Authors: Christobel Kent
The phone rang in his pocket and he pulled it out in a panic, almost dropping the magazine before securing it under his arm, briefcase between his knees. Behind him a door opened and one of the barmen from Rivoire emerged in his black waistcoat, carrying a bucket of slops. He paused, lifting the lid of the nearest bin. Sandro returned his curious look with a contorted smile, praying the magazine was not visible.
An American magazine. And it hadn’t been bought at one of Florence’s kiosks but in the United States.
At his ear the voice wasn’t Pietro’s but Giuli’s.
‘I spoke to your girl last night,’ she said. ‘Your hooker? She told me who he got her in for . . . in the end.’
He listened to her but he already knew the name.
‘The American,’ she said. Brett Van Vleet. ‘He wanted a threesome.’
‘The wife . . . co-operated?’ In the humid alley Sandro pulled at his collar. The magazine was sticky in his hand. Just wanting rid of it, he lifted the lid of the bin beside him, but stopped. It was evidence, wasn’t it? He grappled with the briefcase between his knees.
‘She didn’t like it, apparently,’ said Giuli. ‘She went along with it once and Bruna said she looked like someone was killing her. Only then . . . he wanted the other kind.’
‘The other kind?
She sighed. ‘The other kind of threesome. Two men.’
He coughed and she went on. ‘Another thing. It was him who paid her – Vito, I mean. Because Van Vleet never seemed to have any cash on him. Vito looked after her, she said.’ A pause. ‘Like a brother, she said.’
Sandro cleared his throat. Something came back to him, from last night. Something the beautiful girl at the Excelsior had said to him, before everything went fuzzy.
There’s a word for boys like him
. Mariaclara in a chambermaid’s outfit, and Vito hadn’t been interested.
Giuli hung up and Sandro stood between the bins holding the mobile up in front of his face, thinking.
Van Vleet. Installed in the biggest suite in the Palazzo and talking about shipping the car back to America. But he brought dirty magazines over in his luggage, and got the house detective to pay his bills. Poor Therese. Luisa would laugh at him, for his pity. Wouldn’t she? Did it make any sense at all? Her dog taken – probably dead, he registered absently – the shit still being smeared. Someone was telling her something?
But it wasn’t just Therese being targeted. Marjorie Cameron had been locked in the steam room. Athene Morris, whose bracelet had gone. Sandro’s head ached. He’d gone to the Excelsior to find out what Mariaclara knew about the damned bracelet and now for the life of him he couldn’t get it straight in his head. It occurred to him that he should ask Athene Morris herself who she thought had taken it.
Nothing had happened to Magda Scardino, or Juliet Fleming.
But now Sandro. The magazine had been put in his bag by the same evil spirit, he was sure of it. The malice was the same. Dirty, vindictive. Personal.
Would a man play these tricks? Sandro couldn’t conceive of it. The truth was, as he stood in that stinking alley, that it felt very much to him like nothing human at all. It felt to him as if the dog had been swallowed up by the Palazzo’s grounds, as
if the pale carpeted corridors were growing shit on their own skirtings, the dirty magazine had slid itself into the briefcase Luisa had given him. Something rising up from the building’s cellars, like dank air, locking doors and breathing garbage smell.
The phone rang in his hand. His head spun with possibilities, water circling a drain. Who else had thought something nasty was going on at the Palazzo San Giorgio, before it even started?
‘Hello?’
The journalist, that’s who. John Carlsson.
It was Pietro. He wasn’t phoning to congratulate Sandro on his new job, that much was instantly clear. Nor, as it turned out, to talk about his predecessor’s murder.
‘Hold on,’ said Sandro. ‘Start again. A suitcase?’
Chapter Fifteen
B
EHIND THE BIG COMPUTER
screen in the shabby little office Giulietta Sarto started up out of her seat when Elena came through the door. Under the spiky dark hair Sarto’s face was ashen.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Elena. ‘I didn’t mean . . . I should have buzzed.’ Only someone happened to have been emerging from the front entrance when she arrived at the door with the nameplate that said
Sandro Cellini, Investigations
, and Elena had taken her chance and slipped inside.
Sarto sat back down abruptly, the colour returning. ‘It’s you,’ she said.
‘You do remember me, then,’ said Elena, looking her in the eye.
‘Right,’ said Giulietta – Giuli, only the teachers had called her Giulietta – her mouth set hard. ‘You want to chew over old times? Happy schooldays. My prison reminiscences, my days on the street. That kind of thing?’
