The Flood

Friday, 4 November 1966

‘Two in the morning. What time of day is this to leave me?’

‘The time the roster says. A woman who’s fool enough to wed a slave shouldn’t complain about the hours he works.’

He kissed his wife, smiled at her, touched her soft auburn hair. They’d been married two years. Still no sign of children — not that they hadn’t tried. Kids would come. His instincts, that small voice inside he’d had since childhood, told him so, and it was rarely wrong.

‘Slaves have no choice. Fratelli does,’ she told him. ‘Here. I made you something to eat.’

He’d slept till one. Then Chiara roused him, put on her dressing gown and got up to make some coffee and a panino for him to take to the station. Tomorrow was her day off from the department store. She could sleep late. He felt guilty that she should work at all, but they needed her wages. His salary as a junior Carabinieri officer was so slight it almost seemed insulting. Even though he’d inherited his mother’s house near the Carmine church, money was still in short supply. It wouldn’t always be like this. Soon he’d climb on to the promotion ladder like Walter Marrone before him. Walter was smart when it came to internal politics, acting captain when no one else was around, which would doubtless be the case that very night. Fratelli wasn’t in the same league and he knew it. But Walter could teach him the tricks. They could talk about it later: Walter the temporary boss, an officer on the up; Fratelli his lineman.

November on the dead man’s watch. Perhaps someone would break the tedium and smash the window of a tourist’s car. That was the most he could hope for. There’d be plenty of time to chat.

Fratelli looked at the food she’d prepared for him. Cheese and bread. He knew Walter would have brought along some lampredotto they could reheat in the station kitchen. Maybe even drink a beer or a glass of wine to get through the long and empty hours.

Chiara came close and kissed him.

‘What was that for?’ he asked.

‘A wife can kiss her husband, can’t she?’

She had dark, alluring eyes; a beautiful face that belonged on the walls of the Uffizi. Fratelli had no idea what he’d done to deserve this woman, and refused to give the matter a moment’s consideration, believing that to do so might break whatever magic spell held her to him for no good reason whatsoever. Charming, funny, of a resolutely intelligent and independent inclination, Chiara Brunelli could steal the heart of any man she wanted. She chose his. It was the only dubious and irrational decision he’d ever known her make.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But go to bed.’

She wasn’t normally this affectionate late at night, when he was about to disappear for ten hours or more.

‘Let me call Walter and tell him you’re sick.’

‘No!’

‘You have your feelings. Your intuitions. Why can’t I have mine?’

This mood of hers was so strange.

‘Because you’re the rational one. With your feet on the ground. I’m the moody creature. Leave that role to me.’

She shook her head and clung to the lapels of his coat. The rain beat heavily on the windows of their little terraced house.

‘This weather!’ Chiara whispered. ‘Will it ever stop?’

‘Yes,’ he said patiently.

‘I listened to the radio while you were snoring. It said the army and the police were going into the hills. There was flooding. People leaving their homes.’

Fratelli didn’t follow the news much. He liked to look at whatever was in front of him at that moment, to peer hard and try to unravel its mysteries. Distant happenings in the hills didn’t bother him. They were someone else’s problem.

‘Will you go?’ she asked.

‘If they wanted me, someone would have phoned by now. It’s winter. It rains.’

She pulled at his tie, making the knot fit more snugly against his freshly pressed shirt. Fratelli wasn’t a fastidious man. His clothes were cheap and well-worn, but Chiara liked him to look smart; worked hard with an iron and the antiquated washing machine in the ground-floor storeroom to keep him that way.

‘Let me call Walter…’

‘No,’ he said and placed a single finger briefly on her nose.

‘Don’t play your condescending tricks with me, Fratelli,’ she said in a comical voice. ‘I don’t appreciate them.’

He took her shoulders, felt her warmth and strength, and said, ‘I have to work. And when that’s done I’ll come home. As I always do. I’ll bring…’

‘No flowers! We can’t afford them.’

‘Some food then. A pizza and some cheap red wine. Let’s live the life.’ His hand went to her soft, brown hair. ‘One day, I promise…’

With a petulant sulk, Chiara pulled away and got his coat, put it on him. He could see in his mind’s eye how she’d do the same so fondly with the child to come — a boy, he guessed, and then a girl.

‘I can’t sleep when you go out like this,’ she grumbled. ‘Maybe a little. Then in the middle of the night I’ll do some washing. You need the shirts. This rain had better stop or it’ll never dry.’

Fratelli didn’t know what to say, so he kissed her once more and then, without another word, went out into the dreadful night.

