There was a silence on the line. Then Marrone cleared his throat and said, ‘This is a legal matter now. It’s for the magistrate to judge how we proceed. Not me.’ That pause again. ‘Not you.’
‘Don’t tell me my job, Marrone,’ Soderini barked back at him. ‘I put you in that seat. What I give today I may take away tomorrow.’
The silence again then, ‘I can tell you no more than I’ve said. Which went beyond what is proper, I might add.’
‘This gardener? I hear he was Tornabuoni’s lover.’
‘That much is on the radio, I believe.’
‘If everyone Tornabuoni slept with starts talking to the gutter press, we’ll have a pretty picture soon. Put an end to this. Drag this sorry layabout into court and silence all speculation. I want no more adverse publicity. About this or that other matter.’
‘What other matter might that be?’
‘Rovezzano. Don’t play clever with me. You’re not up to it. We’ve got reporters from Rome sniffing at our door already. Don’t give them dog shit to chase. They thrive on it. Feed them and they’ll never leave.’
‘Sir—’
‘Florence is a piece of theatre, Marrone. I want nothing that detracts from the show. Those Americans with their dollars do not come here for this filth. If they find it they’ll be gone, to Venice or Rome, and no one wants that.’
‘I’m an officer of the Carabinieri,’ Marrone replied. ‘Not the tourist board. I have a man in custody suspected of murder. It may be we will charge him before the night is out.’
‘Does he admit it?’
‘No,’ Marrone replied with some reluctance.
Soderini hesitated for a moment then asked, ‘Did he do it?’
This brought the longest silence of all, one that Sandro Soderini found informative. It never came to a close, either. He was forced to continue himself.
‘Your lack of cooperation in this matter is noted, Marrone. I find your intransigence offensive and ungrateful.’
‘I’m an officer of the Carabinieri,’ the man repeated. ‘My duty is to the law, and to finding and prosecuting Tornabuoni’s murderer.’
‘Your duty is to the city and to me!’
These angry tones echoed around the room. The noise sounded strange to him. He was not a man given to shouting.
‘Is there anything else?’ Marrone wondered.
‘As you know,’ Soderini said, ‘there’s a meeting planned for tomorrow night.’
‘Surely not now…’
‘It’s fixed.’
‘Is that wise?’
‘I judge it so. Vanni Tornabuoni was one of my kind. I knew the man and you didn’t. This is what he would have wanted.’
Was that true? Soderini wondered. No. It was the kind of ridiculous nonsense politicians were forced to say in such circumstances. No one knew what the dead might say. Or desire. Such things were beyond them.
‘I can’t rule out the possibility that Tornabuoni’s private life… his night-time activities contributed somehow to his death,’ Marrone told him.
‘We don’t have gardeners at our gatherings. No fear on that score.’
‘For the sake of decency—’
‘I do not need lectures on that subject from a captain of the Carabinieri whose every step up the ladder has been dependent upon our patronage.’
‘Out of common sense then!’
‘You know what I require, Marrone. Keep your men away from our business the way you’re supposed to. Throw this gardener of yours around the cell a little. Make him talk. He’s your man. I’m confident of it. Then bury this story as surely as we’ll bury Tornabuoni in a day or two.’
‘And how are you sure, Mr Mayor?’
Soderini thought for a moment, then said, ‘Vanni was a squalid little animal at heart. It was his idea of fun to dally with scum like that. He brought this end upon himself. We’ll mourn him, then return to our business.’ In his mind’s eye he could see the cavern already; the lights, the food, the entertainment. A new guest too, from England. There would be a brief note of grief. And then the riotous wake. ‘Make sure you go about yours.’
He put down the phone before the Carabinieri officer could say another word. The gardener. Tornabuoni would sleep with anything that moved, man or woman. He disappeared to Rome and Naples some weekends and came back drained, his face pale from whatever dope he’d consumed alongside the debaucheries. Sandro Soderini was above this kind of behaviour, such vile and physical company. This could not happen to him.
All the same… He got up and walked to the door of his office and turned the key. Then he went back to the desk and unlocked the private drawer at the bottom, the one with the reinforced metal lining, a kind of small, hidden safe.
The letters were there in cheap envelopes, the messages scrawled in blue biro. Each rising in hysterical tone. All addressed to the sprawling house in the Via Maggio in Oltrarno where he lived alone, equidistant between the goldsmiths of the Ponte Vecchio and the bums of Santo Spirito. It was a property that had been in the hands of the Soderini for three centuries; a handsome mansion, the exterior etched in dark, ornate frescoes that made it stand out among the plainer properties around.
His private fortress, his place of safety.
When the first envelope had dropped through the door he’d laughed. The words were so strange, so ridiculous. When the fourth arrived he’d sat brooding alone, wondering what these cryptic messages meant, what kind of man might have sent them.
The first read, ‘The Signoria must make a law against the dreadful vice of sodomy. Make a law against it! One that shows no mercy, so that the beasts who behave so are stoned and burned.’
The next: ‘You must ban games and taverns and public entertainments, the sordid nature of women’s dress, everything harmful to the health of the soul. Everyone must live for God and not the world.’
The third: ‘I cannot tell you everything I feel inside because you are too proud and indisposed to hear it. Oh! If you knew all you’d see that I am like a boiling vessel of liquid sealed up, bubbling but unable to escape! There are so many locked-up secrets behind our walls, Soderini, Florence would not believe them! Yet you know… You…’
The last was a threat, plain and forceful. He read it again and found it impossible to laugh, as he had when, the previous Saturday, it landed through his letterbox, delivered by hand, not the postal service.
‘I shall spill flood waters upon the earth. You shall drown in them, and in that torrent shall flow your blood.’
All four were bastardized Savonarola. Most had been adapted from the Haggai sermons the fanatical friar had given from the pulpit of the Duomo in his Advent sermon of 14 December 1494, when the city was still in thrall to his theatrical power of speech, and working its way towards the purges that would lead, first, to the bonfire of the vanities, then, a few years later, to the violent downfall of the monk from San Marco himself.
‘A lunatic,’ Soderini murmured.
But did gardeners read the sermons of a fanatical fifteenth-century monk?
He reached further into the drawer and retrieved the compact Beretta semiautomatic pistol he’d got from Marrone, a spare in the Carabinieri armoury. It was thirty years since Soderini had done his national service, spending a year as a privileged, idle officer in the leisurely barracks in Sicily his mother had fixed for him — chasing women, mostly; building links with useful criminals and avoiding the odd irate husband.
He still knew how to use a gun.
The stall in the central market was called Nerbone. It had been there, the sign said, since 1874. Judging by some of the old men shuffling at the counter, getting stuck into panini of tripe and lampredotto and other mysterious pieces of meat, so had much of its clientele.
Cassini turned up on time, ordered a bowl of tomato and potato soup called Pappa al Pomodoro, a tripe panino and a can of Coke. He had a blue document folder underneath his arm and an air of happy release about him.