The Flood

Thursday, 6 November 1986

First thing the following morning, Fratelli got his cordless phone and, from the comfort of his bed, called everyone he could think of. A sleepy Luca Cassini. Two butchers in Sant’Ambrogio market. A retired Carabinieri officer who was none too pleased to be woken after a hard night on the booze.

Finally the priest, Father Bruno, with whom he had a pleasant, brief conversation, acknowledging the wisdom of accepting his fate and one day — not this day, but soon — returning to Carmine, taking the magic wine and the holy bread once more, setting foot on the happy road to dying in the arms of the Lord, and with such acquiescence winning the guarantee of a decent Catholic burial, eulogy, hymns, blessing and all.

The shroud of a good Florentine waited for him there, and with it he could climb into the grave contented.

He thanked the man for his concern, could not help but hear the note of wariness in the priest’s voice. Then he fell immediately asleep for a while, only to be woken at nine by a roaring sound he knew only too well. When he walked out into the living room, Julia was having breakfast at the kitchen table. Filling the door was the large shape of Signora Grassi, blocking out the grey winter light, demanding answers.

The first Thursday of every month.

She did an extra shift to keep the place clean. He should have remembered. But lots of things slipped his memory these days.

Julia was in her blue pyjamas. A pot of coffee in front of her. Two plates. Some toast and butter and jam.

‘I slept late and thought you wouldn’t mind if I helped myself,’ she said with a sweet smile, holding up a jar of strawberry preserve.

The radio was on, the news dominated by the arms find outside Fiesole. Few details; only that the Carabinieri were looking for an American woman in connection with the haul.

‘Well, Fratelli?’

Signora Grassi had her hands on her hips, lips pressed together in an expression that, on another woman, might have passed for a pout.

‘Well what? My guest needed breakfast. Why shouldn’t she help herself?’

A salute, a wry grin from the table, then Julia Wellbeloved got on with her coffee.

The Grassi dragon rattled her mops and brooms.

‘This is my house,’ he added bravely. ‘I’m grateful for your assistance, as always. But there’s nothing for the confessional here, I promise…’

‘I shall return in thirty minutes,’ the woman announced. ‘By then I expect you to be dressed and gone. Some of us have work to do.’

‘We do,’ Fratelli agreed, and smiled as she left.

Coffee at the breakfast table. A pleasant face opposite. He’d forgotten what it was like.

‘You slept well,’ he said.

‘I did.’

‘Me too.’

‘You agreed to something last night. You promised. Three Negronis won’t stop you…’

‘You counted. I’m impressed.’

‘You do remember?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘I told you. I can’t take it if people lie to me. If they break—’

‘I don’t lie and a promise is a promise. If this futile visit to London’s what you want. But don’t go to Soderini’s party for my sake, please.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Then why?’

‘For mine. Because I want to. You don’t understand. I’ve led such a trivial life.’

‘It doesn’t look trivial from where I’m sitting. It looks fresh and full of hope and promise. And adventure.’

‘Well, it seems trivial to me.’

He picked up a piece of toast. Spread butter. Jam. Drank some coffee. Felt that if there were a paradise, a place from which the couple in the Brancacci had been expelled, it would be very like this. No need of peacocks and unicorns, of fiery, sword-wielding angels and dire, judgemental threats.

‘Then you should go to the Brigata Spendereccia, whatever, wherever it is. And tomorrow I shall pack my bags for London. Which holds the same sense of mystery for me, I might add. Though where the money—’

‘I’ll call my dad and make some arrangements. We won’t get an appointment till Monday at the earliest. There’s no need to leave tomorrow. The weekend will do. Whenever’s easiest.’

She rose from the chair, picked up her plate and mug. He lacked the intuition to interpret the look in her eyes. Pity? A sense of care? A simple bond of amity?

‘And this morning?’ Fratelli asked. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Shopping for a dress, of course. Something suitable for this evening. You?’

A flash of guilt on his face.

‘I thought I’d… go for a walk.’

‘Where?’

‘Up the hill,’ he said, vaguely waving at the ceiling.

‘You won’t go near Walter Marrone, will you?’

‘Of course not. I’ll have a coffee with Luca somewhere if he has the time. Tell him not to dwell on all that stuff I told him last night. Perhaps we could go to San Marco with you.’

The suggestion surprised her. ‘Good idea. That should keep the pair of you out of trouble,’ she said, then deposited the plate and the mug by the sink and walked to her room.

Pino Fratelli watched her go, thinking.

In twenty minutes the Grassi dragon would be back. He needed to be out of the house. Talking to people. Feeling his way back into the case, the way he should have done days before. Directly.

Morning in the green bowers and lost glades of the Boboli Gardens. The two of them emerged late and lacking in words.

Somewhere in the distance, a high-pitched two-stroke engine whirred. Voices. Men at work. It was close to ten. A bright clear day, though grey-brown clouds were starting to gather against the blue sky, as if to talk about the rain to come.

‘They’ll find us,’ she said, taking his arm, pulling him back into the shadow of the doorway.

The smell of the cottage, damp and smoke from the fire he’d set, was stronger than ever. The workmen were tending to the ornamental gardens a good distance away. Closest to them were the vegetable patches: winter onions, dying artichokes, kale and cabbage. He knew the routine by heart. Some time around eleven, one of the kitchen people would come round looking for something to throw into the inevitable ribollita for the staff. Stale bread, green leaves, some cold meat if they had it, onions and garlic. He’d grown up on this pauper’s fare and the memory brought its smell to his nostrils as vividly as if his dead mother was reheating the same old pot on the stove, the way she did most days.

‘We could run,’ he said.

That sounded like a prayer now, uttered into silence, not knowing where it went.

‘Tomorrow, Aldo.’

He got what few things he had. Passed her the rest of her clothes. Then hid the weapons and the ammunition. When the gardeners came, they’d think tramps had broken in, spent the night, and fled knowing there’d be a beating if they were found.

The men were stupid. They’d never look behind the log store, thinking to find semiautomatic weapons and bullets there.

‘We’re here for a reason,’ she insisted, touching his arm — not that he minded any more. He was hers. He was fallen. He was one among the grey doomed drones who walked the streets of Florence. ‘We have to. Then we’re gone.’