The car was in the garage, broken down again. So he had to pull his collar around his face and walk through the constant rain across the bridge of Santa Trinita to the Carabinieri station in the Borgo Ognissanti. He stopped mid-span and looked in both directions. He’d never seen the river so high. It was approaching the foot of the bridge where he stood and wasn’t far from the top of the arches on the Ponte Vecchio along the way. There were lights in the shops there. Night watchmen, he thought. And cars on both sides, with figures carrying boxes to them.

Clearing the shops of their jewellery. A wise precaution. The rains had been incessant for days. There were stories, old tales, of how Florence had flooded in the past, the river seeping into the city, filling cellars and the ground floors of homes, causing expensive havoc.

Fratelli suddenly felt he understood Chiara’s qualms. This was strange. It felt outside the normal round of dismal winter weather Florence knew and expected any time from November onwards.

He strode across the bridge and turned left towards the station.

Ognissanti… all the saints. He didn’t expect to bump into any that night. The street lights shone on empty streets where water ran across the black cobbles in snaking, writhing torrents. There was a siren from somewhere near Santa Maria Novella. No activity outside the station, though. If something did turn bad, they’d have to bring in more men.

He ought to get into the habit of listening to the radio. Walter Marrone surely did. People on the up ladder cultivated habits like that. For Fratelli it was always the same before night duty. He needed time to be alone with his wife, to talk to her, to feel free of the burden of work for a brief while before picking up his Carabinieri badge once more.

Chiara must have been glued to the set while he slept. What was it she’d told him? There were floods in the hills. People being moved out of their homes. It was foolish to believe his own colleagues weren’t part of that effort too. He belonged to a proud and decent organisation. It wouldn’t let others struggle alone against the vagaries of the elements.

Yet the phone never rang. Someone had to stay in the city. Twiddling their thumbs while the countryside was awash with rain and mud, displaced families and terrified animals. He wished it wasn’t him. Fratelli liked thought, action, helping people. But that was someone else’s decision.

Feet cold and wet, listening to the constant heavy patter of the rain, he walked briskly along the narrow street, past the hospital and the church, found the stazione and saw, through the glass door, a single uniformed officer on duty.

He wondered later why he’d turned back to see the way he came. Whether it was chance or instinct. That old inner eye he’d told himself he possessed, even when he was a child.

There was no knowing. Only the reality. Two weeks later, trying to come to terms with the greatest natural disaster he would ever experience, Fratelli learned it was around this time that the first victim came to die. Out in the hills, a fifty-two-year-old farmer in a tiny village had gone out to see the state of the land around his home. Along the way he met a group of neighbours and told them the area was a shambles, everything was going under. Then he went to try to reach his animals. Forty-eight hours later his corpse was found in a tunnel choked with mud; unrecognizable, twisted in pain and terror like an Egyptian mummy torn from its tomb.

One dead man in a far-off village. No one in Florence would have believed at that moment that more than thirty others still breathed in the city who would join him in the morgue in the painful days to come.

As Pino Fratelli watched the long and narrow street of Borgo Ognissanti, he heard something — a roaring animal voice beneath his feet. The ground trembled. Then, back along the way he’d come, a manhole by the church leapt out of the cobblestones as if thrown into the air by some explosion. Beneath it was a violent plume of filthy water, forcing the iron disc high into the air.

‘Chiara…’ he murmured, feeling the blood in his veins run cold.

A second manhole burst from the cobbles a little way along, and then a third…

Something came back to him at that moment. A cold autumn day long ago. A small boy standing on a beautiful bridge, stone angels staring down at him as he listened to the rush of another muddy torrent, one that took away something that was supposed to be returned to him and never was.

‘Chiara…’ he said again, and began to run towards Santa Trinita. But the water was ahead of him now, writhing and rushing like a malevolent living creature. It was the best Fratelli could do to turn and dash back into the station, flee for the stairs behind the terrified uniformed officer running from his desk, and take shelter — breathless, mind racing — in the first-floor office where a pale-faced man in uniform stood shocked and shaking, barking into a telephone that seemed dead to the watery world beyond.

‘Let me go!’ Fratelli shouted, struggling in the arms of three uniformed officers. ‘For God’s sake let me go!’

It had reached almost four in the morning. Marrone had only then managed to reach Ognissanti, and that by boat. Shocked, out of touch with headquarters, he was captain of a stazione marooned in the bleak night. Fratelli had spent the past two hours fighting to break free of the place and go home. No one would allow it.

And now, with a superior finally in place, he was denied again.

‘Where the hell have you been anyway?’ Fratelli demanded.

