In Florence, SS Captain Alberti prefers to keep a certain distance from the ugly necessities of occupation. He is an aesthete and is using his time in the city to further his knowledge of the quattrocento. What he likes, he takes. Göring and Hitler have both sent ‘art buyers’ to Florence to snap up the city’s treasures at joke prices. The masterpieces of the Uffizi and the Bargello stay hidden in the cellars and laundry houses and guest wings of grand Renaissance palazzi.
The Professor tells them that Alberti has dismissed Count Gaetano and replaced him with the hunchbacked Raffaele Mangianello, who cruises around town on his Aprilia motorcycle, waving a gun. The new Podestà’s first act in office — as much from personal interest as to curry favour with the Germans — is to open the Ufficio Affari Ebraici. His aim, boasted on ten thousand paper flyers, is to make Florence the first Judenfrei city in Italy. The day after his appointment, a group of squadristi raid the Great Synagogue, hauling out copies of the Torah, scrolls and sacred writings onto the steps and burning them in the street. Then artworks, silver menorahs and golden lanterns are taken out, piled in the back of a van, and sent with Mangianello’s compliments to Alfred Rosenberg’s Library for the Jewish Question in Frankfurt-on-Main.
Carità and Mangianello are old friends, the Professor recalls sadly, and through the intercession of the new Podestà the former electrician swiftly becomes one of the most powerful men in the city. He is named head of the Ufficio Politico Investigativo, a branch of the Republican Guard styled on the Gestapo. Declaring himself the ‘Biting Axe of Florence’, he leads a group of a hundred thugs and hangers-on — the Banda Carità. He requisitions a grey stone apartment block in the via Bolognese which becomes his Villa Triste: the site of brutal interrogations, a storehouse for his enormous weapons cache and a place to feast and frolic with his mistress, Milly. The Professor tells them everything now with an apologetic air, taking off his spectacles and wiping them with a handkerchief, looking towards them with old, watery eyes.
Despite the Professor’s visits and the constant companionship of the wireless, Esmond and Ada feel increasingly cut off in the house on the hill. Vegetables are still plentiful in the garden, but they have run out of meat and milk, butter and eggs. Ada is growing thinner as her belly fattens, the melonish bump sticking out from beneath accordion ribs. Esmond tries to hunt partridges with Tatters as Alessandro had, but he’s unwilling to use bullets unnecessarily and so only fires when he has a clear shot. Even then he often misses. After his fifth morning hunting, when he has used sixteen of the thirty bullets he has left and has nothing more to show for it than one small pigeon, he gives up. The bread ration in the city has been reduced to two hundred grams per person; even so, the Professor brings them several grey chestnut-flour loaves when he comes. Esmond makes Ada eat spinach with every meal, for the sake of the baby.
The cold and rain that marked the first weeks of the German occupation have given way to brilliant skies, cool nights of fresh, mountain-like air. Esmond feels gloriously healthy, rising early to go running with Tatters in the hills above Bellosguardo, feeling an extraordinary physical lightness, which he knows to be youth. He is always careful, keeping to the mule-tracks, ducking into bushes at the sound of an engine, but he wouldn’t give up those runs in the morning light for anything. The dog bounces alongside him, pink tongue flapping wild and wet as they gallop along the pale rises.
15
One eleven o’clock in the middle of that sunny October, Bruno and Alessandro pull up in front of the villa in the old Bianchi. Esmond and Ada run out, calling to their friends, who have brought them twelve slices of cured ham, some pecorino, a bottle of home-brewed grappa. They sit in the garden’s lush abundance eating figs and persimmons, medlars and grapes — the last fruits of the year.
‘It’s not all bad news,’ Alessandro says. His skin is very dark after weeks outside; his hair is even longer and wilder, a wiry zigzag on top of his head. ‘The carabinieri have been refusing to serve the Germans. Decent fuckers after all! They’re in love with the King — they used to be his personal bodyguards, of course. So they’re laying down their weapons and joining us in the hills.’
‘And we had our first run-in with Carità and his thugs.’
Alessandro interrupts. ‘From which I think we emerged pretty fucking well for a bunch of intellectuals.’
Bruno lobs a fig at him. ‘Bastard. I want to tell it.’ Esmond feels happy merely being in the presence of these carefree young men. Bruno has filled out in the chest. He looks cool and clever and able in his blue serge suit, a beret pulled down on his close-cropped head. ‘You’ve heard about the Banda Carità, I guess?’
‘Yes,’ Ada nods. ‘The Professor told us he’s been arresting anyone with links to the monarchy.’
‘It’s true,’ Alessandro says. ‘He’s after the aristocrats of Florence. He was an orphan and was brought up by some wealthy family in Milan who treated him like shit. You must always look for the psychological explanation.’
‘He decided’, says Bruno, rolling his eyes, ‘to try to find our hideout in the hills. They came up late yesterday afternoon, eighteen of them armed to the teeth. Our sentries spotted them miles away and we’d rehearsed what to do. We expected it to be the Germans of course, but it’s all the same. We pulled branches in front of the caves, dropped away into the gullies and ravines, shimmied up trees, led the bastards into the high mountain passes.’
‘We know them even in the dark,’ coughed Alessandro. ‘Dusk had fallen and they didn’t have dogs, so we lost them easily. They were so badly organised, the idiots just ran at anyone, blasting their guns like crazy. I was up a tree and saw Carità’s fat head with its queer tuft of white pass right below me. He was with Piero Koch, the fucker who gave me a going over in Regina Coeli. I almost dropped down and went for them.’
‘In the end’, Bruno says, ‘we got two of them.’
‘Got them?’ Esmond asks.
‘Killed them.’
‘Jesus.’
‘We’re not playing games, my friend.’
‘You should have seen Elio,’ Alessandro laughs. ‘He was amazing. He led these goons down a sheep track and hid behind a rock. When they’d passed he jumped out, with a Red Indian yell, made sure they had time to reach for their guns and then bang! bang! he shot the fuckers in the head, right between the eyes. It was like a film, honestly.’
‘He’s a maniac,’ Bruno says. ‘He had to lie down for three hours afterwards and recover.’
‘He’s a hero,’ Alessandro insists.
‘Do we know who they were?’
‘Luigi di Giovanni and Erno Rossilini,’ Bruno says. ‘Both members of Carità’s assassin squad. Killed by a man with a doctorate in Latin law who speaks five languages.’
‘And wears spectacles so thick I’m surprised he could see them at all,’ Alessandro adds.