the days up. That was Tuesday, when a woman phoned for Claudio. ‘And there was nothing to call him about, anyway. Nothing out of the ordinary.’

  ‘And Miss Goldman?’

  ‘Marisa?’ Roxana didn’t understand. ‘Marisa wasn’t here. She was on some boat somewhere, with her boyfriend.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said the policeman. But there was something about the way he said it.

  ‘She went off Thursday night.’ Roxana spoke earnestly, as if trying to convince him. ‘She was meeting her boyfriend – Paolo he’s called – at Piombino or somewhere.’

  ‘Yes. That’s what she told us.’

  Roxana sat back in her chair, trying to work him out. Marisa must have really rubbed him up the wrong way.

  ‘So.’ The weary-looking policeman steepled his fingers again. ‘Saturday. You closed up at one.’ The younger man shifted in his chair again. ‘And afterwards?’

  He spoke almost as if he were making conversation. And how did you spend your holidays? Even as she told him – she’d done ten quick lengths at the public pool surrounded by screaming kids, if he must know, before she went home. Then she’d gone to the supermarket, vacuumed the house – all she could think was, why do they want to know? Did they ask Val, did they ask Marisa, how they spent their Saturday afternoons? Schmoozing at the rowing club, drinking cocktails, choosing from a selection of bikinis? No supermarket shopping and housework for them.

  ‘Your colleague – Valentino.’ So they had asked him. ‘He says you left together, at lunchtime on Saturday?’

  ‘He went to the rowing club. He was wearing his kit.’ There was no need for Val to put on that singlet, the one that showed off his biceps, but he had.

  ‘Yes,’ said the policeman with the ghost of a smile. ‘Well, I’m sure the club will confirm that.’

  It wasn’t an accident. They thought he’d committed suicide. Was that a crime? Did it require proof, and witnesses? Roxana supposed it did.

  And then abruptly it was all over, and Marisa was showing the two police officers out, hurrying them through the still-empty bank, looking tensely around as Roxana watched, hugging herself fiercely. Val was staring from his workstation behind the screen.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said as she slid in beside him. ‘It’s serious, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yup,’ said Roxana, booting up her screen. She felt suddenly exhausted.

  And then it dawned on her: this could be it. The bank – well, she could see it in the policeman’s eyes. Struggling to survive as it was, barely fighting off a takeover. This could be the nail in its coffin. First policemen, then the Guardia di Finanza.

  The door opened and old Signora Martelli came in, dragging her shopping trolley behind her. ‘You,’ she said, shaking her finger at Val, already fumbling in her bulging handbag.

  ‘I wish it was all over,’ said Val, looking away from the old woman.

  ‘Me, too,’ Roxana said.

  *

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Giuli. Her eyes were fixed anxiously towards Luisa as they stood on the bleached and empty pavement. They were outside the address written on the pi
ece of paper Sandro had given them. Luisa gave the girl a gimlet stare. ‘Giuli,’ she said, with barely concealed impatience, ‘I didn’t sleep much last night. It’s nearly forty degrees and I can’t get the sight of that poor girl out of my head. I don’t suppose you’re all right, either.’

  And in fact Giuli didn’t look that good to Luisa. The cheap briefcase she had brought with her seemed to be weighing her down; her tan was peeling and underneath it her narrow little face was pale and beaded with sweat. ‘Not you too,’ Giuli said. And Luisa smiled. Allowing herself to forget that it was she who’d set Sandro on to Giuli.

  They hadn’t mentioned the boyfriend yet. After the sight of Anna Niescu, Luisa had just thought, life’s too short. There are worse things than Giuli falling in love.

  They’d come out on the bus, one of the small electric ones without air-conditioning; them and a mountainously wheezing old man in a string vest who, Luisa had worried, might be making his own last ride. He’d still been sitting there when they got off, taking tiny breaths and mopping his forehead. But if they thought the bus was hot, stepping out of it was like walking into the Sahara. As Luisa stood on the pavement in the insufficient shade of a spindly cherry tree and watched the bus disappear off down the Viale Europa towards Firenze Sud and the distant hills beyond, she wondered whether that was perhaps the old man’s strategy. Perhaps he was just going to ride around until dusk.

