Dead Season

by Christobel Kent

  ‘Out of what?’

  ‘Out of whatever shit he’s in. Up to his neck.’

  ‘But he’s a good guy,’ said Sandro. ‘That’s what you said.’

  She sighed. ‘What do you know about him? Josef? That he worked here?’ Nodding towards the cinema. ‘That he worked hard, taking the money, projecting the films, sweeping up after, getting the takings to the bank? That he had no one, until he met the girl? That job was the only security he had, the only family, the only home.’

  And now the job was gone, the home was gone. ‘You knew him. You talked to him.’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’m a soft touch.’

  Sandro snorted. Nothing could be further from the impression Liliana generally gave to the outside world.

  ‘The lock-up’s here,’ she went on, eyes distant. ‘He came to my stall for fruit, then now and again I saw him here. He helped me with the crates a time or two. I don’t think people talked to him, he was so clearly a Roma, and usually they come with baggage, family. He was trying to make it on his own.’

  ‘You know he told her he worked in a bank?’

  Liliana’s eyes slid away, her hand moved down to the key in the ignition but she didn’t turn it.

  ‘I – I got some of that, yes. She mentioned it on the stall one day.’

  ‘And you didn’t set her straight?’ Sandro could just picture Liliana, raising an eyebrow, in the middle of throwing oranges into a bag. ‘How did he think he’d get away with it?’

  ‘Look,’ said Liliana, ‘he doesn’t have – friends. Doesn’t have family. Just like her. He loves her. Sometimes people are meant for each other. Sometimes they deserve a break. He’d have told her eventually.’ She frowned fiercely. ‘He had a plan.’

  Sandro remembered Anna saying something of the sort.

  ‘I see.’ Sandro leaned back against the shutter, looking at the Carnevale. ‘So you gave him the benefit of the doubt, then. And now you think she’s better off without him? What kind of shit is it you think he’s up to his neck in, and why?’

  In the Carnevale’s façade a window stood open, the ragged tail of a curtain flapping through it. Sandro shifted his gaze back to Liliana, and he saw her calculating. Judging something about him. She took her hand from the ignition key and leaned back in her seat.

  ‘See that?’ she said, nodding down at the metal shutter he was leaning against.

  He followed her gaze to the deep bright scrape on the metal, and looked back at Liliana.

  ‘Tuesday morning, I come here to find the lock’s been forced. I thought – well. Junkies. People don’t thieve from vegetable lockups. I pulled up the shutter expecting some little scumbag sleeping it off, and there he was. Jumped out at me looking like—’ And she shivered, just a little. ‘Looking like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Like he’d been – been beaten half to death, or hit by a car. Blood in his hair. One hand all broken, and marks on him.’

  ‘Did he tell you what had happened?’

  She shook her head. ‘He tried, but I didn’t really get it. He was shaking so hard, I could hardly understand him. He said he had to get out of sight before they found out. Found him gone. He did say over and over, don’t tell Anna. I’ll sort it out myself, he said, don’t tell her. Keep her out of it.’

  ‘Right.’ Protecting her. That was what Giuli and Luisa had thought.

  ‘He asked me for clothes, and I gave him the old man’s overalls, I keep them in the back. I gave him bananas. He wolfed them down, then he asked me for my mobile.’ Her voice went flat.

  Sandro frowned. ‘You gave him your phone?’

  Liliana looked away. ‘I – no. I kind of flipped out a bit. I thought, oh, that was all he was all along. Small-time rip-off merchant, only chats to me because he wants something, I – I don’t know what got into me. I’d had a bad night, sometimes – this heat. I don’t sleep, thinking.’ Sandro nodded. ‘I got angry,’ she went on, flatly. ‘I told him to get out of there. And then he just ran off.’

  ‘That’s why you haven’t locked up, just now?’

  She shrugged. ‘He might still need somewhere.’

  ‘But you haven’t seen him since?’

  She shook her head.

  There was a silence. Sandro was thinking. ‘Tuesday morning. The bruises – purple, green?’

  Liliana frowned. ‘Purple going yellow.’

  ‘You weren’t here Saturday, were you?’

  ‘The usual,’ she said. ‘Six in the morning, then three in the afternoon putting the stuff away.’

  ‘Anything going on? Here?’

  She shook her head slowly, still frowning.

