The Florence of the Medici, of Benvenuto Cellini, Machiavelli and the unfortunate friar was a hothouse of fervent, apocalyptic religion and its darker twin, a desperate, sweaty sensuality. The venal and the venerated walked those same cobbled streets together, changing sides on a whim or through some sudden threat, struggling on occasion to tell the difference between the two. Sacred mixed with profane. The highest, most devotional art emerged from the hands of the most bloodthirsty and profane of individuals.
She closed the last book that had gripped her, Cellini’s autobiography, written with a repugnant sense of self-justification and not an iota of shame. In the section she’d opened by accident Cellini told how, while separated from his wife, he’d fallen in love with a man, a rival goldsmith, only to return home and find the object of his lust meeting his estranged spouse. He’d stabbed both to death as they stood on the threshold, and dismissed their murders as ‘a justifiable accident during a heated argument’.
The casual brutishness from a man lauded as one of Florence’s greatest sons, honoured with a bronze bust in the centre of the Ponte Vecchio, appalled her.
It was now close to midnight. Julia wondered whether she could sleep, and if she did what dreams might come, of dark shapes flitting through the alleys of Florence, of the beautiful Eve smeared with blood, and her counterpart on the opposite wall of the Brancacci Chapel howling while she and Adam fled Paradise in ignominy and despair. Of the strange serpent with a beautiful female face, newly crowned with a bloody halo by an intruder spurred on by uncertain motives.
With those frescoes, many believed, the artistic Renaissance — informed by perspective, by an accurate depiction of the human body, of light and the physical world — began. In fifteenth-century Florence, humanity started to take its first, faltering steps out of the dark age of superstition and feudalism towards a rationalist conscience and a world of equality and justice.
Or so, she whispered to herself, we like to think.
Faint strains of atonal modern jazz were drifting through from Fratelli’s rooms opposite. She went to the door and saw his was open, with a light on.
Gingerly she tiptoed across. He was fast asleep in the solitary chair, a book in his lap. He looked younger like that, as if all the many troublesome ghosts that seemed to haunt him had been briefly exorcized.
Sleeping in a chair couldn’t be comfortable, or good for a man who was not, she had come to realize, well at all.
She walked over and gently shook him awake. It took a few moments for him to come round. Then he stared at her, frowned and said, ‘Yes?’
‘It’s late, Pino,’ she said. ‘You should sleep in a bed. Not a chair.’
He looked at the clock on the wall.
‘True,’ Fratelli said sleepily. ‘This worries me. I don’t need two dragons in my life.’
‘Bed,’ she insisted. ‘There’s nothing you can do now.’
He peered at her, still half asleep.
‘Well, is there?’ she added quickly. ‘Nothing happened today really. An idiot smeared blood on some beautiful paintings. I bet we never hear anything else about it again.’
‘A lot happened today,’ he said. ‘It’s just that we don’t know it yet.’
Then he started to stand, sending the book he was reading clattering to the polished wooden floor.
Julia picked it up and handed it to him. He gave a little salute in return then disappeared without another word through the door by the front window.
She was sorry they couldn’t talk any longer, but he looked exhausted. It was for the best. All the same, books were her second love, after paintings. Pino Fratelli owned so many, in English and Italian. He must have adored them as much as she did. Unusual books, too, indicative of a wandering, restless and highly unusual mind.
The one he’d been reading, a hefty title he’d taken off to bed, was to do with Hebrew myth and a name she vaguely recalled, though not in any great detail.
The title on the cover was Lilith.
Tuesday, 4 November 1986
The following morning Julia Wellbeloved woke at seven, Cellini’s bloody life story still open on her sheets, still rolling around her imagination. The bells of Santa Maria del Carmine clattered in a sonorous tumult beyond the window. She got dressed and threw open the curtains.
The weather had changed completely. A bright winter sun cast the street outside in contrasting tones: one side deep black, the other a bright, chilly white. Men and women in heavy clothing shuffled up and down the pavement, many led by small dogs trudging along in front of them. There were lights in the tiny café a few doors away on the opposite side of the street, and wafts of either steam or cigarette smoke curled out of the half-open door. As she watched, a rusty Fiat estate car came to a halt outside the place, blocking the entire narrow street. A man got out and headed into the café, carrying several trays of pastries. Meanwhile a small, very old bus, lurching towards Carmine, dispatching a fog of diesel fumes in its wake, was forced to a halt behind the Fiat.
The delivery man emerged, and a brief argument of gestures and words that she could just about hear ensued. The language of Florence seemed to her very… florid. Full of words she could only guess at; terms that, judging by the vehement tone with which they were delivered, were unlikely to grace any A-level Italian examination back in England.
The appointment at the Palazzo Vecchio was for nine thirty. For some reason she wanted to get out of the house without seeing Pino Fratelli. So she tiptoed out on to the landing. His door was still open but there was no light and no music. Still sleeping, she thought. All the same, she went down the stone steps as lightly as a mouse and closed the door quietly as she let herself into the cobbled street.
A short dash through the crawl of morning traffic, once again blocked by a stationary car further along the street, took her to the tiny café. She breezed in and, in her best Italian, asked for a cappuccino and a cornetto alla crema.
Signora Grassi, who seemed rather larger and more formidable than she had the day before, glared back at her from the till, a cigarette dangling from her lower lip, almost half of it ash.
‘Buongiorno,’ Julia added quickly.
‘Buongiorno,’ the woman grunted with a nod that sent the ash tumbling down on to the shiny red plastic counter top.
A middle-aged man, slight, with a brown toothbrush moustache, burst into action at her behest, handing her a pastry in a paper napkin, then setting to work on the shiny Gaggia machine.
There was no one else in the place. The attention of the woman at the counter, dressed in a garish pink nylon jacket embroidered with the name of a coffee company, was focused entirely on her single customer.
‘Inglese?’ Signora Grassi said.
‘Yes.’
The woman nodded across the road. ‘Fratelli’s… guest?’
The last word was spoken with such a suspicious intonation that Julia felt her temper start to rise.
‘I’m a postgraduate student here on assignment. The Uffizi arranged the accommodation.’
‘The Uffizi!’ said the man at the coffee machine brightly.
‘I’m researching an academic paper,’ Julia added. Then, out of nothing more than a sense of pure mischief, threw in, ‘I have an appointment with Signor Soderini, the mayor, in a little while to discuss my work.’
The barista’s eyebrows rose in admiration. Signora Grassi, who had to be his wife, puffed on her cigarette and squinted through hooded eyes. The coffee arrived, creamy and welcome. Julia tasted it, wiped the froth from her lip, and told him, truthfully, it was delicious.