Marrone looked dreadful. He wouldn’t talk about what he’d seen out in the city. And still they were trapped on the first floor. The lights were out. The phones and radios were dead. From nearby came sounds that took Fratelli back to his childhood and the war. The dreadful bloody close-quarters fighting during that sweltering August in 1944 when the Allies battled their way into Florence, street by street, house by house. The hurt and angry screams of the wounded outside the terrace where he was a six-year-old living under a name he believed his own, though troubled at times by memories of a different boy, a different city, and a father and a mother who could only be the products of a childish dream.

Twenty-two years on the streets of the city rang once again to the rising shrieks of fear in the dread darkness that sat above the stinking river and all its dirt. They were Carabinieri and could do nothing, since beyond the door the torrent raged, growing higher and more powerful with every passing minute.

The massive, grizzled officer called Cassini relaxed a little of his bear grip.

‘Pino,’ he grunted. ‘Don’t be a fool. None of us can go out there. Even if we had some means… a boat. A light beyond these…’

Cassini nodded at the torches they’d set up by the first floor windows. There was no moon visible, thanks to the heavy clouds that brought this constant rain upon them. So all they could see was what lay in the beams of their standard-issue lanterns, the kind they saved for traffic accidents and — that rarest of Florentine events — a murder.

‘Walter got here, didn’t he?’

‘And nearly died,’ Marrone said. ‘The boat’s gone anyway. I couldn’t tether it. I could barely manage to get to the stairs.’

‘Let me try. I’ll find a way…’

‘You won’t,’ Marrone barked at him. ‘That’s an order.’

Pino Fratelli could scarcely believe his ears.

He managed to shake himself free of their arms and stood there, stiff and outraged.

‘An order, Walter? Your precious world’s broken, man. Look outside the window. If I could do a thing to help a soul out there I would. But I can’t.’ He glanced at the others. ‘I want to be with my own. Don’t you?’

Cassini, a senior, gruff carabiniere, old enough to remember the war as an adult, glowered at him and said, ‘It’s times like these we need to stick together. To keep the ranks. To do what we’re told.’

‘Like we did for the Germans?’ Fratelli bellowed. ‘You bastards sicken me. You think this precious city of yours is the finest there’s ever been and never see the dirt and death between the glorious cracks. Thank God I’m not…’

One of you, Fratelli thought. Except, as far as they were concerned, he was. The truth about him was something he’d yet to share. That would take time. Years of trust that needed forging — rebuilding, in some cases.

‘This is my life,’ he bellowed at them. ‘Mine! I’ll find some way across the bridge. And stay there till you summon me.’

‘Dammit, Pino,’ Marrone replied, then dragged him to the window. The two of them stared at the gushing torrent outside. It was broader, higher, stronger than ever. ‘How will you get there, then? Fly?’

‘I don’t…’

Pino Fratelli stared at the raging flood and wondered if this was how the world died, in a single driving wave of mud and water that kept on rising till it drowned them all. No ark, no Noah, no tidy evacuation for those who would be saved. Just a cold and dismal end to everything. The bleakness, the fearful sense of doom that had lurked within him since childhood was beginning to pulse now, like a painful vein in his forehead.

‘Chiara…’ he whispered.

‘It can’t go on much longer,’ Cassini said. ‘Give it half an hour. I’ve seen floods. They go as quickly as they come. Half an hour. Then we’ll go out and do what we can.’

He seized Fratelli by his coat. ‘If that means racing home to see your wife, then so be it.’

Marrone began to say something, getting between them.

‘No!’ the old carabiniere roared, pushing him back. ‘I never liked this stuck-up little prick. He thinks he’s better than us. Smarter than us. If he feels he’s got the right to race over to his pretty little wife, then let him go. She’ll be upstairs watching all this shit like the rest of us. Waiting…’

‘I don’t feel better,’ Fratelli murmured, shaking himself free of Cassini’s grip. ‘Or smarter.’

But you’re wrong about the flood, he thought. He knew that somehow. Felt it in the cold damp in his feet. Smelled it in the stinking, fetid reek from beyond the window.

It would be several weeks before the Tuscan authorities managed to assemble the first accurate chronology of the disaster that engulfed Florence that night. There were more important things to do. Count the dead. Reconnect power lines and telephone cables, water supplies and transport networks. Bring life back to a city that had briefly stepped outside the twentieth century and found itself thrust into a shapeless, primeval past. After a while, when the scale of the catastrophe was obvious, came the task of directing the influx of ‘mud angels’, volunteers who flew from around the globe to help rescue the priceless objects now buried beneath an ocean of stinking mire.

