‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘I need the bathroom!’
Loud voice, woman’s voice. That always made him cower.
He went back and got the gun from the other room, tucked it into his waistband.
She stared at him when he returned. ‘Does that thing make you happy?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You don’t even know how to use it.’
He didn’t speak.
‘Does it make you feel safe?’
‘Safe as anyone.’ He glanced at the window. ‘Here. For a while.’
‘You’re a lousy liar.’
He wanted to argue. Wanted to shout at her. Control her. But she still wasn’t scared of him and never would be.
‘I need the bathroom,’ she repeated.
He untied her wrists, watched as she got out of the bed, saw her nakedness, wondered about it. She kept the door closed. A long time. He heard running water. The shower.
To drown out the noise and the thoughts he sat on the bed and watched the TV again. After a while a kids’ cartoon came on and he laughed at that, found himself briefly in another place, one that was warm and sunny, a long time ago. An empty hut in a hidden corner of the Boboli Gardens, no lone mother to shriek at him, to watch where his curious fingers might wander. A little space to himself, and an imagination that could run wild watching this funny couple, cat and mouse, beat the living hell out of one another.
Men and women did that too. All the time.
When she came out she wore nothing but a towel round her waist tucked in over her small breasts. Another was wrapped round her hair. The intimacy of the small, damp bedroom, too hot from the fire he’d stoked in the kitchen below, was disturbing. He’d never been this close to a woman like this, one who was confident with her nakedness, didn’t mind him being there.
She reached up and took the towel off her head, then rubbed her hair vigorously.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.
He’d used those same words the night before in the Loggia dei Lanzi. Same threatening tone. She might have been in his head, doing the talking for him.
‘Nothing,’ he mumbled, and realized his voice sounded like that of a kid, one caught watching Tom and Jerry when he was supposed to be doing something else. Washing the dishes, bringing in the coal from the heap outside. Being the slave.
‘Does it turn you on?’
The TV was back with the news. The same story.
She pummelled her hair again, then threw the damp towel into the space beneath the window. There was a fragrance about her. Flowers and scent.
‘I did it for you,’ he said again.
He wasn’t answering that question.
‘Where did you kill him?’ she asked.
‘Outside.’ He nodded at the window. ‘In the barn.’
‘Did you clean up afterwards? The Carabinieri will be here soon, you idiot. You just gave them an invitation. They didn’t give a shit about Ari. Now…’
‘I cleaned up. All the mess I made.’
‘And the guns? The dope? The Semtex? Jesus…’
Damp hair on the pillow, she stretched her sturdy bronze legs out over the sheet, closed her eyes, let out a long sigh.
Then, to his astonishment, she began to laugh. A light, soft, girlish sound. It made his head spin.
‘What’s so funny?’ he asked.
She stopped and looked at him directly. She had green eyes. Dark green. The colour of the snake that wound itself round the tree behind the couple in the Brancacci Chapel, not the cheap fig leaves he used to cover the vile nakedness there.
Her hands went behind her head. He stared at the shape of her.
‘You’re really not that bright, are you?’
‘I killed that bastard. The one who…’
He didn’t go on.
‘Who what?’
‘You know.’
‘You watched, didn’t you? In that place when I danced. I saw you. I saw the look in your eyes.’
‘He murdered Ari.’
‘Because Ari got mad and went out there to kill him. Which was stupid. Never part of the plan…’
‘He…’ The words were hard. They had to be used. ‘They took you. Raped you. I heard you screaming. I…’
He could still picture it in his head, and remember the way he’d watched from the shadows, fascinated, horrified. A part of him envious, too.
Those green eyes glittered at him.
‘Didn’t I ask for it? Dancing for them? Whoring myself…’
‘I did it for you.’
‘Did what?’ she spat at him. ‘Killed a single worm among many?’
‘I’m just one man.’
‘Not even that,’ she said, and started drying her taut, muscular body through the bath towel round her torso. ‘Show me your hands.’
He held them out. They were grubby. Stains beneath the fingernails.
‘You’re filthy. Take a shower. There’s a towel by the bath. It was Ari’s. Use that. Use his clothes. He was big and stupid too. Here…’
She went to a drawer and took out fresh jeans, a black shirt and sweater, some underclothes. He saw her nakedness as she moved. She knew it, and didn’t mind.
‘Put these on when you’re done. You stink.’
She took a deep breath, rolled her head back against the wall.
‘After that we need to talk.’
There was a new look in her eyes. He couldn’t name it. Doubt? Surprise? Recognition?
‘Maybe there’s a reason you’re here. Not that I believe in all that shit.’
He had the gun. He was bigger than her, stronger. Physically anyway. Yet somehow none of this mattered. She’d seen something in him. Recognized the weak tic of fear, of servitude.
Once that happened he always obeyed. Didn’t know why. Didn’t ask for a reason. Just couldn’t find a way to say no.
She was playing with the towel, showing herself to him, grinning.
‘Do as I tell you and maybe good things happen. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ he answered, and heard the uncertainty in his own voice.
She waited. He put the gun on the bedside table and walked into the bathroom. It was spotless and smelled of her. The cracked shower unit had hanks of brown hair in the drain hole and on the neck of the rusty head. Long curly brown strands stuck to the broken white tiles.
In his head he could see the Brancacci again, what lay beneath the fig leaves. That was supposed to stay hidden but it wouldn’t. It was with him, with her, always, bringing the itch of temptation, the offer of that red heat in the head that stopped you thinking about everything else there was in the world.
‘Tornabuoni, Tornabuoni,’ Pino Fratelli muttered as they sat outside the captain’s office in the Ognissanti stazione. ‘This can’t be right.’
She sat by his side, silent, trying to come to terms with the news they’d both watched on the TV that morning. A man’s severed head had been found attached to Cellini’s statue of Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi, long hair wound into the bronze serpents of Medusa. It almost seemed like a bloody joke, real death superimposed upon the fictional.
The victim was Vanni Tornabuoni, the city art commissioner she was supposed to have met the previous morning in his office in the Pitti Palace. The TV said he was a bachelor, forty-two years old, though he looked younger: a handsome, slightly effeminate man. He had not been seen since leaving his office the previous evening. Officers had checked his secluded house in Bellosguardo, the exclusive green suburb behind Oltrarno. There were signs of a struggle. It seemed clear he’d been attacked at the property long before his severed head was found in the Piazza della Signoria. The Carabinieri, who had taken full control of the case, had yet to find any indication of where he was murdered.
‘Why are you so sure this is connected with the Brancacci?’ she asked.