Authors: Christobel Kent
Not good. She knew that straight away.
The Clinic Director stood stiffly away from her as Giuli passed inside the room, her hand held out straight to indicate the chair.
‘I’m glad you’ve come to see me, Ms Sarto,’ she said. ‘Giulietta.’ She didn’t sound glad. ‘Something’s come up.’
‘I – I . . .’ Giuli felt her face frozen into a mask as she stammered. Lunch had solidified into an indigestible lump inside her. ‘I wanted to ask . . . a favour,’ she said, wanting to forestall it, whatever it was.
Massini took off her glasses. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t the time,’ she said stiffly. Giuli had always thought she was one of the good guys. Something had changed.
‘There’s no nice way to put this, Giulietta,’ she said.
*
By the time she turned to go, Giuli felt as though she was sleepwalking back out through the door. This wasn’t real. This wasn’t happening. She felt like flailing, thrashing, shouting, beating the white walls. Passing the cleaner in the corridor, she felt the good-hearted old woman’s eyes on her. Did she know? Out in a daze through reception, empty now save for Sandra, the bad-tempered Englishwoman behind the desk, who watched her go as if she knew too, and into the sun of the Piazza Tasso. She walked on around and behind the vast city wall that formed one side of the square and she didn’t stop until she was on the
viale
and hidden by the brick bulk.
With shaking hands she took out her mobile.
Who? Her head buzzed with it. Who would do that? Who would say that? And it wasn’t in outrage or disbelief, it wasn’t that she couldn’t imagine who. It was more that she’d always known this was coming; it was that the world – the lovely city, its high stone walls, its shitty parks and needle-strewn corners, its dodgy bars – was full of them. Enemies. Only she’d let down her guard, she’d started to think she was free. You were never free.
She’d have to tell Enzo.
But she dialled Luisa instead; the number went straight to answerphone. She’d be busy, of course she would, she’d be with a customer. Giuli hung up without leaving a message, staring at the little screen. Sandro? He’d be in the office, wouldn’t he? She walked the hundred or so steps around the corner halfway down the Via del Leone, stopped in front of the brass plate,
lifted her finger to the bell-push and burst into tears.
It was where Sandro found her ten minutes later when he slipped out for a coffee.
‘To hell with them,’ he said, when she managed to blurt it out in some kind of comprehensible form. ‘To hell and back with the bastards.’ And as he patted her helplessly on the shoulder she started crying all over again.
*
‘But it’s not true?’ said Luisa, into the phone, and immediately cursed herself. Of course it wasn’t true. She thought of the four years she’d known Giuli, and tried to convince herself that was long enough, to know a person inside and out. Hadn’t Luisa always shied away from that maxim, one day at a time? The catechism of the recovering addict: you’re never cured. You can never relax. Luisa had somehow thought that Giuli was different, hadn’t she? The rules didn’t apply. And they’d all relaxed.
Sandro didn’t dignify it with an answer. ‘I’m keeping her here with me for the afternoon,’ he said. ‘I’ll take her this evening, when I go to be introduced. Cornell said I’d have to do that, she’s keen to get things started. But I can tell them she’s my second in command.’
‘They won’t have heard?’ And cursed herself again. It wasn’t like anyone at the Palazzo San Giorgio cared about some bit of office politics in a San Frediano health clinic. The two worlds could hardly be more different.
‘They won’t have heard a thing,’ he said. ‘Damn the lot of them.’
Chapter Seven
B
ELOW HER IN THE
street Sandro was pacing, talking urgently on his mobile. Whoever had called him had something more pressing to talk to him about than her problems: he’d jumped like a scalded cat and headed back outside. The signal was better out there – but there was more to it than that. She was getting in the way.
She couldn’t expect him to save her life, not again. She had to deal with this herself.
There’s been an allegation,’ Dr Massini had begun, and Giuli had felt her life coming down around her like a falling building, in slow motion.
Someone had walked into one of the treatment rooms to come upon Giuli shooting up in there. ‘The person said there could be no mistake. Came straight back out again, but . . .’ Massini had used the feminine ending, faltered. A woman.
Giuli had found she could hardly breathe. The words, when they came out, were jumbled, wrong. ‘What? What? Which
room?’ Trying to think the last time she’d actually been in a treatment room.
‘In the Addictions Clinic,’ Massini began, then checked herself.
