She rolled her eyes. ‘That one,’ she said. ‘So you’ve talked to her. She’s sly. Didn’t you think she was sly?’
‘She said you and he had had a row recently,’ said Sandro quietly, catching Pietro’s eye.
Martinelli knocked back her drink at last, wiping her mouth with the back of a hand and setting the glass down. ‘Lotti was a bastard who beat his wife. Come on, should I pretend I liked him?’
‘His wife died ten years ago,’ said Pietro, and she turned that look on him.
‘Who forgets?’ she said.
‘Did he kill her?’ said Pietro. ‘I mean, between us?’
She shook her head. ‘She died of cancer.’
‘She have any relations?’ said Pietro.
Martinelli shook her head again. ‘She wasn’t from here.’
Which would be why no one had said anything. Sandro felt his spirits dampen abruptly at the understanding and he set his glass back down half-empty.
‘Someone did say something at the time,’ Martinelli said, looking at him as if she could read his mind, those frank blue eyes. She was reading his mind. ‘I mean, you may as well know because someone will tell you. I told him to lay off her.’
‘Ah,’ said Sandro.
‘And the circumstances?’ said Pietro quickly. Sandro could see a flush at his neck, and he would be embarrassed that none of this had come out in the police station.
‘It was a year or so before she died. She came into the bar for a drink at nine o’ clock one morning – and I don’t mean a coffee – and she had bruises round her neck as if he’d tried to strangle her. So I took off my apron and marched down the street to his shop and shouted at him. I was only annoyed there weren’t any customers in there because Lotti wasn’t popular, not even before the big supermarket in the valley got a fresh meat counter. People have their ways of showing they don’t like a person.’
Sandro caught a sideways glance from Pietro and he knew what it meant. This was going round in circles. There was still nothing to connect Lotti and Nielsson beyond their having lived in Sant’Anna at the same time.
‘So you were running this place and still working at the bar?’ Sandro asked. She nodded. ‘You were working there forty years ago, when I last came into this village, weren’t you?’ She nodded again and he leaned forwards, elbows on his knees.
‘I hear Nielsson insulted your boss, called him a cornuto or something.’
‘A eunuch,’ said Maria Clara, looking him in the eye. ‘Similar but not the same,’ and she sighed. ‘She had a thing about that. Men and their dicks. Poor old Massimiliano.’
The memory of Nielsson’s hand on him sat there and it came to him she’d been like a veterinarian examining an animal, nothing personal in it.
‘So,’ he said, aware of Pietro’s impatience, ‘you were working in the bar when we were called in. And back then there was a phone booth in the bar, am I right?’
‘There was.’
‘Did it get much use?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Martinelli promptly. ‘There were only a handful of telephones in the village.’
‘And back then, if I remember rightly,’ of course he remembered – it felt like yesterday, ‘there was a counter at the till that said the caller had used however many scatti, units, and he would pay at the till.’
‘He or she, yes.’
‘But it was a man,’ said Sandro carefully. ‘A man called us anonymously from the bar on that day in September, late summer, a day just like this, an afternoon, to say that La Vipera was being used as a brothel with under-aged girls.’ She gave the slightest shrug. ‘We found no evidence that that was true,’ he said. ‘Do you think it was true?’
She made a gruff sound in her throat. ‘I don’t think they took money for it,’ she said, watching him.
‘Is that why nobody seemed to notice who was using the cabina telefonica that afternoon? Because you all wanted someone to go and see what was going on up there? You wanted the foreigners called out?’ She said nothing. ‘Do you know who made the phone call?’ It was time to stop all this.
Martinelli leaned back on the lumpy divan. Out of nowhere, the soft grey streak of a cat leapt and was on her knee. She lowered a hand to it gently.
‘Of course I know,’ she said at last, her broad fingers finding the cat’s throat and tickling. ‘I remember thinking, what’s he doing in there? Because they had a phone, you see, they were among the few, for the business I suppose, and back then business was good. People ate meat back then, people had money and meat was good for you, back then.’ There was a silence in which the cat’s purr was startlingly loud, a rumble, a train in a tunnel.