Elena felt herself scowl: John had once said it was her
favourite expression. ‘I liked you,’ she said. ‘You looked after me, once.’ She looked just the same, thought Elena, a bit rougher round the edges. Maybe she had been born old.
‘No one liked me,’ said Giuli, grumpily, but her face was clearing. Half her attention, Elena could see, was on the computer screen. Edging round, she saw that she had two windows open – an email with a blown-up attachment, and a page of newsprint. Swiftly Giuli moved to close the email, but not before Elena had seen the photo it contained was of a junkie shooting up in an alley. A subject heading:
Giulietta Sarto
. No other words.
‘It’s nothing,’ Sarto said quickly. ‘Someone’s idea of a joke.’
‘D’you know who it’s from?’ asked Elena.
Sarto looked at her, musing. ‘Maybe,’ she said eventually. ‘Yeah. Maybe.’
She made no attempt to hide what was on the screen now: she even turned it a little so Elena could see it better. It was an American newspaper, the financial pages, by the look of it. A photograph of a flushed man she recognised from the night before and a headline that said:
Van Vleet Refinances: Hit By Fannie Mae
.
‘Funny,’ Elena said. ‘What’s that mean?’
‘I think it means he’s broke,’ said Sarto. ‘But not broke like us. Rich broke is different. All you have to do is refinance, apparently.’
‘You’re checking them out? The guests, I mean?’ Elena had a weird feeling in her gut, something occurred to her. ‘John must have been doing that too. He knows all about them, apparently.’
‘Who’s John?’ Giuli eyed Elena sideways. ‘What did you come here for?’
Elena looked into Giulietta Sarto’s pale, weary face, and hesitated. Had this been a bad idea? ‘My boyfriend,’ she said finally. ‘Or maybe he’s my ex-boyfriend.’ She stopped again.
Giuli eyed her, jaundiced. ‘The sculptor? The guy last night? He didn’t look very ex to me. Though if you want my advice . . .’ She gave a little dry laugh like a cough. ‘Scratch that.’
‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ said Elena, flushing.
‘Whatever,’ said Sarto. ‘So which boyfriend are we talking about?’
Elena felt sick. ‘His name’s John Carlsson,’ she said eventually. ‘We’ve been together a couple of months. Then a bit more than a week ago he just went. Disappeared. Didn’t answer my messages.’ She swallowed. ‘I’m not the type to get a private detective out every time I’m dumped.’
‘Sure.’ Giuli’s voice was rough but not unkind. ‘Go on.’
Elena told her everything, from when John had first seen her through the window to Juliet Fleming’s pitying hand on hers, the night before.
‘She told me he’d come back,’ she finished. ‘He went over there, but he didn’t come and find me.’
‘Carlsson,’ said Giuli slowly. ‘Didn’t he do a story on the place, early on?’ She drew up another tab on her computer screen and there was the headline:
Pleasure Palace
. And a photograph, of faces in the dark, fireworks bursting behind them – and there was John’s name, his byline, at the foot of the article.
‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘Before I forget.’ As Elena watched, Sarto created an email and drew up photographs, more faces that she recognised from last night. She pasted in one link, then another.
San Giorgio launch pics
. Giuli attached them to an email and sent
them to Sandro Cellini, who would be her boss. The subject:
Residents
. She didn’t put any message in.
Elena heard her sigh as she opened another window: a photograph of a bridge across a delta in northern Syria. Elena didn’t know whether the thing was hideous or magnificent, but it was vast, like some huge dinosaur with its great concrete feet planted in a bleak marsh. Looking closely, the scale became more apparent, a small gaggle of human figures at one end of the bridge were no more than specks. Elena frowned, trying to concentrate on understanding the English. There was a link headed:
Bridge collapse disaster
. Giulietta clicked, and sent.
‘Anyone else you’d like to have a look at?’ she asked casually. ‘That Professor’s wife, I imagine she gets about a bit. Your Mr Lludic?’ She leaned in to the computer and Elena stepped back, shaking her head.
‘No,’ said Sarto, ‘you’re not the type, are you? To spy on other people. But I’d say there’s plenty for a journalist to get his teeth into among that lot.’ Elena hugged herself, feeling a creep of fear. Where was he? ‘You don’t know he was using you, though.’
The gruff kindness in her voice was too much. It all spilled out and Sarto listened: she didn’t laugh, or sneer. Elena told her how he’d drift in late, smelling of the Palazzo, cigar smoke and women. He’d stand at the window watching; he’d walk out into the street quickly to make calls.
