Her Sugar Mask

Chapter Four — The Bin

She did not sleep. At one o'clock she was still at the kitchen table. At three she put the knife inside her belt, behind her left hip, and went out.

The house belonged to Nunzia's son. It had one bed, one table, and a calendar from 2019 on the wall. Giulia had checked the lock on the door twice and then pushed a chair under the handle. She had told herself it was habit. It was not habit. She had never done it before in her life.

On the table she had put out four things: the stolen phone, the key, four thousand three hundred and forty euro in an envelope, and a page torn from a newspaper.

On the page she had written three lines.

1. A journalist.

2. The police.

3. Turi's.

She had been looking at the three lines for two hours.

Not a journalist. A journalist would have said she. He would have said a name. He had said the thing — the way you talk about a file, or a number, or a hole in an account.

She knew the type because she had been engaged to one. At twenty-four, for eleven months, to the second son of a shipping family from Genoa. On the evening she ended it, the boy's father had poured her a glass of wine and said, Giulia, you notice things. He had meant it as a compliment.

Not the police. The police did not rent a house for three months and wait.

She drew a line through the first two and sat back.

Then she put the knife in her belt and went out.

· · ·

The walk up took her twenty-five minutes in the dark. Her left arm ached the way it always ached at night, a slow pull from the shoulder down into the three fingers that did not work. She kept her right hand free.

The house was dark. No light in any window, no car.

The bins stood at the side, behind a low wall, two of them, green. She lifted the first lid.

Coffee. Orange peel. She held the phone torch between her teeth and went in with her right hand.

She worked the way she had been taught to work a file: one layer at a time, everything back where it had been, nothing carried away unless she had decided to carry it.

First layer: a brown paper bag, an empty bottle, two receipts from a supermarket in the valley, €41.60 and €18.90.

Second layer: cardboard. The torn sleeve of a courier envelope, pale blue, with a European Commission logo printed on the flap and a barcode on the side. She took a picture of it and slid it back under the grounds.

Third layer: paper, mostly wet with coffee grounds.

Under the grounds there was a small yellow note stuck to the torn corner of a printed page.

On the note, in blue ink, one word.

VITALI.

She stopped.

Her throat closed and the muscles along her jaw tightened. She stayed exactly as she was for thirty seconds, one hand in the rubbish, the torch in her teeth, and listened. Nothing. No window opening, no car, no dog.

She photographed the note twice, once with the flash off, once with the flash off and her thumb beside it for scale. Then she turned the torn page over. Three words were left on it, part of a table:

...tale — parcel 7 — rustic ...

She photographed that too. She put the note and the corner of page back under the coffee grounds and pressed the whole surface flat with the flat of her hand, the way it had been.

At the bottom of the bin, under everything, there was a train ticket.

Trenitalia. Palermo Centrale to Roma Termini. 06:40. Monday the fifteenth of September. One way. The passenger name was printed along the top and half of it was torn away.

FERRANTE M.

She took a picture of it. She put it back. She lowered the lid until it rested the way it had rested, and she wiped her hand on her trousers, and she walked back down the mountain at twenty-five past four.

· · ·

She sat on the edge of the well in the square until it got light.

At eight minutes to seven a car started up on the road above the town. It came down through the switchbacks with the engine too high in the gears, the way people drive when they have a train to catch. It crossed the square and took the coast road.

Giulia watched it go. She had seen the driver's face for less than a second in the headlights of a parked van.

Nunzia came out of a doorway behind her with two cups.

"That's the Ferrante boy," she said. "He goes to Palermo every Monday. Same train. Back on the last bus."

Giulia took the cup. "How do you know."

"I'm seventy-three. I know everybody's Tuesdays."

Nunzia sat down beside her on the well. It took her a while. She drank half her coffee before she spoke again.

"You were out at four in the morning."

"I couldn't sleep."

"The bed in there is thirty years old and it belonged to my husband's mother. Nobody sleeps in it. Try the chair."

Giulia said nothing.

Nunzia drank the rest of her coffee.

"He's a consultant," she said. "That's what he told the mayor. Do you know what a consultant is?"

"No."

"Neither does the mayor." Nunzia set the cup down on the stone. "But he's the one who's going to tell us yes or no. So everybody here is very polite to him and calls him dottore — the way we call any man in a suit dottore in this country, whether we mean it or not."

"Yes or no about what."

Nunzia looked at her over the rim of the cup.

"The co-operative. Twelve families, one olive press, and about forty tons of lemons that nobody will buy at a price worth picking them for."

"One press."

"One press. It hasn't turned since 1987. Before that it was my husband's."

Giulia said nothing.

In her head she was already doing the arithmetic: forty thousand kilos, twelve families, three thousand three hundred each. At thirty cents a kilo at the gate that was a thousand euro a year, before anybody paid for the picking. A thousand euro a year was why the young ones were in Germany and the old ones were on the wall.

Nunzia stood up, which took her two attempts, and went back into her doorway with the cups.

Giulia stayed where she was.

She took the key out of her pocket and laid it on her knee. Then she opened the photographs on the phone and found the torn corner of page, and she held the two of them side by side.

SAN VITALE. 7.

...tale — parcel 7 — rustic ...

She had walked into this village because a road sign had pointed at it. Now the same word was cut into a key that her father had pushed into her pocket while he was dying, and printed on a page in the rubbish of a man who spoke English on the telephone.

She said the word out loud, to nobody, in an empty square.

"San Vitale."