Was that the wrong question? Was she incriminating herself? Giuli had started again. ‘Who says they saw me?’
‘I can’t tell you that just now, Giulietta,’ Massini had said, a rebuke in her voice, and Giuli’s face had burned, with the shame. ‘The person came to me in confidence and until an inquiry is initiated, legally . . .’
An official complaint had been made. Other testimony was being investigated – whatever that meant.
In the street below, Sandro came to a halt and looked up at her, worried.
She made herself smile. Sandro’s first reaction had been a visible effort not to ask her if it was true. He’d help, he’d know the questions to ask – only just now he had his hands full. His head was bent back over the phone now.
Who?
A woman: Giuli’s solitary piece of evidence. Well, the place was full of women. And that very morning she’d seen someone from her past, hadn’t she? Waiting in reception. Giuli squeezed her eyes shut and her life before Sandro – on the streets and in squalid walk-ups – was thronging and alive suddenly, in the blood-dark behind her eyes; faces she’d trained herself to forget materialising out of the shadows. Why hadn’t she fought back? Massini would never know what it was like, to have a past.
Sandro had gazed at her. She could tell what he was thinking.
Shit
.
‘She said, she had to follow procedure. She said I’d be laid off on full pay while an official investigation was under way. The details of the allegation would be revealed to me – or to my lawyers.’ Lawyers. They’d know Giuli had no money for lawyers. Wordlessly Sandro had handed her another tissue. She saw him calculate: how much?
‘And the official investigation will clear you,’ he said stoutly. ‘In the meantime,
I
need you.’ Then, more recklessly, ‘Look, I need you, full stop. I’m . . . well, I’m not thinking of retirement quite yet, but the plan has always been that you would take over. Even before this came up.’
And then his phone had gone off.
On the other end of the line a woman’s voice had been audible, high-pitched. Luisa? Not Luisa.
‘Miss Cornell?’ Sandro’s voice had gone straight to alert. ‘All right,’ he said. High alert. ‘It’s all right.’ And he’d shot out of the door.
Below her now he folded the phone, paused a moment in contemplation. Across on the opposite pavement, movement caught Giuli’s eye: Maria. The Centre’s ancient cleaner, bent and toothless in her forty-year-old raincoat, was scuttling as if to get past before she was seen. Only she couldn’t resist looking up, and their eyes met.
No
, the old woman’s were saying, clear as day.
Don’t ask me
.
Don’t ask me what?
Sandro was in the doorway, breathing heavily after the stairs. He needs to get some weight off, thought Giuli with a pang as she turned to look at him. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘Will you be all right?’
‘I’ll be all right,’ she said mechanically. Maria knows something.
‘My new employers,’ he said, hesitating in the doorway. ‘I said I’d get over as soon as . . . well. They’ve got a problem.’
‘Sure,’ she said, refocusing. He’s not telling me what she said on the phone.
The thought must have appeared in her eyes because he said, ‘I trust you with my business, Giuli, and I’d trust you with my life, you know that.’
‘I know,’ she said, weary.
Sandro cleared his throat. ‘You’re part of my team,’ he said. ‘They need to know that, at the Palazzo, you’re involved. I was going to introduce you. Things have changed, and she needs me there right now. But – maybe this evening. There’s some do on—’
Giuli felt the heat rise in her cheeks again. ‘Sure,’ she said uncomfortably. ‘Whenever.’
‘I’ll call you.’
‘Go,’ she said. And he went.
*
‘It wasn’t an accident,’ Cornell said. ‘A violent death. Giancarlo.’
Lino the doorman had silently stood aside this time, and let Sandro pass. He hadn’t needed to say who he’d come to see.
Alessandra Cornell was almost talking to herself, pacing the carpet in the big room. The shutters were half-closed and the whole Palazzo seemed deserted. Lino had sent him in alone and the library had been empty as he’d hurried past. Sandro wondered if they all knew already, guests, staff and all. The
staff, you bet they knew: it was one advantage of being lower down the food chain, information moved more freely.
‘We’ve got to keep this . . . under control,’ she said urgently. ‘We’ve got to keep it quiet. You understand that? They’ll be here – they’ll be here—’ Cornell put her hands to her face, then dropped them. ‘The
carabiniere
asked if this afternoon would be convenient.’
The attaché looked almost dishevelled. Her collar was skewed and something was smudged in the corner of her eye, as though she’d rubbed at it, hard. Sandro didn’t think she’d been crying, but he couldn’t be sure.
