Roxana had never seen a porn movie in her life, nor had she the intention of ever doing so. She came closer to the boarded-up façade, unaccountably depressed. Why? It was a horrible little place. The dark glass, the mealy-mouthed notices forbidding minors entry and, inside, the dirty, dog-eared posters of thonged backsides and plastic breasts – dearly visible to those minors, undiscouraged, who would have had their noses pressed against the glass.
All on computers now. It had to be worse. Millions of images, each one a hundred, a thousand times worse than anything they ever showed in here, and no one to police who saw what. At least with the old cinema in the backstreet there’d always be some old dear leaning out of her window to see whose husband might have been paying a sneaky visit.
There was a door fitted in the hoarding. Roxana stepped closer and out of the shade, feeling a wave of heat rise from the stone.
So this was why the dark-eyed man with his cashbag hadn’t been in: his job was gone. Had whoever owned the cinema found a place for him somewhere else? For some reason, that mattered to Roxana. What would he do? He’d always been so polite. Waited obediently, let old ladies go ahead of him, never grumbled if there was a queue.
You didn’t think customers made any impression, not really, just the same old thing day in, day out, but there they were, the details, they stacked up over the years. Maybe it was the same for someone working in a porn cinema. The shade of lipstick, the dog always tied up outside, the car parked illegally, the particular brand of aftershave. Ma would say it was the OCD. ‘You shouldn’t fill your head with all that stuff,’ she’d say. ‘All those little tiny bits and pieces, a waste of space. Only so much room in your brain.’
And then, ‘You’re just like your father.’ With his labelled jars and drawers in the shed, his tools laid a certain way in the box, his folding and refolding of shirts.
She should have gone and got that toolbox and fixed the gate herself, shouldn’t she? Roxana realized she was dreading going home, talking to the handyman about the gate. What if he wasn’t trustworthy? What if he preyed on vulnerable women?
Stop it.
Roxana looked up at the building: like the signage, it dated from the 1950s, and it was drab and filthy. It would have sprung up after the war; this close to the Ponte Vecchio, a lot of buildings were just as ugly, the originals having been blown up by the retreating Germans. The plaster was black with decades of grime and exhaust fumes. The windows were thick with dust, inside and out. There was a sign up, too high for her to read: an artist’s impression of balconied apartments and people – those blissfully ignorant people – walking by. Redevelopment: of course. The only mystery was that it had taken until now.
How long since she last walked down here? How long had it been boarded up like this? The man had brought in takings only ten days ago. She moved closer to look at the pine boarding: it was still tacky with resin and smelled of the forest. Then she put her hand against the door that had been cut into the tongue and groove, and it swung open under her hand. Without thinking, she stepped through, and the door banged shut behind her.
She stood on the pavement, hidden by the boarding from the street. The steel fishnet security shutters were still intact. Stepping up, she peered through. Between the shutters and the smoked-glass doors, the floor was ankle-deep in a slurry of junk mail and other flotsam: Roxana could see the polystyrene of a fast-food container, with the shrivelled remains of its contents. A number of envelopes she recognized, the little paned ones with the mark of the bank’s franking machine, then she turned her head sideways to see better. MM Holdings: that was the name of the addressee. No surprise there: the company was a customer of the bank.
One of the darkened glass doors was ajar behind the shutters and with some displacement of air, from inside or out, perhaps even the delayed effect of her own entrance, a gust of something reached her. It was not clearly identifiable, that smell: it was some combination of dark things, of staleness and damp, rotting carpet, the sharp stink of urine and something chemical too, something sulphurous, but Roxana, even having grown up in the city with its overflowing dumpsters and leaking drains, found herself putting a hand to her mouth and nose and holding it there.
There was a sound from behind her. The flimsy door wrenched open and as she turned a voice, deep, angry and suspicious, and not quite Italian.
‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’
A man in a torn T-shirt under overalls, wiry and unshaven. He carried a hammer.
