Dead Season

by Christobel Kent

  Anna Niescu: there was a limit to Luisa’s power over the unborn. Giuli: she had to trust that the girl – the woman – was strong enough, and clever enough, to deal with the news she’d received, and to manage a bit of love in her life. But Sandro: that was another matter altogether.

  And it was back, the wind, gusting up the street, gathering strength, sandblasting her with dirt from the street, forcing her to tug down her skirt. Luisa turned into it, feeling it pull at her, behind her something crashed to the ground and then the wind was gone again and her hair fell back into place.

  Anna; Giuli. They were the young, they would have to manage. But Sandro. She’d been trying to tell herself this case was just a missing fiancé, but it wasn’t. A man was dead. A husband, a father, beaten to death and dumped.

  She had trained herself during Sandro’s thirty years in the Polizia dello Stato to assume that he was safe. To rationalize: he was thorough, he was careful, he had good reflexes. He would come home.

  Until he didn’t.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  DASHA HEARD SOMETHING FALL from the scaffolding opposite the loggia and leaned out further. The wind excited her: let the whole place blow down, she thought. A bucket that had been used to mix plaster had blown off and was dangling from a shred of frayed rope.

  She was looking out for him. She knew he’d come, sooner or later. He’d been there yesterday and the day before, but Dasha wasn’t going to tell anyone. Her own father had been a violent alcoholic who used to sleep in the street outside their apartment block when her mother threw him out. They would step around him on the way to school.

  You’ll be fine, she wanted to say to Anna Niescu, you’ll toughen up, like the rest of us. The old woman’ll keep you on, find you some cot a friend of hers is throwing out. You’ll be fine without him. She squeezed her eyes shut, thinking about what kind of life that would be, for Anna, for the child. There was worse, out there; the Loggiata was a roof over her head at least. She opened her eyes and looked back down.

  The street below held a line of cars, dusted with pollen and something else sticky that came off the lime trees in an adjoining walled garden. A walled garden, an alley, a row of blue dumpsters, overflowing as they awaited the morning’s collection. That’s where he would hide, coming to find Anna. She’d thought of chucking a bucket of water over him, as you would a cat, only something’d stopped her. Didn’t want him to know she’d seen him, although she had, three times: she’d almost told the girl, Giuli, whose dog-eared card she fingered in her pocket from time to time, only then she’d decided against it. Softer than she looked, with her boyfriend and her job.

  How long would he keep on coming back? In the end, he’d give up and disappear, off to find an easier life. Or someone would get him. Whoever was after him would get him and it would all be a whole lot simpler. Let her just think he’s done a runner. Simpler.

  They were all on his side, weren’t they? These people coming looking, detectives and that. They all thought they knew what was best for Anna, they wanted to believe in her fiancé, they wanted a happy ending. But what if they’d got it wrong?

  He wasn’t coming today. Maybe it was all over already. Dasha turned her back on the street, perfectly cool. She didn’t feel the heat, that was what came of being born in the Caucasus; like a lizard, you just soaked up the heat, after a winter on those plains. She could hear Anna, singing breathlessly inside, her little lungs squeezed up inside her so she could barely speak any more. Then there was another noise, a tinkle, a bell or an alarm. She came to the glass door and pushed it open.

  ‘All right?’ she said, and the girl’s lips stopped moving. She seemed dazed with something, sleeplessness perhaps. Dasha had heard her moving about, unable to settle, until the early hours. Now she had a hand in her pocket, as if she’d just put something away, and there was a flush on her cheek.

  ‘Yes, all right?’ Anna repeated the words back to her, the other hand moving to her stomach. ‘All right. Just need a lie-down, for a bit.’

  *

  Forcing herself to take things one at a time Roxana called Cellini from the home phone twice, and twice found his line engaged. She left a message. She could hear how it sounded, too: crazy old ladies with nothing better to do than imagine intruders. She tried to sound considered, thoughtful.