  ‘Not that I can remember.’

  ‘Nothing unusual?’

  ‘I’d have to think,’ she said, her mouth set. ‘I’ve got to go, Sandro,’ she said. ‘I’ve the stall to set up and I’m running late already.’

  ‘If you remember anything,’ said Sandro, stepping back from the little van’s window as she turned the key and the shrill engine spluttered into life.

  ‘Say hello to Luisa,’ she called as she moved off.

  He watched her disappear around the corner in a blue haze of exhaust, and felt something, a spot of rain on his cheek. Then nothing. He looked up at the purpling sky. Not yet.

  Claudio Brunello, battered and dumped in the African market; Galeotti, his skull fractured, his body half out of his car at the roadside. Josef bruised and bloodstained – what had Liliana said? – as if he’d been hit by a car.

  Suddenly decisive, Sandro turned and hurried towards the Carnevale.

  *

  In the stifling shuttered darkness of her room off the Via della Chiesa, Giuli lay on the bed with barely the will to move. She didn’t even know whether she could get it together to call in sick, but then again, did it really matter? If she didn’t call in, they’d just chalk it up to experience, another mistake, another lazy, backsliding ex-con who couldn’t hack it in the real world, without the drugs.

  If you asked her, she’d have said she hadn’t thought about it at all, not her whole life. Who wanted a baby, this day and age? She hadn’t thought it would feel like this. Slowly she rolled over and faced the wall, pulled her arms in between her thin breasts. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  IT TURNED OUT TO be surprisingly easy to get Carlotta to talk. Almost as if all she’d needed was to be asked. A slight show of surprise, suspicion, then she jumped at the chance.

  The house inside was identical in layout to Ma’s, only the smells were different. She was older, of course, and lonelier. She had a son but he didn’t live with her, hadn’t done so for years, not since he’d married an Abruzzese. No one to cook or clean for, so it was fustier, sourer. A smell of cat. But everything was neat and dusted, and she led Roxana straight on to the back porch.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said immediately with relish, standing with her wiry old arms folded as Roxana squeezed herself on to a chair beside the clothes airer. ‘I saw him all right. Or them, I should say.’ And narrowed her eyes to observe Roxana’s reaction.

  Another one like Ma: all fuddlement and slow steps on the outside, but inside things were working perfectly.

  ‘Them?’

  Carlotta craned her neck to look over into their garden next door. ‘Where’s your mother?’ she asked. ‘How come she doesn’t ask?’

  ‘Oh, Carlotta,’ said Roxana, ‘you know Ma.’

  And the old woman just raised her sharp chin in acknowledgement. They both turned to look out across the garden.

  Carlotta’s little patch was much neater, more cut back than Ma’s. Her son came out to do it once in a while. Three rows of tomatoes growing against the left-hand wall, some sparse flowerbeds edged in decorative terracotta, an abundance of hideous ornaments. Cherubs with watering cans, miniature wooden houses, that kind of thing. But nothing tall, not like Ma’s loquat and banana palm, to block out the world and the view. You could see straight to the
back fence, and beyond it.

  ‘We talking about Tuesday?’ Carlotta said. She leaned on the veranda’s balustrade with both stringy arms. ‘Mid-morning, I heard the doorbell go. So of course I went to the front and looked. Didn’t get much of a look, but I could see his shoulder.’ She frowned. ‘Some kind of boiler suit, he was wearing. Overalls. Too big for him.’

  ‘Like a delivery man?’

  Decisively Carlotta shook her head. ‘More like – a mechanic, kind of thing your Dad would have put on, to tinker with the car.’ She gave Roxana a quick, sly glance. ‘Anyway. His voice. I listened. He was pleading. He sounded—’ She shook her head. ‘Sounded funny.’ She was frowning fiercely.

  ‘Funny?’

  ‘Well. Foreign. And – not normal. I thought – well, drugs, you know.’

  ‘Foreign,’ Roxana said slowly. ‘But you didn’t get a look at him.’

  ‘Oh, I did, later,’ Carlotta said, folding her arms. ‘That’s when I sent him packing.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Roxana said. ‘So what happened, exactly?’

  ‘He stayed at the front door a while, just talking to her in this voice, through the door. Soft, begging her.’ Pursed her lips. ‘Sounded like he knew her. Or knew you.’

