In Love and War

1

He wakes with a rising feeling in his chest. An arm draped across him, a gold ring on one finger. The heavy warmth of Tatters on his feet. The dog wakes too and patters around sniffing, looking over eagerly at Esmond. Ada sighs and withdraws the arm, turning over and nesting the sheets between her legs. He stands and crosses to the window, opens a crack in the shutters to see the city, the spires, the dome of the cathedral, all glowing. The sun along the hillsides of Fiesole. Tatters sits behind him, clearing a cone-shaped space in the dust with his tail.

It had been Ada’s idea to sleep up here, the eaves which had been Alice Keppel’s studio during a brief painting fit in the early ’30s. It is large, light, fluttering with doves that roost in soft dun clumps on the roof. This is the sound of their life now: the burble of doves, the wind, the hiss and hum of the radio on the desk by the window. He looks down at her, the hair falling across the pillow, sleep-creases on her face. Against the wall at the end of the bare mattress, stand the three paintings of the triptych. She loves this, she says, almost as much as Anna’s collage of photographs, which hangs beside it.

‘Today’ she says, eyes opening, ‘we go to the sea.’ He doesn’t reply, but stoops to scratch Tatters behind the ear.

‘Vieni qui.’ She rises and draws him and the dog towards her.

‘The bonfire was a risk,’ he says in her ear.

They’d waited until late twilight, when the air around them was violet and the smoke from their little pyre might drift unnoticed. It had seemed important, somehow, to have a fire, to match his mother’s, six years ago, on the icy Shropshire field. They’d lit it down by the swimming pool, a small pile of sticks on the flagstones, brightening the dodos’ patient vigil over the pool. It flared higher as page after page of In Love and War was fed into it.

Ada’s idea. She’d read the novel in an armchair in the drawing room, hair tied up and a pencil in her teeth, marking the margins, adding a question mark here and there. She’d sipped nettle tea and hummed to herself as she went with Hulme from London to the trenches. When she finished, she sat for a long time, cross-legged in the armchair.

‘It’s no good,’ she said, finally, firmly. ‘Don’t look at me like that. You write well — I like so many passages, so many individual images and phrases.’ She got up to stand beside him at the drawing room window. ‘You began to write too early, I think,’ she’d said softly. ‘You’ve watched other people living without coming alive yourself. What I read here, it feels— like the difference between orzo coffee and the real thing. What do the Germans call it? Ersatz?’

He nodded his head and looked glumly out. She took his hands in hers, cold and bony.

‘And you’re one of us, Esmond,’ she said. ‘You don’t want the world to see you through the lens of a book like this. You’ll live a long life, write many great novels, but you’ll be followed by this piece of Fascist propaganda—’ He bristled and tried to pull his hands away but she’d held onto them. ‘However well written. You don’t want our children to read this, to know their father ever thought this way. You’ve outgrown the thing. The truth is, Esmond, you don’t need to answer to your family, to Mosley, any more. You’re your own man now.’

After the fire, he sat up late with the triptych, candlelight on the faces and then on Ada’s sleeping beside him, her eyelids trembling softly under the spell of some dream, her breath quickening and slowing. He let his mind spool into memory before the eerie green of the triptych, Florence concentrated in the layers of paint, the wandering tresses of Mary Magdalene’s hair, the sinews and tendons and bones of the Christ.

2

After Bailey’s arrest, Esmond and Goad had made their way together to the via Zara for their meeting at the Questura. Count Gaetano, the Podestà, was also there, looking sheepish. Goad gave quiet, precise answers to their questions. Esmond had tried to ask about Bailey, but the Quaestor, alcohol-flushed, held up his hand.

‘There is a Red Cross boat to Southampton from Genoa in three days. You must be on it. If not, you will join your friend, the priest, breaking stones in the south.’

That evening, Esmond had packed clothes, his bundle of correspondence and his novel in a morocco travelling case, wrapped Anna’s collage in brown paper and closed up the studio. With Tatters at his heels, he walked out of the wicket gate, locking it behind him. He and Goad were booked on a train at eleven the next morning, a change at Pisa and then up the coast to Genoa. As the city’s many bells tolled nine, he stood in the middle of the Ponte Santa Trinità, a golden moon rising to the east. To leave all of this behind. He remembered walking across the quad with Blacker after being discovered with Philip. Here, again, he’d found love and was being expelled.

He lit a cigarette, tossing the match into the water. The moon caught the lips of waves in the river and was carried on them downstream before slipping into darkness. He patted the parapet wall and moved off. He turned right along the Lungarno, past where he’d kissed Gerald a year and a half earlier, still a boy, he realised, thinking of his young, unhappy self. Up through the arcade of the Uffizi and into the Piazza della Signoria, the perfect centre of the human world. He passed a sandbagged David, sheltered under wood, nodded at him and wended his way up past the Bargello into the warren of streets he now knew better than any. He was a Florentine, he realised, more at home here than anywhere.

Ada was waiting at the balcony, looking down at the square. She stood on tiptoes when she saw him, then disappeared and ran out of the front door of the apartment and across the street into his arms. He held her against him, and they couldn’t breathe with the force of it, and he felt that, if he could manage not to tell her, not to say that this was their last night together, it might not have to be true.

They sat in the drawing room. She’d understood without words. They talked, sank to the floor and made love very slowly, looking out at the moon-gold trees. He held her head in his hands, covering her pale face with kisses. Tatters trotted from room to room, then found a corner to sleep in and began to snuffle and twitch. Esmond and Ada did not sleep. Only when he handed her Anna’s collage did she begin to cry. At eight they walked down to a café on the via della Piazzuola. They fed Tatters pastries under the table, held hands, regretted each sip of coffee, as if by keeping their cups full they might halt time. One last kiss on the corner of the street and then Esmond left, his tears not coming until he’d arrived at the station.

Six Blackshirts, including Carità, were there to see them off. A look of triumph as Goad and Esmond climbed up into their compartment. Carità came right up to the window, rapped on it three times and waved. As the train pulled out, beginning a long arc towards Pisa, Esmond could still see him on the platform, in his shorts, walking with a little bounce and grinning. Goad came and sat next to Esmond and put an arm around his shoulders, but the tears had passed, and he felt something else. The day was hot, the train kept stopping and starting, fishermen lolled by the side of the Arno.

On the outskirts of Pisa, outskirts Esmond recognised with a swell of distress as the same ones he’d driven through the night of Fiamma’s death, the train halted again. Almost without thinking, not giving himself time to change his mind, Esmond stood up.

‘I’m going back,’ he said to Goad.

The older man looked at him through his spectacles, before nodding.

‘Will they be looking for us here at Pisa? Or not until Genoa?’

Goad thought for a moment. ‘I’d guess Genoa. It will give me time to come up with a convincing — hum — canard.’ He rose and took Esmond by the hand. ‘Good luck. You’d better get moving.’

The train gave a creak and began to chunter forward. Esmond went into the corridor, reached out of the window, opened the door and leapt down the embankment, tumbling with his case into some thorny bushes, tearing his trousers and opening cuts on his cheeks and hands. He looked up in time to see Goad leaning out of the window, waving discreetly, but furiously.

He walked back along the Arno with his bag over his shoulder, keeping out of the way whenever he saw a cart or bicycle. At Pontedera he bought a ticket for Lucca, but instead boarded for Florence, getting out a stop early at Ginestra Fiorentina. It was dark by the time he reached the Oltrarno.

He waited in the tree-cover of the Villa Ventaglio until past eleven, watching the light in Ada’s apartment, her hair, her shadow on the ceiling. Sure that no one was watching, he crossed to ring at the door. She’d taken a while to come down, asked Chi è? through the letterbox.

His voice was heavy, choked. ‘I couldn’t go,’ he said, and the door opened, and there she was.

3

Esmond had suggested they move to the villa. There was already talk of the MVSN requisitioning Jewish property, and the apartment was simply too small to hide him for long. Carità’s smile at the railway station came to mind. He knew that, if word of his escape reached the Blackshirts, they’d be after his blood. One evening in October, over dinner with the Professor, he mentioned the unoccupied villa that sat on a hilltop to the south, the key to the front door given to Bailey before the Keppels left, now in a drawer in the sacristy. The Professor had nodded.

‘It may be the answer to a few other problems we’ve been having,’ he said. ‘We need a base out of the city, where people might— disappear.’

Later that night, Bruno Fanciullacci pulled up outside the apartment in a battered and spluttering Bianchi. He’d secured himself a job on the Fiat factory floor in Novoli by day; by night he organised hushed meetings, arranged messages to and from the numerous Communist Party leaders in gaol in Florence. He had shaved and showered since Esmond had seen him in Ada’s apartment. His moustache was a slick black line beneath which, ever twirling, the matchstick. He was wearing a new beige suit, a thin navy tie. He looked dashing and capable and Esmond felt a twist of jealousy. Ada sat in front beside Bruno with Tatters on her lap, Esmond in the back. They drove through the deserted town, lights off. The car jerked and squealed around corners, struggled up the smallest incline.

Every plume of mist from the river was a Fascist spy, every shadow hid a Blackshirt with a Beretta. They parked in one of the side streets in front of the Pitti Palace. Ada kept watch outside while Esmond and Bruno went into the church. It was dark inside, cool despite the warm night. Esmond picked up the key to the villa and, under a pile of surplices, Bailey’s Army standard W/T radio. Then, just as they were about to leave, he stopped.

‘Aspetta,’ he said, and Bruno shone his torch down the aisle. It found the triptych, which brought Esmond up short. ‘D’you think we’ll be bombed?’ he asked Bruno. ‘In Florence, I mean.’

‘Maybe. Depends how bad things get. How long it all goes on. They talk about an Open City, but—’

‘I want to take the paintings. Keep them with me up at the villa. If they’re evacuating art from the Uffizi, the Bargello, all the other churches, we should take care of these.’

Bruno looked at the triptych with a little shake of his head. ‘They won’t fit in the car.’

‘You go ahead, I’ll carry them up.’

Bruno shrugged, then smiled, moving the matchstick from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘We’ll see you up there — if the car makes it. Don’t get caught.’

With the paintings balanced on his head — not heavy, but catching every breeze — he set out up the via Romana. The moonlight was broken by clouds, but he kept to the shadows, relieved when he left the main road and began the long climb towards the villa. He heard the sputtering of the Bianchi’s engine somewhere ahead.

Bruno and Ada were waiting when he arrived at L’Ombrellino. He carried the paintings up into the house and arranged them by the table in the hall. Bruno had found a bottle of champagne, some glasses in the kitchen. Ada lit the candelabra in the entrance. They stood beside the paintings in the candlelight and toasted the new home. Tatters was already exploring, his footsteps clicking, halting as he caught a new scent, then darting into the upper parts of the house. They were silent in the hallway, listening to the dog’s progress. As he left, Bruno embraced them both, the matchstick prodding Esmond’s cheek.

‘Be careful, you two,’ Bruno said. ‘It’s a risk to love someone these days. They’ll use it against you, if they get you.’ Esmond drew himself up when Bruno left, the quicker to fill his space. They stood there, in the hall, watching the flames on the gilt of the paintings. Tatters clacked back in with a mouse clamped softly between his jaws. It was still alive, squirming gently. Esmond reached down and eased open the dog’s mouth. The mouse dropped, paused for a moment, overcome briefly by this unexpected redemption, then scurried off into the skirting-board.

4

They have been here at the villa for a year now. They have grown used to the strictures of their new life as eyes grow accustomed to darkness, though Esmond is dreading winter. He can scarcely believe they survived January ’42, when snow packed so thickly on the roof they’d heard it groaning like a whale in the night. Ice had patterned the windows, the pool had frozen over and the Arno, flowing heavy with snow-water, was just a black slash across the city below them. He’d had to drop rocks down the well in the garden before he could lower the bucket for water. During the day they’d huddled under eiderdowns bundled in clothes, Tatters a furry, breathy hot-water bottle between them. Later they lit fires in the kitchen, hoping no one would see the smoke. They barely slept, tucked into the hot fug, feeding vine-wood into the stove, gradually removing clothes and then bathing in a copper tub. They’d pour jugs of near-scalding water over each other, letting out animal bellows and gurgles of pleasure, then sit wrapped in their towels while potatoes baked in the oven, a bowl of carrots boiled on the stove. They read to each other: Ada Gerusalemme Liberata, Leopardi’s Zibaldone, Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno; Esmond Eugene Onegin, Mrs Dalloway, The Way We Live Now. They began to speak Italian as much as English, Ada correcting him on his grammar and pronunciation; now he dreams in both languages.

Once a week — Wednesday afternoons — Bruno would arrive at the wall at the end of the garden with a chicken or a stick of salami or a haunch of ham. He had Communist contacts in the north who could bypass both the government rationing teams and the black marketers, while relatives of Maria Luigia on a pig farm out towards Pistoia happily provided Bruno with supplies. He spoke breathlessly to Esmond of his efforts to unite the various liberalsocialista factions and their obdurate Communist cohorts. He was always fizzing with news, the matchstick dancing under his moustache as he talked, his hands sweeping across Florence as he described how they’d hound the Fascists into the Arno, throw them bodily from the Ponte Santa Trinità, and then build a country on the teachings of Gramsci, how Esmond and Ada’s children would grow up in a socialist paradise. At this last, Ada would blush and shove him in the chest. As he left, he’d hand them scribbled messages to transmit over the W/T set. They were always in code and made no sense to Esmond, although he began to recognise certain names — Penna, Rossino, Babbo.

Sometimes the Professor came in Bruno’s stead, climbing over the wall at the bottom of the garden and rapping on the window of the drawing room until they let him in. He’d brush the snow from his jacket and peer at them: avuncular, anxious. They’d serve him tea, extinguishing the fire as soon as the water boiled. He’d bring news that wasn’t on the radio: about the partisans high in the hills waiting for their moment to pounce, strikes at the factories in Milan, about the growing strength of the unions in the big cities and discontent among contadini in the south.

Esmond had made several late-night trips to the church that last winter, a hat pushed down over his head, his breath misting in the sharp wild brace of the air. He’d pressed himself into ice-stiff bushes at the slightest sound, leapt garden walls, disappeared into the shadows of buildings where he watched Blackshirts garrulous and greasy after a night in a brothel on the via delle Terme. The curfew was loose, often ignored, but he couldn’t afford to be caught by the carabinieri and so he waited until the small hours before setting out. He came back loaded with books, jumpers, candles. He found Bailey’s service Webley in the priest’s bedside drawer, a Sam Browne belt of ammunition under the bed. He sleeps with the gun on the floor beside their mattress.

Finally, April — the trees shrugged of snow, the box-hedge parterre cutting shaggy lines through the whiteness. Only on distant peaks did snow still vein down. The town below woke with difficulty from winter. Petrol was increasingly scarce, food heavily rationed, the young men all away at war. Most of those who stepped out into the serene light of spring wished the snow and cold and darkness would come back. But the sun continued to shine and the city resumed life haltingly, stretching its stiff limbs.

That summer, they lived in the garden. The precise Italianate order at L’Ombrellino unravelled into wild profusion, geometric lines smudged and finally erased by fiercely sprouting fennel, fig, oleander, morning glory. The pool was dark with algae and frogspawn, knots of weed. Swallows threw themselves down over it to drink from the reflections of their beaks. Esmond imagined them flying up in a great dark wing over the desert where brave sunburnt soldiers stared across a landscape of dunes and mirages of the enemy. When summer ended, they’d swoop — on sudden instinct — southwards to the desert and the dying. The sand would be crossed with bones, dark blood, husks of tanks and troop-carriers. If the swallows knew anything at all, he thought, they’d weep as they passed over, or fly north, back into frozen whiteness.

Ada cut back the weeds on Alice Keppel’s vegetable garden. Soon they had tomatoes, zucchini, broad beans and radishes. She asked Bruno to bring her seeds and they planted carrots and celery, beetroot and cavolo nero. She worked with her hair in a gypsy bandana, an old shirt of Esmond’s hanging over her like a dress. Her hands became hard, the skin of her face dense with freckles. Before dinner they’d swim the dirt and heat of the day from their skinny bodies, lying naked, spreadeagled under the bruising sky.

Bruno and the Professor came more often in summer. Bruno would strip down to his undershorts — placing his matchstick atop his folded shirt — and swim slow lengths. The Professor removed his shoes and dangled his toes, leaning back against the pediment of one of the dodos and speaking with surprise about the destruction of Lübeck: the firestorm that had swept through the medieval city, sucking the oxygen from the air, unleashing tornadoes, turning people to ashes in seconds. He had become obsessed with the bombing raids. He’d started a scrapbook of press clippings, photographs, scholarly articles on the physical and psychological effects of the air war. Two hundred and fifty planes had dropped four hundred tonnes of explosives on the ancient Hanseatic port, he told them, the timbered buildings with their red-tiled roofs passing the flames from one house to the next with a roar. He looked down over Florence and was silent. Bruno’s path through the water, the birdsong in the trees below, wind in the pines and bamboo; he sighed and drew his long grey feet from the water.

Some evenings Esmond and Ada would raid the wardrobes of clothes the Keppels had left, opening bottles of spumante from the cellar and playing music — just softly — on the gramophone in the drawing room, pushing the divans and canapés and armchairs to the side. The discs were marching bands, Christmas carols, Vaughan Williams and Elgar, stolidly English. In one dusty record-case, Ada found three discs of Schubert waltzes. Esmond wore George’s white tie and tails, put a monocle in his eye and brilliantined his hair; Ada disappeared into Alice Keppel’s ball gowns, gathering up the trains and sweeping them around her à la flamenco. They’d jive and foxtrot to the faster numbers, working themselves into a sweaty muddle in the warm drawing room as daylight dwindled, then move in darkness to the slower music. Some evenings, birdsong in the hills was so loud that it drowned out the gramophone, and they’d find themselves dancing instead to a movement of larks and thrushes, finally falling onto the largest of the divans, panting and happy and lost.

She still has her moments of distance though, when she seems to leave him, to disappear into silence. She has the perfect cheekbones for such distance — high and horizontal, like Anna’s. Sometimes he despairs of ever knowing the rills and runnels of her heart. But love without torment, he reasons, is only friendship. They lie on their sky-high mattress, kiss, fuck; but it’s often as if there’s a film between them. One hot night, he’d stood with her in their bedroom and gripped her by the shoulders, shaking her gently. He was a little drunk and half-begged her, finally getting down on his knees.

‘Let me in. I want to know you. I can’t love you if I don’t know you.’

She’d smiled, faltering, then taken her wicker bag from the wardrobe and, looking directly at him, emptied it on the bed.

‘This is me,’ she said. ‘Look at it. This is me.’

Out fell a scallop purse, a diary, several pencils, a bottle of Yardley lavender water, a handkerchief, a blue-bound copy of Mayakovsky’s poems and a photograph of Esmond, taken by Goad last Christmas. She held the photograph out as if in triumph, as if to prove that he’d been fixed to the album of her life, and never again should he question her love.

They have talked, now and again, about the death camps. What started out as rumours were now facts: slatted railway carriages heading eastwards, humans herded like cattle, gas chambers. They listen to Radio Vaticana, which had first broken the news, and was now talking about German plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The Professor has been in touch with Ada’s father, who is in Milan, protected by Ettore Ovazza, safe so far. They can see the eggshell dome of the Great Synagogue from the terrace. Ada stands there some evenings, looking down, a shawl around her, until the light fades and the soft blue dome disappears into darkness.

The leaves are falling in the garden. They will need to be more careful when they step outside, although since the army extended the draft to those aged fifty — sometimes, in the right wind, they can hear the drafted Florentines marching for the war in Russia — they often feel quite alone in the world. L’Ombrellino is like a cloud palace, a vast Zeppelin hanging above an unpeopled city. There are bloodbaths in Greece and Yugoslavia and North Africa, the balance tilts — only slightly — to the Allies, and Esmond and Ada lie on their bed and listen to the radio, looking at the triptych, allowing the tortured figures to stand for what they cannot see, for the suffering that says to them both: it is time to engage.

5

The third of November, 1942: the day after they burnt In Love and War. Esmond is standing in uncertain morning light listening to birdsong rising around the villa. Tatters is at his feet, sniffing the air: damp leaves and woodsmoke. After so long spent in old, familiar clothes, he moves with difficulty in the uniform, which is too small for him. He couldn’t believe, when Bruno showed him the complicated layers of his disguise, that Italian soldiers still wore puttees, and had spent almost half an hour that morning wrapping and re-wrapping them around his calves. On his head is the red fez of the Bersagliere. The right sleeve of his tunic has been pinned behind his back. He thinks of his father.

He hasn’t heard from home for over a year now, and he wonders how his parents are getting through the war, if his mother’s still locked up. He wonders about Rudyard, whether he’s alive, or dry bones in a desert, or heaving a pickaxe in some wind-lashed Silesian prison camp. Now Ada comes out to join him. She is wearing the green and white uniform of an ambulance driver. She hands him a cup of orzo which he blows on and sips, pulling a face.

‘It’s frightful, isn’t it?’

‘Parliamo italiano oggi, carino,’ she reminds him, smiling. They’ve been in the villa so long that Esmond feels panic in his chest at the thought of leaving. He pats the Beretta in the holster on his hip, remembers he isn’t meant to use his right arm, and takes another sip. It’s the first time since coming to the villa that he has really missed smoking.

‘You should put on your cast,’ she says, and he has to think for a moment about the word — ingessatura. She hands him the white plaster — fashioned by the ever-resourceful Maria Luigia — and a sling which he hooks over his head. His arm feels heavy and strange dangling on his chest. ‘We must go,’ she says.

They lock Tatters inside the house with a bone that he begins to gnaw, barely noticing them leave. They go down past the swimming pool into the copse, leaves thick and wet underfoot. Esmond helps Ada over the wall at the bottom of the garden — slipping his arm out from the sling and holding her hand with thickly bandaged fingers — and then they are in the via San Carlo where Bruno is leaning against the bonnet of the ancient Bianchi. He smiles at them, cocking his matchstick.

‘You’re ready?’

Ada nods.

He drives them down through the city and Esmond has to fight an urge not to press his nose to the window. Florence is deserted. A few stray dogs worry bags of rubbish outside the Pitti Palace. Cars sit on their haunches, their wheels removed for the rubber, their owners unable to find or afford petrol. When they come to the via Tornabuoni, Esmond reaches over with his good arm and takes Ada’s hand. He can feel his pulse against her cool flesh. She is made for this, he thinks.

‘Your British Institute, it’s now used for meetings of the Committee of Fascist Youth,’ Bruno says. ‘They’re training the next generation of cannon fodder, teaching range-finding and ordnance in that beautiful library.’ He shakes his head and then brings the car to a halt outside Pretini’s hair salon. ‘I must leave you here,’ he says. ‘I can’t risk anyone seeing me with you. Now, you know what you’re required to do?’ Ada nods. ‘Don’t speak too much,’ he says, looking at Esmond. ‘If you’re caught, give them the information we agreed. Nothing about the Professor, nothing about supply lines. Good luck.’ They climb out into the cool morning. Esmond finds himself wondering what else he knows that the Fascists could possibly want. Some meaningless code names, a few fuzzily recalled locations in the hills that he’s transmitted over the W/T. The Professor is all he has.

