Dead Season

by Christobel Kent

  ‘Oh, Sandro,’ Luisa had said. ‘Don’t you read the papers? Men do it all the time. They don’t know how to get out of it, they pretend to themselves it’ll be fine, then she gets bigger and bigger and suddenly the due date’s next week – and they jump. It happens. He’d told lies and he was going to get found out.’

  But she hadn’t thought simple Anna was stupid, either.

  ‘What if they weren’t lies?’

  ‘What d’you mean? That really Josef and Claudio Brunello are one and the same after all?’ Luisa had shaken her head. ‘Let’s hope not.’

  Sandro had shifted, uneasy, but when he had spoken, Luisa had found herself listening.

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ he had said slowly. ‘I just meant – there was something innocent about it. He didn’t think it would matter, telling a small lie. Maybe he had always looked up to Brunello; say he’s a customer in the bank, say he comes in now and again, say Brunello’s treated him well, because the guy sounds like a thoughtful sort of man. Sometimes – well, there are situations, however honest you are, however well intentioned – sometimes you want something so badly that you fool yourself. Sometimes the thing you want – or the person – seems so necessary to your life that nothing else matters, and the means justify the ends.’

  And then he had clamped his mouth shut, speech over, and Luisa and Giuli had just stared at him, Giuli as if she was going to burst into tears.

  ‘Right,’ Luisa had said, clearing her throat.

  ‘I mean,’ Sandro had said, suddenly weary, as if the speech had drained him, ‘it’s not as if anyone with an ounce of knowledge of the world would have believed that Josef was a respected bank manager, not for five minutes. And there’s no evidence he was properly trying to – to con anyone. Not even Anna, not really.’

  ‘And the apartment?’ Giuli’s voice had been tentative.

  They’d talked about it: Giuli had put forward her theory already. ‘They’re known for it,’ she’d said, ‘aren’t they? Estate agents have the keys to all sorts of places, wrecks, sure, tenanted places, sure, but also show-homes, model houses, fully furnished empty apartments. They let their married friends use them. For—’

  ‘Yes,’ Sandro had said, frowning furiously. ‘I know what for. Affairs. Assignations. But there’s no evidence – not any more – that Josef was – is – married, is there? None.’ They hadn’t said anything: he couldn’t have been interrupted. ‘He didn’t take her there to – I don’t think that was what it was about.’

  ‘Um, she did get pregnant, though,’ Giuli had said, not meeting his eye. ‘So that must have been what it was about. At some point.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Sandro had said, sitting down but not admitting defeat, not yet. ‘But if that was what you wanted – only that – would you choose Anna? Of all girls? I think he loved her. I think he sincerely believed he would be getting that apartment. The stuck-up woman manager saw him talking to Brunello. What if he was asking about a loan?’

  ‘They’d never have given him a loan,’ Luisa had said quietly, and Sandro had pushed his chair away from the table in frustration, letting his clenched fist fall on to the mess of papers, then letting the fingers uncurl.

  ‘No,’ he’d said.

  Then the phone had rung.

  Clearing away the plates, Luisa had listened to Sandro answer it in the hall. She could tell it was a woman, even though she could hear nothing of the voice on the other end of the line. And that Sandro was talking to a woman he liked.

  ‘Right,’ she had heard him say, and heard the alertness in his voice. ‘You’re sure? And not since – when? Right.’

  The conversation had lasted perhaps twenty minutes. The woman was asking him questions, too, about Josef, and about Anna. Sandro must have trusted her because, by the time they’d finished, whoever was on the other end of the line had known more or less everything she and Giuli knew about Josef’s disappearance.

  There’d been a moment when his voice had changed, and he’d turned his back, instinctively, as if to keep this part of the conversation particularly private.

  ‘Really? Really?’ she had heard him say. ‘Miss Goldman was here? All weekend. I see. Well, yes. The police should be told. Yes, I will, yes – I’ll be, I hope I’ll be communicating with them in the morning.’

  Delfino had been her name; hanging up, Sandro had said it. ‘Thank you, Miss Delfino. Roxana.’