Yet, whatever Pino Fratelli’s inner eye told him at times, this was a natural event, a chain of unfortunate incidents; each insignificant in itself, but turned into a terrible and devastating progression of violent physical disorder by their actions upon each other, like dominoes tipping over in an accidental chain.

The rains began three days before, heavy and constant. By the third of November the two dams that served the region, in Valdarno, south-east of the city, were already overflowing, dispatching two thousand square metres of water down the valley towards the city. Cellars in the lowest-lying area, Santa Croce, began to flood before midnight, cutting off power and mains water. Heating oil installations were swamped, garages found their underground storage tanks inundated. Sewerage systems were breached by the force of the current. Soon the Arno was a rank and noxious mix of rainwater, mud, raw sewage and black oil, rising all the time.

At two a.m., the slender Mugnone stream, a tributary that rose near Fiesole, burst its banks and flooded the Cascine Park on the right, northern bank of the Arno, beyond the densely populated centre. Though none in the heart of Florence knew it at the time, this single act sealed the city’s fate, allowing the flood waters to encircle the entire population of the centro storico; almost seventy thousand people crammed into an area little more than eleven square kilometres in size.

As the downpour continued, engineers in the Valdarno began to fear for the integrity of the two dams there and took the fateful decision to release yet more water into the torrent headed northwards. Minutes later the Arno breached the entire length of the Lungarno Cellini by San Niccolò. An hour on, the flood burst over the right bank around the Lungarno Acciaoli on the opposite bank. Within ninety minutes the main arteries into the city were turbulent rivers, not roads any more. Cars and trucks floated on the thrashing current. Furniture, washing, prams and rubbish bins raced along the streets at speeds approaching forty kilometres an hour.

When day broke on a city that was largely unrecognizable even to those who’d spent their lives within its boundaries, Santa Croce found itself under three metres of water. In the famous basilica, filthy water lapped against the stone tombs of Michelangelo, Galileo and Machiavelli, despoiled Giotto’s precious frescoes, the priceless crucifix of Cimabue, centuries of much-loved painting and statuary. Almost on the stroke of eight, waves the height of two men battered down the doors of the Museum of the History of Science in the Piazza dei Giudici by the river next to the Uffizi. Before the hour was out, the square around the Duomo itself was inundated, with such force that the water broke through the gates of the Baptistery and covered Ghiberti’s beloved panels, the ‘Gates of Paradise’, in rank, corrosive mud and muck.

Still the flood grew, until at one point the Piazza della Signoria was six metres deep in swampy filth that lapped at the shins of the statue of David and ran over the ramp of the Loggia dei Lanzi. Cellini’s terrifying bronze Perseus stood there, plinth submerged, like an avenging angel rising from a squalid quagmire.

All this time the city waited, knowing the monster that had invaded their sleepy winter idyll must at some stage begin to shrink back and start to die. Yet at four that afternoon, as night began to fall on a dreadful day that none who experienced it would forget, the Arno and its associated sewage was at its highest, turning vast swathes of the city into a brown and putrid lagoon.

By then the men of the Borgo Ognissanti Carabinieri station had been working slowly, patiently, in the streets, through all the daylight hours without pause, without direction much of the time. Mid-morning the handful of boats that were stored along the riverfront were coming into use. Marrone commandeered as many as his men could handle. Communication was still impossible. No phone, no electricity, no radio. All they could do was respond to the community around them, people who were scared for the most part and, in the case of the sick and elderly, in need of physical aid as well.

The arguments between Fratelli and his colleagues ceased the moment the scale of the catastrophe became fully visible. With the gradual acquisition of some means of local transport, the men in the station began to row down streets where they usually drove their squad cars, calling out to the houses, telling people to stay where they were. For the whole of that day Fratelli found himself partnered with a genial cadet, Ludovico Ducca, a determined young man full of energy and good cheer, even in the most exasperating of circumstances. The two of them formed an immediate bond as they patrolled the waterlogged city centre looking for those in trouble. In the Ognissanti Hospital Fratelli and the muscular Ducca helped elderly and infirm patients to safety on the higher floors. Two babies were born there that day, and the young carabiniere looked a little shocked when one mother, a woman he’d carried up the staircase in his arms, asked for his first name and promised to pass it on to her infant son.

When there was time they comforted the distraught, the terrified, the angry. Told a few that this was not the end of the world. Not a divine judgement on a wicked city, the kind of horror once foretold by Savonarola from the pulpit of the Duomo. It was just rain, a lot of it, and soon the waters would disperse, leaving Florence to recover its glories from the mud and filth, and one day welcome back the warmth of the sun.