He can see his breath in the air as they walk down the via degli Avelli towards the station. Ada is a few steps ahead, carrying a small case with a red cross on it, which she swings jauntily by her side. They wait for a tram to pass and walk out of the shadow of Santa Maria Novella. The railway station stretches in front of them; from under the brow of its porch beetles a line of commuters; travellers trying to keep up with their porters; soldiers embracing their wives and lovers in the gloomy ticket hall, greetings and farewells. Esmond spots another Bersagliera with a rifle across his back. The man salutes when he sees the caporal maggiore stripes on his shoulders. Esmond nods down at his arm, mutters ‘Va bene,’ at the soldier and follows Ada into the station.

Carabinieri stand in their kepis by the ticket gates, asking for documents only from the young girls as they board trains for the coast. Ada, whose hair is up beneath a peaked cap, passes the carabinieri and walks forward to the platform where the train to Livorno is beginning to puff. Esmond starts to follow her when one of the policemen holds out an arm.

‘Documenti, per favore,’ the policeman says, scowling at Esmond’s bandaged arm. Esmond reaches awkwardly inside his jacket and fumbles for his military identification card and notification of disability. He fights not to look towards Ada on the platform. The policeman stares at the documents and then at Esmond.

‘Dove andate?’

Esmond clears his throat and hesitates. Now he does see Ada, fumbling in her case, glancing at him. He stares back at the policeman and, in barely more than a whisper, says, ‘Vado a una clinica ortopedica a Livorno. Ho un appuntamento con un dottore Hartmann lì.’ He holds his breath as the policeman looks again at his papers, finally handing them back with a ‘Grazie’. Esmond walks through the gates and, without looking at Ada, boards the train for Livorno, his pulse visible in the corners of his eyes.

6

They get off at Empoli. The weather has turned for the worse, thunderclouds rolling across the sky from the west. Esmond makes sure Ada has seen him and crosses the road into the park opposite the station. He waits on a bench beneath a plane tree, where she joins him, at the far end, opening her case on her lap.

‘Was it close?’ she asks.

‘I don’t think so. He just wanted to get some sweat out of a soldier. If my Italian isn’t good enough by now—’

‘Your Italian is fine.’

They leave the park and walk past a group of cafés and down a road of blank-faced houses. After a few hundred yards, they stop in front of a building with a faded sign: ‘Hotel Superiore’. There is the sound of singing. Ada rings the bell. They wait for several minutes and finally the bolts are drawn back. A hunched old woman in black opens the door and leads them silently into a courtyard and up a staircase. On the piano nobile they make their way into a gloomy apartment. The old lady leaves them, shutting the door behind her. The singing gets louder. Esmond follows Ada into the bedroom where, against the open windows, an enormous man is performing ‘E Lucevan le Stelle’ from Tosca for the assorted pigeons and sparrows on the rooftops. His back to the room, he quivers at the highest notes, his voice breaking. Finally, after a sudden pause, he turns towards them.

‘Welcome,’ he says in an accent Esmond cannot place. He kisses Ada and shakes Esmond vigorously by his plaster cast, letting out a burbling laugh. He sits down on the bed, motions to two armchairs opposite and pours them out a glass of wine each from the bottle beside his bed.

‘Bene,’ he says, letting out another laugh and raising his glass. ‘I am Oreste Ristori. To your health, young ones — it’s never too early for a sip, heh?’ His face shines as if recently polished. He’s older than Esmond had thought, his vastness hiding wrinkles that only reveal themselves in repose. Above the fireplace on one side of the room are several photographs of a woman who, for a moment, reminds Esmond of Wallis Simpson. In some of the pictures she is in battle fatigues, in another she stands at a waterfall holding a rifle in one hand, her face streaked with mud or blood.

Ristori goes to stand beside the pictures, picking one from the mantel and passing it to Esmond. The silver frame is cold to the touch. She is beautiful. A string of black pearls hangs from her throat.

‘My Mercedes,’ the man says. ‘My star in the dark night. I write to her every day, not knowing even if she receives my letters. She was in gaol in São Paulo. Now she is fighting Vargas’s government in the jungle, with the anarchists, the guerrillas. In Brazil. You see how remarkable she is?’ He beams at Esmond. ‘You see how a man might spend his life for a woman like this?’ He knocks back his wine and sits down on the bed, pouring another. He hums a few more bars of Tosca as he sips. It is cold in the room and Ada gives a shiver.

‘Mr Ristori, we must be on the next train. May we have the documents?’

‘Let me get them. I’m sorry.’ He kneels down and begins to root beneath the bed. ‘It’s rare I have visitors now,’ he says. ‘I attend a literary gathering that is cover for a Marxist discussion group, but still — we are in Empoli, you understand? Revolutions were never made in Empoli. I am back where I began, the Tuscany of my birth. Defeated! Ah, here we go.’ He draws out some sheets of paper covered in dense typewritten text. Ada takes them from him and looks at them closely.

‘I think this is the sort of thing we were after. Thank you.’

‘My pleasure,’ he says, smiling broadly again. ‘You’re sure you won’t stay for another drink?’

‘We must make our train.’

She stands above Esmond, helps him ease the cast off his wrist, rolls the papers around his arm, and closes it over them. They bid farewell to Ristori, and make their way down the narrow stairs of the hotel, through its silent courtyard. As they walk down the broad street towards the station, the sound of Ristori’s singing comes to them again, high and sweet, finally lost in the traffic and the wind.

7

On the train to Pisa, they sit together in an empty compartment. It has begun to rain and the drops are pulled along the window as they gather speed through the Tuscan hills.

‘I’ve no idea if these codes are any good,’ she says, looking out.

‘But he’s dependable. Bruno said so.’

‘He’s a lunatic.’ An inspector comes into the compartment, nods at them both as he checks their tickets and pulls the door shut behind him.

‘In some ways he’s amazing, obviously, a modern Bakunin. He fought for the rights of Italian immigrant labourers in South America. They think he’s a hero down there. No one knew how badly Italians were being exploited. He wrote long articles about the conditions for workers and kept being put on boats back to Italy, but he’d throw himself overboard and swim back to land.’

‘When did he meet—?’

‘Mercedes Gomez. She was another anarchist. They created the labour movement in Brazil, unions for plantation workers. When the police started rounding everyone up, Ristori was put on a prison boat back to Genoa. If he ever goes back he’ll be shot. He’s almost seventy, you know. This isn’t the first time he’s helped us.’

At Pisa there are gangs of Blackshirts on the platforms, police guarding the exits. He waits for Ada to get off the train and follows some distance behind. He makes his way down into the underpass and boards another train, this time for Genoa. Ada is sitting by herself in a crowded compartment. He stands, holding onto the luggage rack, aware suddenly that his cast is itching, that the papers are dampening against his skin.

They are only on the train for two stops, until Forte dei Marmi. He goes first and, without looking back, crosses the road and boards a bus to the seafront. He walks along the promenade, sheltering from the worst of the rain under the umbrella pines. Then an open stretch past shuttered restaurants and hotels until he comes to the Bagno Dalmazia bathing club; a single waiter stands outside on the sand, down towards the beach. Deckchairs sag under a tattered awning.

‘A drink, sir?’ he says, as Esmond walks down onto the damp sand.

‘I’m waiting for a friend. She’s always late,’ Esmond says, the carefully remembered code words sounding sham to his ears. He eases himself down into one of the deckchairs. The waiter disappears inside and Esmond can hear him speaking. He sits and watches the sea, a deep and melancholy grey, pocked with rain. Rocks prod up like fins twenty feet out. After fifteen minutes or so, he is aware of a buzzing noise from where the coast curves round for La Spezia. He thinks of Shelley floating in these choppy waters, his skin the grey-green deadness of the sea. Ada arrives and sinks down into the other deckchair.

‘You weren’t followed?’ Esmond asks in English.

‘No.’

‘I can’t think why I asked that. I suppose it sounded like the sort of thing I should say. Of course you weren’t.’

‘You’re a very convincing spy.’

The waiter brings them both a coffee. It is nearing three and they haven’t eaten yet.

‘They’re coming,’ Ada says, nodding at two boats moving steadily from the north.

‘You’re sure it’s them?’

‘I am.’

They sip their coffee.

‘I wonder,’ he begins, ‘the people who do this kind of thing all the time, the Richard Hannay types, how much they’re in it for the thrill? Waiting around for a secret assignations. Being terribly hush-hush. Generally feeling like a Buchan novel.’

She is silent, watching the boats as they approach.

‘Because it seems rather a flimsy thing to build your life upon, this kind of frisson, don’t you—’

‘Shut up, Esmond.’

‘Right-o.’

‘If you have to speak, speak in Italian. But better, don’t speak.’

He looks down the beach, up towards the road, where only the waiter stands, watching them, coolly complicit. A gust of wind showers them with a fine sting of sand.

‘Right-o,’ he says quietly.

The boats pull up on the shoreline a few hundred yards to the north and one man walks briskly along the beach towards them. He’s wearing a dark blue sou’wester and oilskin and puffing on a cigarette, a red glow each time he inhales. When he reaches them he squats down in front of Esmond. He has amused blue eyes, a square jaw peppered with stubble.

‘Shoot out your arm and let’s have a dekko,’ he says, looking swiftly up and down the beach and then peeling apart the plaster cast. He takes out the papers and gives them a brief, frowning glance before slipping them inside his oilskin. ‘Think they’re kosher?’ he asks.

‘They look real enough,’ Ada says, sitting up as straight as her deck chair will allow. ‘Ristori stole them from the Regia Marina headquarters in Livorno. Could be a plant, but I’d bet they were real.’

‘Good work,’ the man says. ‘You know Bailey, don’t you?’ He looks at Esmond again.

‘Yes. Very well.’

‘Bloody good egg. We sprung him from a camp in Sicily in August. He’s in Spain now, on a job, but he’ll be back in the UK before long. Deserves a rest after what he’s been through. More or less ran our game in Italy until they picked him up.’

‘Your game?’

‘Can’t stay, I’m afraid. Eyeties I’m with are awfully skittish. Cheerio.’

He pulls his hat down and sets off back up the beach. The rain has eased and there is sunlight on the sea as the two boats pull out and head northwards. They sit for a while longer and then Ada stands and stretches.

‘Shall we go for a walk?’

They follow the Englishman’s footsteps down to the tide-line. Ada shucks off her shoes and socks and walks barefoot, stepping over wormcasts and the bubbles of oily seaweed.

‘Aren’t you cold?’ Esmond asks.

‘I love it. I love winter. It’s worth a little pain to feel like this.’

Esmond takes his own shoes off and they walk together, looking up at the dark windows of holiday houses, hotels, restaurants. They herd wading birds ahead of them along the beach; Esmond spots oystercatchers, sanderlings, dunlin.

‘There’s nothing so depressing as a holiday resort in winter,’ he says.

‘But we have it to ourselves.’ She takes his hand and he feels the ridge of the ring on her wedding finger. He remembers slipping Bruno an envelope of cash to take to Bernard Berenson at I Tatti in exchange for the small and ancient gold band. Esmond had given it to Ada one evening, as they’d sat out on the terrace with one of the last bottles of wine from the Keppels’ cellar, and a rich dusk had fallen over the countryside. He’d told her he loved her, that as soon as the war was over, he’d marry her, that he’d never met anyone so admirable.

Now he takes her in his arms on the beach, aware there must be eyes watching them from the slumbering town, but not wanting to miss this, their toes icy in the surf, his cast heavy on her shoulder. Sun ranges across the sea, now blue and sparking green. He kisses her and she pulls him urgently towards her. A spray of sand and salt water covers them, and he is suddenly aware how far from safety they are, how alone. They break apart, pulling their socks and shoes back onto pale blue feet. Esmond hooks his cast back in the sling, and they make their way up to the train station.

8

It is not until the beginning of December, when, en route to Malta, three Poeti-class destroyers are intercepted by Royal Navy corvettes off Lipari and sunk, that they see the fruits of their mission. Bruno, the Professor, Antonio Ignesti and Tosca Bucarelli come to L’Ombrellino to congratulate them. Esmond and Ada are in the kitchen with Tatters when the four appear at the bottom of the terrace, coming up the stone steps by the swimming pool. An unlikely gang — the Professor, slightly stooped, a bottle of wine in each hand, stumbling every so often on the icy gravel, Bruno swinging a whole cured ham, scarf furled around his neck like an undergraduate, Antonio with one arm around Tosca, the other heaving a shopping basket full of pasta and cabbages. He is sturdy and shaven and she blonde and childlike beside him. Tatters gallops down to greet them, speechless with joy at their coming, bouncing up and down until he is tickled and fed a chunk of ham by Bruno.

They sit in the kitchen around another perilous fire, snow falling thickly outside. Corks are pulled from bottles, a pan of water set to boil on the stove, ham and salami sliced on the sideboard. There is an air of quiet satisfaction, of having done something meaningful for Europe, for humanity. The wireless is brought down to the kitchen, and they listen to the news on Radio Vaticana. It is possible, as 1942 runs out of breath, to feel better.

The Allies are on top in most places. Rommel is stuck in Tunisia; the Germans stewing in Stalingrad; the Japanese fading at Guadalcanal. The American war machine is gathering: their bombs fall constantly. Malta — absurdly, it seems to Esmond — stands firm. And here in Italy the Professor tells them of Mussolini’s son-in-law, Ciano, uttering rebellious murmurs in Rome as more and more Alpini are fed into the maw of the Eastern Front. Slogans have begun to appear on the streets of Florence. Viva Il Duce and Credere, Obbedire, Combattare are replaced by Non Mollare! and Ricordiamo Matteotti.

The Professor raises his glass. ‘To Esmond and Ada,’ he says, grinning. ‘And to Oreste Ristori, the madman.’

‘And to me,’ Tosca says. ‘It’s my twentieth birthday today.’ Esmond hugs her, Bruno uncorks a bottle of spumante, the Professor beams soppily as Ada serves out bowls of ravioli. Tatters settles down in Bruno’s lap and begins to snore as they talk about the war.

After eating, they go to stand in the drawing room where Esmond lights another fire, burning more of the vine branches that fill the bothies beside the villa. Firelight plays on their faces as they lounge on divans, the Professor sprawled in an armchair, Tosca and Antonio beginning to dance as Ada winds up the gramophone. Bruno is by the window smoking a cigarillo, looking down over Florence.

The Professor swirls the flat wine in his glass. ‘All wars are civil wars,’ he says woozily, ‘because all men are brothers.’ Dusk has fallen and the city is a mass of shadows under the hills. Esmond goes to stand beside Bruno.

‘You did well,’ Bruno says. ‘Ada told me.’

‘It was a test, I suppose?’

‘It was a success. That’s all that matters.’ Bruno breathes out smoke against the window. ‘Those ships might have made the difference for Malta. Malta might make the difference to the war. Everything is connected, especially at a time like this.’

They are silent for a while. Bruno turns towards him and Esmond watches his thin profile in the glass.

‘We must all choose sides, you know,’ he says.

‘I have.’

‘You’re doing the right thing, certainly. Do you want a cigarillo?’

‘Thanks.’

Esmond sees the flame flare in the window. Two heads bend inwards and two red points separate. The Professor leads Ada in a stately waltz beside Antonio and Tosca, the glow of firelight behind them.

‘It’s important to do the right things for the right reasons. To have ideological certainty to back up your actions.’ Bruno’s voice is soft. ‘Do you see what I mean?’

Esmond swallows the last of his champagne. He feels oddly nervous.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ he says. ‘Stalingrad. I mean horrifying, but also terribly moving. Ada and I listen to Radio Moscow in the evenings, when they broadcast in English, and the way the Russians are laying down their lives, that kind of ecstatic self-sacrifice. They have something we don’t.’

‘Noble, isn’t it?’ Bruno turns and smiles. A beat. ‘You’ll want to rescue your fiancée from the Professor. She’s beginning to look desperate.’

Esmond and Ada stand at the door a few hours later and watch the four of them stagger down the path towards the swimming pool. They wash up together, then make their way to bed, bundled against the cold. Esmond has found an old tweed jacket of George Keppel’s that he wears to sleep. They have talked about bringing the mattress down to the kitchen, but Esmond says there’s something medieval about the idea, and they like the cool light of mornings in the studio, the view down over the city, the sense of sleeping away from a sordid day in the city’s life.

In bed that night, he waits until she is asleep and crawls along the floor to light the stubby candle in front of the triptych. He thinks of the Italian sailors on the boat, imagines the shock of the torpedo blasts, the way the air would have been sucked out of the cabins, how quickly they went down. He wonders how many of the men on board read poetry, how many had a novel they were working on, or a girl like Ada waiting at home. He wonders how many were locked in each other’s arms, in the snug of a hammock below deck, when the torpedoes struck. He’d heard that drowning was an easy way to go once the first lungful of water was drawn in. He looks up at the face of Mary Magdalene and finds himself mouthing something close to a prayer.

‘You don’t believe in God now, do you?’ Ada, wearing a thick jumper over one of Alice Keppel’s nightdresses, is raised on her elbow, watching him.

‘Of course not,’ he says.

‘I like having the paintings here, but not if they’re making you superstitious. I won’t be with a religious man.’

‘I was just thinking about the sailors, about how they died.’

‘You can’t have those thoughts. We’re at war. Now blow out the candle.’

He does so and lies beside her, looking up into the darkness until it is almost dawn, then gets up and takes Tatters downstairs. He lets the dog out into the garden and goes back inside. He sees, by the fire, a red leather book. Il Manifesto del Partito Comunista. He opens it and begins to read — ‘Borghese e Proletari. The story of every society up to this point is a story of class struggles.’ He hears Tatters scratching at the kitchen door. He smiles, closes the book. The dog, with a proud little wag, deposits a baby rabbit on the mat, still weakly twitching, its back broken. Tatters looks up at Esmond with jubilant eyes, then turns tail and rushes back into the garden, barking joyously. By the time they eat breakfast, there are six, soft, motionless pouches of fur curled up on the mat.

‘I’ll cook them for lunch,’ Ada says, smiling.

9

The early months of 1943 bring deep snow and silent, frosty mornings. Esmond had thought that, after the success of their first job, missions for the Resistance would be delivered into their lives in regular, manageable manila envelopes. Instead, apart from frequent visits from Bruno carrying cryptic messages for the W/T, the months of snow and ice pass much as before at L’Ombrellino.

Abroad, though, it is a different matter. Esmond and Ada lying rapt as the good news registers from the Vatican, Moscow, London. The wireless on the table in their bedroom is almost never off. When the German 6th Army surrenders and the Battle of Stalingrad is over, Esmond wakes Ada and they listen together to Radio Moscow playing the Internationale. She looks up at him with a sleep-fogged grin. Even the eyes of the three martyrs seem to soften at the news. The music stops and they hear the voice of the Russian announcer, breaking every so often with emotion as he reads a report of the final battle. They understand almost nothing of what he says but the hopeful relief. They make love then, pressing their cold bodies together, and she’s crying when she comes. He kisses her mole and tastes salt.

The foul weather, which has cut off the mountain passes, keeps the partisans to their hideouts in the hills. The rag-tag members of the Resistance spend the winter planning, discussing. Esmond makes a night-time foray down into the city to pick up a package from the Professor at the university. He hides it in the bottom of George Keppel’s wardrobe until a Chetnik Serb, who grins at him through his thick black beard, comes to collect it.

There are more and more Nazis in Florence; the Professor tells of Bach and Beethoven in the city’s churches, Furtwängler and von Karajan flown in to give gala performances. After the concerts, the Germans congregate at the Paszkowski Bar in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele or at the Braunhaus — a rococo apartment near the German Consulate on the via dei Bardi — where they serve beer from Munich, bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel. Red and black swastika flags hang from the windows and, most evenings, the sound of Hitler’s voice giving long, jagged speeches is heard until the cheers of the men inside drown it out. The locals stand with their ration cards in the street below, half-crazed with hunger.

They follow news from the ghetto in Warsaw hopelessly, helplessly. Reports come to them in stuttering bursts, like rifle fire over the radio waves. They hear of the Waffen SS entering on the eve of Passover, the bodies suspended from the clock tower. They hear of members of the Resistance hiding in sewers and culverts, brandishing Molotov cocktails and pilfered weapons. For a moment, just as the first warm sunshine brings buds and birdsong to the garden, there is a window of optimism, as the Nazis retreat. Then silence for a month. In May, when the rebellion is finally crushed, the ghetto torched, the members of the Resistance shot and hanged, Ada stays up in the bedroom, looking at the triptych, her eyes very cold and very clear. Esmond brings her tea and books, sits on the bed and rubs her feet between his hands. She comes downstairs again once she hears that Lampedusa has fallen. A piece of Italy is in Allied hands. Bruno is carrying two bottles of Chianti with when he comes to see them that evening and they sit out on the terrace and toast the fall of Fascism.

In July, a Wednesday arrives with no visit from Bruno. Ada is sick and so they spend the day lying in bed listening to the BBC report the British landing on Sicily. The Germans haven’t had the time to reinforce the Italian mainland; it is thought that the country will fall in a matter of weeks. Ada leans over the side of the mattress and vomits into a metal bin. Every so often, Esmond goes down to the bottom of the garden to check for Bruno. As night falls, he makes a final trip down to the copse with Tatters and sees the blonde head of Tosca bobbing through the trees towards him.

‘Where’s Bruno?’ he asks.

She is out of breath and sits down on one of the chairs beside the pool. ‘Bruno is fine,’ she says. ‘They have Maria Luigia, though.’

‘Who have her?’

‘The Blackshirts, Carità,’ she says, scowling. ‘She was found carrying forged passports. She’s been taken to the Murate. Bruno thinks we’ll be able to spring her. I think he’s crazy.’ She circles her finger by her head.

‘Is there anything we can do?’ he asks.

‘Sit tight,’ she says. ‘I must go now.’

Bruno comes up to see them the next day. Ada is still sick, and so the thin, tired-looking man comes to speak to them in their bedroom.

‘You have the paintings up here. Very gothic,’ he says when he walks in. ‘And a pistol beside the bed. I’m impressed.’ He looks down at Ada, who has a sheen of sweat on her forehead. ‘Are you all right?’ he asks, cocking the matchstick in the corner of his mouth.

‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘It’s just an infection. The water in the well isn’t as clean as it was. Is there news of Maria Luigia?’

He stoops to stroke Tatters, who has wandered in at their feet. ‘She’s being held while they try to extract information from her. She’s a strong woman, though. I’d rather it were her than almost anyone else. The bastards will torture her, I’d imagine, but she’ll do well.’

Bruno leaves and they sit listening to the radio. Neither of them feels like eating. Night falls and it is hot in the room, even with the windows open. Both of them are sweating and each time Esmond drifts into a shallow sleep, he sees Maria Luigia’s plump, friendly face, a shadow looming over it. He wakes with a start, three, four, five times. Finally, Ada turns and puts her arms around him.

‘Darling, I’m pregnant,’ she says.

10

The first they know is the ringing of the great bell — La Vacca — in the Palazzo Vecchio. They are down by the pool, dangling their feet in the water, trying to get cool in the airless evening. Esmond gets a kick of pleasure each time he thinks about the baby. He feels at once braver and more nervous than ever before. Ada is still sick, drained by the heat, irritable. ‘The baby is not the most important thing,’ she says with a frown, whenever he drapes moony fingers across her belly. Now frogs swim in the pool, pesto-thick with weed and algae. The dodos seem almost alive, so shrouded are they with moss and lichen.

