Yes.
‘I went to the Pizzeria Venere,’ said Vesna, and for a moment he didn’t understand what she was talking about. ‘Where Calzaghe sent her.’ She raised her head, as if even the mention of her boss’s name was enough to bring him to the door.
‘Yes,’ said Sandro, intent now. ‘Yes.’
‘A wine shop and a kitchen shop,’ she said. ‘The man in the wine shop knew who I was talking about, right away. The dead woman with red hair. Everyone in this town knows. Only he said he hadn’t seen her, not on Monday morning nor any other time. He was the kind to have run straight to the police, too, if he had. Highlight of his week, it would have been.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Sandro knew the type. ‘So she went to the kitchen shop?’ He scratched his head, mystified, and caught a gleam in Vesna’s eye.
‘Not so much kitchen as electricals,’ she said carefully.
‘Ah.’ A picture formed itself in Sandro’s mind of the standard provincial kitchen-cum-electrical shop – alarm clocks, irons, answerphones – and he remembered pulling over yesterday morning, on his way back from observing the insurance claimant. Was it only yesterday? Pulling over and parking up on the edge of the Isolotto, where an electrical shop sat alongside a dry cleaner’s, all quite normal, all quite innocuous, the domestic services provided to ordinary, decent law-abiding citizens everywhere. A possibility suggested itself. But he waited for Vesna to tell it her way.
‘There was an old woman in there at first, she said she didn’t know anything. A bit fuddled – I don’t think she was quite all there. But I kept saying, “A red-headed woman, who was in the newspapers,” and then a customer came in, a tourist, and the woman knew what he’d come for because she just said, “He’ll be back in a minute, you have to deal with him. With my grandson, it has to be done on the computer,” she said. Because she didn’t know anything about computers.’ Sandro nodded, concentrating on keeping up as the chambermaid talked without pause, knowing with ever greater certainty where she was headed.
‘So I hung around,’ Vesna went on, as diligent as a rookie police officer. ‘Waiting behind the microwaves. I wanted a look at the grandson. And when he came, and I saw what the tourist wanted him for, I knew.’
‘Yes,’ Sandro said. The same thing as Flavia had gone for, but where was it now?
‘She’d have had to go back to the hotel and get her ID card, you see, there’s a lot of paperwork involved nowadays. You need a document, you need your tax code, it’s all done on the computer. When I got mine – well, that was before all the terrorist stuff came in.’ And she raised her head and looked him in the eye, knowing he knew.
‘A SIM card,’ he said.
‘A prepaid mobile, and a SIM,’ Vesna said, raising her hand to her mouth to suppress the nervous, inappropriate smile coming to her lips. ‘These days you can buy them in all sorts of places, and the electrical shop sells them. I asked the grandson, and he remembered, straight away. He must have been the only person in the town who didn’t know the red-headed woman had committed suicide.’ Her expression was grave. ‘He seemed a nice boy. He was so shocked.’
There was a sound from beyond the dining-room door so faint he hardly registered it. But Vesna did, and she paled in recognition.
‘Calzaghe,’ she said, lifting the tray in panic.
‘So she went looking for a phone,’ Sandro said, lifting a hand to detain her, just one more moment. ‘Because she’d left hers at home? But there was no phone, was there? In the room, after she died?’
‘No,’ said Vesna, eyes fixed on the room behind him, then with an effort shifted to meet his eyes. ‘Because she didn’t buy it. They told her about the registration with the authorities, the need for identification, and she said she didn’t have it on her.’ Vesna swallowed. ‘She didn’t come back. He said … the boy … that happens sometimes.’
People panic, they don’t want to go through all the paperwork.
‘There was something else,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think of it before, I hardly noticed it. There was something. On her hand—’
Why had she left the mobile behind? Had she just forgotten it? If she needed to make a call, why hadn’t she used the hotel switchboard?
‘She had a phone, at home. She could have brought it with her.’ Sandro was more or less talking to himself now, but looking up he registered that Vesna’s anxiety was still focused on the doorway behind him. He turned and stepped ahead of her through it, and there in the dining room stood a fat man of about his own age with small, suspicious eyes and an unmistakable air of hostility.