  ‘You just listened.’

  Of course she did. Roxana tried to moderate her resentment, thinking of Ma behind her door, frightened. Tried to remind herself that Carlotta was scared, too. Carlotta just shot her a glance that said, What did you want me to do?

  ‘Then he came round the back,’ she said. ‘He disappeared, then came round the back, in the alley. Couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there.’

  Two terrified old women.

  ‘He called Ma by name?’

  ‘I thought he was saying, Signorina Delfino.’

  Roxana inhaled, holding it.

  ‘A small man, dark. Dark eyes. Like a Roma. A gypsy.’ She spoke slowly. Carlotta was staring at her.

  ‘Josef,’ Roxana said.

  He came looking for me. She heard Sandro Cellini’s words: he trusted you. A bad feeling, a worse feeling than the one she’d had when she first saw the smashed back gate, rose in her.

  ‘You said you sent him packing.’

  ‘He was there all day. I heard him.’ Ma had said the same thing, and Roxana had disbelieved her. ‘Making sounds, at the back gate, like he was trying to get through.’

  ‘You didn’t call the police.’

  Carlotta gave her a look – stubborn, suspicious, weary – that conveyed all Roxana needed to know about being a lonely old woman.

  ‘I wanted a look at him,’ she said. ‘That was what I was waiting for. I went to the back of the garden, very quiet. He’d got in, he was inside, watching, crouched down, I think, and he stood up suddenly and he was right there. Face to face.’ Carlotta’s woman’s face was alive at the memory, her old mouth quivering. ‘I shouted at him then, I’m calling the police!’

  ‘He scared you.’

  Carlotta refocused on her, and Roxana saw her relive it. ‘He was – it was his face. It wasn’t even human. Looked like he’d been beaten half to death.’ She pursed her lips. ‘It was a shock.’

  Roxana didn’t say anything, didn’t suggest the man might have needed help. She could hear Carlotta’s angry guilt in her next words. ‘He ran off, then.’ The old woman turned back to her stubbornly. ‘Well, what was I to do?’

  Roxana nodded, not listening. Josef Cynaricz had come to her for help. She looked up. Or had he come after her? Was he a victim, or – had Claudio fought back? There was a connection. Absently she felt in her pockets, thinking, I must tell Sandro Cellini this, where’s that mobile? Then she remembered where it was. Call him now, from the house phone. Or go and get the mobile? What if – what if people had been trying to get hold of her? What people? She could hear Ma’s scornful voice in her head. Ten minutes on the motorino, and she’d have it back in her pocket.

  She stood up. ‘Thanks, Carlotta,’ she said, trying to contain a stupid, pointless panic rising in her, just because she didn’t have her phone. Patted her neighbour’s hand in a belated gesture of pity.

  ‘What about the other one, though?’ the old woman said slyly, detaining her.

  ‘The other one?’

  ‘The one that came after,’ said Carlotta. ‘Came yesterday. The kid. He came looking, too. White – sports shoes. Bright white.’

  White shoes. And into Roxana’s head came the image of a kid in low slung jeans she’d mistaken for a drug dealer. Hopping up and down outside the bank in white trainers.

  *

  Walking up the hill towards Bellosguardo, Sandro cursed himself for an idiot, for not bringing the car. His breath was laboured, and the humidity was intense as he climbed towards the grey-lidded sky. It was a bloody long way.

  Time to think? How could anyone think, in heat like this? He paused to lean against a low wall, and looked back.

  The patchwork of roofs spread out before him, intensely red in the strange, lowering light, and it occurred to Sandro that this was where you would come to see the façade of every church in the city. He ticked them off for a while, waiting for his breath to ease, Santa Maria Novella, Santo Spirito, Santa Croce, took in the aggressively pointed bulk of the new university development on the north of the city, the muddle of light industrial units and pylons where the city dissolved into ugliness at Sesto. Thought of the secret places hidden under the red roofs, the loggias and marble porticoes. The dusty streets around the synagogue, the grimy bars, the dumpsters. The Carnevale.

  Nearly there. Sandro mopped his forehead, pushed off from the wall and doggedly walked on: he had no idea if his heart was up to this, at his age. Never having had any kind of check-up, just assuming that, if there was a weakness there, thirty years of police work would already have finished him off. Did he exercise? If walking very slowly counted. Did he drink? Yes. Smoke? No. But it didn’t always work like that, did it? There were risk factors, of course he knew there were, but even so. Sometimes you got no warning.

