‘Best not ask,’ Fratelli said, then gave a little salute and pottered off down the aisles towards the butchers’ stalls.
Fratelli was gone for much longer than she expected. He’d lied about his purpose. She could see it so easily in his face. So Julia was forced to talk to the young carabiniere Luca Cassini, a task she didn’t find easy.
Eventually she decided it was time to deal with the question that had been nagging her since the previous day.
‘What’s wrong with Pino?’ she asked Cassini straight out.
He shuffled uncomfortably on his massive feet and stared around at the stalls, the people, the porters heaving crates around. Anywhere but in her direction. Cassini was chewing gum, a little too vigorously.
‘Luca?’
‘What do you mean, what’s wrong with him?’
‘He’s off sick,’ she went on. ‘I don’t know who he leaned on to get you. But it doesn’t change things. There’s something wrong…’
‘Have you asked him?’
‘Yes! He said he’s mad.’ A pause. It had to be said. ‘As a mole.’
His broad blank face wrinkled in bafflement.
‘A mole?’
‘Precisely.’
‘Doesn’t seem mad to me,’ Cassini said. ‘Bit forgetful. Bit out of it sometimes. Only to be expected in the circumstances…’
He knew he shouldn’t have said the words the moment they left his mouth.
‘What circumstances?’
‘Well… he’s…’
‘What?’
‘He’s dying, isn’t he?’ Cassini said, so loudly the man behind the counter stared at him in shock.
Julia put down the panino. It was disgusting anyway. Luca Cassini shuffled even more awkwardly on his big feet and gazed at the grey cement floor.
She felt cold and stupid and guilty for dragging this out of him. Aggrieved that she’d made him share such a confidence with a stranger. That pained him, obviously.
‘Dying?’ she repeated.
‘It’s not as if it’s a secret. I’m sorry. I thought you two were friends. You must have known.’
‘Then why would I have asked? Oh bugger…’
‘The captain told me to humour him. Everyone in the station knows. He’s been off duty for a year or more. Before I started work there. They reckon it’s a miracle he’s not in hospital by now.’
‘What is it?’ she asked, and wished she didn’t have to hear the answer.
‘Head,’ Cassini replied, and put a finger to his own pale temple as if to make this clear. ‘Got something wrong inside it. Tumour, they said. My gran had one. Lot older than him, though. Horrible thing. Makes them seem stupid, mad sometimes, and they don’t even know it. Don’t realize they’re acting oddly at all. We had to have her put away…’
‘He’s the smartest, nicest man I’ve met since I came to Florence! He doesn’t need putting away.’
Cassini looked hurt by the vehemence of her outburst.
‘No, he doesn’t. And I never said he did. Everybody likes Pino. Everybody feels sorry for him. I’ll do what I can to help. With whatever this obsession is.’
‘Obsession…?’
‘That’s what the captain said. His words, not mine.’
Walter Marrone was fond of Fratelli. She’d seen that for herself. Perhaps he was right. This strange attack on the Brancacci Chapel was a fixation. A mania related to his condition.
‘I’m sorry, Luca. I didn’t mean to force you to say something you didn’t want.’
‘Oh, didn’t you?’ Cassini retorted.
He nodded down the lines of stalls. She followed the line of his gaze. Fratelli was coming back towards them, tugging at his white hair, thinking. He looked absent-minded, a little lost. But he walked like a fit and active man.
‘Pino’s good at that trick too, apparently,’ Cassini said. ‘Getting stuff out of you when you’d rather keep it quiet. Known for it.’ He looked at her. ‘You two make a pair if you ask me.’
‘I said I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah well.’ He seemed downcast, a little upset. ‘Horrible thing to have. You think there’s nothing wrong with you. Then one day…’ He took out his gum and stuck it underneath the counter, as if that made it disappear. ‘My gran never knew when it was going to happen either. After a while she forgot it was on the way altogether. Next thing she’s gone in the head. Not long after that she’s gone altogether…’
Fratelli strode up to the pair of them, beaming. ‘Well,’ he said, rather dryly. ‘It looks as if you two are getting on.’
Julia felt she was rather too close to tears.
‘How was the lampredotto?’ Fratelli asked, trying to look into her face.
‘Vile,’ she muttered. ‘I’m sorry. I have to go. Another appointment…’
‘But I thought…’ She was leaving already, head down, eyes damp. ‘Julia?’
The briefest of glances back in his direction, but enough to give him pause for thought.
‘I have some… information.’
‘Not now…’
‘Negroni,’ he said. ‘The usual place? Six thirty?’
‘Possibly,’ she murmured, then turned on her heels and left.
Fratelli glared at the young carabiniere. ‘Luca…?’
‘Yes?’
‘What did you say?’
‘I didn’t say anything!’
Fratelli tapped his feet.
‘Women,’ the young man added. ‘You know what they’re like. Can I go back to the station now, boss? Look up those records? The ones you want.’
‘Very well,’ Fratelli said, with a nod to the door.
He watched Julia Wellbeloved march out of the market, head down, clearly upset about something.
‘When you meet my English friend again, Luca… go easy on her,’ he told the young carabiniere.
‘Tell her to go easy on me then,’ Cassini grumbled, and looked just like his grandfather then: mutinous and trouble.
It was cold on the ragged little farm outside Fiesole and there was something thrashing in the old VW van again.
In the kitchen he checked the fava beans he’d soaked the night before. At four in the morning, hearing the sounds from outside, he’d peeled a potato, skinned an onion, chopped them, heated some water in an ancient pot, mixed them with the soaked beans and some water. That was eight hours ago now, and still the dish sat in the alcove by the fire, its base just in the embers. This was the way the peasants cooked. Basic. Ancient. Beans and vegetables simmering all day while a man went about his work.
He tested the white bodies with a fork. Drained them, fed the dog from some tins in the refrigerator, coming to an accommodation with the animal. It no longer growled at him. That was all it required. Care.
Stupid.
His mother called him that from the start. It was, he thought, the first word he’d ever heard, uttered from her curled lips as she bent over him in the crib.
Stupid.
An idiot servant born to obey, to waste away his meagre life doing what others wanted. And, for all the secret reading, for the many furtive, wrestling thoughts inside his head, maybe they were right. When hard decisions came along, he avoided them. Sought other things on which to waste his time.
Like cooking, idly, easily, letting the knives do the talking for him.
The dried beans were soft now, ready. So he picked some wild chicory from outside — plenty there, not far from a small greenhouse with a few marijuana plants in it. After that he mashed the messy contents of the battered pan into a rough puree, chopped the chicory and mixed in some of their low-grade olive oil. With the half-stale bread from the kitchen, there was a meal.
Savonarola himself probably ate something similar, day in, day out, while the Medici and the lords of the Signoria feasted on peacock and wild boar. Food was about sustenance, nourishment. Not lavish displays of excess, ostentation and boasting. A careful, timid man could live on nothing if he so chose. Then dip into their world, take what he wanted, and retreat back into the shadows.