Closing the door behind him, Sandro lifted a hand to Signora Kraskinsky leaning on her folded arms, in the building opposite. She simply pursed her lips in response, and he moved on, wanting to shake his head at her comical misanthropy but thinking better of it.
Down the quiet street towards Santa Croce. Quiet but not silent, behind him Sandro could hear the distant clatter of the furgoni being unloaded at the market of San Ambrogio. The baker talking sleepily behind his shuttered shopfront; he’d be closed by the weekend – August was no time to be sticking your head into a furnace, and who needed bread, in the heat? Ahead, a Filipina in a pink overall hurried around a corner and into the street ahead of him, carrying a bucket filled with cleaning products. Out they came at this hour, the illegals, the immigrant workers who lived in basements and windowless rooms, without so much as a fan.
Like Josef Cynaricz, in the city somewhere, with no one he could trust, scared. Scared of what? Of the police, for a start, regardless of whether he had or hadn’t killed Brunello. Because who would be easier to pin it on, if it turned out he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time?
And could he be scared of Marisa Goldman? She was supposed to have been long gone on some yacht, but was not. Sandro thought of the woman, looking down her long nose at him. Why had she lied?
But then again, if Josef had killed Brunello, battered that handsome cropped head into a pulp in some deranged frenzy – of what? Jealousy of the man’s life, hatred, greed? – not only would he not be the man Anna Niescu had fallen in love with, but he’d have disappeared into some Roma camp hundreds, maybe thousands, of kilometres away, he’d be buried away down in Campania or up in Trieste, across the Brenner and into Austria, or on a boat to Dubrovnik. But he was still here, in the city somewhere; he was looking out for his girl.
She hadn’t been wrong about him: Sandro clung to that. He’d thought Anna Niescu was a kind of holy simpleton when he’d first met her, like one of those country saints, but she wasn’t. She was flesh and blood, and she wasn’t stupid.
Where had he been, since whatever happened on Saturday afternoon? Who would have given him shelter?
Not Anna: he hadn’t asked her to help him, to hide him. He hadn’t contacted her directly. He was protecting her. From what? Not the police, because in fact it wasn’t the police he was afraid of.
The edifice built itself in Sandro’s head: wobbly, imprecise, a lopsided building of a theory, precariously balanced on a single assumption, of Anna’s instinct for a good man.
As he skirted the arcaded golden stone of Santa Croce’s northern flank, in his head Sandro mapped a route. He checked his watch: he had time, too. There were things he wanted to see along the way. He came out into the piazza and slowed as the heat hit him like a wall. Six-thirty-five, and he was sweating, the sweat that comes before the weather breaks. Overhead the sky was low and purplish-grey with cloud, a thick blanket smothering the city. He crossed the piazza – empty but for a couple of motionless figures on the stone benches – in a slow, precise diagonal, heading for the newspaper stand on the far corner.
Three streets fanned out from the Piazza Santa Croce’s western side, beyond them and overhead stood the crenulated tower of the Palazzo Communale, and there was something faintly surreal about the perspective, something puzzling to the eye in this heat. As he walked – almost swam in the terrible, humid air – in the wide empty space under the lidded sky, Sandro was for a moment assailed by the most awful feeling of being alone. And not only alone, but walking into a day he might never walk out of, walking to his own death, alone. The feeling was so powerful that if he hadn’t been more than halfway across, he might almost have turned and gone back, home to Luisa still mounded under the covers, and reached under for her warm hand, and stayed there.
But his feet continued as if he had no say in the matter, one in front of the other, and then the newspaper stand was in view and he could even read the day’s headlines on the placard the edicolaio was kneeling to fit into its wire frame.
ESTATE AGENT SLAIN IN BEAUTY SPOT
LOCAL MAN SOUGHT
CRIME RATE A SCANDAL, COUNCILLOR SAYS
His brain focused on the headlines, his feet kept moving and the streets leading off the square at an angle somehow regularized themselves. Sandro felt as though he had managed to fight off a kind of madness by purely mechanical means. By keeping on walking. At the edicola he reached over, the coin ready in his hand, and picked up an early edition of La Nazione. He crossed the road, his eyes on the paper.
