Luisa paused at the bar, asking for two coffees and two glasses of water: Giancarlo had nothing in front of him and she’d be damned if he got away that quickly, not even giving her the time it took to drink a glass of water.
‘So you think we’re shocked,’ she said, setting down the water and the tiny cup and saucer. ‘By what you boys get up to? There’ve been gay men in this city for thousands of years. And if I were prejudiced I’d be in the wrong business, wouldn’t I?’ She was feeling better. ‘Is your mother shocked? I bet she’s not.’
He bobbed his head down. ‘I didn’t mean—’ He put two spoons of sugar in his coffee and stirred it, a flush beginning at his neck.
‘So I’m shocking you now, is that it?’ He laughed, and she saw him relax.
‘No,’ he said, looking at her directly with clear green eyes. ‘It’s just my ma died a while back.’
‘She wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.’ Luisa felt the need to say it. ‘Look at you! Nothing to find fault with.’ She didn’t know what it was in the boy that was bringing this out in her: the euphoria of finding him here, his sweet cleanness, his dead mother even – she’d no idea.
She’d dashed in and out of the shop and hadn’t given Giusy and Beppe a chance to complain. Still, she couldn’t hang about.
‘Right,’ Luisa said. ‘So what’s the story with Chiara? She’s moved out just like that to live with this boyfriend. She’s barely twenty! Her parents haven’t met the man. Is it any wonder they’re worried?’
Their coffee cups were already empty. He looked over her shoulder into the street: she turned to see what he’d seen but no one was looking inside the Caffè La Borsa. No escape for him there.
‘What’s she said to you? To her girlfriends? You’re at the university too, right? Who does she hang out with? What’s this man like?’
A couple came in: a man in a suit, ruddy-faced, past his best, with a woman in very high heels. She spoke in a little girl’s voice, asking complainingly for a Mimosa. Some men, Luisa reflected, wanted that bargain. Most of them wanted it, it sometimes seemed to her, after a day of serving pretty, spoiled women. What would she see in him but the wallet? Giancarlo shifted in his seat, but didn’t bolt. Slowly he took a sip of his water.
‘I haven’t seen the guy,’ he said. ‘None of us has. Come to that, I haven’t seen much of her lately. Since she met him, Chiara comes in less and less and she keeps a low profile. A couple of the girls were complaining she’s avoiding them.’ He smiled. ‘But then, maybe that’s down to them. A particular kind of girl, if you know what I mean.’
‘What kind of girl?’ Luisa didn’t know what he meant.
Giancarlo leaned back. ‘Oh, you know. You’ve known Chiara long enough – she was one of them too until now. Those girls who go on demonstrations and wear baggy sweaters and don’t brush their hair.’
‘Oh, those,’ said Luisa drily. ‘You don’t approve?’
‘Do you? Working in that place?’ And he nodded towards Frollini. ‘I’d have thought they’d drive you mad.’
Luisa eyed him. ‘I think they make the world go round,’ she said, surprising herself. ‘Idealism? Isn’t it what being a kid is all about?’ She laughed. ‘All right, I do wish they’d brush their hair. I don’t think you have to hide yourself in a paper bag to believe in something. It’s like – the burkha, isn’t it? Men need to learn that just because a woman looks good, it doesn’t mean she’s available.’ She stopped abruptly, because he was staring at her. ‘Speech over,’ she said. ‘I’m not prejudiced, is all. I liked Chiara as she was.’ And she realized it was true. ‘It’s too soon for that kind of dressing up.’ She glanced at the woman at the bar, running her finger around the rim of her glass while the man stared at her hungrily. ‘High heels and all that.’
‘Right,’ Giancarlo said slowly, still frowning. ‘But parents never are ready for their kids to grow up, are they? They always want them to stay as they are, sweet and innocent. Life’s not innocent, fun’s not always clean.’ He shifted along the banquette, preparing, Luisa could see, to make his getaway.
‘I know that,’ she said.
‘You know what?’ he said, calling her bluff. ‘I think there’s a bit of, you know, rough play involved here. I think Chiara’s a bit scared of him. That can work. It’s the kind of thing parents don’t like the idea of, but – we like to experiment, you know? With an authority figure.’
Luisa stared. Not Chiara, she thought.
‘So she’s stopped talking to the girls who don’t brush their hair but she talks to you? Because you understand, and they don’t?’
Giancarlo didn’t move off his seat but both hands were down on the leatherette, ready. His shirt came tight across his body with the movement and Luisa saw the outline of something in his top pocket, a little cylindrical shape, pointed at one end. A – not a syringe? She averted her eyes, mind working. Stop it, she thought. You’re not his mother.
