‘Didn’t know how far I’d be able to get him on the back of the bike,’ he said airily, daring her to gasp at his boldness. She swallowed, sick. ‘Left it till the early hours, like three or something, left them both here, went out for a bit of R & R. Had a good pizza actually, out in San Frediano, picked up some coke, for the ride, you know. Both dead, so I thought.’ He scratched his head. ‘Josef wasn’t breathing, I’d swear it, though I tied him up just to be sure. Still there when I came back to get Claudio. How was I to know?’
Valentino tilted his head from side to side. She could feel the weight of him against her legs.
‘You see, I couldn’t really leave Claudio – the body – here. Why would he be here? Draw attention to the place. Josef – well, he lived here. Someone might have broken in, a struggle, you know. Just leave him here for the developers to find, why not?’
‘But he wasn’t dead.’
Roxana was past caring whether she should keep silent or talk. Too late to worry. Underneath her something sharp was digging into her through the fabric of her bag and she tried to think what might be in there. She wanted to cry, thinking of her mobile, of Ma.
Valentino made a small growl in his throat, a warning sound. ‘Soon will be,’ he said. ‘I set that little piece of shit Gulli on to him but he kept getting to places too late. Out at yours, for example, when you said there’d been someone, a prowler, I knew straight away. I told Gulli, I think he’s gone out to find her, to spill the beans, he’s a bloody liability out there.’
‘Why didn’t he just go to the police?’ said Roxana, almost groaning. If only.
‘Kid like Josef? No way,’ said Val. ‘An illegal, a Roma? They like to stay out of the system.’ He sucked his cheeks. ‘Gulli, Jesus. Can track down Galeotti for me and put him out of the picture, in five minutes flat, bang on the car door, cracked skull, gone, but can’t find a skinny Roma on the run.’ She thought there was just a trace of admiration for Josef in the words. ‘Had to be done. Galeotti was losing his bottle, when he saw in the paper Claudio was dead. He knew, you see. I shouldn’t have told him about the money, how I got it.’
‘Boasted,’ said Roxana, with what felt like the last fight she had in her. And as his head turned slowly to fix on her she saw, reflected in his pupils in the darkness, the sudden gleam of something.
‘Genius,’ he said, almost dreamily.
Genius, thought Roxana? Not even smart enough to keep your mouth shut. And at once she understood that he would be caught, but it would be too late for her.
Val’s eyes were on her as he spoke levelly. ‘I’ve killed animals. Just hit as hard as you can. I knew I could do it.’
And then, in one hand, he raised what it was in his lap and she saw it, and as it came down towards her at the last minute she twisted, raised her forearms and it came down, glancing off her hand with a horrible cracking. A length of metal; what was it? A piece of piping. Almost fainting with the pain, she could keep herself conscious only by focusing on the need to identify it. And Roxana felt herself go limp, and as the arm came up again she could only turn over to let it fall on the back of her head, and felt, as if by a miracle, one hand come free and under her. And inside her bag, reaching, reaching, for something, grappling: mobile, mascara, all the small, smooth, harmless things women keep in their bags, when they need something sharp. Nailfile.
Her hand came out, hoping it would be strong enough, sharp enough, the cheap nailfile she’d used since she was sixteen, bought for centesimi, and she lunged, one hand still trapped behind her, and the little piece of plastic and metal went in, somewhere, she didn’t know where, somewhere soft. It wouldn’t be enough, was all she could think, she put all the force she had behind it and still it wouldn’t be enough.
But on top of her Valentino made a shrill, gasping, horrible sound, of outrage, of pain. Of fear. And then, with the tiny pulse of hope that sound gave Roxana, the weight on her shifted, the smell of aftershave and chemical sweat with it. There was abruptly more light as his body lurched sideways off her and she heard the clatter of the piping. Had he let it go?
She scrabbled away from him on the bed, trying to see: his hand was at his face. His eye? Had she blinded him? At the thought she almost dropped the nailfile: she didn’t want to have blinded anyone. Now he’d kill her.
‘Bitch,’ he said through his hands, and his voice clotted with fury. ‘Bitch. That could have been my eye.’