The bell begins to ring just past seven in the evening. It rings for half an hour without stopping and soon there are pistol shots from the town below them. When the bell stops, they catch distant cheers echoing up the hillside. At once, they look at each other and hurry up to the bedroom. Esmond tunes the radio to the BBC. The announcer — it is Alvar Lidell — speaks in a voice of quiet wonder. The Fascist government of Benito Mussolini has been overthrown in a bloodless coup, he says. Marshal Badoglio has announced that Italy will continue to fight alongside its German allies. Former Prime Minister Mussolini has been sent into exile on the island of Maddalena. There will be a further address by King Victor Emmanuel and Prime Minister Badoglio tomorrow at twelve hundred hours Greenwich Mean Time.

Esmond and Ada stare at each other open-mouthed.

‘What does it mean?’ she asks. ‘Is it over?’

‘The war?’ he says. ‘Not yet. It can’t be. The Germans are still here.’

‘But Musso, he’s gone?’

Esmond nods.

‘And Fascism?’

He shrugs. ‘Badoglio, he’s a soldier, he’s not a Fascist.’ Ada begins to laugh, her hair bouncing as she laughs, her eyes bright and wide. Esmond runs his hands through her laughing hair as La Vacca begins to ring again. They look out of the window and over the city, where puffs of smoke appear and drift in the still evening. Two louder explosions and Esmond cranes his neck around, gazing down over the dusky Boboli Gardens to the Belvedere Fort, which is firing its cannons. Now a crackle of anti-aircraft fire answers from the opposite side of the valley, up towards Fiesole.

‘I’m going to go down and see what’s going on.’

She takes his hand, fixing her eyes on his. ‘I’m coming with you,’ she says.

There’s an old bicycle in one of the sheds beside the villa. He hunts around for a pump, inflates the tyres and bangs dust from the saddle. Ada perches, nerveless and serene, on the handlebars as they wobble through the darkening lanes. Esmond is aware of the preciousness of his cargo, but is unable to stop himself pedalling when, at one point, they come round a corner and a blast of wind hits them and the searchlights and fireworks and cheering crowds spread out before them.

The bridge is thick with people. They get off the bike and push it across, murmuring scusi every so often. The whole world is smiling, children play, young couples stand arm-in-arm and look over the river. At the dam downstream, a group of boys have gathered to set off fireworks. These rise into the air and burst, shedding bright fragments that scatter their reflection over the Arno and then fall as ashes on the water.

They reach the Piazza della Signoria and chain the bike to the Loggia dei Lanzi. A stage has been set up in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Michelangelo’s David, now free of his wooden carapace, looks pointedly in the opposite direction. Esmond can see the Professor and Bruno and a group of other men he recognises from those early days at Ada’s apartment. They are arguing, gesturing furiously at each other as a harried-looking engineer rigs up a microphone and tests the Tannoy system — uno due, uno due — which once carried Mussolini’s speeches to the perfect centre of the human world. Esmond thinks of Florence’s future: after throwing off the Fascists, the city will lose itself in petty political squabbles of the sort that is currently, publicly, taking place by the side of the stage. Finally, after glaring threateningly at an older man with a shiny head and round glasses, the Professor makes his way to the microphone.

‘In 1922,’ he begins, and a sudden hush falls across the piazza. Some are climbing up the monuments to secure a view of the stage. ‘In 1922,’ he repeats, ‘we made Benito Mussolini a freeman of the city of Florence. Today, we celebrate his captivity! Fascism in Italy is dead, the MVSN is dead. Today, black shirts will be hung at the back of cupboards, buried in sacks in the garden, burnt on a thousand bonfires.’ A huge cheer goes up, hats are thrown in the air; Esmond thinks of his own British Union uniform, moth-eaten and dusty, abandoned with his room in the church. He takes Ada in his arms and kisses her. ‘We have lived a nightmare,’ the Professor continues, ‘and now we are waking up. This is not the end, but it is the beginning of the end. Our sons are not yet home, our land is not yet our own, this war is not yet over. But soon, soon! Viva Firenze!’

At the heart of the crowd, fist raised, one eye closed by a bruise, is Maria Luigia. She smiles towards them, as if letting them in on the secret of her survival. There are more fireworks, some girls have torn up their ration cards and are throwing them in the air like confetti. Esmond and Ada go to stand beside Maria Luigia’s broadness and lift their own fists into the hopeful air. ‘Viva Firenze!’

11

The next day they walk into town together after breakfast. Bad weather came in overnight and a light rain is falling as they wind along the narrow lanes. The city is vague under a canopy of low cloud, the river yellow-grey and fast as they cross the Ponte Santa Trinità. They make their way past David into the Palazzo Vecchio. There is a swell of noise as they find the ornate main corridor; they follow the voices up a flight of stone steps and into a long, frescoed hall. People are standing and making speeches around a table, but most of the words are lost under the applause and clinking glasses and conversation. Esmond takes Ada by the hand and they cross the room to stand next to Tosca and Antonio in the bay of a window.

Bruno, stubble-shadowed, matchstick in mouth, sits between the Professor and a young, bespectacled man in a red cravat. Further up the table, Esmond sees the portly Oreste Ristori, a half-empty bottle of wine in front of him. He is leaning back and bellowing with laughter at something someone has said, his wide face rippling with each guffaw. Esmond sees the cyclist Gino Bartali, sitting next to his wife, grinning broadly and signing the occasional autograph. The Professor stands up and at once there is silence.

‘Welcome, all of you.’ He smiles, his watery eyes resting for a moment on the man beside Bruno. ‘Whatever our divisions — and we are certainly from different worlds, some of us — that which binds us is stronger. A certainty that we are moving into a new and vital age for our nation, for our city; a love of Florence and our fellow Florentines; a hatred of the thugs and monsters who have ruled us for twenty-one years. Today we welcome back some old friends, freed from needless captivity. We welcome Elio Chianesi’ — the man next to Bruno, with his studious round glasses, half-rises and waves — ‘once a student of mine. He has, for too long, been relying on the books we could smuggle into prison to nourish him. We missed you, Elio. We’re delighted to have you back.’

‘Thank you, Professor,’ he says, his pale cheeks flushing. Another round of applause, which stops suddenly as a young black man in an oyster-white linen suit comes barrelling into the room. He has a wild brush of wiry hair on his head, narrow, oriental eyes. Ada lets out a gasp.

‘Alessandro,’ she says. Leaving Esmond, she moves swiftly across the room to where the young man is already being embraced by Bruno, slapped on the back by the Professor, touched and poked by others. One of the ornate chairs is pulled out and he sits down as a glass of wine is poured. He lifts it to Elio and then turns to see Ada standing behind his chair, looking down at him with widening eyes. Esmond doesn’t hear what they say to each other, but he thinks he understands what is passing between them. The man’s skin is the same colour as the polished mahogany table, his eyes as black as the wine in his glass. Esmond finds himself feeling — not jealousy — but a sleepy melancholy, until he sees Ada, now smiling, gesture towards him and say something to the young man. With a gentle pat on the man’s shoulder, Ada makes her way back to his side.

They don’t speak until after the meeting is over, and the various liberalsocialiste — anarchists, Communists, Christian Democrats and Republicans — stand around drinking up the wine liberated — as Bruno puts it — from the now boarded-up Fascist headquarters at the Piazza Mentana. He and Ada are still at the window, looking out over the elevated cloisters of the Uffizi. The rain is heavier now, the only people moving by the river are hidden by the black domes of their umbrellas.

‘An old flame?’ he asks, trying to sound light-hearted.

‘His name is Alessandro Sinigaglia. His father was a friend of my father’s. He’s been in Regina Coeli for a long time. I hardly recognise him.’

‘Is he Abyssinian? He’s extraordinary-looking.’

‘His father’s Jewish, his mother was the black maid of a family from St Louis who came here just before the first war. She was thrown out when they found out she was pregnant and she made Florence her home.’

He turns to look across the table to where Alessandro, Elio and Bruno are talking. They toast each other, drink, recharge their glasses. They seem bold and worldly, in a way he knows he isn’t. He lets out a sigh. Ada takes his hand and gives it a squeeze, speaking softly.

‘I love you. I know I don’t say it very often — it’s not my way. But I always dreamed of this, of you.’ She squeezes his hand again, harder this time. ‘I told him he could stay with us, just until he finds a place. You don’t mind, do you?’

He shrugs and grins, still basking in her words. People begin to leave the hall, moving off into various meeting rooms — as they walk with them, and pass open doors, Esmond hears snatches of welcome to Badoglio’s government, admonitions to reform, refuse, tighten with the Church, distance from the State. Bruno sticks his head out of one of the doors and sees them.

‘You two should come in here. We’re discussing whether to send a delegation to Stalin, declare Florence an independent Soviet republic. Come on.’ He disappears back inside. Ada whistles.

‘You go,’ Esmond says. ‘You should be involved in this — you deserve to be.’ She smiles and, with a kiss, heads off to join her comrades.

At something of a loss that afternoon, Esmond sits in the condensation-misted window of the Giubbe Rosse, sipping tea. His bicycle is leaning against the window. He has been to the bank, where he was delighted to see Maria Luigia and withdrew a thousand lire from the radio account. He strolled along to the Libreria Gonnelli just off the Piazza del Duomo and bought a copy of Turgenev’s Rudin in Italian which he now reads, frowning, rubbing a window in the misted glass and looking out over his bicycle into the empty square. He finds himself increasingly drawn to Russian novels, particularly those peopled by what Leavis had referred to in a lecture as the ‘superfluous man’. He wonders if fate has marked him as one of these, destined for the footnotes of a great moment, a passenger, an Oblomov.

As evening falls, he sits in the café. His book is finished, the teapot cool, several beer glasses emptied. He is gently drunk and the book lies face-down on his lap. He is beginning to nod as the door opens and Antonio strides in.

‘He’s here,’ he shouts out into the square. ‘Esmond!’ He’s beaming, slaps Esmond on the back and sits down at the table opposite him. Soon Tosca enters, followed by Ada and Bruno, Alessandro and Elio. Oreste Ristori comes in singing the ‘Non più andrai, farfallone amoroso,’ from The Marriage of Figaro. He smiles as Ristori, still singing, gives a little jig. A waiter brings them over glasses and a bottle of spumante, and they sit drinking into the night.

They walk out into the square at around one o’clock and, as they are saying their farewells, there is the sound of aeroplane engines above, a distant rattle of gunfire.

‘It’s not over yet,’ Bruno reminds them. ‘We’re still with the Germans as far as the Brits are concerned. It’s right to celebrate but we should be careful.’ Esmond pushes the bike up the hill with Ada walking on one side, Alessandro on the other. When they get to L’Ombrellino, they shake dust from the sheets of the Keppels’ bed, where Alessandro is to sleep, and open the windows to the night.

Ada has gone upstairs. Esmond and Alessandro are back in the drawing room having a final brandy. A nightjar creaks somewhere in the garden below them.

‘I appreciate you putting me up,’ Alessandro says. ‘Just until things are clearer in the city and I can find a job, a place to rent. It was fucking mad down there, don’t you think?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Maybe it’s because I’ve been in gaol. It just seems like they’re walking around in a dream. All this shit about declaring a Soviet republic in Florence, or becoming a Papal dependency. This city was the beating heart of Tuscan Fascism. The guys who tortured me are sitting at home right now, picking their toenails, but eventually they’ll have to come out, get jobs. What do we do with them?’

‘I was wondering—’

‘Some fool was walking down the via Guelfa with a Party badge on earlier. A bunch of workers from the Ginori factory almost killed him. But we can’t do that, we have to bring them in somehow.’

They sip their drinks a while longer and then go up to bed. On the stairs, just before parting, Alessandro lays a hand on Esmond’s arm.

‘Ada told me about the baby,’ he says. ‘Congratulations. She’s an astonishing girl, the girl who’s meant the most to me. I thought about her a lot when I was in prison and I’m pleased to find her so well. So happy with you.’ A throb of sadness in his voice. Esmond can hardly see him in the darkness of the stairwell, but he smiles.

‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘It’s good to have you here.’

12

The days are taken up with meetings in the Palazzo Vecchio, speeches in the Piazza della Signoria where the various leaders make — with varying degrees of eloquence — their plays for power. Ada even gives a speech, standing in at the last moment for Bruno, who is caught at a rally in the Fiat factory. She is very straight, very still on the stage in front of the Palazzo, Michelangelo’s David looking peaceably over her. She speaks — not for long, but with honesty and intelligence — and Esmond feels extraordinarily proud that his child is growing in this fiery, political woman.

Alessandro is rarely at home. When he is, he’s an excellent guest, making delicious meals from a mixture of packets and tins and Ada’s garden. He goes out with Tatters and Esmond’s Webley early in the morning and comes back with woodpigeons, pheasants and partridges which he plucks in the kitchen until the air is thick with feathers and rich fat. The dog loves him. The evenings he’s not at a rally or meeting workers at the factories in Rifredi or Sesto Fiorentino, he stands for hours in the garden throwing a ball for Tatters, rolling with him in the long grass, the dog covering his dark skin with bright pink licks.

Ada’s thin body doesn’t help her hide her expanding belly. Bruno writes a card that he delivers by hand. Dear Esmond, it reads, I surprised myself at the delight with which I greeted Ada’s news. There are friendships that are obvious, easily observed. There are others that creep up and surprise you. Ours is the latter kind, but you should know how much I value the contribution you made during the days of Fascism and how much I value now your support to Ada, who will be one of the stars of Italian politics in years to come. I look forward to welcoming your child into the world, and to your help in building a better Italy for that child to live in. I wish you all the best, Bruno.

They tell Tosca and Antonio together, over dinner at Antonio’s apartment on the Lungarno del Pignone. It is a tiny, one-bedroom flat on the top floor of an ancient building, some of whose rooms have been left to fall into ruin, their floors collapsed, plaster caving inwards. Antonio’s salotto looks out on the river and is deliciously cool even during the muggy August evenings. They sit at the table by the window and eat soup that Antonio has made, dipping into it a precious white ciabatta — far better than the dusty loaves to which they’ve grown accustomed. When Ada tells them her news, Tosca almost leaps across the table to hold her friend. Antonio rushes off to find a bottle of spumante and they sit long into the night, keen and happy.

‘It’s nothing,’ Ada says, shrugging and struggling not to smile. ‘It’s only biology.’

News of the war comes to them over the W/T, through newspapers and the continually well-informed Professor. The Russians enjoy success after success, driving the Hun back towards the Polish border. Pictures of General Zhukov, looking grim and purposeful, splash across the covers of La Stampa and La Repubblica. The tone of these reports is resolutely neutral, not wishing to alienate the Germans, who remain in Italy in their tens of thousands and are still the ostensible ally. Whenever Esmond sees a German soldier, or the Consul in his black Foreign Office uniform, he is taken by his own astonishment. He would rather forget that the city is still host to these crafty beasts. On the wireless, he hears that Goebbels had announced the departure of the final Jew from Berlin earlier that summer, declaring the city Judenfrei. He hears of chambers being built at Auschwitz, the annihilation of ghettoes at Vilna and Minsk, the uprising at the death camp in Bialystok that was brutally crushed, its leaders committing suicide before they could be caught. He looks the Germans in the eye, and thinks of Philip.

Ada speaks briefly to her father in Turin. He is safe, unsure whether to use the moment to escape and join his wife in Switzerland. He thinks he will go to Lake Maggiore with Ettore Ovazza, from where it will be just a brief boat ride to the border. When she tells him that she and Esmond are expecting a baby, he bursts into tears. He is still crying when the pips sound and the call ends. ‘I love you,’ Ada manages to say, just as the line goes dead. Esmond stands close, his hands folded around her living belly.

Everything changes on the 8th of September. The closeness of August has unravelled into days of low cloud, fierce winds from the hills, sudden and violent showers. Esmond is with Bruno, Elio and Alessandro in the bar of the Excelsior, where they have taken to spending Sunday evenings. Ada is with Tosca and Antonio for dinner, but will join them later. For the first hour, Esmond teaches them English. They are all relatively fluent, but eager to improve their command of the idiom, to perfect their grammar, so that they might — as Alessandro puts it — speak with less shame to the English soldiers when they arrive. Bruno has already met a number of escaped British prisoners-of-war during his trips up into the hills. He reels off military slang — some of which even Esmond doesn’t recognise — with enormous and obvious pleasure: he speaks of ack emmas and emma gees, foot-sloggers in mufti; all soldiers are Tommies. When their beers arrive he grins ‘Here’s how!’ and ‘Down your sherbets!’

After they eat, the three Italians talk to Esmond about Communism. He has, with some reluctance, read The Communist Manifesto. He’s now reading How the Steel Was Tempered, which Elio had painstakingly, and very badly it seems to Esmond, translated into Italian during his time in prison. He finds its men the opposite of superfluous, and, for the first time, is bored by a Russian novel. The hero, Pavel, is all action, a Communist superman, almost entirely lacking an internal life. If this is the literature of the socialist utopia, he’d rather have the dissolute despotism of the nineteenth century.

Despite this, Esmond is drawn to the grandness of the socialist dream. There is such pure-souled hopefulness in the way that Alessandro, Elio and Bruno speak about politics, Bruno’s matchstick quivering as he talks, Elio’s cheeks flushing beneath his round spectacles, Alessandro’s hands twitching like nervous birds in the air as he describes his vision of an Italy where no one is judged on the basis of race, religion or gender. They look out into the dusk over the river, where waves are whipped up by the wind coming down from the hills. They feel like serious young men, at the centre of things.

‘You must be engaged,’ Alessandro says, nodding his spring-curled hair. ‘To act in good faith you must feel the cause deep in your bones, the justness of our mission must beat with your heart.’ He quotes a letter of Marx several times, conducting the air with a finger as he speaks. ‘If we work for all mankind,’ he says, ‘our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.’

While he is speaking, there is a commotion behind the reception desk, loud shouts from the kitchens. Alessandro stops, midstream, and beckons to a waiter.

‘Comrade,’ he says, eliciting a look that mixes scorn and confusion, ‘will you find out what gives?’

After a few minutes, the waiter comes back with a bottle of grappa and four glasses. ‘May I sit with you?’ he asks and pulls up a chair beside Esmond. He fills the four glasses and raises his own. ‘Badoglio has just signed an Armistice with the Allies. An American radio station announced it earlier. The war is officially over for Italy. Saluti.’ They knock back their drinks.

‘But what about the Germans?’ Esmond asks. ‘They’re still here, in Italy I mean, so many of them.’

A communal shrug. ‘Have a gargle of this,’ Bruno says, filling his glass. ‘And stop worrying.’

When Esmond and Ada get back to L’Ombrellino, it is raining so hard that they can’t sleep, and so lie in each other’s arms watching lightning like suddenly recalled memories illuminating the sky. Just before dawn the storm passes, and the air around them is washed silent and clean. A feeling of extraordinary peace in the house. He doesn’t even think about winter. The Allies would be there before the end of the month, bringing with them oil and butter and real life. He realises he should be worrying instead about what he’ll do to earn his living, how to feed his family — what an idea! — now the war is drawing to a close, but he can’t muster any more than a brief flutter of anxiety. Time would catch up with him eventually; until then, everything is arrested and provisional, as if preserved in amber. He drifts to sleep thinking of Rudyard being welcomed by grinning Italian soldiers as he steps off the boat at Reggio Calabria, of seeing his brother for the first time in five years.

Sleep manages somehow to conflate Rudyard and Anna and the joy in his dream celebrates both his brother’s unlikely passage through Italy and his sister’s return from her longer, darker journey. He wakes just after nine with a shriven, bare feeling, longing to return to the unearthly brightness of his dream.

13

He hears them several minutes before he sees them. He is having lunch at the Giubbe Rosse. The bar has taken delivery of a crate of tomatoes from a group of friendly contadini who, in payment, are getting riotously drunk in a room at the back. Because of the noise inside, he is sitting at a round, glass-topped table in the piazza and eating the tomatoes on bread made with chestnut flour. It is not good, but with a glass of Chianti it is edible. It has turned cold and he is wearing George Keppel’s double-breasted ulster buttoned to his throat.

He is reading Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, which, barely a third of the way through, is having a powerful effect upon him. He realises the superfluous man is a Slavic counterpart to the Italian notion of sprezzatura, a kind of studied carelessness affected by all the young men who surround the Professor. Philip had it, and Mosley; Bruno, Elio and Alessandro have it in spades. Ada, too, he thinks with a wistful smile. He decides he needs to affect a little more sprezzatura himself. Played right it is almost indistinguishable from heroism.

He looks up from his book with bother. His knife is rattling on the glass surface of the table. He picks it up, puts it on his plate and continues to read. Now the plate begins to move on the table, taking little hops and jumps until it smashes on the ground. A low rumbling that grows gradually louder until he feels the cobbles tremble beneath his feet.

‘Gianni, quickly,’ he shouts. The waiter comes to stand beside Esmond, who has risen breathlessly from his seat. The rumbling grows louder until all of the contadini are out in the square, throwing their caps in the air and cheering.

‘Gli Americani!’

‘Gli Inglesi!’

It takes a moment for Esmond to adjust once the first tank pulls through the triumphal arch and into the square. The smile stays on his face, the happiness flips in his stomach. The contadini stand in idiotic silence, their caps like shot birds at their feet.

‘Porca Madonna,’ Gianni whispers. Esmond’s smile finally gives way. There are now two tanks in the square, now three: a procession of them making their way over the cobbles and into the via Calimala. They come in a grey stream, thundering past the café. Some of the tables fall over at the vibration, their glass tops shattering. Each of the tanks bears on its side an unmistakable Iron Cross. White flags flutter from the Panzers’ cannons, but their turrets swivel, taking in the square until one points at the group standing amidst the tables and broken glass. A contadino with ruddy cheeks and the wounded blue eyes of a husky flinches. The tanks — Esmond counts sixteen — are followed by armoured personnel carriers, two enormous Hummel guns, and finally a fleet of ten covered Kübelwagens in which sit officers in the grey uniforms of the SD. Their jackets match the sky, Esmond thinks, as one of the cars stops in front of the group.

A young lieutenant leaps out and begins to speak in heavy Italian, looking past them as he passes out handbills on yellow paper. ‘We inform you that this city has been declared a site of specific strategic importance and will be occupied by the forces of the Großdeutsches Reich indefinitely. All men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five should be ready to present themselves to the Stadtskommandatur within a day’s notice. Any resistance will be treated with the greatest severity. Please’ — a smile, thin — ‘enjoy your lunch.’

An hour later, Esmond is standing on the terrace at L’Ombrellino with Alessandro, who is looking at the town through George Keppel’s binoculars. The tanks have been arranged in formal lines in the Piazza della Signoria, the two Hummel guns on the Lungarno beside the Ponte Vecchio.

‘It looks like they’re basing themselves towards the station,’ Alessandro says. ‘All of the personnel carriers are heading that way. It’s only the tanks and artillery that are going to the centre of town. A show of force. Fuck!’

Elio is the first to arrive, his face flushed. He stands beside them on the terrace. An icy wind funnels down from the mountains. Ada comes to join them.

‘How many do you think are there?’

Alessandro puts down the binoculars and shakes his head. ‘Probably not that many, but they’re trying to make it look like a full-scale invasion. Twenty tanks, perhaps a thousand men.’

‘We can call on more than that, surely.’ She looks from Alessandro to Elio.

‘You forget’, Elio says, ‘the Fascists who’ll come crawling out of their holes. People like Carità, Koch — this is what they’ve been praying for.’

By early afternoon, they are all seated in the drawing room at L’Ombrellino. Esmond makes tea on the stove in the kitchen and brings it through to them. It is raining heavily, the city hidden under a grey wash. The Professor sits in a wing-back chair in front of the empty fireplace and blows on his tea, a standard lamp lit behind him.

