Christobel Kent - Dead Season

Yes, was the answer.

‘It’s down to money, you know,’ Sandro said. ‘That’s all. Down to how much we can get for this place, how much there is in the bank, how much we can borrow.’

There was a pause while they considered what a bank manager might say to a modestly employed couple of sixty-something, thinking of taking out a mortgage.

‘I’ll make enquiries,’ said Sandro.

He tried not to listen to the happy, whispering voices that started up in his head, telling him how good it would be to begin again in a quiet street with a view of a green hillside, how good it would be for Luisa, give her something to think about. Boost her immune system.

‘But it’s OK, you know, if — if it doesn’t come off,’ said Luisa, as if she knew what he was thinking. ‘This place isn’t so bad. Or somewhere else might come up, somewhere cheaper.’

He squeezed her hand and, to forestall the disappointment creeping into the conversation, Sandro sat up. ‘OK,’ said Luisa, changing the subject obligingly. ‘So what’s your plan today? This girl, yes? This Anna Niescu.’

‘Yes,’ said Sandro. He snorted. ‘Actually, maybe I could ask her fiance for a loan. He’s supposed to be a bank manager, after all.’

‘You think he really is?’

Sandro pondered. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘She believes it, though.’

Luisa persisted. ‘If there was no answer on his mobile, or at this apartment he’s supposed to be doing up-’ And she paused. ‘Well, why didn’t she just call him at work?’

Sandro recalled Anna’s eyes, round as saucers in response to this very question. ‘Oh, no,’ she’d said, something of reverence in her voice, and something else too. ‘I’d never call him at work, never. Oh, no, I couldn’t do that.’

‘I think he’d warned her off coming to the bank,’ he said warily.

‘Well, husbands do,’ said Luisa, getting up, tying her robe tight at her waist and setting her hands on her hips. ‘Don’t they? Not many like the idea of the wife turning up at the office unannounced.’

‘I suppose not,’ he agreed. ‘Particularly if she’s pregnant and hasn’t been introduced to anyone and isn’t even your wife yet.’

Luisa turned towards the kitchen. ‘Never an issue with us,’ she said cheerfully over her shoulder. ‘You out in a patrol car with Pietro half the time, I’d never have known how to find you if I’d wanted to.’

Reluctantly, Sandro got out of the bed, straightened the pillows and smoothed the single sheet under which they’d slept. At the window he pushed open the shutters and heard the rattle and roar of the garbage truck at the end of the street, smelled the stench from the dumpsters as they were upended into the back of it. There was early morning rubbish collection all over the city, he reminded himself; there were drunks and tourists too. A little apartment south of the river wasn’t the answer to every problem. He leaned on the windowsill. It was hot, already. Eight o’clock. But for the first time in weeks he’d slept soundly.

‘Did you?’ he asked absently. ‘Ever want to find me?’

Luisa was back beside him, leaning out, wrinkling her nose at the smell. ‘Now and again,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Mostly not. Mostly I didn’t want to know what you were up to, cleaning up car wrecks, taking dead junkies to the morgue. Getting shot at by armed robbers. Maybe I should have.’

Sandro tipped his head from side to side, considering the matter. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. And I never actually did get shot, did I?’

They both knew that this was an evasion: he’d been shot at , during a raid on a warehouse in Prato, but they’d missed. He’d been stabbed three times — once in the arm, once in the thigh and once near a lung; he’d nearly bled to death. An HIV-positive hooker had bit him, twenty years earlier, when no one had known anything about the disease and it had taken nearly a year to have final confirmation that he was clear.

‘But one thing’s for sure,’ he said. ‘If her Josef was not the manager of the station branch of the Banca di Toscana Provinciale, he would make damn sure she never turned up there asking for him.’

‘Funny bank to choose, if he was just making it up on the spur of the moment,’ mused Luisa, head cocked as she looked at him. ‘Don’t you think? I mean, it’s such a dodo. Old-fashioned, obscure — I keep expecting it simply to vanish.’

‘That occurred to me, too,’ said Sandro thoughtfully. ‘And Pietro, for that matter.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe he picked it at random, or maybe he has some other connection with the bank we don’t know about.’

With the departure of the garbage truck, the street was abruptly, albeit temporarily, deserted. Sandro blocked out the thought of that rusting wrought-iron balcony, on which they might both be sitting now, looking out towards the Casentino. ‘Although,’ he said, ‘the station branch is probably as far away from the Loggiata Hotel as you can get.’

Chin in her hands on the windowsill, Luisa just nodded. ‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘But I still think it’s strange.’ Then she straightened. ‘I’m starving,’ she announced cheerfully. ‘Let’s go and get some breakfast.’

Even in August, the Piazza Stazione was never deserted. Nor was it much of a piazza, surmounted by the low, modernist bulk of the Fascist-era station that overlooked a patch of sparse and scrubby grass. The blackened concrete facade of an ugly 1970s hotel to one side, the shabby bus station, a busy roundabout. Not much of a piazza at all.

Where the hell was it? Sandro stood at the taxi rank and pondered. In front of him a group of foreign teenagers lounged on the ground, leaning on their backpacks. One of the girls — pudgy, pale, pretty — had taken off her T-shirt and was sunbathing in a bikini top; Sandro stared, so dispirited by the sight that momentarily he forgot why he was there.

All right. He passed a hand over his sweating forehead. He’d looked up the branches of the Banca di Toscana Provinciale: there were three in the city, three more in the suburbs. The nearest one to the station was in a road called the Vicolo Sant’Angelo, but although he had lived in the city more or less his whole life, Sandro didn’t know it. Nor, it turned out, did any of the taxi drivers, but then again, in August, what did you expect? Those left in the city were the no-hopers, half of them probably didn’t even have driving licences.

One of the news vendors inside would have a map he could look at; he knew most of them. But for the moment he stood, under the shade of the station’s portico, watched another girl from among the backpackers feed a piece of fruit into a boy’s mouth, and thought about Giulietta.

He and Luisa had gone for breakfast to one of the big, gleaming, businesslike bars in the Piazza Signoria, a few metres from the shop and therefore very much on Luisa’s turf. Never mind that it was expensive, never mind it catered largely to tourists: the bar made its own pastries, it was clean and sparkling — marble, polished glass and yellow cloths — and there was the view. Not even the heat and the querulous voices of tired tourists shuffling past could spoil that: the fine turreted tower of the Palazzo Vecchio silhouetted against the glaring sky, the pale arcades of the Uffizi leading off to the river. Luisa had settled them on a corner of the wide terrace; the waiter had bowed to her because here she was royalty.

Briskly Luisa had given their order: caffe macchiato , pastries filled with custard, a budino of sweet cooked rice, two glasses of water. Then folded her hands in her lap.

‘You know where you’re going?’ she’d said.