*
‘Caro.’ Luisa spoke to the answerphone uncertainly. Should she send a text message instead? They always seemed so insufficient, terse: she was too old, that was the truth of it. She needed the spoken word. ‘I saw Pietro, I saw him – well, it’s hard to explain. He said it was a covert operation but – oh, damn. I suppose you’re driving. I need to talk to you. Are you driving? I hope you’re on the way home.’
She was rambling now. Cut it short.
‘Maria Rosselli came by the shop this afternoon, with the baby. She asked when you’d be back and I said before it was dark. Anyway, I’m home now. I left early.’
She clicked the phone off. The apartment was cool and silent around her: she needed to get something on for dinner.
No need to go into it all, the whys and the wherefores, not on an answerphone. Sandro was unreliable enough at checking his messages, anyway.
Pietro had walked her back, dutifully, like a stranger in his jeans as they came through the sunny, crowded Piazza della Repubblica. ‘I’m trying,’ he’d said, after long minutes’ silence. ‘I’m trying not to be too heavy-handed. But it’s a dangerous world out there.’
Did all fathers think the world was too dangerous for their daughters? Perhaps all policemen did. ‘Chiara was tied up with this Frazione, too,’ he’d said. ‘You knew that, didn’t you? I don’t know if this guy’s connected with them, even.’
‘I think he might be older than her,’ Luisa had said, slowly: Giancarlo hadn’t said it in so many words, but it felt like the truth to her.
They’d reached the Orsanmichele, both of them turning down the side of it, beckoned by the quiet and stillness in the tall shadow of its soft sandstone façade. With its white marble cornicing, its recesses lined in blue with silver stars, a market converted to a church, it was probably Luisa’s favourite building in the city, too delicately pretty almost to be Florentine. It didn’t seem to belong to the history of bloodshed and power struggles and men. They’d stopped walking.
‘Older?’ Pietro’s voice had been dangerously quiet.
‘Just an impression I have,’ she’d said, realizing that she’d probably said too much already.
‘I don’t like it,’ he’d answered, his voice ragged. ‘I don’t like the boyfriend – the older boyfriend, if that’s what he is – and I don’t like the politics. The Frazione – plenty of people want rid of it. I don’t want her associated – say a demonstration turns nasty? There can be violence. I don’t want her in trouble.’ His voice had risen.
‘But it’s democracy,’ Luisa had said, surprising herself. She’d never thought she had a political bone in her body. ‘It’s the young. You can’t stop them rebelling. It’s all peaceful demonstration anyway, isn’t it?’ She realized she’d had exactly the same conversation with Sandro, only Pietro seemed to have more information. And more than he was telling her, too.
‘Do they know who’s running their Frazione? Do they?’
‘Do you?’
He’d subsided. ‘I can’t talk about it,’ he’d said. ‘I – it’s work.’
‘Do you know something about Rosselli?’ she’d said. ‘Is that what you’ve been working on? Is that why – why—?’ Why you’ve kept away, was what Luisa wanted to say, from your oldest friend?
Pietro had shaken his head, tight-lipped. ‘Not Rosselli,’ he’d said. ‘They haven’t – no one’s got anything on Rosselli as far as I k
now. But Bastone? The lawyer. Do they think he fought his way up from nothing? Chiara calls the police corrupt. His family owns some nice building land, a sizeable parcel down near Scandicci, as a matter of fact.’ And he looked at her. ‘A sale is being negotiated. I’ve spent a bit of time at the land registry lately.’
Where the mall was being built. Dimly she remembered the couple in the bar talking about Rosselli’s collapse, the man saying something about backhanders. Bastone. Sandro had thought him nothing more than a bumbler, a hopeless idealist, out of his depth.
Luisa had tried to get more out of Pietro then but he wouldn’t elaborate, and seeing him there, uneasy in his ill-fitting jeans, looking around as if he was being watched, she had let him go.