‘Badoglio and the King have fled,’ he says. ‘They’re in Brindisi, well within Allied-held territory. But this alters everything. This is war, and on our doorstep.’

There is a murmur amongst the group. Esmond knows most of the men and women sitting around the dusty room. Bruno and Alessandro are there, of course, as are Antonio and Tosca. Bruno had gone from house to house on his bicycle, telling the news, ordering them up to L’Ombrellino. Maria Luigia sits on the divan next to Elio, chiding him for not eating enough. Gino Bartali is there in his cycling kit, peaked cap on his head. There is only one stranger in the room, in a shadowy corner, a wave of sculpted hair and bronzed skin and white teeth that flash whenever particular ironies are expressed. Esmond realises with surprise that this is Pretini, owner of the hair salon on the via Tornabuoni.

‘The Germans’, the Professor says, ‘have established headquarters in the Piazza San Marco, and taken over the university buildings towards Sanitissima Annunziata. There aren’t an enormous number yet, but enough to hurt us. And they’re well armed.’

‘What about the Allies?’ Alessandro asks. ‘Aren’t they supposed to be landing at Livorno? Weren’t they due to parachute into the countryside around Rome? Surely this is just a matter of a few days holing up here with Esmond and Ada until the Brits and Americans come and boot these fuckers out.’

The Professor shakes his head. ‘I spoke to the head of the Giustizia e Libertà cell in Milan, Ferruccio Parri. The Allies have been surprised at how quickly the Germans reinforced. They were expecting to sign the Armistice quickly, to be in Rome by early August, but Badoglio and the King dithered. The Allies are going to come up from the south, and it’s going to take time. We are in this for the long haul.’

‘So what now?’ It is Pretini who speaks, steepling his fingers and sitting back. He is wearing an expensive-looking worsted suit, well-polished ostrich loafers, a red bow-tie.

The Professor clears his throat. ‘The Germans have offered Italian soldiers a choice — they can either continue to fight alongside the Nazis or be sent to the camps. They’ll call up Florentine men in the next few days and offer them the same choice. So it’s a matter of hiding, fighting or — in all probability — dying.’

Bruno cuts in. ‘This villa is too close to the town. We can use it as a temporary base until we establish a permanent headquarters. Gino and I cycled up towards Monte Morello a few weeks ago. It’s wooded and there are caves, shepherds’ huts, plenty of routes into the mountains.’

The group continues to talk and plot well into the night. By the time Pretini drives off down the narrow lane after midnight, the plans are set. Antonio and Tosca are to go at once to Monte Morello. Bruno, Elio and Alessandro will take charge of rounding up fellow partisans in the city and driving them out to the new headquarters of the Resistance. Esmond and Ada will remain at L’Ombrellino until further notice, using the W/T to convey news from the city to the group in the hills.

The house feels empty when everyone has left. Esmond realises he’d grown used to having Alessandro there, a tough, confident presence on the floor below. Ada lies with her back to him and tugs his arms around her. ‘What are we going to do?’ he says.

‘What do you mean?’

‘With you two?’

‘I’m pregnant, I’m not disabled,’ she says, drawing herself out of his arms and turning to look at him in the dim light. ‘I want to — how do you say it? — rock the boat, not a cradle. I’m going to work for the Resistance until I go into labour. If the Germans are still here after I have the baby, I’ll give it to the nuns and carry on fighting.’

‘But what if something happens to you?’

She pauses, takes his hand, her voice gentler. ‘There’s too much what if? with you, darling. Who knows what’s going to happen? I trust my friends, I trust you, I trust that things are going to work themselves out. Now let’s sleep. There are big days ahead.’

14

Over the next weeks, they hardly leave the bedroom. They take turns at the W/T, sitting under the triptych, reading and repeating the instructions that come through before speaking them into the small silver microphone on the desk or tapping out endless streams of Morse. At first only Ada can do this, but eventually Esmond, although slow and checking his crib with every word, manages brief messages. Pretini, whose code name is Penna — the Feather — has another small radio in the back room of his salon. The partisan camp at Monte Morello has a more sophisticated transmitter that the Professor pilfered from the university’s physics department.

The Professor, who comes up to L’Ombrellino as often as he can, tells them of the Germans flooding into the city by road and rail. They have taken over the Excelsior, the Grand, the Savoy. They stand in khaki uniforms in the Piazza della Signoria armed with Mauser submachine-guns, Berettas and MAB 38s requisitioned from surrendered Italian troops. The Gestapo and SD have set up in the cells of the monastery attached to San Marco. The Professor says, with a dry chuckle, that SS Captain Alberti, head of the SD in Florence, has taken Savonarola’s cell for himself and sits beneath Fra Angelico’s gorgeous frescoes as he spins his web across the city.

Mussolini, shipped from one secret location to another by his Italian captors, is finally located by the Germans at Campo Imperatore high in the Abruzzo Apennines. It would — as the Professor tells Esmond and Ada over dinner — have been easy for them to walk through the gates and seize him, so poorly guarded was the old ski resort. Instead the Germans launched a paratrooper raid, with the dashing Otto Skorzeny crashing his glider into the mountainside above the hotel and overpowering the guards. Now Mussolini has been flown to Vienna, where he is photographed with Hitler. A week later, the Germans declare northern Italy the Italian Social Republic, led by Mussolini from its de facto capital at Salò on Lake Garda.

In Florence, SS Captain Alberti prefers to keep a certain distance from the ugly necessities of occupation. He is an aesthete and is using his time in the city to further his knowledge of the quattrocento. What he likes, he takes. Göring and Hitler have both sent ‘art buyers’ to Florence to snap up the city’s treasures at joke prices. The masterpieces of the Uffizi and the Bargello stay hidden in the cellars and laundry houses and guest wings of grand Renaissance palazzi.

The Professor tells them that Alberti has dismissed Count Gaetano and replaced him with the hunchbacked Raffaele Mangianello, who cruises around town on his Aprilia motorcycle, waving a gun. The new Podestà’s first act in office — as much from personal interest as to curry favour with the Germans — is to open the Ufficio Affari Ebraici. His aim, boasted on ten thousand paper flyers, is to make Florence the first Judenfrei city in Italy. The day after his appointment, a group of squadristi raid the Great Synagogue, hauling out copies of the Torah, scrolls and sacred writings onto the steps and burning them in the street. Then artworks, silver menorahs and golden lanterns are taken out, piled in the back of a van, and sent with Mangianello’s compliments to Alfred Rosenberg’s Library for the Jewish Question in Frankfurt-on-Main.

Carità and Mangianello are old friends, the Professor recalls sadly, and through the intercession of the new Podestà the former electrician swiftly becomes one of the most powerful men in the city. He is named head of the Ufficio Politico Investigativo, a branch of the Republican Guard styled on the Gestapo. Declaring himself the ‘Biting Axe of Florence’, he leads a group of a hundred thugs and hangers-on — the Banda Carità. He requisitions a grey stone apartment block in the via Bolognese which becomes his Villa Triste: the site of brutal interrogations, a storehouse for his enormous weapons cache and a place to feast and frolic with his mistress, Milly. The Professor tells them everything now with an apologetic air, taking off his spectacles and wiping them with a handkerchief, looking towards them with old, watery eyes.

Despite the Professor’s visits and the constant companionship of the wireless, Esmond and Ada feel increasingly cut off in the house on the hill. Vegetables are still plentiful in the garden, but they have run out of meat and milk, butter and eggs. Ada is growing thinner as her belly fattens, the melonish bump sticking out from beneath accordion ribs. Esmond tries to hunt partridges with Tatters as Alessandro had, but he’s unwilling to use bullets unnecessarily and so only fires when he has a clear shot. Even then he often misses. After his fifth morning hunting, when he has used sixteen of the thirty bullets he has left and has nothing more to show for it than one small pigeon, he gives up. The bread ration in the city has been reduced to two hundred grams per person; even so, the Professor brings them several grey chestnut-flour loaves when he comes. Esmond makes Ada eat spinach with every meal, for the sake of the baby.

The cold and rain that marked the first weeks of the German occupation have given way to brilliant skies, cool nights of fresh, mountain-like air. Esmond feels gloriously healthy, rising early to go running with Tatters in the hills above Bellosguardo, feeling an extraordinary physical lightness, which he knows to be youth. He is always careful, keeping to the mule-tracks, ducking into bushes at the sound of an engine, but he wouldn’t give up those runs in the morning light for anything. The dog bounces alongside him, pink tongue flapping wild and wet as they gallop along the pale rises.

15

One eleven o’clock in the middle of that sunny October, Bruno and Alessandro pull up in front of the villa in the old Bianchi. Esmond and Ada run out, calling to their friends, who have brought them twelve slices of cured ham, some pecorino, a bottle of home-brewed grappa. They sit in the garden’s lush abundance eating figs and persimmons, medlars and grapes — the last fruits of the year.

‘It’s not all bad news,’ Alessandro says. His skin is very dark after weeks outside; his hair is even longer and wilder, a wiry zigzag on top of his head. ‘The carabinieri have been refusing to serve the Germans. Decent fuckers after all! They’re in love with the King — they used to be his personal bodyguards, of course. So they’re laying down their weapons and joining us in the hills.’

‘And we had our first run-in with Carità and his thugs.’

Alessandro interrupts. ‘From which I think we emerged pretty fucking well for a bunch of intellectuals.’

Bruno lobs a fig at him. ‘Bastard. I want to tell it.’ Esmond feels happy merely being in the presence of these carefree young men. Bruno has filled out in the chest. He looks cool and clever and able in his blue serge suit, a beret pulled down on his close-cropped head. ‘You’ve heard about the Banda Carità, I guess?’

‘Yes,’ Ada nods. ‘The Professor told us he’s been arresting anyone with links to the monarchy.’

‘It’s true,’ Alessandro says. ‘He’s after the aristocrats of Florence. He was an orphan and was brought up by some wealthy family in Milan who treated him like shit. You must always look for the psychological explanation.’

‘He decided’, says Bruno, rolling his eyes, ‘to try to find our hideout in the hills. They came up late yesterday afternoon, eighteen of them armed to the teeth. Our sentries spotted them miles away and we’d rehearsed what to do. We expected it to be the Germans of course, but it’s all the same. We pulled branches in front of the caves, dropped away into the gullies and ravines, shimmied up trees, led the bastards into the high mountain passes.’

‘We know them even in the dark,’ coughed Alessandro. ‘Dusk had fallen and they didn’t have dogs, so we lost them easily. They were so badly organised, the idiots just ran at anyone, blasting their guns like crazy. I was up a tree and saw Carità’s fat head with its queer tuft of white pass right below me. He was with Piero Koch, the fucker who gave me a going over in Regina Coeli. I almost dropped down and went for them.’

‘In the end’, Bruno says, ‘we got two of them.’

‘Got them?’ Esmond asks.

‘Killed them.’

‘Jesus.’

‘We’re not playing games, my friend.’

‘You should have seen Elio,’ Alessandro laughs. ‘He was amazing. He led these goons down a sheep track and hid behind a rock. When they’d passed he jumped out, with a Red Indian yell, made sure they had time to reach for their guns and then bang! bang! he shot the fuckers in the head, right between the eyes. It was like a film, honestly.’

‘He’s a maniac,’ Bruno says. ‘He had to lie down for three hours afterwards and recover.’

‘He’s a hero,’ Alessandro insists.

‘Do we know who they were?’

‘Luigi di Giovanni and Erno Rossilini,’ Bruno says. ‘Both members of Carità’s assassin squad. Killed by a man with a doctorate in Latin law who speaks five languages.’

‘And wears spectacles so thick I’m surprised he could see them at all,’ Alessandro adds.

‘We’ve achieved a lot over the past few weeks,’ Bruno tells them. ‘There are cells springing up all over the country, mostly out of Giustizia e Libertà. This is no local unrest. This is revolution.’

The Bianchi is looking even more careworn than usual, its front bumper hanging by one loose bracket, its rear window cracked, waves of dust and mud rising up its once-white chassis. Bruno tells them the Germans have set up roadblocks on all the routes leading into Florence, and they’d had to drive here over mule tracks, along the bed of a dried-up river. The two young men have dust in their hair, mud streaks on their cheeks. After a cup of orzo, Bruno and Alessandro strip off and go swimming in the pool, laughing at the icy water, splashing each other and then standing, clapping themselves, by the stone dodos as they dry. The October sun finds their skin, finds the glittering green water, the brightly flickering leaves in the copse below, the canted roofs of the city. Esmond and Ada have pulled their chairs into the shade of the vine-hung umbrella sculpture.

As they are walking back to the house, Bruno drapes an arm around Esmond’s shoulder. ‘You should come over to the base at some point, see the set-up. If nothing else, it’d do you two good to get out of here for a while.’ He pauses. ‘Before the baby comes.’

Esmond gives a weak smile. ‘Do you think we’ll be all right?’ he asks.

Bruno squeezes his shoulder. ‘Of course you will. We’ll all pull around when the time comes.’

When their friends have left, Ada and Esmond potter helplessly around the house until dusk. A sense of dejection comes with night. They sleep restlessly and, in the small hours, Esmond wakes to hear the dying cry that haunted his sleep at the Institute. He pulls Ada closely against him, folding his hands around her belly.

16

Pretini calls them on the radio just after eight, his voice low and distant.

‘You two should come down to the town,’ he says. ‘Maria Luigia has put together some new documents for you. And we need to talk.’

They walk arm-in-arm, heads down and hurrying past the guards who now stand sentry at either end of the Ponte Santa Trinità. Esmond realises he held his breath the whole length of the bridge. As they come onto the via Tornabuoni, a Kübelwagen with a grey-suited SD officer inside drives slowly past them. He feels Ada’s grip tighten on his arm. They pass the Palazzo Strozzi and hurry through the wood-framed glass door into Pretini’s hot, bright salon.

The master hairdresser is standing behind the cash desk at the back of the room making notes in a small ledger while one of his assistants, a good-looking chap a few years younger than Esmond, sweeps an immaculate floor.

‘Come,’ Pretini beckons, without looking up. Esmond and Ada move forward, stepping out of the way of the broom. Now Pretini puts his pen down. ‘Shall we go through to the back room? It’s quieter there. You can talk in front of Giacomo, though. He’s on-side.’ The boy stops his sweeping and smiles shyly at them for a moment, then continues. ‘I have the Marchesa Origo at eleven, but she won’t mind waiting a few minutes.’

He leads them into a windowless room at the end of a small passageway where there is a desk, a small sofa and an armchair. On the desk is Pretini’s wireless, which is smaller than the W/T up at L’Ombrellino, and older. Pretini sees him looking at it.

‘From the Great War. I was an Alpino, you know. I won the Silver Medal for Military Valour after the Battle of Caporetto, too.’ He shows them his teeth, absurdly white. ‘Now sit, both of you.’ He sighs into the armchair and Ada and Esmond perch on the sofa. ‘Here we go. These documents have you both as key personnel at the psychiatric hospital in via San Salvi. You’ll be in trouble if the Blackshirts get hold of you, but these should at least see you past the Germans.’ He passes Esmond a manila folder. Esmond takes out the documents, inspects them briefly and hands Ada hers.

She looks at them with a smile. ‘Nella Ferrari,’ she says. ‘I like it. Very sportif.’

Now Pretini settles back. ‘How are you holding up?’ he asks.

‘We’re fine,’ she says quickly, returning Esmond’s glance. ‘We’re ready to do whatever it takes.’

‘Good,’ Pretini smiles at her, tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair. ‘Good.’ A silence. ‘You know it’s a matter of time. The Allies will get here eventually, we just have to hold out, make sure that as few of us get hurt as possible, help those we can—’ He trails off. ‘They picked up Oreste Ristori in Empoli.’

‘No—’ Ada says.

‘He’s completely crazy. He was singing anti-German songs in the square in front of the station, saying he was going to walk to Salò and rip Mussolini’s head from his neck. He’s lucky they took him for a drunk and not a partisan. He’s in the Murate now, probably driving his fellow prisoners mad with his singing. He’ll be out in a month at the latest. At least he doesn’t know the location of the camp at Monte Morello. He won’t give us away—’ He smiles but with a terrible sadness.

‘What else?’ Esmond asks, watching closely.

The hairdresser sighs and folds his hands in his lap. ‘What else. Other news and I’m afraid it isn’t good.’ Esmond’s mind cycles through the likely disasters. So many of those he’s loved are dead already, he thinks, what could hurt him now?

‘Go on,’ he says.

‘It’s my father,’ Ada says coldly.

Pretini nods. ‘He almost made it. He and Ovazza joined up with a group of Croatian refugees in the Val d’Aosta and tried to bluff their way over the border. They were arrested by Swiss police and put on a train back to Turin. At the first station they reached they were picked up by the SS. I’m so sorry.’

‘Did they send him to a camp?’

Pretini is silent.

‘What happened to him?’

‘They were taken to Verbania. We have a man there who helps get people across the border. It’s typical of Ovazza that he wouldn’t think to contact us. We could have made it so much easier for them both. They were locked up in the girls’ school which is now the SS headquarters. They didn’t come out.’

‘He’s dead?’

Pretini nods. ‘I’m sorry.’

Esmond reaches out for Ada’s hand.

‘I’m sorry,’ Pretini repeats.

Back up at L’Ombrellino, Ada sits silently in the drawing room while Esmond mans the radio. During a brief break that he allows himself, he comes down to see her. It is growing dark, but she hasn’t turned the lights on. She is very still in the shadowy room.

‘Do you want anything?’ he asks. ‘A cup of tea?’

‘No. Thank you.’ Elio’s voice comes over the radio upstairs. As he turns to leave the room, Ada says something he doesn’t catch.

‘What was that, darling?’

‘I keep wondering if he heard me, that last time we spoke. I told him that I loved him as the line went dead. I just hope he heard me.’

He goes to kneel in front of her and takes her hands, breathes on them to warm them. ‘Darling,’ he says, kissing her hands, her wrists, ‘I’m sure he did. And he knew it, anyway. You didn’t have to say it.’

‘I always thought him such a fool, pathetic for cosying up to the Fascists. He knew I looked down on him. But he was a good father, he was such a good father.’ He thinks she is going to cry, but instead she stands and makes her way to the door. ‘I’ll take a turn on the radio,’ she says. ‘You must be tired.’

‘But—’

‘Please. It’ll help.’ He listens to the sound of her footsteps disappear up the stairs, then Elio’s voice, her reply. He walks to the window, draws the curtains and turns on the standard lamp. He reads for an hour and then falls asleep on the divan. Tatters wakes him later, a rough pink tongue on his cheeks and neck. He lies, propped on an elbow, and listens to Ada’s voice, reciting a long list of coded co-ordinates onto the airborne waves.

17

They are at the window, looking down on the city, whose rooftops are just now being touched by morning. It is the first Saturday of November. Esmond is standing behind Ada with his arms around her. Her hair is twisted in a knot on her head and she is wearing one of Alice Keppel’s caftans. He kisses the white hollow of her neck and she shivers.

She has been quiet since the news of her father’s death, working long hours at the radio. There is a map of Tuscany spread out on the floor of their bedroom on which she has ringed certain hills where partisans are gathering, has marked up German roadblocks, potential routes between the various Resistance encampments. She speaks to Pretini four or five times each day. The Professor came up to offer his condolences the night after they’d heard. Alessandro and Bruno sent their love over the wireless. When she isn’t working, she sits on the bed and stares at the triptych.

Now, shrugging out of his embrace, she lifts the caftan over her head and stands naked in front of the painting.

‘Like so?’ She poses in front of the portrait of Mary Magdalene, crosses her arms over her breasts and affects an anguished expression. They both begin to laugh. Her hands slip down to rest on the bulge in her stomach.

‘Exactly,’ Esmond says. ‘You’d do for a wonderful martyr.’

‘Not just yet.’

They make love then, slipping beneath the covers of the bed for warmth, burrowing down until their heads are under and they feel themselves lost in a darkness of skin and hot breath. When they are done he throws the covers back and they emerge, gasping, as if they have been saved from drowning. Looking down at her hair flared out on the pillow, he imagines rushing her westwards, to safety, to Spain and then — who knows — Brazil, America, even back to Britain. He sees them in Shropshire together, the presence of the child flitting around the picture like a firefly, illuminating Welsh Frankton, bringing joy to his father’s withered heart.

He is downstairs brewing their orzo when Pretini’s voice comes over the radio. Ada calls down, although Esmond can’t hear what she says above the crackle of logs in the fire. He carries the mugs upstairs, his bare feet cold on the polished wood. As he enters the room, he sees that Ada is getting dressed, pulling on a pair of slacks, leaning back against the cupboard as she wriggles in.

‘They’re raiding the synagogue,’ she says. ‘The Gestapo and the Banda Carità. We need to get down there.’ She takes the mug of coffee and gulps at it. ‘Fuck!’ She winces. ‘Hot.’ Esmond pulls on a shirt and his blue twill suit. He’s about to leave the room when he stops and bends to pick up Bailey’s revolver, which he tucks into the waistband at the back of his trousers. It feels awkward, almost indecent against his tailbone as he comes down.

Ada is already out on the gravel in front of the house, scratching Tatters behind the ear. ‘I said we’d meet Pretini at the Salon at eleven thirty,’ she says. They walk briskly down into the city, which is still for a Saturday morning. The guards on the Ponte Santa Trinità eye them warily, but let them pass.

‘They moved in just after the start of the Shabbat service,’ Pretini says as they enter. ‘They’ve got two hundred of them in holding camps in Santa Croce. They’ll be taken up to the train station tomorrow morning, then to Germany.’ The Professor and Elio are in the salon, bent over a railway map on the floor. Pretini is cutting the Marchesa Corsini’s hair. ‘She’s one of us,’ he says to Esmond, noting his face.

‘And I have a very important party this evening,’ the Marchesa says frostily. ‘I was booked for an appointment last Saturday, but the bastard Carità had me in his Villa Triste.’

Ada stands over the Professor, looking at the map. ‘They’re taking them to the trains?’ The Professor nods. ‘Then we need to act now.’

‘Yes,’ Pretini says, snipping carefully at the Marchesa’s softly waved hair. ‘We stop the trains as they head north.’

‘If we can.’ Elio indicates a point near Pistoia where the railway line curves around the swell of a hill. ‘Alessandro and Bruno are going to drive a truck onto the tracks here. They’ll overpower the guards and stage a rescue. We’ve enlisted help from a group of Czechs who’re hiding out by the Lago di Suviana. A much greater chance of success than if we try to do anything in town. Agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ says Pretini. The Professor nods. Even the Marchesa, with a subtle incline of the head, is in.

‘What can we do?’ Ada asks.

Pretini, standing back to admire the Marchesa’s hair, gives one final snip of his scissors. He removes the gown that protects her Ferragamo suit and bows for a moment, like a man saying grace. Only then does he turn towards Ada. ‘One of Carità’s hit squads has gone to the Ashkenazi prayer house by the Porta Romana. Rabbi Cassuto moved all of the records down there at the beginning of the war. It’ll mean they have the address of every Jew in Florence.’

‘So you need to warn them,’ the Professor says. ‘Those who can should leave. The rest you must take up to L’Ombrellino until we can work out how to make them safe.’

‘Where do we start?’ Esmond asks.

‘We had a call from Professor Rossi at the Bargello,’ the Professor says. ‘He’s been hiding Rudolf Levy, the painter. The Nazis want escaped German Jews more than anything and they know he’s here. Levy and Rossi have been seen together, it won’t be long until they go looking there. He lives at Apartment 18c, via del Proconsolo, by the cathedral.’

