‘Show me what?’ the man demanded.
There were no easy beginnings, no simple answers, and what responses there were lay buried deep, hidden beneath the stultifying layers of time and hurtful memories.
‘Enough,’ Chavah screamed, turning, flecks of spittle flying from her furious lips, the weapon tight in her strong, bronzed arms.
Fratelli took one step forward. A mistake.
Aldo Pontecorvo watched her start to move and, as she did, he placed the handgun from the Fiesole farmhouse close to the back of her head and pulled the trigger.
The second shot he’d ever fired. The second death after Tornabuoni’s.
A scream in the miasmic, close cavern air, and a small, taut body tumbling, arms flailing, towards the suited corpse upon the floor.
Three more shells fired wildly around him as Pontecorvo stumbled backwards, making his way by the dim light of the wan candles. He fell upon the ancient fountain at the rear and, with all his strength, heaved at the central statue there, toppling it, sending the marble figures crashing to the floor.
The weight and pressure in the hillside cistern was released at that moment, as the Arno had been twenty years before. Chill water gushed out of the shattered mouth. Voices bellowed and shrieked behind him.
He pushed through the torrent, raced out into the cold open air, found the first van at the back of the cavern. Behind him he could hear the freed waters gushing wildly from the shattered fountain. The flood was here again.
A lunge for the driver’s door, someone in the way, not moving.
The memory came quickly. The Loggia dei Lanzi on another damp, dark night; Vanni Tornabuoni’s head in his sack bag, a boatman’s hook to hand, waiting on the moment.
She wore a black evening dress with pearls around her smooth, white throat. Her hair was silver in the moonlight, her eyes intelligent, as indignant as scared.
Shrewd enough to flee the cavern once Chavah walked in and shook that rifle at them. To hide somewhere she must have thought as safe a place as any.
‘Who are you?’ he began.
‘No one,’ she answered in that same English accent he remembered. ‘Let me go.’
What are you looking at? Niente, niente, niente.
The same answer, the same lie.
He thrust her through the door, forced her into the driver’s seat. A face more serene than Chavah Efron’s. Not so far from that of the first beautiful Eve on the Brancacci wall.
‘Drive,’ he ordered, raising his pistol to her face. ‘Where I want to go. Drive. Or I shoot you now.’
Luca Cassini was there first, so quickly he managed to bang on the door of the van as it struggled along the lane towards Oltrarno. Moments after, he was leaping into a second vehicle, screaming at them to get in.
Marrone made it into the rear. Fratelli, in the passenger seat, watching Cassini struggle with the ignition, heard an unexpected voice.
‘This isn’t a place for you,’ the captain said.
‘I’ll decide that,’ Soderini replied, scrambling in beside him.
Cassini managed to bring the engine to life. And then they lurched off down the passageway.
It was narrow and winding, but not so much that Fratelli expected to see Pontecorvo’s van ahead. There it was, anyway, on the main road from the Ponte Vecchio, slowly heading for a side-street corner, back into the warren of houses and alleys that stretched along the river.
‘Where on earth’s he going, Pino?’ Cassini asked. ‘You’re always full of ideas.’
Fratelli barely heard. His blood was racing, veins pulsing in his temples. He was glad of the seat, that he could hold on to the door with his hand as Luca Cassini chased after the fugitive Pontecorvo. The monster was stirring, choosing its time, as he always knew it would.
‘Pino!’ Cassini said, fighting with the wheel as he shook Fratelli’s arm. ‘Are you OK?’
‘He’s taking Julia back,’ Fratelli said in a quiet, weary voice.
‘Back where?’
‘To Chiara…’
Cassini swore. The van ahead had lurched off to the right, was tearing down a single cobbled lane. Away from Fratelli’s terraced house.
‘Any other ideas?’ the young officer asked.
Fratelli was about to speak when his shoulder shook violently.
‘My gun,’ Soderini ordered, and a hand appeared.
‘Carmine,’ Fratelli muttered, ignoring the man behind. In his head he could see the figures on the walclass="underline" two peaceful and beatific, two in agony. It might have been Chiara’s face for Eve. Or Julia’s. He was no longer sure.
‘My gun!’
Fratelli turned, pistol in hand, aimed it gently in the mayor’s direction.
The van slowed down. There was silence in the dark interior.
Silence even from Sandro Soderini, wild-eyed and furious as he stared down the man in front of him.
‘This is mine,’ Fratelli said as they approached the low church steps and saw a tall figure fly out of the door, dragging Julia with him. ‘And so is he.’
The Brancacci in moonlight. A naked couple frescoed forever on the pillars.
Fratelli took three difficult steps forward, listened. The hissing sea of tinnitus was starting in his head. His mind couldn’t focus. And still he had Soderini’s gun tight in his right hand, clutched to his waist.
Voices in the shadows, among the still and watchful crowds on the walls.
A man’s wild chattering. Julia’s quiet tones.
Trying to reassure him. To say…
Calm down. Be reasonable. All this will end. And end well.
Such an English response. So civilized and in this of all places, the sacred, ancient corner of Oltrarno where humanity’s dawdling trek out of the Dark Ages was supposed to begin.
A burst of dim light. A handful of the bulbs in Carmine’s interior began to come to life.
Marrone was talking frantically into his radio. Luca Cassini came and placed his burly frame in front, the way he always would. And Sandro Soderini…
The briefest of glances around revealed nothing.
‘You stay out of this, Pino,’ Cassini said as Fratelli walked on.
He saw them now. The tall, miserable figure of Aldo Pontecorvo, in the centre of the chapel; Julia in his arms, a gun to her throat.
She didn’t look so scared. More angry, Fratelli thought.
‘Keep back!’ the young carabiniere yelled and tried to hold him.
Fratelli raised Soderini’s weapon to the ceiling, loosed off a shell. Listened to the shot boom around the nave.
‘I don’t wish to hurt you, Luca,’ he said, elbowing the young cop aside. ‘So kindly keep out of my way.’
No sheets or scaffolding any more. The restorers’ work almost done. No bloody smears from a cockerel’s neck; no dust of the ages or stains from that terrible inundation two decades before.
This was a world, a universe, in miniature. The eternal couple either side, beckoning the congregation into a sea of humanity; behind them faces speaking another old story, that of Saint Peter, played out on frescoed walls.
Fratelli could remember his mother — the only true mother he could accurately picture — telling him those stories. Peter healing the cripple, raising the dead Tabitha and the son of Theophilus. Curing the sick with his shadow. Arguing with the magician Simon Magus in front of the cruel emperor Nero. Finally crucified upside down in front of a set of medieval walls that might have been the Porta San Frediano a few footsteps beyond the door.
And all the while the world watched; ordinary men, ordinary faces, Florentines through and through, peering from the brushstrokes left by Masaccio, Masalino and Filippino Lippi half a millennium before.
Pontecorvo and Julia seemed to be part of this visual narrative, distantly observed from the vaulted ceiling by a flock of curious angels and a Virgin, enthroned on high.