They’d been looking at her askance in the shop even before Maria Rosselli turned up. She hadn’t been a minute beyond the hour for lunch, but truthfully her mind hadn’t been on the job after meeting Pietro. Gazing out of the window, fighting to make sense of it, she’d tried to picture him, this older man Chiara might have been drawn to, this authority figure. Chiara had always been such a determined little thing, it had pained Luisa to think of her subdued by some – some controlling arsehole.
Language. What had got into her?
No, Maria Rosselli had just been the last straw. Parking what she called the perambulator in the busy street without a backward glance and marching her strong-boned features into the shop, looking at the colour-coordinated rails and high heels with incredulity.
‘Have you heard from them?’ she’d barked without preamble, and at the sound Beppe had appeared at the top of the stairs, startled.
Maria seemed to have aged ten years since she’d had sole charge of the child, and to have grown angrier.
‘You can’t leave the baby out there,’ Luisa had said.
‘Well, I can’t bring him in here, can I?’ Maria had said, looking around herself with a kind of contemptuous disbelief. And it was true. Even if the great, ungainly, sprung baby carriage would have fitted through the glass doors, it would have looked as out of place as a spaceship inside the shop.
At the till Giusy had made an ushering gesture: they’d gone outside.
The baby had been asleep, but judging by his flush and the dried tears on his fat cheeks, it had been a struggle. Maria Rosselli had followed Luisa’s gaze impatiently.
‘Obstinate,’ she’d said. ‘Like his mother. And look where that got her.’
Giusy had stuck her head round the door then. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Beppe says, Why don’t you head home?’
Luisa had stared at her, taken aback. Affronted even.
Giusy had given her a meaningful glance. ‘We can manage.’ And then a quick glance at Maria Rosselli, telling Luisa, Get her out of here. Luisa had looked from Giusy to Maria Rosselli, but it had been the baby, at whom she did not look again, that had done it. How could she have left him to this woman’s tender mercies?
‘All right,’ she’d said, and Giusy’s head withdrew. Then to Maria Rosselli, ‘Perhaps you’d walk back with me?’ Maria Rosselli had looked at her with haughty suspicion. ‘As we’ve both been abandoned.’ And before the woman could have taken umbrage at that, Luisa added, ‘I’ll get my bag.’
They had walked in silence for at least half the way, side by side in stately progress. You had to walk in the street with such a baby carriage: it was too wide for the pavements. It had seemed to Luisa entirely typical of Maria Rosselli to refuse to make any concessions in the matter. A small electric bus had trundled patiently behind them the length of the Via del Corso without even a toot.
In the pram between them the baby had slept on, despite the jouncing of the springs on the paving slabs. A number of questions had occurred to Luisa as they’d walked: she’d dismissed each of them in turn. Who will look after the baby? Will Niccolò find another woman? Or will you, Maria, move in with him? But they had all seemed to suggest an answer that would only seal the poor child’s fate.
‘Carlo Bastone,’ she’d said, instead. ‘Have you known him all his life?’
Maria Rosselli had stopped walking, and Luisa had realized with satisfaction that she’d succeeded in surprising her. ‘Yes,’ she had said warily. ‘He was at school with Niccolò.’
‘So he came to the house? You – you approved of their friendship?’
Still wary, Maria Rosselli had shrugged. Tightened her grip on the pram’s handle and resumed walking.
‘He wasn’t a particularly intelligent child,’ she’d said. ‘Not like Niccolò. I felt sorry for him.’
Luisa had found it hard to believe that Maria Rosselli had ever felt pity in her life. They’d arrived now in the sunlit expanse of the Piazza Santa Croce, pigeons strutting around the stone benches, the frescoed façades of the south side in the shade. One bench sat empty in the sun a hundred metres from them.
‘Shall we sit down?’ she’d suggested reluctantly. Maria Rosselli had pursed her lips, but sat.
‘Is he married?’ Luisa had asked. ‘The lawyer, I mean?’ She couldn’t have said why she wanted to know, only that an unmarried man had no checks on him, no woman to moderate him. Would Rosselli – would the Frazione – survive with Flavia gone?
Maria Rosselli had looked at her with contempt. ‘No,’ she said. ‘At least he had sense enough for that. I don’t suppose any decent woman would have him anyway.’ Luisa had wondered how she’d define decent: she herself had only been able to conjure up the image of an iron-jawed matriarch on her hands and knees, scrubbing.
