‘You’re paid to file things, not solve them.’
‘That gardener never did it. I saw him when he came in. Weakly little thing. Couldn’t chop the head off a mouse.’
‘Thank you!’ Marrone cried.
Rossi tapped the papers on the desk. ‘Twenty years! And you’re the second one going through all these dusty files today. What’s this damned place coming to?’
Marrone stared at him. He should have guessed. ‘You mean the files on Fratelli’s wife?’ he asked.
‘Bah!’ Rossi waved him away. ‘No, I don’t. That daft lad Cassini was rifling through those yesterday — doing Fratelli’s bidding, if you ask me. He knew what he was looking for.’
‘Did he find it?’ Marrone demanded.
‘I don’t know! You’re the captain here. You ask him.’
‘And today…’
Rossi stamped his fist on the desk diary. ‘The kid came in asking about a man. He said Fratelli tried to tell you but you’d kicked him out of the stazione.’
The records officer pulled a scribbled note out of his pocket. Showed him the name there: Aldo Pontecorvo.
‘Did you find anything?’
The man broke into a sarcastic grin and opened his arms as if to say, ‘You’re asking me?’
‘Did you find anything?’ the captain repeated.
He went downstairs and returned with a blue folder that contained a single sheet of paper and a black-and-white mugshot of a surly, pale-faced man aged somewhere under forty.
‘One more Oltrarno louse,’ the man said. ‘Bastard son of a madwoman who used to live in the Boboli Gardens, opening her legs for the staff there from what I can gather.’
‘This is it?’
‘His mamma died last January. He went a bit mad. Started shouting abuse in Santo Spirito. Stuff about the mayor and his pals.’
Cautioned, the report read. Told to sober up and go home. There was an address and a phone number. He went to the desk and called the place.
He could picture the kind of hovel from the address and the gruff, aggressive tones of the man who answered. A flophouse near Carmine, not far from Pino Fratelli’s house.
Pontecorvo had been thrown out the previous Sunday for unpaid rent. He’d been muttering more threats. The man was crazy so no one took much notice any more.
‘Just another Oltrarno louse,’ the civilian said again when he finished the call. ‘You’re going to put out a call for something like that?’
‘Go home,’ Marrone ordered. ‘If Cassini or Fratelli come near your office again, tell them they need to speak to me first. Before they see anything.’
‘What’s that they say about stable doors and bolting horses?’
Marrone got his own coat and called home, telling his wife he would be late for dinner, offering no explanation.
Tonight he had other matters to chase — as, he guessed, did Pino Fratelli.
Two flights of stairs through an empty Palazzo Vecchio. Except for the ghosts. They took Savonarola this way after he was arrested on the threshold of the library in San Marco. A few weeks later he walked down the same steps, defrocked, and was dragged to the stake by hooded men in black to greet the flames and the noose and a grim, public death in the square outside.
Her footsteps echoed against the walls. She tried to push that face from San Marco — bloodless, fixed with a cruel determination — from her head.
The door to Soderini’s office was open. His staff gone for the evening. The mayor wore a dark suit with a white carnation in the lapel.
It was hot in the large, ornate room. She took off her coat. Soderini stared at her, the black dress, the pearls. Julia Wellbeloved felt herself being judged, measured, and in other circumstances would have turned straight round and returned to the rainy Florence night.
‘Black,’ he said in his calm, smooth English. ‘Like me. I’m in mourning for poor Tornabuoni. You?’
‘We’re in Florence,’ she said. ‘Speak to me in Italian, please.’
He came to stand in front of her. ‘You’re a very unusual woman.’
She laughed at him. ‘You know that, do you?’
‘I’m paid to judge people.’ He looked her up and down again. ‘You never met Tornabuoni. Still, the thought’s appreciated. How’s this report of yours going, Julia? Have you found time to do your homework while chasing terrorists?’
‘We went to Fiesole thinking it was something to do with the Brancacci.’
‘And was it?’
‘Why not ask Walter Marrone? Is your wife coming?’
A flicker of unexpected emotion ran briefly across his face. ‘My wife? You have been busy.’
‘I can read the paper. Had to go back a bit. No one speaks of it much.’
‘My wife lives in Sicily. Taormina. She rarely returns. It’s best that way.’ He tidied some papers on the desk, avoiding her eyes. ‘She’s half-English. Did you read that too? Her family were one of those aristocratic tribes who came here at the beginning of the century, held their noses while Mussolini was in power. Never quite found the time to leave, or sufficient spine to warrant internment like some of their peers.’
‘I didn’t mean to pry.’
‘No?’ he said with a sardonic smile. ‘In that case why ask? I live a bachelor life. A gentleman with occasional companions when I have the time. This city is my bride if I’m honest. Beautiful, if demanding. I can’t complain if a woman feels she’s unable to compete. Mariani tells me you took your Carabinieri friends to San Marco with you. Why?’
‘For company,’ she said with a shrug.
‘A crazy detective unfit for work and an idiot junior? This Fratelli—’
‘You know him?’
‘I know of him,’ Soderini said with a scowl. ‘A troublemaker. A man who doesn’t know his place. That type never fits. This is why his career turned to dust.’
He brushed something from her shoulder. Something that did not perhaps exist.
‘He’s ill. Retired on medical grounds.’
‘He was as good as retired long before that,’ Soderini retorted. ‘There’s a hierarchy here. One works with it or fails. Fratelli—’
‘Is ill,’ she said again.
‘Were these men helpful? Do you have any fresh answers as to why someone might wish to despoil our treasures?’
Julia thought about this and said, ‘I think I misread the question. Or asked the wrong one. I thought this was about the paintings somehow. I wanted to believe that. It seemed the natural conclusion. The obvious one.’
‘And?’ he persisted.
‘I’m now inclined to think the problem is more to do with the individuals themselves. What makes them the way they are. A flaw in their history that’s affected their character. The painting — art itself — is a catalyst, as it is for the rest of us. A spur. Something that eggs them on, makes them cross a line they always observed before.’
He put a hand to his chin, staring at her. ‘There,’ Soderini said confidently. ‘You have a premise for your paper.’
‘Not really. It’s a matter for the police, not an academic. I can’t invent a reason for their behaviour. Not unless someone finds me a criminal.’
She cocked her head to one side and asked, ‘Do you have one for me?’
‘Here?’ he asked, spreading his hands to indicate the grand office he’d inherited from a line of city burghers and a pope.
‘Somewhere. Tornabuoni’s murder…’ she said, almost in a whisper. Her eyes flitted to the back of the room, in the direction of the square outside. ‘I was in the piazza that night. I might have seen—’
‘What?’ Soderini demanded with a sudden urgency.
‘Someone who looked the spitting image of Savonarola. Hiding in the Loggia dei Lanzi. A troubled man with a pale, distinctive face and a black cloak. Like that of a monk.’