  As he had walked back into the room, Luisa had felt a tiny little prick of something at the sight of his face, alive, intent, a kind of pleasure in it. Not jealousy, but edging towards it. Sandro had caught her expression and almost smiled.

  ‘The girl at the bank,’ he had said, reaching up to the top cupboard for the grappa, a single-grape variety given to them by Pietro at Christmas and reserved for special occasions. Sandro had then fetched one of the liqueur glasses they’d received as a wedding present from the cabinet and sat down. Luisa had cocked her head and stared: he had become a different man. The defeat that had been beginning to settle on his shoulders before they’d heard the phone ring had now evaporated.

  ‘Roxana Delfino. She knows Josef, and she knows where he works.’ Sandro had sipped the tiny glass of clear liquid. ‘Worked, I should say; it’s closed down, since the weekend, and she noticed he’d disappeared. A sharp-eyed girl.’ Another appreciative sip. ‘He worked at the Carnevale.’

  A porn cinema. Luisa and Giuli had looked at each other: this didn’t get any better, did it? A man who spent his life sitting in the little glass booth at a porn cinema, taking money, giving tickets, watching the customers shuffle out again into the daylight. Some of them, no doubt, giving every appearance of being upright citizens.

  ‘No wonder he pretended to be something else,’ she’d said. And Sandro had nodded.

  ‘I was thinking, can’t be much money in porn cinemas these days, what with the internet.’ His face had clouded a little.

  Luisa had shifted uneasily at that. What did Sandro know about the internet?

  ‘Glad to be out of all that,’ he’d said as if in answer. ‘Major part of police work, web porn. Sifting through images, no thanks.’ He had chewed his lip. ‘But that place – well. That huge place, bang in the centre of town and, she said, his takings were less than a hundred euros some weeks. The girl at the bank said. A trickle.’ His face had still been dark, troubled. ‘It’s being redeveloped now, she said. Builders. A mess inside.’

  ‘Roxana Delfino,’ Luisa had said very quietly, and he’d looked at her, still distracted, taken in her expression and then quite suddenly he’d laughed out loud, leaned across and put his arm around her shoulders, warm and close. She could smell the liquorice smell of the grappa on his breath and despite herself she had smiled back. Across the table Giuli, frowning into her lap at the thought of Josef working in a porn cinema, had looked up, bemused.

  ‘I think I know the name,’ Luisa had said, only partly to deflect them. ‘Delfino? I think the mother used to shop with us. In the old days.’

  ‘I knew she’d come up trumps,’ Sandro had said, ‘first time I saw her.’ He had poured himself another glass, small but brimming, and knocked it back. Luisa had given him a sidelong glance, and suddenly they had both been laughing at her.

  ‘Not jealous, darling?’ Sandro had said, a look close to pure delight on his face.

  And Luisa had not known what to say for a second or two. She had never been jealous in her life.

  In the bed now she shifted again, and Sandro turned in unison, and his hand came out to hers, the fingers meeting so precisely in the dark it was like a magic trick, and resting entwined.

  She felt herself begin to drift off then, with his touch, and something Sandro had said settled in her cooling brain: all that space there in the centre of town. The Carnevale’s façade appeared as she first had seen it, the coloured lettering of its name, modish then when it had first opened, in 1950-something. Her mother ushering her to the other side of the street and muttering as they pass
ed, Luisa of an impressionable age, thirteen or so, in her school pinafore. All that space, and as she drifted into sleep, the old cinema’s features, the ugly concrete of its façade, the faded letters of its sign, the smoked glass that spanned the entrance, all erased themselves and left only that: a dark space, a black hole.

  The phone rang again but she barely heard it; it was too late, Luisa had slipped over the edge into sleep. She might reflexively have put her hand out after him, feeling the fingers slipping away as he left the bed, but by the time he had softly closed the door behind him, picked up the phone and spoken softly, quickly into it, she didn’t hear what he said.

  ‘There’s something I’d like you to find out for me.’ Then Yes like an endearment, like a secret assignation, Yes, tomorrow, yes. Early. I understand: I know where.

  *

  In her own bed, sleepless and alone, Giuli lay and stared at the ceiling in the dark.