‘They had a phone, and so why would they be using the public phone box, unless for anonymity?’ Sandro was patience itself: why jump to the conclusion before her? It was clear who she was talking about. ‘But of course, no one’s anonymous in the village bar, are they?’
There was the faint trace of a smile on Martinelli’s lips, but her eyes were sad. ‘They’re dead now, so what does it matter?’ she said. Weary.
‘Lotti,’ said Sandro, eager at last. ‘That’s who, isn’t it? Giancarlo Lotti made that call.’
She smiled again, and then she shook her head.
*
‘We’re eating with mum and dad,’ said Enzo almost before she’d crossed the threshold. ‘I hope you don’t mind?’
‘Who’s cooking?’ she said, dumping her backpack on the hall floor. ‘Me or your mum?’
He’d called Giuli as she stood on the pavement outside the clinic and she’d picked up with relief at the excuse to turn her back on Ragno. Helmet swinging, she’d walked towards the motorino, calculating that she’d still have time to catch the cobbler on the Via del Parioncino before he pulled down his shutter.
‘I’m just leaving the clinic,’ she’d said, knowing he was checking up on her. ‘I’ve got one or two things to deal with and then I’ll –’ But it didn’t seem to be just checking up on her.
‘I’m home already,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come back now?’ And hearing the anxiety in his voice she had just said yes.
They’d have said, wouldn’t they, if she looked as ill as Ragno? She had peered at herself reluctantly in the bike’s wing mirror and thought she looked all right.
‘Mum’s cooking,’ said Enzo now. ‘She said – she said they hadn’t seen us in ages and –’
‘I’ll just get changed,’ said Giuli. She didn’t want to interrogate him: he was prone to feeling guilty at the drop of a hat, and it was true, she hadn’t felt up to going over there the last time Rosetta had asked them. That evening she’d come in from work and just fallen asleep on the sofa.
Enzo’s parents – Rosetta and Fausto – had moved to be closer, from their rambling old house in the hills halfway to Umbria to a little flat out towards Settignano, twenty minutes away. They’d given most of the proceeds from their old home to Enzo to go towards this place, their modern box with its balcony that Giuli loved so much.
Enzo was quiet on the journey, driving even more carefully than usual. They’d bought a cake from the pastry shop on Viale Europa and Giuli balanced it on her knee. Once or twice he opened his mouth to say something, but didn’t.
The little flat had all the possessions that had filled their old farmhouse crammed into it: samplers and china ducks and display plates and even the curtains that Rosetta had embroidered herself. They sat at the kitchen table, hemmed in by it all, as Rosetta heaped enough food for an army in front of them.
Pappardelle with ragu, fennel sausages with potatoes, a huge dish of beans, Rosetta fussing to and fro and piling up the plates. Giuli loved Rosetta, who had never, ever seemed anything but delighted with her daughter-in-law, although Giuli knew she had been told about her past. Who’d want her only child married to a woman like Giuli? Ex-addict, ex-hooker and past childbearing, the perfect bloody package. Enzo said when he’d told her she’d just flapped her hands a bit and said she knew he’d only choose th
e right woman. So when they went for dinner, Giuli always made a point of eating everything Rosetta put on her plate, and she was obediently forking her way through the beans when she noticed that she was the only one. Enzo was pushing potatoes round his plate, Rosetta had had no more than a tablespoon of pasta on hers and most of it was still there and old Fausto in his knitted waistcoat, at the head of the table, was sitting like a statue with his cutlery in his hands, his face stricken.
Giuli laid her fork down and gave Enzo a sharp look. He gave her a pleading one back: he doesn’t know either, she thought. He knows something’s wrong but he doesn’t know what.
Then out of nowhere, Fausto slapped his hands on the table. ‘I’m sorry, Rosetta,’ he said. ‘We must tell them.’
Behind him, Rosetta paused halfway to the sink, frozen, a dish in her hands. A tear sprang, rolling down one of her old cheeks, and she was helpless to dab it away.
Oh shit, thought Giuli, oh shit oh shit, and her hand crept out to Enzo’s. He didn’t seem to notice: he was looking at his mother. ‘Mamma?’ he said.
