After dinner, Douglas puts his arm around Esmond and guides him away from the others.
‘You’re enjoying Paneros, then?’
‘I’ve almost finished it. And yes, very much.’
‘Good. It’s really, if you like, a hymn to the sexual act. What ecstasy, of all of them, is more fervid than that of young lovers locked in lush embraces? I wanted to put that on the page, to make you feel it as you read it. I can’t read that book without a stiffy, all right!’
Orioli had looked a little jaded during dinner, eating and drinking less than usual. He’d asked Strindberg for a mineral water and drunk it, burping loudly and proffering swift, embarrassed apologies. He trots to catch up with them.
‘I’m not so much tonight. It’s my fegato, my bad liver. I need to go on a diet. Maybe I should go home.’
Douglas gives him a swipe on the buttocks with his walking cane.
‘No slacking. We’re going to join these young ones at their nightclubs. I want to see what they do after leaving us. They’ve been secretive recently. We ought to know what we’re missing.’
They make their way towards the orange dome of the cathedral. Beside the main steps of the Duomo, where indifferent hawkers hold out black-market cigarettes and saucy postcards, Douglas gives a little bark.
‘Let’s go in,’ he says. ‘I want to look at Sir John.’
The Prince and Colonel Keppel wait outside with the Reggies as the three friends follow Douglas and Orioli into the cathedral. It is very dark inside, barely any light through the stained glass from the streetlamps in the square.
‘Bugger,’ Gerald whispers, stubbing his toe on an unseen step. They walk down a side-aisle until they come to a small chapel. Douglas speaks, his voice terribly loud in the echoing church.
‘You see there?’ he says, lighting a match and holding it to one of the prayer candles. ‘Let’s fire up some of these, get a better look.’
As Douglas and Orioli light the candles to the side of the chapel, the fresco on the wall is illuminated. It is the painting in terra verde, the colour of the patina on bronze. A cruel-looking man on a horse atop a triumphant plinth.
‘Sir John Hawkwood,’ Douglas booms. ‘By Uccello. This is my favourite Florentine Englishman. Better than the soft-souls who live here now. A condottiero, a mercenary, in the twelfth century. They couldn’t pronounce his name, so they called him Giovanni Accuto. Fought mainly against Florence, actually, but chose to settle and die here. Bloody tough. Would have taught these Italians a thing or two about war. They could do with him in Spain, in Abyssinia. Bloody wet, the Italians.’
Esmond hears someone clear their throat, the sound of rustling papers. He looks around and, with a start, realises that the nave of the cathedral contains some dozen people, dressed in black. A priest comes hurrying towards them.
‘Signori,’ he says, ‘I really must insist—’
Esmond starts to apologise, but Douglas lifts his chin belligerently to the priest.
‘Lining your pockets with pelf from these sentimental fools. Irrational dunces praying for magic and redemption and hope. God, how I hate the clergy.’ He turns towards the congregation, mainly frightened-looking old women, and booms. ‘It’s all claptrap! Don’t you see it? Making you feel corrupt for the few real pleasures of your miserable lives. Go out and live, don’t waste your final days in here!’ By this time Gerald is hurrying him towards the door and Esmond, mumbled apology, places a five lire note in the collection plate.
In Doney’s, Douglas is loud and quarrelsome, ordering bottle after bottle of cheap Chianti and banging his fist on the table with every detail. He smokes incessantly, his large pale face moving behind the smoke like a moon behind clouds. Prince Heinrich, previously vaguely amused by Douglas, now looks on with a kind of fascinated horror.
‘I switched from girls to boys,’ Douglas says, a group of elderly English spinsters at the table next door nodding to one another, ‘in Naples in ’97. I was bartering with some street girl’s mother. A gypsy girl, up near Scampia.’ He inclines his head to Prince Heinrich. ‘Have you ever undressed a gypsy? They’re always perfectly clean.’ He turns back to the table, making sure the old ladies can hear him. ‘So, I was bargaining with this woman over her daughter when the girl’s brother turned up and gave me the most tremendous clout with a cosh. When I woke, he was covering my face with kisses and tears and I quite forgot about the girl. Disappeared with the boy for a fortnight.’
There is a bustle at the back of the room and Esmond can see Fiamma’s uncle Niccolò with a group of other Blackshirts at the bar, arguing with the bartender. With a lurch, he sees that Carità is amongst them. ‘We should go,’ he says quietly.
A younger Blackshirt, whom Esmond hasn’t seen before, walks slowly to their table. He leans over carefully and picks up Douglas’s glass.
‘You drink too much,’ he says, draining the wine himself and placing it back on the table. ‘Basta così.’
‘Damn fool!’ Douglas yells, his face softened and inflamed. The other Blackshirts gather behind their crony. Esmond sees a look of cold rage on Niccolò Arcimboldi’s face, a smirk on Carità’s, as Douglas begins to shout. ‘Look at you, stuffed up and delighted with yourselves, playing at soldiers. Italians make rotten soldiers, d’you know that? Halfway into an attack and they’re writing to their mothers.’
The young Blackshirt pauses for a moment, as if in thought, then swings a punch at Douglas. The old man topples back, knocking over the table, breaking glass and plates. The English women scream. Esmond thinks of Goad at the unveiling of the portrait, a reeling sense of déjà vu. He aims a swift kick at Niccolò Arcimboldi’s shin. Fiamma has picked up her butter knife and sweeps it wildly at Carità, who ducks. Gerald tries to get Douglas to the door while Pino beats frantically at a wide black back with his friend’s cane, his spectacles misting, a stream of curses in English and Italian. More punches reach Douglas as he staggers towards the door with Gerald. Esmond sees Carità draw a dagger from his belt and, before he has a chance to feel afraid, he picks up one of the empty wine bottles from the table and brings it down over the little man’s head. The bottle shatters, Carità stumbles forward, another Blackshirt takes out a pistol and holds it up. ‘A gun!’ More screaming; the Prince and the Reggies cower in the far corner.
Grabbing Fiamma’s hand, Esmond hustles them towards the door and into the night. Gerald and Douglas are disappearing into the Institute, twenty yards ahead. He looks back and sees the Blackshirts lifting their weapons in the air, shouting, Carità leading them. He drags Fiamma after him, stumbling through the doors of the Institute, which he slams and bolts. Panting, they lean against one another until their breathing slows.
‘We just can’t behave like that any more,’ Fiamma says, shaking her head. ‘Norman is out of control. I felt like hitting him myself.’
When they reach the library, Douglas is sitting in an armchair while Gerald pours him a scotch. The old man’s eyes are bloodshot, a bruise ripening on one cheek, his hands shaking.
‘They’re beasts,’ he says. ‘Brutes. See what they’ve done to my little boys, dressing them up as soldiers, marching and drilling when they should be lying in the sun.’
‘Where’s Pino?’ Fiamma asks.
‘The problem is that Musso’s foisted a political system designed for sober Northern temperaments onto a race of lovers. The Italians are all heart, too much compassion for Fascism—’
He lights a Toscano. Esmond crosses to the window. The Blackshirts aren’t waiting for them, only the old man in the pheasant feather cap sits on the steps of the church opposite, watching. A small crowd stands further up, in the pool of a streetlight outside Pretini’s salon, looking down at a pile of clothes on the ground. When it moves, Esmond wonders if a dog has been hit by a car. Then he sees the hands and arms, and runs for the door with Gerald and Fiamma following behind.