‘I told you no lies,’ Fratelli objected. He pointed at his head, his pale finger prodding the thick white hair there. ‘I’m mad.’
‘As a mole?’
‘That’s how I think of it. Something dark with sharp teeth. Beneath the surface. Moving. Growing. Something I can’t see or touch. Or feel much any more, thanks to the drugs the kind and careful doctor prescribes. But something which’ — that very Italian frown once more, brief — ‘will one day break surface, look around and wish for a life of its own. Which will be my death, of course. And its, too. Not that the mole is to know. It’s an innocent creature. Entirely blameless. Such things happen.’
She sipped at her drink and watched him recounting all this as if it were the most natural sequence of events in the world.
‘When?’ Julia asked.
That shrug again.
‘Tonight. Tomorrow. Next week. Next month. Next year. Probably not beyond that. Or so all the specialists say. In the meantime I must be patient. I can’t drive. I can’t work. I mustn’t indulge in anything which may be stressful — the drugs are supposed to help there. I must wait for death and twiddle my fingers in the meantime. The twiddling is the grimmest part. Far worse than the sickness or the prospect of my… disappearance.’
He leaned forward and touched the sleeve of her coat, gazing intently into her eyes.
‘I’m no different to anyone else really. Each life winds down a day at a time. Mine travels at the same speed as yours. All that’s different is the duration, not the pace. Which, since I’m almost twenty years older than you in the first place, is only natural. Don’t feel sorry for me. Pity is the most debilitating of sentiments. Spare me that.’
‘My father’s a doctor,’ she said briskly. ‘He knows specialists in London…’
‘I’ve seen specialists in Florence, Rome, Milan, Turin. You think they’re somehow inferior?’
‘Of course not! But medicine’s not… fixed.’
‘It’s science with a little art on the side,’ he replied with a smile. ‘I had a friend who was a doctor once. Briefly. The relationship that is.’
‘Pino…’
‘You asked. I answered. I’m one more human being afflicted with an incurable disease. A kindly ailment in some ways. Most people never know. I can walk…’ He raised his glass. ‘I can drink, in moderation, naturally. I can play with puzzles.’ A broad and genuine smile. ‘And discuss them with my charming English lodger. People say they’re frightened of death. But really… I think it’s life that scares them the most. Mine’s not so bad. I just wish…’ A flash of anger. ‘I wish Walter would let me back in the stazione one more time. That boy Cassini’s no substitute. I have a feel for cases. For index cards and ancient records. I like the smell of old paper; the way you can pick it up, read the words, store them, make some connection elsewhere…’
A quick sip of Negroni.
‘That art’s dying faster than I am. Youngsters like Luca Cassini think machines should do this for them. In twenty years’ time original thought will be deemed heresy within the Carabinieri, and every other law-enforcement system in the world. Instead detectives will wait for computers and scientists to give them answers, and shriek in agony when those simple solutions aren’t forthcoming. I was never made for such a world. I need to think. And when I think, I live.’
‘Why?’ she asked.
Fratelli blinked at her, puzzled. ‘Why what?’
‘Why did you get it? This illness? What happened, to give it to you and not someone else?’
It seemed to her a simple question. She expected an equally straightforward answer. Asbestos in the office. Some hereditary factor, though given Fratelli’s curious background it seemed unlikely he would know about that. Or an accident. A blow. An admission that it was nothing more than bad luck. A dreadful twist of fate.
Instead he looked a little uncomfortable, shuffling on his chair at the back of the bar, fiddling with his fingers.
‘No one knows the cause,’ Fratelli said eventually. ‘They happen. Like the weather.’
‘Pino…’
‘No…’ He waved his hand at her. ‘I have strange ideas. Strange theories sometimes. You must have noticed.’ He brightened instantly, the way he did. ‘And I have fulfilled my obligation to you, Miss Wellbeloved! A frank confession of my previous lack of candour. Which was not so much a lie as an obfuscation of the truth, as I hope you’ll accept.’
‘Up to a point,’ she muttered, still dissatisfied.
‘Now.’ He was all smiles again. ‘It’s your turn. The mystery of the cock’s comb and cibreo. You have news for me?’