Around three in the afternoon, Fratelli and Ludovico Ducca found an old man dead in his kitchen, floating on the brown tide, in a terraced house two streets from the station. A heart attack, they thought. Not that there was any chance to check. Fratelli gazed at this corpse, knowing there was precious little he could do except make it secure and decent. Ducca was silent, shaken, his pleasant face bloodless for the first time that day. Later Fratelli was to discover he’d only joined up two months before and this was the first dead body he’d seen. There was no time for such considerations then, though it did occur to Fratelli that at this moment Florence was, as he’d said in the heated argument with Marrone, quite without rule, without law, without any sense of formal order. The people they met astonished him in their humanity, their courage, their self-sacrifice, as did the relentless and seemingly inexhaustible Ducca. The healthy gave way to sick, the thirsty to the thirstier. Already teams were being assembled to make their way to the worst-affected areas when a route became clear and, if there were no more people to be helped, to put their shoulders to turning the city back towards some kind of secure normality.

All this came from a form of natural integrity, a sense of morality, of right and wrong that had been given them over the years, as part of the community to which they belonged. Cop or carabiniere, man or woman in the street, they needed no commands. This was how they were.

But Pino Fratelli was a detective at heart, and with a job like his came a certain kind of knowledge. He understood implicitly there were others in the world too, those who possessed no such compunctions, no sense of attachment to those around them. If someone wished to loot or rob, to murder or rape, there would be precious little even the most courageous and dedicated police officer or carabiniere could do to stop them. This bleak, distressed city possessed no fences, no barriers to keep out the wolves that lived on the periphery of society, their rapacity curtailed by a sensible fear of capture and justice that was now briefly absent. This, more than anything, more than the damage, the destruction and the occasional death, appalled him. Frightened him, if he were honest, because that nagging interior voice he’d heard since he saw the manhole fly towards the cloudy sky still whispered in his ear.

This was a day for monsters to roam, and something inside said they would. They were there already.

It wasn’t till six o’clock that the waters finally began to recede. The rain had stopped by then. Perhaps the corner had been turned, and there would be some respite from the weather. Fratelli was back at the Carabinieri station in the Borgo Ognissanti, with Marrone and a team of other officers who’d come in to help. All thought of shifts and rosters and duty were gone. They would work till they could work no more, then sleep briefly and start again.

Someone had found a camping stove and heated up what was left of Marrone’s cold lampredotto. There was still no electricity, no phones. Fratelli ate the grisly, strong meat in a bread bun and pulled on a beer that gruff old Cassini had given him.

Then Marrone came over and put a hand on his shoulder.

‘They say the Trinita bridge is open again. I’ve got a boat heading into the centre soon. Why not go and see if you can reach Oltrarno? Ducca’s trying to get home too.’

Fratelli, exhausted, so focused on what had occupied him since daybreak, blinked and felt ashamed. He’d not thought about Chiara at all. The flood had stolen every conscious thought and supplanted her in his head.

He nodded, lost for words.

‘When you get to the other side,’ Marrone added, ‘be careful. I can’t spare you a boat to take you over there. I wouldn’t trust any to cross the river that way. You have to walk across the bridge then find your own way. Is that agreed?’

‘Yes.’ He smiled at his friend. ‘Thanks, Walter. Sorry if I’ve been an idiot.’

‘You’ve been a marvel.’ He looked around them. ‘They all have. I couldn’t be more proud of any of you. Now go and see Chiara. Make sure she’s safe. This isn’t a special case, you know. I’m offering it to everyone now things are quietening down.’

Five minutes later, Fratelli got into a broad boat from one of the rowing clubs, behind a soldier and state police officer he didn’t know, with Ducca by his side.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked the young cadet.

‘I thought I’d take a look around Santa Croce. My nan lives there. She’s OK, I’m sure. Just want to see.’

Fratelli felt briefly lost for words. He leaned forward and held the young officer in his arms for a moment. Ducca looked embarrassed as they were rowed through the night along a road that was now a river.

The two men in front took the vessel down the street with their steady strokes. Soon the low, elegant shape of the Ponte Santa Trinita began to rise from a sea of black water. Pino Fratelli pinched himself. Was he really in a boat gently sculling down the Borgo Ognissanti? Could this all be just a ridiculous nightmare? Like a strange childhood in Rome, one that seemed to have happened to someone else. But hadn’t.

The pavement on the closest side was just above the flood. The two men steadied the canoe as they got there. Then Fratelli stepped on to solid ground and felt the water resume its icy grip around his ankles once again.

