And then abruptly it was all over, and Marisa was showing the two police officers out, hurrying them through the still-empty bank, looking tensely around as Roxana watched, hugging herself fiercely. Val was staring from his workstation behind the screen.
‘Jesus,’ he said as she slid in beside him. ‘It’s serious, isn’t it?’
‘Yup,’ said Roxana, booting up her screen. She felt suddenly exhausted.
And then it dawned on her: this could be it. The bank — well, she could see it in the policeman’s eyes. Struggling to survive as it was, barely fighting off a takeover. This could be the nail in its coffin. First policemen, then the Guardia di Finanza.
The door opened and old Signora Martelli came in, dragging her shopping trolley behind her. ‘You,’ she said, shaking her finger at Val, already fumbling in her bulging handbag.
‘I wish it was all over,’ said Val, looking away from the old woman.
‘Me, too,’ Roxana said.
*
‘Are you all right?’ asked Giuli. Her eyes were fixed anxiously towards Luisa as they stood on the bleached and empty pavement. They were outside the address written on the piece of paper Sandro had given them. Luisa gave the girl a gimlet stare. ‘Giuli,’ she said, with barely concealed impatience, ‘I didn’t sleep much last night. It’s nearly forty degrees and I can’t get the sight of that poor girl out of my head. I don’t suppose you’re all right, either.’
And in fact Giuli didn’t look that good to Luisa. The cheap briefcase she had brought with her seemed to be weighing her down; her tan was peeling and underneath it her narrow little face was pale and beaded with sweat. ‘Not you too,’ Giuli said. And Luisa smiled. Allowing herself to forget that it was she who’d set Sandro on to Giuli.
They hadn’t mentioned the boyfriend yet. After the sight of Anna Niescu, Luisa had just thought, life’s too short. There are worse things than Giuli falling in love.
They’d come out on the bus, one of the small electric ones without air-conditioning; them and a mountainously wheezing old man in a string vest who, Luisa had worried, might be making his own last ride. He’d still been sitting there when they got off, taking tiny breaths and mopping his forehead. But if they thought the bus was hot, stepping out of it was like walking into the Sahara. As Luisa stood on the pavement in the insufficient shade of a spindly cherry tree and watched the bus disappear off down the Viale Europa towards Firenze Sud and the distant hills beyond, she wondered whether that was perhaps the old man’s strategy. Perhaps he was just going to ride around until dusk.
They had walked very slowly away from the viale and, keeping to the shady side of the street, in among the big apartment buildings, squares of high-maintenance garden courtyard dividing them. This was not a cheap part of town, but Luisa didn’t feel particularly at ease. It wasn’t, she couldn’t quite prevent herself from thinking, like San Niccolo: these blocks were solid and luxurious, no rusting balconies here, but it was lacking something essential.
Luisa looked up at the flowers tumbling down the white concrete, hibiscus and plumbago, purple and scarlet and pale blue; it was all very nice. But none of these people had been born here, had they? These buildings were twenty, thirty years old, maximum. With an uncharacteristic flush of sentiment Luisa thought of Santa Croce, of the old lady opposite them, ninety if she was a day, making her doddery way down the street to the market, six days a week. In Santa Croce there were people — herself among them — who hadn’t moved more than five hundred metres their whole lives.
Giuli gestured them across the street, into the sun, to a metal gate with an entry phone at the foot of a twelve-storey block. ‘This is it,’ she said, coming to a halt.
And Luisa had felt a little thump of panic: was this what she really wanted? San Niccolo was only a couple of kilometres away — but still. And it was her expression that had prompted Giuli’s concern.
‘We’re a pair, aren’t we?’ Luisa said. Hardly anyone’s idea of private detectives, she and Giuli, nagging each other about looking peaky. ‘Give me that.’ She put out a hand for the paper and frowned down at it. ‘Yes, this is it.’
Via Lazaretto 13. Apartment nine, third floor. Luisa was not superstitious at all, ever. But lazaretto meant plague hospital, and the significance of the number thirteen, even if you didn’t believe in anything at all, couldn’t be avoided. And what were they doing here, anyway? Poking about in Claudio Brunello’s double life, just to cause Anna Niescu more misery.
There was the solid-looking metal fence, a metre and a half high, the gate with its entryphone, a small, well-kept strip of shrubbery, a wide, smoked-glass door beyond it. From somewhere out of sight came the sound of a masonry hammer, battering rhythmically. Builders: the soundtrack to August.
On the gate there was a numberpad for punching in an entry code, but no code on the piece of paper Anna had given Sandro. Had Brunello never given it to her? Had she not even got past the gate, when she’d come here looking for him? There was a bell, marked Portiere. Luisa pressed it and, when nothing happened, pressed it again, holding her finger down five, ten seconds.
Still nothing.
Giuli made a sound of impatience. ‘He’s probably at the seaside, too,’ she said.
They looked up at the facade, wondering whether anyone was at home at all. There were signs of life, here and there: some washing hanging out on a balcony about halfway up, a little dog’s paws and snout peering over a balustrade lower down.
And then, as if by some miracle, someone — a youngish man in a suit — brushed past them, swiftly stabbed at the keypad and was through the gate without a word or a backward glance. For a second they gawped, then just in time Giuli put out a hand to stop the gate, and they were inside — inside the garden at least. Ahead, the young man, indifferent to their presence, was through the smoked-glass door before they could catch up with him. The door clicked solidly shut as they reached it.
‘Bastard,’ muttered Giuli. ‘Didn’t even look round.’
There was another bell for the porter here, and Luisa pressed it, without conviction. This time she could hear a tinny ring behind the glass, but there was still no response. And then from behind them someone said, in a deep, cigarette-roughened voice, ‘Don’t bother. He starts on brandy at eleven.’
A weather-beaten woman as wide as she was short — a metre twenty, at Luisa’s guess, and sixty or so years old — was behind them on the path, pulling a shopping trolley, a cigarette stuck between her lips, sizing them up unashamedly — and why not? — through smoke-narrowed eyes. As they stared back at her, she looked up and called a gruff endearment, and the little dog began to yelp excitedly in response, straining to see further over his balcony.
‘He yours?’ asked Luisa.
‘No,’ said the woman shortly. ‘If he was mine I’d take him out for a walk, now and again.’
‘Do you live here?’
‘Who wants to know?’
Luisa held out a hand. ‘Luisa Cellini,’ she said. And seeing the woman’s eyes shift to Giuli, ‘And this is Giulietta Sarto.’ She took a deep breath. ‘We’re trying to trace someone. This is the address we’ve got for him.’ She held out the piece of paper.
Calculation crept into the woman’s stolid expression. ‘Expectant father, is he?’ she said, and Luisa’s eyes widened. The woman smiled, just faintly. ‘Someone said, there was a pregnant woman hanging on that gate for an hour, a couple of days ago.’
‘And no one let her in?’
The woman grunted. ‘I’m Giovanna,’ she said. ‘Baldini. Fourth floor. People — not me, mind, but perhaps you’d worked that out — people keep themselves to themselves out here. I wasn’t there — I might have let her in, might not. But I’d have asked her what she wanted, that’s for sure. Only I wasn’t here. I was out at San Lorenzo for a few days. Cooler out there.’ She folded her arms across her broad chest. ‘All right?’