By seven in the morning, the heat had already entered the building.

It waited beneath the torn ceilings and inside the stripped rooms, mixed with plaster dust and the dry smell of timber. The tall windows of Palazzo Vassero stood open, but the air coming through them offered no relief. It carried the sounds of delivery vans, metal shutters and early traffic from Via Bogino, then abandoned them in the suspended haze.

Enzo Riva lowered his goggles and started the jackhammer.

The machine bucked against his weight. Its point broke through a layer of cracked terrazzo, sending pale fragments across the floor. Dust rose around his boots, obscuring the red electrical cable that ran back through the doorway. Within seconds it covered his forearms and settled into the creases of his gloves.

Behind him, Sami was filling buckets with rubble. He had wrapped a blue cloth around his head, and a dark line of sweat ran down the back of his shirt.

“Thirty-seven today,” Sami said.

Enzo released the trigger. The sudden silence seemed louder than the machine.

“Thirty-eight.”

“You’re trying to make me feel better?”

“I’m telling you to drink.”

Sami lifted a plastic bottle from the windowsill. The water inside it was already warm.

They had started at six to avoid the worst of the heat, although the hotel company had received a complaint about the noise before half past six. Someone from the neighbouring building had telephoned the site manager and threatened to call the police. Enzo had been renovating old buildings in Turin for thirty-two years. In his experience, people living in the centre wanted the palaces preserved, the courtyards quiet and the scaffolding removed, but they objected to every sound required to accomplish any of those things.

He pulled down the paper mask hanging beneath his chin and drank from his own bottle. The water tasted faintly of plaster.

The room had once been a bedroom on the piano nobile. That was what the architect called it. Enzo would have called it a large empty room with a damaged ceiling and expensive problems.

A strip of faded blue silk remained on one wall, trapped beneath a wooden moulding. Above it, painted vines emerged from the dirt on the cornice. The marble fireplace had been removed before the sale, leaving a black rectangular wound. Aurelia Grand Hotels intended to turn the room into two guest suites, each with a bathroom larger than Enzo’s kitchen.

He knew this because he had seen the pictures.

The pictures showed pale furniture, white flowers and a smiling woman sitting on the edge of a bed. Sunlight poured through spotless windows. There were no pipes in the pictures, no cables or crooked floors, and certainly no men in masks trying to discover why the measurements on the plans did not correspond to the measurements of the building.

Enzo put the bottle down.

“Again,” he said.

The jackhammer began.

They worked across the floor toward the northern wall, exposing wooden beams beneath the terrazzo. Some were original and some had been replaced, probably after the war. The new ones were straight and evenly spaced. The old ones twisted through the structure as if the tree had never accepted becoming part of a house.

At eight, Marco arrived with coffee.

He carried three small plastic cups in a cardboard tray, each containing no more than two mouthfuls. Enzo accepted one and drank it without removing his gloves.

“The engineer called,” Marco said.

“Which engineer?”

“De Santis.”

“What does he want?”

“The partition opened today.”

Enzo looked toward the northern wall. “I told him I want him here first.”

“He says it’s on the plan.”

“So is the staircase in the west wing. We found half of that last week.”

Marco smiled, but Enzo did not.

Old buildings did not become old by remaining unchanged. Families enlarged them, divided them and joined them to neighbouring houses. They enclosed balconies, moved doors and built walls in the places where doors had been. A passage might disappear from the plans while continuing to exist inside the structure. A chimney could descend three floors and then turn sideways for no reason anyone living could explain.

Palazzo Vassero had survived two centuries of improvements.

The original plans were missing. The oldest complete survey dated from 1891, with later alterations marked in different inks. Another set had been produced in 1956, when the family divided the upper floors into apartments. Neither set agreed with the computer drawings prepared for the hotel.

On the modern plan, the northern partition was a straight line.

In the room itself, it was not.

It bowed outward near the centre and narrowed toward the windows. Only a few centimetres, but enough for Enzo to notice. When he had measured the corresponding room on the other side, the difference had grown to almost two metres.

