Dead Season

by Christobel Kent

  Roxana Delfino, sounding hurried and anxious. Telling him she thought Josef Cynaricz was the man who’d been out to her house, telling him she thought somehow the man needed her help, that he’d come to her for help. And another man had come after him, a young man in white trainers. A man her neighbour really hadn’t liked the look of.

  Thoughtfully he flipped the phone shut and turned to Pietro. ‘You might send Matteucci down to Roxana Delfino’s place at the Certosa,’ he said. ‘She’s in the phone book.’

  ‘Delfino? The girl in the bank?’

  ‘Sounds very much like Gulli’s been out there. You’d think he’d stop wearing those white trainers.’ He frowned. ‘So Gulli’s after – Roxana? No. After Josef. Off his own bat? I doubt it. And how’d he know where to look? How’d he know Josef had been out there?’ He put a hand to his head, perplexed. ‘You think you could – I don’t like to ask. But I think it’s just her and her mother. I don’t like to think—’ He stopped.

  Pietro nodded. ‘We’ll get someone out there,’ he said, looking up at Marisa Goldman’s villa. ‘What about this?’ he said.

  ‘I need you to let me run with this, only for an hour or so,’ said Sandro. ‘Do you trust me? Give me a morning.’ He peered through the windscreen: it looked more like nightfall than morning.

  ‘I trust you,’ said Pietro, and he leaned across and opened Sandro’s door for him. ‘Get going.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  OH, SHIT, THOUGHT GIULI, tearing around the sweaty room in the half-dark, oh shit, oh shit.

  It was ten minutes since Dasha had called her, and she couldn’t find her keys. She heard Luisa’s voice in her head, Turn on the lights, might be an idea. She wanted to cry, but the time for crying was past.

  At the Women’s Centre the charge doctor had sounded merely bored when eventually, an hour or so back, out of some last vestige of self-respect, Giuli had roused herself to call in sick.

  ‘Feeling rough,’ she had managed. ‘I think it’s something I’ve eaten.’ An excuse transparent through over-use, and they had both known it.

  ‘No problem,’ the doctor, a woman she’d never liked, had said. Giuli had heard the idle calculation in her tone: give her one more chance, maybe, we can get a replacement, plenty more where she came from. Ex-junkie, ex-hooker, waste of space.

  The worst of it was, she reminded herself of her own mother, a woman dead more than twenty years but when alive often to be seen lying motionless with self-disgust, face down on the bed. Mumbling incoherently.

  You’ve come so far, Luisa would say. This is nothing. This isn’t the end of the world. Giuli tried to hear Luisa’s voice as she lay there with stupid tears leaking from her eyes but it didn’t make it any better. You’ve found a man, you’ve started to hope for something, for a day and a half you wondered if you might be pregnant. And you’re not. You probably never will be: but since when did you want a baby anyway? Get over it.

  What would Enzo think, if he could see her? Face swollen with crying, reckless with despair. He’d run a mile.

  And the thought of going into the Women’s Centre and seeing those women, pregnant or aborting or begging for contraception, abusing the unborn with drugs or happy and hopeful – well. She couldn’t do it. She had felt poisonous, her head full to bursting with rage and disappointment.

  And then Dasha had phoned. Giuli had stared down at the phone and the unfamiliar number, letting it ring a good long time until she picked up. Straight away she had been able to tell something was wrong: Dasha’s Italian had turned ragged, her accent heavier. Not the bored, guarded girl Giuli had last seen.

  ‘Hold on,’ Giuli had said sulkily, initially resentful of the girl’s intrusion. ‘Talk more slowly. Who called her?’

  ‘Not called,’ Dasha had said. ‘Sent text message. Him. He sent the message asking her to come to him. She showed me.’

  ‘Josef?’ The words had drawn Giuli upright, off the bed. She had rubbed at her face. ‘Josef sent her a text message. After all this time?’

  ‘You knew he was around,’ Dasha had said angrily. ‘I knew, you knew. I don’t know why he didn’t try before. I begin to think, perhaps he is a good guy. He will leave her in peace. To be safe, just want to know she is all right, that is why he is coming every day, here.’

  ‘Every day?’ Jesus, Giuli had thought. Under our noses. ‘You’ve seen him today?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Dasha had said. ‘Maybe I won’t see him, if he is meeting her. If he has changed his mind, if he wants her after all.’