‘Where?’

She hesitated then. He knew why. She’d never given it a second thought.

‘The south. Calabria. It’s warm there. And green.’

‘Never been,’ he said.

‘I have. I’m telling you.’

Another voice outside. Nearer.

He picked up what few things he owned and walked outside, found the narrow meandering path back to the broken door in the wall, knew she was following all the way.

Soon they were in San Niccolò, glad to be drinking two hot cups of cappuccino and eating warm cornetti.

‘Who was this man you told me about?’

‘What man?’

His head felt light and unreal. Life was a machine moved by cogs and mechanisms. Something had turned the previous night, as she strained and heaved over him, screeching with her passion, bringing the same animal noises from his throat. Forcing him back with her fist when he tried to turn her, straddle over her, do the same in return.

‘The one they burned. The one they hated. Your hero.’

‘Savonarola,’ he said, remembering the brass plaque outside the Palazzo Vecchio, and how he’d placed Vanni Tornabuoni’s head beneath the fist of Perseus, a few short strides away, dead eyes set on the cobblestones where the priest and his two fellow martyrs had died amidst the jeers and crackling flames almost five centuries before.

‘He was a good man who saw the world as it was.’

‘But who was he, Aldo?’

He looked at the clock. Time to go to work. To the refectory kitchens that the catering company rented from the city for the occasion; the same kitchens that had once fed the awkward friar and his little army.

‘I’ll show you,’ he said.

Sandro Soderini spent most of the morning alone in his office in the Palazzo Vecchio, putting off meetings, refusing calls.

Thinking…

Had Vanni Tornabuoni received those same, strangely worded threatening letters? If so, the voluble arts commissioner had never mentioned them, which was strange and out of character. Besides, the language…

The bloody antics of the Red Brigades had been headline news for more than a decade. They were revolutionaries, fired by a perverted brand of savage Marxism. Not religious fanatics wishing to warn their victims with the mangled words of a lunatic priest.

Something felt amiss. And then there was the nosy, persistent and sick Carabinieri detective. He knew a little of the man’s background from Marrone. But nothing in it explained why he was out in the countryside around Fiesole, chasing what appeared to be the last, fugitive member of a terrorist gang. One most of Italy thought had ceased to exist, shattered by raids and prison sentences that would see an end to the bloodshed and the fear that had dogged politicians and industrialists the length of the nation.

None of this made the mayor of Florence feel happy or secure.

So he picked up the phone and got through to Marrone in Ognissanti, demanded a report on the state of the investigation, into the woman called Chavah Efron and the man thought to be with her.

He got the captain’s usual surly grunt, then a perfunctory report: photos distributed, social service records checked. Nothing much found.

‘Her VW van was left in a side road in San Niccolò last night. We found some prints there,’ Marrone said. ‘We’re checking them now.’

‘You think they’re in the city then?’

‘It depends how stupid they are,’ the Carabinieri officer replied. ‘If they have any sense they’ll have stolen a car and got out. I’ve sent people down to the stations to check the bus services. If this woman’s a genuine terrorist, she’ll know the form. The moment you think your cover’s blown, you flee. She’ll have the money. Contacts elsewhere…’

‘I thought,’ Soderini said archly, ‘we’d dealt with this scum.’

‘As did I.’

‘Then who would she go to?’

Silence. Then Marrone said, ‘I’ve put extra officers in the Piazza della Signoria. Around the civic buildings elsewhere. All the obvious targets. Given the amount of weapons and explosive they left behind, I doubt they could have taken much with them. They were in a hurry.’

‘Guesswork, Captain. We don’t pay you for that.’

‘What do you want of me?’ Marrone asked, a harsh note of temper in his voice.

‘Certainty. Knowledge. These people out of the way. For good.’

‘I’ll do my best. In return I require circumspection on your part. Don’t engage in any new public engagements without our prior knowledge. Keep us informed. Be vigilant. This event of yours tonight. I assume it’s cancelled.’

Soderini felt the heat rise in his head. ‘Because?’

‘It’s a time to lie low,’ Marrone added. ‘To stay out of sight. If you—’

‘Florence is my city! Don’t presume to tell me where to go and what to do.’

‘I advise—’

‘This is a private engagement of long standing. God knows I’ve missed enough of them already. We’re not cowards. Nor are we parading ourselves in public. You know your duty when it comes to that. Find these two. The American and whoever’s with her. Do what you must. If you can save us the expense of a jail term, all the better…’

‘The way someone dealt with Aristide Greco?’

Soderini was astonished by his tone. ‘That seemed an admirable outcome to me. One less dangerous parasite to deal with. Are you going soft in your dotage, Marrone? Do I need someone younger and better to run the Ognissanti stazione?’

No answer.

Eventually the gruff and distant voice said, ‘Even in Florence, there’s a limit to how much shit can be shovelled underneath the cobblestones. The journey from hero to villain can be remarkably short. I thought a professor of history might appreciate that.’

Then the line went dead.

Julia Wellbeloved wandered through the shops in the Via dei Calzaiuoli, gasped at the prices, meandered round the Duomo, found a coffee in a place with a payphone, managed to call England, reversing the charges.

She felt like a teenager again. Stranded somewhere. Stupid and in trouble. Not that she’d done that more than two or three times. Her father seemed more amused than offended and listened carefully as she talked of what she wanted: an appointment with the appropriate consultant in Harley Street the week after. A favour from a friend who’d offer at least an opinion for free, or whatever sum a doctor felt to be a pittance.

That done, she wandered east towards Sant’Ambrogio, finally found a black evening dress in a second-hand shop run by a garrulous, friendly woman with too much make-up and a cigarette dangling permanently from her lower lip.

By then it was noon. Fifteen minutes’ walk away was San Marco, the famous convent, now a museum and closed for refurbishment, but not to friends of Sandro Soderini. She slipped into the first cheap café she met, bought a glass of wine and a panino. Wondered where Pino Fratelli was.

Not strolling up the hill. That was for sure.

‘You think you can get round me with a bit of bread and some lampredotto?’

