Chiara must have been glued to the set while he slept. What was it she’d told him? There were floods in the hills. People being moved out of their homes. It was foolish to believe his own colleagues weren’t part of that effort too. He belonged to a proud and decent organisation. It wouldn’t let others struggle alone against the vagaries of the elements.
Yet the phone never rang. Someone had to stay in the city. Twiddling their thumbs while the countryside was awash with rain and mud, displaced families and terrified animals. He wished it wasn’t him. Fratelli liked thought, action, helping people. But that was someone else’s decision.
Feet cold and wet, listening to the constant heavy patter of the rain, he walked briskly along the narrow street, past the hospital and the church, found the stazione and saw, through the glass door, a single uniformed officer on duty.
He wondered later why he’d turned back to see the way he came. Whether it was chance or instinct. That old inner eye he’d told himself he possessed, even when he was a child.
There was no knowing. Only the reality. Two weeks later, trying to come to terms with the greatest natural disaster he would ever experience, Fratelli learned it was around this time that the first victim came to die. Out in the hills, a fifty-two-year-old farmer in a tiny village had gone out to see the state of the land around his home. Along the way he met a group of neighbours and told them the area was a shambles, everything was going under. Then he went to try to reach his animals. Forty-eight hours later his corpse was found in a tunnel choked with mud; unrecognizable, twisted in pain and terror like an Egyptian mummy torn from its tomb.
One dead man in a far-off village. No one in Florence would have believed at that moment that more than thirty others still breathed in the city who would join him in the morgue in the painful days to come.
As Pino Fratelli watched the long and narrow street of Borgo Ognissanti, he heard something — a roaring animal voice beneath his feet. The ground trembled. Then, back along the way he’d come, a manhole by the church leapt out of the cobblestones as if thrown into the air by some explosion. Beneath it was a violent plume of filthy water, forcing the iron disc high into the air.
‘Chiara…’ he murmured, feeling the blood in his veins run cold.
A second manhole burst from the cobbles a little way along, and then a third…
Something came back to him at that moment. A cold autumn day long ago. A small boy standing on a beautiful bridge, stone angels staring down at him as he listened to the rush of another muddy torrent, one that took away something that was supposed to be returned to him and never was.
‘Chiara…’ he said again, and began to run towards Santa Trinita. But the water was ahead of him now, writhing and rushing like a malevolent living creature. It was the best Fratelli could do to turn and dash back into the station, flee for the stairs behind the terrified uniformed officer running from his desk, and take shelter — breathless, mind racing — in the first-floor office where a pale-faced man in uniform stood shocked and shaking, barking into a telephone that seemed dead to the watery world beyond.
‘Let me go!’ Fratelli shouted, struggling in the arms of three uniformed officers. ‘For God’s sake let me go!’
It had reached almost four in the morning. Marrone had only then managed to reach Ognissanti, and that by boat. Shocked, out of touch with headquarters, he was captain of a stazione marooned in the bleak night. Fratelli had spent the past two hours fighting to break free of the place and go home. No one would allow it.
And now, with a superior finally in place, he was denied again.
‘Where the hell have you been anyway?’ Fratelli demanded.
Marrone looked dreadful. He wouldn’t talk about what he’d seen out in the city. And still they were trapped on the first floor. The lights were out. The phones and radios were dead. From nearby came sounds that took Fratelli back to his childhood and the war. The dreadful bloody close-quarters fighting during that sweltering August in 1944 when the Allies battled their way into Florence, street by street, house by house. The hurt and angry screams of the wounded outside the terrace where he was a six-year-old living under a name he believed his own, though troubled at times by memories of a different boy, a different city, and a father and a mother who could only be the products of a childish dream.
Twenty-two years on the streets of the city rang once again to the rising shrieks of fear in the dread darkness that sat above the stinking river and all its dirt. They were Carabinieri and could do nothing, since beyond the door the torrent raged, growing higher and more powerful with every passing minute.
The massive, grizzled officer called Cassini relaxed a little of his bear grip.
‘Pino,’ he grunted. ‘Don’t be a fool. None of us can go out there. Even if we had some means… a boat. A light beyond these…’
Cassini nodded at the torches they’d set up by the first floor windows. There was no moon visible, thanks to the heavy clouds that brought this constant rain upon them. So all they could see was what lay in the beams of their standard-issue lanterns, the kind they saved for traffic accidents and — that rarest of Florentine events — a murder.
‘Walter got here, didn’t he?’
‘And nearly died,’ Marrone said. ‘The boat’s gone anyway. I couldn’t tether it. I could barely manage to get to the stairs.’
‘Let me try. I’ll find a way…’
‘You won’t,’ Marrone barked at him. ‘That’s an order.’
Pino Fratelli could scarcely believe his ears.
He managed to shake himself free of their arms and stood there, stiff and outraged.
‘An order, Walter? Your precious world’s broken, man. Look outside the window. If I could do a thing to help a soul out there I would. But I can’t.’ He glanced at the others. ‘I want to be with my own. Don’t you?’
Cassini, a senior, gruff carabiniere, old enough to remember the war as an adult, glowered at him and said, ‘It’s times like these we need to stick together. To keep the ranks. To do what we’re told.’
‘Like we did for the Germans?’ Fratelli bellowed. ‘You bastards sicken me. You think this precious city of yours is the finest there’s ever been and never see the dirt and death between the glorious cracks. Thank God I’m not…’
One of you, Fratelli thought. Except, as far as they were concerned, he was. The truth about him was something he’d yet to share. That would take time. Years of trust that needed forging — rebuilding, in some cases.
‘This is my life,’ he bellowed at them. ‘Mine! I’ll find some way across the bridge. And stay there till you summon me.’
‘Dammit, Pino,’ Marrone replied, then dragged him to the window. The two of them stared at the gushing torrent outside. It was broader, higher, stronger than ever. ‘How will you get there, then? Fly?’
‘I don’t…’
Pino Fratelli stared at the raging flood and wondered if this was how the world died, in a single driving wave of mud and water that kept on rising till it drowned them all. No ark, no Noah, no tidy evacuation for those who would be saved. Just a cold and dismal end to everything. The bleakness, the fearful sense of doom that had lurked within him since childhood was beginning to pulse now, like a painful vein in his forehead.
‘Chiara…’ he whispered.
‘It can’t go on much longer,’ Cassini said. ‘Give it half an hour. I’ve seen floods. They go as quickly as they come. Half an hour. Then we’ll go out and do what we can.’
He seized Fratelli by his coat. ‘If that means racing home to see your wife, then so be it.’
Marrone began to say something, getting between them.