The couple above the tiny door looked ready to consume each other. She took in the careful, exact detail of their perfect, powerful bodies, all the physical facts that artists of this time were supposed to ignore: hair and flesh meant to be hidden or carefully ignored by the Renaissance artist’s brush. In Vasari’s hidden cavern, beneath the earth of the Boboli Gardens, all was revealed, displayed proudly for the voyeuristic audience below.
Soderini eyed the circle of tables set for dinner, then raised his glass to her. Soon they would sit down and the meal begin.
‘I told you, Julia. This is our secret. Yours now, too.’
Briefly, for no more than a second, there was a face at the door. A tall man, with a pale and bloodless look, beaked nose, beady raptor eyes full of hate and misery, gleaming skull.
She felt as faint and weak as she had in San Marco, tried to steady herself on Soderini’s arm. When she looked again, the shape at the door had vanished.
‘Are you all right?’ Soderini asked.
‘Never better,’ she murmured automatically.
There was a waitress with them. A striking young woman with dark hair and an interesting, engaged face.
‘Is everyone here?’ she asked. ‘Is it time to start?’
Soderini glanced around the room. ‘They’re here,’ he said.
The woman smiled and left. The face hadn’t reappeared. It was a trick of the light, her imagination feasting on the atmosphere and the half-seen faces in the shadows. That was all.
Luca Cassini pushed at the iron gates on the Grotta Grande. The sound of voices was muffled and subtle. But it was there, and so was the Brigata Spendereccia, with Julia Wellbeloved among them.
‘I can get in,’ Cassini said. He tested the ironwork again. ‘Kick it down if you want. But…’
‘But what?’ Fratelli asked.
‘What if it’s just a party? Bunch of men getting plastered with a bit of pretty company. I mean… if Julia’s in trouble, no problem. But what if it’s… innocent?’
‘Do innocents scurry beneath the earth to have their fun?’ Fratelli asked, watching the way Marrone and Ducca stared at the damp ground, shuffling their feet. ‘Tell me truthfully, Walter. What’s happened here over the years?’
Marrone took a deep, pained breath. ‘Nothing. No complaints. No tearful women racing to the stazione. Nothing…’
‘Because?’ Fratelli demanded.
‘Because they get something to keep their mouths shut,’ Ludovico Ducca said. ‘People talk. I’ve heard them.’
‘Heard what?’ Cassini asked.
‘They get the nod. Stepping on the “up” escalator for no good reason. Women mainly. Not always. Oh, please. You’ve never noticed? Not seen someone turn up one Monday morning, fresh desk, new chair? Nice comfy job in the office. A seat on the council. A place on one of those well-paid committees. And you ask yourself: where the hell did they come from? How come they got that, not me?’ He grimaced. ‘Boy or girl. Vanni Tornabuoni…’
He glanced back at the grim shape of the palace behind them.
‘I found a lad in his office one morning. Naked, shivering. Covered in scratches. Scared witless. Orphan from one of the charities. God knows what that animal got up to.’
‘You could have told me!’ Marrone complained.
‘Then we’d both be out of a job. You know what that kid was doing when I saw him next?’
Ducca leaned over and winked at Walter Marrone in the moonlight. ‘Sitting on a horse outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Blue cap. Pretty uniform. Municipal police officer, telling off tourists for dropping litter. I’ve seen it happen in your own stazione. And so have you. So would Pino here, if he wasn’t so damned blinkered he thinks the only bad in the world lies out there…’
Ludovico Ducca waved his arm towards the outline of the palace and the lights of Oltrarno beyond.
‘It’s there that bothers me right now,’ Fratelli cried, jerking his thumb at the Grotta Grande.
‘Do you lot want me to break down these bloody gates or not?’ Luca Cassini demanded.
‘Can you open it… gently?’ Fratelli asked.
Cassini placed his strong right shoulder to the metalwork, dug his feet into the damp gravel and pushed.
Nothing.
Fratelli joined him, putting his weight against the gate. A moment later Marrone was there too, and then Ludovico Ducca.
It wasn’t gentle. Certainly not quiet. When the lock on the gate finally gave, it did so with a high-pitched crack that rang around the mortared walls of the grotto like a gunshot. All four men fell through, stumbling forwards with its collapse. The grating held briefly in their hands, then through its own bulk and momentum detached itself and crashed down on the first low circular marble fountain near the entrance, shattering the rim, dispatching shards of stone into the darkness.
When the ringing of the metal subsided, they went inside the Grotta Grande. A hubbub of distant voices drifted to them from somewhere ahead in the dark.
Then something unmistakable broke the indecipherable babble.
A scream.
Soderini watched the two walk through the door, saw what they were carrying, thought for a moment and stepped back into the shadows. There he felt for the small black handgun he’d kept with him ever since the strange, threatening messages began to appear. He was out of sight in the small, overheated cavern. The crowd had gone quiet the moment the pair emerged — the woman shouting, the man behind her silent and sullen.
Tall, bald, imposing, in the food-spattered uniform of a chef. Vaguely familiar, Soderini thought. A Brigata minion, a permanent fixture. The woman was the waitress. Her eyes sparkled with anticipation.
He looked around. Julia Wellbeloved was nowhere to be seen. Mariani stood at the front, shouting and waving his arms like the pompous buffoon he was.
‘What is this noise?’ he bellowed. ‘Be gone! You disturb the evening…’
The idiotic rant went on. Soderini didn’t listen. Instead he caught the glint in the woman’s eye and retreated further into the darkness, slipping the handgun by his side. There was no clear shot for him, not through the forest of bodies ahead; a dozen men in suits, civil servants and businessmen, hangers-on and Florentine arrivistes, milling around this angry, strange couple.
Many things happened in these caves and never found their way out into the light of day. Perhaps they thought this was one more show, another theatrical performance to amuse the satyrs frozen in the walls: two figures like comical, avenging chefs, marching from the kitchen, looking for someone. That was clear.
The man had a pistol low in his right hand, the woman some kind of larger semiautomatic.
What was a small handgun against a weapon like that? Soderini, a practical, careful man, knew the answer.
A hole in the wall of the final chamber, a secret door crammed with flailing bodies, men in suits, drunk and fearful, trying to squeeze their way through.
Fratelli’s head felt strange. The closeness of the caverns, the heat, the noise, the damp and noxious air… all these things conspired to bewilder him, to fill his fevered mind with fear and uncertainty.
It happens soon, he thought. And there are still such matters to be dealt with.
Julia was here. He’d sent her into the presence of the man who’d murdered Vanni Tornabuoni; someone who was there that distant, dismal night of the flood when Florence succumbed to the cold embrace of the river and Chiara died on the staircase of their house not far from the tragic couple in the Brancacci.
The painful round of self-hate was interrupted. From somewhere came the low rattle of a weapon and the shrill sound of a human scream.
Bodies poured towards him, scattering tables along the way. The mass seemed impenetrable, the panic a human flood; a relentless, inevitable tide, impossible to hold back.