They didn’t pay him for this. It was a reward of its own. Left to his own devices in the archives, with a tame librarian willing to fetch anything he asked for, Aldo Pontecorvo had, over the years, read some of the most precious documents the city owned. Touched the paper Savonarola had written upon. Run his fingers over the words of Benvenuto Cellini, complaining about the miserly philistines of the Medici court. Felt the bloody history of the city rise from the pages and infect his troubled, wandering mind.
The nobility of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries possessed tastes as bizarre and outlandish as their heirs of the twentieth. They were no strangers to herbs and spices from the Orient, to obscure meat and fowl, and fanciful dolci that mixed sweet with sour, fruit with meat. When he knew what was possible he would place orders for the produce and then, the Sunday before the Brigata meeting, start the preparation: cutting and slicing, setting aside the flesh to marinate, in oil and vinegar, honey and herbs.
Then his landlord threw him out. After that, in the pouring rain and cold, alone, wandering the bleak streets of Oltrarno, the worm of anger and vengeance began to work inside him.
Now he was back in their midst, turning the results of those ancient scribbles from the archives into a banquet to be delivered by van at six that evening, and carefully set up in the secret place where the ceremony took place.
Then he would stay and help serve, as usual. Watch in horror and shame, sometimes, and still be too fearful to flee.
On the long, wooden tables, cracked with age, bleached with centuries of use, ranged bowls of handmade testaroli pasta, sage leaves ready to be fried in batter. Doves lay naked on metal platters. Rabbits, flayed and jointed, their kidneys and livers reserved by their side for the sauce. Ugly monkfish split open, their delicate intestines removed to make tripe antipasti. Piglets’ feet, as pale and naked as those of children, were tidied in serried lines on trays ready for the oven; alongside them rows of ducks’ necks, stuffed with forcemeat and plums, heads and long waxy beaks arranged neatly in a line, as if this were a troop of dead birds saluting to the left. A vast cauldron of soup made from spelt, the grain the Etruscans ate, simmered on the kitchen range. And for the dessert, platters of fruit and circles of panforte, not the sweet dessert fed to the tourists, but the original peposo, laced with pepper and spices and filled with the piquant minced pork.
And cibreo.
A feast for the lords of Florence. The kind they would have gorged on when Dante and Botticelli walked the streets outside. When Savonarola himself sat upstairs in this very building, locked in his plain, ascetic cell, praying for the deliverance of the city from such sinful extravagances, listening to the word of God and then proclaiming it in angry sermons from the pulpit in the Duomo.
There were two minions in the kitchen at that moment. A surly, talentless kitchen hand from Turin, and a silent, miserable woman who came in from Empoli when needed. He ordered the man to turn up the heat on the huge gas grill they used for searing and grilling, then told them both to take their break now, a few minutes earlier than usual, and not to hurry back.
‘It’s Christmas?’ the man from Turin said.
‘You want free time or not?’ Aldo Pontecorvo retorted.
He joined Chavah, still patiently slicing the vast heads of chicory into the icy water for puntarelle.
‘Tonight. They’re not all bad,’ he said. ‘Just some of the men. One in particular.’
‘You do your part,’ she ordered. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
Still, he hesitated.
‘Why did you kill Tornabuoni?’ she asked.
No answer. She came close to him, placed her hand, weather-beaten and scarred, on his chest.
‘It wasn’t for me at all, was it?’
Twenty years before, that night in the dark streets, water everywhere. Time didn’t pass. It stayed with you sometimes, clinging to your mind like foul mud. And now it was alive again, starting to move.
Two days before he’d killed a man. That was supposed to be an end to things. Not a beginning.
‘This is enough,’ he muttered. ‘No more.’
‘No, Aldo,’ she said, taking the lapels of his stained white jacket. ‘We do what life makes us. What they make us.’
He could smell her breath, sweet from the fruit she’d been picking at in the kitchen. Some slices still stood in her hand. Sharp, hard apple from Trentino, ready to be turned into sugary fritters.
Chavah reached up and placed a slice of the fruit in his mouth, fed it beyond his lips and watched him, stroking his chest as he ate.
San Marco was little to look at from the outside. One more church portico on a piazza, a visitors’ entrance by the side. Julia met Fratelli and Luca Cassini at the door, then Fratelli spoke to a caretaker. Soon they were joined by the director of the museum, a harassed-looking individual who introduced himself as Franco Mariani.
He was a nervous man, cadaverous, with thinning brown hair and a gloomy face made more miserable by a drooping walrus moustache and sad, brown eyes. Mid-forties, the standard age for civic dignitaries in Florence it seemed, and dressed in the well-tailored business suit which seemed to be the uniform for senior city officials.
‘What’s this?’ Mariani asked, glaring at Fratelli. ‘You’re Carabinieri. I recognize you from the past. That break-in. The Palazzo Vecchio said nothing about you.’ A pause — bitterness, not regret, on his face. ‘Don’t you have better things to occupy you on a day like this?’
‘This is pleasure, not business,’ Fratelli told him. ‘Tornabuoni’s case is well taken care of…’
‘Those terrorists—’
‘Do not visit shuttered museums, I assure you. Captain Marrone—’
‘My appointment’s with the woman—’
‘Luca and Pino are helping me,’ Julia interrupted. ‘With the mayor’s knowledge and encouragement, I believe.’ That took him down a peg. ‘We’ve been following the vandalism in the Brancacci. They have a professional interest.’
Mariani swore and shook his head.
‘Three times in twenty years I’ve seen this. A French fool in the Uffizi, with a hatred for Botticelli. Some mischievous idiot in the Pitti. A man who somehow managed to get a mallet into the Accademia. Paint, ripped canvas, shattered marble. Had they done this to a man or a woman, they would have languished in jail for years. Instead we send them to a comfortable institution, wait while they calm down and then blink innocently as if to say: that was me?’
‘You’ve spoken to these people?’ Julia asked.
‘Once. The Frenchman.’ Mariani frowned, as if trying to remember. ‘This was some years ago, in the beginning when, like you, I thought there was something to be learned.’
‘And?’ Fratelli prompted him.
‘He said Simonetta Vespucci — Botticelli’s muse, if you recall — reminded him of his girlfriend. Who had recently dumped him.’ The director opened his arms wide in despair. ‘That was it. Why do we allow such scum through the door in the first place? They’ve no appreciation. No feeling. No sensitivity. Art is for those who appreciate it, not the masses.’
‘How can the masses begin to appreciate what they can’t see?’ Julia asked, genuinely puzzled.
‘And Benvenuto Cellini and his kind were not sensitive men in some respects,’ Fratelli noted. ‘Julia’ — he nodded in her direction — ‘would simply like to hear what precautions you intend to take when you reopen San Marco to the public. To learn what you know of those who would harm the treasures in your care.’