Fausto stood up and took the dish from her. ‘Your mother –’ He set the dish down and gently, tenderly, put his arms around her. ‘Your mother has a tumour.’
Inside his arms, Rosetta rubbed the tear away with a shrug of her shoulder and looked up at her husband, patient. They were both so small, suddenly, these wiry old people, both so stoical – but so fragile. Giuli tightened her grip on Enzo’s hand, knowing, feeling what he felt in the sickening clench of her own gut. He turned to look at Giuli and for a second he hardly seemed to recognise her. ‘A tumour?’ he said and she could hear the effort he made to keep his voice calm.
‘It’s one of those –’ Fausto made a sound of helplessness, almost exasperation. ‘The pancreas. I’m not even quite sure where that is. I did think – I asked and asked. I thought there would be an operation, treatment, you know. But they can’t. Apparently there are some cancers that still –’ And then with a sound it all seemed to leave him, to deflate him. ‘They say they can’t operate.’
From that moment the evening turned. It was as though the little warm kitchen to which the old pair had transplanted themselves for Giuli and Enzo’s sakes was a bunker, and it was the end of the world. Fausto led Rosetta gently back to the table.
There were details, more details: a minor operation to relieve or forestall the symptoms – itching, jaundice, sickness; there were some medicines that could help too. Fausto emphasised the positives and did not say that these things were all temporary. He didn’t need to.
At one point Rosetta simply, quietly got back up out of her seat and went on with the clearing and washing up, and Giuli helped her. When it was done she clasped Giuli, a quick second – they’d never been people for big demonstrations of anything – and Giuli felt the softness of her old cheek against hers and the hand patting her as if she was the one needing consoling.
‘You’re worn out,’ said Giuli, and as she said it her own tiredness – temporarily kept at bay by the fear of all this, the awful fear of seeing Enzo suffer, a monstrous outrage she wanted to batter at with her hands – settled back on her shoulders like a great weight, and all it brought with it. She’d forgotten her afternoon in the clinic, but now it returned with a vengeance, the intrusion of another world into this warm one, a world none of them wanted to live in, that cold white world of medicine and doctors and machines. If she, Giuli, was ill too. Enzo – who would there be for Enzo?
‘Giuli’s right,’ said Enzo, getting up, and he was there between them, resting his heavy head on her shoulder a second like a child, except that now she was so much smaller than him. And straightening, looking her in the eye, ‘Mamma. Get to bed. Are you sleeping?’
Rosetta shrugged, her eyes bright with unshed tears. ‘I’ll get her to sleep,’ said Fausto gruffly, taking her hand. ‘Look, these young ones,’ he said, gesturing towards Giuli, who felt heavy and bloodless as marble suddenly, swaying beside them. ‘We’ve tired them out – they don’t make them like us these days, do they?’
At the door, Fausto said quickly, quietly, ‘It might be a year.’ Rosetta was in the kitchen, in her easy chair, hands folded in her lap, doing nothing.
‘No more –?’ said Enzo, and Giuli wanted to cringe away into a corner, to throw herself from a window rather than hear the tremor in his voice, but she couldn’t. The time for self-pity was long gone. ‘No more than that?’ he said, recovering himself.
‘It might be less,’ said Fausto. ‘She knows. It will probably be less.’
At home, under the covers, she held him, tight, for a long time until at last he slept.
*
‘You asleep?’ His whisper was in her ear. Luisa smelled something on his breath and stirred.
Well, if she had been, his clattering around in the kitchen would have woken her. Stumbling against a chair before he turned the light on, the cupboard opening, the tap running.
But Luisa hadn’t slept: she never could without him, although she wouldn’t have told him so. The air outside was thickening, another storm brewing, they said, maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after. She opened an eye and saw the time on the bedside clock: midnight. Sandro moved away to the edge of the bed and she heard his boots come off, pushed into the corner. The clunk of his belt hitting the floor. A sigh, but not miserable, more weary. He slid in beside her and laid a warm hand on her side. His hands had always been warm except for that brief time, after the baby.
‘How was it?’ she said.