‘Take care, Pino,’ Ludovico Ducca called as the boat went on its way.

The sky had cleared, a bright moon cast its cold and heartless light on the tortured city. Fratelli barely recognized the neighbourhood where he’d grown up. The high narrow streets, the grand buildings of the Via Maggio as he left the bridge, the grubby square of Santo Spirito, the meaner lanes beyond… he could never have imagined them like this. The waters had, as Cassini predicted, receded with great speed. When they retreated they left behind such devastation… stretches of caking mud, wrecked cars and scooters, loose branches and small trees, broken pottery, dislodged paving, TV sets, chairs and sofas. It was as if the comforting minutiae of modern life had been stripped from the homes of Florence and scattered about by a peevish, gigantic child desperate to play in the swampy muck and sludge the flood had left behind.

Along the Lungarno, men and women trudged warily around, struggling in galoshes, greeting strangers in the street, asking questions that brought no easy answers.

Have you seen…?

No, Fratelli answered quickly. I’m a stupid, lowly carabiniere and I’ve been struggling to make sense of life on the other side of the Arno, in the Borgo Ognissanti, which is not my home and never will be, merely the place that work took me.

Do you have…?

No. I’ve nothing. Just a modest home, a beautiful wife, lots of debts and a head that hurts from thinking thoughts too dark to speak out loud.

Can you help me…?

He was a carabiniere. The badge stayed with him, off duty or on. Between the bridge of Santa Trinita and the back street he called home, Fratelli found himself asked that constantly — by strangers, by people he half knew, by friends, and by a few who loathed him. It was almost twenty hours since he’d slept. The day had been so strange and tiring he felt he might close his eyes and never wake afterwards. But he was a servant of these people, one they needed more than ever. So he helped everyone who asked, whether it was carrying or fetching, talking, comforting, or holding one tearful woman whose grandchild had gone missing for hours on end until the brat came back smirking as if this were all a stupid joke.

The reports of deaths were coming in by the time he left the station. Fratelli had no idea how many might have perished in this strange catastrophe. If someone said it was hundreds, thousands even, he wouldn’t have called them foolish, though a sense of inner reason told him the toll was usually lower than one expected. This wasn’t Hiroshima or Belsen. Only nature, which lacked the trained and tailored efficiency for death that human beings had refined so skilfully over the centuries.

Around ten he still found himself in the square of Santo Spirito, clearing debris and oozing sludge from the front door of an elderly man who was headed for hospital, short of breath, grey-faced, clutching his chest. When that was done, someone Fratelli recognized, a café owner in the square, called him over and dragged him into his narrow little bar. There were candles all round, people huddled together, chatting — laughing, even, at times. At the end of the bar was a lively fire inside a domed pizza oven. Fratelli could scarcely believe his eyes. The man was cooking, without power, handing out food for free to those who needed it.

He poured Fratelli a grappa, half a tumbler full, and pushed it over the counter.

‘On the house,’ the man said.

‘Piero,’ Fratelli murmured, remembering his name.

The grappa was cheap and fiery and welcome. He downed a good measure in one and saw the glass refilled in an instant.

‘You’re the cop,’ the man said.

‘Carabiniere. There’s a difference.’

‘Not to us,’ Piero chuckled, and the men around him laughed too.

Someone asked the question Fratelli knew he’d hear for days to come. Was that it? Could they look to a world getting better? Cleaner? Safer? Or were they simply fools enjoying the eye of the storm? Trapped in a welcome lull before the maelstrom returned, determined to sweep away everything and turn the world back to how it was before the dreams of men had changed its face?

He thought before answering. Considered his own inner feelings. That instinct Chiara used to call his ‘stupid third eye’. Stupid because it was so unreliable, seeing what wasn’t there sometimes, missing the obvious on occasion. But hitting the spot too. That happened, and it was why he listened to it a little.

‘I think the storm is over,’ Fratelli answered. ‘And now… or rather tomorrow, in the daylight… we must look at what it’s left behind.’

‘Go home,’ Piero ordered. ‘You’re no use to anyone except your own.’

Fratelli wondered if the café owner, giving away his precious food and drink, had any idea how welcome those words were.

‘I’d like some pizza,’ he said. ‘Just a margherita. And a bottle of Chianti.’

He placed some notes on the counter.

‘I’m paying,’ he added. ‘I’m a carabiniere. I don’t eat for free.’

The men around him laughed and one said, ‘First cop I ever heard say that…’

‘Not a cop,’ Fratelli replied. And thought to himself: I’m not sure what I am. Who I am, even. Except when I’m at home. With her. When Chiara’s love defines me, makes a place in her heart where I can live in peace and happiness.

