He mumbled something that sounded like, ‘Just in case.’
‘Was there much for you to do here? When you were a carabiniere?’
‘What do you think?’
She thought about it and said, ‘Not a lot.’
‘Theft and drugs. Wife-beating and the occasional assault. Murder very rarely. Malice domestic, usually, as I think the English describe it. Man against wife. Once and once only wife against husband. Florence is not a normal city in many ways, but humanity possesses some universal qualities.’
Fratelli took one last glance at the river, the Uffizi, the flashing blue lights beyond the arches. Then the bus went behind the line of buildings leading to the Ponte Vecchio and the narrow streets that meandered towards Carmine and home. Whatever was happening in the Piazza della Signoria, they’d see no more of it.
‘You don’t have to go to Soderini’s squalid party,’ he said. ‘Not for my benefit. It was thoughtless of me to ask.’
‘It wouldn’t be for your benefit, would it? For ours. I want to write this study. I need to.’
A few hours earlier she’d considered going back to England, throwing herself on the mercy and bank account of her father. At the age of twenty-eight. The idea was unconscionable. Running away would be a cowardly, miserable act. And where would she find herself when she stopped? Alone again, in limbo.
‘If I help you find this man it will make my paper better,’ she said. ‘Academia likes the odd small thrill too, you know. A theory proved by practical action. A guaranteed success. There. Self-interest. Your conscience is salved.’
He winced and she thought for a moment he was in pain.
‘Are you all right?’ Julia asked.
‘Never better. And now? My last story?’
‘Not if you don’t want to.’
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘And I do. The trouble is, I’ve never really told anyone before.’
She felt nervous at that. ‘Why?’
‘Because there was no one to listen. No one who’d believe me anyway. Or try to understand. I was mad for a while.’ His eyes were glassy and blank. ‘Truly. Before this present sickness. A long time ago. I didn’t know who I was. Or what. Walter Marrone could have fired me then if he’d wanted. Perhaps that would have been the right thing to do.’
‘Pino…’
‘No, please.’ He shook his head, then peered at her so directly, with such an earnest, pained honesty, she felt her breath catch. ‘You ask such pertinent questions. Why? How is this? In twenty years I’ve never known anyone…’ His voice fell to a whisper. ‘In all that time.’
She took his gloved hand and looked him in the eye. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Julia told him. ‘Let’s forget all this. I’ll go back to my paper. On Thursday I’ll visit San Marco, then Soderini’s party. You can chase your chicken-murderer…’
‘I’m not chasing a murderer of chickens,’ he muttered with an uncharacteristic sourness. ‘I never have been…’
‘You’re starting to worry me.’
‘Only now?’ he asked, suddenly amused.
‘Yes. Only now.’
‘You asked what causes… this.’ Fratelli pointed at his white hair and then his temple. ‘Here is my theory. A lunatic’s explanation for his madness. Treat it as such.’
The bus lurched through Santo Spirito. She could see tramps sheltering in the doorways and arches of the closed shops.
‘On occasion a man or woman… a child… meets something dark and alien,’ Fratelli said as he stared outside the window. ‘A black, bad thing we label evil — for our own sake, mainly. Because we wish it to be separate from ourselves, not a wickedness that stems from the fragile creatures we are.’
She could see the piazza with the church of Carmine in the distance. So could he.
‘Those painters in the Brancacci understood all that,’ Fratelli went on. ‘Why else did the serpent have the head of a beautiful woman? My belief…’
He scrubbed the misty window with the arm of his sleeve, checking for the bus stop.
‘My feeling is that everyone meets the black thing some time. It’s how we grow. How we survive. And most sensible people…’ He turned and looked at her. ‘Like you. They will recognize it, be afraid of it, reject it, let it go. Spit out the monster the way a child coughs up something nasty. Vomit all that black bile out of their systems and carry on with their lives.’
He reached for the rope that rang the driver’s bell and got up. She followed him to the door. It was so stiff he had to force it open when the bus came to a halt.
The rain was falling steadily. He raised his umbrella briskly and held it over her as she joined him.
‘I think I first met it when I was four years old,’ Fratelli went on as they walked. ‘When the Nazis pushed me out of Rome, seizing my parents, my real mother and father, as I fled. I swallowed down that grief. I let it live inside me. Like a malevolent foul bundle of hate that I clutched to my heart. Not that I knew. I was a child. I thought it was part of my imagination. Something that would go away…’
She wound her arm inside his without thinking. This was Italy. Not England. Even men walked together like this. Closeness, a sense of shared humanity, was normal.
Fratelli pointed to the pizza restaurant on the corner and asked her if she needed something else to eat. No, she said, trying to smile.
‘Let’s talk again in the morning, shall we?’ Julia suggested as he opened the door to the little terraced house. ‘It’s been a long day for both of us.’
‘I haven’t finished,’ Fratelli said, then strode up the stone steps, opened his door and ushered her in. ‘I’ve barely started.’
The place was too warm. The lights were still burning. An LP sat on the hi-fi as if begging to be played.
He walked over to a plain white set of drawers and took out an old photo album, placed it on his untidy dining room table, next to the books and the record covers. Fratelli called her over and her heart sank as he flicked through the pages.
Julia recalled the odd conversation in the café that morning. The sympathy of the Grassi couple. The mention of a wife.
Here she was, in photos that looked as if they came from another era. Fading already. A lovely dark-haired woman, smiling, with bright, intelligent eyes. Beautiful in an elaborate white wedding gown next to a grinning, bashful Pino Fratelli, the two of them outside the church of Carmine along the road. Later, in the washed-out colours of a distant, lost summer; at the beach, in a rundown old car. Happy in a tiny, battered dinghy on a river, a fishing rod in Fratelli’s hands.
‘I didn’t cough up the black thing,’ he said, staring at the photos. He closed the album. ‘So a part of it never left. After a while the rest came back, out in the open, released by something from the place I kept it captive. I think…’
Pino Fratelli tapped his hair again; longer than it was twenty years before; white, not black.
‘If I’d spat it out of me the way I should, this never would have happened. And much else besides.’
‘You can’t blame yourself for things that—’
‘How do you know?’ he roared, eyes wild with fury, arms flailing. ‘What do you know? Of me? Of this city? Of anything?’
His voice was so loud she scarcely recognized it. Or his face, which was torn by grief and anger.
‘Oh, God…’ Fratelli cried, his hands clawing at his face. ‘Now I scream at the one person who listens to me. Jesus…’
There was a bottle of grappa on the shelf. He was going for it. She strode forward and stood in the way.
‘I’m allowed just a small one,’ he told her, calm again, his gentle face so full of grief and shame it tore at her heart. ‘My doctor says so.’