And then from far off in the echoing labyrinth of the building Roxana heard it: someone banging to catch their attention, bang, bang, bang. Or to break something down? Then a bellowing shout, words she couldn’t make out. Without pausing to think, she lurched towards the sound, propelling herself off the bed, but then she was on the floor and Valentino was on top of her again, on her back this time with his hand on her mouth, his hot sharp breath in her nostrils as he pulled her round and under him. He pressed his cheek against hers and hissed, spitting, into her face, Shut up shut up.
Someone had come. The possibilities crowded in on her as she struggled to breathe under Val’s hand and she felt the pressure build in her head: all the possible rescuers; hopeless, doomed, little Josef, a pregnant girl. Then she heard a rough shout: a man’s voice. A door banged, followed by a loud curse and her heart sank as she realized he was moving further away, whoever he was. It couldn’t be Josef after all, the cinema was his home, he would know where he was going, and this was a man lost and crashing through the building’s blind corridors.
Something dripped on her from his face: sweat, she thought, but then although her mouth was clamped shut against it she tasted blood, and she began to buck underneath him, to thrash and kick as though she knew in that instant that her life depended on it, on not giving in, on not being good. And simultaneously she bit down on his hand and blindly kicked upwards, between his legs. Connected.
He howled, fell off her, and Roxana, on her knees, tried to get up, fell. Got up again, her knees bleeding from something, and stumbled away from him until her back was against the wall. Dizzy, she didn’t even know where the door was.
Wherever he’d got to, at the sound of Valentino’s howl the hopeless, futile blundering of this man who might be her rescuer but might, Roxana considered only now, be coming to finish her off, abruptly stopped.
‘Who’s there?’
And the voice, hoarse and urgent, reached her through the blind passageways and partitions of the hideous building, she knew that voice.
‘Where are you?’
Help, she meant to scream, but nothing emerged, no more than a whisper, as if she’d lost breath and voice at once. Opened her mouth again and this time it came, the air whistled back into her lungs, her larynx opened like an instrument and she bellowed, she didn’t even know what. Here.
At her feet Valentino was curled in a foetal position, whimpering. Pressed against the wall, Roxana looked down on him as if from a great height, and knew she should do something else. She should get something heavy and hit him hard before he got up again.
She didn’t move.
Is he coming?
There was nothing else she could do.
*
In the stinking dark Sandro’s hands were bleeding from the splintered wood of the cheap pine door he’d broken down. There’d be a price to pay for the damage, Tyrrhenian Properties would exact it, he’d known with dull certainty as he pounded away at the wood with his battered knuckles. But mostly he could only think, I’m too late. Again, as always, too late.
He’d nearly dislocated his shoulder as the boarding finally gave way under his weight. Astonishingly, behind the hoarding the glass door to the cinema’s littered lobby had stood ajar. Three doors led off the back of it, one a double set leading into the auditorium. He’d decided against that one, taken another at random and found himself in the muffled darkness of a corridor, walls padded with fake leather, sticky carpet underfoot.
Confined spaces had never been one of Sandro’s phobias – or at least he’d never thoug
ht so. But in that corridor, straining for a sound, any sound to give him a clue that he was there for a reason, he felt the certain signs of rising panic, an inability to fill his lungs or expel air from them, a drumming in his skull.
The walls were coated with something gritty, and Sandro didn’t like to touch them but had no choice, and the greasy carpet clung to the soles of his shoes. The first door he pushed at was a cupboard, and he cursed. He didn’t want to go further into the building – there was no light. He kept moving in the dark and when he came to another door he opened it and stepped through.
Pitch black: Sandro blinked and waited in vain for his eyes to adjust. But at least there was some air in here, some elusive draught from somewhere, and he let the door to the suffocating corridor close behind him. He shouted in the thick darkness, and as he waited he thought he did, finally, hear something, a scuffling, and a soft ugly thump in answer. Emboldened, he moved into the room, sniffing for a way through, like a trapped potholer following a breath of air from the outside. And banged his shin hard and painfully on something. He cursed again, louder and more profane this time, cazzo, cazzo, blinking not so much at the pain as in furious disgust at his own clumsy incompetence.