  Giuli had crossed to the sink, taken her flannel, soaked it and pressed it to her face a moment. Something hadn’t been right about this.

  ‘Why wouldn’t he come to the hotel? Just walk right in.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Dasha had sounded angry. ‘Maybe because he knows we would send him away. Maybe he knows the old woman don’t like him. Since a long time, something with his dirty job and that woman who employ him. Some old problem, between those women.’

  ‘Woman? A woman runs the Carnevale?’

  ‘I don’t know everything about it. I think yes.’ Dasha’s voice had turned stubborn and frightened.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she’d said, conscious that Dasha could clam up at any moment. ‘It’s not your fault, Dasha.’

  ‘My fault? Who said it is my fault? Is these men.’ She spat out some of her own language, unmistakably a bad word, or series of bad words.

  ‘Yes,’ Giuli said, trying to stay cool. ‘I know.’

  ‘I should have kept her here,’ she said through something that sounded harsher and more painful than tears. ‘I should have called the old woman and we could have made her stay. But – I didn’t know. I didn’t know she would – maybe not come back.’

  ‘Where’s the old woman now?’ asked Giuli. Thinking of the bad business between her and whoever ran the Carnevale. Whatever woman.

  ‘Out,’ said Dasha. ‘I didn’t tell her. She would be angry. She went out, to talk to someone, she said. Had coat on.’

  ‘Coat?’

  In this heat.

  There was a weary exhalation. ‘You can’t talk to her. She don’t listen. She hate everyone, except maybe Anna.’ And an angry sniff, as though to hold back tears. ‘That baby is coming soon. She was walking so slowly, to the lift, like it hurt her.’

  How could you let her go? Giuli couldn’t say it: Dasha might go for her, or shut up for good.

  ‘All right,’ she said carefully. ‘It’s all right. There was nothing you could do. You called me, that’s the main thing.’

  There was a silence, but Dasha didn’t hang up.

  ‘You saw the message,’ she said.

  Dasha cleared her throat. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you remember what it said?’

  ‘She showed me first his name, at the top of the message. Showed me that it came from him: Jo, it said.’ Dasha sighed. ‘So proud of this mobile he give her. His number the first in there.’

  Giuli waited: in the pause she became aware of her own breathing, of her own body functioning calmly now that the situation required it. No more panic or self-pity. Good.

  ‘Then.’ Her voice was tight. ‘It said, Darling. I’m so sorry. All is ready now – something like that. Prepared, ready, something like that. We can start our life together.’ Dasha made a sound of fierce contempt. ‘How could he suggest that place? I don’t understand that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Giuli, feeling a flutter of panic. ‘What place?’

  ‘The – the cinema. The Carnevale. He said, We meet there, please, I will explain.’

  ‘Perhaps – perhaps—’ Giuli felt numb with fear. ‘Perhaps he wanted to come clean. I mean, tell her the truth about everything.’

  Dasha laughed harshly. ‘Truth,’ she said. ‘Not always what you need.’

  The Carnevale. The place had been a fixture all of Giuli’s life, its grubby façade and its small crowd of men on the streets outside, smoking as they waited to go in, their gaze sl
iding over any woman who passed.

  ‘You go after her,’ said Dasha. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Giuli.

  *

  Sandro half expected a liveried butler to come to the door: what he hadn’t expected was Marisa Goldman, looking like this.

  Skinny to begin with, she seemed as if she’d dropped another four kilos, a line etched down the sides of her mouth, and she was haggard under the tan. She was wearing some kind of tunic over dark linen trousers that made her legs look very long and lean. It occurred to Sandro that he didn’t like trousers on women. Old-fashioned, Luisa would say, but then again she never wore them, either.

  ‘It’s you,’ Marisa Goldman said without preamble. ‘All right, come in.’

  Stepping across the threshold and into the air-conditioned interior, Sandro felt a sudden perverse regret at the abrupt disappearance of the humid outside air, the smell of roses and jasmine.

  She showed him into a spacious ground-floor salotto. Cool and stale and surprisingly empty, the long windows shuttered. There was furniture, all right – three rectangular beige sofas, a sideboard, coffee tables – but every surface seemed too bare, too unadorned. Perhaps that was how the rich did things: he didn’t know, or greatly care.

