‘I didn’t think that for one minute.’
‘Of course you did,’ he said, getting up and throwing some money on the counter. ‘Tomorrow you must meet the mayor of Florence. Why waste your time on a sick old Carabinieri maresciallo? I apologize. Come. I’ll see you home.’
Outside the rain had diminished to fine drizzle. The cobbled pavements shone beneath the street lights. A couple of tramps started making begging noises the moment the two of them emerged.
‘Don’t walk here on your own after dark,’ Fratelli advised. ‘Around my street it is safe enough. The piazza is best avoided except in daylight…’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I said. Negroni. The drink of Florence. I catch a bus round the corner. There’s a place I frequent. I no longer drive.’
He waved the finger at his ear and mouthed the word ‘matto’.
‘I’ve never tried a Negroni.’
‘You’re twenty-eight,’ Fratelli replied. ‘You’ve all the time in the world.’
Julia looked at this peculiar man, with his heavy coat, his white hair, the face that was both young and old.
Then she glanced back at the clock on the wall of the ice-cream parlour: six thirty. As she watched, the owner turned the sign on the door so it read, ‘Chiuso’.
Time moved strangely in this city. Early and late seemed to swap places at will.
‘I thought patience was for idle fools,’ she said, as much to herself as him.
Fratelli shuffled in his heavy coat. ‘You shouldn’t take me too seriously. It’s not necessary. Or wise.’
‘I can spare an hour,’ she said.
He spent the time staring at the grey waters of the Arno. The river looked angry. As if it wanted to belch the renegade priest Savonarola’s ashes back into the city that had dumped them into its midst five centuries before.
Then a bell somewhere chimed six thirty. He walked back into the Piazza Santa Croce. The rain had turned steady and settled. The olive growers’ marquee was closed, its main doors secured by heavy ropes and locks.
The woman called Chavah Efron stood outside at the back, huddled in a khaki anorak, looking around, bedraggled, wondering, he guessed: did this strange man keep his promises?
Yes. Always, in the end.
He strode over, nodded. Her entire stock seemed to be piled next to the tent, covered with plastic sheeting to protect it from the rain. She looked younger than he remembered. Vulnerable when the hard mask dropped.
‘So I didn’t get stood up.’ She tried to peer into the cowl. ‘Are you sure we haven’t met before?’
‘I’m sure,’ he said, and looked at the pile of cardboard boxes.
‘You want two?’
A few night people were wandering into the bars and restaurants. She’d parked her VW on the corner of the Via de’ Benci, the busy road that led down to the river and the Ponte alle Grazie across to San Niccolò. Fiesole lay in the other direction, a short drive away in the hills overlooking Florence.
‘My restaurant friend…’
‘Don’t ask about Thursday again. I told you.’
In the sharp street light her hands looked like leather. Marked with cuts and rough skin.
‘The thing is,’ he went on, ‘I can’t carry more than two cases. Are you here tomorrow?’
‘Tuesday’s not Thursday,’ she said straight away, running a finger at her curly black hair, keeping it out of her face. ‘What do you think?’
Chavah Efron was both beautiful and fallen, like the woman on the wall. He looked at the black night around them and could feel her slipping away.
‘Do you have any money?’ she asked.
‘I’ll give you what I have now,’ he said. ‘You keep all the cases. I’ll come back in the morning and get four.’
He took out the crumpled wad of small denomination notes. She stuffed the money into a zipped pocket on her jacket, anxious for anything.
He picked up the two cases again. ‘Open the doors. I’ll pass them to you.’
She climbed into the back of the rusty Volkswagen and held out her dirty hands, beckoning. ‘Give,’ Chavah Efron said.
He pulled back the cowl, felt the chill night on his bald head. The way the van was parked blocked any view of them from the pavement on the other side of the Via de’ Benci. No one close by.
She was crouching in the back, staring at him. ‘I do know you. I’ve seen you before. I…’ Her grimy fingers went to her mouth. ‘Oh shit…’
By then he was on her, hands round her cold damp mouth. Pushing her back on to the pile of cardboard boxes, dragging the length of rag out of his pocket. He held her firmly, not tightly, never went near the soft curve of the belly. This was about rescue, not harm.
The gag went round her mouth, met her teeth, stifled her screams. Then he yanked off the bulky, filthy Afghan jacket, bound her hands in front of her, tightly, not cruelly. After that, he closed both doors behind him. The only light in the rear compartment came from a street lamp drifting through the front window. He could just make out the crumpled form lying on the filthy floor of the van, mumbling what sounded like obscenities. Her hands were to her face. Her head was a mess of black, curly hair, shaking with surprise. She wasn’t sobbing. More furious than angry.
‘I won’t harm you, Chavah Efron,’ he said as loudly as he dared. ‘I know who you are. I know what’s happened. I wish…’
Her legs were apart and kicking, rough farm boots against the tinny van floor.
A breathless silence. A sensation of control, of power, and the ecstasy of shame. He looked at the woman, her eyes blazing with fury, and he thought of the creatures on the wall in Santa Maria del Carmine. One perfect, one sullied. And a third, crippled with the body of a serpent, triumphant.
‘I can save you,’ he said.
She stared at him with bright, furious eyes. Not like the Eve on the wall, not much.
All things happened for a reason.
He picked up the sheepskin jacket. It stank of animals. Sifting through the tissues and coins, the little tinfoil tabs of dope, he found a set of keys. Then, ignoring the writhing of her limbs, he clambered over into the front seat, took out the business card, worked out the hand-drawn map in his head. Stabbed the puny engine in to life, and gingerly edged the VW out of the city until he found the winding Via Salviatino towards Fiesole, ignoring the angry, mumbled cries, the thrashing of the body in the back.
‘My name… my true name is Ariel Montefiore,’ Fratelli told her as the bus chugged along the choking streets that led to the Ponte Vecchio and beyond, following the southern bank of the Arno. They had the back bench to themselves, watching the city stagger past beyond the rainy windows.
‘That sounds lovely,’ she observed.
‘I was born in the Roman ghetto in 1938. And you?’
‘Hemel Hempstead General Hospital, 1958.’
‘Twenty years apart. Yet different worlds. Mine was about to fall bloodily apart. You opened your eyes to a place that was a little gentler, I feel.’
‘A little,’ she mused. ‘There always seems to be a war somewhere. And bombs.’
The bus lurched into the busy piazza at the end of the Ponte Vecchio. Pedestrians everywhere swarming into the street, carrying shopping bags, pulling heavy hats over their heads.
‘No,’ Fratelli insisted. ‘They were different. My parents ran a bakery in the ghetto. Not far from the Piazza Mattei. You know it?’