The Flood

Monday, 3 November 1986

Pino Fratelli, maresciallo ordinario of the Florence Carabinieri, was a lean, diminutive man of forty-eight; he was still shivering visibly, though he was dressed for this cold day in an ankle-length winter wool coat with a scarlet scarf at his delicate neck. When his leather gloves were not gesticulating at the vivid and spellbinding paintings in front of him, they fumbled with each other like tubby wrestlers fighting for domination. His face was more that of a musician than a Carabinieri officer: thoughtful and dignified, the prepossessing features combining melancholy and intelligence in equal measure. Beneath a deep-lined forehead, the round brown eyes seemed bright and alert; those of a younger man, heavy-lidded yet restless. Then there was the hair, a full and wayward head of it, pure white, the colour of hoar frost, flowing down over his collar. In the thick, heavy overcoat he had the appearance of a solitary and lugubrious artist of meagre means, stranded on the pale, unbounded beach of life, seeking amusement or enlightenment and finding neither.

By his side sat a serious-looking woman called Julia Wellbeloved, twenty-eight, intense and academic. She had a long and pleasant northern face, skin so pale it seemed translucent under the bright arc lights. These searing lamps were attached to the scaffolding that, with heavy sackcloth sheeting, separated the alcove of the chapel from the larger, darker nave behind. Her fair hair was pulled back behind a sharply angular head and tied in a severe bun held in place by a single elastic band — practical, if scarcely elegant. Sharp and icy blue, her eyes followed every move ahead. She possessed a calm, ascetic face, neither beautiful nor unattractive, yet striking: that of a Botticelli handmaiden staring querulously out of the side of the canvas; pretty enough to be visible, yet insufficiently distinctive to hold the painting.

A bystander watching these two — as they talked in low and earnest tones next to one another on a narrow church pew — might have thought they looked like minor politician and pretty young mistress, lecturer and attentive student. The truth was more mundane. They were landlord and tenant, drawn together by mutual interests and strange circumstances, puzzling over the curious sight that had closed the famous basilica of Santa Maria del Carmine and would keep its doors firmly shut to all but the Carabinieri and officials of the city cultural department for some time to come.

It was three days now since Julia Wellbeloved had arrived in Florence, seven months since she’d left her well-paid job with a City of London law firm and chosen instead the semi-poverty of being a postgraduate student. Money was tight, but not short. The sale of the flat in Islington, part of an ill-fated marriage that had lasted a too-long year and a half, saw to that. Now she was through with the law; through with men, too — for a while, anyway. All she wanted was to exercise her intellect, and that through a specific task: a dissertation so arcane it had taken an Italian cultural association to find the means to fund it.

Or perhaps the Florentines had more reason than most to help. The academic paper she was writing, one that would, she vaguely hoped, lead to an academic career, was entitled ‘Why Murder Culture?’ It would seek to document, investigate and hope to explain the infrequent but troubling attacks by members of the public on works of art, paintings and statues principally, some famous, some obscure, and a few, perhaps the understandable ones, wrapped in notoriety.

Funding apart, it made sense to start her work in Florence, a place that was in some ways a living exhibition itself; both inside its galleries and outside in the teeming streets and lanes where, with Dante and Machiavelli, Michelangelo and da Vinci, and many others now mostly forgotten, the Renaissance began. Was there another city in the world that stood to suffer more from such bizarre and seemingly inexplicable acts?

No. And now it was the third of November, 1986. There was blood on the walls of the Brancacci Chapel, the most famous corner of Santa Maria del Carmine, the ‘Sistine Chapel of Tuscany’, or so the guidebooks said. Thanks to Fratelli, a charming, intense man, she could see the subject of her studies at first hand.

‘Signora,’ the man next to her said, indicating two officers with more arc lamps, struggling through the jungle of ladders, paint pots and toolboxes strewn across the stone chapel floor. ‘The officers need to pass.’

She pulled her slim legs underneath the pew and said, ‘They should be careful of strong light. Old pigment may be affected.’

‘I’m puzzled,’ Fratelli replied, peering into her eyes with friendly interest. ‘Which are you? An artist or a criminologist?’

She’d seen little of her landlord since her arrival. Inconclusive and unsatisfactory meetings at the Uffizi and with the cultural authorities had occupied her time until that afternoon, when Fratelli had knocked excitedly on her door and announced that there was an incident close by that might prove of interest to her work. The Uffizi had arranged accommodation: a separate studio in Fratelli’s small terraced house three streets from Santa Maria del Carmine. This side of the city was known as Oltrarno — the quarter ‘beyond the Arno’, the broad and powerful river that swept through the centre beneath a line of fine bridges and was now a swirling, forceful flume thanks to recent constant rain. The Ponte Vecchio was only a ten-minute walk away. It was easy to reach the tourist quarters — the Duomo, the Piazza della Repubblica — across the nearby Ponte Santa Trinita. And the Uffizi, with its constant crowds and close by the inchoate architectural mess that was the Piazza della Signoria.

But she hadn’t found herself in the Florence of picture postcards, of tourists posing in front of the statue of David, and endless queues for the stairs to Brunelleschi’s great dome. Fratelli lived in the city the Italians knew as Firenze: close and local, shabby in places, a muddle of dark and secretive alleys.

‘Neither really,’ she confessed. ‘I’m a student.’

Fratelli frowned at the inadequacy of her answer.

‘I’d love to paint but I can’t,’ she added. ‘So if I can’t create art I thought perhaps…’ She shrugged her slender shoulders. ‘I might at least try to save it.’

‘What an honourable aspiration,’ he said in a light and pleasant voice.

‘For a policeman you seem very familiar with art yourself. If you don’t mind my saying.’

He gestured at the chapel and said, ‘Not really. History perhaps and this’ — he glanced at the Brancacci Chapel — ‘is history. A little of mine, too. When church was a place I favoured, I came here. I grew up with these faces. They were a part of my childhood. Better to stare at dead and pretty people than listen to a tedious sermon that takes half an hour to express a sentiment which might be said in a single minute. Oh…’

A stern and stony-faced priest close to the officers in the chapel turned and glowered at them.

‘In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,’ Fratelli declared in a lilting singsong voice, then made the sign of the cross.

The priest shook his head and barked, ‘Pino! Behave or I will throw you out of here myself! Show some respect. How…’

He was a somewhat older man than Fratelli. Burly, with a wrinkled, flushed face — once handsome, she guessed. He looked utterly distraught, as if this act of vandalism was a personal affront, which perhaps was how it seemed.

‘I consider myself admonished, Father Bruno.’ He winked at Julia Wellbeloved. ‘We’re old friends. Don’t worry.’

‘You’re a very mischievous man,’ Julia said, not altogether seriously. She was grateful he’d knocked on her door that afternoon, inviting her round to the church to see the chapel, even if she hadn’t known the reason. In other circumstances she would have had to seek permission: the Brancacci was closed off from the transept and undergoing restoration. So much of Florence was in the same condition. Twenty years on from the great flood of 1966, the city still seemed to be half complete. Only those directly involved had access to its many partly closed galleries and precious monuments. Fratelli appeared glad of the opportunity too. He looked like a man in search of a puzzle, something to exercise his obvious intelligence.

‘That may be true,’ the Italian agreed. ‘However, I approach my work with deadly seriousness. As to Pino Fratelli the man…’ He frowned. ‘It’s difficult, when you’ve known yourself so long. Marco!’

One of the Carabinieri officers, a man in a flowing dark blue cloak, turned and fetched him an ill-tempered stare.

‘You should listen to what my young English friend says about the lamps,’ Fratelli ordered. ‘Wait for the people from the Uffizi to turn up. They’ll get here once they’ve finished their afternoon nap. Shine the wrong light on our lady on the wall and you may find they throw you in jail, not the beast who first assaulted her.’

The carabiniere uttered a single foul epithet and went back to work.

‘Violence and this place are no strangers,’ Fratelli continued, as if speaking to himself. ‘What am I saying? Violence and art are bedfellows and always have been. You know the story about Michelangelo?’

She shook her head.

Fratelli swept his gloved hand across the space in front of them.

‘He loved this place, one painting above all others. The Expulsion.’ His eyes flickered towards the left wall. ‘When he was young he was set the task of copying some of the portraits as an exercise. With other pupils, naturally. Michelangelo was an honest man with a wicked tongue. He told one of his peers, a sculptor, Torrigiano, exactly what he thought of his work. The opinion was not put kindly.’

He pointed towards the area before the small altar.

‘Somewhere there, Torrigiano attacked him, breaking Michelangelo’s nose like a biscuit, or so Benvenuto Cellini records. Look at any picture or statue of him and you see that wound. Disfigured for life, a nose that belongs on a boxer or a thug. Not a genius. Over nothing but a student drawing.’ He scanned the walls. ‘Not that Cellini was an angel. How many murders did he confess to in those scandalous memoirs? I don’t recall. The point…’

There were more people arriving by the main door. Loud, important voices. The word ‘Uffizi’ was spoken as if it were a magical incantation.

‘The point,’ Fratelli said forcefully, ‘is that what we see here is supposed to take us through the cycle of our earthly lives. From the moment of the first temptation’ — he indicated the fresco high on the right wall: Adam and Eve, beautiful and serene, a writhing serpent behind them bearing the face of a woman — ‘to our expulsion from Eden. Our inevitable fall from grace.’

He turned to the counterpart fresco on the left wall, an image of heartbreaking force. The same couple in despair, expelled from Paradise, Adam burying his face in his fingers, Eve shrieking in agony, hiding her shame with her hands, above them a vengeful scarlet angel driving both out of Paradise with a fearsome blade.

‘These two, Michelangelo did adore,’ he said. ‘They stayed with him throughout a long and dramatic life. You know the words?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken,’ Fratelli continued, resurrecting his sermon tones. ‘So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep out the way of the tree of life.’

The priest was staring at the pair of them.

‘Genesis is such an unforgiving book,’ Fratelli said, returning the man’s anger with a smile. ‘I am honoured to be beyond its reach.’

He turned and glanced at the group approaching through the nave.

‘Tell me what you see, Julia Wellbeloved,’ he demanded. ‘Swiftly, if you please.’

The priest, the man on the ladder by the first fresco, and the Carabinieri officers around them stopped to listen.

‘I see a damaged painting.’

He gestured for more with his gloved hands.

‘I see,’ she added hesitantly, ‘a ladder, I assume for the restoration, which was used to inflict the damage. A dead brown hen on the altar, its head removed. Blood on the fresco.’

‘Where precisely?’

‘On Eve, as she’s tempted.’

‘The purpose being?’ Fratelli continued.

‘I don’t know!’

‘Oh come on,’ he cried. ‘You have eyes!’

He pointed at the fresco on the left, the expelled couple. Michelangelo’s favourite was by Masaccio, an unfortunate artist of brilliance who died young, perhaps poisoned by a rival, his great promise unfulfilled. The gentler, placid image of The Temptation, the one that the intruder had spoiled with chicken’s blood, was by a more conventional, less adventurous artist.

Julia Wellbeloved felt as if she were an undergraduate again, being examined. She glanced at the visitor’s sheet on her knee. The name was there.