‘And when we have him?’ Esmond asks.

‘Get him up to L’Ombrellino and wait for instructions. He might have to stay with you for a few days, until things calm down.’

Esmond’s heart is thumping as they walk out onto the via Tornabuoni. German soldiers march up past the Palazzo Arcimboldi, their feet echoing on the cobbles. Esmond checks the gun in his waistband and hurries to keep up with Ada. She has on the beige tunic she wore the first time he met her, a green cardigan over it. Her hair is still knotted on her head, a nest of dark red snakes.

There are tanks in the Piazza del Duomo. At the sandbagged foot of the Campanile, three Germans are arguing with a Blackshirt. A monk hurries up the steps of the cathedral. Otherwise the square is deserted. Esmond remembers going into the Duomo that drunken night with Douglas and Orioli. Five years, he realises. He barely recognises the boy he sees in his mind, standing in front of Uccello’s portrait of Sir John Hawkwood, swaying with drink, half-hard with lust for Gerald and Fiamma. Ada reaches out for his hand as they come onto the via del Proconsolo and he can feel his pulse against hers. They walk in time to the thud of their hearts.

Professor Rossi’s apartment is on the third floor of a wide building in the shadow of the cathedral. The front door is open and they make their way into the hallway and up stone stairs. Ada rings the bell, Rossi’s name beneath. They wait, breathless. The door opens.

‘You came,’ he says. He’s a short man, bald at the crown. He looks exhausted, unshaven. He loosens his tie with a nervous movement as they enter a gloomy drawing room. The bulk of the cathedral blocks out light in the flat. Everything is bathed in a dim terracotta glow from the tiles on the roof of the Duomo. In an armchair in one corner sits an elderly man, breathing audibly. Behind him, one hand on his shoulder, is a slender woman.

‘Some coffee?’ Rossi asks. ‘It’s the real thing.’

‘We should move,’ Ada says.

The elderly man gets slowly to his feet. He picks up a stick that is leaning against the arm of the chair and walks towards them.

‘I am Rudolf Levy.’ A deep, musical voice. ‘Very pleased to make your acquaintance.’

‘We need to leave now,’ Ada says, crossing to the window and looking down onto the square.

Rossi clears his throat. ‘My wife,’ he says. The slim woman steps forward from the shadows. Esmond sees that despite being quite young — she must be forty or so, he reckons — her hair is ice-white. ‘My wife,’ Rossi repeats, ‘is on Rabbi Nathan’s list.’

Ada nods. ‘We’ll have to take her too.’

‘It’s ridiculous,’ the woman says, slightly shrill. ‘I’ve never been to the synagogue. I subscribed to a charity drive Nathan Cassuto was holding for Jews in Russia ten years ago. We got talking and I told him that my parents were Jewish. I’m an Italian, though. I go to church, for Christ’s sake.’

‘It’s better that you go,’ her husband says.

‘Can I take a suitcase?’

‘A small bag,’ Ada says. ‘something you’d take shopping. You can’t draw attention to yourself.’

Rossi and Levy embrace. ‘Good luck, old friend,’ Rossi says. He then takes his wife in his arms and places a long kiss on her lips. They pull apart, and it is painful to observe, and Esmond averts his eyes. He can see Rossi standing watching them as they make their way slowly down the stairs, Levy leaning on Esmond’s shoulder. At the bottom of the steps, the old man apologises.

‘It’s my asthma. I was gassed in the war.’

It is bright in the square when they step outside. Esmond feels exposed, singled out by the light. The four of them hurry past the tanks. The Germans have gone but Esmond can make out a group of Blackshirts on the other side of the square. Ada stops to look in a shop window, taking Levy by the arm.

‘Be natural,’ she says. ‘We’re going for a walk with our aunt and uncle. Assume you’re being watched at all times.’

Esmond holds out his arm to Signora Rossi. He can feel dampness spreading under his shirt, sweat gathering on his face. He is gripped by a sudden fear that, if they are stopped, he’ll forget all of his Italian. That he’ll stand there mouthing uselessly, his brain an empty phrasebook. Rossi’s wife gives his arm a little squeeze. ‘She’s pregnant, your wife,’ she says. ‘It’s very brave. Of both of you I mean.’

There are guards on all of the bridges. The Ponte alle Grazie is manned by Blackshirts; on the others, a pair of Germans stand at either end in khaki, regular soldiers for whom this is just another day. They smoke when they think they aren’t being watched, chat, look at the flowing river.

‘We’ll take the Santa Trinità,’ Ada says. She and Levy are walking a few yards behind Esmond and Signora Rossi. ‘There are more guards on the Ponte Vecchio and anything else takes us too far out. Have you got the key to the church on you, Esmond?’

He feels in his pocket. He still has the key to his digs at Emmanuel, a heavy iron one that opens the front gates at L’Ombrellino, some dimly remembered doors and cupboards in Shropshire. Now he holds up a brass Yale attached to a tasselled fob. ‘Here it is.’

‘Levy’s going to need to rest before we go up to the villa. Perhaps we should wait there until night,’ she says. They are on the via degli Strozzi. At the corner of the via Tornabuoni, Esmond sees Pretini leaning against a wall, reading a copy of La Nazione. The hairdresser gives an almost imperceptible nod as they pass. Ada and Levy drop further back as they approach the bridge.

His heart hammering in his head, Esmond leads Signora Rossi past the first pair of German guards, who are talking in broken Italian to a Blackshirt smoking on the parapet wall. Two nuns are walking over the bridge ahead of them; a group of contadini drive a mule in the opposite direction. It is loaded with corn and moving irritably over the cobbles. Esmond is holding his breath. Signora Rossi swings her shopping bag casually. He looks back once and sees that Ada is having to help Levy, who leans heavily on his stick, pausing every so often. They, too, have passed the first set of guards.

Now Esmond and Signora Rossi reach the first of the buttresses that jut out V-shaped into the water. He can see the second pair of guards over the gentle arc of the bridge. One of them has his helmet off. His hair is the same colour as Esmond’s; he can’t be far out of his teens. The other guard is older, darker, obscured by the shadow of his helmet. Now they are at the second buttress and the bridge is sloping downwards. Esmond’s heart is beating so hard it seems to shudder the air around him. He dare not look back at Ada. He is hurrying without realising it. They are level with the guards. The younger one suddenly smiles, raising his arm in the Fascist salute towards Esmond. Signora Rossi hesitates for a moment and then moves on. Esmond returns the salute.

‘Sie sind Deutsch?’ the guard asks. Esmond thinks quickly.

‘Mi dispiace, sono italiano.’

The guard points to his own head. ‘I capelli,’ he says, laughing. Esmond forces himself to laugh back.

‘Auf Wiedersehen,’ he says, and then walks on, hurrying to Signora Rossi. It is only when they are outside the gate of the church that Esmond bends down and pretends to tie his shoelace. Looking back along the via Maggio, he sees that Ada and Levy have also been stopped by the guards. Ada is speaking to the older German, who hasn’t taken off his helmet. She is smiling, shaking her head. Esmond opens the wicket gate and motions Signora Rossi inside.

‘Hide yourself,’ he says. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ She steps into the dark entrance porch and Esmond shuts the door quietly. He walks back up towards the bridge.

The younger soldier has disappeared and the other has his rifle pointed at Levy and Ada. Esmond feels the gun in his waistband. He thinks of the easy shots he’d missed while out with Tatters, then catches sight of the swell under Ada’s tunic and draws the revolver out, hidden under the lapel of his jacket, walking towards the bridge. Ada has seen him; her eyes brighten. He takes a deep breath. At that moment, horn blaring, a Kübelwagen screeches around the corner from the Borgo San Jacopo and comes to a halt between Esmond and the bridge. In the passenger seat is the young blond soldier, excitement on his face. In the back is an SS officer. Esmond steps into the shadow of a building. The guards from the other end of the bridge now hurry to join the group. Ada holds out her documents to the SS officer, who inspects them coldly. He then says something to Levy, who shrugs.

For a moment, he thinks they’re going to let Ada go. She says something which makes the SS officer smile; the young soldier lets out a laugh. The officer goes to the car and speaks into the radio there, waiting. He comes back out and rejoins the group, still in apparent good humour. Then he barks out an order and Levy is bundled into the car. Apologetically, the SS man takes Ada by the elbow and helps her in. He goes around to sit in the front seat. Esmond stands on the Lungarno watching as the Kübelwagen pulls away. He sees Ada’s face at the rear window, looking urgently outwards, one hand pressed to the glass. He watches the car pull over the Ponte Vecchio and out of sight.

Dazed, he walks back to the church and lets himself in through the wicket gate. He is still gripping the revolver in his pocket, he realises, as he goes into the dark church and sits at a pew. He places the gun on the wooden seat beside him and slumps forward, his head in his hands. ‘Signora Rossi,’ he calls out. ‘Signora Rossi, they got them. You can come out, but they got them.’

18

They wait in the church until darkness has fallen and the street outside is empty before they make their way up to L’Ombrellino. A German patrol car comes past at one point, its searchlight shining into the surrounding gardens. Esmond forces Signora Rossi over a fence and down behind a laurel bush. They crouch against one another as the rumbling car with its sweeping beam stops. The sound of German voices, footsteps, a match being lit. The car begins to move again, its searchlight flickering against house-fronts further down. They wait for a few minutes, breathing the same air, then rise and continue the climb up the hill to Bellosguardo.

When they’re inside, Esmond rushes straight to the bedroom and the W/T.

‘Penna, come in Penna.’ It is several minutes before a reply.

‘Esmond, I’m so sorry, Esmond.’

‘You know?’

‘We know.’

‘What’s going to happen to them?’

‘Levy will be on the train with the rest of the Jews for Germany tomorrow. We’ll do our best to fish him out.’

‘But Ada?’

There is the crackle of static. Then, in a graveyard voice, ‘They’ve handed her over to Carità.’ Esmond staggers into his chair. ‘It’s not as bad as it might be,’ Pretini says. ‘If they knew she was Jewish, they’d have taken her to the camp by the station with Levy. It means her identity is holding up. Carità will interrogate her, knock her about a bit, no more.’

‘Where is she?’

‘At the Villa Triste. You sit tight and I imagine she’ll be out this time tomorrow. She’s a tough one, your Ada.’

He cannot sleep. He paces up and down the floor of the drawing room. Signora Rossi sits upright on a divan, watching him. He imagines going down to the Villa Triste with his gun and shooting his way in. He wonders if Alessandro would come with him. But the other members of the Resistance are planning their raid on the German train the following afternoon. If he does it, he’ll have to do it alone. Several times he shouts out, kicks at the furniture, sobs. He feels madness stammering at the edge of his mind, and all his mind can hold is the memory of Ada’s green eyes, stretched impossibly wide. Finally he slumps down in an armchair.

Signora Rossi makes him a cup of tea, pulls up a footstool beside him and sits. She takes his hand in hers and strokes it, not speaking. He can’t choke down the image of Carità’s pudgy face, his wide nostrils, his schoolboy’s shorts with their fat, hairless knees. Tatters comes into the room and curls up in his lap, begins to snore. They are sitting like that, Signora Rossi holding his hand, Tatters grumbling quietly, Esmond hunched and hopeless, when the sun comes up.

He waits by the radio all day. He knows he mustn’t call Pretini or the partisans at Monte Morello. All efforts will be centred on the rescue attempt. There’s nothing he can do for Ada. Signora Rossi sits reading Chekhov in the drawing room. She makes a lunch of pasta and beans, but he can’t eat. As darkness falls, he’s standing in front of the triptych. He has tuned the wireless to Radio Moscow. The news in English at 7 p.m. speaks of the Anglo-American bombing raids on Berlin, thousands of tonnes dropped on the already blazing city, lines of refugees spidering out into the countryside. The Allies now hold most of Southern Italy. They have broken through the first of Kesselring’s defensive positions above Naples and are at Monte Cassino, approaching the Gustav Line, beyond which, Rome. They will not arrive, he reasons, in time for Ada.

It is very late when he finally hears Pretini’s voice over the W/T. He’d been dozing on the bed wrapped in George Keppel’s tweed jacket, not wanting to sleep but eventually sinking into a series of rapid nightmares. ‘This is Penna, come in Esmond.’

‘Esmond here.’ He waits, as if the world has stopped. Then he hears Pretini sigh and his heart sinks.

‘It was a catastrophe. A fucking catastrophe from start to finish. They’d been warned of our plans. The train was preceded by a Krupp K5. It blasted the truck from the tracks then started shelling the hills. There were snipers, several heavy machine guns, at least a hundred soldiers with the carriages. We had no chance. We lost two Serbians. Elio took a bullet in the shoulder.’

‘And the train, it’s gone?’

‘Gone. I’ve had Rabbi Cassuto here all afternoon. Two hundred young men taken today. He fears another round-up later in the month.’

‘And Ada?’

‘No word, I’m afraid.’

19

On Tuesday morning Bruno arrives at the villa. He’s riding a red Moto Guzzi, goggles down around his neck when he comes to the door. He holds onto Esmond’s hand for a long time when he sees him. ‘We’ll go in and get her,’ he says. ‘I promise you, if she isn’t out by Friday, we’ll blast our way in there.’ Esmond nods. ‘She’ll be all right,’ Bruno says.

Signora Rossi hugs Esmond on the steps of the villa and then climbs up behind Bruno with her shopping bag on her lap. She puts her arms around him and he pulls up his goggles. Bruno waves as he drives through the gates and out into the road. Esmond stands on the gravel in front of the villa listening until he can no longer pick out the engine from the other sounds in the air. The house is silent and cold.

He can’t face waiting alone by the radio for another day and so goes out for a run. He and Tatters pound along the cypress-lined hillsides, past the Arcetri Observatory and the Torre del Gallo, along towards San Miniato. He feels if he can keep running, can keep up hammering his feet and heart and breath, then he might never have to face losing Ada. He realises, as he stands, exhausted, on a hilltop beside an abandoned shepherd’s hut and looks down into a valley where the first mist is gathering beneath the trees, that he was tested on the bridge and that he came up short. He should have saved Ada, should have held a gun to the SS officer’s head until he let her go. He reaches down and flings a handful of shingle into the valley.

When he gets back to the villa it is almost three. He is drenched in sweat, already cooling on his brow. Tatters is panting at his feet and goes immediately to his bowl of water which he laps in rapid strokes. Esmond hears Pretini’s voice on the radio. He takes the stairs two at a time.

‘Hello.’

‘We have Ada.’

He looks up, up to the bright sky. ‘Where is she?’

‘At the Careggi Hospital, by the university. She’s officially still under arrest, but we have people near her. We’ll get her out.’

‘How is she?’

‘She’ll live. She’s conscious.’

‘When can I see her?’

‘That wouldn’t be wise, for you to be down there. My friend, the doctor, wants to keep her overnight. In the morning they’ll tell the guards that they’re taking her for surgery and bring her up to L’Ombrellino in an ambulance.’

‘Tomorrow, then.’

‘Yes, tomorrow.’

He clumps back downstairs, searches the shelves in the drawing room until he comes upon a book of Hopkins’s poems and sits reading all afternoon and well into the night. He hears nothing more on the radio but finds some consolation in the poems. ‘Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, / Despair, not feast on thee,’ he repeats the lines to himself, remembering how Leavis’s voice would rise into the mad eaves as he read. He takes the book with him to bed and by the time he turns out he has all of the ‘Terrible Sonnets’, each hopeful-hopeless line, by heart (a phrase which gains sudden new truth). He drifts off to the echo of: ‘I can; / Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.’

20

The ambulance arrives just after eight next morning. Esmond has been up since before dawn. He realises he has been allowing plates to pile up in the sink, dirty clothes to fall across the room. He sweeps the floor of the drawing room, scrubs the sideboard in the kitchen, changes the sheets on their bed. He even dusts the triptych. By the time the doctor comes up the steps and rings the bell, the inside of the villa is gleaming.

‘I am Morandi,’ he says. ‘I have your friend.’ Esmond looks out towards the ambulance parked on the gravel. ‘She will need some care. Normally I would not have wanted her to leave so early, but these are special circumstances, no? She is still losing blood. Rather a lot of blood. Will you help me get her inside?’

Ada is trying to step from the back of the ambulance, her face lifting towards the light. Her cheeks are heavily bruised and one ear is bandaged. Her left hand is wrapped in plaster. Esmond rushes towards her. ‘Ada!’

‘You shouldn’t be walking,’ Dr Morandi says.

They sling her between them and carry her up to the bedroom, where she lies down in obstinate obedience, burrows beneath blankets, and pulls the sheet up over her head. They go back downstairs and stand by the ambulance.

‘She needs to stay in bed indefinitely. Plenty of water to drink and change the dressings every day. Here’s a bag with bandages, some pills to help with the pain. You mustn’t be surprised by the amount of blood. It’s normal. She’s given birth, you know. In all but name.’

‘But— the baby?’

‘I’m sorry. At twenty weeks, there was no chance. We didn’t even try.’

The doctor gets back into the ambulance and pulls away. Esmond stands in the driveway for a few moments, overcome by a heaviness so complete it almost crushes him. He goes up and sits beside the bed, watching the slight rise and fall of the covers, sending all his love and pity towards the hidden, sleeping figure, so as not to think of himself.

When he pulls back her clothes that first night, he cannot believe that a body that looks like this can live on. There is barely a patch of skin that is not broken or bruised. The bruises are like clouds at sunset: billowing purple, magenta and yellow. One on the inside of her thigh is exactly the colour of the water in the pool — spring-green. The fingernails of her left hand are missing and the wrist is broken. When he changes the dressing on her ear, he sees that the lobe has been ripped away from the skin. He bathes it in iodine and she winces. Her stomach is soft, the skin there like a balloon as it begins to deflate. They look down at her body together, and there is fascination alongside the horror.

She first speaks to him on the second day, when he and Tatters come up the stairs with a bowl of soup. The dog lies looking up at her as Esmond spoons it between burst lips. When it is finished, she says ‘Thank you,’ very softly. He is amazed that she hasn’t cried. While she is sleeping, he sits at the table in the kitchen with his head on his arms, or throws himself on the divan in the drawing room and sobs and howls, Tatters pressing a rough tongue against his cheeks.

On the third day, she sits up and fixes him with her green eyes. Her voice when it comes, is unchanged, surprising him. ‘After they got rid of the baby—’

‘Was it—? Did you—?’ He looks at her and is silent.

‘After they got rid of the baby, they had to clear other stuff out of me, a hurried operation before they got me out of the hospital. I remember Morandi saying, This is going to hurt. But it didn’t, not at all, and I’d be surprised if anything does again.’

‘Because of what Carità had done to you.’

‘That? Nothing. Do you understand nothing?’ She burrows beneath the covers again and he resumes his helpless bedside vigil.

The days pass and the bruises lose their brilliance. The blood which had flowed so thick and red between her legs that he’d quickly used up the bandages and had resorted to tearing up George Keppel’s Turnbull & Asser shirts for dressings, slowly abates. He brings the gramophone up to the room and they sit in darkness, her head in his lap, listening to Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, the Goldberg Variations, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. Still, she doesn’t cry. After dinner, which he carries up from the kitchen, his powers of culinary invention increasingly tested as the garden turns in on itself for winter, they sit on the bed and stare at the triptych.

With a choir singing Rachmaninoff’s Alleluias in the background, he tells her the story of the triptych, of Filippino Lippi’s life, of the painter’s dissipated father. With the covers pulled up, her head in his lap, he speaks for hours, thinking back to his father’s gallery in the chapel at Aston and the stories Sir Lionel had told him about Filippino. He calls to mind lines from Browning’s ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, from Vasari and Cellini. That which he cannot remember, he invents, hoping that a story, even one as melancholy as this, might reach her in a way he cannot.

*

He tells her of the vagabond priest, Fra Lippo, the greatest painter of his day, a rogue, a libertine. He’d made a teenaged nun pose as the Madonna, had locked the doors of the cathedral. Nine months later our hero, Filippino, was born.

The atmosphere of his youth was rich with the scent of gesso and tempera, with the sound of apprentices grinding pigments, stretching cartone, hammering gold leaf. Sandro Botticelli, Lippo’s most gifted pupil, was often there, helping the older Lippi, schooling the younger. When Fra Lippo was poisoned by his brother-in-law, dying on the floor of Spoleto cathedral, Filippino went to live with Botticelli in Florence.

Botticelli introduced Filippino to Lorenzo de Medici and very soon the young man with the famous name was commissioned by Florentine bankers to decorate family chapels, wedding chests, tondo portraits of wives and mistresses. As he turned eighteen, he was able to call upon the city’s greatest artists, Verrocchio, Perugino, Ghirlandaio.

Filippino was certain he’d eclipse even his father, whose name trailed like a ghost behind him. He was, after all, Filippino — Little Filippo. In 1483 he completed the frescoing of the Brancacci Chapel that had been halted sixty years earlier, when his father’s master, Masaccio, was struck down by the plague. At twenty-five he was painting himself into history, onto the walls of all of the city’s most magnificent churches.

But life was chaotic. He’d inherited his father’s love of wine and women. The days began to darken. Botticelli’s great love, Simonetta Vespucci, died of tuberculosis and he fled to Rome. Filippino was passed over for a number of major commissions, left others unfinished, drowning himself in the city’s fleshpits. There were love affairs that ended in rows. His closest friend, Betto Pialla, was arrested for sodomy and hung on the strappado at the Murate prison. Filippino spent a night in debtor’s gaol before Verrocchio bailed him out. His work became obvious, slapdash, cynical. There were new painters appearing whose work made Filippino’s seem stale and outmoded — Michelangelo and Leonardo in Florence, Bosch and Dürer abroad.

Botticelli returned to Florence, Esmond continues, and painted three masterpieces: Primavera, The Birth of Venus and Diana and Actaeon. Each of them used as the principal character the face and body of Simonetta, whom Botticelli said he saw in his mind clearer than any living person. Filippino’s old master was a mournful, bitter figure now, caught up in his memories of his dead lover, his increasing religiosity, his professional rivalries.

He reaches out for Ada and takes her hand. The world grew darker still, he says. The priest Savonarola came to the city, preaching from the Book of Revelation about the horrors to come. He was followed by keening, dead-eyed acolytes, the Weepers. Black-coated Officials of the Night rounded up prostitutes, cutting their noses off to mark them; homosexuals were beaten and dragged through the streets. Women were no longer encouraged out; when they did leave their homes, the new city frowned upon colour, decoration. The world of twill and lawn and damask and brocade became dull overnight, all prompted by this flat-faced monk in his Fra Angelico-frescoed cell in San Marco. I’m not an artist, just a humble craftsman, Filippino would say when people asked him what he did.

Then King Charles VIII of France crossed the Alps and, picking up Swiss mercenaries along the way, pitched siege outside the walls of Florence. There was an outbreak of the plague, some of the city’s walls were burning. Penitents whipped themselves on the steps of the Duomo. Food ran out and people starved. The flames of hell seemed close to them then. A pyre was built in the centre of the Piazza della Signoria. The city brought its armfuls of pagan texts, graven images which formerly, encouraged by Poliziano, by Pico della Mirandola, they’d hoped to smuggle into their Christian faith. The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Picture, Esmond says, Filippino arguing with Botticelli, desperate to stop him carrying out all three of his Simonetta-inspired masterpieces. Finally his old master leaves with Diana and Actaeon, sobbing, saying that he must make his peace with God. That only in the kind cruelty of Savonarola’s words can he escape from the despair that has hunkered over him since Simonetta, coughing blood, left the world. Filippino watches from the window as the painting burns. That evening, he begins the triptych. He doesn’t sleep until the three paintings are finished.