Piero shrugged, took his money and came back a few minutes later with a bottle of red wine and a cardboard box with a plain pizza, just tomato and mozzarella. Fratelli stumbled outside and headed west. He needed to be away from people for a while. With his wife, the two of them shivering over food and cheap Chianti.

The area around Santa Maria del Carmine must have been lower lying than the rest of the quarter. The mud seemed deeper, stickier, more foul. There were lights on in the church as he trudged past. Fratelli found himself wondering what kind of damage the waters had wrought there. He admired the place, at least the Brancacci Chapel, with its beautiful figures on the walls: the story of Saint Peter, the historic depictions of Adam and Eve, before and after the Fall. Fratelli was not much fond of the awkward fig leaves painted on the orders of some prudish judgemental member of the Medici who didn’t appreciate art, only power. The rest he loved with the detachment only an atheist could feel.

‘Worry for yourself, Pino,’ he murmured as he turned the corner into his own narrow street. ‘You’ve done enough for one long day.’

The whitewashed walls of the houses carried a tidemark a good two metres high. Debris lay scattered among the ooze that spread almost knee-deep from pavement to pavement as if the level of the city itself had somehow risen with the flood. Now that he was in the place he’d called home for as long as he could remember, Fratelli found the catastrophe took on a personal aspect. Staggering through the mire, looking at these familiar houses, the cars and scooters and rubbish bins moved by the force of the inundation, the way the small and intimate landscape he knew so well had changed, he saw in his own bright imagination what must have happened, perhaps not long after daylight, when the mass of flood water came to occupy the rest of the centro storico on the other side of the Arno.

It was a moving, potent bore of icy sludge and rain, a surging wave at its head, racing in from the river carrying everything before it. Doors were off their hinges everywhere, cars lay upturned and useless, stuck in the greasy slime. The air smelled of water and sewage and fuel oil. A dry and bitter wind was starting to howl in from the north.

He saw his front door and Fratelli’s heart quickened. There were no lights on upstairs. His instant fear was foolish. There were hardly any lights on anywhere. But a few places had flickering candles and oil lamps. And Chiara was so careful, so organized. She always kept a supply for when the electricity was out, knew how to get to them, place them carefully in saucers so she could navigate the narrow landing and reach the street if need be.

Fratelli’s pace increased even though his freezing feet kept sticking in the dirt and clay.

Four doors away he called ‘Chiara!’ and didn’t know why.

His cry echoed off the walls, with their tidemark higher than most men, then rose to the white, uncaring moon.

‘Chiara! Where are you?’

Something caught him as he lurched forward, the pizza and the bottle in his hands. The edge of the pavement, hidden from view. An object dislodged by the force of the flood. He’d never know. He went down, face first, hands flailing. Piero’s precious cardboard box was forced into the shitty brown filth where it took the weight of his fall and broke into pieces. The bottle of Chianti disappeared into the mire. But Fratelli’s mind was racing with grim notions and so he barely noticed.

Hauling himself from the grasping mire, he stumbled to his feet, lurched on. Three doors, two…

He stopped, breathless, by his house. The black wooden door was half off its hinges, torn from the frame as if by a sledgehammer, but still blocking the view from the street. This seemed odd. He pushed at it with his shoulder and the wooden slab fell forward with a loud slap.

Fratelli stopped and stared into the pool of darkness that was the hallway of his home, turning the beam of his torch around, horrified by what he saw. The tide of mud had burst through the narrow entrance and now lay deep over the floor, up to the third or fourth step of the stone staircase.

They’re all like that around here.

His heart beat like an overworked drum. He called her name again, heard his voice bounce around the narrow dark entrance hall, then race up the landing to the first floor where they lived, where she’d kissed him that morning, something in her mind that made her beg him, ‘Don’t go. Let me call Marrone. Say you’re sick.’

But I’m the one who dreams those dreams, not you.

Pino Fratelli did his best to recover his breathing, then switched the torch beam ahead of him and took two uncertain steps forward, found himself stumbling over the washing basket, trapped in the quagmire at the foot of the stairs.

Something caught his eye. A naked, muddy foot emerging from the mess that had travelled up the steps. The beam moved on. It found a familiar shape, one that broke his heart. Crying, half stumbling, he fell up the stone stairs, slipped to his knees, the torch trembling in his hands.