Noon in the Sant’Ambrogio market. Fratelli and Luca Cassini back at the same stall.

‘I was being generous. Trying to say sorry for last night. I never wanted to drag you into my problems. You insisted…’

Cassini had been told to steer clear of the stazione for a few days until the air cleared and Walter Marrone decided what to do with him. The prospect of being kicked out of the Carabinieri didn’t seem to bother him one jot. His father was already talking about a career in one of the leather stores, selling expensive valises to rich foreigners. Not a job he fancied, Fratelli felt, but Luca Cassini was an easy, amenable soul. One who expected little of the world and was grateful mostly for what he got.

‘And then what?’ the young man asked.

‘Then we go to meet Julia in San Marco. You like painting, don’t you?’

‘’Course I do. Don’t know a thing about it, mind. Why are we going there?’

‘Because she asked for us! Must I always have an ulterior motive?’

‘You tell me,’ Cassini spluttered.

‘Don’t talk with your mouth full. Just listen, Luca. Walter Marrone still has no idea who this man is. The one who was hiding with Chavah Efron when we went out to Fiesole yesterday. It says on the radio they’ve found the van. There’ll be prints in it, but you know how long it’ll take to match them to anything.’

‘They’ve got a computer now.’

‘A decent filing clerk would find us an answer more quickly.’

‘This isn’t your problem, Pino, is it? Or mine?’

‘I’ve made certain inquiries. Around the market here. To see who’s been buying curious food.’

‘What’s that got to do with that stuff we found in Fiesole?’

‘Perhaps nothing. Who knows? The man who attacked the paintings in the Brancacci—’

‘Here we go again.’

‘There’s a link,’ Fratelli insisted. ‘I’m sure of it.’

Cassini finished his panino, balled up the paper it came in, threw it on the stone market floor.

‘Marrone’s got a whole team on the case. And some big knobs up from Rome. One mention of the word terrorist and you’re knee deep in blokes in black suits and sunglasses on their heads. Funny lot, if you ask me.’

‘How do you know this?’ Fratelli asked.

‘I did report for work this morning, you know. Asked a few questions before they booted me out of the stazione. I’m not daft.’

‘I never thought you were. And the more we work together, the more I like what I see.’

‘I’ll give you a discount on a nice handbag then,’ Cassini moaned.

‘You’re not out of the Carabinieri yet. We need a name. I’ve made inquiries. It’ll take a little while. If you could find a way to sneak back into Ognissanti this afternoon…’

‘More than my life’s worth. Captain Marrone stared daggers at me this morning. I was lucky to get out of there with my balls intact, thank you.’

Fratelli shrugged.

‘Stop it!’ Cassini cried. ‘I’m not going back in there.’

‘Fine. Your choice. I respect it.’

‘Pino…’

But Fratelli wasn’t listening. Someone was marching down the hall towards him. A big man in white cotton overalls and green boots, covered in blood from chest to fat thighs.

He was grinning and waving a piece of paper in one hand, a long yellow chicken neck, the head still intact, red comb, shiny mustard beak, sinews dripping from the severed end.

‘Fratelli!’ the butcher roared when he found them. ‘I have news!’

The refectory kitchen in San Marco. Blood and flesh beneath the frescoes of the last supper: hungry saints watching a whey-faced Christ. Fish and raw winter vegetables: the dark crinkled leaves of cavolo nero, leeks and carrots, chicory and radicchio. Pontecorvo examined the produce on the table, reading the menu for the night.

Waiting to be told.

That was all he did, and now the orders came from someone new. She was making puntarelle by the sink the way he’d instructed, scraping the tall, weed-like chicory plants into pale green strips then dropping them into a bowl full of water and ice cubes to curl. On the counter by the side stood a basin of crushed, salty anchovies and olive oil that would cover them when, finally, that evening, they were served among the antipasti.

It was two in the afternoon. The temporary staff for the catering company that occupied the ground-floor premises — once a refectory for Savonarola’s novice monks — had assembled for work. The money was a pittance; experience was, for the thugs who hired them, a boon. So he’d had no difficulty persuading them to take on a new hiring, a strong young woman who’d carry and skivvy and do whatever they wanted.

The company only worked special occasions, one each month more special than the rest. Aldo Pontecorvo had been left to his own devices when it came to that commission. He was a fixture; had been that way for more than two decades when he began as a lowly trainee sous chef waiting on tables, too fearful of his betters to look them in the eye. Now this was his task alone and no one even asked him what the menu would be. The epicurean splendours of the Brigata Spendereccia, which would be only one of the attractions on offer for that evening in the secret hiding place of the Medici, were left to his imagination and slow, patient research among cookery books going back eight centuries and more.

As usual, one week before, he’d spent one morning going through the resources handed down from generations past, in the archive building near Sant’Ambrogio. Then he’d scribbled down the dishes and walked round the busy, colourful market, talking to buyers, assessing what was practical.

They didn’t pay him for this. It was a reward of its own. Left to his own devices in the archives, with a tame librarian willing to fetch anything he asked for, Aldo Pontecorvo had, over the years, read some of the most precious documents the city owned. Touched the paper Savonarola had written upon. Run his fingers over the words of Benvenuto Cellini, complaining about the miserly philistines of the Medici court. Felt the bloody history of the city rise from the pages and infect his troubled, wandering mind.

The nobility of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries possessed tastes as bizarre and outlandish as their heirs of the twentieth. They were no strangers to herbs and spices from the Orient, to obscure meat and fowl, and fanciful dolci that mixed sweet with sour, fruit with meat. When he knew what was possible he would place orders for the produce and then, the Sunday before the Brigata meeting, start the preparation: cutting and slicing, setting aside the flesh to marinate, in oil and vinegar, honey and herbs.

Then his landlord threw him out. After that, in the pouring rain and cold, alone, wandering the bleak streets of Oltrarno, the worm of anger and vengeance began to work inside him.

Now he was back in their midst, turning the results of those ancient scribbles from the archives into a banquet to be delivered by van at six that evening, and carefully set up in the secret place where the ceremony took place.

Then he would stay and help serve, as usual. Watch in horror and shame, sometimes, and still be too fearful to flee.

