‘On Eve, as she’s tempted.’
‘The purpose being?’ Fratelli continued.
‘I don’t know!’
‘Oh come on,’ he cried. ‘You have eyes!’
He pointed at the fresco on the left, the expelled couple. Michelangelo’s favourite was by Masaccio, an unfortunate artist of brilliance who died young, perhaps poisoned by a rival, his great promise unfulfilled. The gentler, placid image of The Temptation, the one that the intruder had spoiled with chicken’s blood, was by a more conventional, less adventurous artist.
Julia Wellbeloved felt as if she were an undergraduate again, being examined. She glanced at the visitor’s sheet on her knee. The name was there.
Then she looked at the faces on both pillars.
‘The purpose being to make Eve’s expression by Masolino, which is graceful, beatific, at one with God, resemble that of her painted by Masaccio,’ she said. ‘After the Fall.’
‘After the Fall,’ he repeated, staring at the altar. ‘In pain and despair. Expelled from Eden. Deprived of the gift of the tree of life. Immortality.’
Then, more loudly, so that the priest and the officers around him turned to stare, he added, ‘You hear?’
Fratelli got to his feet, a little unsteadily, and brushed his too-long white hair away from his artist’s face. ‘This is not the vandalism you believe,’ he muttered. ‘Nor some childish prank of witchcraft. There’s a purpose. A deliberate intent. Exactly as our observant English expert says.’
He looked at the disfigured Eve. The bird’s blood was smeared over her delicate mouth, turning it into an empty scarlet chasm, the gore stretching in diagonal lines across her eyes, just as Masaccio had painted on the countervailing fresco.
‘And then,’ Fratelli said, sounding a little puzzled, ‘there’s this.’
He pointed in turn at two garlands of cardboard vine leaves, surely from a supermarket or gift shop, plastered across the hips of both women — Masolino’s serene, eternal Eve and Masaccio’s wretched mortal exile. They were held in place by nothing more than black electrical tape.
‘That,’ Fratelli declared, ‘may be the single most important fact we have. Although…’ Something else had caught his eye.
‘Pino!’ roared a deep male voice through the gloom. ‘What in God’s name are you doing here?’
A tall, formidable figure in a dark blue uniform, cap beneath his arm, marched in front of them. He had a ruddy, thunderous face. When no response came he folded his arms, glared at Fratelli and bellowed, ‘I am waiting for an answer.’
‘This is my local church,’ Fratelli objected. ‘What am I supposed to do when I hear there’s trouble? Stay at home and watch TV?’
‘You go to church now, do you? Is this what sick leave entails?’
‘Walter…’
‘Capitano to you!’
‘Now I am truly confused,’ Fratelli cried, throwing his arms out wide. ‘Am I on duty or not?’
‘Not,’ the uniformed man declared. ‘I want—’
‘Expel me the way God expelled Adam and Eve if you wish. But for your own sake, hear out my friend.’ He gestured at Julia Wellbeloved. ‘She’s come all the way from England and is an expert in such matters. Attacks upon works of art. It is her speciality.’
‘Well I’m starting to study it…’ the Englishwoman added weakly. ‘I wouldn’t call myself an expert really…’
‘Signora,’ the captain said, nodding his head. ‘This is a crime scene. I require you and Fratelli to allow us to examine it without further intrusion. Please leave, the pair of you…’
He beckoned to the open door of the church and the failing day outside.
‘Walter,’ Fratelli began, taking the man’s blue serge arm.
‘Get out!’ the Carabinieri captain ordered.
Fratelli shook his head and stared at the plain grey stones of Santa Maria del Carmine.
‘So be it,’ he said with a sigh. Then he winked at the woman next to him and offered her a wry, apologetic smile.
The man was fifteen years younger than Pino Fratelli but no less striking in appearance. Six feet tall, with the physique of an athlete, wrapped inside the cowl of a black duffel coat that made him resemble an ascetic mountain monk, he stood in the square of Santa Croce staring at the marquee of the olive fair blowing in the squally rain. For one moment he removed the ample hood to see the activity ahead of him more clearly. A passing street cleaner paused from sweeping rubbish and stared. He saw a man who seemed conspicuous in his anonymity, his features a plain and featureless mask, without movement, without apparent life. A long nose curved like the beak of a cruel bird of prey, eyes grey and bulbous, fierce under dark eyebrows that ran together as one. In the white expanse of flesh that was his face, only the full grey, sensuous lips seemed to carry a hint of blood. There was not a single hair on his head, only a gleaming and flawless scalp soon covered up once more by black fabric, like a demonic tortoise retreating inside his shell.
He pulled back the cowl, turned on the cleaner and said in a low and vehement voice, ‘Do not stare at me. I bite.’
The worker with the broom turned his eyes to the cobbles, apologized and pushed his cart further down the square.
The piazza was empty in the sleeting rain. Few tourists. No customers for the sellers of overpriced new-season olive oil straight from the press.
Beneath the ankle-length coat he wore heavy moleskin trousers stained with flour, a cheap blue shirt, a warm black sweater from a country clothing shop. The cockerel’s blood stayed sticky on his fingers, hidden now inside old woollen gloves. How many times had he washed them? Countless. It stood there as a reminder of his inaction. His cowardice. His reluctance to play the part he knew, in his heart, was his own.
In the Carmine church, hurriedly splashing the bird’s blood on the wall, covering up the obscene nakedness of her vile body, he’d felt alive. Four minutes he’d allotted himself. A blink of an eye; less than that, in the endless stretch of time.
The relief, the pride he’d felt, lasted no longer. A slaughtered cockerel, a point — the point — made upon the figures on the wall.
And then he’d wandered the city, feeling the excitement and the pleasure leach away inside him. By the Arno, in the park near San Niccolò, he’d watched the brown waters of the river fighting, roaring as they raced across the weir. Rain and wind had brought down foliage from the countryside, trees and branches floating furiously on the ceaseless swell. Swans and ducks wandered in the shallows at the river’s edge, over the grass fields where only weeks earlier children had played in the last warm breath of autumn.
And what had he done?
Killed a cockerel, smeared blood on paint, fastened some decoration about their wicked loins with tape.
‘I’m as weak as a child,’ he murmured. ‘Without its innocence.’
He knew why he’d hesitated too.
Fear.
Vengeance never dug a single grave. It was always two, and one of them was his.
An icy shower swept from behind the towering basilica of Santa Croce and chased away the few rash visitors who still loitered on the cobbles.
He began to walk back towards the Ponte Vecchio. Halfway across the square, the leaden sky burst forth, despatching its contents over Florence in gusty blasts of sleet so forceful they made the bravest dash for shelter.
There was nothing else to do but dart into the marquee of the olive-oil producers. The place was half full with reluctant shoppers, stamping their feet to stay warm, eyeing one another as if to say, ‘No, I don’t want to be here either.’
Some walked around the stalls, made small talk, tried the oil and bread. Since it was the new season’s crop from individual farms, it fetched twice the price of the commercial product. Twice the quality, said the posters.