Fratelli was lost in his own thoughts and didn’t seem to hear. This obsessive certainty of his worried her. The confessions of the previous night — about his illness and then the death of his wife — had changed him. There was something intensely cathartic in his words, the way he unburdened himself of the past. If he was to be believed, these dreadful doubts and fears had been locked inside him for twenty years. So she was the first to hear the full story of how Chiara had died, since Fratelli had collapsed completely after her murder, the distraught husband in him defeating the carabiniere.
According to his story, he’d stayed with Chiara’s body until discovered, and was so distressed and incapable of speech that, for a time, the investigators suspected he was responsible. Weeks in sedation, either silent or ranting, followed. The tone of blame in Fratelli’s explanation told her he knew himself this was more than mere grief. There was something in him — a flaw; mental, physical perhaps. With hindsight, it might have been the tumour in its infancy or a disturbing remnant of his strange childhood history. Real or psychological, this wound healed only on the surface, remaining fragile and easily reopened. To the world he seemed such a calm, sane man. But another, wilder, more uncertain creature lived beneath, one that never spoke much in the months after Chiara’s death, even to Walter Marrone, his friend and colleague, who took over what was to prove a fruitless murder investigation.
This was the flood inside him, Fratelli said, as she listened in the overheated living room, on a hard chair next to the record player, music playing softly in the background. Something that beckoned the muddy brown waters of death and uncertainty into Chiara’s too-brief life, staining them both forever. There was no point in arguing against his certainties. The facts, in Fratelli’s head, spoke for themselves. After her murder he was briefly insane, so the husband never thought to mention the small details that the carabiniere would have found so important. Those strange marks on his dead wife’s face, the red smears making a downturned frown around her mouth, he never disclosed to Marrone. The overworked pathologists in the morgue failed to pick them up too, since they had other clients to deal with, and a rape victim, which Chiara clearly was, needed little in the way of explanation.
When Fratelli was released, he began to believe these visual images were all part of the madness, one more piece of delusional, psychic trauma left behind by that terrible night, like a tidemark inside his head, or that sign she’d noticed scattered around the city high up on the walls of houses, offices, churches… on the fourth of November 1966 the waters of the Arno reached here.
And, in the case of Pino Fratelli, never fully receded.
Julia remembered so clearly sitting next to him in the cold Brancacci Chapel two days before, wondering why he was shivering so much in his heavy winter coat as he stared at those paintings on the wall. He wasn’t. He was trembling with shock and fear and the horror of a returning memory. The sight of the scarlet daub of chicken’s blood on the mouths of the two Eves had taken him back to that night twenty years before. It was a miracle he’d kept his composure at all.
‘They’re connected,’ Fratelli said, coming out of his shell with an abrupt nod.
‘What…?’
It took a moment for Julia Wellbeloved to drag herself back to the bare, chilly anteroom of the Carabinieri station and the reasons they were there: to tell Marrone about what they’d seen in the Brancacci and to offer her possible glimpse of Tornabuoni’s killer. To get Pino Fratelli back inside the Carabinieri. That was a part of his plan too. Not that he’d mentioned it.
‘They’re connected. But I thought he’d kill a woman. I felt it was women he hated and feared. That ought to be the case.’
‘You talk as if you know him,’ she said.
Fratelli smiled and tapped his head through the white hair. ‘Mad as a mole.’
‘No you’re not. And there’s no such turn of phrase in Italian. I checked.’
‘See. You become more of a detective with each passing day. Yet I do know him. He’s been in my head for twenty years, with the flood. Perhaps.’ His eyes lost their focus for a moment. ‘Perhaps it’s in his head too and like me he refuses to listen. Wants it to be a bad dream. Part of the craziness. Things would be so much simpler that way. Life a lot more… acceptable.’
A fierce look of frustration gripped him.
‘Then something surfaces to revive it. But what?’
After he’d spoken about his wife, Fratelli had shown her some of his books, the ones he’d taken to show Walter Marrone that afternoon. Told her about Lilith and some myths about the Fall. If she’d been able to pull herself out of that room, think rationally about all this, she knew she’d dismiss these ideas as nonsense, fantasies stretched out of a few old and flimsy facts: the memory of a scarlet stain on his dead wife’s lips, the reappearance of something very similar on the walls of the chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine.
Yet she crawled into bed at three that morning feeling the same unshakeable conviction that had gripped him from the moment he saw those smears on the face of the innocent Eve, and the halo above the serpent’s golden hair. Fratelli had talked earlier about how he looked for links from the past to the present, from one act to another. It was exactly the kind of connection Julia hoped to make at some stage in her own work, the dissertation that was still hovering out of her reach. The unseen, elusive thread that ran from Chiara’s death on the stone stairs of the house in Oltrarno to the daubs of chicken blood on the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel was real. As real as Pino Fratelli himself, in all his perpetual, gentle confusion.
A few hours later she’d been woken by him hammering on her door. He’d been listening to the early morning news on the radio, something he did seven days a week since his wife’s murder. Not long after, they set off for the Carabinieri station in Ognissanti. Julia found she could barely look at the plain stone steps of the house as she walked down them.
‘It had to be a woman,’ Fratelli repeated, shaking his head as he sat hunched on the bench outside Marrone’s office. ‘Not someone like Vanni Tornabuoni. A…’
He stopped short of saying it.
‘A what?’ she asked.
‘Tornabuoni was a homosexual,’ Fratelli said with a shrug. ‘Gay, I think they call it these days. Or perhaps liked a little of both. So what? Everyone knew. No one minded. He was one of the aristocrats. The men who run this city. Even if they did mind, no one would say a thing. Could this be a part of his madness?’
He scratched his head.
‘Our man is unforgiving, judgemental. He must hate homosexuals. This is not uncommon. Savonarola did. He wanted them executed…’
‘I can’t see a link. It may not be him—’
‘Those answers exist,’ Fratelli broke in. ‘We simply fail to see them. Women, women… It must come back to them. That dreadful statue of Cellini’s where he hung poor Tornabuoni’s head. It’s full of a hatred of femininity too. You see this? Perseus — and that madman Cellini — wishes to destroy Medusa because she’s strong. Not the weak, submissive sexual toy he lusts after. Just like Lilith…’
‘I see it,’ she agreed and thought: do I?
The question needed to be asked again, even though she knew Fratelli had no answer.
‘Do you think it was him, Pino? The man I saw? In the loggia last night. Did he kill Tornabuoni? Was he the same man in the Brancacci?’
He considered this idea, and when he did she could see the carabiniere surface; thoughtful, cunning, never saying anything he didn’t wish to disclose.
‘Who can know?’ Fratelli answered in the end. ‘But you must tell Walter when they finally have the sense to let us in there. Tell him everything.’