CHAPTER THREE

EVEN LATER AS THE light faded and the heat refused to die in the stifling streets, as Sandro waited on the corner for Pietro, standing awkwardly with the gift in his hands, trailing gold ribbon and all, he couldn’t get her out of his head.

Anna Niescu had not been what he expected.

He had felt Giuli’s eyes on them every time she came back into the room, on one pretext or another; it had been like being a teacher or a doctor trying to coax a word out of a child, with a pushy parent hovering nearby.

‘Giuli,’ he’d said in exasperation on something like the fourth interruption – looking for the tax forms, she’d said, as if Giuli had any interest in her own tax code, let alone anyone else’s. Anna Niescu had stopped what she was saying and turned to smile that innocent, trustful smile at Giuli as she entered – as she’d done on the previous three occasions. Giuli her protector.

A bit too protective. It was as if Giuli thought she needed an interpreter, as if she didn’t trust the girl – woman, Sandro supposed, as he now knew her to be twenty-eight years old, despite appearances – to speak her own mind, or possibly to be able to form a coherent sentence. Sandro himself, he had to admit, had had the impression before Anna Niescu spoke that she might be – simple. Too good for this world, as had used to be said of the backward child of every village; no doubt there was a term in modern psychology for it, but Sandro was quite happy not to know it.

‘Giuli tells me you can find him,’ Anna Niescu had said, smiling from Giuli to Sandro and back again, apparently unable to see the reluctance in his eyes, the anxiety in Giuli’s.

Ironic, Sandro had thought, that these days such trustfulness is assumed to be the symptom of a psychiatric disorder of some kind. Faith. Sandro himself was long past churchgoing: he felt himself to be too dirtied by a life of policing – public servant, then private investigator, and he couldn’t have said which was dirtier – to summon up sufficient belief in a benevolent creator. Too much of a sinner himself, too. It wasn’t quite the same thing as being an atheist, though.

‘Well, I can try,’ Sandro had said with extreme wariness.

He had been right about at least one of his assumptions about Anna Niescu. She was indeed looking for the father of her child. She referred to him as her fidanzato: her fiancé. Husband, Sandro had thought, would be the appropriate word under the circumstances, but then he was old-fashioned.

‘I know four days isn’t very long,’ she’d said apologetically. ‘But he’s not answering his phone. I called round at the apartment, on Sunday, then yesterday, and there was no answer.’

She’d given him the address, on a scrap of paper: an apartment block out towards Firenze Sud, a decent neighbourhood, if not exactly picturesque, a place of Holiday Inns and comfortable modern housing and perhaps anonymity. Sandro had contemplated the image of this girl, this child, heavily pregnant, standing in the street in the heat and pressing despairingly on a doorbell. There was something biblical in the scene that Sandro resisted: she was no virgin. Only innocent.

He’d imagined the guy, lying low, waiting for her to go away. Home would not be the place to catch him, would it?

‘So when did you last see him?’ he’d asked resignedly, overwhelmed by a sense, not unfamiliar to him, of his own uselessness in the face of fate, and women.

‘I saw him on Friday, about seven, after he finished work,’ she’d replied with bright obedience. ‘He came to see me after work as often as he could, with something. A cake, or something, to keep up my strength. He brought me flowers once.’

Today was Tuesday. ‘On his way home?’ Sandro had asked gently. He had not pointed out to her that it was usual for a couple expecting their first child to be cohabiting, at least.

Anna had smiled, still trusting, and Sandro had felt his gloom grow. ‘Yes,’ she’d said. ‘It’s not quite ready yet, you see. The apartment: he’s getting everything ready for the baby. And I live in, at the hotel. Since I was eighteen: it’s like home to me.’

She was chambermaid and breakfast cook at the Loggiata Hotel. Sandro didn’t know it, though it was in San Frediano, not far from the office; he had wondered how much they could be paying her, to shuffle between the tables with brioche and coffee, to take hours over making beds, in her condition. He had returned the girl’s open gaze and thought, with a spark of fury: as little as they can get away with. And will she be out on the street, when the baby comes?

A shabby, old-fashioned place, Giuli had said afterwards. ‘She might call it home, but you couldn’t have a baby there.’