‘Maybe,’ he said uneasily, ‘I mean, she did come over yesterday when she saw me. Showing off her new look.’
He rubbed a hand up and down his arm, as if cold suddenly, though it was warm in the bar.
‘But it’s not – I mean, it’s happened all of a sudden. I don’t think she wants to stop being anyone’s friend, not really – I suppose it’s to do with him, you know. When there’s suddenly only one person that matters, everyone else has to take a back seat.’ He looked away. ‘Love, you know.’
‘Love,’ repeated Luisa. The word sounded old and false.
‘Yeah, love,’ he said, looking back at her, defiant.
‘I think maybe you mean sex,’ she said, and looked involuntarily at the couple at the bar.
‘Maybe I do,’ he said, and with that slid out around the table and was on his feet.
‘You got kids?’ he said, looking down at her, and she shook her head. He shrugged. ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘You look like someone’s mum.’ Luisa stood, resisting the temptation to offer him her hand this time, folded her arms instead across her body.
‘You’re worried about her too,’ she said. Giancarlo tipped his head.
‘No,’ he said. Then straightened his head again. ‘Well, maybe. Maybe just a bit.’
He moved off then, and she hurried after him: they were caught briefly together in the narrow entrance to the bar. ‘If you were to see her again,’ said Luisa quickly, as if it might be her last chance. ‘If you were to just try and find out where she is …’
‘I’ve got to run,’ Giancarlo said, his gaze caught unwillingly by her need. ‘I’ll be late for my lecture.’ He stepped away from her.
‘You know where to find me,’ she called after him as he moved off, threading his way north through the crowds around the little market.
A woman walking past, hanging on tight to her companion’s arm, turned to peer at her and then at Giancarlo’s broad young back, and Luisa stepped, deliberately expressionless, into the moving throng and back to work.
Chapter Seventeen
‘I
WANT TO GO AND
see it,’ said Rosselli. Standing there beside the hotel with its jaunty striped awning, bathed in the sharp brilliance of the seaside sunshine, he seemed horribly out of place. His skin had a grey look, as though he’d been living underground.
Sandro had broached the subject of their return as they stood to leave the breakfast table. ‘We can’t stay here indefinitely,’ he’d said tentatively. ‘And there’s your mother. There’s the baby.’ Rosselli had turned to look at him blankly, his milky brown eyes magnified behind the thick lenses.
And there’s my life, Sandro had thought. There’s Luisa, and Giuli, there’s Pietro and Gloria and Chiara to deal with, there’s the great thronging city coming back to life after the summer. Damn the man for getting him involved in this – forgetting that it wasn’t the man, it had been Giuli and Enzo and Luisa feeling sorry for the baby, the whole conspiracy of emotion – but damn him anyway, and his loss and his grief. Because, for all the clean blue air and the sound of the gulls and the freedom of a wide horizon, Sandro couldn’t wait to leave this place.
So when he’d said they’d better pay up and clear out and Rosselli had just nodded, Sandro had taken it as compliance. He’d paid the bill himself, on a credit card, while the man stood beside him obediently: he’d claim it back, he supposed, though he couldn’t imagine the settling of accounts at the end of this case. Could Rosselli, standing there vacantly with his hands hanging at his sides, still lead his Frazione to power, any kind of power? It seemed improbable. Perhaps there were things about intelligence, and principle, that Sandro didn’t understand, that drained you like this, left you used up. Or perhaps it was just grief.
‘Come on,’ he’d said, leaving the bags in the car, and then, as if all Rosselli had needed was that morning’s hour of catatonic introversion to come to this one decision, he’d made his announcement. He wanted to go to the Stella Maris.
‘I don’t even know if it’s allowed,’ Sandro said, stalling because surely this wasn’t advisable. What if the man – what if he did something reckless? ‘The police have closed the hotel for the time being. There’s no one there but the maid.’
‘I want to go there,’ Rosselli repeated stubbornly. And his eyes seemed to gain focus. ‘And surely if there’s only the maid it’ better?’
Sandro gazed at him, and for a moment a doubt flickered. Always suspect the husband first: could it all be a smokescreen, this sleepwalking show of grief? He had to admit, he didn’t like Rosselli, but more importantly, he didn’t understand him. Bereavement threw everything up in the air, of course, no one could be expected to behave normally under such circumstances. But what he knew – what Giuli had just told him – about Rosselli and Matteo’s relationship, that high-minded, politically committed partnership of theirs, repelled him. He couldn’t understand it.