Just before nine, two Japanese tourists — a woman of twenty-one and her boyfriend — tottered into the square after an extortionate meal in the Borgo dei Greci. The rain was coming down steadily, sloping thirty degrees to the black shiny cobbles on the icy northern wind. The woman clutched a copy of a tourist guide, trying to scan the pages. The Piazza della Signoria was deserted on this bleak wet November night. She didn’t have much idea of the way back to the hotel. There was no one to ask in her shaky English.
‘That way,’ the boyfriend cried, pointing at the Ponte Vecchio. ‘That way!’
She was getting sick of him. Every night it was the same. Food, then drink, then sex. They could have been back in Tokyo, hunting for a cheap hotel in Roppongi. Why come to Italy for this?
‘I want to see something,’ she said, and walked into the centre of the square, peering at the damp, flapping pages of the book.
Statues, she thought. Paintings. Beauty. That’s why they came here. It had taken all her persuasion to get him into the Uffizi, where she’d marvelled at Botticelli’s swan-necked Venus while he sighed and grumbled about not being able to use his shiny new Canon SLR. But it was night now, and everything that Florence had to see lived inside, behind those stern, dark exteriors. She’d expected beauty everywhere: flower-filled piazzas, men with guitars and accordions, warmth and colour and life. The city wasn’t like that. It was cold, dour and severe as a hated maiden aunt.
‘I want to see…’
There was David ahead of them, illuminated in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, shining in the steady drizzle. Michelangelo, she thought. That was a name on the list.
Still clutching the book to her, glancing at the page, she crossed the empty piazza and stood in front of the tower of the palace. It looked like something out of Disneyland, she thought. There should have been knights in armour. Elegant, pale, blonde-haired ladies in medieval dress. Perhaps they were there sometimes. Just not on a night like this.
‘Seen it,’ he grumbled behind her. ‘Let’s go to bed.’
‘Bed can wait. Let’s see it again,’ she said, and stood in front of the tall, handsome nude whose eyes were set towards the river, aimed south at Rome, the book said, a warning to the Pope to heed Florence’s independence.
He looked strong and beautiful. A nice young man, her mother would have said. The kind of foreigner every Tokyo girl wanted to meet. But there was a slingshot over his shoulder and something in his eyes that said: don’t mess with me. I’m not just pretty. I’m tough too.
She could hear her boyfriend coughing and choking on the cobbles. Maybe he’d throw up again. She didn’t get why he had to drink so much. Especially the grappa which she hated.
‘There are more statues,’ she said, and liked the way he reacted, shaking his head as if in disgust, too frightened to argue. ‘Over there the book says. You can get dry.’
And you’d better not puke, she thought. That would be the end.
She strode over to the odd alcove by the entrance to the Uffizi, still wondering at the way the reality of Florence so contrasted with the image she’d built of the place when she read the guidebooks and histories back home. There was supposed to be magnificence everywhere, a visible show of all Europe’s grandeur. Not lowering fortresses hiding their riches behind windows cloaked in iron bars. The loggia was, she realized as she walked towards it, one of the few free displays of art anywhere they’d seen. A collection of statues set in a small enclosed area, the front open to view so that you could walk round them, feel close to the past.
‘What the hell’s that?’ the boyfriend asked, coming close and staring at the flapping, damp pages. He looked interested finally.
‘Perseus,’ she said, ‘with the Head of Medusa.’
‘Who?’
Something from mythology, she thought. Quite what… It was late. She was tired and a little woozy from cheap red Chianti. Another day…
He walked to the front of the statue and stared up at the warrior with the sword and the strange severed head in his hand. Then, like an idiot, he put a foot on the bottom ledge of the plinth, reached up and slapped the figure hard on the leg, yelling some stupid cry, the kind he copied from all the dumb Samurai TV shows he loved.
‘That’s the way!’ the boyfriend barked at the still figure above him. As he spoke a bead of something thick and dark dropped from the dangling head, landed on his face, spattered his eyes and lips.
Rain, she thought. Except rain didn’t move like that, slowly, in big, gouty gobs that looked too physical, too real to come from the sky.
She watched him start screaming. Watched him begin to gag and then puke. Then she looked at the statue again and, as her eyes adjusted to the faint lights of the Loggia dei Lanzi, saw the thing there, the staring eyes, the matted hair, the mouth open in terror.
Real, she thought. It looks so real, and then her legs buckled, her breath came in short, agonizing gasps and she fell on to the stones in the Piazza della Signoria as a black fog of nothing came to swim around her.