His mother’s dead voice whispered in his ear, the words he’d first heard forty years before.
‘We’re all part of this story, Pino. We always will be.’
Not me, he thought. I didn’t believe that then. I don’t now. We’re what we make of ourselves, not the product of another’s imagination.
The man in front of him stood still, waiting it seemed, Julia firm in his grip.
Fratelli stepped forward, struggling to keep his balance. His head was ringing with sounds, voices, memories. It was a struggle to raise the gun ahead of him, to say in a shaking voice, ‘Let her go, Aldo. For God’s sake, no more blood.’
A booming, hollow sound, like wood exploding. The main doors to Carmine thrown open. The shouts of men. Carabinieri, Fratelli didn’t doubt it.
‘You let your wife go!’ Pontecorvo cried. ‘What about her blood? Who are you to speak?’
‘Pino,’ Julia said. ‘Don’t come closer. Don’t…’
Fratelli raised the gun again, loosed a second shell into the ceiling, felt fresco and plaster fall around him like hard rain.
For a moment his vision blurred, went black. He could hear his own breathing. Feel the blood racing through his veins.
When his sight came back, he was aware of something else. Behind Pontecorvo and Julia a figure in black, hunched in the corner. Couldn’t see who. Anyone might have dashed through the shadows of Carmine, got into that place unnoticed.
Men behind, low voices. Marrone issuing orders. The metallic snap of weapons being prepared.
The black shape shot out of the corner, arm raised, silver blade glinting, fell on Aldo Pontecorvo’s back, stabbing, shrieking, flailing at the tall man’s back.
A howl of agony and shock. Julia slipped free. Fratelli seized her arm as she fell forward, dragged her forcefully into his arms. Then the two of them fell to the wall, against the faces of dead Florentine nobles, locked together, breathing in anxious gasps.
Two shapes on the floor, entwined like one. An arm rising, falling, a long knife smeared in blood.
Marrone was there, Cassini too, yelling, swearing.
Pino Fratelli wasn’t holding Julia any more. She was holding him. Something in her eyes… Fratelli was unable to find the words to frame the question.
A final scream and the black shape rose from the chapel floor. Aldo Pontecorvo lay on the tiles, face up, eyes glassy, mouth open, blood on his neck, blood everywhere.
A breathless man climbed to his feet and stood over him, dagger in hand.
‘Bruno?’ Sandro Soderini said, walking through the crowd of carabinieri, into the chapel’s heart.
Marrone followed, eyeing the priest and the weapon in his hand. Luca Cassini too, bending down on the floor to check the still figure there.
He didn’t look up when he said, ‘Well, this one’s gone. That’s for sure.’
All eyes on the parish priest of Santa Maria del Carmine. Father Bruno Lazzaro. A man Fratelli had known since childhood.
‘I heard a noise.’ His wild eyes ranging the chamber. ‘While I was in here working. This…’ His hand gestured to the dread shape on the ground. ‘This animal had a woman with him. A weapon. I had to act. It wasn’t…’
Julia’s arms left him. Fratelli clung to the wall, head clearing at that point. Mind focusing.
‘He told me, Priest!’ she said without the least hesitation, pointing back towards the column with the fallen couple. Then, more quietly, as Bruno Lazzaro glared at her, ‘He told me. The cockerel was for Tornabuoni. The shape above the snake…’
Her hand swept the fresco. Julia Wellbeloved glanced at Fratelli.
‘It was a dog collar, Pino. Not a halo.’
Fratelli closed his eyes and wanted to laugh.
‘He thought Lazzaro would be at the Brigata tonight,’ she went on. ‘And when he wasn’t, he came for him here. For you. Because—’
‘What are these lies?’ the man in black bellowed, raising the knife.
Cassini was on him like a shot, forcing the blade from his hand with a wrench of the wrist and a simple, ‘I’ll have that, thank you.’
Julia circled the priest. ‘You and Tornabuoni raped her. Then you murdered her.’
‘No!’
‘Both of you, while Aldo Pontecorvo, a frightened, broken child, someone you’d used already, listened. Watched. And when you’d fled and he could think of nothing else, he painted that dismal frown on her dead lips.’
She went quiet, for Fratelli’s sake. No need. He could picture this already, every moment, each step along the grim and bloody way.
With a nod he walked into the centre of the chapel, looked at the priest, beckoned with his gloved hand, the gun still in it and said, ‘More.’
‘These are lies!’ Lazzaro cried. ‘I saw nothing.’
Fratelli raised the weapon to the priest’s head. No one moved. No one spoke.
‘It wasn’t me, Pino! Chiara called us in from the street. Tornabuoni… my back was turned. I was downstairs. She said there was a little dinghy you used for fishing. I went looking for it.’
A gesture as if from the pulpit, then hands to his face, despair and sorrow.
‘When I came back that beast—’
‘He told me,’ Julia cut in. ‘Everything he’d never dared before. He heard her screams.’
‘No!’
She walked forward, stood next to Fratelli to face the priest directly. ‘Then, on the staircase, you held Chiara’s arms while Tornabuoni throttled her.’ A stabbing finger in his face. ‘You!’
‘And you’d believe this filth?’ Lazzaro asked, and fetched a kick at the slashed corpse by his feet. ‘You trust his word over a man of God?’
‘But God wasn’t there, Bruno,’ Fratelli said calmly. ‘Not on that long and miserable night just when you needed him. He’d left you on your own. Hadn’t he?’
Fratelli took one step closer, passed the weapon to Cassini, looked at the man in black and waited.
So many faces on them at that moment. Marrone’s men and Soderini. Julia. The young carabiniere Pino Fratelli had so come to admire. And the stern, judgemental citizens, given a kind of immortality by the brushes of artists long dead.
A cruel scowl crossed the priest’s face. He surveyed them all. ‘You pompous, craven asses. You sin like animals and pass the guilt to me.’ He stabbed his chest with a bloody hand. ‘It was the end of the world.’
Cassini had got a pair of handcuffs from somewhere and was unwinding them.
‘The end of the world,’ Bruno Lazzaro murmured. ‘Am I owed nothing? No pleasure? No company?’
The young carabiniere took his hands, slapped the cuffs on his wrists.
‘This is what you’re owed, chum. And the rest to come. Pino?’
Fratelli’s head felt as if it was clearing. He wondered what might replace the terrors and fears and fury that had festered there so long.
Then something new began to rise inside him, cold and roaring, as big as the world, as determined and inevitable as death itself.
The flood. It was here now. In truth it had never gone away.
The bright and vivid colours around him lost their lustre. Not long after, his limbs failed too. Pino Fratelli felt himself falling towards Carmine’s hard cold stones and the fast-approaching dark.
December 1986
Snow beyond the windows of the private room. Bare trees in the distance. A city turning white beneath the blizzard. Foreign voices in the corridor outside.
This is not home, Pino Fratelli thought. This is not a place to die.
He lay on the hard hospital bed feeling drowsy from the drugs and the disease. The doctors and nurses had left them for this brief moment before the theatre. Now Julia Wellbeloved and Luca Cassini sat on either side of him; Julia on his right, squeezing the hand that still had a little feeling, Luca making small talk.