CHAPTER TWO

August

IF PEOPLE WEREN’T WHERE you expected them to be, well, no wonder: it was August.

Roxana Delfino sat behind her plexiglas teller’s screen in the bank’s gloom with nothing better to do and wondered, for example, whether the Carnevale had closed for August this year, because their guy hadn’t been in with the porn cinema’s takings in a cloth bag, as he had every Tuesday since Roxana’d been there.

In Florence in August you couldn’t rely on anything: not the parking regulations, not the market stalls, not the staff of your favourite bar nor the stock of your favourite grocery, supposing they were open at all. A month off in August, that was the tradition, sometimes brought forward and stretched to five weeks if July became unbearable. For Roxana, who liked things the way she liked them, August in the city was a nightmare.

Her mother said it was why she hadn’t got a man: had said it again last night. ‘You’re thirty-three,’ she’d said darkly. ‘It’s a dangerous age. I had three kids by the time I was thirty-three. You’re just too fussy, Roxana. You have to have everything – just so.’ As if she, Violetta Delfino, was any different.

Roxana had still been grinding her teeth over that when at seven-thirty that morning she had zipped on her silver Vespa down the narrow, high-sided length of the Via Romana, a road that annoyed her every day for its not-quite-straightness, kinked in the middle so she had to ease off halfway down to make the bend. There was – as there always was, even in August – a bus looming behind her, just waiting for her to make a mistake. Not yet eight in the morning and the hot wind had blown on her face like it came straight from a hairdryer.

Roxana had kept her cool, her gloved hands steady on the handlebars; she heard the bus squeal reluctantly to a stop in her wake and she had sailed on.

Then down the Via Maggio, dead straight, stone palaces to either side with their huge eaves projecting so far into the street that they almost met overhead. At ground level the darkened interiors of antique shops, all closed for the month: some with brown cloth blinds down, some with metal shutters, some displaying brocade chaises and heavy wooden frames with patrician disregard for the possibility of a smash and grab. Would anyone have the energy in this heat, Roxana had wondered as she sailed past, to ramraid, to heave all that stuff into a van? The answer, she supposed, was yes: there were always some people desperate enough. Last night a baby had cried somewhere in a nearby house for hours in the heat and eventually a row had interrupted, the child’s father shouting at its mother, the mother screeching, Just do it. Finish me off.

Three kids, and where were the others, Mamma? she wanted to say, but never did. Got their freedom and left Roxana to look after Ma. Luca in London, twenty-nine and working in a bar, clubbing till dawn most nights, taking God knew what illicit substances – but Luca could do no wrong. Susanna was up north, working in a hotel in Lugano on the Swiss border, with two kids under three and a feckless husband who kept disappearing, but at least she was married, at least she had her family. And Roxana wasn’t going to tell Mamma how it really was: and even if Susi called at least once a week to moan about Carlo, sounding worn out and angry, then she’d say, the kids were beautiful, it was worth it. That was always how the call ended: a coded warning not to tell Mamma.

And they were beautiful; Roxana had a picture of them at work, stuck under the counter where the customers wouldn’t see it. She looked down now, no need to be furtive, the place was as quiet as the grave. Paolino was one and a half and had his dad’s dark red hair and a fierce little face; Rosa, three, black-eyed and cherubic, took after her grandmother.

Not that easy though, Mamma. As if she could just nip out of the bank and on to the Via del Corso in her lunch break and nab a man with I want kids tattooed on his forehead.

Mamma had this theory that if women lived alone too long – chance would be a fine thing: what she meant was, lived without a man too long – they turned strange and fussy, liked their own little way of doing things too much. They turned into spinsters, and according to Mamma, Roxana was a prime example. ‘Sometimes,’ she’d pronounce, watching Roxana restack the dishwasher or order the cupboards or check they’d double-locked the door, ‘I wonder if you’ve got that thing. That obsessive-compulsive whatsit.’

Sliding her neat little motorino into the space under the embankment wall that was unofficially reserved for it next to Valentino’s fat, shiny, show-off Triumph motorbike, Roxana had climbed off gingerly, not wanting to raise a sweat, not before a day’s work. She unclipped her helmet, eased off the thin cotton jacket and stowed them away in the pillion box. Removed her handbag and locked the box, fastened the big yellow steel immobilizer and set off for the bank. Even then as she turned off the river into the warren of streets east of the Uffizi, she looked back over her shoulder, to be sure.

The city seemed so empty, bathed in heat and desolate, but there were always thieves: always. Roxana was a Florentine through and through, born in the hospital of Careggi that sat on the hills to the north; she’d been knocked off her motorino twice – a broken wrist the first time, a collarbone the second – and mugged seven times. Not in the last couple of years, though: she was careful these days. Her mother’s little villa in Galluzzo, where they had both lived since her father had died last year of a heart attack at fifty-eight, had been burgled three times. The thieves came in the early hours, high on something: you woke up in the morning to find wires where the flatscreen TV had been (My only pleasure, these days, Ma had wheedled to get her to buy it) and her handbag gone.

