The man felt hungry so, without a word or a glance at the huddled figures seated behind the trestle tables, he went from one to the next, taking lumps of coarse white bread, dipping it in saucers of oil, moving on, not saying a single word.
Some were mediocre, some superb. He knew his food. That was why he never lacked for kitchen work whenever it was on offer. One job in particular, his for twenty long years, the first Thursday of each month. An unusual, private event. It was Monday now. By Thursday he’d be expected back in the kitchen, preparing the strange, exotic dishes once again. He didn’t dare avoid that appointment. Splashing the blood of a bird on the walls of the chapel did nothing to lessen his hatred of the duty, or his pain at its past memories. He needed money. Somewhere to live.
When he got to the end of the line, he found himself staring into the eyes of an exotic-looking woman with ringlets of dark hair, gold on her wrists and around her neck.
‘It’s not raining in here,’ she said. ‘You can take your hood down if you like.’
‘Still cold,’ he murmured.
The woman cocked her head to one side and said in a heavy accent he couldn’t place, ‘You look familiar.’
‘I don’t think so.’
She shrugged, held up a bottle of green fluid, so bright and fresh it looked more like alcoholic spirit than oil. There were photos on the table. The woman half naked in the countryside, harvesting olives. Just this side of thirty; short but sturdy, forceful. Beside her was a tall, strong young man with a black beard and a knowing face. A few words about a tiny estate the two of them ran alone. One that followed the latest trend, being ‘biologico’.
Organic. A fad copied from the Americans.
He looked at their names, examined her face again, recognized it, placed it. Looked at the man pictured with her, and remembered him too.
It was the end of the afternoon. The weather had turned bitterly cold. A gusty rain had begun to fall two days before, with such persistence and force that older Florentines, who could recall the great flood of twenty years before, watched the sluggish, muddy waters of the Arno rising and shivered, remembering.
Fratelli put a gloved finger to his lips and said, ‘Ice cream.’
‘Ice cream? What’s ice cream got to do with it?’
‘With what?’
She glanced back at the dark hulk of Santa Maria del Carmine.
‘With the paintings?’ Julia Wellbeloved was confused. She’d read Fratelli incorrectly, and felt a little foolish for doing so. ‘I thought you were the police officer here. In the church.’
‘Carabinieri officer please. I was just such in the church. I still am.’
‘I meant the one in charge.’
‘I never said such a thing,’ he replied, baffled. ‘Nor does the ice cream have anything to do with the paintings. How can it?’
‘I…’
He tapped his watch.
‘We’re wasting time. The Grassi dragon cleans the house today. We dare not return while she’s dancing round with the vacuum cleaner. I’d rather go back into the chapel and joust with the captain.’
It was Julia Wellbeloved’s turn to fold her arms and stare at Pino Fratelli.
‘Every Thursday, when Signora Grassi does the cleaning, I go for ice cream,’ he said, as if the explanation were obvious. ‘There’s a place in Santo Spirito. They make it themselves.’ He smiled. ‘Want some?’
‘It’s freezing.’
‘Not inside it isn’t.’
He beamed at her and looked very like an expectant child.
‘With regard to the painting… you study well,’ Fratelli added. ‘Even if you’re not an expert. I exaggerated. Still, you have the skills.’
‘Thank you.’
‘That was not a hen, of course. There were long claws on the back of the legs. Old claws.’
Fratelli tugged a hank of white hair to his mouth and chewed at it for a moment.
‘The bird’s severed head was beneath the painting. The comb would have been long and stiff. Except, of course, there was no comb. It had been cut off for some reason. Also…’ He looked embarrassed. ‘Trust me. It was a cockerel. A mature bird. The kind you find on a farm or a smallholding. Not a shop. Never a shop.’
‘Pino,’ she said delicately. ‘There wasn’t much blood and what there was will wash off. The fig leaves were cardboard stuck on with tape. It’s terrible the paintings should have been attacked. But in all honesty… the damage is minor. The chapel’s in the middle of restoration. They’ll fix it. No one will know.’
‘I know.’ He nodded at her. ‘You too, and I would have thought this might have been of interest. Given your paper.’
‘But I don’t have any answers. It may just be a vandal. Someone who broke in overnight.’
‘Of course you don’t have any answers. You haven’t started looking.’
She glanced back at the church.
‘They should have better security.’
‘What? You mean cameras? Invisible alarms? Devices that discern our intentions, good or bad, before we’re allowed to enter?’
‘Cameras and alarms. Yes, of course.’
Fratelli pushed out his bottom lip in a very Italian gesture of disgust, then briefly stuck a finger in his ear and jiggled it around.
‘God was God and still he couldn’t stop his own creations stealing from the tree. We focus on mechanisms far too much. Better to hunt for motivations, intentions, their sources. To analyse what information we possess, instead of counting off possibilities.’
‘Security…’
‘They have alarms. And one day they’ll have cameras, I’m sure. This is the habit of the modern world, I think. To invent a new toy for every problem, while meekly peering at the facts themselves through horrified fingers.’ His gloved hands went to his face and he briefly peeked from behind them, a child once again. ‘The bell went off. But the man was ready. Perhaps he knew no one was working in the Brancacci today. He was so quick — the bird was dead already, the fig leaves in hand — and gone by the time anyone arrived.’
He gazed at her and the intensity of his bright brown eyes was a little disconcerting.
‘One of our patrol people arrived twenty minutes after the alarm was triggered. That was all it took. Our culprit was swift and prepared. Unlike Capitano Walter Marrone of the Carabinieri and our friends from the Uffizi who only now have come to see. They probably heard on the way out to lunch. No point in interrupting one’s social calendar, eh? You’re right. It’s minor damage and they know it.’
‘Quite.’
‘But this was not an idle case of vandalism. This is obvious. It was about saying something.’
‘What?’
Fratelli shrugged and said, ‘Search me.’
‘Well, at least the paintings got off lightly,’ she noted.
He put a hand to his chest and breathed in the damp air with care. She watched him and thought: this man is ill and doesn’t want to show it.
‘You never saw them before today, did you?’ he asked.
‘Not that I recall. Perhaps in a book…’
‘Then you have an excuse. Ice cream,’ he said, tapping her arm and pointing in the direction of Santo Spirito. Fratelli sniffed the darkening day. ‘Quick, before they close.’
‘I can do you a deal,’ said the woman from the olive fattoria. ‘Try some. We made it ourselves.’
She poured a spoonful into a tiny paper cup, as if she were serving wine, and handed it over. The woman wasn’t scared of him. Maybe his appearance wasn’t so bad. He didn’t look like one of the Santa Spirito bums, the barboni who hung around the piazza begging for coins. Not yet.
He swigged it back in one. The taste was peppery and fresh. And behind it… nothing. All good Tuscan oil had that fire in it but he knew the kinds he liked, even the commercial ones. All were better than this. It was poor stuff, the work of a hopeless amateur unable to pay for an expert press to turn their second-rate fruit into something worthwhile.