Anna Niescu had been gone an hour by then but the room still seemed to harbour her scent: sweet and spicy, soap and talcum powder and the heat of her skin.

‘Will they do anything for her, at the Centre?’ Giuli had just shrugged. Meaning, who knows? Meaning, they’ll do what they can, but it won’t be enough.

‘I’ve got a picture,’ Anna Niescu had said, almost the first word she’d spoken, scrabbling in her cheap bag and offering him not a photograph but a mobile phone. As she presented it to him with shy pride, Sandro had identified the phone immediately as a fake – a clone of an expensive make, the numbers beginning to erode, the metal trim peeling away in one corner. ‘Josef gave it to me.’

‘Josef?’ Not an Italian name: that would be Giuseppe.

‘Claudio Josef Brunello, but he called himself Josef.’ So part-Italian. ‘His grandmother was from – somewhere else. He did tell me, I just can’t remember it right now—’ And she had broken off. Abruptly her eyes had filled with tears and Sandro could imagine her, at eight or nine in school, unable to answer a question.

‘I don’t suppose it matters,’ he’d lied, patting her arm uselessly, trying to suppress the gloom settling over him at her scant knowledge of this man or the world, at her utter guilelessness. He had squinted at the small, indistinct image on the mobile. Almost hopeless: the two faces, hers and his, were pressed together on the tiny screen, the picture of extremely poor quality. All he had been able to tell was that the man had dark hair and eyes and was under fifty years old. He would also have said, from the angle of his head and body, from his slight, uneasy grimace, that, whilst beside him, her cheek against his, Anna was beaming, her fiancé wasn’t too happy about being photographed at all.

Then she had looked from the picture to Sandro uncertainly, as if she had only just realized how little she had to go on. ‘He’s a good man,’ she’d said. ‘He’s educated, he’s got a proper job.’ Defensive. ‘He’s high up, in a bank, actually. And expecting a big pay rise, any day now.’

‘Really?’

Trying to keep the scepticism out of his voice, Sandro had held the small screen up in front of him. Could this man be – respectable? Could he be for real? He’d tried to persuade himself he could – short-haired, the suit didn’t look too cheap – but no. He’d pulled himself up: it was a pipe dream – now these two women had got him at it. Hoping against hope.

He’d handed the mobile back to her. ‘Have you got anything more – detailed?’ He had spoken as casually as he could manage.

‘No,’ she’d said, her face falling. ‘He um – ah, he didn’t like – well.’ Then recovering, the smile back: ‘I’m sure he would have given me a photo if I’d asked.’

‘I’m sure he would.’

They’d looked at each other in silence a moment then; she’d shifted in her chair in some passing discomfort and despite himself Sandro had looked down, at the great round of her belly under the thin cotton. It was too much for her, he’d felt briefly: too big, too portentous, it immobilized her.

And then he’d seen it move under the fabric: like the quick shadow of something, like a shoal of fish under water. It broke the perfect round of stretched flesh with a limb, the knotted curve of a spine; and, with hands suddenly gripping the chair’s seat on either side of her, Anna Niescu had looked down too and then up at him, half shy, half delighted.

Now, in the shadow of the brooding statue of Dante outside Santa Croce, Sandro scanned the wide piazza for his old friend. The poet gazed with eyes so darkened now by time and pollution so that they became hooded and sinister, and the statue, the chronicler of the afterlife, more than ever a figure of death. A memory came back to him: of being a boy in the city in the days when this piazza – all the city’s piazzas – had been emptier, the occasional car innocently traversing them, when cars were a marvel and not a curse, and tourists had moved through the streets, awestruck and respectful, carefully consulting their red guide books. A memory of running in a gang of boys wheeling like a flock of birds around the city’s monuments, trying to dodge the great poet’s stern gaze as they headed past him for the market of San Ambrogio.

Anna Niescu, alone, would bring that child not into the world of his childhood but into this new world, where the hawkers and pimps and drug dealers – he could see them even now – stood back in the shadows of palace buttresses around the lovely piazza. She would love the child, that at least was certain, but would it be enough?

‘Sandro!’