The story was on the front page. He stopped. Someone hooted, someone else shouted. Sandro looked up, blinked, saw a guy on a motorino shaking his fist, and walked on. Reaching the pavement, he leaned against the nearest wall.
He hadn’t even read the words: the photograph had done it. A sleek Maserati – not quite so sleek as when he’d last seen it parked up under the city wall in San Niccolo. It was pictured at the side of what looked like a country lane, the low, square shape of a farmhouse some way off and out of focus, a verge of long, dry grass and seedheads, a neatly trimmed mulberry tree. And a vicious dent in the rear-wheel arch, very much as if someone had slammed it with a tyre lever. The personalized number plate: GALIMM.
Beside the open driver’s door, a forensics nylon tarpaulin covered an elongated, body-sized shape, almost but not quite out of the car. A dark stain not quite covered by the sheet, where the tarmac met the summer verge. And one shoe.
Slowly, Sandro pushed himself away from the wall, folded the paper and stuck it in his battered briefcase. He took the nearest exit from the piazza, which turned out to be the Borgo de’ Greci, then turned off to the left down a narrower street whose name he didn’t know. His general direction was fine, for the moment anyway, he was heading for the Carnevale, even if all thoughts as to what he might do when he got there had temporarily deserted him.
That little, sharp-faced, chiselling estate agent, Galeotti, impatient while they looked around the flat in San Niccolo. For a brief, mad moment Sandro thought, does this mean we don’t get a deal on that place? The man Sandro hadn’t trusted for a minute, with his goatee and his constant glancing at his watch and his flash car. Flash car: the keys to the flat in Via del Lazaretto, Sandro recalled instantly, had had a Ferrari fob, but he already knew, he had known from his first glance at the photograph, that when Luisa spoke to her old school friend in the condominium, she’d confirm as much. That Galeotti Immobiliare was the agency selling the Via del Lazaretto flat.
Coffee: that was what Sandro’s body instructed him. Before you open that newspaper again, you need a kick-start. He passed at least three bars that were shuttered up, scraps of paper posted on their doors carrying cheerful messages about when the direzione would be back from the seaside, and by the time he found one that was open, he was a street away from the Via dei Saponai, the bank and the Carnevale.
A dim little place under an archway, a tiny barman with a big handlebar moustache whom Sandro vaguely recognized: Orlando, was that the name? He didn’t ask, because if he knew Orlando from somewhere, then Orlando might know him. If they didn’t trust you when you were a policeman, they trusted you even less when you’d been kicked off the force. He got a coffee – lungho macchiato, he specified after a brief struggle with his conscience; less coffee, Luisa had said, think of your heart, consider a camomile now and then – and moved off to one of a handful of high, zinc-topped tables. He downed the coffee in one and when it kicked in, he felt the smooth acceleration behind his chest wall as something entirely health-giving and pleasurable.
Life was too short.
He hadn’t liked the estate agent, he hadn’t trusted him, but the sight of the end of a man’s life, even that of a venal, greedy man with a fussy little beard, was a sad thing. It couldn’t help but turn your mind to how it would look when it was your turn.
Claudio Brunello’s death hadn’t been any prettier. He’d been chucked like a bit of rubbish over a steel crash barrier to lie among fast-food wrap
pers in the dirt. That had been different, though. It came to Sandro that he’d never believed that the African market was where Brunello had died. It didn’t smell like it, didn’t feel like it, and after thirty years’ experience, you knew. This – and he opened the paper, shook it flat, looked at another photograph – this crime scene held the traces of this man’s last moments. The battered rear end of his car, his body half out of its seat. It was clear where Galeotti had died. But where had Brunello’s last moments come? It mattered. Not just to find his killer, but to reconstruct the man, the manner of his death, to find out why.
They were talking, at the bar: Orlando with a squat man in a road sweeper’s fluorescent overalls with his back to Sandro. About the weather, first.
‘My luck,’ the barman was saying, ‘looks like it’s going to break today, you only have to look at the sky. And I’m closing up tomorrow.’
Was tomorrow Saturday? It was. A week since Brunello was killed.