Then she looked at the faces on both pillars.

‘The purpose being to make Eve’s expression by Masolino, which is graceful, beatific, at one with God, resemble that of her painted by Masaccio,’ she said. ‘After the Fall.’

‘After the Fall,’ he repeated, staring at the altar. ‘In pain and despair. Expelled from Eden. Deprived of the gift of the tree of life. Immortality.’

Then, more loudly, so that the priest and the officers around him turned to stare, he added, ‘You hear?’

Fratelli got to his feet, a little unsteadily, and brushed his too-long white hair away from his artist’s face. ‘This is not the vandalism you believe,’ he muttered. ‘Nor some childish prank of witchcraft. There’s a purpose. A deliberate intent. Exactly as our observant English expert says.’

He looked at the disfigured Eve. The bird’s blood was smeared over her delicate mouth, turning it into an empty scarlet chasm, the gore stretching in diagonal lines across her eyes, just as Masaccio had painted on the countervailing fresco.

‘And then,’ Fratelli said, sounding a little puzzled, ‘there’s this.’

He pointed in turn at two garlands of cardboard vine leaves, surely from a supermarket or gift shop, plastered across the hips of both women — Masolino’s serene, eternal Eve and Masaccio’s wretched mortal exile. They were held in place by nothing more than black electrical tape.

‘That,’ Fratelli declared, ‘may be the single most important fact we have. Although…’ Something else had caught his eye.

‘Pino!’ roared a deep male voice through the gloom. ‘What in God’s name are you doing here?’

A tall, formidable figure in a dark blue uniform, cap beneath his arm, marched in front of them. He had a ruddy, thunderous face. When no response came he folded his arms, glared at Fratelli and bellowed, ‘I am waiting for an answer.’

‘This is my local church,’ Fratelli objected. ‘What am I supposed to do when I hear there’s trouble? Stay at home and watch TV?’

‘You go to church now, do you? Is this what sick leave entails?’

‘Walter…’

‘Capitano to you!’

‘Now I am truly confused,’ Fratelli cried, throwing his arms out wide. ‘Am I on duty or not?’

‘Not,’ the uniformed man declared. ‘I want—’

‘Expel me the way God expelled Adam and Eve if you wish. But for your own sake, hear out my friend.’ He gestured at Julia Wellbeloved. ‘She’s come all the way from England and is an expert in such matters. Attacks upon works of art. It is her speciality.’

‘Well I’m starting to study it…’ the Englishwoman added weakly. ‘I wouldn’t call myself an expert really…’

‘Signora,’ the captain said, nodding his head. ‘This is a crime scene. I require you and Fratelli to allow us to examine it without further intrusion. Please leave, the pair of you…’

He beckoned to the open door of the church and the failing day outside.

‘Walter,’ Fratelli began, taking the man’s blue serge arm.

‘Get out!’ the Carabinieri captain ordered.

Fratelli shook his head and stared at the plain grey stones of Santa Maria del Carmine.

‘So be it,’ he said with a sigh. Then he winked at the woman next to him and offered her a wry, apologetic smile.

The man was fifteen years younger than Pino Fratelli but no less striking in appearance. Six feet tall, with the physique of an athlete, wrapped inside the cowl of a black duffel coat that made him resemble an ascetic mountain monk, he stood in the square of Santa Croce staring at the marquee of the olive fair blowing in the squally rain. For one moment he removed the ample hood to see the activity ahead of him more clearly. A passing street cleaner paused from sweeping rubbish and stared. He saw a man who seemed conspicuous in his anonymity, his features a plain and featureless mask, without movement, without apparent life. A long nose curved like the beak of a cruel bird of prey, eyes grey and bulbous, fierce under dark eyebrows that ran together as one. In the white expanse of flesh that was his face, only the full grey, sensuous lips seemed to carry a hint of blood. There was not a single hair on his head, only a gleaming and flawless scalp soon covered up once more by black fabric, like a demonic tortoise retreating inside his shell.

He pulled back the cowl, turned on the cleaner and said in a low and vehement voice, ‘Do not stare at me. I bite.’

The worker with the broom turned his eyes to the cobbles, apologized and pushed his cart further down the square.

The piazza was empty in the sleeting rain. Few tourists. No customers for the sellers of overpriced new-season olive oil straight from the press.

Beneath the ankle-length coat he wore heavy moleskin trousers stained with flour, a cheap blue shirt, a warm black sweater from a country clothing shop. The cockerel’s blood stayed sticky on his fingers, hidden now inside old woollen gloves. How many times had he washed them? Countless. It stood there as a reminder of his inaction. His cowardice. His reluctance to play the part he knew, in his heart, was his own.

In the Carmine church, hurriedly splashing the bird’s blood on the wall, covering up the obscene nakedness of her vile body, he’d felt alive. Four minutes he’d allotted himself. A blink of an eye; less than that, in the endless stretch of time.

The relief, the pride he’d felt, lasted no longer. A slaughtered cockerel, a point — the point — made upon the figures on the wall.

And then he’d wandered the city, feeling the excitement and the pleasure leach away inside him. By the Arno, in the park near San Niccolò, he’d watched the brown waters of the river fighting, roaring as they raced across the weir. Rain and wind had brought down foliage from the countryside, trees and branches floating furiously on the ceaseless swell. Swans and ducks wandered in the shallows at the river’s edge, over the grass fields where only weeks earlier children had played in the last warm breath of autumn.

And what had he done?

Killed a cockerel, smeared blood on paint, fastened some decoration about their wicked loins with tape.

‘I’m as weak as a child,’ he murmured. ‘Without its innocence.’

He knew why he’d hesitated too.

Fear.

Vengeance never dug a single grave. It was always two, and one of them was his.

An icy shower swept from behind the towering basilica of Santa Croce and chased away the few rash visitors who still loitered on the cobbles.

He began to walk back towards the Ponte Vecchio. Halfway across the square, the leaden sky burst forth, despatching its contents over Florence in gusty blasts of sleet so forceful they made the bravest dash for shelter.

There was nothing else to do but dart into the marquee of the olive-oil producers. The place was half full with reluctant shoppers, stamping their feet to stay warm, eyeing one another as if to say, ‘No, I don’t want to be here either.’

Some walked around the stalls, made small talk, tried the oil and bread. Since it was the new season’s crop from individual farms, it fetched twice the price of the commercial product. Twice the quality, said the posters.

The man felt hungry so, without a word or a glance at the huddled figures seated behind the trestle tables, he went from one to the next, taking lumps of coarse white bread, dipping it in saucers of oil, moving on, not saying a single word.

Some were mediocre, some superb. He knew his food. That was why he never lacked for kitchen work whenever it was on offer. One job in particular, his for twenty long years, the first Thursday of each month. An unusual, private event. It was Monday now. By Thursday he’d be expected back in the kitchen, preparing the strange, exotic dishes once again. He didn’t dare avoid that appointment. Splashing the blood of a bird on the walls of the chapel did nothing to lessen his hatred of the duty, or his pain at its past memories. He needed money. Somewhere to live.

When he got to the end of the line, he found himself staring into the eyes of an exotic-looking woman with ringlets of dark hair, gold on her wrists and around her neck.

‘It’s not raining in here,’ she said. ‘You can take your hood down if you like.’

‘Still cold,’ he murmured.

The woman cocked her head to one side and said in a heavy accent he couldn’t place, ‘You look familiar.’

‘I don’t think so.’

She shrugged, held up a bottle of green fluid, so bright and fresh it looked more like alcoholic spirit than oil. There were photos on the table. The woman half naked in the countryside, harvesting olives. Just this side of thirty; short but sturdy, forceful. Beside her was a tall, strong young man with a black beard and a knowing face. A few words about a tiny estate the two of them ran alone. One that followed the latest trend, being ‘biologico’.

Organic. A fad copied from the Americans.

He looked at their names, examined her face again, recognized it, placed it. Looked at the man pictured with her, and remembered him too.

It was the end of the afternoon. The weather had turned bitterly cold. A gusty rain had begun to fall two days before, with such persistence and force that older Florentines, who could recall the great flood of twenty years before, watched the sluggish, muddy waters of the Arno rising and shivered, remembering.

Fratelli put a gloved finger to his lips and said, ‘Ice cream.’

‘Ice cream? What’s ice cream got to do with it?’

‘With what?’

She glanced back at the dark hulk of Santa Maria del Carmine.

‘With the paintings?’ Julia Wellbeloved was confused. She’d read Fratelli incorrectly, and felt a little foolish for doing so. ‘I thought you were the police officer here. In the church.’

‘Carabinieri officer please. I was just such in the church. I still am.’

‘I meant the one in charge.’

‘I never said such a thing,’ he replied, baffled. ‘Nor does the ice cream have anything to do with the paintings. How can it?’

‘I…’

He tapped his watch.

‘We’re wasting time. The Grassi dragon cleans the house today. We dare not return while she’s dancing round with the vacuum cleaner. I’d rather go back into the chapel and joust with the captain.’

It was Julia Wellbeloved’s turn to fold her arms and stare at Pino Fratelli.

‘Every Thursday, when Signora Grassi does the cleaning, I go for ice cream,’ he said, as if the explanation were obvious. ‘There’s a place in Santo Spirito. They make it themselves.’ He smiled. ‘Want some?’

‘It’s freezing.’

‘Not inside it isn’t.’

He beamed at her and looked very like an expectant child.

‘With regard to the painting… you study well,’ Fratelli added. ‘Even if you’re not an expert. I exaggerated. Still, you have the skills.’

‘Thank you.’

‘That was not a hen, of course. There were long claws on the back of the legs. Old claws.’

Fratelli tugged a hank of white hair to his mouth and chewed at it for a moment.

‘The bird’s severed head was beneath the painting. The comb would have been long and stiff. Except, of course, there was no comb. It had been cut off for some reason. Also…’ He looked embarrassed. ‘Trust me. It was a cockerel. A mature bird. The kind you find on a farm or a smallholding. Not a shop. Never a shop.’

‘Pino,’ she said delicately. ‘There wasn’t much blood and what there was will wash off. The fig leaves were cardboard stuck on with tape. It’s terrible the paintings should have been attacked. But in all honesty… the damage is minor. The chapel’s in the middle of restoration. They’ll fix it. No one will know.’

‘I know.’ He nodded at her. ‘You too, and I would have thought this might have been of interest. Given your paper.’

‘But I don’t have any answers. It may just be a vandal. Someone who broke in overnight.’

‘Of course you don’t have any answers. You haven’t started looking.’

She glanced back at the church.

‘They should have better security.’

‘What? You mean cameras? Invisible alarms? Devices that discern our intentions, good or bad, before we’re allowed to enter?’

‘Cameras and alarms. Yes, of course.’

Fratelli pushed out his bottom lip in a very Italian gesture of disgust, then briefly stuck a finger in his ear and jiggled it around.

‘God was God and still he couldn’t stop his own creations stealing from the tree. We focus on mechanisms far too much. Better to hunt for motivations, intentions, their sources. To analyse what information we possess, instead of counting off possibilities.’

