‘What the hell do you want?’ she asked.
‘Thursday.’
‘What about Thursday?’
‘You’d do it all over again?’
‘I need the money. One more time and I’m gone. What’s it to you?’
‘That’s what the kids said when your husband sold them dope.’
‘One more time! Why throw this at me? You’re one of their slaves too.’
He thought of the dead cockerel, stolen from the kitchen, and its blood on the wall. It seemed like a weak and childish prank.
She laughed at his silence. Then said, ‘See? We’re no different.’
‘Not true.’ He picked up the duvet, dragged it out from underneath her, watched the way she stiffened at his closeness. He placed the coverlet over her small body. It wasn’t so cold in the room for him. A woman… He didn’t know.
‘Go to sleep,’ he ordered.
Ignoring her squawking he went downstairs, drank some bottled water and stretched out on the sofa, big hands behind his big, bald head, counting the options, the possibilities. After a while she shut up and so did the dog on the chain by the barn.
He waited an hour. The farm was silent throughout. Not a sound from upstairs. Only, through the grimy glass of the cracked windows, the distant call of owls and the blood-chilling shrieks of a nearby vixen.
At ten o’clock he went to the kitchen then rifled through the cupboards: not bad. Some decent food there and a few vegetables. He opened a pack of dried fava beans from Puglia, held them to his nose. The bitter stink made his stomach ache with hunger so he seized a lump of pecorino and munched on that. Half the beans went into a saucepan filled with cold water. It was important to think about the time ahead. To prepare.
After that he found the two biggest, sharpest knives they had, picked up a butcher’s cleaver and a meat saw too, then walked upstairs and looked at her.
Chavah Efron was, to his relief, asleep. Or pretending to be.
All for the best, he thought.
Ten o’clock in the house in Oltrarno. Rain spattering the windows, nothing beyond them but a single street light swaying in the blustery wind. She’d asked Fratelli for some of his favourite books on Florence and walked away with her arms full. No guides to art and architecture, no lists of local restaurants. Instead a collection of obscure titles in Italian and English. The strange and disturbing autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Francesco Guiccardini’s History of Florence, another work from the sixteenth century, thankfully in translation. A life of the monk Savonarola by Roberto Ridolfi — a modern author, not the Florentine nobleman who plotted against Elizabeth I, hoped to marry Mary Queen of Scots, and later returned to his native city to become a senator. And a copy of A Room with a View if, Fratelli said, she fancied ‘something light’.
She carried them back to her own small, tidy and rather overheated room, then lay on her single bed to browse through each. The tortuous birth of the Renaissance was part of her degree. But that was an academic exercise, conducted dispassionately through books and paintings, not people, not life. Now she was beginning to feel a part of the canvas of that astonishing drama, drowning in the feverish burst of violent creativity, beauty and inspiration that began just beyond her window.
And such players among its vivid cast. Cellini was a Florentine through and through, soldier, artist, sculptor, goldsmith and, as Fratelli had said earlier, a self-confessed murderer and necromancer who, in his autobiography, boasted of his affairs and killings, of conjuring up a legion of devils one night in the Colosseum. Machiavelli lived through the turmoil of the expulsion of the Medici and then the Savonarola years, rising to become a senior civil servant after the monk’s execution in 1498. He wrote his most famous work The Prince while exiled from the city, suspected of conspiracy for which he was tortured in the Bargello, the grim city prison near the Piazza della Signoria. Guiccardini was the consummate politician, working for the Vatican or the Medici, depending on the prevailing political climate. He saw the rise of Savonarola as a youth, knew Machiavelli personally, and, according to rumour, was fatally poisoned by the godfather to one of Cellini’s children.
Flitting through the dog-eared, annotated, well-thumbed pages of the books Fratelli owned, she found herself transfixed by the contrast between the city’s sumptuous visual beauty and the cruelty and degradation of those who created it. Assassination — by poison, by public sword fight, with a stealthy dagger in the dark — was commonplace. Sexual hypocrisy was rife. Both Cellini and Machiavelli stood accused of sodomy, a capital offence at the time, as did Savonarola when pilloried by his enemies. In the struggle between the working classes, the merchants, the noble families and the Medici (the latter a kind of royal family), loyalties shifted like desert sands, marooning the unfortunate, turning yesterday’s heroes into the next day’s decapitated traitors. And that was just within the city walls. Beyond, in the ragged patchwork of individual states that preceded modern Italy, lurked the scheming Vatican and rival states like Venice and Milan, bristling with arms and ambition, covetous of one of the most prosperous and financially astute cities in Europe.
For those with ambition, the journey from glory to destruction could be shocking in its savage brevity. When 1497 began, Savonarola was ruler of Florence in all but name, with sufficient power and influence over the city to persuade thousands of its citizens to burn their paintings, finest clothes, mirrors and ‘immoral’ books in the bonfire of the vanities. By the following Christmas the friar’s enemies were openly taunting him and his supporters in the street, driving a donkey into the Duomo during a church service and slaughtering it before the altar. In May 1498 Savonarola and his two closest priests were hanged then cremated on a pyre in front of cheering crowds before the Palazzo Vecchio, on the very spot of the bonfire of the vanities. As the priest approached the pyre, one of his executioners whispered into his ear, ‘The man who wanted to burn me is now himself put to the flames.’
The friar’s great enemy, the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, applauded from Rome before returning to the simony, debauchery and corruption which Savonarola had so loudly condemned. In the crowd, watching the fiery spectacle, stood Machiavelli, already marshalling the political theories that would one day, in sorry exile, turn into The Prince.
Drawn into these distant stories, Julia found herself seeing these men — and all were men — walking the streets she was coming to know. Politics in the rival gangs fighting for control of the fortress-like civic headquarters, the Palazzo Vecchio. Misery in the Bargello where Savonarola and thousands of others were suspended from the ceiling, hands behind their back, then jerked and dropped using the cruel torture known as the strappado. The violence of the monk’s fall saw the siege and sacking of his great Dominican monastery of San Marco and the persecution and occasional slaughter of his acolytes. None of this took place in that remote, imaginary terrain that carried the easy label of ‘the past’. The city those lost souls all knew and fought for, the Duomo, the Baptistery and the austere black and white facade of Santa Croce; they still stood today, little changed on the outside, a testament to their stories.