‘Looks like the end of the world,’ said the road sweeper, nodding out through the glass door. He lifted a small glass of something dark red to his lips and tipped his head back.
And that was what it had felt like to Sandro, crossing the endless suffocating expanse of the Piazza Santa Croce as overhead an apocalyptic sky pressed down on him. Turning dark at dawn instead of light.
He looked back at the paper again. Bellosguardo, it said; that was where the man had been found. Not out in some country village. And Bellosguardo was where Sandro was going to meet Pietro – with a little detour to the Carnevale on the way.
LOCAL MAN SOUGHT. Sandro scanned the piece – a double-page spread – in search of the sub-headline, found it, but was not much the wiser. Police have identified a suspect known to have been in the immediate vicinity at the time of the killing. The man is local to the area and has a previous history of violent crime. His name will be released later today. Sandro stared.
Could that mean Josef? Was he a local man? Previous history of violent crime – that would still be speculation, wouldn’t it, about Claudio Brunello’s murder? Was that what Pietro was thinking? He hadn’t said that last night.
He tucked the paper under his arm and slapped his coin on the bar, turning to leave.
‘Not many going to cry over the loss of Galeotti,’ said Orlando, and Sandro stopped. He removed the newspaper from under his arm and held it with one hand, tapping it in the open palm of the other.
‘No?’ he said mildly. Frowned down at the headline.
‘He was a crook,’ Orlando said. He folded his short, weathered arms across his apron and eyed Sandro.
‘You knew him?’ Sandro asked.
Orlando gave a faint shrug. ‘A lot of people did,’ he said.
‘I suppose I did, too,’ Sandro replied.
‘Well, then,’ Orlando said. ‘You can tell.’
‘A customer,’ Sandro said.
‘Now and then.’ Orlando was eyeing him narrowly now, and Sandro knew when to change tack.
‘It’s the way of the world,’ he said. ‘Bankers, estate agents. It’s the working man who pays.’ Sandro meant it as a vague gesture towards solidarity that might prompt information, but the barman seemed to take it differently.
‘Galeotti was more of a crook than most.’ Orlando turned his head a little to one side, as if listening for something. ‘And what have bankers got to do with anything?’
Sandro shrugged, watching him.
The barman set wrinkled elbows on the bar. ‘Claudio Brunello wasn’t a crook. If that’s who you mean. Drank his coffee in here every morning, macchiato in vetro and a budino, wouldn’t have anything else if there were no budini.’
There was a pause, in which they both reflected on Claudio Brunello’s taste in breakfast, his restraint, his discriminating tastes.
‘A good man, didn’t line his own pocket, always left a few centesimi on the bar. I’ve seen the Guardia in that bank of his – and I’ve seen you. Asking questions. A good man, whatever they say.’
How, wondered Sandro, did we get on to Brunello? ‘No,’ he said, ‘I meant – I meant the big guys, the Banca d’Italia, those American banks. I didn’t mean – the Toscana Provinciale’s not going to bring the sky down on us all, is it? Small-time stuff.’
The barman was watching him.
‘Did he know Galeotti?’ Sandro asked. ‘Claudio Brunello, I mean?’
The moustache turned down. ‘Wouldn’t have given him the time of day,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have thought.’ He raised a hand to the road sweeper, trudging out through the door. ‘See you in September,’ he said.
The barman turned back to Sandro; his face seemed somehow to have smoothed, his expression now bland and incurious.
‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.’ And he touched a thumb to his lower lip, superstitiously.
Sandro nodded, watching him as he took Sandro’s cup and stacked it in the dishwasher basket behind the bar. Sandro slid the road sweeper’s sticky shot glass along the bar top, and Orlando took that too, and Sandro headed for the door once more.
‘He was a crook, though, dead or not,’ said Orlando to his back, and in the doorway, feeling the heat outside, Sandro paused.
Behind him, Orlando spoke deliberately. ‘Galeotti had some big deal going down lately. A lot of money involved. And then he gets mugged and killed? Some coincidence.’ And then turned his back, the conversation finally over.
For a moment Sandro stayed there in the doorway. Something had happened to the air, the light. For a moment, in the narrow street, he didn’t recognize it, then he understood that it had been lightning.