‘Security…’

‘They have alarms. And one day they’ll have cameras, I’m sure. This is the habit of the modern world, I think. To invent a new toy for every problem, while meekly peering at the facts themselves through horrified fingers.’ His gloved hands went to his face and he briefly peeked from behind them, a child once again. ‘The bell went off. But the man was ready. Perhaps he knew no one was working in the Brancacci today. He was so quick — the bird was dead already, the fig leaves in hand — and gone by the time anyone arrived.’

He gazed at her and the intensity of his bright brown eyes was a little disconcerting.

‘One of our patrol people arrived twenty minutes after the alarm was triggered. That was all it took. Our culprit was swift and prepared. Unlike Capitano Walter Marrone of the Carabinieri and our friends from the Uffizi who only now have come to see. They probably heard on the way out to lunch. No point in interrupting one’s social calendar, eh? You’re right. It’s minor damage and they know it.’

‘Quite.’

‘But this was not an idle case of vandalism. This is obvious. It was about saying something.’

‘What?’

Fratelli shrugged and said, ‘Search me.’

‘Well, at least the paintings got off lightly,’ she noted.

He put a hand to his chest and breathed in the damp air with care. She watched him and thought: this man is ill and doesn’t want to show it.

‘You never saw them before today, did you?’ he asked.

‘Not that I recall. Perhaps in a book…’

‘Then you have an excuse. Ice cream,’ he said, tapping her arm and pointing in the direction of Santo Spirito. Fratelli sniffed the darkening day. ‘Quick, before they close.’

‘I can do you a deal,’ said the woman from the olive fattoria. ‘Try some. We made it ourselves.’

She poured a spoonful into a tiny paper cup, as if she were serving wine, and handed it over. The woman wasn’t scared of him. Maybe his appearance wasn’t so bad. He didn’t look like one of the Santa Spirito bums, the barboni who hung around the piazza begging for coins. Not yet.

He swigged it back in one. The taste was peppery and fresh. And behind it… nothing. All good Tuscan oil had that fire in it but he knew the kinds he liked, even the commercial ones. All were better than this. It was poor stuff, the work of a hopeless amateur unable to pay for an expert press to turn their second-rate fruit into something worthwhile.

Five thousand lire for a half-litre bottle. The most expensive he’d ever seen. He looked at her, the cheap clothes, the gold, the dead, strained eyes.

‘A husband and wife can’t run an estate on their own,’ he said. ‘Too much labour.’

The card read: Aristide and Chavah Greco. There was a hand-drawn map on the back to a place in the hills, an offer to buy direct from the farm at special prices. He thought of offering his help. But she looked penniless too. Had to be, from what he knew…

‘I do other things,’ she said very quietly.

‘Like what?’

‘First crop.’ She held up a bottle and looked a little awkward. She didn’t want to answer the question. ‘I’m hoping’ — she shrugged her sturdy shoulders at the cardboard cases of bottles of oil piled high behind her — ‘I won’t have to lug every one of these back to Fiesole when this party’s over.’

She smiled a weak smile. He guessed she hadn’t sold much at all. The tourists might fall for this trick, but not the Florentines. They never spent a cent without good reason.

‘You’re Greek,’ he said, thinking of the surname.

‘No. Greco’s my husband’s name. He’s from Calabria. I’m Chavah Efron and I come from Newark, New Jersey. Via Kathmandu, Morocco, and several places I’d best not mention.’ That smile again. ‘Efron.’

She made a tweeting sound. Trying so hard to sell something. The oil. Herself.

‘My mom came from Tel Aviv. In Hebrew Efron means lark.’

He picked up a leaflet from the stack on their table. It was a big pile. Not many people were interested in paying a fortune for fresh green olive oil that had never been near insecticide. The words and pictures told a kind of story, a myth about a couple trying to find their way back to the Garden. A couple of hippies. Took over a rundown estate five years before. Had to wait that long to get organic accreditation. They even had short profiles of themselves. Chavah left America to ‘travel’ when she was just sixteen. Asia, Africa, Europe. Ari, a big, unsmiling thug, clean-shaven; none too bright by the looks of the photo. Son of a ‘businessman’ from Reggio in Calabria, the very toe of Italy. A world away from here. Ari was a good head taller than her, though looking at the photos he guessed she wore the trousers.

‘Chavah Efron,’ he said when they went back for the last two cases.

‘That’s my name.’ She looked tired and a little puzzled. But grateful somebody was talking to her. No one else came near.

‘Why Florence?’

She scowled and said, ‘Life beats you up sometimes. I’m bouncing back.’

‘Efron means lark?’

‘Like I said.’

‘And Chavah?’

He didn’t know why he asked that.

‘It’s Jewish. In the Torah it means the mother of all life.’

‘What the hell’s the Torah?’

She laughed. ‘The Book of Moses. The Jewish Bible, if you like. Don’t ask me to explain. Not my thing.’

His head was hurting. He kept seeing the blood-smeared paintings on the wall. And something else too: another memory of her, that time almost a month before.

The first Thursday of the month. A little piece of hell come down to earth.

‘What kind of name’s that?’ he asked, almost to himself.

‘My name.’ She seemed bemused by this conversation. ‘The mother of all life, of everything… Sounds pretty good to me.’

‘I meant…’ he began. ‘As a name.’

She folded her arms across her chest. He tried not to stare.

‘I guess you’re a Catholic. Don’t get me wrong. Doesn’t bother me. I got a Jewish mom. Doesn’t make me one. Worked that out when I tried the kibbutz thing and a little…’ She looked guarded. ‘Other stuff. I got too much going on in the present to worry about tomorrow. God…’ The woman glanced at the marquee door, back to the severe black and white facade of Santa Croce. ‘You got that bastard coming out of your ears.’

She waited. When he didn’t speak she said, ‘Chavah. Eva. See the connection?’

He couldn’t move. Couldn’t think.

‘Eve! That’s where it comes from,’ she said, as if it were nothing. She held out her hands and did a little dance. The snaking, sinuous movements brought back more memories. ‘Eve!’

He stood there, shaking, seeing her in his head, another time, naked, laughing, twisting, crying, in a room full of lascivious men bawling for more.

When he calmed himself he thought of the husband. The stories he’d read in the papers.

First Thursday of every month.

However much they pressed, she wouldn’t go back. She couldn’t. It was unthinkable.

‘What other things?’ he asked.

‘Is this a job interview or something?’

‘Maybe. I’ve got friends who could use this stuff. Thursday. You’re here in the market? I know someone who runs a restaurant.’

She looked suspicious. ‘Give me his number. I’ll call.’

‘Thursday evening. Not the day…’

A moment of hesitation, a scared look on her face, then she said, ‘Thursday evening I’m busy.’

‘Eve…’

‘I said it meant Eve. My name’s Chavah.’

All things happened for a reason.

‘My friend with the restaurant. He’s got big money. Only night he closes is Thursday. You could cancel.’

She sighed. ‘What do you mean, I can cancel? I told you. Thursday’s taken.’

And so, he thought, are you. ‘How much for a case?’ he asked.

She put a grubby finger to his fleshy lips, thinking. ‘Sixty thousand, list. But I think you’d have a nice face if you let me see it. To you, forty.’

‘I’ll take one…’ he said, and didn’t move.

‘Two for sixty. You can sell it to your restaurant friend.’

‘Two it is,’ he answered, and didn’t move.

She waited, tilting her head from side to side, soft black locks shifting, golden earrings alive with light. ‘When you’re ready…’

‘For two I have to bring my car. And the money. I don’t have either with me now. When the market closes.’

‘Fine,’ she said, and handed him a card, sighing as if to say: you’re just a time-wasting lunatic. You won’t show and we both know it.

And Thursday I’ll be back in the same place, whatever happens, because I need the money. I’ve got to be there.

‘Six thirty. Signor…?’

‘I’ll help you, Chavah,’ he said. The thin, unsmiling mouth broke just a little. ‘With your van.’

She raised a glass of olive oil as if it were a toast. Chartreuse, the French liqueur. That, he realized, was what it looked like.

‘Six thirty,’ he repeated, then walked out into the cold and rain.

The direct way was not that of Pino Fratelli. Five minutes after setting off for Santo Spirito, he diverted to his terraced house with the admonition, ‘A book. We need a book. The Grassi dragon will be on guard. Stay behind, smile and keep silent.’

The cause of his apprehension turned out to be a large woman in a threadbare dress who was sweeping the stone stairs with great vigour as the two of them arrived. Home was an ancient terrace, the ground floor two storerooms, one full of cardboard boxes of junk, the other occupied by the skeletons of old bicycles and several motor scooters in pieces. At the top of the staircase the place divided into two separate apartments, his on the right, the rented studio that Julia Wellbeloved was using to the left. He never locked his door. Most of the time it was half open, with the strains of old jazz drifting through.

‘What, may I ask, is this?’ Signora Grassi demanded the moment they came in. ‘You know I wish to clean alone.’ Her beady eyes fell on Julia. ‘And who…?’

‘My latest guest,’ Fratelli announced. Then, as if it explained everything, ‘She’s English.’

‘Have you taken your tablets?’ she asked, eyes narrowing. ‘I’ve counted those in the bathroom and it would seem so. But I know your dark and sneaky nature by now, Fratelli. If you wash them down the sink…’

‘I took them!’ he said quickly, scuttling past her. ‘A book if you please. Then we’re gone.’

The woman held her broom like a weapon as Fratelli led Julia up the stairs and, for the first time, beyond his front door into the flat beyond. The place was rather more ordered than she expected, with a polished pine floor and a window on to the narrow street that led to Santa Maria del Carmine. A small table with dinner plates was tucked into an alcove. Shelves of books covered every wall. Between the history and art titles was an expensive-looking record player with a set of classical albums neatly lined beneath. Opposite was a single leather chair. This was a room for one person only.

Fratelli marched over to the rows of titles above the hi-fi system, chose the one he wanted, then led her back past the glowering figure on the staircase.

‘She didn’t seem much of a dragon,’ Julia observed once they were back in the street and out of earshot.

‘The woman was in a better mood than usual. Take my word: Grassi is a she-devil. Though I love her dearly. Come.’

They walked round the corner into the tree-lined piazza of Santo Spirito. In the dark November drizzle, the square of one of Florence’s oldest churches looked a little worse for wear. Stray cats scavenged the rubbish bins, sorry tramps begged for money as they sheltered in doorways. The city changed as it crossed the river. This was not pretty or fey, but real and grim. Mean, even, a word she could never have applied to the elegant streets around the Duomo and the Piazza della Signoria.

The ice-cream parlour turned out to be a tiny, narrow room, little more than a corridor, one side lined with gleaming silver tubs full of ice cream, and what looked like a disused domed pizza oven at the rear. A cheery man of some size perched on a stool behind the counter. He knew Fratelli. Perhaps everyone in Oltrarno did. They were the only customers, seated at a rickety table by the window, watching the rain and the tramps. He picked at a pistachio cone while Julia stirred the crema of a very fine cappuccino. The idea of eating ice cream on a dark November evening was a step too far.