Two metres did not disappear.

He finished the coffee and crushed the cup.

“Tell De Santis I want his authorisation in writing.”

“He sent an email.”

“Print it.”

“Why?”

“So I can frame it for him.”

Marco looked at the wall. “He says it’s hollow.”

“Then he can come and knock it down.”

“He’s in Milan.”

“Of course he is.”

Marco disappeared through the doorway. A moment later they heard him laughing with Sami in the corridor.

Enzo walked across the exposed beams to the northern wall. Much of its wallpaper had been stripped away, revealing grey plaster beneath. Someone had drawn a red X at shoulder height and written REMOVE across it.

The partition was not load-bearing. Enzo had no argument with that. It sounded hollow when struck, and the plans showed no pipes or electrical lines passing through it. But the base was thicker than a normal partition, and its plaster contained animal hair, suggesting it was considerably older than De Santis believed.

Enzo placed his palm against it.

The wall felt cool.

He moved his hand to the plaster beside it. Warm. Back to the centre. Cool again.

“Sami.”

The younger man came over, still holding the empty coffee cup.

“Put your hand there.”

Sami touched the wall. “And?”

“You don’t feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“The temperature.”

Sami moved his palm across the plaster. “There’s a void behind it.”

“We know there’s a void.”

“So the air is cooler.”

“Air has to come from somewhere.”

“Maybe it comes from Milan.”

Enzo gave him a look. Sami grinned.

Marco returned carrying a single sheet of paper. He offered it to Enzo with exaggerated ceremony.

“Your protection from prosecution.”

Enzo read the email. The hotel company wanted exploratory work completed before the structural survey scheduled for Monday. The partition could be removed under the site manager’s supervision. Any historic material discovered was to be photographed and reported.

At the bottom, De Santis had written: Please avoid further unnecessary delays.

Enzo folded the paper twice and put it in his pocket.

“We’ll make an opening first.”

“How large?” Sami asked.

“Large enough to see.”

They moved the jackhammer aside and brought in a rotary drill. Marco fetched an inspection lamp, a hammer and two chisels. Enzo marked a rectangle in the centre of the wall, working beneath the red X.

The drill penetrated the first layer easily. Powder spilled from the hole, followed by darker grains of mortar. Four centimetres in, the bit struck brick.

Enzo withdrew it.

“Not hollow?” Marco asked.

“Not here.”

He tried again twenty centimetres to the left. The result was the same. Plaster, mortar, brick.

Sami knocked his knuckles against the wall. The sound was unmistakably hollow.

Enzo changed to a longer bit.

This time it passed through the brick and jumped forward so sharply that the drill struck the wall. A small current of air touched Enzo’s hand.

It was cool and smelled of something he could not identify.

He turned off the drill.

All three men stood still.

“What is that?” Marco asked.

Enzo pulled his mask down. The dust scratched his throat. He leaned closer to the hole without touching it.

The smell was faint. Damp fabric, perhaps. Old wood. Something sweeter underneath, not pleasant but not immediately foul.

Sami bent toward it.

“Wine,” he said.

Enzo looked at him.

“It smells like a cellar.”

“There’s no cellar on the second floor.”

“Then maybe the family kept wine up here.”

“Behind a brick wall?”

Sami shrugged. “Rich people.”

Enzo switched on the inspection lamp and pressed its narrow tip against the opening. The beam entered but illuminated nothing he could see. He widened the hole carefully with the drill until it was large enough to admit the lamp.

Beyond the bricks was darkness.

Not the shallow darkness of a cupboard. The light reached a floor and a portion of wall perhaps three metres away. Enzo moved it from side to side. Dust drifted through the beam.

“Room,” Marco said.

Enzo did not answer.

The plans showed no room. That alone did not surprise him. What troubled him was the plaster. The northern partition was old, but the brickwork inside it appeared newer. Someone had constructed a wall in front of another wall, leaving a space between.

Or leaving a space behind.

“Can you see anything?” Sami asked.

“Only the floor.”

“What kind?”