Sandro stepped off the pavement, listening for thunder, to gauge the storm’s proximity. None came. To his left was the Via dei Saponai, and the bank.
So Galeotti’d had a big deal going down. Not the flat in San Niccolo; not the apartment in the Via del Lazaretto: they’d be small enough potatoes. Who’d kill a man over a run-down apartment in a condo in Firenze Sud? Unless the secret it was being loaned out for was a big one.
And he went the other way, towards the crumbling brick façade of the church, knowing that the alley beyond it would lead him to the Carnevale. And it was as he turned into the alley that he heard it, an ominous low rumble somewhere far off to the north-west, and over the church the sky darkened perceptibly.
From somewhere a cool breeze came, curling round his ankles, blowing dust in the gutters, then it was gone. Ahead of him was the Carnevale, boarded up in bright pine, half the letters of its vertical neon name already dismantled: ‘—nevale’, it read. Sandro stopped. It was a good-sized building, four storeys, a row of five blind, dirty windows. And as he stared Sandro found himself thinking of those paltry hundred or so euros Josef Cynaricz banked every week and imagining the dusty rooms behind that blind façade.
What was it that Roxana Delfino had said? What had the builder told her, putting up the hoarding? Not a pretty sight, in there. There was no sign of any activity today, but Sandro felt a strange reluctance to go any closer. And then he nearly jumped out of his skin as a steel shutter rattled up, shockingly loud, at the foot of one of the buildings between him and the Carnevale. As he watched, a small, two-stroke Ape van of the kind used to transport almost anything almost anywhere in his benighted, low-tech country, edged out, neatly reversing to face him in the narrow alley. Sandro peered through the dusty windscreen, trying to make out who was driving – and then she jumped out. It was Liliana, from the vegetable stall, and she gave him a wary glance on her way round to the back of the van. Sandro hurried towards her, ridiculously pleased to find her here.
Seeing him approach, she stopped, in the middle of fastening down some crates of zucchini-flowers, the delicate furled petals, yellow tinged with green, in neat rows.
‘Liliana,’ he said, and she raised an eyebrow.
‘Sandro Cellini,’ she said. ‘How’s Luisa?’ Everyone always asked him that.
‘She’s good,’ he said.
&nbs
p; Beyond Liliana, who stood examining him curiously with folded arms, was the cinema’s blackened, ugly façade, waiting for him. It was as though fate had put Liliana between him and the horrible old place. Only he didn’t believe in fate.
‘Listen,’ he said. She cocked her head. ‘You know little Anna, right? Who works at the Loggiata. Little dark-haired Anna, who’s pregnant? Likes her oranges.’
‘I know her.’ Liliana’s expression darkened a shade. ‘Sweet kid.’
‘And—’ He hesitated. ‘You know her guy. Josef.’ She stiffened, just perceptibly. He persisted. ‘You know he’s disappeared, then?’ Liliana pursed her lips.
‘Disappeared,’ she said. ‘Right.’ Giving nothing away.
‘I’m trying to find him for her. I’m a private detective now, you knew that, right?’
‘I knew that,’ said Liliana, with the faintest sympathetic edge to her voice.
‘There are people,’ said Sandro cautiously, ‘people who think she’s better off without him.’
Liliana gave him a quick, hard look before turning away abruptly, reaching up for the roll-down shutter to her lock-up. Following the movement, Sandro saw the flash of a big shiny padlock and, as the shutter came down, a broad scrape across the articulated metal slats above the lock. He noticed that although she pulled the shutter down, she didn’t secure it.
‘That could be true,’ she said. ‘All things considered. But that doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy.’
Sandro took a step to the side, leaned down to peer behind her at the shutter again.
‘Have you seen him?’ he asked quietly. ‘You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’
Liliana stood, and tugged at the door of the Ape. She climbed inside, but left the driver’s door open. She’d had a husband once. He helped on the stall. An old drunk; everyone thought she was well rid of him when he died, everyone except Liliana. She kept going without him, as you do.
‘You can’t tell her,’ she said, steely. ‘If I tell you. He said, look after her. Keep her out of it.’
Dead Season Page 29