  They had walked very slowly away from the viale and, keeping to the shady side of the street, in among the big apartment buildings, squares of high-maintenance garden courtyard dividing them. This was not a cheap part of town, but Luisa didn’t feel particularly at ease. It wasn’t, she couldn’t quite prevent herself from thinking, like San Niccolo: these blocks were solid and luxurious, no rusting balconies here, but it was lacking something essential.

  Luisa looked up at the flowers tumbling down the white concrete, hibiscus and plumbago, purple and scarlet and pale blue; it was all very nice. But none of these people had been born here, had they? These buildings were twenty, thirty years old, maximum. With an uncharacteristic flush of sentiment Luisa thought of Santa Croce, of the old lady opposite them, ninety if she was a day, making her doddery way down the street to the market, six days a week. In Santa Croce there were people – herself among them – who hadn’t moved more than five hundred metres their whole lives.

  Giuli gestured them across the street, into the sun, to a metal gate with an entry phone at the foot of a twelve-storey block. ‘This is it,’ she said, coming to a halt.

  And Luisa had felt a little thump of panic: was this what she really wanted? San Niccolo was only a couple of kilometres away – but still. And it was her expression that had prompted Giuli’s concern.

  ‘We’re a pair, aren’t we?’ Luisa said. Hardly anyone’s idea of private detectives, she and Giuli, nagging each other about looking peaky. ‘Give me that.’ She put out a hand for the paper and frowned down at it. ‘Yes, this is it.’

  Via Lazaretto 13. Apartment nine, third floor. Luisa was not superstitious at all, ever. But lazaretto meant plague hospital, and the significance of the number thirteen, even if you didn’t believe in anything at all, couldn’t be avoided. And what were they doing here, anyway? Poking about in Claudio Brunello’s double life, just to cause Anna Niescu more misery.

  There was the solid-looking metal fence, a metre and a half high, the gate with its entryphone, a small, well-kept strip of shrubbery, a wide, smoked-glass door beyond it. From somewhere out of sight came the sound of a masonry hammer, battering rhythmically. Builders: the soundtrack to August.

  On the gate there was a numberpad for punching in an entry code, but no code on the piece of paper Anna had given Sandro. Had Brunello never given it to her? Had she not even got past the gate, when she’d come here looking for him? There was a bell, marked Portiere. Luisa pressed it and, when nothing happened, pressed it again, holding her finger down five, ten seconds.

  Still nothing.

  Giuli made a sound of impatience. ‘He’s probably at the seaside, too,’ she said.

  They looked up at the façade, wondering whether anyone was at home at all. There were signs of life, here and there: some washing hanging out on a balcony about halfway up, a little dog’s paws and snout peering over a balustrade lower down.

  And then, as if by some miracle, someone – a youngish man in a suit – brushed past them, swiftly stabbed at the keypad and was through the gate without a word or a backward glance. For a second they gawped, then just in time Giuli put out a hand to stop the gate, and they were inside – inside the garden at least. Ahead, the young man, indifferent to their presence, was through the smoked-glass door before they could catch up with him. The door clicked solidly shut as they reached it.

  ‘Bastard,’ muttered Giuli. ‘Didn’t even look round.’

  There was another bell for the porter here, and Luisa pressed it, without conviction. This time she could hear a tinny ring behind the glass, but there was still no response. And then from behind them someone said, in a deep, cigarette-roughened voice, ‘Don’t bother. He starts on brandy at eleven.’

  A weather-beaten woman as wide as she was short – a metre twenty, at Luisa’s guess, and sixty or so years old – was behind them on the path, pulling a shopping trolley, a cigarette stuck between her lips, sizing them up unashamedly – and why not? – through smoke-narrowed eyes. As they stared back at her, she looked up and called a gruff endearment, and the little dog began to yelp excitedly in response, straining to see further over his balcony.

  ‘He yours?’ asked Luisa.

  ‘No,’ said the woman shortly. ‘If he was mine I’d take him out for a walk, now and again.’