‘I think he might have done something, or seen something,’ said Elena finally, and she sat, suddenly, on the chair beside Giulietta Sarto’s. Sarto put a hand on her shoulder, and Elena smelled nicotine, saw the calloused yellow of a smoker’s forefinger.
‘He went over there, looking for someone,’ said Elena. She hadn’t formulated the thought even to herself, but it had been sitting there, since Juliet Fleming had told her last night in the dark that she’d seen him. ‘I think John’s in trouble.’
*
Sandro had gone straight to his office on arrival at the Palazzo San Giorgio, and shut the door behind him. The laptop he’d left there yesterday sat forlorn on the small desk, the only sign the room was his. Impotently, he’d opened it, shut it again. They’d been around two decades but still Sandro couldn’t see the computer as his friend.
He’d left the door unlocked yesterday, and his briefcase in the office. Anyone could have gone in and slipped that magazine into it. He pressed his face to the narrow window and saw a slice of Danilo Lludic’s big sculpture, standing there like the Trojan Horse. An outsider. He locked the door behind him and went back to the foyer, looking for Alessandra Cornell. He would have to tell her, sooner or later.
‘She’s in with Bottai?’
Lino nodded. ‘He wants you out,’ he said.
‘Really,’ said Sandro, unsurprised. He still hadn’t worked out how much of what Pietro had told him he was going to say to Alessandra Cornell, but he certainly didn’t want to say it in front of that buffoon Gastone Bottai.
A suitcase, left unclaimed in the hold of a budget coach at the train station. A big, cheap suitcase, the kind southerners might ship their belongings up and down the country in, everything
bar the kitchen sink, tied up with string. Not the kind you’d associate with the Palazzo San Giorgio.
Scardino and Sir Martin Fleming emerged from the corridor, heads down in conversation, and instinctively both Sandro and Lino stepped back, making themselves small.
‘I think we might even fly out tomorrow,’ Scardino was saying, seeming barely aware of Sandro or the doorman. ‘Magda says she’ll come too, this time. Funny, she always said she hated Cairo.’
Fleming nodded. They hardly looked up as Lino leaned forward, holding the glass street door open for them. ‘I’ll be happy to put you in touch with our man over there,’ said Fleming, and then the Englishman did look, one eye sliding round to catch Sandro’s before flicking back. ‘And then we’ll see you in London.’ And the door closed.
Automatically Sandro registered the information. They were leaving, and soon. The night Vito had been killed the couples had been out together, and after they got back Sir Martin Fleming had stayed outside to smoke his cigar.
Fleming stood there now, hands behind his back, talking to the lean Professor. Thick as thieves. The memory of his conversation with Fleming at the bar the night before came back to him, with the handsome Lauren Tassi drinking beside them in determined silence.
‘I often think I should have given her a garden,’ Fleming had said. Then, turning to Sandro, ‘My wife. We never had a chance, moving around, you see. She’d have loved a garden.’
And something in the man’s voice, some insoluble melancholy had made the hairs rise on Sandro’s neck; he knew that fear so
well. ‘There’s time now,’ he’d said, and the Englishman had just looked at him. Then Lauren Tassi had leaned across and asked them if she had to drink alone, and Fleming had moved off.
He found he was holding his breath; he felt as though he’d been holding it since he’d ended his conversation with Pietro in the garbage stench of the Piazza Santa Cecilia. He needed a coffee, badly.
‘We’ll need to talk to them in the end,’ his old partner had said, with a warning in his voice. ‘However much your job is to protect them. It’s not the kind of thing you can keep quiet.’
Sandro had half an hour, Pietro said. In which to talk to his boss and gain her permission to take the morning off because he had to get across the city to a low modern building that sat beside the motorway winding up into the Apennines. A building he had become very familiar with during his thirty years as a police officer – the city’s morgue and forensic laboratory complex. Sandro needed to go there to look at something they had found in that suitcase.
Vito’s body, of course, would be there too. That had only just occurred to him.
‘You’ve missed the ladies,’ said Lino, breaking into his thoughts. ‘They went off with your wife, I believe.’
Sandro nodded. Luisa had called – not knowing he was still in the Piazza Santa Cecilia, twenty metres from the shop – to tell him what Frollini had let her in for. He’d said, he thought he knew whose the magazine was, at least; he told her about Van Vleet and the hooker too. Registering her stiff silence, he hadn’t then told her what Pietro had called to tell him. What would be the point? She’d have freaked out even more. He’d
seen the limousine glide past five minutes later but had stayed back in the alley’s shade.