That was Mags. Benny had no idea what the Sergeant’s birth name was. It was the Sergeant who kept watch over the place under the bridge to make sure it got cleared up every morning or the Bill would have something to say. (Thames police had a station just by Waterloo Bridge, too.) Benny didn’t know where the Sergeant stashed the blankets and pallet. But the Sergeant had said that as Benny was working all day and bringing food back for them, the least they could do for him and Sparky was take care of his stuff. Benny could have afforded a bed-sit somewhere nearer his job in Southwark. People were always putting up little cards in Mr. Siptick’s window advertising bed-sits and rooms for rent. The problem wasn’t money, but age. What landlady would rent to a twelve-year-old boy (and his dog)? What would happen, and he knew it would happen, was the Social. His mum had warned him and so had Mags. For Benny the Social had horns and cloven feet.
Benny loved the Victoria Embankment, Waterloo Bridge and Westminster Bridge beyond it, and up the other way was Blackfriars, and the Thames in the early morning layered in mist. He liked to watch the river and think about the stories the Sergeant was always telling him about the old docks and warehouses, Wapping and Stepney, Whitechapel and Limehouse. All the ships, maybe five hundred of them, coming up the Thames from Gravesend, when the Thames was a real working river. It still was, but now, not much muscle or sinew-too many boats carrying tourists back and forth.
Occasionally, a sunset could be so intense that it looked as if London were burning. Great flares of orange and red that seemed impossible to have ignited over a city so vastly gray, and often dreary, Benny thought, if you didn’t look underneath.
There was always underneath. You couldn’t take things at face value. He thought of his mother, Mary. Underneath her head scarf and wool shawl, his mother was never a beggar. She had lost everything in one fell swoop-Benny’s father, and his pay, and she having no skills to work going had lost their little house in County Clare. But there had been those fortunate few years when she had worked as cook for the bankrupt family, but that too had gone. It was a terrible thing about coming finally to the streets; it was a long slide that you’d thought you’d stopped once, twice, three times; that you thought you’d got a handle on, and then only to find you’d slid farther down until your bum at last connected with cement.
He could see each of them now with his chop on the end of a stick holding it over the fire, and the Sergeant on his way back. He wore a long, heavy brown coat that had all of its buttons still. He was very proud that it didn’t look seedy. It was all he had, the Sergeant had told Benny, from the old life in National Service. “Mucked about in the military police, me, in the war. Be surprised what you learn as an MP. Proper job I had of it, sorting out who done what to who. But it seems I’ve a mind for that sort of thing.”
They had sat down to look out over the river. Benny said, “I met a policeman a couple days ago. A detective from Scotland Yard.”
“Scotland Yard? Now that’s something, that is. What did he want?”
Benny told him about the murder. “He wanted to know about Gem, too.”
“That poor little girl someone wants her out of the way? Never did hear of such a thing. Terrible.”
“The thing is, I always took it that Gem was making it up. You know, so people’d pay attention to her. She hasn’t got a proper family, I mean, no mum or dad, sisters, brothers-she hasn’t got anyone.”
“It’s a puzzle, young Ben, it surely is.” He was quiet for a few moments. “I wonder… now, I had experience as an MP with a young soldier who was, uh, messing around with the captain’s wife. I finally twigged it, but what he done, see, was parade a good-looking German tart-ahem, I mean a woman-around just to put us off the scent. With a girl that looked like her, why bother with the wife? What I’m sayin’ is, could the business with young Gemma be a distraction?”
Benny frowned. “Distraction? But from what?”
The Sergeant shrugged, wetting cigarette paper with the tip of his tongue. “How about that murder?”
“Yes, but… trying to kill Gem, all that happened before the murder.”
“Still…”
They were silent for a few moments as the Sergeant smoked his cigarette. Benny looked through the dark out over the river to the lights on the far side. “Still, I wish that detective’d come back.”
The Sergeant pinched the end of his cigarette before lighting it. “You can bank on that, young Ben. The Bill always comes back.”
II Firenze Farrago
Twenty-three
That part of the Ponte Vecchio that he could see from this upper story of the tiny hotel was drenched in light. Such a distillation, such a concentration of light, Melrose had never seen before. It cast a golden skin across the Arno and beaded the graceful arc of the bridge where the goldsmiths traded, as if even more gold were called for, as if there could never be too much of it, as if the city could dissolve into sheer light and luster.
Florence’s abundant charms had laid themselves at his feet last night when, after stowing their things in the high cool rooms of their small hotel, they had gone in search of dinner. Trueblood had picked this hotel, liking its seclusion on a street so narrow it could hardly accommodate more than the two of them walking abreast. The hotel seemed to occupy no more than a floor of a building that seemed otherwise tenantless. Melrose loved it; he loved the lobby-reception room, the antique furnishings of his own small room and everything going about in slippered silence.
Except Trueblood, who now stood in his doorway. “Come on come on come on come on” jabbered Trueblood, with the speed of an auctioneer.
It was, thought Melrose, an unseemly pace for this otherwise slow morning. “Good lord, allow me to enjoy this vision of Florence.”
“We want to go to the Brancacci Chapel. That’s first.”
Trueblood was carrying the brown-paper-wrapped Masaccio panel, about as convenient as lugging an oar around. There had been a bit of a row with a long-suffering flight attendant over the disposition of this long parceclass="underline" Trueblood wanted it sitting in the seat beside him (as if St. Who was not very sturdy on his legs), and the flight attendant had told him no. It must ride somewhere out of people’s way. And, no, he could not purchase another ticket for it. Trueblood had given in and put it overhead, but had not been happy. He got a crick in his neck from constantly having to look up.
As Melrose swept coins and credit cards off the nightstand and into his pocket, he said, “Aren’t you afraid you’ll lose that walking around?”
“No.”
They left the room, Melrose sighing and exclaiming he trusted he wasn’t to be herded around at this pace the entire time they would be here. Trueblood didn’t answer, just went on before him through the little lobby. Melrose loved the cool space of this lobby, with its blush-tinted stone flooring, rich dark moldings and white busts in alcoves. Reception consisted of a Regency desk and the chap behind it. The breakfast room, where Melrose was headed, though Trueblood was not, was large enough for only four tables and gave the impression, since the other three were unoccupied, that it was a dining room of one’s own.