‘And weapons, Luca?’ Fratelli asked. ‘What did it say about them?’
Cassini shrugged. ‘Nothing. We never found their weapons. We never do. I mean… if they’re not out there, who cares where they’ve hidden their guns? Who—’
Fratelli marched downstairs. There was a spare pair of wellington boots by the front door. He told Julia Wellbeloved to put them on, then strode out into the yard, followed the line of old footprints, walked past the barn, into the low woodland, and picked his way up the hill.
‘Keep checking the radio, Luca,’ he ordered. ‘We’re getting higher. Maybe…’
Maybe I’m wrong, he thought. Maybe I am going mad.
But their tracks were recent and obvious. Up and down the hill. He had to follow.
They trudged along the Via Pisana towards the Ponte Vecchio for a while, then turned sharp left towards the rising mound of the Boboli Gardens. The private park of the Medici. A vast green paradise of follies and grottoes and groves, full of statues and surprises; so large that most locals had never visited every corner of its sprawling acreage.
A dead-end alley led to a high brick wall with a single door in the corner. A workman’s entrance, little used. He walked to it, turned, looked round.
‘You want somewhere to sleep, to hide,’ Aldo Pontecorvo said confidently. ‘This is it. The garden’s a big place. There are things in there…’
Did he dare tell her? Was this a secret that could finally be shared?
He walked back to join her. Felt something slip from him as the words rose to his throat.
‘I was born here. Thirty-seven years ago. To a woman who hated me. In a gardener’s hovel in a corner they never bothered with.’
‘You don’t need to make excuses,’ she said. ‘We are who we are.’
She held the bag in her left arm, moved it up and down. He heard the weapons rattling inside. Then he went back to the door, took out the crowbar, put it in the crack between the frame and the wood and heaved hard.
Free in two goes. He helped her squeeze through the narrow door, closed it carefully when they were inside.
The police and the Carabinieri kept an eye on this place. It was part of the treasures of Florence, somewhere to protect, to keep from the hoi polloi on the street.
Ahead lay a narrow path strewn with autumn leaves.
The grey day was dying.
‘Follow me,’ he said, holding out his hand for her to take.
A picture in his head. The walls of the Brancacci. The magical, holy couple, inside the garden, expelled from its precious, immortal presence. He never knew which side he belonged to, never would. But this was a kind of home for him and soon she’d know it.
The woman followed him up the winding track beneath the walls of the Belvedere Fort as it meandered through crazily angled corridors formed by high conifers, past signs for grottoes and fountains, the Jupiter Garden, the Ladies’ Garden, the palace itself. Finally they wound behind a low, artificial mound, walked half bent down a narrowing gap between shrubs and trees on either side.
Fruit lay on the ground. Apples and pears and oranges, starting to rot in the November rains.
In an archway of branches stood a tiny shack, brown brick leaning into the hill. A door, crooked, covered in cobwebs, grey and rotting in the wan daylight.
He turned the rusty handle, shone a torch inside.
No one came here any more.
The smell was the same. Smoke and dank earth. He felt he’d been breathing it every day of his life. Aldo Pontecorvo walked into the hovel built against the Boboli Hill, found candles where she’d left them, lit three, set them on the shaky wooden table. Slowly the light cast its dim yellow warmth into the shadows. Two rooms and a door to an outside privy. A washbasin, a gas stove fed from a cylinder beneath. Beyond the door the low double bed where she slept, and next to it the single mattress on the floor that was his.
Back in January she’d died in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, not far from the Duomo; the place, the plaques reminded everyone, founded by another Florentine noble, Folco Portinari, the father of Dante’s beloved Beatrice. There was no love in the face of his mother. Had she owned the strength, he felt sure her dying words would have been a curse.
That was when they threw him out of the grim place on the hill and he found a single room in an Oltrarno boarding house at a price a casual cook could never afford. Coming back, his feelings veered from fear through hatred to a kind of awe. Every childhood had its share of innocence, even his. This lost corner of the Medici’s orchard fed his simple imagination from the moment he could think. As a solitary, fanciful child, never forced to go to school, ignored mostly by his mother and his peers, he’d spent long days here, exploring every hidden inch, learning by heart the maze-like pathways that crisscrossed, from theatre to fountain, grotto to pavilion. At times the Boboli Gardens seemed a corner of paradise abandoned by the gods of the palazzo at the foot of the hill. It was all his, until one black night that would transform him from naive boy to knowing, broken man.
He held up the candle. ‘We’ll be fine here for the night. Two even. No one knows about this place. My mother…’
‘You lived here?’
‘Just the two of us.’
‘Your father—?’
‘I never knew,’ he interrupted. ‘She never talked about him. It was as if I was…’
He thought about the statues hidden in the garden; grinning gnomes and satyrs leering from beneath the bushes. One of these had sired him. Or so he’d always believed as a child.
‘As if I came from nowhere.’
Chavah Efron placed her bag on the table. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Go fetch some food. And wine. Red.’
She looked around, pulled one of the two chairs up to the small wooden table, brushed away the dust with her arm.
‘Red,’ she said again.
They followed the muddy tracks through the bare trees in the wood, then marched to the brow of the hill. The day was failing, street lights coming on all over Florence as they watched; lines of illumination marching down the avenues, worming their way through the narrow alleys in the city centre, along the banks of the Arno.
‘This isn’t a job for two men and a girl,’ Luca Cassini grumbled.
‘Am I a girl now?’ Julia Wellbeloved asked as she clambered through a thicket of brambles, following Fratelli who walked head down, eyes on the ground.
‘Stop being picky, will you?’ Cassini retorted. ‘You know what I mean. We ought to have a team with some proper lanterns. And dogs.’
They said nothing.
‘I’m not leaving that poor thing of theirs here, by the way,’ he added. ‘Whatever happens…’
‘Kindly shut up about the dog and look around you,’ Fratelli demanded.
He’d come to a halt by the side of a saucer-shaped crater. A little like the mouth of an ancient dwarf volcano, filled with the same ragged, untidy scrub they’d walked through most of the way. But when Fratelli turned his torch on the branches below them, flashes of blue were visible. Plastic, by the looks of it.
‘What do you see, Luca?’ he asked.
‘Does teacher ever knock off for supper?’
‘No. Talk to me.’
Cassini and Julia strode to the rim of the indentation.
‘Muddy footprints,’ the young officer said.
‘Something’s hidden there,’ Julia added. ‘Underneath sheets, or something. They put those branches over them. Judging by the footprints, they did it just this afternoon.’
Fratelli put one leg over the edge then scrambled down the side, staying clear of the slippery muddy tracks someone had left earlier. The two others followed. By the time they got there, he was throwing broken branches out of the way.