He gave the mashed beans a stir in the earthenware pot, piled some on a lump of bread. The beat-up van was moving again. A body trussed up in the back, struggling, terrified, expectant.
Why had he waited?
Because he was weak and frightened.
He gazed at the fire, listened to the muffled shouts from beyond the door, watched the VW lurching from side to side.
Twenty years before, down a dark, drenched Oltrarno street, he’d met the Devil. Seen him and his cronies at their work. Joined them, after a fashion.
That night he’d felt something planted in himself; a poisonous seed, a cancer that would grow steadily over the years, whispering in his head, demanding he find the courage one day to cut it out.
And when that day came…
He went over to the sink and picked up the two knives he’d taken with him the night before, trying to stifle the thought: this would have been so much easier if he’d got it over and done with then.
Outside.
The dog didn’t bark. The birds didn’t sing. No voice rose in objection. No fiery angels fell from heaven shrieking at him to stop.
The only witnesses were the spindly, wizened shapes of the olive trees clinging to the steep hillsides.
Something still didn’t feel right, though. The story the woman had told him the night before…
She was supposed to be weak, defenceless. It hadn’t felt that way.
He found himself wondering about her, questioning how truthful she was when she spoke about the olive oil that was supposed to save them. Biologico. A magic wand that might mean they could one day give up selling dope and coke and heroin. How much bright green oil would be needed to fill the gap that junk left?
An ocean. And, in the end, nothing changed. She was still lost but alone now. Stranded. Dancing for self-made princes, whoring herself to their whims.
Dead before long, like him. That was the way it always went.
He stuffed some bread and beans and wild chicory into his mouth, watched the van shake in front of him.
When he’d finished with the food he raised the largest, shiniest, sharpest knife to his mouth and licked the edge of the blade with his tongue. It cut into the soft flesh. He tasted the warm saltiness of his own blood, felt the welcome steely sting of pain.
This will do.
The dog sat quietly on the bare earth, watching him.
It knew what was coming.
Beneath the pale uncaring sun he walked towards the van, tramping through the thick brown mud, staring at his hands and the implements they carried, trying not to shake.
Julia spent the afternoon in the Bargello, trying not to wonder whereabouts in the sprawling, high-walled Florence fortress they’d tortured prisoners for century upon century. Now the place was one more gallery full of beautiful objects — statues mainly, with little sign of its grim past. Savonarola and his fellow friars were forced into confessions inside these walls with the liberal use of the strappado, presumably in one of the elegant rooms that now contained the beautiful works of Donatello, Michelangelo and the ubiquitous Benvenuto Cellini. Had time erased their screams and the brutality of their tormentors? Did the past still live behind a closed door or trapped inside a glass case, waiting on the amusement of passing visitors?
That depended on the individual imagination, or a willingness to render oneself blind to the deeds that haunted the stones she found herself walking every day. The night before, in one of Pino Fratelli’s books, she’d read about the controversial executions that preceded the fall of Savonarola, when five of Florence’s leading citizens were convicted of secret correspondence with the exiled Piero de’ Medici. These men were treated to the strappado inside the Bargello too, then hurriedly led into the cold, square courtyard and beheaded one by one. Ever practical, the civic leaders of the time had liberally scattered straw across the cobblestones to make it easier to remove the stains. Now she stood on the first floor of the museum, amidst the beautiful statues, looking down at the scene of their bloody end. Bored tourists meandered over the unmarked paving stones, unconscious of history, blind to the pain of those who went before. Yet, she noticed, she felt the faint and ancient patina of their agony. And so, she thought, would Fratelli in this place, for reasons she couldn’t yet understand.
Her motives for coming to Florence seemed to be growing more tentative — illusory, even. There was only one more research appointment in her diary for this week: two days hence, in the convent of San Marco, a little out of the centre, once the seat of Savonarola himself. She’d read copiously about that place and couldn’t wait to get inside, though the letter confirming the meeting warned that some parts of the building were closed ‘per lavori’. Works. What the Americans liked to call ‘refurbishment’. Florence seemed to be in a constant state of repair, much of it from the dreadful flood of twenty years before. Fratelli had referred to that event in passing, and when he did she’d noticed a brief creasing of his benign face, as if the memory caused him pain.
Or else it was the illness. Mad as a mole. Another game of his; a riddle, a trick. There was no such saying in Italian. It was part of the man’s disguise, an effort to hide his true malady, a terminal one, just as Florence concealed her own past with a show of bright magnificence and marvellous statues over the bloodstained cobblestones. What kind of illness might it be? Was it terminal because the Italian doctors didn’t know how to treat it? Would an English physician feel the same way?
She’d thought of medicine as a career before choosing the law, rejecting it only because her own father was a general practitioner in Berkhamsted, one with more wealthy and influential medical friends working in Harley Street and the great London hospitals. Julia wanted independence as much as she craved a profession. This, she knew full well, was why her marriage had failed so rapidly. She’d refused to become Mrs Benjamin Vine. There seemed no point. Not in the 1980s. The modern world. And besides, in Italy, and many other parts of Europe, married women held on to their maiden names after they took those wordy and rather meaningless vows. What difference did it make anyway? For Benjamin, a crucial one, or so it turned out. He felt she’d rejected him. Or rather failed to embrace him, to fall in with his ways, to love him as much as his self-esteem merited.
The whole business was doomed from the beginning and she remained baffled as to why she’d never noticed till the crockery was flying round their little flat in Islington, amidst the tears and shouts.
Wandering round the Bargello, watched by the serene statues, she thought of her ex-husband and her failed career as a lawyer; thought of Pino Fratelli, an intelligent, charming man, dying quietly, slowly, day by day, from an illness so subtle and insidious it was scarcely visible at all. It was entirely possible Florence was the wrong place for her to be at that moment. That her dreams of academic offers stemming from a brilliant dissertation were fantasies, never to be achieved. She’d split with Benjamin only six months before, left her job not long after. Everything had happened in a rush, against her naturally cautious English nature. If she wished, she could quickly return to Oltrarno, pack in a hurry — hopefully before Pino Fratelli got home from his investigative peregrinations around the city. Then walk to the station of Santa Maria Novella, catch a train north, be in Paris the following day. After that she would change lire to francs, meander slowly to the coast, eking out her dwindling money along the way, take a ferry across the Channel, and be home in chill, grey Hertfordshire, penniless, before the week was out.