  She had shot home on the motorino; enough of walking – what had she been walking for? She’d sped through the hot, dark streets, down to the river, along the Arno, the city not quite empty, people walking like ghosts, in silence, but desolate, it seemed to her. Desolate as she’d passed the African market, the tattered police ribbon still in place, desolate as she followed the embankment, looking at the necklace of lights reflected in the water. The surface was clogged with waterweed, brought to the surface by the heat, and Giuli had turned her face away so as not to think of the pale-blue sea she and Enzo had lain beside and stared at from their campsite under the umbrella pines, not much more than a week ago.

  Giuli had missed a text from Enzo as she’d been leaving Sandro and Luisa’s building. She’d stared briefly at its contents, then climbed on to her moped. She’d known him nearly a year – longer if you counted seeing him, liking him, before exchanging a word – and she had never failed to respond to even a missed call. But what would she say to him? The sense that she was on the point of making a terrible fool of herself – engaged? At her age? – engulfed her, and Giuli had clicked the phone shut, pulled on her helmet and started the moped’s engine.

  She’d let herself into the silent building on the Via della Chiesa: even from this quiet, run-down corner of the city people were gone, to the hills or the sea. The stairwell smelled stale, the heat rose with her as she climbed. Key in the door, Giuli forced herself to think of Anna.

  Estate agents and their games. She’d known a hooker – once, long ago, in a former life – who’d done it, thought it was all a great game, sneering through a show apartment, posing on the bed. Poor Anna; this was exactly what Giuli had wanted to shield her from, the people who’d think she’d done a dirty thing. How many times had it taken? Anna was young, and innocent; in Giuli’s mind that had somehow made it easier for her to fall pregnant. It might have been just once. It might have been the first time.

  ‘Did you get the name of the estate agent? For the apartment in the Via del Lazaretto?’

  Sandro had asked the question thoughtfully, and Luisa had shaken her head; she hadn’t thought to ask, she’d ask in the morning, and then Sandro had laid a hand on her shoulder and she’d smiled up at him, both of them remembering that precious moment when he’d caught her, jealous of the girl in the bank. Watching them, Giuli had thought only of the impossibilities that lay between her and a future like that, a kitchen of their own and no need to say anything to be understood.

  Taking off her clothes, she brushed her teeth and lay down under clean sheets and, closing her eyes, tried to picture Enzo’s face but could not.

  Could it really all turn so quickly? But Giuli knew this was what she’d expected all along, that it hadn’t been real, that she’d allowed herself to imagine things that would never happen. Enzo didn’t really want her, wouldn’t really want her. She turned over in the bed, then turned back.

  What did it matter? She could live without him, as Anna would live without her Josef. What had she been thinking of? And she lay, staring into the dark until she thought at last of Anna’s baby, the only thing in the end that mattered in all this, and the small cooling wind that came no more than an hour before dawn finally lulled her to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Friday

  WAKING EARLY AND DISORIENTATED, Roxana lay with her eyes closed and tried to work out what was different.

  At first she could hear nothing, nothing but a little sparse birdsong in the dawn light, not a breath of wind to spur on the defeated chorus. It was no cooler – even swinging her legs off the bed brought a sweat to Roxana’s upper lip – so that wasn’t exactly it, but close. Weather. The light falling through the slats of Roxana’s roller shutters was dull and grey: that was a change. And the air – the air was different. Smelled different.

  Someone was moving around, downstairs. Roxana felt light-headed, a little panicky, she held her breath.

  ‘Roxi?’

  It was her mother. Roxana breathed out, slowly, and the situation came back to her. No work today. And last night—

  Ma had the ears of a bat, sometimes, she could hear her daughter’s bare feet touch the floor as if Roxana was still a teenager and she was listening for her key in the lock late at night. ‘Roxana?’

  ‘Coming, Ma.’ Roxana could hear the sleep still in her voice.

  Last night.

  It had been purple dusk, not quite dark, when she had parked up and come through the front door under the jasmine: eight o’clock perhaps. Her mind had been on other things than home, all the way; on Irene Brunello walking proudly out of Marisa’s front door; Marisa drunk and lonely in her borrowed life of luxury, telling her Val was a good bet for marriage.

