Cassini fetched her black winter coat, holding it as she shuffled her arms into the sleeves. Then they put on their own heavy jackets for the cold, damp night outside.
‘Rain,’ Fratelli said. ‘Best we get the bus. You wouldn’t want to turn up wet.’
They caught it round the corner. Empty again on this dark November evening. They went over the Ponte Santa Trinita. Luca Cassini chattered about football. Fratelli stared out of the window at the full waters of the Arno, glistening under a sickle moon. She thought of that night twenty years before when, finally, he’d struggled to make his way across this same bridge once the floods had retreated, only to find his wife murdered in the house they’d just left. That moment was with him now. She felt sure of it, from the way his eyes wouldn’t leave the banks of the river, forever flitting back towards Oltrarno.
The bus bounced as it left the bridge and hit the cobbled road on the far side. Fratelli was scribbling something on his notepad, tongue out of the side of his mouth, an amusing picture of concentration.
‘Here,’ Fratelli said proudly, passing her a sketch of streets and palaces, and the name of a bar.
‘What’s this?’
‘It’s where we meet tonight,’ Cassini said. ‘Afterwards.’
‘I don’t know where I’m going! Or what time it finishes.’
Or I walk out, she nearly added.
‘None of us can guess the time, Julia,’ Fratelli told her. ‘But the place.’ He patted Cassini on the arm. The young officer grinned like a teenager. ‘Luca’s got an idea about that.’
‘Our uniform lads have been told to stay away from the Pitti Palace,’ Cassini added. ‘Happens first Thursday of the month. Stay clear. Don’t peek.’
Fratelli leaned forward and gazed into her face. ‘Any trouble at all and you get up and march straight out of there. This’ — he pressed the paper into her hand — ‘will take you to a small café I know which stays open all hours. There we will buy you a Negroni and treat you to a professional Carabinieri debriefing.’
He rubbed his gloved hands.
‘Motion. Events. Action. This is what our case requires.’
‘And if you see someone who looks like that mad monk,’ Cassini chipped in, ‘best you run a mile.’
She didn’t laugh at that, and nor did Pino Fratelli.
Walter Marrone sat alone in his office, staring at the street lamps in the Borgo Ognissanti, feeling miserable and impotent. His dealings with the awkward, enchanting Fratelli had woken memories — unpleasant, unwanted ones. Of a time, two decades almost to the day, when the fragile facade of safety and civilization had been wiped from the city in a few chill, savage hours. The handful of carabinieri who’d worked in the stazione that night did not emerge from the experience without scars. They saw a side to Florence that had lain hidden beneath the surface, unrecognized, too dark to acknowledge.
And then there was Chiara. He’d watched, powerless, as senior officers turned on the distraught Fratelli demanding answers.
Why had he called no one to the house when he found her body?
What exactly had he seen?
Marrone had tried to intervene when his friend’s silent grief — obvious to one who knew him — only spurred the suspicions of those for whom he was a stranger. Or worse, half recognized as a prickly and occasionally arrogant individual in an office where ambition was stifled unless it lay in one direction only: that of satisfying the wishes of the city’s powerful elite.
He’d adored Fratelli’s wife for her bright intelligence, her beauty and, more than anything, the way she brought a sense of calm rationality to a difficult, occasionally wayward man he admired and regarded as a close and decent friend.
The Ognissanti stazione was a good Carabinieri unit, staffed by dedicated men. They worked hard to sift some truth from the grime and muck that filled that little terraced house. Yet, long as they laboured, there was nothing to be found — not in Chiara’s wounded body, her torn clothes, the few scraps of evidence, a cigarette butt, a tissue; all discovered in the dank brown silt and slime that filled the doorway and half covered the staircase of Fratelli’s modest home.
One new fact only had emerged. Chiara had been attacked, and perhaps died, in the first-floor living room, then left on the stairs. Nothing more.
This was two decades before. Marrone, now captain of the station, was aware his mind ought to be on other things. The callous, brutal murder of a city dignitary, if such a term could be used for Vanni Tornabuoni, a man whose vices were an open secret to his peers, and to the police and Carabinieri with whom he had occasional dealings over his indiscretions. Tornabuoni was a vile, corrupt aristocrat, an arrogant blue blood who, had he come from a different part of the city, would have found his way into the penal system years before, and doubtless landed up in the old Murate Prison where he belonged. The man charged with his murder would be dealt with. Sandro Soderini had made this clear, and what the mayor wanted the mayor got, one way or another.
But justice for Fratelli’s wife? That had never happened and never would. There was no easy way of resurrecting these long-dead cases. No new conduit into the past.
Twenty years. It had taken half that time for Fratelli to reveal to Marrone the truth about his birth. How he was snatched from Rome and his parents to be brought up almost as a foundling in Oltrarno with a doting single foster mother. A decade on, the truth about Fratelli’s condition became clear too. Then, Marrone had taken it on himself to call his friend into his office and tell him face-to-face that he could no longer work as a maresciallo ordinario, or in any other capacity for the Carabinieri.
Fratelli had shouted and screamed to no purpose. The idea was unthinkable. The doctors felt he could suffer a catastrophic collapse at any instant, one that sudden stress might bring on. Marrone had also noticed uncharacteristic lapses in his capacious memory. The man’s mind, so sharp and sensitive, would fail without warning, lead him to ask the same question twice in the space of a minute, demand the answer be repeated more than once before it seemed to stick. Then, moments later, he would be normal and fail to understand that anything had been wrong.
There was treatment. Drugs and counselling, principally, since the medical advice suggested the tumour was too far advanced for the surgery and radiotherapy which would have been used had the illness been detected earlier.
The consequences were plain and depressing and both men knew it. So, on that dismal sunny day, Marrone asked for his friend’s driving licence and Carabinieri ID card, put them both safely in a drawer, and then the two of them went to Fratelli’s favourite bar in San Niccolò and got stinking drunk.
This was not, on reflection, the best thing to do with someone terminally ill. But that was, for Marrone, and perhaps for Fratelli too, the most infuriating aspect of the business of all. This dying man looked, for the most part, fit and well, if prone to the occasional forgetful moment and angry outburst. Until the final collapse occurred, Fratelli could, in theory anyway, function as well as any other officer inside the stazione. Better than most, if Marrone were honest.
But if a man couldn’t drive a car, how could he act as a maresciallo ordinario? Or perform any more mundane functions — something Fratelli offered to do repeatedly? What price for brilliance against that ticking monster hidden beneath his skull?
All this occurred six months before, during a beautiful bright summer. At the time Marrone could not bring himself to believe that, if the doctors were right, he would be attending Pino Fratelli’s funeral before another eighteen months was out. And perhaps much sooner than that.