‘Wellbeloved,’ Fratelli said with a sudden, bright smile. ‘What a beautiful name. Beneamato. So, are you?’

‘Am I what?’

‘Beloved? Family. Boyfriends. Girlfriends. Who knows? I’m across the hallway from you. It’s important we should be frank with one another during your stay. To avoid any embarrassing moments. I have no restrictions on what you may do in my house. Provided it is as close to legal as a generous morality such as mine allows. No’ — he made a gesture of rolling a cigarette and then putting it between his lips — ‘magic puff, puff. This isn’t London.’

Her face flushed. ‘That’s a lot of very personal questions, if you don’t mind my saying so. Nor do I indulge in’ — her slender fingers mimicked his gestures — ‘magic puff, puff.’

His tidy silver brows furrowed in bafflement. ‘This last I believe,’ Fratelli said. ‘So why the reticence on the rest?’

‘Because you don’t know me!’

He licked the cone, shaking his head. ‘This is why I ask. The English… Sometimes you’re very obtuse. How are we to become better acquainted if you tell me nothing about yourself?’

‘In England—’

‘You’re in Florence.’

‘In England,’ she repeated, ‘we get to know one another gradually.’

‘Bah!’ A gob of green ice cream flew from his cone as his hand gestured at the air. ‘Patience is for idle fools. Do you really have time for such games? The world’s a fragile place. Who knows what tomorrow may bring? I ask you these things, Julia Wellbeloved, so that we may put such small matters out of the way and discuss the mystery of our tarnished Eve.’

‘In England!’ she repeated again, more loudly.

‘Oh. I understand. You behave as if you’re trapped inside the pages of that writer who came here. Forster. What was the book called?’

She had to think quickly. This man seemed to demand it. ‘A Room With a View?’

‘Correct. Well, I am not running the Pensione Bertolini. Nor do you look much like a lost and insipid young thing who goes by the name of Lucy.’ His face darkened for a moment. ‘Though there was a murder in that book, if I recall correctly. So it cannot have been entirely without interest.’

‘It was about repression, I think,’ she suggested.

‘How very like your race. My point exactly. So, Julia Wellbeloved. Who are you?’

What was there to say? Not much, so she told him — some, anyway. Twenty-eight years old. A recently enrolled postgraduate student at University College, London. Daughter to a widowed general practitioner from Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. Not poor; certainly not rich. Blessed with a limited talent with a paintbrush but not a scintilla of originality, though this never affected her love of art, that of the Italian Renaissance in particular. The rest, her private view of herself, she withheld, though it occurred to her that a perceptive man like Fratelli could probably guess for himself.

Not unattractive, yet insufficiently striking to turn a head. Able to acquire a husband when the curiosity took her, but not for long. The determination and the conviction were lacking. The same might be said of her brief career as a commercial lawyer, straining at the lead, with no success, to find some criminal work to keep her mind alert. That was at an end now, too, which meant she came to Florence without ties of any kind, would be here for a month, no more, then return to London to finish her postgraduate studies in the same uncertain condition.

‘And after you have unravelled the motives of the murderers of art?’ Fratelli asked.

Julia finished her coffee and found herself lost for an answer. He waited, just long enough, then said, ‘Sometimes we’re defined as much by what we’re not as what we are. There’s nothing wrong in this, I think. The sin is to allow ourselves to be fixed by the opinions and the desires of others. Whether through fear or laziness. Better to be a shapeless creature flitting through the dark than a trapped bird in an ugly cage, crammed into a pre-formed mould that the world wishes filled for no other reason than because it’s there. Which is the sad fate of most, let’s face it.’

‘You’d make a terrible careers advisor.’

‘I’d make a terrible anything. Except a detective. I was good at that.’ A flash of fierceness crossed his gentle face. ‘I still am. Given the opportunity.’

‘Why don’t you have it?’

‘They deny it to me on the grounds I’m sick.’ He put a finger to his white hair and twirled it. ‘Here. Matto. Crazy. What’s that word you have? I know. I studied English once. Ah, yes.’ He leaned forward and whispered, as if it were a secret, ‘Bonkers! I am bonkers as a mole.’

‘Do you say that in Italian? Mad as a mole?’

‘Sì. A mole. Also I’m a liar and an impostor. Your own frankness demands candour on my part also.’ He licked the last blob of green gelato from his cone, stared at her and said, ‘I am not who I seem.’

‘You mean…?’

She couldn’t imagine what.

‘Pino Fratelli,’ the man in the thick coat said very forcefully, ‘is a fraud. Strictly speaking, he doesn’t exist.’

He twirled the finger at his ear again and added, ‘Bonkers. See?’

‘As a mole,’ she murmured.

‘Exactly. Also…’ His gentle, pleasant face turned serious and grim. ‘I have an intuition. I can feel when bad things are going to happen. They say this is a part of the illness. The madness.’ He drained his glass. ‘But I tell them… no, it was always like this. When I was a child…’ His voice fell to a whisper. ‘Later.’

‘You mean… premonitions?’ she asked in a quiet, worried voice.

‘No. I don’t know what I mean. If I did…’ There was the faintest of smiles now. ‘I wouldn’t be mad now, would I?’

The ice cream was gone. Her cappuccino finished.

‘The book?’ she asked, anxious to change the subject, and concerned that Fratelli seemed to have forgotten why they braved the Grassi dragon.

He thought for a moment, then a light came on in his eyes. He dragged from the depths of his overcoat a thin volume on the Brancacci Chapel. On the cover was a photograph of Masaccio’s Adam and Eve, banished from Paradise, their faces racked with grief and shame.

‘This is a proof copy of the guide they intend to sell to tourists once the Brancacci is reopened. You can see the frescoes before and after restoration. Here is how they were when the Arno swept into that place twenty years ago.’

Fratelli placed a page in front of her.

She gazed at the tragic couple, expelled from immortality and perpetual joy by the scarlet angel brandishing a sword above them. Away from the chapel she felt some distance from these figures, a sense of useful perspective. What she saw now was both intriguing and bewildering.

‘Eve’s different when she leaves Eden,’ she said. ‘She’s fatter. Her body is more corpulent, more… physical.’

‘Well observed. The serpent has done her work. She now exists for the purpose of sex. Of bearing children — not as a solitary beauty, an intellectual mate for her man in Paradise. While Adam, even in his humiliation, seems little changed physically. This is a male world. And?’

It seemed impossible to believe. But there was the proof, on the page.

‘The fig leaves were there before,’ Julia said, staring at the vine that wound round the torsos of the agonized couple. This was no cardboard ornament from a tourist shop. It was real, painted on both frescoes around the lower regions of all four figures. Yet it was wrong too, somehow. ‘I thought the vandal was just being prudish. But he wasn’t. He was recreating something… something old and lost. He wasn’t the first to object to their nakedness.’

Pino Fratelli looked at her. He seemed fascinated.

‘I have a career for you, Miss Wellbeloved. Once you have purged these academic ambitions from your system. You must be a detective. Not only are you observant, but you interpret what you see very judiciously. This is rare in one so young. Though…’ He breathed on his fingernails, then brushed the front of his coat. ‘I possessed it in spades from an early age.’

‘When…?’ she began.

‘When I was younger than you. Oh! You mean the frescoes? The fig leaves were plastered on our beautiful couple, before and after the Fall, in the seventeenth century, by one more prudish barbarian of the Medici. Twenty years ago there was the great flood of Florence. An event of’ — his eyes turned black and sorrowful — ‘biblical magnitude, the papers will always say. For once they do not lie. The Brancacci Chapel was damaged. Not as badly as some places. But still sufficient to warrant restoration.’

Fratelli stopped. The man behind the counter of the ice-cream parlour had come over to collect the coffee cup and the half-eaten cone.

‘We’re closing,’ he said, eyeing them as if half expecting trouble. ‘Some of us have homes to go to.’

‘We all do, apart from our bearded friends outside in the street,’ Fratelli replied.

He watched the man go, then leaned across the table.

‘Even now, two decades on, there’s much work to be done. In the case of the Brancacci, the city authorities undertook to remove the Medici’s ham-fisted ornamentation and return our pair of lovers to their original nakedness. Which is exceptionally frank, I might add. See. Our couple in Paradise here…’

He flipped to another page and then a close-up. Her eyes widened in amazement. In the Brancacci she’d focused on the blood and the damaged face of Eve in The Temptation. Now she could see the subjects in greater, more candid detail. She was used to nakedness in classical Italian art, familiar with the way it was toned down too. Pubic hair was mostly unknown, and only seen when male genitalia were displayed quite frankly. The female form though…

‘Am I seeing what I think?’ she asked.

Fratelli threw his arms wide open and said nothing.

It was unmistakable. Masolino’s original depicted Eve almost naturally. No hair, but there was the distinct line of a vagina depicted on her torso. It seemed, too, that the female head of the serpent was gazing down directly towards it.

‘That’s new,’ she said. Her fingers ran across the book and the image there. Julia Wellbeloved felt excited, enthused, thrilled by the prospect of the mystery that Pino Fratelli seemed to be placing in front of her.

‘It’s shocking, I agree,’ Fratelli replied. ‘To some sensitive souls, at least. To depict a woman the way she really is, in her nakedness…’

‘Whoever damaged the paintings must have come from the congregation,’ she said confidently.

He demurred.

‘Too far,’ Fratelli said. ‘Think again.’

‘I can’t see any other possibility.’

‘Why do you assume the congregation is familiar with our newly naked Eves?’

She cursed herself. The entire chapel was closed for work. Heavy sheets and scaffolding set it apart from the main transept of the church.

‘Stupid of me. The only people who got to see it would be those involved in the restoration.’

‘Only?’ he asked. ‘A multitude, I would think. Visitors, workmen, art officials, experts in the dubious field of restoration. The lesser souls who must feed and serve them during their working day.’

His eyes gleamed.

‘Curious students with a mission. Still, it’s a start, and a start is all we need…’

‘Pino!’ barked the man behind the counter, tapping the watch on his wrist.

‘After ice cream comes Negroni,’ Fratelli said. ‘There’s only one place for that. Drink and a little food.’

‘I’ve things to do,’ she said, not entirely truthfully. ‘Tomorrow morning I meet the mayor.’

This news interested him. Fratelli placed a thoughtful finger on his cheek and murmured, ‘Sandro Soderini? I’m impressed.’

‘You know him?’

‘Everyone does, in theory anyway. He’s a Soderini. The closest we have to a Medici these days. I’m a little man from Oltrarno. I don’t move in such circles. But I know of him. An intelligent, educated man. His namesake was an aristocrat, uncle to the vile Lorenzino Medici, who murdered an even more vile Medici despot, another Alessandro, in a house not far from here. Lorenzino was later assassinated in Venice by Cosimo the First, the man who sits on the horse in the Piazza della Signoria with pigeons pooping on his head. Soderini can confirm all this for you. He was a professor of history before his elevation to that office of the Pope’s he now occupies in the Palazzo Vecchio. He’ll give you five minutes of his time then pass you to some pretty minion. Ask him to get you into the Vasari Corridor.’

‘The what?’