With his hand pressed against his shin in a pointless attempt to dull the pain, he heard the scream. And didn’t know whether it was a man or a woman, almost gagging against the layered smells, fresh pine and latrine and old sweat. For a moment Sandro thought he might choke on it and die right there but his heart kept on thumping steadily, against all reason.
‘Who’s there?’
A silence and then he heard her cry out, he didn’t know whether it was the same voice, but he could tell this time that it was a woman, and turned towards the sound. Tripped and stumbled through the cluttered blackness of the room, feeling that draught freshen and pick up as though, miraculously, it was leading him towards the sound. There was another door. Another corridor, so dark, so dark he had to put out his hands and feel his way.
She shouted again. Here.
And a door gave under his hands and he was in there with them. Some thin grey light in here, though barely enough to see in the few seconds Sandro had to gather himself that at his feet a crouched form was struggling upright.
‘Watch out,’ a woman’s voice said sharply, from somewhere else, and Sandro could only think, as the shape on the floor launched itself at him, Oh, Jesus. I’m too old for this.
*
Giuli heard the ambulance’s siren from a long way off, getting louder. She heard the rattle as the shutter came up and saw Luisa standing there.
‘Oh my God, Giuli,’ she said, staring. ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’ In a voice Giuli had never heard Luisa use before, tremulous under huge pressure, a dam holding back some great flood.
It’s all right, Giuli wanted to say, only she didn’t know if it was. There was blood on her hand, and on her jeans. Heard the siren become deafening and abruptly stop, then saw the ambulance men crowd into the space with their bulky jackets and a bag of something and a cylinder of something else.
And then one last face appeared, a narrow, battered face belonging to a man with dark eyes and an expression of anguish and fear and desperation who edged to the door frame and stopped, and stared. Josef.
Beside her Anna lay half-collapsed on her front, still warm, still breathing, holding tight and alive to Giuli’s hand and making a small sound, over and over again. Giuli heard all this and saw all this and felt all this but really she heard and felt and saw none of it. All she saw was the child, the new child in her lap, her free arm around it, the child warm and bloodstained and covered with some waxy stuff, its eyes glued shut, its body folded and naked as a puppy’s, on the skull the skin still transparent with newness. And the child – the new girl, the new being among them – opened her mouth, and made herself heard.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Saturday
HE HAD APPEARED ON the Saturday morning, nine o’clock, which would have been a decent hour on any other day. At least they’d slept well, like the dead, for the first time in what seemed like months. But they hadn’t set an alarm, and the sound of the street bell woke them.
As she padded through the flat to answer the intercom Luisa registered the new cold in the air as a benediction. Summer would end.
‘Who?’ she said, not understanding. Then she got it, and put a hand to her breastbone. Please God. Not Giuli, now. She buzzed him in.
She stood at the top of the stairs in her nightgown and slippers, aware of her face crumpled from sleep, her unbrushed hair. She listened to the slow climb of footsteps and it occurred to her that this was a brave step for the boy to take.
Boy? The man who raised his head to hers as he climbed the last flight was about forty. And she needn’t have worried about her hair; Enzo, Giuli’s fidanzato, looked as though his mother cut his for him. An open face: kind.
He stopped on the landing, hesitant. ‘Permesso?’ Polite, too.
‘Is Giuli all right?’ she asked, unable to keep the anxiety out of her voice. Remembering the astonishment in Giuli’s face as she held the bloodstained bundle in her lap, could it only have been yesterday afternoon? It might have been too much for her.
But Enzo’s face split in a shy smile even at the mention of her name and Luisa saw it all in that instant, and relaxed.
‘Yes,’ he said, ducking his head then raising it again to meet her eye. ‘I – I – she didn’t call me, all yesterday.’ The ghost of that anxiety clouded his open face. ‘But last night – then last night—’
Luisa nodded. They’d been at the hospital, waiting uselessly on plastic seating, not relatives, barely friends, to be told everything was all right with the baby. And then Giuli had started up and said, there’s something I’ve got to do.