On the long, wooden tables, cracked with age, bleached with centuries of use, ranged bowls of handmade testaroli pasta, sage leaves ready to be fried in batter. Doves lay naked on metal platters. Rabbits, flayed and jointed, their kidneys and livers reserved by their side for the sauce. Ugly monkfish split open, their delicate intestines removed to make tripe antipasti. Piglets’ feet, as pale and naked as those of children, were tidied in serried lines on trays ready for the oven; alongside them rows of ducks’ necks, stuffed with forcemeat and plums, heads and long waxy beaks arranged neatly in a line, as if this were a troop of dead birds saluting to the left. A vast cauldron of soup made from spelt, the grain the Etruscans ate, simmered on the kitchen range. And for the dessert, platters of fruit and circles of panforte, not the sweet dessert fed to the tourists, but the original peposo, laced with pepper and spices and filled with the piquant minced pork.

And cibreo.

A feast for the lords of Florence. The kind they would have gorged on when Dante and Botticelli walked the streets outside. When Savonarola himself sat upstairs in this very building, locked in his plain, ascetic cell, praying for the deliverance of the city from such sinful extravagances, listening to the word of God and then proclaiming it in angry sermons from the pulpit in the Duomo.

There were two minions in the kitchen at that moment. A surly, talentless kitchen hand from Turin, and a silent, miserable woman who came in from Empoli when needed. He ordered the man to turn up the heat on the huge gas grill they used for searing and grilling, then told them both to take their break now, a few minutes earlier than usual, and not to hurry back.

‘It’s Christmas?’ the man from Turin said.

‘You want free time or not?’ Aldo Pontecorvo retorted.

He joined Chavah, still patiently slicing the vast heads of chicory into the icy water for puntarelle.

‘Tonight. They’re not all bad,’ he said. ‘Just some of the men. One in particular.’

‘You do your part,’ she ordered. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

Still, he hesitated.

‘Why did you kill Tornabuoni?’ she asked.

No answer. She came close to him, placed her hand, weather-beaten and scarred, on his chest.

‘It wasn’t for me at all, was it?’

Twenty years before, that night in the dark streets, water everywhere. Time didn’t pass. It stayed with you sometimes, clinging to your mind like foul mud. And now it was alive again, starting to move.

Two days before he’d killed a man. That was supposed to be an end to things. Not a beginning.

‘This is enough,’ he muttered. ‘No more.’

‘No, Aldo,’ she said, taking the lapels of his stained white jacket. ‘We do what life makes us. What they make us.’

He could smell her breath, sweet from the fruit she’d been picking at in the kitchen. Some slices still stood in her hand. Sharp, hard apple from Trentino, ready to be turned into sugary fritters.

Chavah reached up and placed a slice of the fruit in his mouth, fed it beyond his lips and watched him, stroking his chest as he ate.

San Marco was little to look at from the outside. One more church portico on a piazza, a visitors’ entrance by the side. Julia met Fratelli and Luca Cassini at the door, then Fratelli spoke to a caretaker. Soon they were joined by the director of the museum, a harassed-looking individual who introduced himself as Franco Mariani.

He was a nervous man, cadaverous, with thinning brown hair and a gloomy face made more miserable by a drooping walrus moustache and sad, brown eyes. Mid-forties, the standard age for civic dignitaries in Florence it seemed, and dressed in the well-tailored business suit which seemed to be the uniform for senior city officials.

‘What’s this?’ Mariani asked, glaring at Fratelli. ‘You’re Carabinieri. I recognize you from the past. That break-in. The Palazzo Vecchio said nothing about you.’ A pause — bitterness, not regret, on his face. ‘Don’t you have better things to occupy you on a day like this?’

‘This is pleasure, not business,’ Fratelli told him. ‘Tornabuoni’s case is well taken care of…’

‘Those terrorists—’

‘Do not visit shuttered museums, I assure you. Captain Marrone—’

‘My appointment’s with the woman—’

‘Luca and Pino are helping me,’ Julia interrupted. ‘With the mayor’s knowledge and encouragement, I believe.’ That took him down a peg. ‘We’ve been following the vandalism in the Brancacci. They have a professional interest.’

Mariani swore and shook his head.

‘Three times in twenty years I’ve seen this. A French fool in the Uffizi, with a hatred for Botticelli. Some mischievous idiot in the Pitti. A man who somehow managed to get a mallet into the Accademia. Paint, ripped canvas, shattered marble. Had they done this to a man or a woman, they would have languished in jail for years. Instead we send them to a comfortable institution, wait while they calm down and then blink innocently as if to say: that was me?’

‘You’ve spoken to these people?’ Julia asked.

‘Once. The Frenchman.’ Mariani frowned, as if trying to remember. ‘This was some years ago, in the beginning when, like you, I thought there was something to be learned.’

‘And?’ Fratelli prompted him.

‘He said Simonetta Vespucci — Botticelli’s muse, if you recall — reminded him of his girlfriend. Who had recently dumped him.’ The director opened his arms wide in despair. ‘That was it. Why do we allow such scum through the door in the first place? They’ve no appreciation. No feeling. No sensitivity. Art is for those who appreciate it, not the masses.’

‘How can the masses begin to appreciate what they can’t see?’ Julia asked, genuinely puzzled.

‘And Benvenuto Cellini and his kind were not sensitive men in some respects,’ Fratelli noted. ‘Julia’ — he nodded in her direction — ‘would simply like to hear what precautions you intend to take when you reopen San Marco to the public. To learn what you know of those who would harm the treasures in your care.’

‘The latter first,’ Mariani declared. ‘They’re lunatics and vandals. Religious maniacs. The insane. How else can you explain it? What is there to comprehend?’

‘Soderini said they hated beauty,’ Julia told him.

‘Which is true. Soderini’s an intelligent, learned man. He understands these things intimately, from his own perspective. He will…’

Mariani’s declaration stuttered to a halt.

‘He’ll what?’ Julia asked.

‘Be a better source of guidance on this subject than I,’ the man said in a low, hard voice. ‘Come. I’ll show you what we can do to prevent such damage. It was next to nothing before these present works. It will be next to nothing after. After which, you must leave. We’re in no fit state for visitors, nor do I have staff to keep you company.’

