He took it, sipped shakily.
How long? A second? A minute? An hour? He’d no idea.
The pressure in his head eased. It was not pain, not really. More a nudge from something alien inside him, wishing to make its presence known, then, once recognized, roll over and return to sleep.
Fratelli looked at the clock. It had barely moved. A minute perhaps. No more.
He finished the water, shrugged off Cassini’s arm and, as he did so, said, ‘Enough of this. I stood too long at the counter. That’s all. I have an important question for you, Luca. What’s your job tonight?’
The silence again.
Fratelli leaned forward and gazed into his blank young eyes. ‘What is your job?’ he repeated.
The young carabiniere paused, glancing at the other two in embarrassment. ‘I’m your legs, Pino,’ he said eventually.
Fratelli could read those looks. ‘I asked before, didn’t I? That very question.’
‘You did,’ Grassi’s husband told him.
‘When?’
The café owner shook his head and said, ‘Get yourself home, Pino. To bed. We’ll take you. Rest. Sleep for a while.’
‘Sleep? Sleep?’
It was November in Florence. A black, wet night. Just like the one twenty years before when the river rose and engulfed the city in its foul, dank waters, letting loose a heartless creature that still lurked in the shadows somewhere, waiting for another moment, a second opportunity.
He’d sent Julia Wellbeloved out there knowing all this, using it to encourage her natural curiosity and sense of decency and justice. So a part of this creature lay within him. Came from him. Perhaps the spur now, the catalyst, was nothing more than the shrieking cries of a dying maresciallo ordinario gnawed by the cancer of guilt over his wife’s brutal and unexplained murder, willing to sacrifice anything and anyone in order to salve and bury that pain.
‘The time?’ Fratelli asked, too weak to look at the grandfather clock. Or perhaps too frightened, afraid it might cease its ticking once again.
‘It’s ten past seven,’ the husband told him. ‘You looked at the clock just now. Go home.’
‘I was making conversation,’ Fratelli said, forcing himself to his feet. He straightened his long silver hair as best he could, smoothed down his old creased coat, reached into his pockets and, very slowly, with no small difficulty, pulled on his old and tattered calf leather gloves.
His mind was returning. The signs of distress — that dizziness, the ringing of a million tiny bells, the fringing and lack of focus of his vision — were surely diminishing.
‘Luca and I have an appointment,’ he said, convincing himself he felt better already for getting upright. No, not better.
Fine.
Good.
Well.
‘We have?’ Cassini asked.
‘Why else do you think I brought you here? You must learn to ask questions. To demand answers. I had to wait until the due hour before I could act. So we took a coffee. Do I make idle decisions? Am I a man who wastes what time we have?’
Cassini looked a bit offended by that.
‘Who are we meeting then?’ he asked.
Fratelli drew himself up to his full height, which brought him up to Luca Cassini’s chin, and said, ‘A fat naked midget. Who else on a night like this?’
Outside it was cold and wet. For once he was glad to feel the cold sharp rain on his face.
As they strode through the Vasari Corridor, across the Ponte Vecchio, Soderini spoke all the time: of Florence, of history, of his ancient clan and how it had held power here in varying degrees for six centuries or more.
He possessed the soft, persuasive tone of one of those academics who moved so slickly to a career on TV, filling in the spaces for the ignorant while always managing to remind them there was more to be said, though not for them. Knowledgeable and articulate, acutely intelligent yet adept at explaining complex ideas in simple, rational terms, Soderini’s personality was both repellent and magnetic. She could imagine how a man like him might acquire the mayor’s chair, even without that aristocratic blood in his veins.
A natural master, seemingly born to rise to the top of any society or milieu he occupied. There was a genuine love there, too, for himself and his surroundings. The paintings on the walls of the Vasari Corridor, the church, the bridge, the river… all these things he spoke of as if they and the city itself were a part of him, a fifth limb, a visible, tangible facet of a personality that, through his Florentine blood, spanned the centuries.
Then they entered the final narrow portion of the corridor and she saw the sharp right turn towards the Pitti Palace. The fruitless visit to Vanni Tornabuoni’s office seemed an age away. The last few days might have been a week or more. In that time she’d seen Pino Fratelli turn from an eccentric, retired cop into a charismatic and troubled man who interested her greatly; for his character, his damaged nature, and the burning pain he sought, in an absent-minded, haphazard way, to lance.
When she had waited impatiently in Tornabuoni’s office two days earlier she’d cursed the absent cultural director, blamed his absence on the arrogance and lousy timekeeping of all the men she’d known. Her brief husband, more than any.
But she was wrong there. Tornabuoni was probably dead already; shot, headed for that terrible revelation in the Loggia dei Lanzi that evening.
By a man who looked like Girolamo Savonarola, perhaps believed himself to be the heir of the troubled and troublesome priest. That was fact, whatever Walter Marrone and the others thought. Fratelli had never doubted it. He’d understood she was right from the beginning, and quietly led her to San Marco and that painting in the hope of proving his hunch without once revealing his game.
She forgave that sly yet necessary trick. Julia Wellbeloved had come to believe she would forgive Pino Fratelli quite a lot.
They came to a halt by a small door in the corner of the corridor junction. Soderini pulled a key out of his pocket, and turned on a light. A winding staircase circled down. He led the way and soon they were outside.
Even in her thick winter coat, Julia Wellbeloved shivered. The air was damp and chill, rank with the smell of mould and vegetation. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw they had emerged on a slope by the edge of the Boboli Gardens. The palace stood to their right, a vast, dark mass. There were lights at a gate by the public street — a guardhouse, she guessed. To her left, barely illuminated by a few lamps, was an artificial cave built into a strange building encrusted with sculpted vegetation and strange mythical figures. Two marble Roman statues stood on either side. Above the arched roof, embedded in the curious ornamentation, was the Medici coat of arms: six palle; spheres set in a shield.
She thought she could hear sounds — music and voices — from the depths of the grotto.
‘Is this a good idea?’ Julia Wellbeloved asked, half to herself.
‘New horizons,’ Soderini said, and pushed open the iron grille ahead of them. ‘They’re always good.’
He stood there, a handsome, confident middle-aged man, illuminated by the yellow lamps in the mouth of the cave. His hand was out, a gesture of open invitation.
‘You’re coming.’
It wasn’t a question.
A sound, or a sense of someone close by, made her glance back towards the distant gate at the palace end of the corridor. A shape shone in the light there, pale and glistening in the rain. It seemed too grotesque to be real.
Then Sandro Soderini took her arm and the Grotta Grande consumed them.