He turned on Marrone.
‘Where are your men? You have a suspect. Pontecorvo was there in Fiesole. I guarantee it.’
‘I’ve added him to the list. Be assured of it. But we’re snatching at ghosts in the dark. I can’t march in there on the basis of your guesswork…’
Fratelli looked back towards the gate and the white dwarf glistening in the rain. Cassini and Ducca stood next to the statue, shuffling their big feet. Good men, he thought.
‘All my life,’ Marrone went on, in a hard, embittered tone that Pino Fratelli did not recognize, ‘I looked up to you. Sympathized with you. Covered for you when you went off the rails. All my life…’
Fratelli placed a hand on the captain’s arm. ‘Walter. Now is not the time.’
‘When was? When you recovered from Chiara’s death and could have talked to me then? Over the years when we worked alongside each other? Drank ourselves stupid when we felt like it? When I told you my secrets? And you kept yours locked inside, as if all the grief in this city belonged to you alone? My God…’
‘What are you talking about?’
Marrone stepped back and glowered at him. ‘Or was it yesterday? When you came to my office with your Englishwoman? What was it she yelled at you? Tell him. Tell him, Pino.’
Fratelli felt cold and tired. ‘This is a stupid argument about nothing,’ he said. ‘You’re here. We both know why. To make sure Soderini’s little party doesn’t get out of hand. I’d advise you bring more men…’
‘I know!’ Marrone roared.
The angry words rang out in the black, cold night and echoed off the rusticated stone of the ugly, hulking palace by their side.
‘I know,’ Marrone repeated, more gently.
Fratelli felt another headache coming on. A Negroni would have killed it. The gin and the vermouth. A plate of finocchiona. Five minutes with Julia, bandying clever chitchat across the table.
‘Know what?’ Fratelli asked, and regretted the words the moment they’d passed his lips.
Marrone came close and peered into his face. ‘I read the files from twenty years ago this evening. Every last one of them.’ He sighed. ‘I should have done it long before. I thought it wisest not to. I’d hoped you’d buried her. My prurient interest seemed an imposition. A pointless one. Now I know—’
‘Know what?’ Fratelli screamed at him.
A moment of hesitation, then Marrone said, ‘I know something was smeared on Chiara’s face too. Just like Eve in the Brancacci. By the man who killed her. I know that twenty years ago it was an expensive French lipstick, of a kind she’d never have worn.’
‘It was?’ Fratelli asked, suddenly calm and interested. ‘You’re sure?’
‘French. Chanel. There was a forensic report came in three, four months afterwards. We wouldn’t let you near the files, would we?’
‘No.’ Fratelli put a hand to his chin. ‘French lipstick, twenty years ago. The blood of a slaughtered rooster, perhaps killed for Soderini’s private feast tonight. That’s quite a contrast, don’t you think?’
The carabiniere in Marrone surfaced. ‘You can link this to the Brigata somehow?’ he asked.
Fratelli shrugged. ‘If I’d had access to those papers, who knows? We might not be here tonight. And Vanni Tornabuoni—’
‘In the circumstances,’ Marrone interrupted, ‘we had no choice. How could we allow a man to investigate the murder of his own wife?’
Fratelli looked at him and said nothing.
‘The lipstick—’ Marrone continued.
‘It was smeared on Chiara’s face like a frown,’ Fratelli cut in. He shrugged. ‘As you said. Just like the Brancacci two days ago. I’m sorry. I would have told you yesterday but you seemed to think you had your man. Also, I had the impression you couldn’t wait to get me out of there. I’m an embarrassment, Walter. No, no. Don’t object. I am an embarrassment. I know this better than you.’
‘You could have told me. Bella and I loved Chiara too. You owed us that.’
Evenings out in the city eating cheap pizza, drinking red wine. Fratelli with Chiara, Marrone with his charming, too-loud Neapolitan wife. She’d left him for a lawyer ten years before but they stayed on good terms. Marrone proved a fine father to their twins, even though the lawyer was a crooked villain with a poor reputation in the city. Four lives tied together by amity and love two decades before, now irrevocably severed by time.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Because I was broken. I didn’t know what was real and what was part of the nightmare. I felt my world had disappeared and something bleak and dark and evil had taken its place. Then, later… You had problems of your own.’ His hand went to Marrone’s shoulder. ‘Was I wrong?’
‘Yes,’ the captain replied in a curt whisper.
Fratelli found himself stifling — successfully for once — a rising sense of anger.
‘When I woke up I was in that sanatorium. And you were visiting every day, with chocolates and smuggled bottles of booze. I was fighting to find a little of who I was. To understand Chiara was gone from me. Besides, neither of us wanted to talk much, did we? Not then.’
‘Perhaps not,’ the man next to him agreed.
‘Is there more?’ Fratelli asked.
‘You know there is. You asked Cassini…’ He nodded back towards the gate. ‘You told him to check the file. You suspected it was there.’ The captain laughed, a short, dry sound. ‘You always were one step ahead of everyone else, weren’t you? And as usual you never thought to mention it.’
‘Would you have listened?’
‘It would have pained me. Not as much as you, of course. But it would have hurt. And I would have listened,’ Marrone insisted. ‘How could I not?’
‘Then what is it I know?’ Fratelli asked.
‘That the night Chiara went missing there was a Brigata meeting. Our men back then were told to avoid it. Just as they are now, two decades on. Who was there… we’ve no information…’
‘Soderini and Tornabuoni,’ Fratelli told him. ‘Along with half their peers. Haven’t you noticed the governance of this city is handed down from generation to generation? Slowly, with a pretence of fairness. But we’re theirs, Walter, and they know it. As do we.’
Marrone sighed and stuffed his hands deep into the pockets of his coat.
‘I’ve never turned my back on a crime in this city,’ he said. ‘Nor would I. Whoever was the perpetrator—’
‘Oh, please!’ Fratelli complained. ‘We’re too long in the tooth to mince words with one another. If a villain presents himself… of course not. But do you look?’ He waved an arm around the vast gardens ahead of them. ‘Or do you hide when they order it? We both know the answer. This is how the world works. Ours, anyway. Soderini and his acolytes were council men twenty years ago. I checked. The Brigata’s a secret, private civic institution. I have no proof, no piece of paper to say it. Do you think they keep an attendance book? But they were there. I’m sure of it…’
‘If you’re sure, you’re sure.’
Fratelli shook his head. ‘There’s a worm in this dark place. There always has been. Perhaps it’s a part of us, a part we seek to dismiss, to ignore and pretend it doesn’t exist. Unless you’re one of them.’
The vast stone bulk of the Pitti Palace, a hideous fortress brimming with gorgeous treasures, loomed over them, casting a shadow beneath the sickle moon. The heavy downpour of early evening was turning to light drizzle. This wasn’t twenty years before, when the heavens had turned on the city in constant, howling blasts.