‘I need a break,’ Pontecorvo said, then left the three of them working in the kitchen and walked out into the open courtyard of Savonarola’s convent. He felt he could hear the voices of all those dead Dominicans whispering in the shadows as he walked; another sinner on the road, another soul striding towards Purgatory. Briskly, moving at speed in the belief that haste might still his thoughts and fears, he strode to the former hospice building by the cloister. The place was empty. This was November. A dead month for all but the hardiest of visitors, even at the best of times. With most of the complex closed to tourists, only the occasional workmen and civic officials meandered its corridors.

He strode into the hospice and sat in front of the work that dominated the room, Fra Angelico’s Last Judgement. In the centre stood the tombs of the dead, thrown open by a blue-robed Christ in Judgement, seated on his throne in the sky, surrounded by the Virgin, saints and angels. To the left, the godly and chaste entered the Garden of Eden, hand in hand beneath those same trees and palms and trilling birds that Masolino and Masaccio had painted in the Brancacci. The gate to Heaven, the portal through which Adam and Eve had been expelled in the beginning, was open now, and welcoming. Through it flooded the glorious golden light of God Himself. The worthy entered Paradise to enjoy eternal life and joy. While, on the right, demons and monsters drove vile sinners and the unrepentant to Hell, stabbing them with stakes until they passed through into a subterranean inferno of pain and agony and torture; a pitiless, never-ending torment, where the fallen devoured one another and were in turn torn to pieces by a grim, horned Satan surrounded by the flesh and entrails of his victims.

His eyes strayed upwards, to the ceiling. The cell of Savonarola, where the man had worked alone in fury, documenting the venality of the city with fearful warnings, stood somewhere above.

He’d read those sermons while he was supposed to be searching the state archives for ancient recipes to amuse the Brigata Spendereccia. Sinners were meant to enter the eternal fire. The wicked deserved retribution. Those who did God’s work…

An image of the horror in the barn in Fiesole came to him. Tornabuoni trying to scream from behind the gag. A bloody corpse, bone and gore.

In the cold chamber of the hospice, Aldo Pontecorvo shivered, trying to force those pictures from his head.

He’d shown Chavah all these places when they’d first arrived that morning. Did she understand? Had she guessed? Why now? After twenty years in purgatory?

Because he couldn’t live with himself, with the pain, any more. Not that he could tell her.

So he got up and walked back to the kitchen, checked the work, went back into the convent and headed for the cloister and the stairs to the first-floor dormitories where the brothers had lived in sacred isolation most of their lives.

It was so cold, he half expected to see frost shimmering on the plain columns and arches. There were voices, loud and confident. He stopped and fell immediately into the cloister shadows. Two men: one middle-aged, with an intelligent, acute face and long white hair; the second younger, burly. Big feet, black shoes, broad, aggressive face.

And a woman. Striking, with a long, pale face, fair hair tied back severely so that it exaggerated her high forehead. He was close enough to hear their voices. She was speaking. Italian with a foreign accent.

A voice he’d heard before. His own words came back to him and he felt himself shiver involuntarily.

What are you looking at?

Then that frightened, accented response.

Niente, niente, niente.

He watched this tall, composed and serious Englishwoman.

All acts invited responses. Sins demanded confession or retribution. They began a cycle that only virtue and sacrifice could close.

He slunk back to the kitchen, keeping to the dark side of the cloisters all the way.

His practised eye ranged over the dishes. Most, he was glad to see, were complete. What work remained was menial and easily left to others. Transport was in the hands of the catering company. All seemed organized.

‘Chavah,’ he said, taking her to one side.

She looked bored. These chores didn’t suit her.

‘The police are here.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know. Two nights ago in the square… a woman saw me.’

A flash of anger. ‘You never told me this.’

It didn’t seem important. A stranger’s face in the dark.

‘We should leave,’ he said. ‘Right away. You can…’

This tense relationship ebbed and flowed. He’d no idea which of them was dominant at that moment.

‘I can what?’

‘Take some things and go. It’s me they want. You’ve done nothing.’

‘We’re not done yet.’

‘Just go…’

She held him then, tightly, refusing to move. There was something so plain and ordinary in her touch, he wondered that he’d avoided this simple intimacy all these years.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I won’t. And nor shall you.’

The four of them walked up a stone staircase, past scaffolding and sheeting, Mariani striding ahead, talking all the time, of history and the difficulties of preserving it. He stopped at the top and, for all the recent dark events, Julia Wellbeloved found herself smiling with a sudden, warm burst of instant pleasure. She’d read about this place. It was a little out of the centre of the city. One more institution that hid its jewels from prying, public eyes.

Now, with the help of the director’s incisive, brisk talk, she recalled the story of the remarkable works of art created here for the benefit of the solitary, ascetic inhabitants alone. In the middle of the fifteenth century, two decades before Savonarola’s arrival, the artist brother Fra Angelico had been asked to decorate the forty-three monastic cells that ran along three first-floor corridors of the dormitory surrounding the Sant’Antonino cloister. Here the friars read and thought and prayed, surrounded by frescoes mostly from the hand of the man they knew simply as ‘Brother John of Fiesole’.

At the head of the stairs stood the most breathtaking of Angelico’s images, a large Annunciation of such tender humanity it was impossible not to be moved by its sense of simple and serene joy, its wonder at the miracle of life. A slender, pious Mary sat, head bowed, in an archway next to a beautiful garden, listening carefully to the words of an angel with glorious multicoloured wings telling her she would bear the son of God. There was something so touching, so personal about the painting, that she could only marvel that it came from the hands and imagination of a monk sworn to celibacy and retreat from the venal, living world beyond San Marco’s walls.

A sheet of thick plate glass covered the whole of the fresco.

‘That’s it?’ Fratelli asked, going closer to the fresco than the rest. ‘That’s your protection?’

‘What else are we supposed to do?’ Mariani asked. ‘The work belongs at the head of the stairs. It’s the introduction to the dormitories. Would you rather it were lost in the Uffizi?’

‘Not at all,’ Julia said. ‘It’s perfect here.’