‘Sorry,’ said Roxana, ‘I’m sorry,’ and saw him looking her up and down in silence, the shirt and jacket and tights. She didn’t belong here.
‘I – I was looking for someone,’ she stammered, and his stare hardened.
‘There’s no one here,’ he said curtly. He was from the East, she thought, Romanian or Polish or Bosnian, one of those. ‘The place is empty. We’ll be getting guard dogs in next week; you’re lucky you didn’t come looking then.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘The door wasn’t locked, I just thought – he might still be here.’
‘Who?’ said the man, folding his arms aggressively.
Roxana darted a glance over her shoulder into the dim, fetid interior beyond the wire shuttering. ‘He used to work here,’ she said. ‘That’s all. He just – just disappeared. I wanted to know where he’d gone.’
Something dawned behind the man’s eyes, no more than a crafty glimmer. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘What d’you want him for, exactly? Girl like you.’
Roxana swallowed: she didn’t like being called a girl, suddenly.
‘Nothing,’ she said, involuntarily taking a step backwards, feeling the stinking dark behind her. ‘It’s all right, it doesn’t matter.’
‘Let me tell you,’ said the builder, and a smile widened, without warmth. As he uncrossed his arms, she saw the veined flexing of biceps, despite his leanness. ‘It was disgusting in there. Whoever he was – he didn’t live like a king. That little hole of his.’
She couldn’t stop herself; incredulously she blurted, ‘He lived in there?’
The man with his hammer grunted, rocking on his heels. ‘You can call it living,’ he said. ‘This city,’ and he smiled again. ‘You seen them? It’s not all rich, with the swimming pool and the garage. In the basement, in the attic, they live like rats, no one can see.’ And the arm with the hammer relaxed and the hand swung down loose at his side. ‘Should have got started months ago,’ he said. ‘Come looking in September, no more pigsty. You find someone your type.’
‘It – it was a business matter,’ Roxana improvised, wanting to shut him up, wipe that smile off his face, wanting to push past him and run.
‘Business?’ and he cocked his head, suddenly quite still: it was as if the word had sent an alert somewhere. ‘What kind of business?’ And then, pushing his angry face close to hers so she could see the trace of white in his stubble and smell the cigarettes on his breath. ‘You tell me your name, please.’ And his hand was on the strap of her handbag, and holding.
‘Roxi?’
And she felt her knees almost buckle with relief at his voice, coming from the other side of the tongue and groove boarding. High-pitched, a bit panicky, a bit useless, but she’d never been so happy to hear it in her life.
‘Are you in there? The security guard said – Roxi?’
It was Val, come to find her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SHE APPEARED IN THE kitchen doorway, padding on bare feet, pale but not sick, not any more. The ghost of colour in her cheeks.
From the kitchen table Luisa smiled at Anna tentatively. The tabletop was scattered with pages of notes: Sandro’s notes. She hastily pushed them into a pile and pulled out a chair beside her. Moving gingerly under her own weight, Anna lowered herself obediently into the seat.
Without asking, Luisa put water on to boil. Camomile tea, the answer to everything and nothing. Sweet biscuits: she wished she had something better than the plain ones she kept as a
last resort. She would buy something with chocolate, Luisa decided. She should also get something more tempting and began to wonder where she might get a decent chicken in August; chicken would be good for the baby.
Telling herself not to be daft, that Anna Niescu would probably have fled before she got back from the butcher’s, Luisa turned from the stove to see the girl studying a page covered in Sandro’s scrawl. He’d written down what they told him about the apartment. It was headed, Via del Lazaretto. It was about the only thing on the page that was legible, but it was enough. Anna turned her head sideways to meet Luisa’s gaze.
‘You went there?’ she said, and at the trace of pride in the girl’s voice, Luisa’s heart sank. ‘Did you see it? Did you see our apartment?’
Carefully, Luisa set the cup in front of her and the plate of biscuits. She sat down.
‘It’s a lovely area,’ she said. ‘Close to the countryside, isn’t it? Very nice.’
