Fiore touched the contents of the package. ‘It’s hair.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I need it for my work.’
She, too, leaned back and stared towards the hills, suddenly seeming much older than her thirteen years.
‘You work so hard, my husband,’ she said. ‘When are you coming home?’
*
The following afternoon, as I left my house, the sky blackened, and it began to rain. I hurried over the Ponte Santa Trinità, the surface of the river pearly in the half-light. By the time I reached the apothecary, the rain had grown so heavy I could hardly see, and it was pale, too, almost white, as if it had chalk in it. I walked in, water streaming from my clothes. Giuseppe eyed me from behind the counter. He was alone.
‘I was just about to close,’ he said.
‘I won’t keep you.’ I took out a handkerchief and wiped my face and neck. ‘Have you seen Faustina?’
‘I was about to ask you the same thing.’
She had disappeared suddenly, he said, about two months ago. He was disappointed in her. She had always been independent, even wilful, but it wasn’t like her to let him down like this. She knew he couldn’t manage on his own.
‘Could she have been arrested?’ I asked.
He had made enquiries at the Bargello, he said, and at the hospital — he had been worried — but no one had been able to tell him anything.
‘I was hoping,’ he said, a slight tremor in his voice, ‘that she might be with you.’
I reached into my pocket and took out her hair. ‘She sent me this.’
He moved to touch it, but his hand stopped short in the air. His eyes had sloped down at the edges; his mouth had shrunk.
‘She did that once before,’ he said. ‘After her father died. She was about fourteen. When she first came to work for me, everyone thought she was a boy.’
‘I’m sure she wouldn’t have left you unless she had a good reason.’
‘You sound as if you know something about it.’
I shook my head.
While we had been talking, the rain had slackened. I looked over my shoulder. Tucked into a niche or recess on the other side of the street was a man in a flint-coloured cloak and downtrodden boots. His face was in shadow. Though he was hard to make out, I instinctively felt he wasn’t there to take refuge from the weather.
I asked Giuseppe if he knew the man.
He peered through the window. ‘My eyesight’s not too good.’
I stepped outside. The storm had moved on, and the air had a glazed, shivery feel.
‘She’s gone.’ Cocking his head, the man gnawed at the skin on the side of his forefinger. ‘Neighbour told me. Right busybody. Doesn’t miss a thing.’ He eased himself forwards into the silvery light. His face was furtive and whiskery, and a glossy red cyst disfigured his left eyelid. ‘She knows all about you, for instance.’
‘You’re one of Bassetti’s people,’ I said.
‘Who’s Bassetti?’
‘Don’t bother denying it. You’ve got that look about you.’
‘There’s no need to be insulting.’
‘How much is he paying you?’
The man was chewing his finger again, and didn’t answer.
‘Just tell me,’ I said. ‘How much?’
He allowed himself a thin, pinched smile.
Infuriated, I thrust my hand into my pocket and flung a fistful of loose change at him. The coins bounced off his forehead, his chest and the wall on either side of him, and dropped, jingling, to the paving stones.
*
About a month later, I was in my workshop when I heard footsteps outside, in the stable yard. I opened the door. Earhole was standing in the dark, hands twitching. He glanced back towards the gate, as if he thought he might have been followed, and I was reminded of myself, the way I had been for so many years.
‘A soldier let me in,’ he said. ‘He remembered me, from the last time.’
As he stepped past me, into the room, I noticed that his clothes were smudged with black, and he was limping. I asked him what had happened. He didn’t answer. Instead, he unwrapped a soiled cloth containing stale bread and a piece of sausage and took a bite of each.
‘I haven’t eaten anything all day,’ he said.
Since he had started working for me, he had developed a sense of his own importance, and his behaviour had become more self-conscious and high-handed. He seemed to want to emphasize my dependency on him.
‘Well?’ I said. ‘What have you found out?’
He began to pace up and down. For the first few days, he said, it was exactly like before. The same old routines and rituals. The monastery, the palace. The monastery again. He was on the brink of despairing of the whole endeavour. And then, finally, he had a moment of inspiration.
‘It was so strange,’ he said, turning to me, face bright, hands frantic. ‘It was as though everything suddenly made sense — all the bewilderment and brutality, all the fear.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ I said.
He could keep it to himself no longer. ‘The mystery: I think I’ve solved it!’
That afternoon, Earhole had decided to see the monastery of Santa Maria Novella for himself. Appearing at the gatehouse, he had claimed he was thinking of becoming a novice, and his enthusiasm for the Dominican order had been so convincing that an ancient monk had taken him on a tour of the place and bored him half to death with interminable lectures on its history and ethos. He was beginning to regret having been so conscientious when he was shown into the Spanish Chapel, famous for its fourteenth-century frescoes, and it was then that he saw the dogs.
‘Dogs?’ I said.
Black-and-white and savage-looking, with thick leather collars, they were at the bottom of the fresco on the eastern wall, strutting and skulking at the fringes of the crowd. When he saw them, he came to such a sudden standstill that the monk asked if there was something wrong. He had always been frightened of dogs, Earhole told the monk, ever since he was attacked by one when he was a baby. The monk said there was another reason to be frightened. The dogs represented the Dominicans in their role as inquisitors, as guardians of the faith.
‘Dio di merda!’ I said.
Despite his limp, Earhole was almost dancing on the spot. ‘You see? You see?’
I fetched the jar down off the shelf. We put our faces to the greenish glass and stared at the sinister, floating piece of skin.
‘The snout, the ears, the teeth …’ Earhole’s hands were twitching furiously at the edge of my field of vision. ‘It’s the same as the fresco. It’s all exactly the same.’
I looked past him, into the darkness of the stable yard. Things came together with such velocity and force that I almost lost my balance. I was thinking of the man I had killed on that windy night in 1692, and the words that he had muttered: water, black cloak, naked. Earlier that same night, though I had not known it then, the girl had died — or been murdered — and had ended up on a piece of waste ground near the river. Had I inadvertently done away with the only witness to the crime? And had I then, equally inadvertently, come to the aid of the murderer by disposing of the body? I flashed forwards to Stufa staring at the jar just before he hit Fiore. I played all these moments off against his nickname, Flesh.
‘What if Stufa killed the girl?’ I said.
Deep lines appeared on Earhole’s forehead, and I had a glimpse of how he might look when he was in his thirties or forties. ‘We don’t know she was murdered,’ he said. ‘And even if she was, we wouldn’t be able to prove it.’