  Marisa Goldman jerked a hand carelessly towards the nearest sofa, and he sat. She remained standing, arms folded across her concave stomach. There were bracelets piled up her slim brown forearms and she wore many rings, silver and gold, and a big square aquamarine on one little finger. The rings seemed to Sandro all to disguise the lack of one ring in particular, but then he was being old-fashioned again.

  She didn’t appear frightened. He’d expected her to be hostile or scared or both. But she seemed indifferent.

  ‘You went to see your boss on Friday evening,’ he said.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’ she said. Could she be more glacial? ‘A glass of water? A coffee? I have some beer.’

  Beer, at this hour? He looked more closely at her and understood that she’d been drinking herself.

  He repeated the statement and abruptly she sat down, too close to him. Her face seemed like a mask, her fingers like bones under the rings, an empress exhumed in her finery.

  ‘You went to see him, although you’d told everyone you were going away on the Thursday night. Out of the city. Where was it you were supposed to be going?’

  ‘My – my lover has a yacht. We sailed to Elba. He has a cottage there on the cliffs. A private beach.’

  Marisa Goldman disdained the word fiancé then, did she? Being of more elevated birth than little Anna Niescu, or Giuli.

  ‘You didn’t go to Elba,’ he repeated patiently. ‘You were here.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful craft,’ she said, turning away from him and walking to the window with considered elegance, and he wondered if she was actually mad. ‘Built in Genoa in 1932 for the Aga Khan’s son, teak decks and Frette linens and a staff of six. The cottage isn’t much.’ She gave a tiny shrug, her back still turned to him. ‘A simple place. But I don’t really like sleeping on the boat.’

  His phone gave a little peal to indicate the arrival of a text. The look Marisa Goldman threw him over her shoulder didn’t deter him from opening the phone and looking. Too soon, surely, for Pietro to have found anything out? It was from Giuli, and he stared at it for too long, because he couldn’t understand it. Sent in haste, full of fumbled abbreviations.

  Josef’s boss at Crnvle a wmn. Josef hs txtd Anna, askd hr 2 meet.

  What did that mean? Josef’s boss a woman? Suddenly Sandro’s head felt ridiculously overstuffed: too many suspects, too many blind alleys. One thing at a time, please. A woman. He had a woman in front of him.

  Asked her to meet? Josef asked Anna to meet him? He couldn’t even think about that.

  He looked at Marisa Goldman. He thought of those photographs in her office, the straight back, the tendons in her hands gripping the reins. The gun over her shoulder. He thought of Claudio, battered under the dusty trees.

  The big villa seemed very quiet suddenly.

  ‘Do you have staff here?’ asked Sandro, partly because he wanted to know, and partly because the direct approach did not seem to be working.

  Her big, pale, green-gold eyes were turned on him. ‘A housekeeper and a maid and a gardener. The housekeeper and the maid are on holiday.’

  ‘Did you send them away?’ he asked gently. ‘Did they tell Irene Brunello that you weren’t at Elba after all, that you’d been here all along, and you sent them packing before they could tell anyone else?’

  And abruptly the green-gold eyes brimmed with tears. He could hear Luisa’s voice, tough and contemptuous, in his ear. Don’t fall for it.

  ‘Was Irene Brunello trying to contact you here, too, since Claudio didn’t come home on Saturday evening. And you didn’t answer, you didn’t pick up.’ His voice was soft but not gentle any more. Her face, turned towards him in the window’s pale filtered light, was very still, the brimming eyes did not overflow and she said nothing.

  ‘Do you know Sergio Galeotti?’ he asked. Her lip just turned downwards, dismissive, the ghost of a shrug. ‘He was an estate agent,’ he said, helpfully. ‘You had some of his material on your desk the other day. He’d just sold the Carnevale cinema, as a matter of fact.’ Sandro still had no proof that this was so. But he had little to lose.

  Marisa Goldman seemed to shiver in disgust.

  ‘Does that offend you?’ He spoke as softly as he could. ‘The mention of that cinema? It’s nothing to do with you, then, the Carnevale? It’s run by a woman, did you know that?’

  Her expression darkened, turned mutinous, and Sandro hastily decided to change tack.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I know you had a relationship with your boss. Let me guess. You were bored, or between boyfriends, his wife was busy with the children. You found yourselves alone one evening.’

