Free Dead Season by Christobel Kent Page A

one.’
    Sandro had snorted explosively. As if he would want to emulate Beppe in menswear. An amiable enough young man, handsome, fit, polite, but interested in nothing but his own reflection in the shop’s many mirrors. An airhead, as Giuli would say. Although Giuli had been known to harp on this particular string too: the magic telephone with all the answers. I know this city already , was all he’d say to her, or to Luisa come to that. I don’t need a map or a telephone directory; there’s no substitute for getting out there and talking to people.
    And as if on cue had come Luisa’s next question; Sandro had begun to suspect her of having a strategy, and that this loving breakfast together was a part of it.
    ‘Are you – um, are you seeing Giuli today?’
    The coffee arrived; just from the smell Sandro had been able to tell it was good. These days – well. August. He’d had a really horrible cup on Monday morning in the only bar still open in San Frediano, not his regular place: he’d had to push it back across the bar in disgust.
    ‘She’s coming over later,’ he’d said warily. He’d been beginning to think that, when she finished at the Women’s Centre, he might send her over to the Loggiata to talk to the girl again. ‘This afternoon. Why?’
    Luisa had carefully dissected the budino , looking down at the plate. When it was done, four neat quarters of sticky golden rice and pastry, she had looked up again and said, ‘I think she’s seeing someone.’ Sandro had felt his mouth hang open and Luisa had sighed. ‘I want you to talk to her about it.’
    ‘What?’
    Why should he be surprised? Giuli was only forty-three. Was she attractive? Hard for Sandro to judge. He’d first encountered her as a damaged teenager, long ago and briefly, then found her again, now a stringy, desperate, drug-addicted hooker, before prison and rehab shook her up and set her straight, or straight enough. She looked pretty good to him these days; every time he looked at the girl he marvelled at the strength of will that had pulled her back. She got her hair done every six weeks, had her clothes dry cleaned, was at work five minutes early. And as Sandro had observed, she had even mastered her quick temper – the long-suppressed rage of a neglected child.
    She had begun to care about others, and in a constructive way, too. Giulietta had learned to consider their problems in detail and work towards a solution; Anna Niescu was a case in point.
    And now she had a boyfriend?
    Sandro had put his face in his hands, feeling Luisa’s testing gaze on him. Because with Giulietta Sarto men had always been the biggest problem. If you asked Sandro – not that the psychotherapist ever had, not that Sandro had ever volunteered his opinion either – the self-mutilation, the drink, the anorexia, the drugs, had been the symptoms; men had been the problem.
    ‘It really hadn’t occurred to you?’ Luisa had asked.
    ‘Why?’ he’d replied, despairingly. ‘What makes you think she’s got – someone?’ But even as he’d said it, he knew, there’d been all sorts of clues.
    ‘That week away, last week,’ Luisa had said. ‘A week camping by Monte Argentario? Do you think she did that alone?’
    Slowly Sandro had shaken his head. ‘No. No – but—’
    ‘But what?’
    ‘But she might have gone with a girlfriend.’ Sandro had stared down at the glaze on his pastry, still warm when it had been set in front of him.
    ‘Might have. But she didn’t, did she?’
    When she had got back from Castiglione della Pescaia, a pretty fishing village in the shadow of the big forested mountain that ended in the gleaming sea, the last place on earth the old Giuli would have wanted to go to, to be among the happy families and the old couples in their caravans, Giulietta had come straight round to Sandro and Luisa’s apartment. She was paying rent on a bedsit in San Frediano now, but their place was home.
    It had dawned on Sandro as he’d ushered