Anna set her chin in her hands and gazed off into the distance. ‘You think I’m an idiot,’ she said simply. ‘You think he deceived me.’ She sat up and looked into Luisa’s face, hands folded on top of her belly. She didn’t even glance at the biscuits.
‘I don’t know,’ said Luisa, and it was the truth. However bad it looked, she still clung to the belief that the man had at least loved Anna Niescu. What kind of human being could deceive this child, in that way? If Sandro were here, he would tell her, Plenty. There are plenty of them out there. Luisa knew as much herself, if she was being sensible, only she wasn’t being particularly sensible at the moment. Going to see that apartment with the balconies in San Niccolo had only been the start of Luisa not being sensible.
‘We couldn’t get inside the apartment,’ she said with a sigh and pushed the plate closer to Anna. ‘Eat. For the baby.’
Anna contemplated the biscuits, which Luisa had arranged in a star shape, and picked one up. ‘No,’ she said, nibbling, the food held in her little paw of a hand. ‘I couldn’t get inside either. No one would let me in. That porter knew I was there but he hid from me.’
‘Did you see him when you went there with your – with Josef?’ asked Luisa. ‘The porter?’
‘He spied on us,’ said Anna, still nibbling, to Luisa’s satisfaction. ‘I saw that the door was open a crack.’
‘But he didn’t come out? He didn’t speak to you?’
Anna shook her head and laid the biscuit down. It looked as if a mouse had been at it. Luisa gestured towards the tea and Anna drank. Luisa waited; Anna was defensive enough as it was. If there was doubt in her mind, somehow it seemed important to Luisa that she realize it for herself.
Eventually Anna spoke. ‘Josef had the keys.’ She frowned. ‘Three or four keys on a keyring: a big Ferrari keyring, red with the horse. A small one for the front gate, a medium-sized one for the front door, a long one for the apartment door, a tiny one for the postbox.’
She was observant. That hadn’t really occurred to Luisa before. ‘Did he look in the postbox?’ she asked, more out of idle interest than anything else. It was the first thing she would do herself, on returning home.
Anna frowned at the question, then hesitantly shook her head. ‘We went straight up,’ she said, smiling a little. ‘In the lift. I like to take the stairs, it’s good for me, I said, but he made me take the lift.’
Luisa tried to visualize the apartment building’s lobby. Lift facing as you came through the doors. She hadn’t seen the stairs. They must be round at the back.
‘And then?’ she asked softly. ‘I expect you were excited, weren’t you?’
‘Well, he said, don’t expect too much. He said, it needs work. He tried to keep my hopes down, I think. But I was excited. I haven’t ever had a place of my own.’
Luisa nodded. She knew how that felt. She and Sandro had lived with her mother for three, nearly four years before they got their own place; they’d moved out when she was pregnant. That had been how it was done. And when the baby died, thirty-six hours after she was born, Luisa remembered how that felt too, coming back to the empty apartment, too big for just the two of them.
‘And when you saw it? What did you think?’
Anna turned her head a little, a distant look in her eyes. ‘I don’t know. It was – a bit dusty. I think it had been empty for a long time. Josef kept apologizing for everything, when he couldn’t make the light come on.’
‘Was the flat furnished?’ There was something about Anna’s account that made Luisa uneasily curious.
Anna chewed her lip. ‘There were beds and a couch and a very old kitchen. You could sleep there.’ Luisa saw her glance quickly around herself. ‘Much older than this one, I mean, more like the one at the Loggiata. It would have been fine, of course. I am used to old things. I told Josef, there was no need to change it.’
‘And how was he?’
Anna set her lips together, a small line appearing between her eyebrows. ‘He was – agitated. A bit.’
Luisa nodded. Her unease was not diminishing.
Anna went on, concentrating as she tried to be precise, ‘He – he was excited like me, when we opened the door. Then he grew more – anxious, as we walked around. I think he was worried that I didn’t like it. I kept telling him I liked it.’
‘And did you?’