  He tilted his head, appraising her. ‘Let me guess,’ he said, ‘it would be, I’d say, three years ago, something like that? You were probably just a bit prettier, a bit fresher, three years ago. Let’s say. Women reach their prime at a different age, I’m sure you know that. The skinny ones, in my experience, get there a bit earlier than the rest.’ He knew he was sounding coarse; he didn’t care.

  She was looking at him with fury now, but the indifference was gone, she was engaged. The truth was building inside her, and soon she wouldn’t be able to keep it quiet. Not yet, though.

  ‘And on Friday you went to see him. What was that about? Was it about a property deal, was it about your rich boyfriend, was it about money?’

  A faint flush appeared on her sallow cheek.

  ‘Money. Did you need money from him?’

  And he knew that was why she’d gone to see him. But triumph remained stubbornly elusive, because Claudio Brunello was dead, and he had no idea where Josef was, and he still couldn’t see where Marisa Goldman fitted in.

  ‘Was it something to do with the sale of the Carnevale?’ he said. ‘It had been on the market for months, hadn’t it? Something was stopping the deal going through.’

  She stalked back across the room towards him, a wraith in her dark linen. ‘I have nothing to do with a pornographic cinema,’ she enunciated, imperious and clear as a bell. ‘Nothing, do you hear? My family—’ and she snorted, ‘if we owned two thousand square metres in the centre of Florence, believe me, we would have sold it years ago. Just like the rest. Sell when it’s worth nothing, then wring your hands as plebs like Galeotti get rich. That’s how it works in my family.’

  Sandro said nothing, just watched wide-eyed as she leaned down to look him in the face.

  ‘I asked him for money. All right. I did.’ And then she sat hard down beside him, too close, hands clasped on her narrow knees so tightly the tendons stood out white.

  ‘Why did you need it?’ asked Sandro quietly, but he knew already: the absent maid and the lifeless house told him.

  ‘I needed it because I need somewhere to live. Tha
t’s why I was talking to that little creep Galeotti, too.’ She wasn’t meeting his eye. Sandro looked around the room.

  ‘Somewhere to live? This place not good enough for you?’

  ‘He’s left me,’ she said then, and all the fight seemed to go out of her. ‘Are you satisfied now? Paolo’s left me. I’m just a squatter here, they all know it now, that’s why I sent them away. When I saw the maid gossiping with Irene Brunello it was the last straw.’ Her head bowed. ‘I’ve got till the end of the month, when Paolo gets back from the boat.’ Her head came up again. ‘So I went to Claudio and asked him for money. He could get it through the bank, it would be so easy. He could call it a loan, on favourable terms. So easy.’ Her eyes were wide, distant. ‘The great advantage of a small bank. Discretion.’

  ‘How much did you ask for?’ He put the question carefully, and still it seemed to surprise her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Was it a hundred thousand euros, a little more perhaps?’

  She frowned, bewilderment turning to offence. Perhaps a hundred thousand wouldn’t be enough for a woman like her. ‘I didn’t mention specific sums,’ she said, trying to stand on her dignity.

  Sandro could feel his theory, his house of cards, struggling to stay upright. ‘Did he know what you were going to ask?’ he asked, willing it to stay in place. ‘Had you spoken to him during the day, so that perhaps he might – make arrangements?’

  Her frown deepened.

  ‘What? No. I didn’t – I didn’t even know myself. That I – that I would be able to do it. To go over there and ask him. I only said – could I meet him? He didn’t even want to do that. He said he needed to get to Irene and the children.’

  Damn, damn. Sandro put his head in his hands, thinking furiously. He should have asked Viola, when exactly did Brunello move that money? Because if Claudio Brunello had had no idea she was after money, who was it for?

  But Giorgio Viola had told him, of course he had. Last thing, he had said, he’d moved the money on Friday at the very end of the working day.

  But he persisted: there was something there, there was some rage buried inside Marisa Goldman, and all he had to do was access it. She could have done it. She was desperate enough. Might she know Gulli? She might: they all knew someone like him, these slim-wristed, crisp-shirted, fragrant men and women, they all had someone to do their dirty work for them even if it was just slipping them a wrap of cocaine.