‘I’m puzzled,’ Fratelli replied, peering into her eyes with friendly interest. ‘Which are you? An artist or a criminologist?’
She’d seen little of her landlord since her arrival. Inconclusive and unsatisfactory meetings at the Uffizi and with the cultural authorities had occupied her time until that afternoon, when Fratelli had knocked excitedly on her door and announced that there was an incident close by that might prove of interest to her work. The Uffizi had arranged accommodation: a separate studio in Fratelli’s small terraced house three streets from Santa Maria del Carmine. This side of the city was known as Oltrarno — the quarter ‘beyond the Arno’, the broad and powerful river that swept through the centre beneath a line of fine bridges and was now a swirling, forceful flume thanks to recent constant rain. The Ponte Vecchio was only a ten-minute walk away. It was easy to reach the tourist quarters — the Duomo, the Piazza della Repubblica — across the nearby Ponte Santa Trinita. And the Uffizi, with its constant crowds and close by the inchoate architectural mess that was the Piazza della Signoria.
But she hadn’t found herself in the Florence of picture postcards, of tourists posing in front of the statue of David, and endless queues for the stairs to Brunelleschi’s great dome. Fratelli lived in the city the Italians knew as Firenze: close and local, shabby in places, a muddle of dark and secretive alleys.
‘Neither really,’ she confessed. ‘I’m a student.’
Fratelli frowned at the inadequacy of her answer.
‘I’d love to paint but I can’t,’ she added. ‘So if I can’t create art I thought perhaps…’ She shrugged her slender shoulders. ‘I might at least try to save it.’
‘What an honourable aspiration,’ he said in a light and pleasant voice.
‘For a policeman you seem very familiar with art yourself. If you don’t mind my saying.’
He gestured at the chapel and said, ‘Not really. History perhaps and this’ — he glanced at the Brancacci Chapel — ‘is history. A little of mine, too. When church was a place I favoured, I came here. I grew up with these faces. They were a part of my childhood. Better to stare at dead and pretty people than listen to a tedious sermon that takes half an hour to express a sentiment which might be said in a single minute. Oh…’
A stern and stony-faced priest close to the officers in the chapel turned and glowered at them.
‘In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,’ Fratelli declared in a lilting singsong voice, then made the sign of the cross.
The priest shook his head and barked, ‘Pino! Behave or I will throw you out of here myself! Show some respect. How…’
He was a somewhat older man than Fratelli. Burly, with a wrinkled, flushed face — once handsome, she guessed. He looked utterly distraught, as if this act of vandalism was a personal affront, which perhaps was how it seemed.
‘I consider myself admonished, Father Bruno.’ He winked at Julia Wellbeloved. ‘We’re old friends. Don’t worry.’
‘You’re a very mischievous man,’ Julia said, not altogether seriously. She was grateful he’d knocked on her door that afternoon, inviting her round to the church to see the chapel, even if she hadn’t known the reason. In other circumstances she would have had to seek permission: the Brancacci was closed off from the transept and undergoing restoration. So much of Florence was in the same condition. Twenty years on from the great flood of 1966, the city still seemed to be half complete. Only those directly involved had access to its many partly closed galleries and precious monuments. Fratelli appeared glad of the opportunity too. He looked like a man in search of a puzzle, something to exercise his obvious intelligence.
‘That may be true,’ the Italian agreed. ‘However, I approach my work with deadly seriousness. As to Pino Fratelli the man…’ He frowned. ‘It’s difficult, when you’ve known yourself so long. Marco!’
One of the Carabinieri officers, a man in a flowing dark blue cloak, turned and fetched him an ill-tempered stare.
‘You should listen to what my young English friend says about the lamps,’ Fratelli ordered. ‘Wait for the people from the Uffizi to turn up. They’ll get here once they’ve finished their afternoon nap. Shine the wrong light on our lady on the wall and you may find they throw you in jail, not the beast who first assaulted her.’
The carabiniere uttered a single foul epithet and went back to work.
‘Violence and this place are no strangers,’ Fratelli continued, as if speaking to himself. ‘What am I saying? Violence and art are bedfellows and always have been. You know the story about Michelangelo?’
She shook her head.
Fratelli swept his gloved hand across the space in front of them.
‘He loved this place, one painting above all others. The Expulsion.’ His eyes flickered towards the left wall. ‘When he was young he was set the task of copying some of the portraits as an exercise. With other pupils, naturally. Michelangelo was an honest man with a wicked tongue. He told one of his peers, a sculptor, Torrigiano, exactly what he thought of his work. The opinion was not put kindly.’
He pointed towards the area before the small altar.
‘Somewhere there, Torrigiano attacked him, breaking Michelangelo’s nose like a biscuit, or so Benvenuto Cellini records. Look at any picture or statue of him and you see that wound. Disfigured for life, a nose that belongs on a boxer or a thug. Not a genius. Over nothing but a student drawing.’ He scanned the walls. ‘Not that Cellini was an angel. How many murders did he confess to in those scandalous memoirs? I don’t recall. The point…’
There were more people arriving by the main door. Loud, important voices. The word ‘Uffizi’ was spoken as if it were a magical incantation.
‘The point,’ Fratelli said forcefully, ‘is that what we see here is supposed to take us through the cycle of our earthly lives. From the moment of the first temptation’ — he indicated the fresco high on the right walclass="underline" Adam and Eve, beautiful and serene, a writhing serpent behind them bearing the face of a woman — ‘to our expulsion from Eden. Our inevitable fall from grace.’
He turned to the counterpart fresco on the left wall, an image of heartbreaking force. The same couple in despair, expelled from Paradise, Adam burying his face in his fingers, Eve shrieking in agony, hiding her shame with her hands, above them a vengeful scarlet angel driving both out of Paradise with a fearsome blade.
‘These two, Michelangelo did adore,’ he said. ‘They stayed with him throughout a long and dramatic life. You know the words?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken,’ Fratelli continued, resurrecting his sermon tones. ‘So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep out the way of the tree of life.’
The priest was staring at the pair of them.
‘Genesis is such an unforgiving book,’ Fratelli said, returning the man’s anger with a smile. ‘I am honoured to be beyond its reach.’
He turned and glanced at the group approaching through the nave.
‘Tell me what you see, Julia Wellbeloved,’ he demanded. ‘Swiftly, if you please.’
The priest, the man on the ladder by the first fresco, and the Carabinieri officers around them stopped to listen.
‘I see a damaged painting.’
He gestured for more with his gloved hands.
‘I see,’ she added hesitantly, ‘a ladder, I assume for the restoration, which was used to inflict the damage. A dead brown hen on the altar, its head removed. Blood on the fresco.’
‘Where precisely?’