  Maybe he was. Maybe she really had been being too picky all these years. And thinking of him, his hopeful face, untroubled as a child’s – maybe they could be a team. Maybe she needed someone like that, to lighten her up. One thing was for sure, she wasn’t going to mention Valentino to Ma.

  It had turned out that Ma had too many things of her own to tell, though. She’d had a busy day.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she had said complacently, silhouetted in the doorway to the parlour. ‘The handyman. I dealt with it.’

  Setting her bag down wearily, inhaling the powerful scent of the evening flowers, the jasmine and nicotiana coming in at every window and through the open door behind her, Roxana had been on the point of scolding her. For heaven’s sake. Couldn’t you have told him to wait? But she didn’t. She stared at Ma, in a belted, pale-blue summer dress she hadn’t seen in years, fine tights, the Ferragamo sandals Roxana’s father had bought her for her fiftieth, good as new because almost never worn.

  ‘Ma,’ had been all she said, before she’d stopped.

  ‘Well, I went to the doctor’s first,’ Ma had said, shushing Roxana out through the salotto – had it been dusted? There was a smell of polish – on to the veranda at the back. ‘This morning.’

  She’d wanted to clear a few things up, she had said. Do it on her own: there was no point in just sitting at home fretting over whether she was losing her grip, was there? There were tests.

  They’d both sat down. ‘And?’ Roxana had still been holding her helmet, she had realized. Gently she had set it down beside her, and pulled off her jacket.

  ‘Well, it takes time,’ Ma had said, smoothing the cloth on the little table. Refocusing, Roxana had seen that there was a Martini glass with an olive in it, and a small empty beer bottle.

  ‘I had to offer him something,’ Ma had said, seeing where she was looking. ‘Coming out here, in August. Nice man. The handyman.’

  ‘Right,’ Roxana had said, trying to remember when she’d last seen Ma drink a Martini. Dad had made them once in a while, for special occasions. The bottles must have been gathering dust for a decade. But alcohol didn’t spoil, did it? ‘The doctor?’ she had said. ‘The tests?’

  ‘Well,’ Ma had said comfortably. ‘Like I said, it takes time. They do tests, then do them again, to measure deterioration.’

  Roxana had stare
d at her. So had it taken that day Ma had spent hiding, frightened, in the hall, for her to gather her wits and see what the truth of the matter was? She had imagined Ma getting dressed so carefully, for the visit, and felt a sudden burning shame, mingled with respect. ‘So?’ she had managed.

  ‘He says, he can’t say.’ Violetta Delfino’s eyes had been bright. ‘But right now, it seems I have the appropriate level of – cognition, or something – for a person my age. No evidence of progressive disease – although, of course, he will do the tests again to monitor that. He says, his belief is that I have been depressed.’ Pressing her lips together in an expression familiar to Roxana. ‘I told him, nonsense.’

  ‘Right, Ma,’ Roxana had said, expressionless. She hadn’t known whether to cry or to hug her mother. Neither response, she had guessed, would be greeted with anything but impatience.

  ‘They say the weather’s going to break,’ Ma had said then, getting to her feet. ‘I had a Martini.’ A week, a day ago, the non sequitur would have panicked Roxana. ‘Would you like one?’

  There had been no scent of dinner from the kitchen; things, it seemed, had changed today. ‘Fine,’ Roxana had found herself saying.

  The alcohol had been warm and oily but had tasted surprisingly clean. Roxana had let it burn her throat and as it did so, she’d felt her shoulders drop. Ma hadn’t had another: at least Roxana didn’t have to worry about her turning to drink. The beer bottle had gone.

  Ma had settled herself into her chair, smoothing her dress. She had looked perhaps ten years younger; why, the doctor had asked, hadn’t they done this test months ago? Roxana had supposed it would have always had to be Ma who requested any such test.

  ‘So what did the handyman say?’ Roxana had sat up straight, suddenly flustered and reaching around her for her handbag, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. How did you pay him?’