Now we see him, ten years later, dying in the airy bedroom of a house overlooking the Piazza della Signoria. Only forty-eight. The triptych is at the end of the bed — Esmond points towards it — hanging there, watching over him just as it watches over us. Out of his window he can see the massive form of David moving by. One of the last things he did was to vote on where Florence should house its new masterpiece, sculpted by the man who would go on to be the true inheritor of Lippo’s title, the greatest painter in Florence — Michelangelo. The triptych is his own monument, a relic of those sinister days when it seemed as though Florence would fall.

As he dies, he feels himself being soaked into the triptych. These paintings, he realises, are enough. They may not have the surface beauty of Primavera or the grace of his father’s work, but they tell the truth, and that is what matters. To an echo of applause as David is set down outside the Palazzo Vecchio, Filippino drifts deeper into the paintings, feeling the tendons and sinews of his own body coil around those of St John. He begins to disappear. Now his wife is here, mopping his brow with a damp cloth, his son, another Filippo, mouthing words he cannot hear, grasping his hand. As if lifted on a cloud he looks down on himself, on his family. He dies with the triptych before him and tendrils of love pouring out from his beatless heart into the still, soft world.

*

He tells the story of Filippino over and over, becoming more inventive with each iteration, knowing that the brighter the images he offers Ada, the more she is able to leave her own suffering. It’s not a happy story, but it begins to gather a life, and helps to heal her mind, just as his careful ministrations heal her body. After a fortnight, she rises from the bed. The scar on her ear has become infected, an indignant red; her wrist remains in its cast, the nails do not grow back; otherwise she is as recovered as she’ll ever be. In silence, Esmond helps her to dress, pulling the old tunic with its scent of lavender over her head, lacing her shoes. When they are finished, they stand facing each other, and she takes his hands and leans forward to kiss him.

*

Esmond puts in a call to Pretini on the W/T that afternoon. It is the twenty-third of November. ‘Ada is up and about,’ he says. ‘We’re ready to help again. To do whatever we can.’

A little after nine that evening, there is a ring at the front door. Pretini is with them, and the Professor and Elio, his arm in a sling. As Esmond and Ada are greeting their guests, a motorbike pulls into the driveway with its front light off. Bruno and Alessandro skip up the steps to the door and soon they are all in the drawing room, a fire roaring in the grate. The Professor has brought brandy and a lasagne made by his wife, which they heat in the kitchen. Ada is distant but composed. The men are careful with her, take care to let her know that she is included in their plans but not unthinkingly. After they have eaten, Bruno passes around a box of Toscanos. Pretini looks first at Esmond, then at Ada.

‘A second wave of round-ups this weekend. They’re trying to grab every Jew in the city, this Judenfrei dream of Mangianello’s. We’ve been attempting to get as many as possible out, but the Germans are breathing down our necks. The convent at Prato was raided last night. Six nuns arrested for harbouring Jews, although Cardinal della Costa marched down to the Stadtskom-mandatur immediately in full sacerdotal dress and had them released. We’re going to send two families from the Oltrarno up to you tomorrow. They’re holed up at the back of the salon at the moment, but there simply isn’t room for them.’

‘There are too many who need our help, too few of us to give it,’ the Professor says. ‘The best we can do is warn them and hope they get away. I have spoken to Rabbi Cassuto. He’s aware of the dangers. He’s tough, for such a young man.’

Esmond nods. The fire has died down and he adds another vine branch to it.

‘We need to take the fight to the enemy,’ Bruno says, slapping his hand on his thigh and making Ada start. ‘It’s not enough to simply react. As the Allies approach — and they will, soon, Monte Cassino is only a temporary hold-up — we need to make the Fascists feel like they’re under attack from within and without.’ He throws his cigarillo into the fire and puts a matchstick in his mouth, which he moves from side to side as he thinks.

‘So what do we do?’ Esmond asks.

‘We attack. Our first target is Gino Gobbi. A Colonel in the MVSN. He’s in charge of the Blackshirt squads rounding up conscription shirkers in the hills. We have information that he’s planning to lead a more serious attempt on Monte Morello just before Christmas.’ He knocks back his glass of brandy. ‘We’re going to get him before he does.’

‘Why not go for Carità?’ Esmond says. ‘Or Alberti? Why go for this Gobbi? I’ve never even heard of him.’

‘Because he’s easy and he’s official,’ Bruno says. ‘He lives on his own in an apartment on the Lungarno Soderini, just upriver from Antonio’s. He’s regular, leaves his place on the dot of seven-thirty every night and strolls up to a restaurant near the Ponte alla Carraia. We’ll hit him on the evening of the first of December.’

‘We want to get Carità as much as you do,’ Alessandro says. ‘But he’s heavily guarded. He’s a paranoid fucker and we’ll need to plan carefully. But we’ll get him, never fear.’

‘Fine,’ Esmond says, looking across at Ada, who is sitting still, listening. ‘At least we’re doing something.’

21

The next day, they hear nothing from Pretini. They had been expecting the Jewish families to arrive, but when evening comes and there is still no news, Esmond calls down to the salon. There is no response, just the dull buzz of static. It is dark outside. They have not yet had dinner. He radios through to the partisans at Monte Morello and Maria Luigia answers.

‘They’re all down in the city,’ she says. ‘Carità has Penna. We shouldn’t speak any more. The Germans will be listening in. Goodbye.’

A little after midnight, the doorbell rings. Esmond and Ada are both in bed, neither asleep. They go downstairs together, Esmond looking through the shuttered window beside the door before opening it. Antonio and Tosca are standing on the doorstep. He is shaggy-headed, exhausted-looking; she is as neat as usual, but agitated.

‘Carità raided the salon this morning. Pretini had no chance,’ she says as they follow Esmond into the kitchen. ‘They found the two families in the rooms at the back, handed them over to the Gestapo, hauled Pretini and his assistant, Giacomo, off to the Villa Triste. At least we found out where the leaks have been coming from. There was a priest with Carità, a Father Idelfonso. He’s been hanging around the monasteries and convents, picking up news from the monks. Unworldly bastards don’t know any better and reveal everything. One of them must have told him about Pretini. Now we just have to hope that Pretini’s able to keep his mouth shut about the location of the camp.’

Esmond places a bottle of grappa on the table and Tosca pours herself a drink. ‘He’s tough. There’s nothing to worry about there. And we’re still going to take Gobbi down,’ she says, gulping and pouring another. ‘We need to prove they can’t scare us.’

On Saturday morning, the twenty-seventh, Ada and Esmond stand in the garden with their binoculars trained down on the streets around the synagogue. They see nothing, they hear nothing, and they feel useless and cut off now that Pretini is no longer on hand to keep them up to date with news from the streets. It is only on the Sunday evening, when Gino Bartali pulls up on his bicycle, his peaked cap and racing colours bright even in winter, that they learn.

Bartali tells them that SS Captain Alberti brought specially trained commandos over from Trieste to manage the round-up. Jews were hunted down in all corners of the city: in the convents, in the hospitals, in the empty galleries of the Bargello where several had been hidden by Professor Rossi. Eight Jews in their seventies were taken from a care home in Novoli and rolled in their wheelchairs to the slatted train at Santa Maria Novella station.

Carità had led gangs through the streets of the Jewish quarter breaking windows, entering houses and looting. What they didn’t steal, they destroyed. They found six grubby-faced children hiding in a cellar and Carità led them up to the station himself, waving the train off as it chugged slowly out of Santa Maria Novella station. That train would eventually, after agonising stops on windswept mountain passes, long waits at empty platforms whose lamps swung yellow light into blackness — all of this seen through slats no wider than a finger — end up at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The last man who stepped onto the train at Santa Maria Novella that Sunday morning, holding himself very tall despite the weight he must have felt, was Nathan Cassuto, the city’s youthful Chief Rabbi.

Bartali also gives them a message from Bruno. They are to meet at the side of Santo Spirito at six-thirty the next evening. Esmond should bring his revolver.

22

It is cold as they make their way down into the city. The trees have dropped their leaves on the lanes and there is damp squelching beneath their feet. It had rained earlier in the day and now there is a fine mist. The lights of the town look smudged. Esmond is wearing George Keppel’s ulster, the revolver snug in one pocket.

As they reach the first houses, he hears the drone of aeroplanes overhead. They look up as searchlights slash across the sky. The anti-aircraft guns crackle over Fiesole but the planes surge on, through the air and mist.

The red coal of a solitary Toscano burns in the shadows behind the facade of Santo Spirito. Esmond and Ada walk along to the right of the church where they find Bruno attached to the glowing cigarillo, Elio and Alessandro beside him. ‘We’re waiting for Antonio and Tosca,’ Bruno says. Esmond stands back and looks up at the darkened windows of St Mark’s. He picks out the French windows of his old studio, the rooftop terrace where he’d spent his sweltering days three summers ago. This is his seventh December in Florence, he realises. He asks Bruno for a smoke and lights it, brightening them all for a moment with the flare of his match. Five earnest, eager faces. A few minutes later, Antonio and Tosca arrive. They gather around Bruno.

‘Elio’s going to make the hit,’ Bruno says. Esmond has noticed before that, when they discuss death, they speak like characters in a trashy American novel. He gives a little smile in the darkness. ‘We’ll get him in front of San Frediano, at the Piazza di Castello. I’ll be waiting around the corner. If Elio misses, I’ll go after Gobbi.’

‘I won’t miss,’ Elio says. He looks very young in the dim light, Esmond thinks. His round glasses reflect the Toscano.

‘There are guards on both bridges — the Vittoria and the Carraia. We need to have them covered. Make sure that Elio can escape. If they come near, we shoot them, is that understood? Antonio and Tosca, you take the guards on the Ponte della Vittoria; Esmond and Ada, you’ll be on the Ponte alla Carraia. Alessandro will have the Moto Guzzi to get Elio away afterwards. Listen, Ada, here’s a gun for you.’ He hands her a small Beretta that she places quickly in the pocket of her jacket.

The seven friends look at each other for a moment and then, without speaking, make their way in separate groups up towards the river. Esmond hears the engine of the motorbike start and then fade into the distance. He and Ada wend their way through the streets directly behind the Lungarno until they come to a small passageway leading to the riverfront. They lose themselves in shadows and look over towards the bridge. The two German soldiers are smoking in the mist, waterproof jackets over their uniforms. There is no traffic on the Lungarno. They can hear the river slapping against its banks every now and again, the sound of the Germans talking. Esmond looks at his watch. It is twenty past seven. The revolver is heavy in his pocket.

They hear the bells of Santo Spirito chime seven-thirty, those of San Frediano answering a few moments later. Ada places a swift kiss on his cheek. ‘It’ll be fine,’ she says. They wait. The breeze over the river swirls the mist like a brush through grey paint. They wait for the sound of Elio’s gun. Five minutes pass, now ten. When the bells toll quarter to eight, first Santo Spirito, then San Frediano, Esmond gives Ada’s hand a squeeze.

‘You stay here,’ he says. ‘I’m going to wander along and see if I can see anything.’

‘Be careful.’

He walks in the darkness thrown by the buildings, his hand in his pocket, his fingers wrapped around the cold metal of the gun. He stops for a while at the midpoint of the Lungarno, where he can see both sets of guards. The two on the Ponte della Vittoria are sitting down on the stone wall playing whist, holding their cards inside their jackets to shield them from the rain. He stands there, watching, for another ten minutes. He wonders how long Bruno will wait before giving up. He decides to make his way along to the piazza in front of San Frediano. He keeps himself hidden against the dark bulk of the buildings, stepping out into the street to avoid the cone of light beneath a streetlamp. As he’s there, in the middle of the road, he hears a door slam shut ahead of him.

He scurries further along, pressing against the damp stone of the next building. He sees a man walking towards him, hands in the pockets of an overcoat, stopping for a moment to light a cigarette and then walking on. The bells of Santo Spirito begin to strike eight. Suddenly, appearing through the mist behind the man, a figure, running, a gun glinting in the streetlight. The assailant lets out a high cry, audible over the bells, holds the pistol out straight-armed, and then nothing. Esmond watches with horror as the man turns around to face his pursuer. Elio looks down at his gun, pulls at it and slaps it against his knee in frustration as the man turns again and begins to run lumberingly down the Lungarno away from Elio, towards Esmond.

In the seconds it takes for San Frediano to ring out — a single peal and then eight deep notes — Esmond has drawn the revolver from his pocket and stepped from the shadows. The sprinting Colonel Gobbi doesn’t see him until it’s too late. He stumbles into Esmond’s arms, the cigarette falling from his mouth. Esmond holds him up with his left arm and relief passes across the man’s face.

‘Aiuto,’ he says, ‘c’è un pazzo qui—’

There have been five strikes of San Frediano’s bell above them. On the sixth, Esmond pushes the revolver up into Gobbi’s ribs and flicks off the safety catch. The Colonel’s eyes open very wide. On the seventh strike Esmond pulls the trigger, again on the eighth. Gobbi slumps forward, giving a tight spasm. Esmond lays him down carefully in the shadowy lee of the building, looking towards first one bridge, then the other. The guards have heard nothing over the sound of the bells. Elio is still standing in the road, watching. He walks slowly towards Esmond. Together they look down at the slumped figure. Then Elio shakes his head, as if awakening from a dream.

‘You need to go,’ he says. ‘Run to the piazza, Alessandro will look after you.’

‘No,’ says Esmond. ‘I’m not leaving Ada again.’ He starts back along the Lungarno towards the Ponte alla Carraia. Elio runs to keep up with him. ‘You need to get rid of the gun,’ he hisses.

Esmond shakes his head. ‘I’m fucked if I’m caught either way. I’ll keep the gun.’ They have almost reached the passageway when, ahead of them, the light of a German Kübelwagen appears, sweeping from side to side along the Lungarno.

‘Quick,’ Elio says, trying to drag Esmond back the way they have come.

‘No,’ he says again.

Ada is standing in the shadows of the passageway, her skin dimly glowing. ‘Quick,’ Esmond says. The three of them move down the passageway in single file, coming out on the Borgo San Frediano. Esmond tries to lead them back towards Santo Spirito, but Elio hesitates.

‘Wait,’ he says. Esmond feels an urge to wipe Elio’s glasses, misted with rain. ‘They’ll find the body any minute. There’ll be Germans crawling all over the place. We’ll never make it all the way up to the villa.’

‘What about Antonio’s place?’ Ada says.

They walk swiftly along the road, again in the shadows. The rain is starting to drum the street, casting a misty scrim before them. Just as they turn up towards the Ponte della Vittoria, there is the sound of a police siren. Soon, a second joins it. ‘They’ve found the body,’ Elio says. They begin to run. When they reach the river, they look along to see half a dozen searchlights illuminating the Lungarno. Soldiers are spewing across the bridge from the north, their feet rhythmic on the cobblestones.

Outside Antonio’s apartment, they pull the bell and wait. Nothing. One of the German Kübelwagens is moving up the Lungarno towards them. ‘Fuck,’ Elio says. Esmond looks along the river and sees two figures moving quickly, keeping just out of reach of the searchlight that is oscillating first one way, then the other, on top of the car. The figures run across the traffic circle at the bottom of the Ponte della Vittoria and come stumbling up to the front door of the building. Antonio fumbles with his key-ring, gets the key in the latch and the five of them spill inside. Esmond slams the door shut with his foot. They hear the slow rumble of the car pass by, and then they are all laughing, breathless, staggering up the stairs.

‘I need a drink,’ Elio says.

‘What a blast. Wowee!’ Tosca spreads happily back on the wall on the first landing.

Esmond takes Ada’s hand and they come up last of all. She kisses him at the doorway and they go inside.

‘It was horrifying, but distant,’ he’s saying, much later, as they sit by the window, a bottle of limoncello on the table in front of them. ‘As if it wasn’t me pulling the trigger, but me in a novel, a film. Do you see what I’m getting at?’ Tosca is curled asleep in an armchair in the corner. Antonio is cooking at the small stove in his kitchen. Elio is staring out into the night, watching the lights move along the Lungarno.

‘We did it, that’s what matters,’ Elio says. ‘The bastards will take us seriously from now on.’

An hour later, they are all drunk and dead tired. Elio is slumped across the table, sleeping. Antonio insists that Esmond and Ada take his bed and stretches out on the floor by Tosca’s feet. Their faces together on the pillow, Esmond tries to recite ‘God’s Grandeur’ to Ada, but falls asleep somewhere in the first line. They are woken every so often by police sirens. In the night, winds blow away the clouds and they wake to a dawn that is bright and still.

23

Bruno arrives at the apartment just after seven. Elio, rubbing his eyes, answers the door. Antonio is curled in the chair with Tosca in his lap. Esmond and Ada get up slowly and take turns washing in the sink. Bruno is sitting at the table with a cup of coffee. His face bears none of the triumph that Esmond had expected.

‘Well done last night,’ he says grimly. ‘We did what we had to do.’

‘But—’ Esmond sits down opposite his friend.

‘But Alberti and Mangianello convened a special court in the night, after they found out about Gobbi, I mean. It was decided they should send a strong message to the Resistance. Five prisoners are being executed over in the Cascine this morning.’

‘Not Pretini—’ Ada says. Esmond’s eyes dart to the window and the park.

‘No, not yet. It would seem they think they can get more from him. But Oreste Ristori is one of them.’

At ten o’clock sharp, the soldiers begin to arrive in the park across the river. The shooting range is swept of fallen leaves and then a Black Maria pulls up. Five men are dragged out, their hands cuffed. There is no crowd, just a group of Blackshirts and a single man in a dark suit who begins to scream and swear at the prisoners. Antonio comes back with a pair of binoculars. ‘That’s Gobbi’s brother,’ he says, touching the focus ring. ‘I’ve seen him around.’ The five men are tied to posts in front of the shooting range. ‘Alberti is there,’ Antonio continues, ‘and Mangianello.’ Now an ambulance with a lightning flash on the side pulls up.

‘That’s—’ Ada begins.

‘Carità. Yes.’ Antonio says.

Gobbi’s brother continues to shout at the five prisoners, the harsh notes of his voice coming across the still waters of the river. ‘Can you make out any of the others?’ Bruno asks. ‘Let me look for a moment.’ He takes the binoculars. ‘There’s Luigi Pugi, Gino Manetti. I don’t know the other two. They’re not even partisans apart from Oreste. Just anarchists rounded up because the Germans don’t want troublemakers on the street. This is appalling, it’s criminal.’

As the men are tied to their posts, Carità steps from the ambulance and embraces Alberti and Mangianello. Bruno points out Piero Koch, once as infamous in Rome as Carità in Florence. He is hunched and long-limbed, like a spider. Esmond watches the Blackshirts struggle to tie their ropes around Ristori’s enormous belly. Gobbi’s brother’s voice rises higher as Carità, Koch and three other Blackshirts take their positions facing the men. Over the harsh cries, though, another sound drifts out. Ristori is singing. As the Banda Carità raise their rifles to their shoulders, Ristori leads the five prisoners in the Internationale, although only Ristori’s voice can be heard over Gobbi’s brother’s screams. Esmond reaches his hand out in the air towards the man, towards the voice. ‘C’est la lutte finale / Groupons-nous et demain / L’Internationale / Sera le genre humain.’ Five shots. Five bodies slump forward, Ristori’s heavily enough that his ropes break and he tumbles into the sand. Esmond thinks of Mercedes Gomez, mud-streaked in a jungle clearing, the pictures on Ristori’s mantel, the things for which we live.

Tosca is crying and Ada sits with her. Bruno shakes his head, lowering the binoculars. Elio’s face is set hard. Esmond, still looking down over the five bodies, their five murderers, sees Shelley sitting in the same park a hundred and twenty years ago, writing ‘Ode to the West Wind’. Very quietly, to himself, he mouths: ‘O Wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’

24

They spend Christmas at L’Ombrellino. The Professor comes up in the Bianchi with Bruno, the back loaded down with bottles of wine and food. Maria Luigia’s cousins have given them three chickens, there are carrots and potatoes from the garden. Alessandro has been brewing grappa in the caves at Monte Morello. He and Elio arrive on the Moto Guzzi with a rucksack full of alcohol. Maria Luigia turns up on a bicycle, her plump cheeks flushed from the cold, an enormous salami hanging around her neck, the chickens dangling from the handlebars. Gino Bartali and his wife also cycle up, while Antonio and Tosca, in evening dress, come late, as the chickens are being carved. Antonio’s hair has been carefully cut. He is cleanly shaven and smells of rose water.

‘I wouldn’t let him up here until he looked half-decent,’ Tosca says. She is wearing a long red dress and a red carnation in her hair.

Esmond sits next to Alessandro at lunch, immaculate in his oyster-white suit. After they have eaten, they sip orzo coffee, leaning back in their chairs, and Esmond drapes a fraternal arm around his friend’s shoulder. ‘That was smashing,’ he says.

‘I’ve eaten too much.’ Alessandro opens the button at his waist. ‘I wish Pretini were here. It’s the only thing that spoils it, you know?’

‘I’ve been thinking about him, too. What’s the chance he gives us away? Tells Carità the location of the camp, I mean.’

‘Pretini? Never. He may look like a playboy, but he’s a tough fucker.’

‘It’s pretty strange, this foppish hairdresser now a rebel leader. Only in Italy, I guess.’

Alessandro offers Esmond a cigarette. He takes it and bends his head to the flame of his friend’s lighter. Alessandro lets out a stream of smoke with a sigh. ‘Guys like Pretini, they’re exceptional. It’s obvious why I’m fighting.’ He holds his hand up to his face, smiling. ‘If they don’t go after me because I’m half-Jewish, they’ll go after me because I’m half-black. I’m like a Christmas present to those fuckers, tick all the boxes.’ He laughs. ‘But Pretini, it’s all about idealism, honour. He says the Fascists, the Nazis, they offend his sense of decency. And he’s willing to die for that. I think that’s remarkable.’

After lunch, they sit in front of the fire in the drawing room. The Professor raises a glass to Pretini. They have heard from Morandi, the doctor, who has been brought in to treat him at the Villa Triste, the apartment block in the via Bolognese whose upper floors are now the administrative headquarters of the SD. The Germans have been complaining about the screams coming from the basement rooms, so rumour has it. Pretini has refused to give Carità any information. His bright teeth have been ripped out, he has been thrown down a flight of stone stairs, fourteen bones broken in all, but still he will not speak. The Professor has taken Pretini’s wife and daughter — whose existence was kept from all but a handful of friends, bad for business with the assorted Marchesas and Contessas — up to the Marchese Serlupi’s villa.

‘This may be the last time we are all together,’ the Professor says, peering around the room through thick spectacles. ‘The Allies are on the move again. Things will only get closer to the edge from now on. Elio and Alessandro have what you might call a functioning bomb factory in Monte Morello. In January, we will begin a full-scale campaign of terrorism. The Germans will wish they had never set foot in Florence.’

There is a moan of approval, the clinking of glasses. Antonio, who has taken off his tie and untucked his shirt, kisses Tosca.

‘Maria Luigia is taking charge of CoRa, our radio network. Ferruccio Parri has sent us a high-powered portable transmitter from Milan which we will use to co-ordinate the various cells gathering in the hills. The set here at L’Ombrellino isn’t strong enough to reach the mountain passes. Its presence also poses a threat to Esmond and Ada. With the new machinery we will be able to transmit detailed information to the British SOE. They’ve already sent ammunition and supplies. You will all—’ — his voice catches a little here — ‘be remembered in years to come for your bravery, for your dedication to the people of Florence, the cause of freedom.’

