He twirled the finger at his ear again and added, ‘Bonkers. See?’
‘As a mole,’ she murmured.
‘Exactly. Also…’ His gentle, pleasant face turned serious and grim. ‘I have an intuition. I can feel when bad things are going to happen. They say this is a part of the illness. The madness.’ He drained his glass. ‘But I tell them… no, it was always like this. When I was a child…’ His voice fell to a whisper. ‘Later.’
‘You mean… premonitions?’ she asked in a quiet, worried voice.
‘No. I don’t know what I mean. If I did…’ There was the faintest of smiles now. ‘I wouldn’t be mad now, would I?’
The ice cream was gone. Her cappuccino finished.
‘The book?’ she asked, anxious to change the subject, and concerned that Fratelli seemed to have forgotten why they braved the Grassi dragon.
He thought for a moment, then a light came on in his eyes. He dragged from the depths of his overcoat a thin volume on the Brancacci Chapel. On the cover was a photograph of Masaccio’s Adam and Eve, banished from Paradise, their faces racked with grief and shame.
‘This is a proof copy of the guide they intend to sell to tourists once the Brancacci is reopened. You can see the frescoes before and after restoration. Here is how they were when the Arno swept into that place twenty years ago.’
Fratelli placed a page in front of her.
She gazed at the tragic couple, expelled from immortality and perpetual joy by the scarlet angel brandishing a sword above them. Away from the chapel she felt some distance from these figures, a sense of useful perspective. What she saw now was both intriguing and bewildering.
‘Eve’s different when she leaves Eden,’ she said. ‘She’s fatter. Her body is more corpulent, more… physical.’
‘Well observed. The serpent has done her work. She now exists for the purpose of sex. Of bearing children — not as a solitary beauty, an intellectual mate for her man in Paradise. While Adam, even in his humiliation, seems little changed physically. This is a male world. And?’
It seemed impossible to believe. But there was the proof, on the page.
‘The fig leaves were there before,’ Julia said, staring at the vine that wound round the torsos of the agonized couple. This was no cardboard ornament from a tourist shop. It was real, painted on both frescoes around the lower regions of all four figures. Yet it was wrong too, somehow. ‘I thought the vandal was just being prudish. But he wasn’t. He was recreating something… something old and lost. He wasn’t the first to object to their nakedness.’
Pino Fratelli looked at her. He seemed fascinated.
‘I have a career for you, Miss Wellbeloved. Once you have purged these academic ambitions from your system. You must be a detective. Not only are you observant, but you interpret what you see very judiciously. This is rare in one so young. Though…’ He breathed on his fingernails, then brushed the front of his coat. ‘I possessed it in spades from an early age.’
‘When…?’ she began.
‘When I was younger than you. Oh! You mean the frescoes? The fig leaves were plastered on our beautiful couple, before and after the Fall, in the seventeenth century, by one more prudish barbarian of the Medici. Twenty years ago there was the great flood of Florence. An event of’ — his eyes turned black and sorrowful — ‘biblical magnitude, the papers will always say. For once they do not lie. The Brancacci Chapel was damaged. Not as badly as some places. But still sufficient to warrant restoration.’
Fratelli stopped. The man behind the counter of the ice-cream parlour had come over to collect the coffee cup and the half-eaten cone.
‘We’re closing,’ he said, eyeing them as if half expecting trouble. ‘Some of us have homes to go to.’
‘We all do, apart from our bearded friends outside in the street,’ Fratelli replied.
He watched the man go, then leaned across the table.
‘Even now, two decades on, there’s much work to be done. In the case of the Brancacci, the city authorities undertook to remove the Medici’s ham-fisted ornamentation and return our pair of lovers to their original nakedness. Which is exceptionally frank, I might add. See. Our couple in Paradise here…’
He flipped to another page and then a close-up. Her eyes widened in amazement. In the Brancacci she’d focused on the blood and the damaged face of Eve in The Temptation. Now she could see the subjects in greater, more candid detail. She was used to nakedness in classical Italian art, familiar with the way it was toned down too. Pubic hair was mostly unknown, and only seen when male genitalia were displayed quite frankly. The female form though…
‘Am I seeing what I think?’ she asked.
Fratelli threw his arms wide open and said nothing.
It was unmistakable. Masolino’s original depicted Eve almost naturally. No hair, but there was the distinct line of a vagina depicted on her torso. It seemed, too, that the female head of the serpent was gazing down directly towards it.
‘That’s new,’ she said. Her fingers ran across the book and the image there. Julia Wellbeloved felt excited, enthused, thrilled by the prospect of the mystery that Pino Fratelli seemed to be placing in front of her.
‘It’s shocking, I agree,’ Fratelli replied. ‘To some sensitive souls, at least. To depict a woman the way she really is, in her nakedness…’
‘Whoever damaged the paintings must have come from the congregation,’ she said confidently.
He demurred.
‘Too far,’ Fratelli said. ‘Think again.’
‘I can’t see any other possibility.’
‘Why do you assume the congregation is familiar with our newly naked Eves?’
She cursed herself. The entire chapel was closed for work. Heavy sheets and scaffolding set it apart from the main transept of the church.
‘Stupid of me. The only people who got to see it would be those involved in the restoration.’
‘Only?’ he asked. ‘A multitude, I would think. Visitors, workmen, art officials, experts in the dubious field of restoration. The lesser souls who must feed and serve them during their working day.’
His eyes gleamed.
‘Curious students with a mission. Still, it’s a start, and a start is all we need…’
‘Pino!’ barked the man behind the counter, tapping the watch on his wrist.
‘After ice cream comes Negroni,’ Fratelli said. ‘There’s only one place for that. Drink and a little food.’
‘I’ve things to do,’ she said, not entirely truthfully. ‘Tomorrow morning I meet the mayor.’
This news interested him. Fratelli placed a thoughtful finger on his cheek and murmured, ‘Sandro Soderini? I’m impressed.’
‘You know him?’
‘Everyone does, in theory anyway. He’s a Soderini. The closest we have to a Medici these days. I’m a little man from Oltrarno. I don’t move in such circles. But I know of him. An intelligent, educated man. His namesake was an aristocrat, uncle to the vile Lorenzino Medici, who murdered an even more vile Medici despot, another Alessandro, in a house not far from here. Lorenzino was later assassinated in Venice by Cosimo the First, the man who sits on the horse in the Piazza della Signoria with pigeons pooping on his head. Soderini can confirm all this for you. He was a professor of history before his elevation to that office of the Pope’s he now occupies in the Palazzo Vecchio. He’ll give you five minutes of his time then pass you to some pretty minion. Ask him to get you into the Vasari Corridor.’
‘The what?’
He wrote down the name on a napkin and passed it over. ‘He’ll know. It’s in his gift. Not many receive that favour. Only great statesmen and…’ He winked. ‘Pretty young women who catch Soderini’s eye.’
‘Oh,’ she whispered. ‘Thank you.’
He toyed with another napkin on the table. ‘After ice cream comes two Negroni, no more. I’m a man of habit, Julia Wellbeloved, solitary but not lonely. I like to know my guests a little, and always make this offer, whoever they may be. Hospitality is a duty for a host. You are my guest. But truly… I do not wish to foist myself upon you.’