She shook her head.
He was smiling, remembering something.
‘A beautiful, modest part of that marvellous city. There’s a fountain with tortoises. I fool myself I recall the place. In my mind’s eye’ — he tapped his white-haired head — ‘I can see it. But this must be a false memory, from a later visit. It’s impossible.’
Finally the bus broke free of the crowds. She could see the river running through the centre of the city, a watery spine that reflected the street lights from both banks. Across the torrent stood the grand, severe arches of the Uffizi stretching back towards the Piazza della Signoria. Somewhere there, tomorrow morning in an office in the Palazzo Vecchio, she would meet the mayor, Alessandro Soderini, an aristocrat whose family was important here four centuries before. That was the grand face of Florence. On this more modest side of the Arno there was just a straggly line of traffic working through the rain.
She’d walked along the riverside road the day before on a long trudge to the Piazza Michelangelo, the hillside viewpoint which was so popular with visitors. The area at the foot, by the Arno, was old and undistinguished, yet likeable somehow, a pleasant place to stop for a solitary coffee. San Niccolò. It seemed to be their destination.
Fratelli couldn’t take his eyes off the vast building across the river and the heavy tower of the Palazzo Vecchio behind.
‘I’m still a Roman really. I like it there. Most everything exists for beauty, for pride, for love. The city manifests that warmth, that affection to everyone it meets. Florence,’ his eyes were fixed on the Uffizi, ‘is a bloody place. Everything kept hidden except for those judged fit to enjoy it. A monument to the power and majesty of its rulers.’ His right index finger went up in a gesture much like a schoolteacher’s. ‘Which is why you see so much rustication in our buildings. They’re meant to resemble fortresses; domestic castles which hide their secrets behind thick, impenetrable walls. I detest rustication. Compare the exquisite Quirinale with the brutal Pitti Palace behind us…’
‘Why couldn’t you remember the tortoises?’ she asked.
He turned to her with a quick and self-effacing smile. ‘Because when I was four years old a brave and kindly Catholic priest took to smuggling Jewish children out of Rome and spirited me here. A few years later he was shot by the Germans in the Ardeatine Massacre in retribution for a partisan attack. Three hundred and thirty-five men murdered by the Nazis on one bleak day. I knew none of this, of course; nor that I’d been secretly delivered to an equally brave and kindly spinster in Oltrarno. She owned the house where you’re staying. Until I was fifteen years old, I thought she was my mother and I the most conspicuous bastard in Florence. Then she told me the truth.’
Julia looked at him and struggled for words. The Second World War happened to other people, older people. Not someone like this man next to her, who seemed in some ways so young, full of life and a curious kind of juvenile enthusiasm.
‘Mussolini,’ Fratelli continued. ‘They speak of him now and say he wasn’t so bad to the Jews. It depends on your point of view. He didn’t kill them outright, so if a failure to commit mass murder is kindness, then perhaps he was a benevolent man. Many were deported from Rome, though. In the case of my parents, they were rounded up and sent to a place called Porto Re in Yugoslavia. Porto Re was a camp. Not Belsen. Not Auschwitz. But a prison for Jews and anyone else he hated or feared or both.’
‘I never realized.’
They were past the Uffizi. On both banks the houses grew more modest; ancient terraces with the odd patch of open grass or pavement.
‘Me neither,’ Fratelli replied. ‘When I was very young, a good Catholic with a brave unmarried mother here in Florence, Mussolini was warring with his peers. They ejected him, but then an infuriated Hitler placed the idiotic little tyrant back on his golden throne.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘With conditions. Those Jews he was hiding in Yugoslavia among them. Eight thousand in all, shipped north in trains like cattle.’
He turned and pointed back to the Ponte Vecchio.
‘See those windows in the middle at the top?’
Julia squinted back at the strange, medieval bridge, made up entirely of shops.
‘That,’ Fratelli went on, ‘is the Vasari Corridor, the place I mentioned. A private walkway between the Pitti Palace on this side of the Arno and the Palazzo Vecchio a kilometre away in the Piazza della Signoria.’
‘A secret passage?’
‘Not at all,’ he said with a shrug. ‘The Medici didn’t want to mix with the hoi polloi. They didn’t mind who knew it. But those windows in the centre…’ His face was, for a moment, quite bleak. ‘Mussolini invited Hitler round for tea when the war was going well. As I said, the corridor is a place for statesmen. So they met there, and in order for his German friend to enjoy a better view, the little marionette had those ugly modern windows inserted into the Medici’s private escape route from the filthy, stinking masses.’
He took one more look and then turned to face the front of the bus. ‘Ask Soderini to let you walk the length of it, one side of the Arno to the other, and see it for yourself. Florence always sucks up to dictators, anyone with power. It makes us feel privileged.’
There were vessels on the river. Fast, slender rowing boats with five or six men sculling frantically against the heavy swell.
‘My father’s name was Gideon,’ Fratelli said. ‘My mother’s Esther. As I said, they were communists. Internationalists, which is why I imagine they chose names that weren’t as Italian as one might expect. Like Ariel for their son.’
His sudden sadness was so real she felt she could touch it.
Have you taken your pills?
The Grassi dragon asked that. Walter, the austere, ruddy-faced Carabinieri captain, had sounded just as solicitous that afternoon in the Brancacci Chapel when, beneath his anger, he’d inquired, ‘Pino. What in God’s name are you doing here?’
‘Communist and Jewish. Twice damned. They died in Auschwitz. I went there once. I don’t know why.’
She placed her hand on his arm, squeezed the thick coat briefly. ‘I’m sorry, Pino.’
He stared at her, puzzled. ‘Why? I never knew them. I never found a surviving relative in Rome who might help me colour in a little of who I was. Help me dispel my ignorance. To all intents and purposes, I am Pino Fratelli, son of an unmarried woman from Oltrarno; a beautiful, caring mother, one I loved dearly all the days of her life. But…’
His brown eyes grew misty. This habit of a sudden distraction was one she was coming to recognize.
‘There’s a certain Hebrew gloom about me at times. I can’t avoid it. The thing’s passed on in the blood, I suppose. Along with much else. Generation to generation. Not that there’ll be any passing on from me.’
He looked up, abruptly alert.
‘We’re almost there. So that’s out of the way. I apologize I felt the need to burden you with this knowledge. Please, dismiss it now. I don’t know why I told you really. It’s just that…’ He pushed the bell for the next stop. ‘You seem a very attentive listener for some reason.’
They got off and stepped out into the rain again. His house was a mile away or more, she guessed, and in between lay the square of Santo Spirito, a place to be avoided after dark by a woman on her own. It was too late to change her mind. Besides, she liked this man. He intrigued her.
‘Negroni!’ Fratelli said again, and pointed across the road to the bright lights of a deserted bar. ‘The best there is in Florence!’ He grinned. ‘The best there is in the world.’
It was a rundown farmhouse reached by a dead-end farm track a good ten minutes by car outside Fiesole. No near neighbours. No lights. No sign of anyone inside. Nothing to get in the way.