He wrote down the name on a napkin and passed it over. ‘He’ll know. It’s in his gift. Not many receive that favour. Only great statesmen and…’ He winked. ‘Pretty young women who catch Soderini’s eye.’

‘Oh,’ she whispered. ‘Thank you.’

He toyed with another napkin on the table. ‘After ice cream comes two Negroni, no more. I’m a man of habit, Julia Wellbeloved, solitary but not lonely. I like to know my guests a little, and always make this offer, whoever they may be. Hospitality is a duty for a host. You are my guest. But truly… I do not wish to foist myself upon you.’

‘I didn’t think that for one minute.’

‘Of course you did,’ he said, getting up and throwing some money on the counter. ‘Tomorrow you must meet the mayor of Florence. Why waste your time on a sick old Carabinieri maresciallo? I apologize. Come. I’ll see you home.’

Outside the rain had diminished to fine drizzle. The cobbled pavements shone beneath the street lights. A couple of tramps started making begging noises the moment the two of them emerged.

‘Don’t walk here on your own after dark,’ Fratelli advised. ‘Around my street it is safe enough. The piazza is best avoided except in daylight…’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I said. Negroni. The drink of Florence. I catch a bus round the corner. There’s a place I frequent. I no longer drive.’

He waved the finger at his ear and mouthed the word ‘matto’.

‘I’ve never tried a Negroni.’

‘You’re twenty-eight,’ Fratelli replied. ‘You’ve all the time in the world.’

Julia looked at this peculiar man, with his heavy coat, his white hair, the face that was both young and old.

Then she glanced back at the clock on the wall of the ice-cream parlour: six thirty. As she watched, the owner turned the sign on the door so it read, ‘Chiuso’.

Time moved strangely in this city. Early and late seemed to swap places at will.

‘I thought patience was for idle fools,’ she said, as much to herself as him.

Fratelli shuffled in his heavy coat. ‘You shouldn’t take me too seriously. It’s not necessary. Or wise.’

‘I can spare an hour,’ she said.

He spent the time staring at the grey waters of the Arno. The river looked angry. As if it wanted to belch the renegade priest Savonarola’s ashes back into the city that had dumped them into its midst five centuries before.

Then a bell somewhere chimed six thirty. He walked back into the Piazza Santa Croce. The rain had turned steady and settled. The olive growers’ marquee was closed, its main doors secured by heavy ropes and locks.

The woman called Chavah Efron stood outside at the back, huddled in a khaki anorak, looking around, bedraggled, wondering, he guessed: did this strange man keep his promises?

Yes. Always, in the end.

He strode over, nodded. Her entire stock seemed to be piled next to the tent, covered with plastic sheeting to protect it from the rain. She looked younger than he remembered. Vulnerable when the hard mask dropped.

‘So I didn’t get stood up.’ She tried to peer into the cowl. ‘Are you sure we haven’t met before?’

‘I’m sure,’ he said, and looked at the pile of cardboard boxes.

‘You want two?’

A few night people were wandering into the bars and restaurants. She’d parked her VW on the corner of the Via de’ Benci, the busy road that led down to the river and the Ponte alle Grazie across to San Niccolò. Fiesole lay in the other direction, a short drive away in the hills overlooking Florence.

‘My restaurant friend…’

‘Don’t ask about Thursday again. I told you.’

In the sharp street light her hands looked like leather. Marked with cuts and rough skin.

‘The thing is,’ he went on, ‘I can’t carry more than two cases. Are you here tomorrow?’

‘Tuesday’s not Thursday,’ she said straight away, running a finger at her curly black hair, keeping it out of her face. ‘What do you think?’

Chavah Efron was both beautiful and fallen, like the woman on the wall. He looked at the black night around them and could feel her slipping away.

‘Do you have any money?’ she asked.

‘I’ll give you what I have now,’ he said. ‘You keep all the cases. I’ll come back in the morning and get four.’

He took out the crumpled wad of small denomination notes. She stuffed the money into a zipped pocket on her jacket, anxious for anything.

He picked up the two cases again. ‘Open the doors. I’ll pass them to you.’

She climbed into the back of the rusty Volkswagen and held out her dirty hands, beckoning. ‘Give,’ Chavah Efron said.

He pulled back the cowl, felt the chill night on his bald head. The way the van was parked blocked any view of them from the pavement on the other side of the Via de’ Benci. No one close by.

She was crouching in the back, staring at him. ‘I do know you. I’ve seen you before. I…’ Her grimy fingers went to her mouth. ‘Oh shit…’

By then he was on her, hands round her cold damp mouth. Pushing her back on to the pile of cardboard boxes, dragging the length of rag out of his pocket. He held her firmly, not tightly, never went near the soft curve of the belly. This was about rescue, not harm.

The gag went round her mouth, met her teeth, stifled her screams. Then he yanked off the bulky, filthy Afghan jacket, bound her hands in front of her, tightly, not cruelly. After that, he closed both doors behind him. The only light in the rear compartment came from a street lamp drifting through the front window. He could just make out the crumpled form lying on the filthy floor of the van, mumbling what sounded like obscenities. Her hands were to her face. Her head was a mess of black, curly hair, shaking with surprise. She wasn’t sobbing. More furious than angry.

‘I won’t harm you, Chavah Efron,’ he said as loudly as he dared. ‘I know who you are. I know what’s happened. I wish…’

Her legs were apart and kicking, rough farm boots against the tinny van floor.

A breathless silence. A sensation of control, of power, and the ecstasy of shame. He looked at the woman, her eyes blazing with fury, and he thought of the creatures on the wall in Santa Maria del Carmine. One perfect, one sullied. And a third, crippled with the body of a serpent, triumphant.

‘I can save you,’ he said.

She stared at him with bright, furious eyes. Not like the Eve on the wall, not much.

All things happened for a reason.

He picked up the sheepskin jacket. It stank of animals. Sifting through the tissues and coins, the little tinfoil tabs of dope, he found a set of keys. Then, ignoring the writhing of her limbs, he clambered over into the front seat, took out the business card, worked out the hand-drawn map in his head. Stabbed the puny engine in to life, and gingerly edged the VW out of the city until he found the winding Via Salviatino towards Fiesole, ignoring the angry, mumbled cries, the thrashing of the body in the back.

‘My name… my true name is Ariel Montefiore,’ Fratelli told her as the bus chugged along the choking streets that led to the Ponte Vecchio and beyond, following the southern bank of the Arno. They had the back bench to themselves, watching the city stagger past beyond the rainy windows.

‘That sounds lovely,’ she observed.

‘I was born in the Roman ghetto in 1938. And you?’

‘Hemel Hempstead General Hospital, 1958.’

‘Twenty years apart. Yet different worlds. Mine was about to fall bloodily apart. You opened your eyes to a place that was a little gentler, I feel.’

‘A little,’ she mused. ‘There always seems to be a war somewhere. And bombs.’

The bus lurched into the busy piazza at the end of the Ponte Vecchio. Pedestrians everywhere swarming into the street, carrying shopping bags, pulling heavy hats over their heads.

‘No,’ Fratelli insisted. ‘They were different. My parents ran a bakery in the ghetto. Not far from the Piazza Mattei. You know it?’

She shook her head.

He was smiling, remembering something.

‘A beautiful, modest part of that marvellous city. There’s a fountain with tortoises. I fool myself I recall the place. In my mind’s eye’ — he tapped his white-haired head — ‘I can see it. But this must be a false memory, from a later visit. It’s impossible.’

Finally the bus broke free of the crowds. She could see the river running through the centre of the city, a watery spine that reflected the street lights from both banks. Across the torrent stood the grand, severe arches of the Uffizi stretching back towards the Piazza della Signoria. Somewhere there, tomorrow morning in an office in the Palazzo Vecchio, she would meet the mayor, Alessandro Soderini, an aristocrat whose family was important here four centuries before. That was the grand face of Florence. On this more modest side of the Arno there was just a straggly line of traffic working through the rain.

She’d walked along the riverside road the day before on a long trudge to the Piazza Michelangelo, the hillside viewpoint which was so popular with visitors. The area at the foot, by the Arno, was old and undistinguished, yet likeable somehow, a pleasant place to stop for a solitary coffee. San Niccolò. It seemed to be their destination.

Fratelli couldn’t take his eyes off the vast building across the river and the heavy tower of the Palazzo Vecchio behind.

‘I’m still a Roman really. I like it there. Most everything exists for beauty, for pride, for love. The city manifests that warmth, that affection to everyone it meets. Florence,’ his eyes were fixed on the Uffizi, ‘is a bloody place. Everything kept hidden except for those judged fit to enjoy it. A monument to the power and majesty of its rulers.’ His right index finger went up in a gesture much like a schoolteacher’s. ‘Which is why you see so much rustication in our buildings. They’re meant to resemble fortresses; domestic castles which hide their secrets behind thick, impenetrable walls. I detest rustication. Compare the exquisite Quirinale with the brutal Pitti Palace behind us…’

‘Why couldn’t you remember the tortoises?’ she asked.

He turned to her with a quick and self-effacing smile. ‘Because when I was four years old a brave and kindly Catholic priest took to smuggling Jewish children out of Rome and spirited me here. A few years later he was shot by the Germans in the Ardeatine Massacre in retribution for a partisan attack. Three hundred and thirty-five men murdered by the Nazis on one bleak day. I knew none of this, of course; nor that I’d been secretly delivered to an equally brave and kindly spinster in Oltrarno. She owned the house where you’re staying. Until I was fifteen years old, I thought she was my mother and I the most conspicuous bastard in Florence. Then she told me the truth.’

Julia looked at him and struggled for words. The Second World War happened to other people, older people. Not someone like this man next to her, who seemed in some ways so young, full of life and a curious kind of juvenile enthusiasm.

‘Mussolini,’ Fratelli continued. ‘They speak of him now and say he wasn’t so bad to the Jews. It depends on your point of view. He didn’t kill them outright, so if a failure to commit mass murder is kindness, then perhaps he was a benevolent man. Many were deported from Rome, though. In the case of my parents, they were rounded up and sent to a place called Porto Re in Yugoslavia. Porto Re was a camp. Not Belsen. Not Auschwitz. But a prison for Jews and anyone else he hated or feared or both.’

‘I never realized.’

They were past the Uffizi. On both banks the houses grew more modest; ancient terraces with the odd patch of open grass or pavement.

‘Me neither,’ Fratelli replied. ‘When I was very young, a good Catholic with a brave unmarried mother here in Florence, Mussolini was warring with his peers. They ejected him, but then an infuriated Hitler placed the idiotic little tyrant back on his golden throne.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘With conditions. Those Jews he was hiding in Yugoslavia among them. Eight thousand in all, shipped north in trains like cattle.’

He turned and pointed back to the Ponte Vecchio.

‘See those windows in the middle at the top?’

Julia squinted back at the strange, medieval bridge, made up entirely of shops.

‘That,’ Fratelli went on, ‘is the Vasari Corridor, the place I mentioned. A private walkway between the Pitti Palace on this side of the Arno and the Palazzo Vecchio a kilometre away in the Piazza della Signoria.’

‘A secret passage?’

