‘I may be able to help there,’ Julia said quietly.
Fratelli smiled. Such a genial, pleasant man. ‘You can?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Well…’ He grinned at her and waited.
‘There’s a price.’
‘Name it.’
She didn’t take her eyes off him. ‘The price is the truth. About your illness. No nonsense about…’ Julia twiddled her finger at her ear. ‘Madness and moles.’
Fratelli’s face fell at that. He thought for a moment. ‘Ah. Luca Cassini. I wondered what was eating at that callow young man. He seemed intimidated by you. I should have guessed he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. Walter said he was giving me the office idiot, though to be frank I feel he was uncharacteristically unjust there. Luca’s just young and a little frightened by the large and complex world in which he finds himself. As are we all, if we have any sense.’
She’d finished her Negroni before him. Fratelli turned and spoke to the woman behind the bar, who made two more.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘If that’s what you wish.’
‘I do.’
‘May I ask why? This curious matter of the Brancacci apart… we’re strangers. Foreigners. When you finish your dissertation and return to academic glory in Great Britain, we will write perhaps, from time to time. And then… nothing. Why?’
‘Because I can’t deal with lies. I can’t take that from someone. I…’
The woman was bringing over the drinks. Julia was surprised by how welcome this conversation felt.
‘There will be a reason,’ he said, ‘but I don’t need to hear it.’
‘My husband. Ex-husband. He’s gone. He lied to me and…’
Fratelli shuffled uncomfortably on the plush bar seating. ‘You don’t have to tell me, Julia,’ he said quietly. ‘Truly.’
She let him finish squirming. ‘What if I want to?’
‘Then…’
‘I never thought I’d get divorced. That kind of thing happens to other people.’
‘Bad things are supposed to be like that.’
‘But they don’t. They happen to you. To me. I never really talked about it. To Ben. To my father. To anyone.’
‘You don’t need—’
‘I do, Pino. Please listen. I thought things were just… wrong. A little cold and awkward. Then I found out there was someone else. His business meetings. His nights away from the office. It all started not long after we married. Perhaps before. I was never enough for him. I was wrong somehow.’
‘He must have been a very blind and stupid man,’ Fratelli said as he clutched his drink to his jacket.
‘No. He was a bastard. I’ve always had an eye for them somehow. I’ll never know why. The worse they treat you… The more you forgive them. I hated myself more than I hated him for that very reason.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ he said straight out. ‘He was the one who deceived you.’
‘You deceived me too. About…’ Another twirl of the finger at her ear. ‘Madness and moles.’
‘You were a stranger then. It was a white lie. I’m not a… a…’
‘A bastard,’ she said, and felt the uneasiness between them. ‘I realize that.’
He stared out of the long window at the front of the bar. It was raining again, steady drizzle that made the cobbles in the street outside shine like black mirrors.
‘I can’t stomach lies,’ she said. ‘I want the truth. Then I’ll tell you what I know. If it’s any use…’
He smiled. Such a calm man. Easy in himself. Resigned to whatever future lay ahead. She’d never met anyone quite like Pino Fratelli before.
‘But you don’t have to if you don’t want…’
‘There’s no need for a bargain, my dear. You asked, so I’ll answer.’
He spent hours hidden in the chilly shadows at the back of the Loggia dei Lanzi, waiting for the square to clear. It was stupid to have approached the woman earlier. She was English. A tourist, probably. With any luck she’d be gone in the morning, his one witness vanished to the next destination on the Grand Tour: Venice or Rome, Pompeii or Capri. They fluttered through the city like transient insects blown on the wind; temporary minor nuisances, nothing more.
But she spoke Italian, he thought. Easily, confidently. And the way she looked at him…
There was no point in wasting time or effort on what he could not change. To her he was a tramp in a hood, nothing more.
A set of nearby bells was striking the half-hour. Eight thirty. The steady rain had driven all but a few stragglers from the Piazza della Signoria. Those that did emerge from the darkness of the Uffizi or the adjoining streets scurried across the cobbles hoods up, heads down, or struggling beneath copious umbrellas billowing in the stiff breeze.
Wait for the moment. Do this well. Nothing would be the same hereafter. An endgame was in motion, one he could shape a little, direct to some extent, but never control. That was impossible, for anyone; even the great dignitaries whose lights no longer burned in the municipal offices of the Palazzo Vecchio to the right of this small and curious alcove on the square. His life was a series of distinct events, each magnificent in its horror, separated by long stretches of boredom and insignificance. Now the period between each occurrence was shortening. Or he was hastening the arrival of the next. He was unsure which. Something moved, an unseen impetus, shuffling him on, as the angel with the sword hastened the fallen couple from the garden in Masaccio’s fresco.
All that mattered was the immediate act ahead and he knew full well what that was.
When the square was as clear as it was likely to be at this time of night — scarcely a soul nearby, no one emerging any more from the Palazzo Vecchio; no cars, no bicycles — he strode out from the gloom at the back of the Loggia dei Lanzi. In his gloved right hand he held the boathook he’d stolen that evening from the rowing club on the city bank of the Arno. In his left was the object he’d kept in the bag. It proved heavier than he expected.
Walking towards Cellini’s Perseus, he attached the thing to the boathook. Then, very quickly and purposefully, he shone a torch on the bronze of the warrior, aiming it at the left hand that held the Gorgon’s severed head.
The face was beautiful and sensuous, her body naked and beguiling with its bronze gouts of blood and fleshy sinews. But this Medusa was an exaggerated, theatrical creature too, her severed head dripping with a snakelike cortex and a profusion of torn and dangling veins and muscles.
Artistic licence. Or a point about the woman. That serpents were a part of her, just as they were with Lilith in the Brancacci. Everyone knew that carnal trio on the Carmine walls.
The truth, as any butcher understood, was more mundane. A sharp knife did swift work, on beast or man. Reality was less dramatic. Both cleaner and more messy.
Still, this curious creative fancy helped his purpose. He secured his gift to the Piazza della Signoria more tightly on the boathook, then lifted it high until the hair met the shining head of Medusa glittering in the rain. There, in the prominent prow of snakes, above her closed and peaceful eyes, he moved it carefully to entangle new with old and keep the thing in place for all to see.
For one tense moment he stood back and surveyed his work.
A noise. A group of tourists cackling like teenagers on the far side of the piazza. Drunk, probably. Students from the language schools; young Americans discovering what it was like to enjoy cheap and plentiful alcohol in the place they called ‘Yurrup’.
He moved the hook, untangling it from the thing above him. Dampness was seeping through his gloves. Rain, or something else. He’d no idea. No witnesses, no fingerprints, no easy lines to join him to this deed.
A job well done, he thought, then lobbed the pole into the shadows and hurried off through the rain, back to the little van parked in a lane close to Santa Croce, and then the green silence outside Fiesole.