Sandro passed a hand over his face, and as he felt the patchiness of his own stubble it occurred to him that, fifteen years older and after a sleepless night, he probably looked even rougher than Rosselli. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
They could have taken the car, and gone straight on from the hotel to the superstrada. But something told him it was advisable to take this day step by step, not plan ahead even as far as that. They walked in silence: as they stepped on to the boardwalk and were hit by the full wide radiance of the sun glittering off the sea, Sandro’s phone rang.
‘It’s Enzo,’ he said, almost talking to himself, squinting down at the screen in the glare. Giuli had said – what had she said? He’d been trying to get hold of her. ‘Can I take it? Is that OK?’ He glanced up and Rosselli just stared at him a moment as if he couldn’t remember who Enzo was: Sandro felt the vibration in his hand as it rang on.
‘Enzo,’ Rosselli said eventually. ‘Sure.’ Sandro, who realized he’d been holding his breath, pressed the accept button, exhaled.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘What’s up, Enzo?’ The night call from Bastone came back to him: the heat of the hotel room in the dark and Rosselli snoring on the bed beside him. ‘Did the lawyer call you, then?’
Rosselli had sat down: there were benches along the front edge of the boardwalk, behind a railing, and some small trees turning dark after the summer. He put both hands in his pockets and then, staring out into the blue light, he lapsed into stillness.
‘What?’ said Sandro. ‘Hold on, Enzo. What?’
This wasn’t like the lad: he was gabbling. ‘Slow down, start again.’ Enzo took a breath and Sandro repeated what he knew. ‘There wasn’t much damage, they only took the laptop, right? Then this morning you met Bastone at the Frazione’s offices. And the police came?’
Enzo murmured despondently and Sandro strained to get his drift. ‘They came back again? Anyone – anyone I’d know?’ As if Enzo would have encountered any of Sandro’s old mates in the Polizia di Stato: Enzo had led the cleanest and most blameless life of any forty-year-old man alive.
And at last Enzo seemed to pull himself together, and despite the occasional shakiness to his voice, what he was saying took shape. Sandro concentrated hard and let him talk, interrupting only once or twice.
‘They didn’t say what they’d found?’ he asked. ‘Or what else they were looking for?’ Enzo mumbled again: he sounded shellshocked. ‘No, well, they wouldn’t, maybe. At this stage.’
When Enzo had finished, Sandro said, with as much reassurance as he could muster, ‘You’ve done absolutely the right thing, Enzo, absolutely the right thing. You have to comply with the police. They’d have arrested you if you’d refused, you and Bastone both, even if he is a lawyer.’
Which is something I’m beginning to wonder about, Sandro thought to himself. For a highly educated man Bastone had struck him as neither competent nor reliable. Was he involved with the Frazione merely because he was, effectively, Rosselli’s only friend? It didn’t seem enough of a reason, for either of them.
‘I’m sure he knew that. Listen—’ He glanced at Niccolò Rosselli’s figure, still motionless on the bench, outlined against the silver waves. ‘I’ll be back in the city this afternoon. Yes? And we’ll go over it. In the meantime –’ and his heart sank at the prospect ‘– I’ll see if I can find anything out. Someone might do me a favour at Porta al Prato.’
Porta al Prato was police headquarters: he deliberately didn’t say,
Pietro might do me a favour.
‘I’ll call you when I’m back.’ He hung up.
‘All right?’ said Rosselli, looking up at him now, trustful as a child.
‘Not exactly,’ said Sandro, hesitating. ‘There’s something – the
avvocato
phoned last night. There was a break-in, at the Frazione’s offices.’
Rosselli stood up abruptly, his jacket crumpled. ‘Thieves?’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘Let’s walk,’ Sandro said. And as they set off he went over it – at least, over what Bastone had said on the phone in the middle of the night. He found himself fumbling for words. It was procrastination, he knew: the break-in on its own could be explained away, if not seamlessly. Opportunists, political or otherwise, a bit of crude sabotage or just ordinary burglars. Only it didn’t ring true, not any more, not after what Enzo had just said. He stopped. Still putting it off.
‘I don’t understand,’ Rosselli repeated stubbornly.
Sandro sighed. ‘The thing is, Niccolò,’ he said, ‘it’s taken a nasty turn, now. The police came back this morning. They called the lawyer and asked him to come to the Frazione’s offices, and he called Enzo. For moral support.’