‘Not at all,’ he said with a shrug. ‘The Medici didn’t want to mix with the hoi polloi. They didn’t mind who knew it. But those windows in the centre…’ His face was, for a moment, quite bleak. ‘Mussolini invited Hitler round for tea when the war was going well. As I said, the corridor is a place for statesmen. So they met there, and in order for his German friend to enjoy a better view, the little marionette had those ugly modern windows inserted into the Medici’s private escape route from the filthy, stinking masses.’

He took one more look and then turned to face the front of the bus. ‘Ask Soderini to let you walk the length of it, one side of the Arno to the other, and see it for yourself. Florence always sucks up to dictators, anyone with power. It makes us feel privileged.’

There were vessels on the river. Fast, slender rowing boats with five or six men sculling frantically against the heavy swell.

‘My father’s name was Gideon,’ Fratelli said. ‘My mother’s Esther. As I said, they were communists. Internationalists, which is why I imagine they chose names that weren’t as Italian as one might expect. Like Ariel for their son.’

His sudden sadness was so real she felt she could touch it.

Have you taken your pills?

The Grassi dragon asked that. Walter, the austere, ruddy-faced Carabinieri captain, had sounded just as solicitous that afternoon in the Brancacci Chapel when, beneath his anger, he’d inquired, ‘Pino. What in God’s name are you doing here?’

‘Communist and Jewish. Twice damned. They died in Auschwitz. I went there once. I don’t know why.’

She placed her hand on his arm, squeezed the thick coat briefly. ‘I’m sorry, Pino.’

He stared at her, puzzled. ‘Why? I never knew them. I never found a surviving relative in Rome who might help me colour in a little of who I was. Help me dispel my ignorance. To all intents and purposes, I am Pino Fratelli, son of an unmarried woman from Oltrarno; a beautiful, caring mother, one I loved dearly all the days of her life. But…’

His brown eyes grew misty. This habit of a sudden distraction was one she was coming to recognize.

‘There’s a certain Hebrew gloom about me at times. I can’t avoid it. The thing’s passed on in the blood, I suppose. Along with much else. Generation to generation. Not that there’ll be any passing on from me.’

He looked up, abruptly alert.

‘We’re almost there. So that’s out of the way. I apologize I felt the need to burden you with this knowledge. Please, dismiss it now. I don’t know why I told you really. It’s just that…’ He pushed the bell for the next stop. ‘You seem a very attentive listener for some reason.’

They got off and stepped out into the rain again. His house was a mile away or more, she guessed, and in between lay the square of Santo Spirito, a place to be avoided after dark by a woman on her own. It was too late to change her mind. Besides, she liked this man. He intrigued her.

‘Negroni!’ Fratelli said again, and pointed across the road to the bright lights of a deserted bar. ‘The best there is in Florence!’ He grinned. ‘The best there is in the world.’

It was a rundown farmhouse reached by a dead-end farm track a good ten minutes by car outside Fiesole. No near neighbours. No lights. No sign of anyone inside. Nothing to get in the way.

He drove the VW slowly over the rutted lane until the gravel ran out at a small square of disintegrating concrete. A howling dog came and barked at him when he climbed out, then gave up when it reached the length of its chain. There was a chicken coop, the sound of gentle, alarmed clucking coming from inside. The sky had cleared to ragged strips of cloud. In the dim moonlight he could make out rows of low grey olive trees, ancient and crooked like an army of wizened crones stretching down the hillside. A rusty tractor stood outside a corrugated-iron barn that looked ready to collapse. Beside it was a rickety stack of wooden crates. The place smelled of rotting fruit, a nearby cesspit, and poverty.

Five years to tell the world not a drop of chemical had touched your precious bright-green oil on its way into the bottle. And still the stuff tasted like cheap crap. They were crazy. Except that wasn’t the whole story, and he knew it.

A hefty key from her ring worked with the front door. He turned on the lights and walked into a low living room, sparsely furnished and smelling of damp. A wood-burning stove close to death leaked weak smoke. He walked over and put some more fuel behind the doors, watching the flames rise. There were brightly coloured bean bags for chairs, an old hi-fi system, posters on the wall. Che Guevara and Trotsky, Jim Morrison and Hendrix. Bare bulbs dangling from wires. A kitchen with a gas ring and some pots and pans drying over the sink.

One plate, one knife, one fork, one mug. The rest were still in a bright orange cabinet by the window.

The woman was screaming and banging on the van walls outside. He didn’t mind. No one would hear.

An open staircase led to the first floor. He turned on more lights and walked up. One room full of boxes of bills, invoices and tax documents, books on olive growing and agriculture, old newspapers. A couple of albums of photos. Golden temples and smiling Buddhist monks in saffron. A postcard of a square in Marrakech labelled Jemaa el-Fna. Not many of the man, and all of them by the look of it in Italy.

He walked to the window and looked back outside. The van was there, not moving much. He’d kept the back door closed. She was quiet now, shuffling around, trying to get free, he guessed. Pointless. He’d bound her tight and the nearest lights were half a valley away, down towards Fiesole.

There was a small, black lacquered box beneath the ledge. It looked oriental, covered in exotic decorations. He opened the lid, stared at the plastic bags full of marijuana.

Beneath his feet the floorboards squeaked and moved as he walked across them. He bent down, got the large door key in the gap between the planks, lifted what looked like a loose one.

Small sacks of white powder, more grass, heavy lumps of resin. Dope was another of their sins. And weapons. Three handguns. A semi-automatic rifle of the kind he’d only seen in movies. A sawn-off shotgun and next to it boxes and boxes of shells. And, in plastic bags, a hard, dark substance he first thought to be a kind of drug. Then he picked it up, smelled it.

Chemicals, noxious and strong.

Explosive?

Things didn’t add up.

Like waiting five years for the poison to leach out of the land. They had to make money somehow. The husband came from Calabria. The crime organization there, the ’Ndrangheta, had been quietly making inroads into Tuscany. Or so he’d read in the papers. They’d need foot soldiers, a lowly advance guard. A couple posing as hippies pushing dope while they waited for the paperwork to come through for their oh-so-clean olives. The woman was American, from New Jersey. A place the Mafia liked. He’d read they had some Jewish gangs there; big men who thought of themselves as compari to the Sicilians.

Fallen. So many times, he guessed. Just like him. And the more you fell, the more you ached to go back home, to that green place without pain or death or sin. Whores and drug peddlers, thieves and usurers. Little people. Insects running in between the cobbled cracks of Florence, scuttling from one grubby corner to the next. They were always the first to be saved.

He walked into the other room and looked at the double bed. It was black cast iron, with an oversized mattress, crumpled sheets and a livid orange duvet. Even from this distance, he could hear Chavah Efron back to kicking hard and repeatedly at the walls of the van.

He walked outside, went to the van, threw open the doors. She lay in a crumpled heap among the boxes, glaring at him.

‘Why do you make this noise?’ he asked, shaking his head. ‘This is your home. You know no one’s here.’

He climbed in, crawled over on his knees, untied the gag. She didn’t try to kick him. That he found surprising. Her cheeks were wet with tears. He took out a handkerchief and wiped away the stains as best he could.

‘Answer me truthfully. When does your man come back?’

‘Any minute now, asshole. And when he does—’

‘Don’t lie!’

Chavah Efron fell quiet. But she didn’t weep. Just stared at him with those sharp and knowing eyes.

‘He’s coming,’ she whispered. ‘He’s a good man and he’ll kill you…’

‘A good man gives you dope? A good man makes you whore yourself for him? Sell his drugs and warm his bed?’

There was hatred in her face. No fear at all.

‘What do you want?’ she shrieked.

‘To be washed clean,’ he said, and it was close to a whisper. ‘Just the same as you.’

He picked her up in his arms, holding her so tightly she couldn’t struggle, though she kicked and fought as best she could, screaming all the while.

The dog barked and leapt against the chain. He heard the flapping of frightened wings in the chicken coops. From the grey, crippled shapes of the olive trees, he thought he heard the cry of a fox. He carried her up the stairs, placed her on the bed, then one by one undid her hands and tied each, outstretched, to the iron bars at the top. Not too tight. Room to move. No more.

After that he went back down the steps, walked outside, closed the van, locked the front door of the farmhouse behind him and turned off the ground-floor lights.

When he returned to the bedroom she didn’t try to kick out any more. He was a big man. She was small, unable to harm him. She lay there on the bed, tiny body on the orange duvet, legs apart. Looking at him in a way he didn’t like to see.

‘Do it then,’ she said.

‘Do what?’

‘What you want. You’re just like all the others, aren’t you? Just like…’

‘No, I’m not,’ he said, and sat on the bed.

‘Why would someone cut off the comb of a cockerel?’ Fratelli stirred his drink with a lurid red plastic straw. ‘Leave the head and neck but gut the thing? Take out its insides and leave the meat?’

Their destination turned out to be one street back from the river in the Via de’ Renai, a sloping cobbled lane with a handful of cafés and restaurants. The place Fratelli chose was a long narrow bar full of mirrors. The elegant woman behind the counter nodded in recognition as they entered and didn’t look at Julia for one moment. The room was full of cigarette smoke emanating from a handful of customers. She was pleased to see Fratelli try to wave it away with a scowl. He seemed to be one of the few Italian men who didn’t have a cigarette to his lips every minute of the day. There wasn’t an English voice around.

‘The comb?’ she asked, relieved that the story about his childhood now seemed to be behind them, as if it were a necessary hurdle he wanted her to cross before returning to more direct affairs.

Fratelli had ordered food and two glasses of the cocktail he’d mentioned. A Florentine speciality, invented in the city, he said. Red vermouth, gin and Campari. An odd combination, sweet and strong, yet somehow well suited to the chilly weather. He sat admiring his ruby-coloured tumbler full of drink and ice, lost in thought.

‘What about the comb, Pino?’

He stroked his white hair and said immediately, ‘Nowhere to be seen. Removed completely. Sharp knife. Scalpel even. Why?’

‘He wanted the blood?’ she suggested. ‘To smear it on the walls.’

A long, lugubrious stare. ‘He removed the head for that. Used the neck as if it was a paintbrush. He’d no need to remove the comb or to gut the bird. Why? And why was it a cockerel? An old one you wouldn’t normally eat?’

Julia pushed away the salami and bread Fratelli had ordered. She wasn’t feeling hungry.

‘Where would you get something like that?’ she asked.

‘In the countryside,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Where else? A farmer. Or a worker there. I’ll tell Walter. In the morning. When his mood has recovered. A decent man but he has a terrible temper.’ He smiled for a moment, looking a little guilty. ‘At least, he has with me.’

‘What will he do?’

‘Same as always,’ Fratelli grumbled. ‘Mutter grazie then go his own sweet way. A farm. He should crosscheck with known offenders. Do the kind of thing he’s good at. Menial work. Walter’s a clerk at heart. Not an artist.’

She had to laugh.

‘And you are?’

‘Of course! Why do you think they never promoted me beyond maresciallo ordinario? I have a creative temperament which offends them. I am Brunelleschi, dreaming of new ways to build my dome. They are the mealy-mouthed, penny-pinching paper-pushers of the Signoria, bidding me to dream up a miracle before ungraciously shoving a few lire across the table and saying, “Make it happen with that.”’