They’d visited Pompeii on honeymoon. She’d wept over the figures crouching there in the ancient ruins, caught by the cloud of volcanic dust that had trapped them, turned living men, women and children into statues, frozen in their death throes. And here was Chiara, much the same. Face and torso out of the muck, the rest of her caked in it, still wearing her dressing gown, head back at an awkward, unnatural angle. Her legs were forced apart, her thighs, mud reaching beyond the knee, bare and pale in the torchlight. He wiped his eyes then, with his right hand, moved the dressing gown across to cover her.

His fingers brushed her skin and then he took her hand in his. Cold, and so long gone. While he was carrying pensioners in Ognissanti, struggling to get food and drink to strangers on the other side of the river, his wife had died here.

How?

There were no words in his head — none he could recognize, anyway. No notion of what to do or say. Only reality: his beloved Chiara, broken on the stairs, taken from him, from everyone who loved her.

Imagination.

He thought in pictures from time to time and now that sly, unwanted facility returned with a sharp swiftness, reinforced by the automatic instincts of the detective inside.

She never slept well when he wasn’t home. Some time early in the morning, probably close to dawn, she’d come downstairs to do the washing, only to be met by the flood and the shattered door, a city in chaos.

Pinioned between his grief and his need to understand, Fratelli didn’t dare look at her face. Not yet. He had to think this through. To imagine. To see.

Someone, a passer-by, would notice her. Perhaps he called out for help. For shelter. Chiara would never refuse. If she’d known there was someone in trouble she’d have been the first to offer without a second thought.

This was a back street of Oltrarno. Not Santo Spirito, not quite. No danger here. Not usually. Except when the flood came and reduced this plain and ordinary world to its primal, elemental state.

The cop in him turned her hands in his. Blood beneath the fingernails. Scrapings of skin.

She fought.

‘Of course she fought,’ he murmured.

And what else?

There were two of him now. The first, the husband, imprisoned inside the second, the carabiniere. It was the latter who played the light around the hallway, saw no sign of footprints, only mud and water. This was a murder without precedent. One in which the elements themselves managed to remove all traces of the beast who committed it.

An emotion inside began to work its way to the surface; a choke, a cough, a cry, an arrhythmic tic that joined the two of them, detective and spouse, in bleak and shapeless grief.

The sharp and brutal realization rose in his head and burned there like a flare.

Fourteen hours or more had passed since someone killed his wife here, on the stairs of their home. They would never find him now, not in the sea of mud and muck that was Florence on the fourth of November 1966. He couldn’t even call the station. Summon a car. Do anything but shout and scream to himself, perhaps for hours, for all the long night.

Dead was dead. Gone was gone.

He shone his torch on her face finally and felt all sense of hope and decency leave him; knew that if a man who looked culpable had passed by in that instant, he’d tear him limb from limb and never care about the consequences.

Chiara’s blank and glassy eyes stared upwards towards the rooms that were their home. Her hair was damp and messy, caked in mud, set in hanks, as if her attacker had grabbed her there. Livid bruises marked both sides of her throat where he’d choked the life out of her.

Pino Fratelli, twenty-eight years old, a good man mostly, stared at what he saw and thought of another sight: the astonishing couple in the Brancacci Chapel, Masaccio’s Adam and Eve, newly expelled from Paradise, the woman’s mouth creased and contorted, corners pointing downwards in a shriek of pain.

Chiara looked like this now and it took him a moment to understand why. Then he moved closer and saw. Perhaps it was lipstick. Or something else. A stain, scarlet, smeared across her mouth and lips, as if to make that same expression of agony, a clown-like cry of despair, emphasized by the downturned smear of red at the edge of her mouth.

The husband in him took out a handkerchief from his pocket, dampened it with his tongue and cleaned the shameful smudges from her skin.

His tears fell on her filth-stained cheeks, his hands and the grubby handkerchief fought to clear this muck, this abomination, from her face.

Then he lay there with her, not moving, scarcely daring to breathe. There was no one to summon. No friend, no relative to reach on this strange and unreal night.

Pino Fratelli wept for his dead wife, whispered to her, said meaningless phrases, felt the rational, ordered part of his mind leave him.

Somewhere outside he heard a sound. An impossible one. The ebb and flow of the river, a familiar rhythm, constant and eternal. The ceaseless noise filled his head; the chill, dank waters swamped his imagination. When he closed his eyes he saw Chiara floating to her grave on its filthy surface, like Ophelia borne away by the flood.

It would be daylight, another ten hours, before a local police officer, checking the houses in the street, walked through the half-open door and found him there, still clutching the cold, stiff corpse of his wife on the drenched and dirty stairs. And another seventeen days before Pino Fratelli, finally waking to some kind of consciousness in a sanatorium by the coast outside Livorno, would speak again.

Not that he had much of substance to say.