Now the revolving security airlock hissed, the mechanical voice instructed the new arrival to turn around and remove all metallic objects from all pockets, as it always did. Only the odd flustered tourist, having strayed off the beaten track, ever complied; the security capsule’s early morning occupant stood patiently and waited for the door to open.

Here he is, thought Roxana, almost with disappointment. The bank’s most reliable customer, not quite regular as clockwork any more – it was close to ten by now, rather than the usual eight-fifteen – but—

It wasn’t him. Signora Martelli, proprietress of the newspaper stand in the tiny Piazza Santa Felicita shuffled through the door, dragging her shopping trolley after her, pale and sweaty with the heat under her habitual full make-up, to deposit her meagre takings. The typical customer: on her last legs, heart trouble, swollen ankles, the summer would probably see her out. Roxana eyed her. She didn’t envy the executors of that will. The old lady wasn’t letting ill health mellow her – she was one of those who had her favourites, Roxana theorized, a working woman who disapproved of other working women. Yet, with a disdainful sniff, she eventually allowed Roxana to investigate the failure of a standing order to pay her water bill. Not quite satisfied by the explanation that an annual review had been specified on the standing order and it had lapsed, she had shuffled off again, leaving the place to return to glum silence, dust motes hanging in the murk.

The last time they’d been burgled, Roxana had been woken by the intruders and she’d got up, bleary with rage, the heavy immobilizer for the Vespa in her hand, only Ma had appeared in her bedroom doorway white with terror and clung on to her. Roxana had had to stand there, stupid big piece of plastic-sheathed metal in her hand, and do absolutely nothing. Nothing but stroke Mamma’s hair to calm her. They hadn’t even claimed, not wanting the insurance to go higher: Roxana had gone for the cheapest TV she could find this time.

Too many drugs, too many desperate types, too little respect. Easy pickings from the wealthy tourists bred crime as uncleared garbage bred rats.

Obsessive-compulsive? Roxana didn’t know where Ma had picked up that little bit of psycho-babble. It was simply that the answer was to be wary, and to pay attention to the detail.

The boss would laugh at her, gently, for this tendency, but then he’d reassure her that this was precisely why he’d employed her. It was why she was such an asset to the bank, with her thoroughness, her conscientiousness.

In the silent interior, Roxana couldn’t suppress a sigh. It was also why she was left holding the fort for most of August – that big mummy’s boy Valentino Sordi, currently messing about happily with the coffee machine in the little staff room.

The offices behind her were dark and empty: the boss’s sanctum – with Direttore in big letters on the frosted glass – and that of his deputy Marisa, who could do no wrong as Gestore, Business e Family with special responsibilities for bringing in commercial customers. The use of English words in Marisa’s title was intended to indicate modernity.

Were they having an affair? Roxana mused, with nothing better to do than indulge in flights of fantasy. Their holidays were more or less coinciding, even if Marisa had been away a day or two longer than him, and since the boss was supposed to be at the seaside with his family, would he even have time for an affair? Not to mention the fact that Marisa, with her designer clothes and her evenings at the Gallery Hotel drinking cocktails, had a wealthy boyfriend already. But still …

Could Roxana have been appointed Gestore, Business e Family if she’d played her cards right? Marisa Goldman, the daughter of a Swiss banker and a Torinese countess, had nothing but good breeding and the right wardrobe, a certain aristocratic way with customers. Whereas despite her degree in economics and accounting, and her thesis on the decline in small-scale manufacturing in rural northern Italy, Roxana was still only a sportellista. A teller, a bank clerk, after three years behind the plexiglass, for all the boss’s professions of enthusiasm for her attention to detail.

And it wasn’t as though the Banca di Toscana Provinciale was one of the big names. No, it was a small, old-fashioned bank, a niche bank, if you wanted to put it kindly, with just ten branches, three of them in Florence. It was her mother’s bank, though, which was more or less why she’d ended up here. It had been where her father had brought her to open her own first bank account – now a source of constant frustration to her because the bank was too small, too obscure, and too backward to have its own cash machines anywhere but in the city, so every time she took money out she had to pay some other bank’s whopping charge and feel a mug all over again. The Banca di Toscana Provinciale wasn’t ready for the modern world, and Roxana had always thought that she was, more than ready. So what was she still doing here?

She stared at a terrible poster, dog-eared on the outside of the boss’s office. A man with a white grin and a sharp suit, holding out his hand, and customers queueing in the bank, a dream bubble over each one’s head. Kids playing in the garden, a shiny car. Look ahead! the man was saying. Get in line! Who’d come up with that one? Queue up like a drone, borrow more than you can afford, don’t bother to read the small print.

Roxana’s friends – friend, really, Maria Grazia, whom she hardly saw now she’d moved to Rome to work in film production – told her, get out, the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze had vacancies, a big shiny new building in the north of the city; get an apartment up there, there are some great offers on the new developments. Break free.