  I think it was Josef; I think he’d come to find me but I don’t know why. Serves me right for having my name and address in the book, I suppose. And paused, as if his answerphone might be in a position to reassure her, No, don’t worry. And then someone else came, after him. Maybe – and she heard her voice falter – Maybe he was looking for him. Carlotta said he wore white trainers. The second guy.

  She went through to the back and they turned towards her in mid-conversation as if she was an intruder, Ma amused, Carlotta peering across her, the Persian between them on the fence even less welcoming, its tail fiercely upright.

  ‘Ma,’ she said warily, ‘I think you should get that handyman back out here. There’s so much needs doing.’

  The two old women exchanged a look. ‘Fine,’ said Ma comfortably. ‘He’s a nice young man. I don’t mind.’

  ‘Today,’ said Roxana.

  Climbing on to the motorino, Roxana told herself, that would do it, a handyman on the premises would surely deter this – this guy in the white trainers, whoever he was. Could he be after Josef? Wasn’t she being – hysterical? Some feral kid, that’d be all. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to exaggerate the danger. They’d be all right; she wouldn’t be gone long.

  And she needed her phone.

  The Via Senese was choked with cars heading the other way, south to the seaside. Friday: she could see anxious faces hunched over steering wheels as the holidaymakers peered up at the dark sky. The storm was coming down from the Alps, chasing them. If there was one thing worse, they were thinking, than boiling to death in the city in August, it was getting to the beach just as the weather broke.

  She left the Vespa carelessly in the street outside the bank. The closer to the centre she’d come, the emptier it seemed, Roxana’s sometimes the only vehicle in the street, the bar she’d lunched in days ago shuttered up. It didn’t mean the traffic wardens had gone too, but Roxana didn’t plan on being inside too long. A wind had got up, a weird mixture of scalding Saharan gusts and colder air sucked up from somewhere else, and for a moment Roxana had a vision of some great massing swirl of air currents overhead, portending disaster.

  She punched in the access code at the side door without thinking, only in the pause while she waited for it to work did she wonder whether the numbers might have been changed already. She was surprised by the exhilaration she felt at the thought. And then the muted buzz indicated that the code had been accepted and the door slid back and, with only a moment’s hesitation, Roxana went inside.

  It was as if the place was already abandoned, as derelict as the Carnevale: a musty smell, as from an old cellar or the rowing club’s boat house as you passed, a whiff of the river. Somebody had been back, after they’d left. There was a strip of plastic tape across the door to Claudio’s office. Roxana peered over it.

  Empty shelves, already gathering dust. The desk was still there, lonely at the centre of the room, and the computer.

  Roxana had a sudden, powerful sense that she shouldn’t be there. She took a hasty step backwards, away from the open doorway, and for a second she couldn’t remember why she was there. The phone: and then she struggled to remember where she would find it. Not Ma losing her marbles, this time; Roxana had a glimpse of what that kind of confusion must feel like. Pull yourself together.

  She threaded past the empty workstations. When she’d started at the bank, there’d been a couple of other tellers on a job-share, half the week each, and a part-time secretary. It had all dwindled without her noticing. She pushed open the door to the tiny kitchen, the only bright space in the bank with its frosted window facing south, a little patch of normality. The electric ring, the microwav
e, the coffee machine. A socket, and in it the charger to her phone, the wire leading off behind the cabinet. She reached down and pulled on the cord: the phone came up from where it had been hiding behind the toaster. She heard something else fall.

  Two missed calls: Ma, Maria Grazia. She listened to the second message: Coming home, should be back tomorrow on the train. Hope you’re all right. Meet me at the station? Absently she peered down to where whatever it was had fallen, and hung up. It would be nice to see her. A new start; she could tell her the bank was finished. They could plan – she leaned down. There was something down there. It looked like some correspondence. An envelope. Delicately she fished with her fingers, but the space was too narrow. Pulled open the drawer and took, at random, a kitchen knife, and poked. Got it: eased the envelope up with the point of the knife. She put it in her handbag.

