“Mr. Scudder,” he said. “I want to say Martin, but I know that’s not right. Help me out.”
“Matthew, Mr. Pollard. And this is my wife, Elaine.”
“How fortunate for you,” he told me, and took the hand she extended. “I looked over here and thought, What a beautiful woman! Then I looked again and thought, I know that fellow. But then it took me a minute to place you. The name came first, or the surname, at any rate. His name’s Scudder, but how do I know him? And then of course the rest of it came to me, all but your first name. I knew it wasn’t Martin, but I couldn’t sweep that name out of my mind and let Matthew come in.” He sighed. “It’s a curious muscle, the memory. Or aren’t you old enough yet to have found it so?”
“My memory’s still pretty good.”
“Oh, mine’s good,” he said. “It’s just capricious. Willful, I sometimes think.”
At my invitation, he pulled up a chair from a nearby table and sat down. “But only for a moment,” he said, and asked what brought us to Italy, and how long we’d be in Florence. He lived here, he told us. He’d lived here for quite a few years now. He knew our hotel, on the east bank of the Arno, and pronounced it charming and a good value. He mentioned a café just down the street from the hotel that we really ought to try.
“Although you certainly don’t need to follow my recommendations,” he said, “or Michelin’s, either. You can’t get a bad meal in Florence. Well, that’s not entirely true. If you insist on going to high-priced restaurants, you’ll encounter the occasional disappointment. But if you simply blunder into whatever humble trattoria is closest, you’ll dine well every time.”
“I think we’ve been dining a little too well,” Elaine said.
“It’s a danger,” he acknowledged, “although the Florentines manage to stay quite slim themselves. I started to bulk up a bit when I first came here. How could one help it? Everything tasted so good. But I took off the pounds I gained and I’ve kept them off. Though I sometimes wonder why I bother. For God’s sake, I’m seventy-six years old.”
“You don’t look it,” she told him.
“I wouldn’t care to look it. But why is that, do you suppose? No one else on God’s earth gives a damn what I look like. Why should it matter to me?”
She said it was self-respect, and he mused on the difficulty of telling where self-respect left off and vanity began. Then he said he was staying too long at the fair, wasn’t he, and got to his feet. “But you must visit me,” he said. “My villa is not terribly grand, but it’s quite nice and I’m proud enough of it to want to show it off. Please tell me you’ll come for lunch tomorrow.”
“Well...”
“It’s settled, then,” he said, and gave me his card. “Any cabdriver will know how to find it. Set the price in advance, though. Some of them will cheat you, although most are surprisingly honest. Shall we say one o’clock?” He leaned forward, placed his palms on the table. “I’ve thought of you often over the years, Matthew. Especially here, sipping caffé nero a few yards from Michelangelo’s David. It’s not the original, you know. That’s in a museum, though even the museums are less than safe these days. You know the Uffizzi was bombed a few years ago?”
“I read about that.”
“The Mafia. Back home they just kill each other. Here they blow up masterpieces. Still, it’s a wonderfully civilized country, by and large. And I suppose I had to wind up here, near the David.” He’d lost me, and I guess he knew it, because he frowned, annoyed at himself. “I just ramble,” he said. “I suppose the one thing I’m short of here is people to talk to. And I always thought I could talk to you, Matthew. Circumstances prevented my so doing, of course, but over the years I regretted the lost opportunity.” He straightened up. “Tomorrow, one o’clock. I look forward to it.”
“Well, of course I’m dying to go,” Elaine said. “I’d love to see what his place looks like. ‘It’s not terribly grand but it’s quite nice.’ I’ll bet it’s nice. I’ll bet it’s gorgeous.”
“You’ll find out tomorrow.”
“I don’t know. He wants to talk to you, and three might be a crowd for the kind of conversation he wants to have. It wasn’t art theft you arrested him for, was it?”
“No.”
“Did he kill someone?”
“His lover.”
“Well, that’s what each man does, isn’t it? Kills the thing he loves, according to what’shisname.”
“Oscar Wilde.”
“Thanks, Mr. Memory. Actually, I knew that. Sometimes when a person says what’shisname or whatchamacallit it’s not because she can’t remember. It’s just a conversational device.”
“I see.”
She gave me a searching look. “There was something about it,” she said. “What?”
“It was brutal.” My mind filled with a picture of the murder scene, and I blinked it away. “You see a lot on the job, and most of it’s ugly, but this was pretty bad.”
“He seems so gentle. I’d expect any murder he committed to be virtually non-violent.”
“There aren’t many non-violent murders.”
“Well, bloodless, anyway.”
“This was anything but.”
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense. What did he do?”
“He used a knife,” I said.
“And stabbed him?”
“Carved him,” I said. “His lover was younger than Pollard, and I guess he was a good-looking man, but you couldn’t prove it by me. What I saw looked like what’s left of the turkey the day after Thanksgiving.”
“Well, that’s vivid enough,” she said. “I have to say I get the picture.”
“I was first on the scene except for the two uniforms who caught the squeal, and they were young enough to strike a cynical pose.”
“While you were old enough not to. Did you throw up?”
“No, after a few years you just don’t. But it was as bad as anything I’d ever seen.”
Horton Pollard’s villa was north of the city, and if it wasn’t grand it was nevertheless beautiful, a white stuccoed gem set on a hillside with a commanding view of the valley. He showed us through the rooms, answered Elaine’s questions about the paintings and furnishings, and accepted her explanation of why she couldn’t stay for lunch. Or appeared to — as she rode off in the taxi that had brought us, something in his expression suggested for an instant that he felt slighted by her departure.
“We’ll dine on the terrace,” he said. “But what’s the matter with me? I haven’t offered you a drink. What will you have, Matthew? The bar’s well stocked, although I don’t know that Paolo has a very extensive repertoire of cocktails.”
I said that any kind of sparkling water would be fine. He said something in Italian to his house boy, then gave me an appraising glance and asked me if I would want wine with our lunch.
I said I wouldn’t. “I’m glad I thought to ask,” he said. “I was going to open a bottle and let it breathe, but now it can just go on holding its breath. You used to drink, if I remember correctly.”
“Yes, I did.”
“The night it all happened,” he said. “It seems to me you told me I looked as though I needed a drink. And I got out a bottle, and you poured drinks for both of us. I remember being surprised you were allowed to drink on duty.”
“I wasn’t,” I said, “but I didn’t always let that stop me.”
“And now you don’t drink at all?”
“I don’t, but that’s no reason why you shouldn’t have wine with lunch.”
“But I never do,” he said. “I couldn’t while I was locked up, and when I was released I found I didn’t care for it, the taste or the physical sensation. I drank the odd glass of wine anyway, for a while, because I thought one couldn’t be entirely civilized without it. Then I realized I didn’t care. That’s quite the nicest thing about age, perhaps the only good thing to be said for it. Increasingly, one ceases to care about more and more things, particularly the opinions of others. Different for you, though, wasn’t it? You stopped because you had to.”