The partisans stand, applauding, and their applause grows louder until it hurts the ears. The noise grows and grows until it gives over to the sound of screaming, the sound of gunfire, the sound of the bombs that explode throughout January. It is the sound of the briefcase bomb left by Alessandro in the lobby of the Fascist Federation on the via dei Servi and the childlike shrieks of the Blackshirt guard whose legs are ripped off by the blast. It is the sound of the bomb that Bruno places in the brothel on the via delle Terme, patting the madam on the bottom and whispering a warning as he leaves. Two SS Sturmbannführers are killed in their underwear, waiting for their girls to arrive. It is the sound of bullets tearing through the greatcoats and shirts and underclothes of the two guards on the Ponte della Vittoria, bullets which come from guns fired out of Antonio’s window. He can never go back to the flat, and he and Tosca join the partisans in the caves at Monte Morello. It is the sound of bombs destroying railway lines, Esmond and Ada’s particular speciality: charges placed at strategic positions on the Florence to Rome line, on the tracks at Campo di Marte, just outside Santa Maria Novella station.

One wintry afternoon, they are strapping sticks of dynamite to the Florence — Bologna line, a line which Mussolini calls the masterpiece of his railway network (although even here, contrary to boasts, the trains don’t always run on time). Ada snaps at Esmond as he fumbles with a fuse. She takes the IMCO lighter from his fingers and lights it. They retreat to the cover of rail-side brush and wait. A rush and a suck of air as the bomb detonates, sending a train carrying six hundred Mauser semi-automatic rifles, sixteen hundred rounds of ammunition, eighty Model 24 Stielhandgranate, twenty-four barrels of Bavarian beer, two refrigerated containers of wurst and schnitzel, a dozen rats and a terrified driver careening into the Arno.

They don’t know it until later, but at the very moment that the train sank beneath the river’s roiled waters, Carità was pressing the cold muzzle of his revolver into the warm nape of Alessandro’s neck. Alessandro, a priest who was watching from the steps of the church tells the Professor that evening, dropped to his knees with a dreamy look on his dark face, his oyster-white suit immaculate and angel-like as he keeled over into the dust.

25

The next day, around eight, Esmond wakes. Tatters is standing up at the end of their bed, ears pricked. Esmond remembers Alessandro, the news of whose death had been given to them by Maria Luigia over the radio the night before, and he feels grief settle over him. Tatters begins to growl and Esmond kicks out at the dog, then regrets it. Tatters steps off the bed, sulking, and patters downstairs. Esmond hears the sound of the front door opening. He reaches over and nudges Ada just as Tatters begins to bark.

‘There’s someone downstairs,’ he says. Ada’s eyes open and she sits up as Esmond leans out over the bannisters. The sound of boots on the wooden floor, voices. Tatters barking.

‘Stai zitto!’ someone yells. The front door is opened, a whimper and then a single gunshot. No more barking. Esmond runs back into the room to pick up his pistol, ready to go down and confront the men, but Ada places her hand on his shoulder.

‘Not now.’ The boots clump up the stairs to the first floor. Ada quickly pulls the covers up over the bed. She then unplugs the W/T and puts it in the cupboard. Esmond takes his gun and the book of poetry from his bedside. They jam themselves in beside the Italian soldier’s uniform, relic of their first mission, still hanging there with Esmond’s suits, Ada’s dresses. They make themselves as comfortable as they can and wait. They can hear men moving through the rooms of the floor below them, looking in the bedroom where first Alessandro, then Signora Rossi slept. There is a tightening of the air as someone enters the room and then, through a crack between the cupboard doors, Esmond sees a squat figure in shorts, a flash of white hair.

‘They haven’t been gone long,’ Carità says.

‘We’ll have the place thoroughly cleaned before the Reichsmarschall gets here,’ another voice says. Esmond sees Alberti, whom he recognises from the shootings in the Cascine. ‘He’s very particular. Ah, what do we have here?’ Esmond can see Alberti standing in front of the triptych. ‘These are rather good. Our rebel friends have taste.’

‘Hmm,’ Carità has taken Anna’s collage off the wall and is scrutinising it. Esmond can feel Ada’s breath on his cheek. He thinks of Tatters with a stab of sadness. ‘I know the little bastard holing up here. He’s a pathetic little faggot, nothing to worry about.’

Alberti is still standing in front of the triptych. ‘I will make a gift of these paintings to the Reichsmarschall when he arrives,’ he says. ‘To welcome him to Florence.’

‘Fine,’ Carità replies. ‘I’ll have my men bring them down to San Marco today. I’ll take this one for myself now, though,’ he says, tucking the collage beneath his arm.

They stomp back down the stairs. Esmond listens for the sound of the door slamming and then looks out of the window as a motorcycle and sidecar pulls through the front gate. ‘Shit,’ says Ada behind him. Esmond runs down and out to where Tatters is lying, a red patch spreading slowly across his wiry white fur. Esmond kneels down beside the dog’s body, which is still warm, and cradles it in his lap. He begins to cry. For the dog, certainly, but for Alessandro, too. For Oreste Ristori. For his baby. He’s still crying when Ada comes down and takes his head against her and speaks soothingly. He feels the flatness of her stomach, the bony undulations of the ribs above them and lets out another sob.

‘We need to get out of here,’ she says. ‘I radioed down to Maria Luigia at CoRa. Bruno’s coming to take us to Monte Morello. We should go up and pack.’

‘I need to do this, first,’ he says.

Esmond takes the dog’s body down into the garden and lays it beneath the umbrella sculpture, from which the dead fingers of last summer’s vines hang down. He brings up stones from the terrace by the swimming pool and soon he has constructed a small cairn over the body. He walks back up to the house, his eyes now dry, his mouth set in a firm, bloodless line.

He fills his morocco bag with clothes, runs down to the drawing room to grab an armful of books, then back up to the bedroom, where he places the books with his revolver and a bundle of letters in the top of the bag. He and Ada stand staring at the triptych together.

‘I suppose it’s goodbye,’ she says.

He looks at the painting of Christ, the two smaller panels either side. ‘Don’t be so sure,’ he says.

‘But the centrepiece is too big to—?’

‘He can stay,’ he says. ‘Cast his judgement on the Germans. Maybe one of them will catch a glimpse of something that keeps him from the worst.’

When Bruno pulls up half an hour later, they are standing on the gravel driveway with two small bags beside them. In Ada’s arms, she holds the painting of Mary Magdalene. John the Baptist leans back against Esmond.

‘You realise how conspicuous they’ll make us?’ Bruno says from the window of the car.

‘We’re conspicuous already,’ Ada says. She and Esmond sit in the back seat while the paintings jolt and bounce in the front beside Bruno, as they make their way over mule tracks and through vineyards to the hills.

After forty minutes of driving, they begin to climb steeply. Pine trees clamber up the hillside, then gorse bushes and heather. The road takes them under the lip of rocky bluffs, winding along ridges looking down on deep valleys. Finally, after driving through a pine forest so thick it’s like night has been called back, they pull into a clearing, where Elio is standing, waiting for them. The university bus is parked to one side, branches teepeed over it. Nets covered in camouflage material hang over the mouths of three caves inside which Esmond can see figures, the glow of cigarettes.

‘You heard about Alessandro?’ Elio asks as they get out of the car. Esmond nods grimly. ‘What are those?’ Elio points to the paintings which, despite the journey, look sublime as ever. Ada embraces him and soon Antonio and Tosca are out with other assorted deserters and partisans, some of whom Esmond dimly recognises from those first meetings at the Palazzo Vecchio. He reads Alessandro’s death in each face.

They are led into the wide mouth of a cave, where sleeping bags are arranged, each within a neatly marked-out area, most with boots and guns and small personal items beside them. They go deeper inside and Elio gestures to a small alcove formed by a group of glittering stalactites that drip down from the roof.

‘We thought you might like this spot. It’s darker, of course, but there’s a little more privacy. Your bed-rolls and sleeping bags are there, candles. I hope it’s all to your liking. I know it’s not L’Ombrellino, but we try.’

‘It’s fine,’ Ada says, putting down her bag on the rock floor of the cave. They bring the paintings inside, leaning them against a wall which still finds some daylight from the mouth. The two figures seem lost without their Lord. Esmond takes Ada in his arms and they look at the saints.

‘They’re alone now.’

‘They have each other.’

‘I loved being with you,’ Esmond says. ‘Up there at the villa.’

‘I loved it too.’ She pauses. ‘But this feels real. We can get things done here. After Alessandro, we need to.’ He can feel the hardness of the Beretta, which Bruno had given her the night they’d killed Gobbi and which she’s kept in her pocket ever since, digging into his thigh. That night, Esmond is woken by the skinny howling of mountain wolves. He reaches out for Ada’s hand in the damp darkness, squeezing it tightly.

26

They go after Carità in the middle of March. The spring of ’44 is a warm one and the partisans in the hills are buoyed by the mild weather, by the news coming out of Monte Cassino, where the third battle has just ended and the Allies at last scent victory. In the north, there is a wave of crippling strikes in the factories, further rumours of a deterioration in Mussolini’s mental state after, under pressure from Pavolini, he is forced to execute his son-in-law Ciano.

Elio and Bruno have drawn it all up in great detail. There have been rehearsals in the clearing in front of the cave. There are fallback plans taking in any number of contingencies, a broad range of less and less likely outcomes. Each of them is given a card with typed instructions as to where they must be, what they must do as the assassination unfolds.

It is eleven in the morning. Esmond, his blond hair under a beret, is sitting at the Caffè Gilli beside a round-topped laurel bush. He sips at his second orzo espresso of the morning and tries to remember not the taste but the buzz, the lift he used to feel when drinking real coffee. He can see Tosca’s blonde head in the shadows of the triumphal arch. She is standing back from the road, her bag at her feet, looking young and carefree and entirely uninterested in the workers hurrying past, the German soldiers who glance at her, the Blackshirts who wolf-whistle. In the other direction, down towards the via Calimala, Antonio leans back against a wall with a copy of the Corriere della Sera held up to his face.

There are businessmen at the tables around Esmond, mostly Italian, their conversations carried out in low, confidential voices. He sips, looking at his watch and then along to the Paszkowski next door, where German soldiers eat pastries with their coffee, the golden flakes lifted skywards by the breeze that drifts up from the Arno. An SS Hauptsturmführer leafs through a copy of Der Schwarze Korps, licking his finger to turn the page. Waiters come and go, nodding their heads and muttering a half-insolent Danke when one of the Germans settles his bill.

Ada comes to sit at Esmond’s table, her hair tucked up under a cloche hat. ‘Hello,’ she smiles thinly at him, her voice cool and businesslike. She puts her purse on the table and from it draws out a make-up compact, dabbing a thin layer of powder under her eyes. ‘He’s coming,’ she says, without looking up.

Esmond waits until Tosca catches his eye and then nods. She, a small, blonde figure, walks up from underneath the arch swinging her bag, large and black. Esmond watches her take a seat at the Paszkowski and attach the bag to the hook beneath the table. She smiles at the waiter when he comes to take her order. Now Antonio lowers his newspaper and begins to move up towards the cafés on the north side of the piazza. He reaches Tosca just as Carità’s ambulance pulls into the square.

The tall figure of Piero Koch, in a long coat of black leather, is the first to step from the ambulance, then two guards, one of whom Esmond recognises from the shootings in the Cascine. The guards carry MAB 38s on straps around their shoulders. Finally, Carità and his mistress, the giggling, underdressed Milly. They sit down in their usual place at the front of the Paszkowski, two tables away from where Antonio and Tosca are locked in conversation, their heads leaning in towards one another. Koch and the guards stand at the entrance of the bar, scanning the piazza warily. The waiter brings two glasses of brandy to the table and Esmond can hear Carità’s high, yelping laugh.

He takes a sip of his coffee and glances at his watch again. Just on time, the Bianchi pulls up the via Calimala. Bruno is at the wheel, his elbow resting on the open window, the matchstick dancing in his mouth the only sign of his nerves. The car is moving very slowly, comes to a stop in front of the Savoy, and waits. Somewhere, a bell tolls the quarter-hour. In the stillness after, Esmond hears a dull clunk and Ada draws in a breath, almost a sob. He looks across to the Paszkowski and sees Tosca, hand to her mouth, staring down at the floor where Antonio is desperately scrabbling on his hands and knees. Esmond feels his lungs empty, his eyes fixed on Tosca’s horrified face.

‘Eine bombe!’ The SS officer is on his feet, pointing at Antonio, who gives up on whatever he’s looking for and rises, pulling a revolver from his waistband. The two guards bring their guns to their shoulders, but there are too many Germans and they can’t get a clear shot at him. Now Carità is up, hands raised, an unctuous grin on his face. Tosca goes to stand beside her lover, pressing herself against him as, with his jaw set, he points his revolver straight at Carità. Stillness.

‘A Mexican standoff? I don’t like your odds.’ Carità’s voice rises into a cackle. ‘Time is also not on your side.’ He gestures towards the German soldiers who are standing at the south side of the square and now, alerted by the SS officer’s shout, heading up towards the Paszkowski. ‘I’d surrender now if I were you. Less chance of your girlfriend getting killed.’

‘Go fuck yourself,’ Antonio says, his Sicilian accent punching out.

‘Go fuck yourself,’ Tosca repeats.

There is a longer silence. Esmond watches Koch’s hunched, angular frame shuffling slowly round to stand behind Antonio, a long hand reaching into the pocket of his coat. He thinks about shouting out, tries to stir himself into action, but feels jammed. A chair scrapes beside him as Ada gets to her feet. He looks up at her, helplessly, as she draws the Beretta from her pocket. Koch has pulled out his own gun and is aiming at Antonio’s head as Ada fires, twice, at the hunched back, and the gangly frame rears up, gives a little shudder, and then bends over on itself, two scorched holes in the black leather. There are shouts from the guards, Milly lets out a cry, one of the waiters begins a prayer. Koch collapses forward onto a table and draws plates and glasses clattering to the floor beside him.

Ada shoots again, this time over the heads of the Germans standing motionless on the terrace of the Paszkowski. She takes off her cloche hat and shakes her hair down over her shoulders. The soldiers run, perhaps thirty of them, their boots crackling on the stones of the square. Antonio is firing at Carità, who is crouching with Milly behind an upturned table, but the bullets ping off the metal. Ada looks down at Esmond.

‘Come on!’ he says, rising. ‘We can get to the car if we go now.’

She shakes her head, eyes wide and bright, her wet lips open. ‘I love you,’ she says, and turns. Firing at the guards, at Carità, Ada crosses at a crouching run to where Antonio and Tosca are standing. Then the three of them back slowly away from the terrace and onto the via Brunelleschi. Antonio is empty; soon Ada too. Just before they move out of sight, Esmond sees Ada looking over towards him, a grin, her pale face softening. He rises, moves to follow, everything in him rushing towards her, love minting courage in his heart. Again, a little shake of her head. Then she turns, takes Tosca by the hand, and they run.

The terraces of the two cafés erupt. The SS officer is shouting into the café’s telephone, which has been brought to his table. The businessmen around Esmond rise, dusting their clothes. Everyone is talking, a few relieved chuckles. The soldiers have arrived and Carità is yelling at them, gesturing up the road. Milly is standing over Koch’s body, her hand pressed to her mouth. Esmond pulls the beret down on his head, aware of the approaching soldiers. As the patrons of the two cafés begin to scuttle away in nervous clusters, he hurries to the Bianchi, his heart an animal flutter in his chest. Opening the passenger door, he slips into the seat.

‘Quickly, after them,’ he says.

Bruno is mouthing Cazzo, cazzo, cazzo, slamming his hand down on the steering wheel.

‘She shot Koch. Is he—?’

‘I think so.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Let’s go after them.’ Esmond says.

Bruno looks over at Esmond and shakes his head. ‘Too risky. They’ll have more chance on foot. They’re together, they know what they’re doing.’

‘But—’

Bruno holds up a hand. ‘We have a rendezvous at the Corsini Gardens at one. We need to stick to the plan.’

Esmond sees the soldiers in the café glance over towards the car. Bruno starts the engine and they speed up the via Roma and through the city. They’re half an hour early when they arrive at the gates of the Palazzo Corsini. The Marchesa seats them in the lemon house, overlooking the gardens where birds sing spring and fountains babble. Esmond taps his foot, looks at his watch every few seconds, gets up and paces from one end of the glass house to the other, the image of Koch’s death-shudder in every direction. Bruno sits very still, breathing slowly. Finally they see a figure making its way towards them through the parterre.

‘What happened?’ Bruno says.

‘I don’t know.’ It’s Antonio. ‘They were right behind me and then—’

‘I mean with the bomb, stronzo! What happened with the fucking bomb?’

‘I dropped the fuse. I was trying to attach it under the table, but it was more fiddly than the one we practised on. I dropped the fuse and then, when I was looking for it, the bomb fell out of the bag. I’m sorry.’

‘And the girls?’

‘Like I said, they were behind me—’

They wait at the Palazzo until two o’clock. The Marchesa has a dinner party that evening, drinks in the garden beforehand. White-jacketed waiters are laying out trestle tables on the lawns. She escorts them to the gates, the battered Bianchi outside, wringing her hands in sympathy. They travel back up to Monte Morello in silence.

They are sitting in the cave that evening, Esmond staring at the paintings, Bruno upright at the radio desk, Antonio slumped on his bed, arm crooked over his face and sighing. Finally there is the sound of Maria Luigia’s voice over the wireless.

‘I have news,’ she says. ‘They were taken by the Germans. Carità couldn’t get to them first. They’ve been taken to Santa Verdiana, to the women’s prison. It could be worse. I know the prison governor, she’s a good woman, she’ll try to make sure they aren’t hurt. And Koch is dead, by the way. They took him to Santa Maria Nuova, but they couldn’t save him.’ Esmond remembers the jolt of his body just before he collapsed, the scorched holes in the leather. When Bruno has finished speaking to Maria Luigia, he makes another call on the wireless. Esmond hears a British accent.

‘Please come down as soon as possible,’ Bruno says. ‘We need help.’

An hour later, a man pulls into the clearing in front of the cave on his motorbike. Esmond recognises the British agent they’d met with on the beach at Forte di Marmi. The man nods in Esmond’s direction.

‘Wotcha,’ he says, grinning. ‘Wondered if I’d see you about.’

27

The next morning, Esmond, Bruno, Elio and the British man, Creighton, set off towards the city in the bus. Bruno lets the heavy vehicle coast down the slope. There are now regular aerial drops of fuel from the Allies, but Bruno seems to enjoy sending the bus whistling down the mountainside with its engine off, spraying gravel over cliff-edges, dodging pot-holes and fallen rocks. The four of them are dressed in sand-coloured Wehrmacht Feldbluse and peaked caps. Esmond has a rifle slung across his midriff. Bruno sports two holsters, each holding a Walther PPK. Creighton is sitting beside Esmond at the back of the bus, polishing his revolver.

‘I’ll do the talking,’ he says.

‘My German’s pretty good,’ Esmond says.

‘You look fifteen. And the German doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be authoritative.’

They continue in silence for a while. Esmond notices it feels strange to be speaking English.

‘So you’re SOE — what is that? Army? Secret Service?’

‘The less you know, young man,’ Creighton says, smiling softly, blue eyes darting out over the countryside. ‘We’ll have a good chinwag when the war’s over. We should get together with old Bailey in London. Have a sherbet or two.’

They take a circuitous route through the north of the city and into Le Cure until they come to the via dell’Agnolo. They park in front of the gates of Santa Verdiana, the former convent, now with a chain on the gate, glass shards cemented to the top of the walls, guards leaning on their guns in the courtyard.

‘Are we ready?’ Creighton says. The four men walk out of the bus and up to the gates. Bruno is carrying a silver-topped stick and raps on the wood. Elio, like Esmond, has a rifle cradled in his arms. A black door at the side opens and a white-bearded guard peers out at them.

‘Dov è la Direttore?’ Bruno barks. The guard ushers them through. They wait in the courtyard, listening to the sound of crockery in a kitchen somewhere, a woman singing on one of the prison’s upper floors. After a few minutes, a kindly-looking woman in a grey suit comes to meet them.

‘Can I help you?’ she says, taking in their uniforms.

‘Sprechen sie Deutsch?’ Creighton asks, giving a small and patronising smile.

The governor shakes her head doubtfully. ‘Ein bißchen,’ she offers up.

Creighton switches into Bavarian-tinted Italian. ‘We’re here for the political prisoners.’

‘Which ones?’

‘All of them,’ he says, flatly. ‘They’re being transferred to the SD holding cells at San Marco. We have a new female interrogator.’

The governor looks hesitantly from Creighton to Elio. Elio nods briskly. ‘Auf einmal!’ he shouts, shaking his rifle in the woman’s direction.

‘My colleague is lacking patience,’ Creighton says. ‘Do excuse him. We can of course bring our new interrogator here. We might see what she got from your other prisoners, make a day or two of it.’

‘That won’t be necessary. We have five politicals at the moment. Please wait here.’

A few minutes pass and then two women wander blinking into the yard, accompanied by a female guard with a truncheon. Soon after, Tosca walks out. She is limping and doesn’t meet Esmond’s eye when he looks towards her. Finally a pair of older women appear, accompanied by the governor.

‘These last two are Royalists. I’m not sure you’re interested in them.’

‘Oh, we’re interested in everyone,’ Creighton says, smiling. ‘But you should have one more.’ He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a piece of paper. ‘A certain Nella Ferrari. Ring any bells?’

She nods. ‘Oh yes, but she’s already gone. All of the Jews went last night. The Ferrari girl tried to protest and I must say her documents looked in order, but the men were very insistent.’

‘Were they Germans?’

‘No. Italian. Centurione Carità — perhaps you know him?’

Creighton smiles at her again. ‘We must improve our communication with our Italian comrades,’ he says, bowing. ‘You have been most helpful, direttora.’

They load the prisoners into the bus, first asking the guards to remove the handcuffs.

‘They won’t try anything with us,’ Creighton says, winking.

Only when they’re sure that they aren’t being followed does Bruno turn northwards towards the mountains. Esmond sits stunned as they make their way through the suburbs and out into the wide fields of the plain. Everyone is silent apart from the two Royalist ladies who chatter busily in the back. Tosca reaches over and puts a small hand on Esmond’s shoulder. When they reach the clearing, they get out and stand disconsolately on the grass. Creighton comes and puts his arm around Esmond.

‘I’m awfully sorry, old chap,’ he says. ‘Let me get on the blower and see if I can find out what happened.’

Ten minutes later and Esmond is sitting, sobbing silently. He holds his revolver in his hand, flicking the safety catch on and off, breathing unsteadily. Tosca is leaning against Antonio, her eyes bright with tears. Elio and Bruno are awkwardly silent. Creighton shakes his head.

‘There’s simply nothing we can do. The train is already in the Salò Republic. It’s out of our reach. Listen, mate,’ he says, putting his arm around Esmond’s shoulder again, ‘she’s got a sporting chance, she really does. There’s six months of this war left, if that. She’s in good health. The Germans are losing heart. I’d back her, you know.’

