‘First,’ Fratelli declared, ‘something our English friend spotted straight away. The fig leaves.’
‘Christmas decorations,’ Marrone interrupted.
‘Do you put up fig leaves for Christmas?’
‘Well, no. But…’
‘My intuition is they have something to do with catering.’
‘Fine, fine,’ the captain agreed.
‘More importantly, and again I’m grateful to Julia Wellbeloved for prompting this realization, there’s the question of why? What’s the point of covering up the supposed shame of some 500-year-old frescoes? Who could possibly object to their nakedness being revealed, and the removal of the prudish, ugly additions of whichever damned Medici put them there to begin with?’
Marrone’s head went from side to side, a sign of faint agreement.
‘I can see there’s something sexual here. I’m not as stupid as you think.’
‘I don’t think you’re stupid for one moment, Walter. You’re the most clinical and precise investigative officer it’s ever been my privilege to work with.’
The captain looked surprised and said, ‘You mean that?’
‘Of course I do! In ninety-nine per cent of cases you’re king, and my small and unpredictable talents are quite unnecessary.’ He hesitated then added, ‘But this is the one per cent. I’m sure of it. Of course we can assume that whoever daubed chicken blood on these frescoes was motivated by fury at what he perceived to be their obscenity. That’s obvious. But we’re missing a more important and informative question.’
Marrone blinked. ‘Which is?’
‘Who knew our beautiful couple would soon be revealed in all their naked glory? Not the general congregation of Carmine, that’s for sure. The chapel’s been sheeted off ever since restoration work began. There’s been no announcement in the papers. Nothing in the art magazines. I’ve looked.’
‘Interesting,’ Marrone observed.
‘Who knew?’ Fratelli repeated. ‘The restorers themselves. The officials of the Uffizi, the city art institutions, the writers and photographers preparing the tourist guides.’
‘Bleeding-heart atheist liberals, all of them,’ the captain noted. ‘They’d love the fact there was a bit of nudity on the walls. No point looking among that bunch…’
‘Very probably. So we must think about the small people, the invisible people. The ones they never notice. Builders and scaffolders. Suppliers of paint and materials, food and drink. Church wardens. That stolid proletarian stock from which this city was built. The Medici’s cannon fodder. The hoi polloi.’
‘You’re starting to sound like a bleeding-heart liberal yourself.’
‘Politics have nothing to do with it. That’s where we start looking. The little people.’
The captain sniffed. ‘I have a report on my desk saying the damage was insignificant. Chicken blood is easily washed off, apparently. It will be back the way it was by the end of the week. In any case, even supposing we could drag some lunatic vandal to court, he’d get a suspended sentence and an appointment with a psychiatrist. There are no obvious suspects. If we happen to bump into one—’
‘I haven’t finished!’
There it was again. The sudden anger. The flash of violence. Ambra Neri had seen this same strange and uncontrollable emotion earlier that morning. Where did it come from? This was all so foreign. Unlike the man he thought himself to be.
Marrone sat sullen and silent.
‘I apologize,’ Fratelli told him. ‘But you must hear me out. The daubs on Adam and Eve were what we all saw. They weren’t everything. Over the serpent. The beast with a woman’s head. There he painted something else. A bloody halo.’
The captain’s right eyebrow rose in disbelief.
‘Bear with me,’ Fratelli begged, and seized some books from his carrier-bag collection, turning the pages on two titles about Hebrew mythology and ancient biblical lore. ‘Who was the first woman, Walter? Do tell me.’
‘Eve, of course.’
‘You think?’
Marrone looked at his watch and scowled.
‘Jewish folklore,’ Fratelli said, bringing out a book. ‘The Alphabet of Ben Sira. Probably eighth century. According to this, the first woman was called Lilith. She wasn’t drawn from Adam’s rib. She was his equal. Made from dirt and dust like him. Like us.’
‘And?’
‘And she refused to mate with him the way he wanted. Lying down, him dominant, on top. Lilith believed herself as good as any man. If there was sex to be had, she wished to control it.’
‘Pino, Pino…’
‘Bear with me! Lilith abandoned him and went to live with the demons, bearing their children, dominating them, not him. It was then God made Eve. The second woman. The obedient, servile wife. That’s why Masolino’s serpent has a woman’s head. A beautiful one. She’s Lilith, come back to take her revenge on the man who failed her, and the woman who took her place in Paradise.’
Walter Marrone was a literal-minded man. Not slow, certainly not dense.
‘This is an interesting idea,’ he said. ‘You’re saying that, by painting a halo on the woman of the snake, this Lilith, our vandal is somehow worshipping an ancient Hebrew myth?’
‘I don’t know what I’m saying,’ Fratelli admitted.
‘That he’s Jewish? How many Jews are there in Florence?’
Fratelli shuffled on his chair. ‘Well, there’s one here, if you remember.’
‘Oh, come on. That was an accident of birth. You’re as Florentine as any man I know.’
‘It was not an accident! I was taken!’
Marrone looked a little shame-faced.
‘I’m sorry,’ Fratelli added, his voice losing some of its volume. ‘My antecedents are irrelevant. I wasn’t saying he was Jewish. Just that the inspiration came from there. We get ideas from everywhere. Painters, writers, dreamers, mystics, all kinds of people, Catholic, Jew, Protestant, atheists even… they all got obsessed with Lilith one way or another. You should look at some of the things the English were doing during the nineteenth century…’
‘The English now! You said we were looking for a builder. Or a caterer. One of the hoi polloi.’
‘An educated man too,’ Fratelli replied. ‘Self-educated, perhaps. Obsessive. There. See. We’re narrowing it down already.’
‘Pino…’
‘Think about this, Walter. Someone breaks into the Brancacci Chapel with a dead rooster. He smears blood on two sets of precious frescoes and covers up the nakedness of the figures with some cheap decorations from a restaurant. After that he paints… very carefully I think, look at the pictures you must have… he paints a halo over the beautiful head of the serpent, the female demon who tempted Eve and brought about our expulsion from Paradise.’
Marrone did think about it. Then he said one word. ‘And?’
‘Does that feel finished to you? Does any of this leave you thinking: we’re done now? He’s had his fun? He’ll return to putting plaster on walls rather than the blood of a slaughtered bird. Doling out lampredotto or selling pizza. Our man will go off the rails just this once, and never again feel the need to walk to that feverish, sexual place he visited in the Brancacci when he stood there, wiping the bare flesh of those beautiful creatures with the neck of a dead chicken?’
He tugged at his white hair and shook his head.
‘Though I still wish to God I knew why that rooster had no comb.’
‘Are you sure you’re telling me everything?’ Marrone asked. ‘You seem very confident of yourself, I must say.’
‘In this I’m confident,’ Fratelli replied, and didn’t look him in the eye. ‘Don’t ask for reasons. You wouldn’t understand them.’
‘I could try…’
‘No. They’re irrelevant and you don’t have the time. I want to see the files. The detailed reports. I want access to criminal records. I want to be able to ask questions of people who’ll come running to you to complain afterwards, and when they do I need you to tell them to go shove their heads up their arses.’