Carabinieri case. If it had been the Polizia di Stato, in which Sandro had served for thirty years, this would have been an awful lot more friendly. He might have left the State Police under something of a cloud, but he had a lot of allies there still, not least his old partner Pietro. He
had
worked on a case with the Carabinieri – the Military Police – since his retirement, which had worked out okay, so there were people he might talk to—
Hold on
, he told himself, don’t call in any favours just yet. Let’s see where this is going.
‘Why don’t you sit down,’ he said, and abruptly she obeyed. ‘Now, tell me again.’
‘Giancarlo was found dead in his apartment this morning,’ she stated stonily, staring straight ahead. ‘His landlady found him. They didn’t say how he died, but they said they were investigating it, so it couldn’t have been . . . an accident. Could it? He’d been dead,’ and Cornell looked crazed for an instant, ‘since last night. They’re saying midnight.’ She put a hand to her head as if it hurt her.
He knew she was trying not to think of what that meant because even after three decades’ experience he was doing the same himself. Even twelve hours – in this heat. Rigor then dissolution, humanity gone.
‘I fired him two days ago,’ said Cornell, staring. ‘Could he have killed himself?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought he was the type,’ said Sandro. ‘How did he react, when you fired him? Was he . . . distressed?’
She frowned. ‘Not exactly. He was . . . well, first of all, actually, he laughed. As if he couldn’t believe it. Then he was angry. He said how was he to know the – the woman, the prostitute—’ She fumbled. ‘How was he to know she wasn’t a visitor? He said he wanted to talk to Gastone, but Gastone wasn’t around.’ Never there when you need him, thought Sandro. That kind of guy. She went on. ‘He was. . .’ and her lips clamped as if on an unpleasant memory, ‘he was aggressive.’
Sandro nodded, thinking.
‘You can’t always tell, with these macho guys,’ he said mildly. ‘The
carabiniere
didn’t ask about his state of mind?’
‘He wanted to know if Giancarlo took drugs.’ Sandro registered her use, once again, of the man’s first name. Would Vito have been her type? Something began to tick in the recesses of his old policeman’s brain.
‘He wanted to know if that was the reason we let him go.’ She looked up at Sandro, pleading. ‘I said no. He said they’d need to talk to us.’
‘Did you tell him why you
did
fire him?’
Slowly Cornell shook her head. ‘I panicked,’ she said, and swallowed. ‘I said . . . he was coming to the end of a trial period
and it wasn’t really working out.’
It was Sandro’s turn to put his head in his hands. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Well, that wasn’t exactly a lie.’ He looked her in the eye. ‘You can’t actually lie to the Carabinieri, you do know that?’ She gazed back at him, saying nothing. ‘There were no drugs? You’re sure?’
Cornell sat up. ‘If I’d had any suspicion he was a drug-user, I’d never have employed him, I’d have fired him on the spot.’ She frowned. ‘It would have been easier if it was drugs, wouldn’t it?’
Sandro reflected that she was right, interestingly. If the question had been asked, they’d have a reason for it. Substances at the scene – they wouldn’t have toxicology results quite yet.
‘What can I say to them? I can’t risk this . . . getting out. We can’t.’ She held his gaze a moment then went around behind her desk, and, opening a drawer, pulled out a stapled sheaf of papers. ‘This is the job, Sandro: damage limitation. You’ve got to help me. This is your contract.’ She set the document down on the desk between them. ‘But our loyalty is to the Palazzo. We have to protect our guests. This is the job, if you want it.’
She folded her arms, chin jutting, and Sandro almost felt sorry for her.
‘Alessandra,’ he said gently. ‘Miss Cornell. Don’t you think it is possible that you need me more than I need you, at the moment? Please.’
The attaché sat down again, eyes gleaming. Was it an act? He didn’t think so.
‘I’ll try to help you,’ he said, and sighed. ‘First we work out what we tell the Carabinieri, then we work out what we tell the . . . clients.’ He eyed the contract. ‘But me – you tell me
the truth. And I need a free hand, with the guests, with my investigation. If I need to talk to someone, inside or outside, I can talk to them. If I need to involve a – a colleague, I can do that. My partner, Giulietta Sarto.’
She began to shake her head, eyes wide. ‘I can’t – Gastone simply wouldn’t allow it.‘