A small reservoir was created above the complex. It provided sufficient pressure to power the fountains inside, a sink in the kitchen and a tiny washroom. In summer, hidden shafts were opened to allow in fresh air. In winter, gas heaters brought a stifling, damp heat to the final, secret cavern where they met and dined. A narrow lane at the rear allowed food and other goods to be brought in without spoiling the theatrical illusion at the front.
‘You know this place,’ Chavah Efron said. ‘What next?’
They stood outside by a catering van. She had the bag from Fiesole heavy in her hand.
‘We serve them,’ he said.
Then one more death and we flee. Take what money we can steal, walk to Santa Maria Novella and catch the first train south — to Rome, to Naples; to somewhere warm with the promise of sun and a different life.
No more seedy assignations beneath the Boboli earth. Twelve times a year. Two hundred and forty Brigate in all. He’d worked every one, as skivvy and waiter; then, latterly, following the butcher Bertorelli’s incarceration, as master of the kitchen in San Marco. The only source of a pitiful income, as his solitary mother grew meaner and madder with the years, relying on him to do everything until the very end.
And all the time the grotto lived in his head like a disease, as it had since that distant night of the flood.
Drink this now, boy, and everything will be fine.
They’d lied to him then, for their own purposes. In the intervening years they would lie to many others, often in his presence, as if he didn’t exist. So he’d stood and watched, a craven figure, half hidden in the shadows, feeling the atmosphere change, the innocent and the cowardly depart, the hardened figures in the gang grow drunk and bitter as the evening turned from louche carousing to riot to debauchery then worse. When the screaming started he stayed there too, watching those who had taken his place, knowing he was as much use to them as any of the stone satyrs leering from Vasari’s hideous mortar.
Afterwards came that siren, wheedling voice. A word in the ear. A rank, breathy introduction with an offer. A job, a threat, a simple promise: be silent and await your reward. He saw them now, faces at the back of photos in museums and institutions. Mostly women, but not always. Tornabuoni, a man who would consume anything, saw to that.
This was about submission as much as rape. They would be made tame and timid, loyalty bought through a small gift or preferment, the memory of their loss cemented in place by an inner sense of shame he understood only too well. These were the hierarchies, made up of the bones and corpses of centuries, upon which Florence — his city, as much as Tornabuoni’s or Soderini’s — was built. A man like Savonarola, retrieved from those lost ashes scattered on the Arno from the Ponte Vecchio, would recognize it in an instant, and shriek his curses into their ears, all of them, high and low.
A month ago he’d watched, more closely than ever, not knowing why. There was something about the victim they picked this time. Someone, a local, infrequent visitor one of the kitchen hands said, had seen the girl performing at a private function in the city. Brought her along, paid for her to wear her Egyptian costume, a bikini with a flimsy golden skirt barely covering her hips, a top just as skimpy, a jewelled headband, a transparent shawl. Then, after the dinner, she’d danced for them again, a more lurid and sensual performance. Twelve men, three women guests. When the direction of the evening became obvious, the women left, then most of the men. They’d seen Chavah Efron, the dancing girl brought in to shake and tremble her naked thighs and hips in their faces, lean down and show them her breasts as they slavered over their cups, eyes glazed and full of heat.
The rest knew what was coming.
Drink this now, boy, and everything will be fine.
That was the biggest lie of all. Just two of them took her, threw her screaming into the shadows, did whatever they wanted. The rest retreated and it was always like this. Always them. The same pair from twenty years ago, assailing her as once they’d assailed him.
‘What would you have done?’ he asked. ‘You and Ari?’
Chavah Efron stood there, a small, muscular determined woman, and said, ‘Killed them all. That beast Tornabuoni first…’
‘I dealt with him,’ he said.
‘You cut off the snake, not the head…’
‘The head goes on forever,’ he whispered.
The head is us, he thought. This city, running through our veins as the Arno runs through it, in a muddy, swirling flood.
She had him by the collar, so close he could smell the sweetness of her breath. ‘If you lack the courage, why are we here?’
‘To find the last one…’ he began.
‘They’re all the same. Can’t you see? All…’
‘We could go south…’
She laughed and then he knew. This was a dream, had been from the moment of his birth, would be till the end. They were living through the Anni di Piombo, the Years of Lead. A time of bombs and bullets, from left and right, Cagliari to Milan; blood and chaos throughout an Italy shrieking beneath the mass of its own corruption.
A noise. A quick movement of her foot. She kicked the flap of the bag open, and as she did so he saw again the weapons hidden there, metal shining in the half-light.
I shall spill flood waters upon the earth. You shall know them, and in them shall be your blood.
The flood did not recede. It ran through you, stormed greedily down your screaming mouth, lurked within your heart, craving justice.
‘The first,’ she said, ‘is yours.’ Then Chavah Efron picked up the bag, reached for the weapons inside and offered him the first to come to hand.
Franco Mariani, the man from San Marco, stood near the entrance, a little drunk, his walrus moustache now drooping more than ever. Julia soon realized she was the only woman, the idle focus for the attention of a dozen men in all, every one of them middle-aged, dressed in a dark suit and downcast in mood — even Soderini now, it seemed. This chamber was perfectly circular, with a door in darkness at the rear through which a couple of waitresses were emerging bearing drinks.
The walls here were frescoed, with none of the mortared stalagmites and encrustations of the previous rooms. Instead they offered a panorama of a riotous Arcadian age: battling warriors, screaming women, rampant satyrs, lust and violence, passion and a searing animal thirst for life. The contortions of naked skin, of grin and grimace, death cry and lustful croak, travelled around the circular space, all pointing to a focal point, back behind her, above the secret door through which she’d entered.
She sought the centre of this tumultuous, rolling fray; found it finally. Above the dark arch which had led them past the figure of Helen’s abduction, past the statue of Venus and her stone satyrs, was a large fresco that depicted a naked couple wrapped in each other’s arms, on the point of coupling ecstatically in an artificial pose, upright, locked together against a tree of orange fruit. This was Masaccio’s stricken couple, the newly fallen Adam and Eve, stumbling into the world that awaited them. The real world. That of Florence; of Sandro Soderini, his ancestors and his heirs.
Gone was the shame, gone the despair. Their nakedness was displayed openly. Their beautiful faces were wreathed in anticipation, not coarsened, as they appeared in the chapel, but made more beautiful by this open acceptance of who and what they were.
It was Eve’s mouth that drew Julia’s attention above all else. The lips were full and carmine, raised in an ecstatic grin that was the mirror image of the gory smear she’d seen defiling the calm, pure face of Masolino’s Eve on the column opposite in the Brancacci.