“Wood.”

“Parquet?”

Enzo moved the lamp. “I think so.”

“Why seal a room with parquet?”

Enzo switched off the lamp and straightened. Sweat ran from his hair into the collar of his shirt. Through the open windows came the metallic rattle of a tram and the brief ringing of a bicycle bell.

In the courtyard below, someone started an angle grinder.

Marco checked his watch. “De Santis wants it open.”

“De Santis is in Milan.”

“And we’re here.”

Enzo looked again at the printed email protruding from his pocket.

Every experienced builder collected stories about objects discovered during renovations. Coins beneath floorboards. Letters inside fireplaces. Newspapers stuffed into ceilings. Enzo had once found a small pistol wrapped in oilcloth behind a bathtub in San Salvario. In a villa outside Chieri, his crew had uncovered the bones of three dogs buried beneath a kitchen.

He had never found a missing room.

“Photograph everything,” he said.

Marco took out his telephone.

They began with hand tools, removing the plaster around the exploratory hole. Beneath it, the bricks had been laid roughly, without the precision used elsewhere in the palazzo. Some came free with two or three strikes. Others broke apart, filling the room with red dust.

After twenty minutes, the opening was half a metre wide.

Enzo could now insert his head, but the air coming through it had changed. The sweet smell was stronger. Wine, as Sami had said, but also something dry and stale.

He shone the light inside.

A narrow room extended beyond the wall. Its ceiling was lower than that of the bedroom, decorated with a simple painted border. The parquet was almost completely covered in grey dust. On the far wall hung the dark rectangle of a painting, although the beam was too weak to reveal its subject.

Near the centre of the room, Enzo saw the polished edge of a wooden table.

He moved the light.

Something pale appeared beneath it.

Five narrow shapes rested against the floorboards.

Fingers.

Enzo recoiled, striking the back of his head against the brick.

“What?” Marco said.

“Stop.”

“What did you see?”

Enzo removed his goggles. Dust had gathered in the moist skin around his eyes. For a moment he could hear nothing except his own breathing and the grinder in the courtyard.

“Get everyone out of this room.”

Neither man moved.

“Now.”

Sami stared at the opening. “Is someone in there?”

“I said get out.”

Marco stepped back, but Sami remained where he was.

Enzo raised the lamp again. He did not put his head through the hole this time. He held the light at arm’s length and angled it toward the floor.

The hand was still there.

It appeared to belong to a man seated at the table, his arm hanging beside the chair. He wore a dark jacket. The skin of the hand was grey, but intact.

Not bones.

Not old.

Enzo shifted the beam upward. A white cuff. A shoulder. The side of a head.

The man’s face was turned away.

“There’s somebody inside,” Enzo said.

“Alive?”

“No.”

Sami crossed himself.

Marco reached for his telephone. “I’ll call.”

“Wait.”

“Why?”

Enzo did not know. Perhaps because once the call was made, the palazzo would cease to be a building site. Police would close the floor, perhaps the entire property. Questions would be asked about the permits and the broken wall. De Santis would return from Milan and deny having authorised anything.

Or perhaps Enzo simply wanted to understand what he had seen.

“We need to know if he’s alone,” he said.

He took the hammer and removed another brick.

A crack travelled from the corner of the opening to the red X. Plaster fell in sheets. Marco jumped back. Enzo reached for the edge, but the centre of the partition had already begun to lean.

“Move!”

The wall collapsed inward.

The sound was softer than Enzo expected: bricks striking parquet, timber splitting, a long exhalation of dust. The table shook. A bottle rolled across it and struck a glass.

The dead man moved.

His head lifted as the chair shifted beneath him. For one impossible instant, he seemed to look directly at the three workers. Then his body tipped forward at the waist and struck the table, bowing to whoever had finally opened the room.

Behind him, seated in the opposite chair, was a woman in the remains of a pale evening dress.

Her empty eye sockets watched him fall.

One skeletal hand rested beside the wine bottle.

Stefano

Books by Stefano

A Vintage for the Dead

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