  It wasn’t the climb, either. The horrible feeling, hardening to stone somewhere below his ribs, didn’t come from mere exertion of his ageing muscles; he wasn’t frightened of what his heart might do, he was frightened of something else. Risk factors. Did these include climbing on a piece of packing case to peer in at a cracked and filthy window round the side of a derelict porn cinema?

  The street had been empty. Liliana and her little van had disappeared around the corner, leaving no more than a bluish tinge to the air. The Carnevale was boarded up, the fencing smooth and impenetrable, new pine and padlocks and signage with a drawing of an Alsatian. Above the glaring wood, the dirty façade looked even bleaker and uglier than ever; how could it have survived so long? Only the complacency of the city’s surveyors and assessors, the academicians and bureaucrats who refused to allow even a new shutter to be erected, could have allowed this canker of a place. Sandro had skirted the pine boarding, round to the alley – no more than a man’s width – that ran alongside the cinema.

  The flank of the building was big and blind – a characteristic of theatres generally, Sandro acknowledged. A high, almost blank wall with the stinking alley underneath it – and it had stunk. Dog faeces and urine, intensified by the heat and the confined space. Moving along it with extreme reluctance, Sandro had came to a door and stopped. A plain, small door in the blackened wall, and the lock and doorknob were shiny with use. Sandro had taken the single step back that the space allowed. Narrow, featureless and dirty, the door could not have been more banal – but it was something else. It was the real point of entry, it was the secret life of this building. That had been when it had started up inside him, the slow tightening of that obscure and dangerous muscle: fear. He had pushed the door; it had resisted. Of course.

  Further along the alley, something had gleamed on the ground, some stinking liquid, and there had been a pallet propped against the wall. Beyond it, a couple of metres up, he had noticed a small makeshift window of t
he sort inserted illegally all over the city, on the cheap and out of sight, to provide the bare minimum of light and ventilation. Holding his breath, Sandro had moved on.

  Stopping below the small, high, broken window, the pallet at his feet, a feeling of aversion as strong as he had ever experienced had come over Sandro. There was a protruding overflow pipe of some kind to the right of the window, offering itself as a handhold: Sandro had set his foot on the pallet, tested it, reached up and taken hold of the pipe. As he had pulled himself up in the cramped space, the sudden sense of his own sagging weight, his singular uselessness and vulnerability, had pressed in on him like gravity, a choking sensation that he had had to fight to overcome, to continue upwards, inching until his face was there, his arm already aching, the ridiculous old man that he was turning out to be.

  And at first, he had seen nothing anyway. The glass was filthy and behind it all was dark.

  The pane had been cracked and a triangular segment had fallen away. Gingerly Sandro had pushed at it with his free hand, dust on his fingertip, and the old dried putty had given way, the glass moving inwards. He had eased his head sideways so as to see in without blocking the light.

  What was there? Almost nothing. But Sandro had had the terrible sensation of being about to fall, whether backwards or forwards he didn’t know, and of wanting, suddenly, urgently wanting to be back at home with Luisa in his kitchen and not here: the last place he had wanted to be was here, or perhaps worse than here was the next step, to be inside this building against whose wall he was so unwillingly pressed.

  He had glanced into a small, empty room. A mattress on the floor in one corner, the dirty inside of a duvet, thin with age, bundled on it, shadowed and crumpled. Stained: worse than stained. An old cooker that might have come out of a dumpster, askew in one corner. Something on the wall. All up the wall. And the smell.

  Head down now and plodding in the grey heat of the hillside with the rhythmic saw of the cicadas resonating among the trees, Sandro found himself pinching his nostrils against even the memory of the smell he’d left below him in the city. The ammoniac secretions of that alley and something thicker, dirtier, coming up at him from inside the Carnevale. Still climbing towards Bellosguardo, not far now, he heard a voice calling him from higher up; he kept his head down just a moment longer, told himself to keep moving. He had thought that he would vomit, there in the alley, make his own sour contribution to the stench. He had swayed, his grip had loosened a moment on the piece of dirty pipe, his foot had slipped and clattered. But he had not fallen; he hadn’t vomited.