‘We made progress,’ he said, sounding tired. His cheek against the back of her neck, his breath sweet and medicinal. ‘We did. We met the maid, old Princess Salieri’s housekeeper, carer, Gianna Marte.’ The ghost of a laugh. ‘She’s got a thing for Pietro, poor sod. She said they were so unfriendly, no one would talk to her in the village, although she seems to be besotted with her employer, the son, whassisname.’ A pause. ‘Bartolini.’ He rolled away. Sighed. We –’ she heard a hesitation, no more than a check in his throat ‘– we went up to the house. To La Vipera,’ he hurried on past that, ‘and then we spoke to Martinelli.’
She thought about him going where she’d been, of that hillside where she’d walked with Bartolini and not told him. Still hadn’t told him.
‘But what about you, getting something out of that old rogue, for once, old Frollini?’ His voice turning into a mumble.
‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ she said. Silence. ‘I think it’s got something to do with Salieri.’ She had lain awake a long time turning that over before he got back, listening to the motorini whining past, the puff and hiss of the buses, bottles clattering into the dumpsters. ‘Sounds like you’re not going to get anything out of her anyway. The old lady.’
A thought occurred to Luisa, with trepidation. Not Sandro, but her? She could offer to go up and talk to her. But if she did, she would have to tell Sandro she’d been up there already and all that went with that. She held a sigh, let it out slowly and turned onto her back. She lay looking up at the ceiling in the dark. His hand had slid with the movement but stayed on her, flat now on her belly. ‘I always knew,’ she said, before she could stop herself. ‘I always knew something had happened with her, with you and that woman. I knew you couldn’t get her out of your head, all these years.’ She ran out of breath, gulped, kept going. ‘So I went up to Sant’Anna,’ she said. ‘I went because I wanted to make sure she was dead. ’
She waited, in the silence. The long, unnatural silence in which she couldn’t even hear him breathe extended and then, with a volcanic sound of upheaval, he was shifting, up and over on his side away from her. He snored.
Chapter Fifteen
‘I’M NOT SURE,’ SAID SANDRO INTO the phone, his hand cupped over it. ‘She’s just being funny with me.’ It wasn’t his imagination. Luisa had seemed on the point of saying something since they got up, but every time he looked at her, she looked somewhere else.
Pietro had called first thing and Luisa, who had just br
ought him a coffee in the bedroom, two sugars, standing there with it in her hands as he sat on the end of the bed in his underwear trying to get his sock on, had made an exasperated noise when he dropped the sock, ignored the coffee and grabbed for the phone.
He’d called after her. ‘Darling?’ He had the firmest impression she had something to say – although usually when Luisa wanted to say something she just said it, and forcefully. So he’d had to begin the conversation telling Pietro that, although, yes indeed, he was very fond of him, the darling had been directed at Luisa’s retreating back.
He stood up, creaking, one sock on, and went to retrieve the coffee from where she’d left it.
‘Women,’ said Pietro at the other end of the line. ‘Still, though. Still. That Martinelli, she came up trumps, didn’t she? Manzoni is going to be pleased with you, my lad. We’ve got our link between Lotti and La Vipera.’
Maria Clara Martinelli had put them out of their misery almost immediately, as if she’d suddenly had enough of the game, the light gone out of her eyes.
‘His father,’ she’d said, ‘Lotti senior. It was Giancarlo’s dad I noticed going into the booth that afternoon, and I remembered thinking it was odd because they had a phone of their own. Maybe he didn’t want his wife overhearing – she was a tartar, old Mrs Lotti – or maybe he was smart enough to know they could trace calls. He wasn’t stupid, old Lotti.’ And without asking, she’d poured them both another sticky black inch of nocino.
Pietro had shaken her hand on the doorstep, then Sandro, then Pietro had grabbed it again.
Passing back through the square, the bar had still been open and, seeing the lights, they’d pulled up. It had been empty, a twenty-something behind the counter, playing a game on his mobile, who could barely be bothered to look up when they came in. The look he gave them was vacant, then he seemed to recognise Pietro and nodded, setting his phone down reluctantly to make the coffee. In the corner the old phone booth was full of stacked toilet paper.
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