The straw made one more round of the glass, then Fratelli took a sip of the strong cocktail and briefly closed his eyes, delighted.

‘Credit where credit’s due. Genius requires patronage, since it’s rarely possessed of a pecuniary mind. I need them as much as they need me.’

His keen eyes fixed on her then, Fratelli leaned forward, lightly punched her knuckles with his and said, ‘I was joking. I’m an idiot. A holy idiot sometimes, but that still leaves me an idiot. Walter’s damned good at minutiae. Better than I could ever be. If only the man would do as I say!’

It seemed futile to point out that Walter Marrone appeared to be Fratelli’s boss.

‘Perhaps our vandal was simply deranged.’

Fratelli stared at her and said nothing.

‘Crazy. Unbalanced,’ she added.

‘Is that the intended conclusion of your report? Why do people attack works of art? Because they’re lunatics. If so, it will surely be the shortest academic paper in history.’

‘Of course I want to find reasons…’

‘Reasons are all we have. Without them everything is reduced to chaos. To folly and irrationality. You know the kind of people who commit crimes like that? Crimes that make no sense, have no source, no connection with any prudent purpose?’

‘Lunatics,’ she said firmly.

‘No. Ordinary, boring, middle-class men and women. The people you see on the bus and the train. Who think themselves the most normal and law-abiding citizens of all. Then go out one day, get drunk, get mad, get furious with the world around them, or simply see an opportunity for mischief when no one else is looking.’

He stared at the cocktail, swilled it once round the glass and ordered another.

‘Then commit a feat of idiocy — an act of violence, of murder, of gross cruelty; some cowardly, disgraceful sin of omission — simply because they can. Once it’s done they’re horrified by it, by themselves, and shrink back into their little shells, hoping no one will notice their brief lapse into wickedness. While secretly praying for it to happen again because in that moment…’ The straw came out of the glass and described a 360-degree circle over the Negroni. ‘In that very moment, they feel more alive than they’ve ever known before.’

He shook his head and she realized she was becoming mesmerized by this man. By his strange, bohemian appearance: the clothes; the wild, white hair. And the languid yet unremitting energy inside him, as furious and relentless as the churning waters of the Arno.

‘We should be grateful for that sense of guilt. It makes the job of the Carabinieri so much simpler.’ He scowled at the gleaming counter. ‘But a man who smears a priceless painting with the bloody neck of a cockerel…’

Fratelli’s sad eyes roamed around the bar. There were just five or six other people: a woman staring at a glass that appeared to have a carrot and a stick of celery in it, and a few men, all like Fratelli, looking a little lonely.

‘He has a reason. There’s a line from an occurrence, a thought, perhaps an offence against him in the past. That line runs directly to the present. Without guilt, without that averted look in the face of a man one suspects, the discovery of that line becomes the principal challenge any investigator must face. The one you must deal with in your paper. A criminal who possesses a sense of guilt is a case half solved. It’s the ones who burn with self-righteousness, who know that what they do is both justified and logical… they’re the challenge. Hitler, listening to that pusillanimous dwarf Mussolini in those garish windows of the Ponte Vecchio, never thought himself a criminal for one moment. He was a liberator, a hero to his people, a man of the most refined and sensitive morals. Morals that allowed him to murder mankind by the million.’

The glass of Negroni rose in a toast.

‘It’s bastards like that we’ve got to worry about.’

‘Because?’ she asked.

‘Isn’t it obvious? Had you sat and listened to Hitler and Mussolini at their little tête-à-tête forty-odd years ago, you would have heard the most genteel of conversations, by two men who saw themselves as dignified masters of their respective worlds. Monsters, and they didn’t even know it.’

He glanced at his watch. She caught the clock on the wall. It was eight.

‘I’m sorry, Pino. I need to eat.’

‘You can eat here! They’ll make anything you want. A panino? Some pasta?’

She didn’t rise to the offer.

‘Be my guest,’ he pleaded. ‘I won’t pester you after this, Julia Wellbeloved. You’ll go back to your studies tomorrow. I’ll nag Walter for as long as his patience lasts. With luck our culprit shall be found. And after that we’ll meet on the stairs and nod politely at one another. Not a word of what I say will be of the slightest practical use to you in your work.’ He grinned. ‘See? An artist. I told you. For amusement only.’

‘A sandwich,’ she agreed. ‘Cheese. No more meat.’

‘You don’t like finocchiona?’ he asked. ‘I’m shocked. This is a Florentine speciality. Meat from the Cinta Senese pig with fennel seeds. Beautiful. This’ — he picked up a slice of the pink and fatty sausage, dangled it in front of her — ‘is the best. From Greve. We call it sbriciolona. Crumbly. See?’

‘Too strong for me.’

He called out to the woman behind the bar for more plates.

‘In Florence we like exaggeration. Everything bigger, tastier, more powerful, more… gross. You must tell us when we overstep your mark. This’ — he tore off more of the raw sbriciolona — ‘I buy down the Sant’Ambrogio market for a pittance an etto and—’

His eyes closed, as if he felt a sharp pain. Fratelli rocked on his bar stool, looking for a moment as if he might tumble to the floor. Her hand shot out to steady him.

‘Are you all right?’

‘What? What?’

‘You nearly fell.’

‘Ridiculous! I was thinking. That’s all.’ He beamed at her. ‘I told you I was an idiot. And you…!’

He reached over quickly, took her hands and kissed her briefly on each cheek.

‘… Are a genius, my new English friend!’

She was blushing and could feel the heat in her face. Fratelli, a sensitive man caught by his own enthusiasm, saw this and let go of her fingers, refused to meet her eye.

‘I apologize,’ he said. ‘Italians have strange habits for you. I understand this but sometimes I forget. What we view as everyday warmth you see as an unwanted intrusion…’

‘It’s all right,’ she replied, amused by his embarrassment. ‘I’m not a stranger to Italy or Italians.’

‘No?’ he asked.

‘Why am I a genius?’

He nodded, as if thinking this through for himself. Food arrived. Cheese and bread, olives and other antipasti.

‘Because you asked the right question. Where would one buy an old cockerel? Like a fool I said… a farm. Which is possible, of course. But if I wanted one I wouldn’t dream of going there. I’d go to the market. The real one, not that tourist trap in the centro storico. To Sant’Ambrogio. If it moves, if it’s edible, they’ll sell it.’

Fratelli raised his glass again.

‘Salute,’ he said, and took a hefty swig.

‘And the comb?’

‘Haven’t a clue,’ he replied. ‘You?’

Julia Wellbeloved shook her head and found herself laughing. His meandering way of thinking and sudden, sharp, unpredictable intelligence intrigued her. She was also struck by the idiosyncratic nature of his conversation. Threads and questions entered it and never reached a resolution, unless his companion asked for one. Was this because Fratelli was using her as a sounding board? Or did his illness — whatever it was — make him forgetful at times?

‘You said something,’ she pointed out, ‘when we left the church. About how I had an excuse.’

‘For what?’ he asked, seemingly baffled.

‘For not seeing everything you did. About the paintings, I imagine.’

Fratelli thought for a long moment, chewed on some more of the fatty, half-raw meat and then prodded a stubby forefinger in the air.

He retrieved the book for which they’d braved the Grassi dragon, opened it, found the right page, thrust the photograph before her and said, ‘It was this.’

His finger indicated the serpent behind the beautiful Eve. The creature possessed a woman’s face, one that was very much like Eve’s own; lovely, with blonde hair, though tied back behind the creature’s neck.

‘Think,’ Fratelli urged. ‘Remember.’

She felt tired, not least from this man’s intense presence. Yet still he tempted her with his mysteries.

‘I do!’ she cried, recalling what she’d seen in the Brancacci Chapel, beyond the blood and the strange defiled frescoes on the wall.

This serpent was unadorned. Slyly triumphant, as it led the original Adam and Eve away from Paradise, into the world of flawed and mortal humanity.

‘Today it had something over its head…’ she whispered.

‘What?’ Fratelli demanded.

The memory and the reality were both so faint she wondered whether either could be real.

‘An oval. Lightly drawn in blood. Not blatant, like Eve’s face. More like a…’

She hesitated. She was no more religious than Pino Fratelli. Still the idea seemed sacrilegious in the extreme.

‘Like a halo perhaps.’

‘A halo, exactly. Executed with a glove I think,’ he said, indicating his own index finger, scrawling an ellipse in the water left on the bar by his icy glass. ‘He didn’t simply wish to punish Eve for her nakedness. But also to reward the serpent, the female viper, a hellish, womanly Satan, for dragging her down from the heights of Heaven in the first place. An intellectual point, I imagine; one he made while ensuring he left no fingerprints behind. So he’s a practical man too.’

Fratelli raised his glass and said, ‘Congratulations. You get better by the hour.’

‘What can it mean?’

‘A guess? It’s the best I can do.’

‘I think your guesses are probably good ones.’

‘My guess is that what we’ve seen is not the end but the beginning. Of what,’ he added quickly, before she asked, ‘I cannot know.’

He looked at his watch.

‘One hour, you said. I’ve taken enough of your time. Too much. I’m sorry. Sometimes I don’t know when to stop.’

‘Don’t worry. It was an interesting day.’

She meant it, too. More interesting, if she was honest with herself, than waiting hours for dry Uffizi officials to grant her interviews in which they did little except keep glancing at the clock.

‘Home,’ he said, with a self-deprecating smile. ‘Tomorrow you go to meet a true Florentine, one with centuries of history in his blood. And I shall nag Walter with my crackpot ideas.’

‘They don’t sound crackpot to me,’ she said.

‘They should,’ he insisted. He shook his white-haired head. ‘Really. And I hope — I’d pray if I could — they are.’

The blue sweater had ridden up as she struggled. He could see the pale, smooth skin of her stomach. By the tight, disordered bundle of flesh that was Chavah Efron’s navel lay a butterfly, a tattoo in red and blue, small and a little amateurish. As he stared at it she murmured something in a language he couldn’t understand. The words were strange, exotic, like an incantation. A prayer, perhaps.

I’m not what you’d call a good Jew either.

They all found God in the end. If they didn’t, God came to you, one way or another.

He climbed half over her, put his hand to her throat, peered into her face, wondering at how calm she looked. As if she expected this, had brought it on herself.

‘Get on with it then,’ she said. ‘I’ll lie here and not move a muscle. I won’t even notice. Promise.’

‘You don’t understand,’ he muttered, wary of her.

‘Ari will kill you…’

He closed his eyes and shook his head.

‘When he gets back…’

His hands gripped hers, his face came close.

‘Don’t lie to me. Your man’s dead,’ he said. He looked into Chavah Efron’s bright, alert eyes and said, ‘Shot in Rovezzano two weeks ago. I saw his photo in the paper. Same man.’ He tapped his bald head. ‘I remember things.’

Wished he didn’t sometimes.

There was no emotion on her face at all now. Except, perhaps, curiosity.

After a while he stared at the tattoo again and said, ‘This dream of yours…’

‘You don’t know anything about my dreams.’