And she would. Roxana told her – over a snatched coffee the last time she visited, Maria Grazia with that worried look in her eyes – she would, only for the moment, there was that tug at her heart that was Mamma.

‘She’s only sixty,’ Maria Grazia had said in an exasperated outburst. Then hissed, ‘She could live another thirty years, Roxi. Getting more cranky and ill every year.’

It was all right for Maria Grazia; her mother, long divorced, was a journalist, she prided herself on being modern, didn’t want her kids hanging on to her apron strings until they were forty or married.

Suddenly, unwatched, unsupervised, Roxana felt like calling up Maria Grazia and telling her. Asking her what she thought about the only interesting thing that had happened in the bank for months.

If Maria Grazia was even there. She hadn’t been, Roxana had found with a sense of obscure humiliation, on the last couple of times she’d called – out on location, a kindly, condescending assistant had said. As if the girl knew that Maria Grazia’s best friend from school was stuck in a dead-end job while the fledgling production director was hanging out with a film crew in Romania.

And if she was there, she’d think her old friend was losing it. Roxana could imagine the intake of breath, the disbelieving laugh. ‘You mean, that’s the highlight of your day, Roxi?’ she’d say. ‘Some old guy failing to turn up to deposit his takings?’

Not old, at least, not very, not much older than Roxana. Deep lines around his eyes, but then working at the Carnevale might have that effect on you. Not her type, even in a different line of work, she’d have to make that clear to Maria Grazia or she’d start matchmaking straight away. Though there was something about him … Otherwise why would his absence keep nagging at Roxana? Dark hair. Black, black eyes. Not always quite clean, not always close-shaven; there was nevertheless something about the Carnevale’s bagman, who no doubt had a name but Roxana had never learned it, that made you think twice. Something that made you wonder, or maybe, as Maria Grazia would undoubtedly say, You’ve got a bit too much time on your hands, Roxi, if you’re wondering about every customer that comes through the door. A tendency to daydream: perhaps that was why Roxana had never been promoted.

There was a clatter at the little staff door behind Roxana, and a grunt, and Val was back, a tiny tin tray in his hand with two coffees on it and a ridiculously pleased expression on his big, stupid, handsome face. The coffee smelled good, Roxana had grudgingly to admit. She hadn’t felt like breakfast this morning, waking in a sweat after a night of broken sleep, that neighbouring baby crying, the suffocating humidity, Mamma’s grumbling still turning over and over in her head, and a bitter taste in her mouth.

‘Thanks,’ she said, downing the thimbleful and pushing back her chair. ‘God,’ she sighed, ‘I don’t remember it being this quiet last year.’

Val shrugged. ‘Don’t knock it,’ he said with indifference, stacking the cups carelessly back on the tray, setting it down on her neat working surface and parking himself beside her. Spinning on the adjustable seat like a child at the barber’s. Roxana retrieved one of the cups as it tipped and threatened to spill its dregs. He set his big feet up on the counter in a parody of insolence. Val didn’t have a thesis or even a degree; he’d scraped through the Liceo Scientifico with a decent grade thanks to private tuition but had dug his heels in when university was suggested. He was simply too lazy.

Val had got his job at the Banca di Toscana Provinciale because he was connected: his uncle was one of the directors. He might stay a sportellista all his life, too, but the thing was, Val didn’t really care. His mother – who worked all the hours God sent running a grocery-cum-wine bar – would keep him supplied with money, and business was booming, if Val’s appearance was any guide. All Val cared about was how he looked. He would spend the first half an hour of each morning brushing himself down after the ride in on his big Triumph, examining the creases in his sharp wool trousers, adjusting the angle of his tie.

Roxana stood up abruptly, the tray in her hand: she’d wash up. She always did.

‘He hasn’t been in,’ she said, and even as she said it, she experienced a minute, sudden, unexpected nudge of panic. As if shining a light on this small and apparently inconsequential mystery might conjure up a whole world of unforeseen consquences: one tiny thing out of place, one idle, curious question asked.

‘Hasn’t been in?’ repeated Val stupidly. ‘Who hasn’t been in?’

Dimwit. Val dealt with the bagman just as often as Roxana.

‘The Albanian.’ To her he was an ‘Albian’ – he might have been anything Eastern European. ‘From the – the cinema, with his cashbag. It’s Tuesday, and he hasn’t been in.’ Then, patiently as if she was talking to a slow child, ‘Every Tuesday since I’ve been here, eight-fifteen – or at least, between eight-twelve and eight-twenty – he comes in to make his deposit.’

Val stared back at her. ‘Dunno,’ he said, and shrugged, but he was frowning. So maybe it really was odd if it had penetrated Val’s thick skull. Or maybe he just didn’t know what she was talking about.

‘Really,’ said Roxana, turning away with the tray but she felt that sharp little tweak of anxiety again. Kept her face impassive, shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s just that it’s August.’

A porn cinema, in this heat. And these days there was the internet. Ugh.

‘Yeah,’ said Val indifferently. Then, with a child’s expression of transparent craftiness, ‘How about we bunk off early, then?’