28

Now that Ada is gone, she is everywhere, her name hymning in his mind. He yokes the thud of his heart to those two syllables: A-da, A-da, A-da. He sleeps in her sleeping bag, deep dreamful sleeps, the painting of Mary Magdalene beside him. He lives like a pilgrim, barely listens to the news, doesn’t want to know what is happening at Monte Cassino, in the Pacific, in Britain, is scarcely aware of preparations for the invasion of Europe. Ada is all the points of the compass for him, all the map of the world, all the war. In saying her name, he draws up a hard and secret energy, and he fights as if she were there, at his shoulder, urging him on. He plants bombs on the railway lines alone now, riding down on the Moto Guzzi and coming back with a steady expression. Every explosion is like an offering. He and Bruno kill two German guards they find lying smoking in a field not far from the turning up towards Monte Morello. It is easier than killing Gobbi, he realises. This time he pities the men, but his mind is too full to dwell on them.

He is silhouetted against a pale dawn sky, cresting a hill on the motorbike. The saddlebags are plump with explosives, a Sten gun stiffens his back. He’s wearing a long leather jacket and silver goggles. He passes before a dark row of cypresses, through an olive grove, is obscured by a crumbling Roman wall and then emerges, a wind-whipped cigarillo in his teeth. He knows the goat-tracks of these hills as he once knew the streets of Cambridge, of Shrewsbury, of Florence. At night, before sleeping, he rehearses his route, laying the tracks over the swell of hills like a lattice, then growling the Moto Guzzi towards its destination: an arms silo; an aerodrome; a railway line.

Dawn still hasn’t broken over the mountains when he comes into the village of Sant’Ellero. Pine trees line the road as he freewheels the motorbike down the hill and parks in a lay-by. The station crouches below him, further down is the Arno, which is narrower, faster-flowing here by its source. The Florence — Rome railway line meanders like the river, unexpected tributaries shooting off. He lifts the saddlebags from the bike and scrambles down to the tracks.

Creighton has supplied him with blocks of plastic explosives, small and wrapped in brown paper. He looks up the tracks towards the station, where an elderly woman is sweeping dust into desultory clouds. The hillsides around are thickly wooded. Even though the sun is now rising above the high mountains in the east, he is still in shadow. He darts to the rails, presses the packages of explosives like nougat into hollows he digs out of the stones beneath and around the tracks. He checks the connections and plays out the fuse, concealing himself in the dark shade of a pine tree a little further up the hill.

He looks at his watch. The train is late. He lights a cigarette and stares up through the branches to the blue air above. Sometimes, in the moments of calm, he is seized by a lightness of spirit that feels almost crude without Ada beside him. He can hear birdsong, the plash and spatter of the rocky Arno, and now, in the distance, the whispering rattle of the approaching train. He carefully stubs out his cigarette and gives a last glance up to the sky.

The information is never certain. He relies on messages from mouth to mouth, passed behind menus in noisy restaurants, or in snatched conversations in the lanes of Milan or Turin, through the bars of a gaol at night. The messages are written on slips of paper and sewn into the lining of jackets, or swallowed and fastidiously retrieved, or dropped from moving cars. In the fading echoes of these whispers it is suggested that a certain person, or group of persons, will be in a particular place at a particular time. And he must go and kill them there.

Thus in theory, Creighton had told him, in the second and third carriages of the train now coming towards him are eighteen members of the SS Einsatzgruppen — the death brigade that would be responsible for rounding up the remaining pockets of resistance in Florence, shepherding the last Jews, gypsies and Communists into the slatted wagons at Santa Maria Novella, executing any who stood in their way. A decent target, Esmond thinks.

He can see the train coming around the bend towards the station. His view of the carriages telescopes as the track uncurves and he is left with only a front-on picture of the locomotive, the driver dimly visible in the cab. The woman has stopped sweeping and is leaning on her broom, exchanging a few words with the driver through the steam. The train lets out a whistle and begins to pull away from the station and towards him. Esmond flicks open his IMCO and lights the fuse, which hisses its snaking path down towards the tracks. He scurries further up and raises a pair of field glasses to his eyes. The high wheeze of the engine as it gathers speed. A sudden, incongruous burst of birdsong as the sun breaks over the nearest hills and illuminates the valley. Almost, almost, the train is there.

The locomotive passes over the nest of explosives. The first carriage, in the windows of which he sees two young men in fedoras, smoking, a woman at her knitting. The second carriage, which is empty. The third. Not eighteen, but five slate-suited German officers. Their carriage passes over the explosives. He’s misjudged the length of the fuse, or the damp air has snuffed out the flame. He pulls out his revolver and takes aim. Now the fourth and penultimate carriage, also empty, rolls over the brown packages of nitroglycerine. Nothing. He raises his revolver, closes one eye, aims at the brown packages. A crack, a split-second of vacuumed air and everything stops, then with a roar like a living beast the tracks rear up from the earth.

A wave passes along the train’s long steel spine and the carriages buck from the rails, forming a jagged W before the locomotive plunges down the hill and into the Arno. It comes to rest in the roiled water, steam still rising from the engine. The woman on the station platform has dropped her broom, raising her hands to her mouth. The birds have stopped singing. He doesn’t wait to see who — if anyone — crawls from the capsized train. He doesn’t think of the driver, or the woman, or the young men in the first carriage. Or passengers who may or may not have been in the last. He gets back on his motorbike and lights a cigarillo, pulls the goggles down over his eyes and takes off up the hill, a hard knot of satisfaction in his chest.

29

Esmond feels his energy grow until he can barely sleep, and sits all night in the cool moistness of the cave thinking of Ada, recalling their moments of love. He pictures her in the studio, frowning over a desk of knobs and dials; he sees her in their bed at L’Ombrellino, Tatters tummy-up beside her, afternoon light slanting into her hair; then he sees her broken, sees her fighting, calls to his mind that last look between them, the little shake of the head. These memories tie a wire around his heart. Tosca and Antonio look at him as if he were a stranger now, Bruno and Elio struggle to keep up.

Maria Luigia is captured in a building on the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele on the 13th of May. The radio is discovered and destroyed. Less than a month later she is murdered by a firing squad in the yard of the Murate prison. Her body is returned to her cousins in the country and Esmond goes with Elio, who is undone, to stand in one corner of the graveyard of Porte Sante, in the shadow of a row of cypresses, and look across as her coffin is lowered into the earth. Her family wring and crumple on the cusp of the grave; the priest a magpie, hopping nervously, aware of the shadowy figures watching, some friendly, some not. Esmond and Elio leave quickly, before the end, by scrambling over the cemetery wall, down the steps in front of San Miniato al Monte, and into the waiting Bianchi. When they get back to the cave, Elio goes to sit in front of the paintings. For all of them now, this has become a place of retreat. They can sense the end of things — disaster, victory, resolution — and they contemplate the two saints, together into the night, a sense of shared purpose stringing between them.

News of the fall of Rome reaches them in early June. The front is so close that Esmond fancies, lying in the cave at night, that he can feel the breath of English soldiers on his skin, the rumble of their marching feet in the rocks beneath. Soon afterwards, Pretini is released by Carità. The Professor brings him up the mountain to see them. The hairdresser’s face is unrecognisable, his mouth a twisted empty snarl without its teeth. He has lost an eye and the socket weeps yellowish fluid. His nose is flattened against his face. He tells them, calmly and clearly, about his time in the anonymous-looking building on the via Bolognese, of walls lined in spikes, the carefully reconstructed version of the strappado — a medieval torture device — the cat’s paws and crocodile shears and whips and thumbscrews. He tells them of Carità applying electric shocks to his gums, to his ears, to his genitals, while Father Idelfonso played Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony on the piano to drown out his screams. He tells them of the mock executions where a gun was placed against his temple and the trigger pulled, and how each time he was sure it was loaded, and the peace that came with that. Two Serbians that were captured by Carità have also been returned alive; blind, castrated, their tongues cut out, but alive. Bruno drives them to the nuns at Prato where Morandi, his doctor friend, does his best to make them human again.

The mention of Morandi brings Ada closer. He remembers the doctor’s words — She gave birth, you know. He thinks of the child that never was, the life that might have been. How much would he have loved that baby, knowing that half of it was her? That evening, alone, he sits in front of the paintings, very close, so that he can see their ancient crazing, and rearranges the bright, broken pieces of memory, the chaos of vague possibilities that was their child. Someone said — St Augustine, he thinks — that memory is a place of palaces and caverns. His is only caverns now.

*

One night he sits in the dirt at the mouth of the cave with Creighton. They no longer light fires. Only the glow of his cigarillo, Creighton’s pipe which breathes tender red threads in its bowl. There are regular patrols — German and Fascist — whose searchlights sweep across the hillsides. The sound of dogs, shouts in the still air, engines toiling up rocky inclines. Esmond can tell that they’re getting closer.

‘Destroy yourself,’ Creighton says, tapping his pipe and relighting it, ‘that’s how you become a better soldier. It’s unnatural, I’m sure. Young chap like you, you feel like you’re the centre of the bloody world. But the story of your life isn’t about you any more — it’s about us. The Resistance, the GAP, the Allies. In war, individuals disappear — it’s a group experience. It’s why the Russians are so bloody good at it. Submit yourself to the collective will. Learn to think of yourself as a pawn, you see?’

Esmond lets a smoky breath out into the night. Somewhere, high above, a wolf. ‘I see it differently,’ he says, directing a cool glance at the Englishman. ‘We’re all individuals now. Now more than ever. My story — me and Ada, everything that happened — it’s simple enough, really. The war is a million such stories stacked on top of each other, entwining, competing. You find the right story, you find the truth, the war’s secret centre.’

The drone of aircraft. Creighton looks up. ‘Brits,’ he says. ‘We bomb at night.’

They smoke in silence until the planes have gone. With a nod, Creighton stands, taps out his pipe and disappears into the cave. Esmond sits for a while longer, listening to the wolves and, further off, gunfire, explosions. Finally he goes into the dark interior, lies down next to Mary Magdalene and sleeps.

Time gathers to a bright point. Everything is in flux. Esmond, Bruno and Elio now barely pause for breath; they come back to the hills only to pick up supplies, reload their guns. Esmond feels a kind of joy each time they head down into the city, calm in the knowledge that each journey may be the last, and bring him closer to her.

30

Elio is the next to be caught. He sets out to plant a bomb in the Piazza San Marco and doesn’t return. A day later, they hear that Carità has him in the Villa Triste. There is a meeting in the clearing at which the Professor lays out various plans of attack. But even as he speaks, it is clear that only one course is now possible. Everyone looks at Esmond and Bruno. Carità thinks of himself as a vengeful angel, invulnerable. It is up to them to prove him mortal.

The two young men arm themselves with MAB 38s, Berettas, grenades, and drive down into the city. Esmond fastens his Old Wykehamist tie around his head to keep his hair from his eyes. The rebels come out to watch them as they go. Tosca gives a small wave, Creighton salutes. It is evening, the 15th of June. They drive in silence and pull up a block away from the Villa Triste. They step out into the warm air, both of them breathing hard. At the entrance to the high, grey apartment block, they stop and embrace.

‘For Ada,’ Esmond whispers, gripping Bruno.

‘For all of them,’ Bruno says. ‘In bocca al lupo.’

‘Crepi il lupo.’

They move swift and silently into the courtyard. The lower levels of the building are dark, but there is a light up on the third floor, the sound of someone playing the piano. Two guards stand beside Carità’s ambulance, smoking. They close in until they are breathing the Blackshirts’ smoke and then two bright flashes from two guns, the explosions ricocheting up the steep walls of the building, and the guards slump forward. The piano stops. They are inside and climbing up a darkened stairwell.

Esmond moves easily, his legs taking the steps two, three at a time, his heart pumping fiercely in his chest, his revolver out in front. They reach the second landing and pause, panting. The sound of many feet coming down from above, guns being loaded, shouts that become whispers as the Blackshirts approach. The damp, nostalgic air of the old building. Bruno takes out a grenade, pulls the pin, waits for a moment and then, leaning out into the empty space in the stairwell, hurls it upwards. They press themselves against the wall and listen to the falling plaster, a man screaming, and then Carità’s voice.

‘It’s over now. I’ve got men outside. Alberti is on his way with stormtroopers. You’re trapped rats. If you throw down your guns, come up here with your hands raised, I’ll make sure it’s quick. You’ll get to keep your bollocks, unlike your friend Elio.’

Bruno looks across at Esmond and gives a little nod. Esmond shrugs and smiles, pushes the tie further up his forehead. They run up the stairs, firing all the time, but now there are doors opening on the landings, smoke grenades being dropped, the flash of guns from all sides. Two Blackshirts fling themselves out of the fumes. Bruno steps around them, but Esmond is caught in the face by a fist and stumbles. He pulls the trigger of his revolver, but it jams, or he’s out of bullets, and then it all seems to slow down as he reaches round to pull the MAB-38 from his shoulder. A volley of gunfire which he has time to stand back and watch as it comes towards him. He’s hit in the collarbone and the thigh and falls, groaning. He realises that he hasn’t even seen his enemy yet, and a sudden surge of energy lifts him to his feet. He makes it up another flight of steps before there, above him, grinning, is Carità, Bruno lying crumpled at his feet. Esmond sees the pudgy knees, the quiff of white hair, before a rifle butt thuds down onto his skull, bringing blackness.

31

Esmond wakes to the sound of music. Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. He’s in a long hall, balconied French windows open to the courtyard several floors below. A man in a monk’s habit, dark hair swept over a balding crown, is playing a grand piano. The bass notes throb in time with the pain in Esmond’s shoulders. He realises his arms have been tied behind his back. He is standing on a high stool beneath a wooden frame. Carità sits at a table beside the frame, eating slices of beef which he spears and presses between fleshy lips. There is a bottle of wine on the table and he pours himself a glass, stands, and kicks the stool from under Esmond’s feet. Esmond’s arms, tied at the wrists, swing up behind him as he drops. His muscles spasm, fight for a moment, then a splintering sound as his shoulder-balls leave their sockets. The dreadful parting of bone and with it a pain that brings darkness.

*

He is in a small, windowless room, blue-lit. He is naked, tied to a chair that is raised on a platform, almost a stage. Carità stands beside a car battery, holding two wires in gloved hands. The ends of these wires are taped to the end of Esmond’s cock, to his lips, to his earlobes. They are pressed into the weeping bullet wounds in his thigh and his collarbone. He is astonished at the noises that come from him, not language, not human. He is losing his words, forgetting books, people, names, giving himself entirely to the endless moment of pain. He feels as if he is drowning in black milk. He lives strung up between the brief respites, a kind of torture in themselves, when Carità goes out for a piss, or when he lights a cigarette and blows the smoke in Esmond’s face, mouthing again, ‘Tell us where your friends are hiding. Don’t be an idiot. This can stop, just tell us where they are.’ He feels the secret inside him, wrapped like a gift, and sees how natural is Carità’s belief that he can burn, hack, bleed it out of him.

An early morning, when Carità has gone out for breakfast, and he is there, alone on the blue-lit stage, he remembers how in The Magic Mountain Settembrini has to give up his attempt to record the literature of suffering because all literature is suffering. Esmond understands, there in the eye of his pain, how wrong Mann was. Heartache, loss, loneliness: these are literature; but suffering like this, of the body, it is beyond the reach of language. Every so often, he hears, very close, a mechanical wail that gradually opens out into the screaming of a human voice.

*

Esmond, bound to the chair, wakes to find Carità standing under the swaying blue bulb. He is staggering drunk, his face flushed and glistening, his lips moistly fleering. Resting against his schoolboy’s legs is Anna’s collage. He reaches down and begins to peel the photographs from the backing board to which, a lifetime ago, his sister had glued them.

‘Tell me where your friends are, Esmond.’ The picture of Anna on the carousel is peeled off. ‘Where are they hiding?’ Carità flicks open a silver cigarette lighter and the photograph curls and then burns. Carità drops it to the ground and Esmond remembers his mother, burning letters in a Shropshire field. Esmond and Rudyard, cricket and Cambridge, Anna and Aston Magna. Carità, with long, grubby grey nails, picks at the edges, tears them up from their moorings, holds them to the greedy tongue of flame. Esmond realises that he has no photograph of Ada, and it feels like a victory, for to see her burnt would be too much, would take away the one thing holding him together.

‘Tell me where your friends are hiding, Esmond. We’ll find them anyway. Do it for your father, for Goad. Imagine what they’d say if they knew you were protecting a gang of Communists. Tell us and we can walk out of here together.’ Now the picture of Esmond and his father at the Albert Hall rally. The old man’s hopeful smile, one strong arm and an empty sleeve. Esmond feels a rush of love for his father that meets a wave of certainty that he’ll never see him again. The picture flickers and burns.

Finally, the collage is scraps of charred paper, a glue-marked board. Carità leaves and Esmond, husked out, slumps in his chair and weeps.

*

Carità. Pliers.

‘Tell me where they are.’ The little finger of his left hand breaks. A brief moment between the snap and the detonation of pain.

‘Tell me where.’ Now the nail is pulled out of the broken finger, and it is as if his hand is on fire.

‘We know they’re in the mountains. Where?’ His ring finger. The sound is like biting on a stick of grissini.

‘Are they in the east? With the Serbians?’ Both of his thumbs, now. They take more work and Carità grunts as he breaks them.

‘In Monte Morello? Monte Oliveto? Where are they, you pig, where?’

Esmond remembers his father’s words — anger is stronger than fear. He lifts his head and spits, first on his own chin, then in Carità’s face.

*

He and Elio in the blue-lit room. Elio is owlish and astonished without his glasses, his nose flattened to his face.

‘You know, whatever happens to us—’

‘Yes?’

‘History—’ Elio’s voice is cracked and fading.

‘Yes?’

‘Brecht. You know? Burn me. Do not fear death—’

‘But rather the inadequate life.’

‘Good.’

Silence. Esmond looks down at Elio who is silent, sleeping, and smiles.

*

He is standing next to Bruno in the hall with the wooden frame which had dislocated his shoulders. It is hot and the French windows, with their birdcage-like Juliet balconies, are wide open. A fan turns in the corner where Father Idelfonso is still playing Schubert. Esmond cannot move his arms and presumes they are bound, but looking down he realises that it is just that they are broken, hanging at his sides. When Carità comes to punch him, to cut obscure symbols on the skin of his chest with a stiletto knife, he can do nothing. Milly enters the room wearing only stockings and suspenders, her breasts threatening to overbalance her. Bruno starts to laugh. Esmond looks across at his friend, who is covered in bruises, one of his eyes closed, his mouth empty of teeth, then back at the overweight, absurd figure of Carità’s mistress. He begins to laugh as well. Milly has crossed her arms over her chest, her mouth open in a scandalised O. Carità is irate, storming back and forth in front of them.

‘Why are you laughing? Don’t you realise that you’re going to die?’

They stop laughing when Elio’s body is dragged into the room. Father Idelfonso interrupts Schubert to play Chopin’s Funeral March. Carità goes over to the body and lifts the head back to show, beneath a face, toothless and eyeless, the opened neck darkly smiling. A whisper of breeze through the French windows. Esmond can hear Bruno’s breath coming fast and ragged. Carità lets Elio’s head drop back down and comes towards them.

‘It’s time to end this, don’t you think?’ he says, drawing out his long, ivory-handled knife. He presses the blade against Esmond’s Adam’s apple. Esmond winces and feels blood running warmly down his chest. Carità draws the blade away.

‘I’ll give you one last chance. For form’s sake.’ He smiles and walks to the end of the room, unlocking the door and opening it. ‘You may be a little unsteady on your feet, but no one will stop you. Just tell me where the camp is and you can go. Think of the taste of the air, the freedom.’

Esmond is holding his throat, blood rising between his fingers. Carità crosses to stand by the window, his hands, black with gore, twining over the balcony. ‘This is your last chance, boys.’ He looks down into the shadowy courtyard, his pudgy face caught in the evening’s dying light and nods with a sudden, serious goodwill. A glance between Esmond and Bruno — a swift decision. On legs that can hardly bear his weight, Esmond plunges forward. He stumbles, then seizes upon an image of Ada in the high room at L’Ombrellino, her arms crossed over her bare chest, the triptych behind her. From her, he draws a final burst of energy, as if love alone might staunch blood, knit bones. Now beside him, Bruno, staggering and certain. They grab Carità by his black shirt with their broken fingers, lift him up with their broken arms, and with the very last of their strength they pull him out into the void, shrieking.

32

As he falls, Esmond doesn’t think of Bruno, or Carità, falling with him. He doesn’t think of Elio, or what remains of him. He doesn’t think of Alessandro in the graveyard beside the Great Synagogue or Maria Luigia buried in the cemetery at San Miniato. He doesn’t think of Tatters running at his heels along the cypress-lined mule-tracks of Bellosguardo, or the doggy cairn by the swimming pool. He doesn’t think of Philip lying in a grave in the blushing heights above Barcelona. He doesn’t think about Anna. He doesn’t think about Rudyard, who is not more than a hundred miles away, marching towards Florence. He doesn’t think of Gerald or Fiamma. He doesn’t even think of Ada, who is, however, thinking of him. Under a sky of fast-moving sulphurous clouds, she sits and pictures him, and it makes her smile, the shape of his face in her mind.

Instead, as he falls, he remembers, aged seven or eight, when a dog had died at Aston Magna. It was a stable dog, not one of the hounds, and his father had refused to call the vet. She didn’t even have a name. She’d given birth to three healthy pups who were now with Cook in the kitchen, sucking milk from plump fingers. One of the pups was still inside her, though, and after dragging herself around the yard on her hunkers for an hour, straining every so often, groaning after the stable lads had tired of their attempts to fish the dead, sack-wrapped pup out of her, she’d crawled up to Esmond’s room to die.

He’d sat with her all night, the shuddering weight of her in his arms, her head on his shoulder, sour breath in his ear until finally she’d stopped breathing. He sat with her a while longer and then carried her out into the pale morning and buried her in his mother’s rose garden, beneath a Crown Princess Margareta. He was astonished by the lightness of her body, as if life were substantial. Back in the warmth of the house, he went into the kitchen where Cook was still sitting in a deep armchair, the silky knot of puppies in her lap, cooing a gentle song to them. He’d said nothing, but sat on the arm of the chair and watched, wonderstruck, as the new lives writhed and shivered.

He even has time, on his journey to the hard earth, to marvel at the workings of the mind, where this forgotten image from his youth has arrived, unbidden, and filled his heart with sorrow and joy. And now, as if the dog, whose mottled fur and wet nose he can see with extraordinary clarity, there beside him, has unblocked some obstruction, a flood of love comes. Anna speaking gentle words in his ear; Philip in the foliage at Cambridge, the sound of rain on leaves; Fiamma and Gerald in the island-studded river. He pictures Douglas and Orioli, Mosley and his father swinging him between them as a child, his mother burning books in a field, and he loves them all. Now the parade of figures wisps across the cyclorama of his mind, the Unfinished Symphony loud around them, the city’s angels peeling themselves from the bridges and loggias. St John and Mary Magdalene dance, wild-eyed, sweeping their tattered robes about them, Mary’s hair like a russet river. And Ada — and he swells at the thought of her, and the last thing he does, before the ground rushes up, is to send arrowing towards her everything that is left of his strength.

As he dies, he realises that the last few months of his life have been spent chasing after the wrong thing. His father’s idea of pluck. But he knows he has done enough, and that it doesn’t matter. Carità hits the ground first, a wet thud. Esmond feels himself turn inside himself and can now see the largeness of the palpitating earth, the depth of human love, the stars in the firmament, Ada singing gently into the sulphurous sky. As he draws his last breath, he realises that this is the thing: this is joy and courage and hope. Ada. A feeling of extraordinary peace washes over him, a feeling of bliss. Ada. Blackness.