‘The latter first,’ Mariani declared. ‘They’re lunatics and vandals. Religious maniacs. The insane. How else can you explain it? What is there to comprehend?’
‘Soderini said they hated beauty,’ Julia told him.
‘Which is true. Soderini’s an intelligent, learned man. He understands these things intimately, from his own perspective. He will…’
Mariani’s declaration stuttered to a halt.
‘He’ll what?’ Julia asked.
‘Be a better source of guidance on this subject than I,’ the man said in a low, hard voice. ‘Come. I’ll show you what we can do to prevent such damage. It was next to nothing before these present works. It will be next to nothing after. After which, you must leave. We’re in no fit state for visitors, nor do I have staff to keep you company.’
‘I need a break,’ Pontecorvo said, then left the three of them working in the kitchen and walked out into the open courtyard of Savonarola’s convent. He felt he could hear the voices of all those dead Dominicans whispering in the shadows as he walked; another sinner on the road, another soul striding towards Purgatory. Briskly, moving at speed in the belief that haste might still his thoughts and fears, he strode to the former hospice building by the cloister. The place was empty. This was November. A dead month for all but the hardiest of visitors, even at the best of times. With most of the complex closed to tourists, only the occasional workmen and civic officials meandered its corridors.
He strode into the hospice and sat in front of the work that dominated the room, Fra Angelico’s Last Judgement. In the centre stood the tombs of the dead, thrown open by a blue-robed Christ in Judgement, seated on his throne in the sky, surrounded by the Virgin, saints and angels. To the left, the godly and chaste entered the Garden of Eden, hand in hand beneath those same trees and palms and trilling birds that Masolino and Masaccio had painted in the Brancacci. The gate to Heaven, the portal through which Adam and Eve had been expelled in the beginning, was open now, and welcoming. Through it flooded the glorious golden light of God Himself. The worthy entered Paradise to enjoy eternal life and joy. While, on the right, demons and monsters drove vile sinners and the unrepentant to Hell, stabbing them with stakes until they passed through into a subterranean inferno of pain and agony and torture; a pitiless, never-ending torment, where the fallen devoured one another and were in turn torn to pieces by a grim, horned Satan surrounded by the flesh and entrails of his victims.
His eyes strayed upwards, to the ceiling. The cell of Savonarola, where the man had worked alone in fury, documenting the venality of the city with fearful warnings, stood somewhere above.
He’d read those sermons while he was supposed to be searching the state archives for ancient recipes to amuse the Brigata Spendereccia. Sinners were meant to enter the eternal fire. The wicked deserved retribution. Those who did God’s work…
An image of the horror in the barn in Fiesole came to him. Tornabuoni trying to scream from behind the gag. A bloody corpse, bone and gore.
In the cold chamber of the hospice, Aldo Pontecorvo shivered, trying to force those pictures from his head.
He’d shown Chavah all these places when they’d first arrived that morning. Did she understand? Had she guessed? Why now? After twenty years in purgatory?
Because he couldn’t live with himself, with the pain, any more. Not that he could tell her.
So he got up and walked back to the kitchen, checked the work, went back into the convent and headed for the cloister and the stairs to the first-floor dormitories where the brothers had lived in sacred isolation most of their lives.
It was so cold, he half expected to see frost shimmering on the plain columns and arches. There were voices, loud and confident. He stopped and fell immediately into the cloister shadows. Two men: one middle-aged, with an intelligent, acute face and long white hair; the second younger, burly. Big feet, black shoes, broad, aggressive face.
And a woman. Striking, with a long, pale face, fair hair tied back severely so that it exaggerated her high forehead. He was close enough to hear their voices. She was speaking. Italian with a foreign accent.
A voice he’d heard before. His own words came back to him and he felt himself shiver involuntarily.
What are you looking at?
Then that frightened, accented response.
Niente, niente, niente.
He watched this tall, composed and serious Englishwoman.
All acts invited responses. Sins demanded confession or retribution. They began a cycle that only virtue and sacrifice could close.
He slunk back to the kitchen, keeping to the dark side of the cloisters all the way.
His practised eye ranged over the dishes. Most, he was glad to see, were complete. What work remained was menial and easily left to others. Transport was in the hands of the catering company. All seemed organized.
‘Chavah,’ he said, taking her to one side.
She looked bored. These chores didn’t suit her.
‘The police are here.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. Two nights ago in the square… a woman saw me.’
A flash of anger. ‘You never told me this.’
It didn’t seem important. A stranger’s face in the dark.
‘We should leave,’ he said. ‘Right away. You can…’
This tense relationship ebbed and flowed. He’d no idea which of them was dominant at that moment.
‘I can what?’
‘Take some things and go. It’s me they want. You’ve done nothing.’
‘We’re not done yet.’
‘Just go…’
She held him then, tightly, refusing to move. There was something so plain and ordinary in her touch, he wondered that he’d avoided this simple intimacy all these years.
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I won’t. And nor shall you.’
The four of them walked up a stone staircase, past scaffolding and sheeting, Mariani striding ahead, talking all the time, of history and the difficulties of preserving it. He stopped at the top and, for all the recent dark events, Julia Wellbeloved found herself smiling with a sudden, warm burst of instant pleasure. She’d read about this place. It was a little out of the centre of the city. One more institution that hid its jewels from prying, public eyes.
Now, with the help of the director’s incisive, brisk talk, she recalled the story of the remarkable works of art created here for the benefit of the solitary, ascetic inhabitants alone. In the middle of the fifteenth century, two decades before Savonarola’s arrival, the artist brother Fra Angelico had been asked to decorate the forty-three monastic cells that ran along three first-floor corridors of the dormitory surrounding the Sant’Antonino cloister. Here the friars read and thought and prayed, surrounded by frescoes mostly from the hand of the man they knew simply as ‘Brother John of Fiesole’.
At the head of the stairs stood the most breathtaking of Angelico’s images, a large Annunciation of such tender humanity it was impossible not to be moved by its sense of simple and serene joy, its wonder at the miracle of life. A slender, pious Mary sat, head bowed, in an archway next to a beautiful garden, listening carefully to the words of an angel with glorious multicoloured wings telling her she would bear the son of God. There was something so touching, so personal about the painting, that she could only marvel that it came from the hands and imagination of a monk sworn to celibacy and retreat from the venal, living world beyond San Marco’s walls.
A sheet of thick plate glass covered the whole of the fresco.