  ‘Do you live here?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  Luisa held out a hand. ‘Luisa Cellini,’ she said. And seeing the woman’s eyes shift to Giuli, ‘And this is Giulietta Sarto.’ She took a deep breath. ‘We’re trying to trace someone. This is the address we’ve got for him.’ She held out the piece of paper.

  Calculation crept into the woman’s stolid expression. ‘Expectant father, is he?’ she said, and Luisa’s eyes widened. The woman smiled, just faintly. ‘Someone said, there was a pregnant woman hanging on that gate for an hour, a couple of days ago.’

  ‘And no one let her in?’

  The woman grunted. ‘I’m Giovanna,’ she said. ‘Baldini. Fourth floor. People – not me, mind, but perhaps you’d worked that out – people keep themselves to themselves out here. I wasn’t there – I might have let her in, might not. But I’d have asked her what she wanted, that’s for sure. Only I wasn’t here. I was out at San Lorenzo for a few days. Cooler out there.’ She folded her arms across her broad chest. ‘All right?’

  ‘All right,’ said Luisa warily. ‘So you didn’t see the girl. You wouldn’t have – recognized her. From a previous visit?’ Giovanna Baldini was obviously someone who kept her eyes open, but it was best to proceed with caution.

  The woman regarded her. She shook her head. ‘I haven’t seen any pregnant women calling here. Who was she looking for, then? Who’s the father?’ She looked through the smoked-glass door after the young suited man, long gone by now. ‘Not him. Sixth floor, him. Not to mention gay.’

  Luisa shifted her gaze discreetly to the bell-pushes beside the door, each with its own nameplate. There were something like thirty of them, and at first glance she saw no Brunello.

  ‘Well?’ said Giovanna Baldini, amused. ‘Found him?’

  ‘He’s called Claudio Josef Brunello,’ said Giuli curtly, clearly not interested in dragging this out.

  ‘Never heard of him,’ said Giovanna Baldini promptly. ‘But then people do come and go. Some of these nameplates are ten years out of date. Did you say third floor?’

  ‘Can you let us in?’ said Giuli.

  Luisa began to shake her head at the girl but then Giovanna Baldini laughed abruptly. ‘Impatient, huh?’ she said. ‘I’ll let you in, but that’s it, you’re on yo
ur own. See if you can get any sense out of our estimable concierge.’

  She fished a key out of her shorts pocket and pushed open the door. As they went through, Luisa paused to study the panel of bell-pushes again. ‘How does this system work, then?’ she asked. The flats were numbered, but Anna Niescu had written no number on the piece of paper, just as she had no code.

  Giovanna Baldini was patient. ‘Four flats per floor. Nothing on the ground but the concierge, first is one to four, second five to eight, third nine to twelve. And so on. You get that?’

  ‘I get that,’ said Luisa, ‘yes.’ She scanned the names against apartments nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Names faded and stuck over, but no Brunello.

  ‘Well?’ With the woman’s face up close, there was suddenly something familiar about Giovanna Baldini. The tiny gold hoop earrings, each with a garnet. ‘I was at school with you,’ Luisa said, studying the names of the third-floor apartment owners. No Brunello. ‘In the Via Colonna. 1961?’

  A faint smile appeared on the weatherbeaten face, the ghost of a girl behind it. ‘You weren’t Cellini then,’ she said.

  ‘Venturelli,’ supplied Luisa, staring: they might be everywhere, the kids she was at school with, mightn’t they? Become invisible with age: you’d have to get right next to them to see any trace of what they once were. And Giovanna Baldini nodded.

  ‘Venturelli. You married a policeman, I heard,’ she said. ‘Straight out of school.’

  ‘Can we get on with this?’ said Giuli with gathering impatience, from the polished marble interior of the dim hallway.

  And Giovanna Baldini seemed to take the words as her cue because quite suddenly she had slipped between them and was off, hauling her shopping trolley up the stairs. She paused only when she’d reached the landing, opened her mouth and said, ‘Four five nine one. The entry code outside.’ And she nodded back down towards a shadowy corridor that led off the hallway, rounded the corner and was gone.

  As the rattle of the trolley receded, outside the scuffed doorway at the end of the corridor, Luisa and Giuli looked at each other. Whatever lay behind the door wasn’t an alluring prospect.