  MM Holdings, it said. This was the account into which Josef paid his weekly takings, and this was the name on those envelopes she’d seen littering the lobby of the cinema. She slit the envelope and stared down, frowning. A form letter, confirming the discharge of a debt against the property: it had been copied to Tyrrhenian Properties. She looked at the date on the letter and the signature, then thrust it all down into her bag. Slowly she turned and walked to the door.

  Back past the workstations, out to the silent, dusty lobby: Roxana knew where she was going. She ducked under the tape and into Claudio Brunello’s office.

  Slowly she seated herself behind her dead boss’s computer and switched it on.

  What if someone caught her? The Guardia? The police? Or whoever it was who had killed Claudio? She told herself, she couldn’t think about that.

  Even as she typed in Claudio’s user name and code – she’d observed him do it often enough, taken it as a sign of the trust he placed in his employees – a part of her brain was wondering, How much would you need to know about Claudio to guess it? The name of his first-born child and the date of her birth. Even Roxana knew that you were supposed to be an awful lot more cryptic than that, and a lot less sentimental. Was it his soft heart that had killed Claudio?

  MM Holdings. It came up quickly, everything she wanted, plain as day. It was a very old client, and a lot of the early business was summarized; this must have been done when computerization came in twenty years earlier. Some scanned-in microfiche records, deeds and contracts – MM Holdings had been operating under that name since 1967, when it had been formed as a limited company. The directors were listed. Of the founding three, only one remained, the other names had changed three or four times. In surprise Roxana pushed the chair back. Good God, she thought, as she stared at the name. Her. Really?

  A current account. The account had been exceptionally active until the late nineties. After that takings had fallen off dramatically, dwindling to less than was required to finance the account’s operation. The sell-off must have come just in time. She wondered why it hadn’t been negotiated sooner; then she saw. A loan taken out against the property a year ago would have had to be repaid before the sale could go through: this was the same debt discharged in the letter she’d found stuffed behind the cupboard. Discharged last Friday. Roxana clicked on the mortgage file for detail, and as she did so she heard something, a small, familiar sound, and she was so absorbed suddenly and the sound so familiar that Roxana overrode it in her head.

  Something wasn’t right. She peered at the figures. Something was wrong. And then there was another sound and she looked up.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh.’

  *

  They were both in the front of Pietro’s car, with the air-con on. It seemed safer there, somehow, the sight of sheet lightning coming down somewhere over by Pistoia had put the wind up both of them.

  ‘Jesus,’ Pietro had said, awed by the spectacle, the whole sky lit briefly like neon over the Pisan plain. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well we’re not going to the seaside.’

  Inside the car it was very hot in spite of the air-con, and horribly humid. From behind the windscreen the sky looked black, but it still wasn’t raining. ‘We can’t stay here,’ said Pietro, starting the engine, glancing up at the trees. ‘Under a tree, on the top of a hill? I’ll take you over there.’

  They parked up on the street outside Marisa Goldman’s gate.

  ‘It’s not money, then,’ said Pietro, nodding at the villa’s expensively pale façade, at the outhouses and the roses, glowing fluorescent in the strange light.

  Sandro shook his head. ‘You don’t know that,’ he said. ‘Appearances aren’t everything.’

  ‘She was here all along,’ said Pietro ruminatively. ‘Do you think – could a woman have done it?’

  Sandro had taken out his wallet and was sorting through it. Had he kept the card? Probably not. He raised his head, focused on Pietro. ‘Depends on the woman,’ he said.

  ‘Nice car,’ said Pietro, nodding at the handsome machine standing on the driveway. A customized Cinquecento, a kept woman’s car. ‘We could get forensics to pull it in. If she moved him in that? A woman?’ He was deeply dubious: the car looked like no more than a toy.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sandro, ‘just not yet,’ and returned to his task. Patiently he sorted through old receipts, the card for a rosticceria around the corner from home, a reminder from the surgery for his prostate check. Damn. He got out the phone and without expectation scrolled through the numbers, but there it was. Giorgio Viola.