She’d sighed. Get to the point. ‘His family was wealthy?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Maria Rosselli had said. ‘Very well off. But of course I wasn’t impressed by his family.’
I bet you weren’t, Luisa had thought, getting the picture. She would allow her bespectacled son a single friend, the class’s other misfit, someone she could look down on despite his money. Condescension, of course, might be confused with pity but was not the same thing. Sandro said she’d barged into Bastone’s office as if she owned the place.
‘You were widowed so young,’ she had said, changing tack. ‘It must have been difficult.’
‘My husband was always an invalid,’ Maria Rosselli had said stiffly. ‘My life was never easy. But we managed.’
‘There was never any difficulty – with Niccolò’s best friend being from a privileged background?’
Maria Rosselli’s mouth had turned down. ‘None at all,’ she’d said. ‘My son can acquit himself in any company. If you ask me, Carlo was envious of Niccolò, not the other way around. I’m sure you know how that is in those friendships? One person simply wishes to become the other, wants everything they have.’
Such as? Luisa wanted to ask but the woman had carried on. ‘And Carlo’s family were not of that vulgar kind, that spends freely.’
Right, Luisa had thought. Tightwads, then.
And suddenly she’d had enough of this lot, the Florentine reserve, the chilly, closed-off snobbishness of Maria Rosselli and, no doubt, Carlo Bastone’s miserly landowner family too. She had stolen another glance at the sleeping child, without whose existence she’d happily never have exchanged another word with either Rosselli. They were tough, weren’t they, babies? They could survive all sorts, that’s what people said. She had sat, looking down at the golden sleeping face … and looking at its features the same thought had come to her that she’d had the day before, only more insistent this time.
‘It’s his, you know.’ Maria Rosselli’s harsh voice had broken in on her, as if its owner had read her mind. Luisa had looked from the child to his grandmother. ‘Niccolò’s the father. I know what you’re thinking. But it’s in the file.’
‘In the file?’ Luisa had found herself at a loss: she could only repeat the horrible old woman’s words.
‘In the medical file. They had to crosscheck his DNA to rule out … some syndrome or other. When he was just born.’
‘Well,’ Luisa had said, repelled. ‘I suppose that’s useful info
rmation.’
The other woman had said nothing more and abruptly Luisa had got up and brought their encounter to a close. ‘I’ll let you know,’ she’d said, glancing down at Maria Rosselli’s set face and noting something new in the stone-grey eyes looking up at her – an ebbing of that ferocious, hostile certainty and the beginnings of something that might be fear. ‘When Sandro calls.’
The apartment was cooler now and Luisa moved through the rooms, opening windows, letting in the ripe smells of Santa Croce’s restaurants and dumpsters, along with the warmer air of the streets. She was filling the coffee pot, to distract herself, when the house phone rang.
She knew before he spoke that it would be Sandro, the only person in Italy, and possibly the world, who still believed in the landline.
‘You were right,’ he said, and her heart filled at the sound of his weary, familiar voice. ‘I was driving. We’re on our way home.’
*
Slowly Enzo walked down the alley that led from the Frazione’s offices to the Via Sant’Agostino. Behind him Carlo Bastone was still in there, talking among the ransacked filing cabinets and empty desks to three policemen who stood around him like sentries: from they way they’d gone on, Enzo had thought for a moment that they might detain them both. He took deep breaths.
The alley stank. It had never bothered Enzo before, he was accustomed to the smells of the city. But this evening, as the sky faded overhead, the day’s heat seemed to be concentrated in the narrow space, and the staleness of the air was suffocating. He increased his pace, resisted breaking into a run. How would that look, if the police officers emerged and saw him pelting like a pickpocket for the Via Sant’Agostino?
On the corner he stopped. A tall man in a suit and tie stood against a wall opposite with his arms folded, a windowless wall that stretched between a bakery and the fag-puffing neon-jacketed drivers outside the ambulance post, the misericordia. There was graffiti behind the man. Frazione = Merda. Frazione = Shit.
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