‘Of course,’ said Anna, still frowning, looking down at her hands. ‘I would have made it our home.’ She looked up. ‘As you said, it is a very nice part of the city. Very quiet, very green.’
Quiet, thought Luisa. Remembering the hum of the motorway as they had exited the bus on the ring road, a different sort of sound, low and constant. She preferred the sounds inside the city. People talking in the street.
The suburbs were an uneasy place to Luisa. A view of the hills was one thing, although you could get a similar, more distant version of that from the city centre if you were high enough. She pondered the slopes of the Mugello that would have comprised the view from that apartment, and below the picture-postcard view, the remains of old farm buildings slowly eroded by the advance of the city. Shacks and old fridges and woodstacks in the lee of the motorway, old lives disintegrating on the dirty verges and beside slip roads.
‘Of course,’ she said gently. ‘Very good for children, especially.’ Anna brightened, and cautiously Luisa proceeded.
‘Did you meet the neighbours?’
‘Not really,’ said Anna, and Luisa heard a defensive note in her voice. ‘I would have liked to. I suppose perhaps people keep themselves to themselves in those places. Do you think so?’
Luisa shrugged. ‘Some do,’ she said cautiously. Thought of Giovanna Baldini. ‘Some don’t. Maybe it was the wrong time of day,’ she went on. ‘People at work.’
‘Maybe,’ said Anna. ‘We didn’t stay long.’ Her head bobbed down. ‘A night. Then later, when I – when I was pregnant. We thought about where we would put the nursery. Two nights. Both times he had to get to work, early. I had to also.’
Luisa nodded, Anna looking away, not wanting to say any more. Two nights together, one to get pregnant, the second to make a home. Decide where to put the baby’s cot. What had they said at the Loggiata, when their little Anna stopped out all night?
‘I have one day off,’ Anna said, her small chin jutting defiantly as if she knew what Luisa was thinking. ‘Monday off.’ Luisa began to murmur something non-committal, only Anna took hold of her hand and with sudden and surprising determination held her eyes. ‘Where is he?’ she said. ‘Where?’
Looking back at her, Luisa waited a moment, concentrating on keeping her expression, her movements, her voice, quite calm. ‘We don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘We will, though.’ Uncertainly Anna nodded, not turning away, and then Luisa asked her, ‘You noticed something, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘When you went to that flat with him. You knew something was wrong, then, didn’t you? You knew even then.’
And keeping her eyes fixed on Luisa, slowly Anna nodded.
*
‘I don’t know
who he is,’ said the woman called Marisa Goldman, glancing down at the crumpled paper with a cold stare. ‘No. But it’s a ridiculous question.’
The officers of the financial police might, to Sandro’s relief, have gone out on their lunch break – Sandro had no desire for a run-in with unfriendly authority – but someone was in Claudio Brunello’s office.
The door was firmly closed, but as Goldman had ushered him into her own room, at once impatient and reluctant, he had seen a large head bent over a desk next door. The head had been raised at the sound of Sandro’s entrance, and even though the computer screen on the desk had blocked all but the eyes and a bulky outline from view, there had been something about those eyes, the big rounded shoulders that, had Marisa Goldman not practically shoved him ahead of her into her office, he’d have liked a closer look at. Something familiar.
Sandro knew her type. Bella figura was all she cared about: keeping it together and looking good. Wearing the right kind of shoes. Luisa had a thousand customers like Miss Marisa Goldman, with long brown legs, long aristocratic necks, long noses to look down, women she’d clothed since they were fifteen but who wouldn’t deign to recognize her in the street. Empty-headed, self-absorbed, narcissistic people – they were everywhere – people who regarded things and labels as if they were more important than the human beings holding them out for inspection.
There were two photographs in heavy, discreet frames on the shelf: one of Marisa Goldman somewhere like Scotland, looking charming in a tweed outfit beside a heavy-set, glowering man, gun carelessly over her shoulder. In the other she was on a horse. More of the same: those sports that didn’t mean sport but status.
Dead Season Page 20