‘Of course,’ the director agreed. ‘This is its home and always has been.’ He glanced at the ceiling. ‘We’ll have some video cameras up there. In all the entrances. Anywhere someone might get in. There’ll be more attendants, sitting around doing nothing all day. The cost of all this’ — he shrugged — ‘will come from the drones who troop through the door, naturally. But if you ask me… can we stop the madmen?’

Mariani’s eyes fell on the perfect, calm face of Angelico’s Mary.

‘No. What if someone were to smuggle a hammer beneath their jacket and attack the glass? Should we search everyone? Art’s like life. The safer we make it, the more remote and meaningless it becomes.’

They walked along the corridor. In each of the modest cells was another painting from the life and passion of Christ. Jesus risen from the tomb, telling a prostrate Mary Magdalene, ‘Noli Me Tangere’ — do not touch me. Deposed from the cross. As an innocent, naked infant at the Nativity. Then, in a strange, almost surrealistic image, blindfolded and holding a cane and globe, the symbols given him by his tormentors, slapped by unearthly hands, spat at by a disembodied head.

Ropes cordoned off each cell. Anyone might step over them in an instant.

‘We’ll let people know where they can and cannot go and keep them out as much as we can,’ Mariani said. ‘They may wander into a few cells that contain lesser works. But…’ He sighed. ‘This is the extent of our precautions. If you have any other suggestions, do please tell us. Paintings are like children. One must love them, protect them, guard them against evil as much as possible. But they live in the real world, our world. One can no more protect them against everything than one can keep the grimmer side of life secret from a son or a daughter. Angelico was a practical man. He would never have expected his work to continue to amaze people here five centuries after his death. There’s the miracle. That we have it at all. Besides…’

A wry look of amusement broke his scowling features for a moment. ‘We fool ourselves if we think a few psychopaths are our greatest enemy. Time, neglect and forces we cannot control wreak more havoc on this city than its inhabitants. Decay, so-called restoration…’

He led them to a small annexe at the end of the corridor.

‘These were his quarters. A small oratory, a study, a bedroom.’

Mariani guided them to a panoramic painting on the wall. It depicted, he said, Florence at the end of the fifteenth century, not so much changed in the centre from today. The Palazzo Vecchio looked a little more grey and severe, Brunelleschi’s dome on the Duomo rather more pristine. The hillside church of San Miniato al Monte was visible to the right behind San Niccolò, unchanged. Through the canvas, the Arno wound beyond city walls, now but remnants, out into verdant countryside and on to the distant peaks of the Tuscan Apennines.

Townsmen and — women wandered around the Piazza della Signoria in the foreground, chattering, bargaining, meandering on horseback. Children played tag. Soldiers flourished their weapons. Only a few — among them two men carrying bundles of faggots on their backs — seemed to notice the commotion at the centre: a bonfire joined to the Palazzo Vecchio by a wooden walkway, a tree trunk rising in its midst, planks to make a scaffold, a ladder attached to its summit.

Painters of this period often played with the notion of time, she remembered. This represented not a single event but a succession of them, all leading to the same moment. On the steps of the Palazzo Vecchio, three men in white knelt before a makeshift court (the tribunal of judgement, Mariani said), watched by a handful of bystanders from the bare steps of a loggia free of sculpture. At the same time, these three condemned men appeared on the pathway to the fiery stake, held between the arms of burly minders in black, faces hidden beneath sinister, pointed hoods.

Then, finally, in death. Three ragged figures, suspended by nooses, consumed by flames.

‘There,’ Mariani declared, ‘Savonarola built the bonfire of the vanities in which Botticelli and even Michelangelo destroyed their work. If you believe the tourist books, anyway. And died on the same spot himself a few years later. They seized him…’

He pointed back towards the way they’d come.

‘Right there. By the library. I can show you the very spot. There’s a plaque on the wall.’

History.

It was beginning to swirl around her again, making the room swim, filling her head with strange thoughts.

‘He can’t have hated art that much,’ Mariani’s brittle, unemotional voice continued. ‘He never saw fit to demand the destruction of the frescoes that graced his own home. Nor bar his adoring followers from recording his own image. A hypocrite. Come…’

They turned a corner into the tiny room that was, the sign said, Savonarola’s private oratory. Mariani pointed out a small portrait on the wall. A tonsured man in a monk’s habit, smiling though his head was split open by a vicious, blood-drenched sword.

‘Fra Bartolomeo,’ the director continued, ‘came after Angelico. A more sophisticated man in some ways. A friend and associate of Raphael. But a Savonarola lover… have no doubt. This he painted as a memorial to the friar after his death. The city dignitaries might have had his head if they’d known, naturally. So the portrait pretends to be of Peter, not our awkward, fundamentalist monk. It’s him though. Without doubt. Follow, please…’

They walked on into the next room, Savonarola’s own cell.

A new portrait now, close up, frank. From life, it could only be.

Julia Wellbeloved looked at it and found herself unable to move, to think clearly, to speak for a moment.

It was the man from the canvas in the other room, but seen in an entirely different light. Wrapped in a black cloak that might have been a shroud, his face was pale and hairless, his nose and eyes prominent and marked with both pain and some solitary determination.

‘It would seem Bartolomeo dashed this off in the brief time after Savonarola was seized and before his execution. Perhaps from memory of a meeting in the Bargello. There’s an air of foreboding about it…’ Mariani came nearer and gazed at the head close up. ‘Quite remarkable. I intend to move both these works to somewhere more spacious before long. In some quarters Savonarola is regarded as a martyr. There are those who wish him beatified — not that the Vatican will play ball. The Dominicans, or some at least, wish it. Others regard him as a heretic and a criminal. He died excommunicated and remains so. I’m too timid and too wise to step into a fight between priests. Bartolomeo’s portrait was held in private hands for centuries. We only acquired it a few years ago. If it’s true to life — and there’s no reason to think it’s not — I’m glad I never got to meet our severe and judgemental friar. He hated what Florence was in his own time. I doubt he would have approved of what we’ve become since. Though perhaps we should follow his example, and those of his executioners, and burn our pesky vandals instead…’

She couldn’t take her eyes off the figure on the wall. The prominent nose, the burning eyes. The sense of an iron will staring death in the face.

