‘Perhaps we’re the fools,’ he whispered. ‘The deceivers. Blind to what we really are.’
The taller man came forward and held Pino Fratelli in a tight bear hug. Then he whispered in his ear, ‘Lead and I will follow. But remember this…’ Marrone let go, stood back, shook a finger at him. ‘We’re equal, and that’s the way it’ll stay! No more sly secrets. No more of your trademark trickery. You’re a cunning old fox and I’ve always followed like a willing ignoramus. But please. Together now, Pino. Bring your friend the dullard along with you. This is an unfinished funeral for me as well.’
Fratelli shook his head. His eyes felt moist for some reason and his throat hurt.
‘Pontecorvo would have been seventeen that night,’ Marrone added. ‘He lived with his mother in a hovel here. Close enough to your house.’
‘Seventeen?’ Fratelli muttered. ‘Not much more than a child…’
‘We pulled him in for unruly behaviour in January when his mother died,’ the captain went on. ‘Last Sunday he was thrown out of his lodgings over debts. He was ranting, bellowing threats against all and sundry. There’s your catalyst. You always want one, don’t you?’
It had to be said.
‘There’s a man in his grand office in the Palazzo Vecchio who thinks he owns you, Walter. Along with every other brick and cobblestone in Florence. I’m just a dying, failed maresciallo ordinario. You’ve a career and a reputation. You could give me your weapon and leave this to me. I’ve not got a damned thing to lose.’
‘Let me worry about that,’ Marrone told him. The captain glanced back at the gate. ‘We’ve got Ducca, who’s not fit for much, if I’m honest. And one mindless young cadet…’
‘Don’t speak of Luca that way. He’s a fine young man who deserves better.’
Marrone cast his head to one side and frowned.
‘And they’re all we’ve got,’ Fratelli added.
‘Good,’ Marrone said, then rubbed his hands and grinned. It occurred to Fratelli he hadn’t seen that happy expression in a long time.
Julia Wellbeloved found herself in a place so curious she had to unwind her arm from Sandro Soderini’s and stand in the middle of the Grotta Grande, wide-eyed and lost for words. A gently curving artificial structure now held them like a monster’s mouth enfolding its victims, ready to swallow. The fantastical cavern was a riot of decoration, a rich lunatic’s junk room crammed to the gills with the dreams of several warped imaginations. The walls were covered in shaped mortar and stalactites festooned with shells and pebbles and hunks of quartz. When these encrustations retreated, the gaps were filled by frescoes of Arcadian landscapes, paintings of strange, exotic creatures, leopards and monkeys, goats and mountain bear. As her eyes adjusted to the half-dark, she could see — emerging among the flamboyant mortar half-formed figures there — satyrs and leering shepherds, fantastic anthropomorphic creatures chasing capering nymphs.
She followed him through the interior arch and entered a tiny chamber dominated by a single statue: a muscular, naked man abducting a beautiful, protesting woman. The fingers of this virile attacker bit into his victim’s flesh in a cruel and physical way that reminded her of Bernini. This was too good a work to hide in the darkness beneath the hill of the Boboli Gardens.
‘Any ideas?’ Soderini asked.
‘About what?’
‘About the statue, of course. You said you studied art. Let’s have a little proof.’
‘Is this a game?’ she asked testily.
‘Most things are. Indulge me.’
Shaking her head, amused by this man in spite of herself, she checked the paintings on the walls in this tiny antechamber, her mind straying to the lights in the room beyond, and the rising sound of company somewhere close by, yet hidden.
Classical scenes. Warfare. Rape and pillage. The subject she saw everywhere in Florence; on the ceilings of the Palazzo Vecchio, on the walls of the Uffizi. Old legends, great fairy stories that enchanted the aristocrats of the Renaissance, many of whom wished to trace their lineage back to the ancients.
She walked round the smooth and delicately sculpted marble, touched the man’s strong thigh, the woman’s solid arm, looked at her lovely face, turned away from her abductor, yet half smiling in the alluring way that certain men seemed to feel might happen in circumstances such as this.
Rape in classical times always had a touch of beauty, of the spiritual, about it. Men were there to dominate and subjugate, women to be their subjects. That was the way of the world.
‘I suppose you think she was asking for it?’ she said, turning on Soderini.
‘Who was?’
‘Helen of Troy,’ she guessed. ‘This’ — she slapped the male statue’s thighs — ‘is Theseus.’
Soderini nodded, impressed. ‘Very good. And this?’ he asked, gesturing at the final room.
She strode through into the last of the three chambers. It was taller than the others with a circular window at the top. The glass there was grubby. Through it the weak rays of the moon fell upon a single pale statue in a fountain set at the centre. Vicious horned satyrs clung to the edge beneath the feet of the lovely woman depicted above them, their cruel faces set in expressions of lust and hate.
Hand across her breasts, placid face staring down at humanity. The pose was close to that of Botticelli’s depiction of Venus, new-born, emerging from a scallop shell, brought into being when the Titan cut off the testicles of his own father, the primordial god Uranus, and flung them into the bright blue waters of the Mediterranean.
A sudden keen memory from the Palazzo Vecchio. The quarters of Cosimo I, the man who created this labyrinth of underground temples. A vast ceiling painting of the moment of her creation: the vengeful son taking a scythe to the loins of his prone and grizzled father.
A canvas by whom?
She felt the smothering weight of Florentine history begin to bear down on her, linking the living to the dead, the past to the present in a constant, circling nexus as real and as heavy as the stones of the city itself.
By Vasari, who else? The man who built the corridor all the way from the fortress on the other side of the river to this very spot, and designed, with Buontalenti, the interior cave in which the Medici worshipped other gods. A willing slave to the feverish imagination of his masters.
‘They practised alchemy here,’ Soderini said.
‘I thought they burned people for that,’ she said without thinking.
‘No. In Florence they burned people for disobedience. Here…’ His hand gripped the head of the nearest satyr, which was clinging to the bowl beneath Venus, eyeing the beautiful woman above it with a naked hunger. ‘They tried to turn base metal into gold. Not because they needed it, of course. But to unlock the secrets of eternal life. To reverse what lesser men would call the laws of nature.’
‘They failed, Sandro,’ she said.
‘But they tried, Julia.’
The sounds of revelry were closer, yet just as elusive in their source. Soderini marched to the furthest wall and stared at a hideous face that grinned at them from the mortar. Dusty, probably terracotta, she thought, it resembled that of a man turning into something else. A creature of the sea, half flesh, half seaweed. The muffled sounds were coming from beyond.
‘The books will tell you there are three chambers in the Grotta Grande,’ Soderini said.
He found a handle on the grim face on the wall, pulled, and the masonry began to move.
‘The books lie.’
Voices and music. Then a sudden wave of heat.
The caves were nothing more than fanciful decorated rooms set inside a series of small, interlinked buildings attached to the lower side of the Boboli hill, covered in part with earth, then decorated and made to look real, natural.