  As he waited for the connection, he summoned up the man, his pale, sweaty despairing bulk behind that desk north of the station, his defeated look as he walked away from the bank and along the river last night, Sandro watching him through the long lens of the birdwatcher’s camera.

  ‘You might ask,’ he said as an aside, hand over the mouthpiece, just while he remembered, ‘a guy who takes pictures of birds, down on the river, not far from the African market. You might talk to him.’ Pietro looked bewildered, but before Sandro could explain further, Giorgio Viola answered his phone.

  It took five minutes of patient explanation before Viola softened even fractionally. Damn, thought Sandro, why aren’t I better at this? It wasn’t as if he didn’t sympathize with Viola. How could he convey it, that he was on his side? That they were on the side of – what? Of the defeated, the not quite competent, the stupidly soft-hearted. Only the more he wanted to be sympathetic, the gruffer he sounded.

  ‘I’m only trying to find the father of this woman’s child,’ he said eventually, in despair. ‘I don’t want to do any insider trading. The last thing I want to do is get you into trouble. Just give me a leg-up here.’

  There was a silence, the chink in Viola’s frightened obduracy. And then he spoke.

  ‘There was the transfer of a considerable sum.’ Sandro held his breath, hearing the man’s fear, his voice quick and breathless. ‘Brunello transferred just over a hundred thousand euros from the bank’s reserves, initially into his own account, just before close of business on Friday. His own authorization.’ And then Sandro could almost hear the man clamp his mouth shut.

  ‘He was defrauding the bank?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ Viola’s voice showed that he still felt unsettled. ‘I don’t know. I just pointed it out to the Guardia, we don’t know yet. But to do that last thing on a Friday night – I don’t know.’

  ‘You said initially? Initially into his own account? And where subsequently?’

  He could see Pietro, head cocked, listening intently.

  ‘I don’t know. They don’t know yet. It looks as though there have been attempts – to conceal the eventual transfer. The Guardia di Finanza are the experts – there are so many ways, you know. To launder money, to disguise the disbursement of funds. They’re taking their time – look. Look. I have a pension, if I play my cards right. Please. I can’t say any more. The Guardia will share the information with the authorities in due course. Won’t they?’

  Like hell – and he wasn’t the authorities, anyway. But the man’s manifest terror defeated him, he let him
go. ‘You’re one of the good guys,’ he said, and as he hung up he heard Giorgio Viola sigh, a small, unhappy sound that somehow encompassed all they shared.

  They sat in silence in the car a moment: this was how he and Pietro had spent their every waking hour, side by side in the front seat of a stale-smelling vehicle, adjusting the air-con or the heating, saying nothing. Watching, or thinking, or preparing to get out and deal with something they didn’t want to deal with. A little over a hundred thousand euros: Sandro’s mind wandered over the figure, imagined Brunello in his office, Friday night, on the way to the seaside to his wife and children. Transferring money – for what? Hold on. Hold on. He turned to Pietro.

  ‘So he was stealing,’ said Pietro, suddenly despondent, before Sandro could say anything.

  ‘That’s what it looks like,’ said Sandro slowly. ‘Just over a hundred thousand euros.’

  ‘A lot of money,’ said Pietro, leaning his head back.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sandro thoughtfully. ‘Or perhaps not enough. If you were going to disappear and spend the rest of your life on the run, say. Not enough.’

  He could feel Pietro’s attention.

  ‘Can you find out who owns that place?’ he said abruptly. ‘Who owns the Carnevale? Or rather, who owned it?’

  Pietro shrugged, still watching him. ‘Easily done,’ he said. ‘A phone call.’

  Sandro frowned down at the mobile still in his hand, looking at the cluttered little screen. An icon was blinking at him. Would the magic phone Giuli had been so keen on – what seemed like an age ago – would that explain things to him patiently, like the old fool he was? Somehow he doubted it. At random he checked his messages, and there it was. He held the phone to his ear.