Another image rose in her imagination. A dark shape emerging from the shadows of the Loggia dei Lanzi, bag in hand. Moving towards Cellini’s Perseus…

The room dimmed, her legs folded beneath her. Before she knew it, Julia Wellbeloved was on the floor.

When she came to she was downstairs, being placed on a sofa in an office by Luca Cassini’s strong arms. Even Mariani looked worried as he scuttled round getting water, offering tea, coffee, biscotti.

Fratelli knelt by her side. He looked terribly worried. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘I fainted, of course.’ She looked at Mariani and said, ‘Tea would be nice. It was nothing. I’m not…’ She felt her legs, her arms. ‘Not hurt.’

More nervous now than ever, the director hurried from the room, calling to an unseen secretary somewhere.

‘What really happened?’ Luca Cassini asked.

‘I’ve seen that face before. The black hood. The long nose. Those cold, dead eyes.’

Fratelli said not a word.

‘But you knew that, didn’t you, Pino? That’s why we came.’

‘You had an invitation from the mayor. Not me.’

‘You knew.’

‘I had an inkling. I didn’t want to push you to conclusions.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, folding her arms.

‘It’s nothing,’ he replied, without the least embarrassment or suggestion of an apology. A tug of the white hair. That distanced, puzzled look. ‘A man who thinks of himself as the new Savonarola. A deliverer of judgement to a tainted, corrupt den of sin and iniquity.’

‘We’re not that bad,’ Cassini complained.

‘To him you are,’ Julia said. ‘Who is he?’

Fratelli took a piece of paper out of his pocket. It had bloodstains on it and the printed logo of a Sant’Ambrogio butcher.

‘I believe his name is Aldo Pontecorvo. He buys unusual items from the market once a month. Pays cash always. Picked up an order last Saturday, three cockerels among them. Not seen since. No one knows where he works. Where he lives. A quiet, surly man. Big.’

‘You’ve got a name?’ Cassini said. ‘You know what he looks like?’

‘It would seem so, Luca.’

‘Oh, crap.’

‘What?’ Julia asked.

‘We’re going to Ognissanti, aren’t we?’

Cassini sneaked into the stazione by the side entrance using his ID. Fratelli and Julia Wellbeloved marched to reception and demanded an audience with Walter Marrone. After close to an hour of argument, and finally being threatened with arrest, Fratelli scribbled out a name and a description on a piece of paper and told the desk officer, ‘If you want to find the accomplice of the terrorist Chavah Efron, tell your stubborn captain to look for this man.’

By six o’clock they were back at Fratelli’s terrace house in Oltrarno, drinking coffee and talking in his living room. Luca Cassini had not been idle. The stazione had been too occupied to eject him, so he’d hung around the corridors picking up what little gossip was going. The general opinion in the office was that in Tornabuoni’s gardener they had their murderer, if only he’d do them the courtesy of reaffirming their suspicions. The man had now withdrawn the confession he gave under interrogation. Even so he was due to appear in court the following day. At Fratelli’s suggestion the young cop had made inquiries to see if there were any reports of an unusual-looking man wearing a black monk’s habit acting suspiciously around the city. His questions had been met with raised eyebrows and a curt answer in the negative. His attempt to search the files for the name Aldo Pontecorvo had led to him being ejected by the records officer. The Romans had taken over the terrorist case and seemed unwilling to allow any locals near. If they had leads, they were keeping the fact quiet.

‘Why would anyone report him?’ Julia asked.

Fratelli frowned. ‘Who knows? You can’t get answers without asking questions. There has to be a reason he’s doing this. Pontecorvo’s a casual worker in the food industry. Thirty-five, forty years old according to my butcher friend. Once a month he buys unusual provisions in quantity, pays cash and never explains what he does with it all. But why should he start killing people now?’

Cassini put his coffee cup on the table and said, ‘So we’re looking for some bloke who thinks he’s this Savonarola nutcase? A mad monk who hated… what, exactly?’

‘Everything he saw as impure, unclean, corrupt and worldly,’ Fratelli replied without the least hesitation. ‘Homosexuals. Corrupt city officials. The godless. The sensuous. Men who had affairs and visited prostitutes. Women who wore garish clothes and displayed their bodies.’

‘Doesn’t exactly narrow it down, does it?’ Cassini responded. ‘He must hate most of us then.’

‘I believe he does.’

‘Including himself,’ Julia suggested. ‘Logically…’

‘Logically he must!’ Fratelli declared with a grin. ‘There’s an interesting thought. Didn’t Savonarola whip himself in times of doubt? I don’t remember. Many of his peers, though…’ He glanced at the shelf, seemed to think about pulling down a book, then decided against it. ‘Self-loathing is an interesting idea. Some burning sense of guilt. Perhaps lasting decades. I like that, but it must have a source. A reason why he should turn murderous two nights ago — not two years or two decades. For that… I have no ideas whatsoever.’

He smiled at her. Julia now wore her new clothes from the second-hand shop. A simple black dress, sleeveless and modestly cut at the front, with a string of pearls, a relic of her brief marriage, around her slender neck. The shoes didn’t match. Her hair was tied back in the severe way she had adopted for work. When she thought about it, she might have been ready to walk back into her old office and attack a new set of conveyancing documents. It probably wasn’t right. But for such a mysterious evening, what was?

‘Have I done something wrong?’ she asked, worried by the way they were looking at her.

Fratelli tugged at his hair and winced.

‘You look a bit scary,’ Cassini offered. ‘Like a schoolteacher. No offence but…’

She sighed then, grumbling, took off the band and shook her fair hair around her shoulders.

‘That’s a lot better!’ the young carabiniere cried.

‘You’re too kind. What am I supposed to learn tonight?’

No answer.

‘If this turns into something squalid—’ she began.

‘You must do what you see fit,’ Fratelli cut in. ‘You’re a guest of the city. A foreigner. A woman who happens to be lodging with a former maresciallo ordinario of the Carabinieri. If you choose to walk out of the Brigata Spendereccia, Soderini might be cross, offended — vindictive, even, when it comes to helping your project in the future…’

‘My project,’ she muttered under her breath.

