‘What, may I ask, is this?’ Signora Grassi demanded the moment they came in. ‘You know I wish to clean alone.’ Her beady eyes fell on Julia. ‘And who…?’
‘My latest guest,’ Fratelli announced. Then, as if it explained everything, ‘She’s English.’
‘Have you taken your tablets?’ she asked, eyes narrowing. ‘I’ve counted those in the bathroom and it would seem so. But I know your dark and sneaky nature by now, Fratelli. If you wash them down the sink…’
‘I took them!’ he said quickly, scuttling past her. ‘A book if you please. Then we’re gone.’
The woman held her broom like a weapon as Fratelli led Julia up the stairs and, for the first time, beyond his front door into the flat beyond. The place was rather more ordered than she expected, with a polished pine floor and a window on to the narrow street that led to Santa Maria del Carmine. A small table with dinner plates was tucked into an alcove. Shelves of books covered every wall. Between the history and art titles was an expensive-looking record player with a set of classical albums neatly lined beneath. Opposite was a single leather chair. This was a room for one person only.
Fratelli marched over to the rows of titles above the hi-fi system, chose the one he wanted, then led her back past the glowering figure on the staircase.
‘She didn’t seem much of a dragon,’ Julia observed once they were back in the street and out of earshot.
‘The woman was in a better mood than usual. Take my word: Grassi is a she-devil. Though I love her dearly. Come.’
They walked round the corner into the tree-lined piazza of Santo Spirito. In the dark November drizzle, the square of one of Florence’s oldest churches looked a little worse for wear. Stray cats scavenged the rubbish bins, sorry tramps begged for money as they sheltered in doorways. The city changed as it crossed the river. This was not pretty or fey, but real and grim. Mean, even, a word she could never have applied to the elegant streets around the Duomo and the Piazza della Signoria.
The ice-cream parlour turned out to be a tiny, narrow room, little more than a corridor, one side lined with gleaming silver tubs full of ice cream, and what looked like a disused domed pizza oven at the rear. A cheery man of some size perched on a stool behind the counter. He knew Fratelli. Perhaps everyone in Oltrarno did. They were the only customers, seated at a rickety table by the window, watching the rain and the tramps. He picked at a pistachio cone while Julia stirred the crema of a very fine cappuccino. The idea of eating ice cream on a dark November evening was a step too far.
‘Wellbeloved,’ Fratelli said with a sudden, bright smile. ‘What a beautiful name. Beneamato. So, are you?’
‘Am I what?’
‘Beloved? Family. Boyfriends. Girlfriends. Who knows? I’m across the hallway from you. It’s important we should be frank with one another during your stay. To avoid any embarrassing moments. I have no restrictions on what you may do in my house. Provided it is as close to legal as a generous morality such as mine allows. No’ — he made a gesture of rolling a cigarette and then putting it between his lips — ‘magic puff, puff. This isn’t London.’
Her face flushed. ‘That’s a lot of very personal questions, if you don’t mind my saying so. Nor do I indulge in’ — her slender fingers mimicked his gestures — ‘magic puff, puff.’
His tidy silver brows furrowed in bafflement. ‘This last I believe,’ Fratelli said. ‘So why the reticence on the rest?’
‘Because you don’t know me!’
He licked the cone, shaking his head. ‘This is why I ask. The English… Sometimes you’re very obtuse. How are we to become better acquainted if you tell me nothing about yourself?’
‘In England—’
‘You’re in Florence.’
‘In England,’ she repeated, ‘we get to know one another gradually.’
‘Bah!’ A gob of green ice cream flew from his cone as his hand gestured at the air. ‘Patience is for idle fools. Do you really have time for such games? The world’s a fragile place. Who knows what tomorrow may bring? I ask you these things, Julia Wellbeloved, so that we may put such small matters out of the way and discuss the mystery of our tarnished Eve.’
‘In England!’ she repeated again, more loudly.
‘Oh. I understand. You behave as if you’re trapped inside the pages of that writer who came here. Forster. What was the book called?’
She had to think quickly. This man seemed to demand it. ‘A Room With a View?’
‘Correct. Well, I am not running the Pensione Bertolini. Nor do you look much like a lost and insipid young thing who goes by the name of Lucy.’ His face darkened for a moment. ‘Though there was a murder in that book, if I recall correctly. So it cannot have been entirely without interest.’
‘It was about repression, I think,’ she suggested.
‘How very like your race. My point exactly. So, Julia Wellbeloved. Who are you?’
What was there to say? Not much, so she told him — some, anyway. Twenty-eight years old. A recently enrolled postgraduate student at University College, London. Daughter to a widowed general practitioner from Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. Not poor; certainly not rich. Blessed with a limited talent with a paintbrush but not a scintilla of originality, though this never affected her love of art, that of the Italian Renaissance in particular. The rest, her private view of herself, she withheld, though it occurred to her that a perceptive man like Fratelli could probably guess for himself.
Not unattractive, yet insufficiently striking to turn a head. Able to acquire a husband when the curiosity took her, but not for long. The determination and the conviction were lacking. The same might be said of her brief career as a commercial lawyer, straining at the lead, with no success, to find some criminal work to keep her mind alert. That was at an end now, too, which meant she came to Florence without ties of any kind, would be here for a month, no more, then return to London to finish her postgraduate studies in the same uncertain condition.
‘And after you have unravelled the motives of the murderers of art?’ Fratelli asked.
Julia finished her coffee and found herself lost for an answer. He waited, just long enough, then said, ‘Sometimes we’re defined as much by what we’re not as what we are. There’s nothing wrong in this, I think. The sin is to allow ourselves to be fixed by the opinions and the desires of others. Whether through fear or laziness. Better to be a shapeless creature flitting through the dark than a trapped bird in an ugly cage, crammed into a pre-formed mould that the world wishes filled for no other reason than because it’s there. Which is the sad fate of most, let’s face it.’
‘You’d make a terrible careers advisor.’
‘I’d make a terrible anything. Except a detective. I was good at that.’ A flash of fierceness crossed his gentle face. ‘I still am. Given the opportunity.’
‘Why don’t you have it?’
‘They deny it to me on the grounds I’m sick.’ He put a finger to his white hair and twirled it. ‘Here. Matto. Crazy. What’s that word you have? I know. I studied English once. Ah, yes.’ He leaned forward and whispered, as if it were a secret, ‘Bonkers! I am bonkers as a mole.’
‘Do you say that in Italian? Mad as a mole?’
‘Sì. A mole. Also I’m a liar and an impostor. Your own frankness demands candour on my part also.’ He licked the last blob of green gelato from his cone, stared at her and said, ‘I am not who I seem.’
‘You mean…?’
She couldn’t imagine what.
‘Pino Fratelli,’ the man in the thick coat said very forcefully, ‘is a fraud. Strictly speaking, he doesn’t exist.’