‘So she’s fine,’ said Enzo, looking down again. He stood there waiting to be invited over the threshold, holding a bike helmet between his hands. He mumbled. ‘I’ve come to ask you – to ask you—’
‘Come in,’ said Luisa.
*
The stocky nurse who’d dressed the five-centimetre laceration on one side of Sandro’s neck where Valentino Sordi had gouged him with manicured fingernails clearly also thought that, at sixty-something, Sandro was too old to be spending his Friday nights like this.
Sitting in Pietro’s garden now with his old friend opposite him, Sandro still didn’t know if he’d have been able to do it without Roxana Delfino’s help: perhaps best not to dwell on that. It had seemed an eternity before she did come to his aid, that much was for sure: the younger man writhing like a snake, smaller than him but furiously energetic and alarmingly strong, Sandro had registered immediately. Also weirdly, maniacally unfocused in his movements, though: not a fighter. Valentino Sordi might have honed his body for leisure but he didn’t know what fighting was, and fortunately for him it turned out that Sandro, for all the weight and slackness and age he felt dragging against him, still did.
Even as Roxana unfroze and flung herself on Sordi’s back, he’d felt it come back to him, that trick of twisting an opponent into submission with the right grip on the wrists and a sudden shift of one’s weight, and as Valentino went down underneath them he’d remembered, on a hot summer’s night just like this, perhaps ten years earlier, bringing down a drug-addicted car thief as he tried to flee into the gardens of some apartment blocks in Sesto Fiorentino, cuffing the boy and rising in triumph to meet Pietro’s eye in the dark.
It hadn’t been Pietro who’d finally arrived, with a feebly wailing siren, at the Carnevale. Sandro hadn’t recognized the uniformed officers of the Polizia dello Stato standing uncertainly in the littered lobby as Sandro sat, sweating and dishevelled and, of course, too old for this, beside the sullenly silent Valentino Sordi, bound at the wrists with a plastic tie and bleeding profusely from a jagged wound just below his eye. He supposed he would have to get used to not recognizing members of the Polizia dello Stato.
And Pietro had appeared, in the end, a
t the police station, with news of Gulli, and Roxana Delfino’s supposedly helpless elderly mother.
‘Unbelievable,’ his old friend mused now, raising a beer to his lips at the garden table. ‘Two old biddies? Had him cornered in the back yard.’
It had rained again that morning but now, at five in the afternoon, the sky was clear and the temperature in Pietro’s pretty garden, lowered by thirty-six hours of storms, was deliciously cool. Sandro could smell roses.
‘Hardly even need to go to the seaside, if it’s like this,’ Sandro mused. He felt wrung out: all those women. All those women depending on him. But he also felt at peace.
And it turned out that two old ladies – Roxana Delfino’s elderly mother and her even more doddering neighbour – had not needed his help, nor anyone else’s. They had felled Gulli with a rusty spade when they spotted him lurking behind their gardens, then tied him up with washing line, for good measure. Wouldn’t have held him for long, but then Pietro and Matteucci had arrived.
‘Matteucci turned almost human,’ said Pietro reflectively. ‘Couldn’t stop laughing when he saw the little ratbag trussed up in white nylon line. And he switched on the charm for the old dears.’ He let out a sigh. ‘I suppose I can put up with him.’
Pietro’s daughter Chiara came out with a tray of coffee, smiling shyly, set it down and went back into the kitchen, where she and her red-headed mother were still going over Sandro’s case, awestruck. They just couldn’t get over it. Signora Martelli had owned the porn cinema, all these years, sitting there in her news-stand, pronouncing on other people’s sins.
‘Someone has to own those places,’ Sandro had said. ‘It’s not always who you expect.’ And in fact, now that it was gone, he almost felt affection for the Carnevale, symbol of a simpler age, and doomed.
They poured the coffee. No sugar for Sandro, on a health kick now, although, as Luisa might have pointed out, if he was serious he’d leave out the coffee, too.
‘He’d never have got away with it,’ said Pietro. ‘That’s the crazy thing. The Guardia might work in mysterious ways but they would have traced the money in the end, Jesus, it’s their job. Hell, I think even that fat guy, Viola, would have got to the bottom of it, in the end.’
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