Two weeks before she’d caught him in his tiny room.
‘Touch your cock and you’ll burn in hell!’ she’d screamed, and then came the belt and a trip to see the sour old priest.
Hell was everywhere in Florence, staring at him from the walls of the Duomo, inside and out.
Hell was here, with him on this cold, soaking night, a vile soreness that got worse as he walked, awkwardly, like an infant who’d peed his pants. He wondered if that pain would ever go away. If he was destined forever to be the chattel of the people who’d used him that night.
Men with polished, aristocratic accents. Sleazy women in shiny silk dresses and garish make-up.
Drink this now, boy, and everything will be fine.
And so he had. Because you did what these people told you. That’s why you were born.
Head hurting, lost for where to turn, Aldo stumbled on, full of grief and guilt and shame, though he’d done nothing to deserve it. Except obey.
There was a light in the square of Santo Spirito, a group of men outside the bar. More than there should have been, but this was no ordinary night, not for anyone. The rain seemed so persistent it might have been a punishment, like the flood God sent to cleanse the world. Not that there was a Noah in Florence that night. Just a new Aldo Pontecorvo, born somewhere beneath the dank, soaked earth of the Boboli Gardens, locked in the embrace of a man… more than one… a gang of them…
He stopped, choking at the memory, stumbled against a rusting Fiat 500, bent down and gagged, the sour acid bile rising in his mouth. Then, like the stone demons beneath the ravished nymph, he began to retch in forced and painful gasps.
The sky seemed to resonate to the rhythm of his agony, sending showers of gusting rain to wash away his spewing on the black, shining cobblestones of Santo Spirito. After a while there was nothing more to vomit, no dregs of the strange, rich meal they’d let him taste in the cave before the cup of tainted wine came his way.
He stayed in the gutter, drenched and mindless, wishing the downpour might wash away his agony, knowing in himself this was the daydream of a child, a creature he could never be again.
Five, ten, thirty minutes later, with the street now turning into a river, he splashed and staggered towards the light ahead.
The voices made him stop in sudden dread.
There was someone here he knew. A shape, happy and drunk, sated with wine and victory. Tall and erect in the clothes of a gentleman. No, two of them he saw, sheltering under an umbrella.
They walked down the street, towards Santa Maria della Carmine.
He took the woman’s purse out of his jacket and looked at the lire notes. More money there than he could earn with Bertorelli in a month. The price of his acquiescence. The cost of his silence.
Drink this, boy, and everything will be fine.
But it wasn’t and never would be. So he followed them, like the peasant he was, into the narrow lanes of Oltrarno. Watched, blood frozen, as they came upon her. Watched and knew he was lost.
Monday, 3 November 1986
Pino Fratelli, maresciallo ordinario of the Florence Carabinieri, was a lean, diminutive man of forty-eight; he was still shivering visibly, though he was dressed for this cold day in an ankle-length winter wool coat with a scarlet scarf at his delicate neck. When his leather gloves were not gesticulating at the vivid and spellbinding paintings in front of him, they fumbled with each other like tubby wrestlers fighting for domination. His face was more that of a musician than a Carabinieri officer: thoughtful and dignified, the prepossessing features combining melancholy and intelligence in equal measure. Beneath a deep-lined forehead, the round brown eyes seemed bright and alert; those of a younger man, heavy-lidded yet restless. Then there was the hair, a full and wayward head of it, pure white, the colour of hoar frost, flowing down over his collar. In the thick, heavy overcoat he had the appearance of a solitary and lugubrious artist of meagre means, stranded on the pale, unbounded beach of life, seeking amusement or enlightenment and finding neither.
By his side sat a serious-looking woman called Julia Wellbeloved, twenty-eight, intense and academic. She had a long and pleasant northern face, skin so pale it seemed translucent under the bright arc lights. These searing lamps were attached to the scaffolding that, with heavy sackcloth sheeting, separated the alcove of the chapel from the larger, darker nave behind. Her fair hair was pulled back behind a sharply angular head and tied in a severe bun held in place by a single elastic band — practical, if scarcely elegant. Sharp and icy blue, her eyes followed every move ahead. She possessed a calm, ascetic face, neither beautiful nor unattractive, yet striking: that of a Botticelli handmaiden staring querulously out of the side of the canvas; pretty enough to be visible, yet insufficiently distinctive to hold the painting.
A bystander watching these two — as they talked in low and earnest tones next to one another on a narrow church pew — might have thought they looked like minor politician and pretty young mistress, lecturer and attentive student. The truth was more mundane. They were landlord and tenant, drawn together by mutual interests and strange circumstances, puzzling over the curious sight that had closed the famous basilica of Santa Maria del Carmine and would keep its doors firmly shut to all but the Carabinieri and officials of the city cultural department for some time to come.
It was three days now since Julia Wellbeloved had arrived in Florence, seven months since she’d left her well-paid job with a City of London law firm and chosen instead the semi-poverty of being a postgraduate student. Money was tight, but not short. The sale of the flat in Islington, part of an ill-fated marriage that had lasted a too-long year and a half, saw to that. Now she was through with the law; through with men, too — for a while, anyway. All she wanted was to exercise her intellect, and that through a specific task: a dissertation so arcane it had taken an Italian cultural association to find the means to fund it.
Or perhaps the Florentines had more reason than most to help. The academic paper she was writing, one that would, she vaguely hoped, lead to an academic career, was entitled ‘Why Murder Culture?’ It would seek to document, investigate and hope to explain the infrequent but troubling attacks by members of the public on works of art, paintings and statues principally, some famous, some obscure, and a few, perhaps the understandable ones, wrapped in notoriety.
Funding apart, it made sense to start her work in Florence, a place that was in some ways a living exhibition itself; both inside its galleries and outside in the teeming streets and lanes where, with Dante and Machiavelli, Michelangelo and da Vinci, and many others now mostly forgotten, the Renaissance began. Was there another city in the world that stood to suffer more from such bizarre and seemingly inexplicable acts?
No. And now it was the third of November, 1986. There was blood on the walls of the Brancacci Chapel, the most famous corner of Santa Maria del Carmine, the ‘Sistine Chapel of Tuscany’, or so the guidebooks said. Thanks to Fratelli, a charming, intense man, she could see the subject of her studies at first hand.
‘Signora,’ the man next to her said, indicating two officers with more arc lamps, struggling through the jungle of ladders, paint pots and toolboxes strewn across the stone chapel floor. ‘The officers need to pass.’
She pulled her slim legs underneath the pew and said, ‘They should be careful of strong light. Old pigment may be affected.’