The hand clapped his shoulder, and the face into which he turned to look was beaming from ear to ear. Sandro was surprised by the gratitude he felt at the sight of his old friend’s face, and the happiness he saw there. Pietro Cavallaro, his old friend, his former partner.

It had been too long: they both agreed on that.

‘Not here,’ Sandro said, taking a look around the big bleached piazza, the gaudy frontages of the cheap leather shops and the souvenir sellers stupefied by the heat.

They ended up in a modest bar in the Piazza San Ambrogio that was still open because the market stayed open through the summer, the butchers and salumifici taking it in turns to get away. The place was quiet and old-fashioned, just what Sandro wanted. A bar of speckled mica, an elderly cold cabinet, a listless overhead fan. The middle-aged barman mopped his neck resignedly with a tea towel and moved with extreme slowness to pour them each a birra media. The beer at least was nice and cold.

Pietro should have been away on holiday by now. ‘A bit of a crisis with personnel,’ he said, uncomplaining. ‘This flu.’

Oh, yes, the flu, thought Sandro: interesting how someone like Pietro never gets the flu. Flu in August? Bird flu, swine flu – the world really was going crazy: the hysteria and illogic greeting its every new mutated virus a gift to the new breed of freeloader, his eye on the main chance. I think it might be this new flu, boss. Don’t want to risk my comrades by coming into work, don’t want an epidemic.

‘Maybe I’ll get away by the weekend,’ said Pietro, rapping the table with his knuckles, for luck. ‘If it’s quiet.’

Sandro slid the gift across the table by the door where they sat. ‘It’s a what-d’you-call-it,’ he said. ‘One of those music gizmos. Pod, thing.’

Pietro drew his head back in surprise and admiration. ‘Sandro,’ he said. ‘That’s generous.’

Sandro smiled faintly. ‘You thought I’d give her an apron, or a – a crystal punchbowl?’

Pietro laughed with embarrassment. ‘Well,’ he said, and stopped.

‘I did my homework,’ said Sandro. ‘Asked Giuli. And Luisa did warn me. Eighteen-year-old girls are different these days, she said.’ Of course, he thought with abrupt despondency, she’s probably got one already, this pod thing.

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Pietro, with emphasis.

Another memory came to Sandro unbidden, of Pietro walking his little chubby toddler in her lace socks into the police station, the girl beaming up at each officer as he passed his hands over her red-gold head, trailing her favourite toy through the corridors. Sixteen, seventeen years ago.

The last time he’d seen Chiara, walking with her friends in the Cascine, she’d had her hair dyed black and shorter than a boy’s and had been wearing jeans with careful slashes cut across each thigh. When Luisa had been eighteen, thought Sandro, she’d have worn the same clothes as her mother before her, good handmade leather shoes, neat skirts, white blouses. By the time she got to twenty-one they’d been engaged already: walking hand in hand across the Ponte Vecchio and looking at rings. But Chiara had smiled to see him, despite the clothes. He had wanted to get her something nice.

‘Well,’ said Sandro, clearing his throat. ‘And maybe I’m not such an old fart as you think I am.’

‘Yes, you are,’ said Pietro. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of: I am too. How’s work, anyway? You going to have room for an unpaid helper, when I’m retired?’

Sandro looked at him sharply and understood that he was joking. Pietro would have plenty to keep him busy on early retirement, otherwise why was he going for it? The wife, the kid, the little holiday house in the mountains. Fishing.

‘Work’s fine,’ he said, hearing the dullness of disappointment in his own voice and making an effort to brighten. ‘New client today.’

By the time he finished telling Pietro about Anna Niescu, both their glasses were drained and sticky and the place was empty.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Pietro, momentarily dejected. ‘That’s not going to be a happy ending, is it?’ Turned the empty glass in his hands. ‘Man lets woman down: not a new story, that one. He’s the bastard, not the poor unborn kid.’ He glanced up at the barman, slumped now on his stool, defeated by the heat. Raised a finger and after a long moment’s consideration the man eased himself off his perch.

‘This heat.’ And they shook their heads in unspoken agreement, on any kind of madness licensed by the inhuman temperatures, the boiling nights, the abandonment of the unborn included.