He nodded towards the door. ‘When I came here I saw the dope and the guns. Your man was a Calabrian crook who got what he asked for. What you get for pushing poison to suckers who know no better.’

He thought about this ramshackle, falling-down farmhouse, set alone on a hill outside Fiesole.

‘Good place to hide. He was smart that way. The cops wouldn’t come looking here.’

‘Smart?’ She glared at him. ‘He’s dead. How smart is that?’

She drew back her head and spat in his face.

He wiped the saliva from his cheeks.

‘I need to go,’ she said.

‘Go where?’

‘Where do you think? Idiot!’

He walked into the room with the dope and the guns, picked the best he could find, a recent East European pistol, loaded it, came back, showed her the thing, untied her hands, waved her to the bathroom. He left the door half open and kept his eyes on her as she squatted. To make sure she didn’t try to get out of the window. That was why, or so he told himself.

‘Now what?’ she asked, reaching for the toilet roll. He led her back to the bed, bound her hands again, then her feet at the ankles. Legs tight together. It had to be that way.

Then watched her struggling on the duvet. He could run again now. Take the weapons and the dope and the van and go back to the city to turn them into cash. After what he’d seen she wouldn’t do a thing. Couldn’t have the police sniffing round this place, asking searching questions. Listening to her plead, ‘But it’s all for the farm, you see. Biologico. Macrobiotic or something. What’s a little dope and gun-running, a dead Calabrian hood for a husband, next to that?’

‘What the hell do you want?’ she asked.

‘Thursday.’

‘What about Thursday?’

‘You’d do it all over again?’

‘I need the money. One more time and I’m gone. What’s it to you?’

‘That’s what the kids said when your husband sold them dope.’

‘One more time! Why throw this at me? You’re one of their slaves too.’

He thought of the dead cockerel, stolen from the kitchen, and its blood on the wall. It seemed like a weak and childish prank.

She laughed at his silence. Then said, ‘See? We’re no different.’

‘Not true.’ He picked up the duvet, dragged it out from underneath her, watched the way she stiffened at his closeness. He placed the coverlet over her small body. It wasn’t so cold in the room for him. A woman… He didn’t know.

‘Go to sleep,’ he ordered.

Ignoring her squawking he went downstairs, drank some bottled water and stretched out on the sofa, big hands behind his big, bald head, counting the options, the possibilities. After a while she shut up and so did the dog on the chain by the barn.

He waited an hour. The farm was silent throughout. Not a sound from upstairs. Only, through the grimy glass of the cracked windows, the distant call of owls and the blood-chilling shrieks of a nearby vixen.

At ten o’clock he went to the kitchen then rifled through the cupboards: not bad. Some decent food there and a few vegetables. He opened a pack of dried fava beans from Puglia, held them to his nose. The bitter stink made his stomach ache with hunger so he seized a lump of pecorino and munched on that. Half the beans went into a saucepan filled with cold water. It was important to think about the time ahead. To prepare.

After that he found the two biggest, sharpest knives they had, picked up a butcher’s cleaver and a meat saw too, then walked upstairs and looked at her.

Chavah Efron was, to his relief, asleep. Or pretending to be.

All for the best, he thought.

Ten o’clock in the house in Oltrarno. Rain spattering the windows, nothing beyond them but a single street light swaying in the blustery wind. She’d asked Fratelli for some of his favourite books on Florence and walked away with her arms full. No guides to art and architecture, no lists of local restaurants. Instead a collection of obscure titles in Italian and English. The strange and disturbing autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Francesco Guiccardini’s History of Florence, another work from the sixteenth century, thankfully in translation. A life of the monk Savonarola by Roberto Ridolfi — a modern author, not the Florentine nobleman who plotted against Elizabeth I, hoped to marry Mary Queen of Scots, and later returned to his native city to become a senator. And a copy of A Room with a View if, Fratelli said, she fancied ‘something light’.

She carried them back to her own small, tidy and rather overheated room, then lay on her single bed to browse through each. The tortuous birth of the Renaissance was part of her degree. But that was an academic exercise, conducted dispassionately through books and paintings, not people, not life. Now she was beginning to feel a part of the canvas of that astonishing drama, drowning in the feverish burst of violent creativity, beauty and inspiration that began just beyond her window.

And such players among its vivid cast. Cellini was a Florentine through and through, soldier, artist, sculptor, goldsmith and, as Fratelli had said earlier, a self-confessed murderer and necromancer who, in his autobiography, boasted of his affairs and killings, of conjuring up a legion of devils one night in the Colosseum. Machiavelli lived through the turmoil of the expulsion of the Medici and then the Savonarola years, rising to become a senior civil servant after the monk’s execution in 1498. He wrote his most famous work The Prince while exiled from the city, suspected of conspiracy for which he was tortured in the Bargello, the grim city prison near the Piazza della Signoria. Guiccardini was the consummate politician, working for the Vatican or the Medici, depending on the prevailing political climate. He saw the rise of Savonarola as a youth, knew Machiavelli personally, and, according to rumour, was fatally poisoned by the godfather to one of Cellini’s children.

Flitting through the dog-eared, annotated, well-thumbed pages of the books Fratelli owned, she found herself transfixed by the contrast between the city’s sumptuous visual beauty and the cruelty and degradation of those who created it. Assassination — by poison, by public sword fight, with a stealthy dagger in the dark — was commonplace. Sexual hypocrisy was rife. Both Cellini and Machiavelli stood accused of sodomy, a capital offence at the time, as did Savonarola when pilloried by his enemies. In the struggle between the working classes, the merchants, the noble families and the Medici (the latter a kind of royal family), loyalties shifted like desert sands, marooning the unfortunate, turning yesterday’s heroes into the next day’s decapitated traitors. And that was just within the city walls. Beyond, in the ragged patchwork of individual states that preceded modern Italy, lurked the scheming Vatican and rival states like Venice and Milan, bristling with arms and ambition, covetous of one of the most prosperous and financially astute cities in Europe.

For those with ambition, the journey from glory to destruction could be shocking in its savage brevity. When 1497 began, Savonarola was ruler of Florence in all but name, with sufficient power and influence over the city to persuade thousands of its citizens to burn their paintings, finest clothes, mirrors and ‘immoral’ books in the bonfire of the vanities. By the following Christmas the friar’s enemies were openly taunting him and his supporters in the street, driving a donkey into the Duomo during a church service and slaughtering it before the altar. In May 1498 Savonarola and his two closest priests were hanged then cremated on a pyre in front of cheering crowds before the Palazzo Vecchio, on the very spot of the bonfire of the vanities. As the priest approached the pyre, one of his executioners whispered into his ear, ‘The man who wanted to burn me is now himself put to the flames.’

The friar’s great enemy, the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, applauded from Rome before returning to the simony, debauchery and corruption which Savonarola had so loudly condemned. In the crowd, watching the fiery spectacle, stood Machiavelli, already marshalling the political theories that would one day, in sorry exile, turn into The Prince.

Drawn into these distant stories, Julia found herself seeing these men — and all were men — walking the streets she was coming to know. Politics in the rival gangs fighting for control of the fortress-like civic headquarters, the Palazzo Vecchio. Misery in the Bargello where Savonarola and thousands of others were suspended from the ceiling, hands behind their back, then jerked and dropped using the cruel torture known as the strappado. The violence of the monk’s fall saw the siege and sacking of his great Dominican monastery of San Marco and the persecution and occasional slaughter of his acolytes. None of this took place in that remote, imaginary terrain that carried the easy label of ‘the past’. The city those lost souls all knew and fought for, the Duomo, the Baptistery and the austere black and white facade of Santa Croce; they still stood today, little changed on the outside, a testament to their stories.

The Florence of the Medici, of Benvenuto Cellini, Machiavelli and the unfortunate friar was a hothouse of fervent, apocalyptic religion and its darker twin, a desperate, sweaty sensuality. The venal and the venerated walked those same cobbled streets together, changing sides on a whim or through some sudden threat, struggling on occasion to tell the difference between the two. Sacred mixed with profane. The highest, most devotional art emerged from the hands of the most bloodthirsty and profane of individuals.

She closed the last book that had gripped her, Cellini’s autobiography, written with a repugnant sense of self-justification and not an iota of shame. In the section she’d opened by accident Cellini told how, while separated from his wife, he’d fallen in love with a man, a rival goldsmith, only to return home and find the object of his lust meeting his estranged spouse. He’d stabbed both to death as they stood on the threshold, and dismissed their murders as ‘a justifiable accident during a heated argument’.

The casual brutishness from a man lauded as one of Florence’s greatest sons, honoured with a bronze bust in the centre of the Ponte Vecchio, appalled her.

It was now close to midnight. Julia wondered whether she could sleep, and if she did what dreams might come, of dark shapes flitting through the alleys of Florence, of the beautiful Eve smeared with blood, and her counterpart on the opposite wall of the Brancacci Chapel howling while she and Adam fled Paradise in ignominy and despair. Of the strange serpent with a beautiful female face, newly crowned with a bloody halo by an intruder spurred on by uncertain motives.

With those frescoes, many believed, the artistic Renaissance — informed by perspective, by an accurate depiction of the human body, of light and the physical world — began. In fifteenth-century Florence, humanity started to take its first, faltering steps out of the dark age of superstition and feudalism towards a rationalist conscience and a world of equality and justice.

Or so, she whispered to herself, we like to think.

Faint strains of atonal modern jazz were drifting through from Fratelli’s rooms opposite. She went to the door and saw his was open, with a light on.

Gingerly she tiptoed across. He was fast asleep in the solitary chair, a book in his lap. He looked younger like that, as if all the many troublesome ghosts that seemed to haunt him had been briefly exorcized.

Sleeping in a chair couldn’t be comfortable, or good for a man who was not, she had come to realize, well at all.

She walked over and gently shook him awake. It took a few moments for him to come round. Then he stared at her, frowned and said, ‘Yes?’

‘It’s late, Pino,’ she said. ‘You should sleep in a bed. Not a chair.’

He looked at the clock on the wall.

‘True,’ Fratelli said sleepily. ‘This worries me. I don’t need two dragons in my life.’

‘Bed,’ she insisted. ‘There’s nothing you can do now.’

He peered at her, still half asleep.

‘Well, is there?’ she added quickly. ‘Nothing happened today really. An idiot smeared blood on some beautiful paintings. I bet we never hear anything else about it again.’

‘A lot happened today,’ he said. ‘It’s just that we don’t know it yet.’

Then he started to stand, sending the book he was reading clattering to the polished wooden floor.

Julia picked it up and handed it to him. He gave a little salute in return then disappeared without another word through the door by the front window.

She was sorry they couldn’t talk any longer, but he looked exhausted. It was for the best. All the same, books were her second love, after paintings. Pino Fratelli owned so many, in English and Italian. He must have adored them as much as she did. Unusual books, too, indicative of a wandering, restless and highly unusual mind.

The one he’d been reading, a hefty title he’d taken off to bed, was to do with Hebrew myth and a name she vaguely recalled, though not in any great detail.

The title on the cover was Lilith.