Pietro tipped his head back. ‘Plenty of men run scared, don’t they? When it dawns on them. The thought of that responsibility.’ He gave Sandro a glance, chewed his lip, knowing that Sandro would have laid down his life for the chance of a child of his own. Sandro just shook his head, almost smiling, and Pietro went on, thoughtfully, ‘Or he could have been married already, leading a double life. Nodded. ‘That happens.’

‘Yes’, Sandro said frowning. Did that fit? Maybe. She’d seen his apartment only once, she said. Once.

‘And what about the bank? That thing about him working in the bank?’

Pietro was still puzzling away at it with that way he had; it was like watching him disentangle his wife’s jewellery, no rush, patience itself, until finally with quiet satisfaction he would hold the unknotted chain up to the light. Sandro had to resist a rush of warm feeling: it would be so easy just to settle back in with Pietro, to pretend they were still partners. But that part of his life was over. Pietro was a state policeman, and Sandro would never put his old friend in a compromising situation.

‘The Banca di Toscana Provinciale,’ he said with a sigh. ‘The branch by the station, so he’s hardly a big wheel.’

‘No,’ agreed Pietro. ‘Didn’t some big bank try to buy it up last year?’

Sandro shrugged; he was having trouble trying to believe any of Anna Niescu’s fiancé’s story, let alone get a handle on the latest developments in the banking crisis.

He sighed. ‘I’m going to talk to her again tomorrow. At the Loggiata, where she works. There’s more, I’m sure, she – she just couldn’t think straight, she said.’

She’d been flustered, in the office, poor child. As it had dawned on her that her faith might have been misplaced, that Sandro and Giuli were going down a different path than the one she’d envisioned, where her beloved was in a hospital with memory loss from a car accident, perhaps, and when they found him all would be well. Other women might have been frightened, resentful, angry; she was just so certain that he wouldn’t want to miss it all. The birth, the uncomplicatedly joyful event. She was so sure that he must want to be found.

Pietro was still musing. ‘Responsible job – doesn’t fit with the guy who takes fright, does it? To run out on all that?’

Sandro frowned, thinking of the way she’d talked. Telling him about the man who took her for her first prenatal scan and held her hand, the man who came to see her after his day’s work, to bring her cakes. ‘She really loved him,’ he said.

Pietro shook his head, sad but curious. ‘To think there are still girls like that around. Where does she come from?’

‘She was adopted herself,’ said Sandro, gazing out through the window at the shuttered market building. ‘Looks as if she’s got some Roma blood to me. Found abandoned and adopted by an elderly couple, religious by the sound of it; the old man died before she’d left junior school, and mother when Anna was eighteen. She was devoted to them.’

She’d shown him a dog-eared photograph of the old couple, a pair of contadini from a village up in the Apennines. When they’d died she’d gone to the city to look for a job; someone at her school has suggested it, perhaps out of misplaced kindness, knowing the girl would never be academic.

‘I’ve got some savings,’ she’d said, looking up at him. ‘I can pay you.’

Sandro had just looked at her. ‘Let’s see how we go,’ was all he’d said. Savings: how much could you save living in as a chambermaid at the Loggiata? They probably even deducted her board.

‘So, first stop, the bank?’ said Pietro. ‘Or this apartment he’s supposed to be doing up for them, his little family?’

‘Yes,’ said Sandro, ‘I think, the bank.’

And something stirred at last in his sluggish, heat-stupefied veins. The need for action, the chance that maybe tomorrow morning there’d be a breath of air, in the early hours. The Banca di Toscana Provinciale, then, first thing. He stood up.

‘I hope you do get away,’ he said, anxious suddenly, prey to some foreboding he didn’t want to acknowledge.

And at the door he turned back. ‘Give Chiara my love,’ he said. ‘Tell her I remember that day you brought her into the station. Tell her I remember that rabbit she brought with her, trailing around, holding it by the ear.’

And Pietro’s expression – the same combination of affection, respect and bewilderment he’d known for twenty years – followed him out on to the street and stayed with him all the way home to Luisa.

Who had a surprise waiting for him.