‘He’ll do nothing to prevent you leaving, Julia. He’s no fool.’

Luca Cassini drained his cup. ‘Well I grew up here and I never heard of this nonsense. Not till Pino mentioned it. Toffs like Soderini. All them posh people who think they own everything. They love their secrets, if you ask me. Why? I mean… they run the bloody place as it is. They’ve got this city in their tight little fists already. There’s nothing left that isn’t theirs, my granddad says.’

‘And he’s a wise and worldly man,’ Fratelli added.

‘Exactly,’ Cassini agreed. ‘So what have they got to hide?’

Julia and Fratelli exchanged glances. Luca Cassini was coming out of his shell so quickly, revealing a smart and likeable young man. She hoped Fratelli’s use of him wouldn’t work to his disadvantage.

A glance at her watch. It was time to go.

‘Will someone walk me to the Palazzo Vecchio?’ she said. ‘I seem to have a date.’

‘Two noble escorts into the Florentine night,’ Fratelli said grandly, then stood up and offered his arm. He looked well again. Activity suited him. It was hard to believe he was sick at all when she saw him like this.

Cassini fetched her black winter coat, holding it as she shuffled her arms into the sleeves. Then they put on their own heavy jackets for the cold, damp night outside.

‘Rain,’ Fratelli said. ‘Best we get the bus. You wouldn’t want to turn up wet.’

They caught it round the corner. Empty again on this dark November evening. They went over the Ponte Santa Trinita. Luca Cassini chattered about football. Fratelli stared out of the window at the full waters of the Arno, glistening under a sickle moon. She thought of that night twenty years before when, finally, he’d struggled to make his way across this same bridge once the floods had retreated, only to find his wife murdered in the house they’d just left. That moment was with him now. She felt sure of it, from the way his eyes wouldn’t leave the banks of the river, forever flitting back towards Oltrarno.

The bus bounced as it left the bridge and hit the cobbled road on the far side. Fratelli was scribbling something on his notepad, tongue out of the side of his mouth, an amusing picture of concentration.

‘Here,’ Fratelli said proudly, passing her a sketch of streets and palaces, and the name of a bar.

‘What’s this?’

‘It’s where we meet tonight,’ Cassini said. ‘Afterwards.’

‘I don’t know where I’m going! Or what time it finishes.’

Or I walk out, she nearly added.

‘None of us can guess the time, Julia,’ Fratelli told her. ‘But the place.’ He patted Cassini on the arm. The young officer grinned like a teenager. ‘Luca’s got an idea about that.’

‘Our uniform lads have been told to stay away from the Pitti Palace,’ Cassini added. ‘Happens first Thursday of the month. Stay clear. Don’t peek.’

Fratelli leaned forward and gazed into her face. ‘Any trouble at all and you get up and march straight out of there. This’ — he pressed the paper into her hand — ‘will take you to a small café I know which stays open all hours. There we will buy you a Negroni and treat you to a professional Carabinieri debriefing.’

He rubbed his gloved hands.

‘Motion. Events. Action. This is what our case requires.’

‘And if you see someone who looks like that mad monk,’ Cassini chipped in, ‘best you run a mile.’

She didn’t laugh at that, and nor did Pino Fratelli.

Walter Marrone sat alone in his office, staring at the street lamps in the Borgo Ognissanti, feeling miserable and impotent. His dealings with the awkward, enchanting Fratelli had woken memories — unpleasant, unwanted ones. Of a time, two decades almost to the day, when the fragile facade of safety and civilization had been wiped from the city in a few chill, savage hours. The handful of carabinieri who’d worked in the stazione that night did not emerge from the experience without scars. They saw a side to Florence that had lain hidden beneath the surface, unrecognized, too dark to acknowledge.

And then there was Chiara. He’d watched, powerless, as senior officers turned on the distraught Fratelli demanding answers.

Why had he called no one to the house when he found her body?

What exactly had he seen?

Marrone had tried to intervene when his friend’s silent grief — obvious to one who knew him — only spurred the suspicions of those for whom he was a stranger. Or worse, half recognized as a prickly and occasionally arrogant individual in an office where ambition was stifled unless it lay in one direction only: that of satisfying the wishes of the city’s powerful elite.

He’d adored Fratelli’s wife for her bright intelligence, her beauty and, more than anything, the way she brought a sense of calm rationality to a difficult, occasionally wayward man he admired and regarded as a close and decent friend.

The Ognissanti stazione was a good Carabinieri unit, staffed by dedicated men. They worked hard to sift some truth from the grime and muck that filled that little terraced house. Yet, long as they laboured, there was nothing to be found — not in Chiara’s wounded body, her torn clothes, the few scraps of evidence, a cigarette butt, a tissue; all discovered in the dank brown silt and slime that filled the doorway and half covered the staircase of Fratelli’s modest home.

One new fact only had emerged. Chiara had been attacked, and perhaps died, in the first-floor living room, then left on the stairs. Nothing more.

This was two decades before. Marrone, now captain of the station, was aware his mind ought to be on other things. The callous, brutal murder of a city dignitary, if such a term could be used for Vanni Tornabuoni, a man whose vices were an open secret to his peers, and to the police and Carabinieri with whom he had occasional dealings over his indiscretions. Tornabuoni was a vile, corrupt aristocrat, an arrogant blue blood who, had he come from a different part of the city, would have found his way into the penal system years before, and doubtless landed up in the old Murate Prison where he belonged. The man charged with his murder would be dealt with. Sandro Soderini had made this clear, and what the mayor wanted the mayor got, one way or another.

But justice for Fratelli’s wife? That had never happened and never would. There was no easy way of resurrecting these long-dead cases. No new conduit into the past.

Twenty years. It had taken half that time for Fratelli to reveal to Marrone the truth about his birth. How he was snatched from Rome and his parents to be brought up almost as a foundling in Oltrarno with a doting single foster mother. A decade on, the truth about Fratelli’s condition became clear too. Then, Marrone had taken it on himself to call his friend into his office and tell him face-to-face that he could no longer work as a maresciallo ordinario, or in any other capacity for the Carabinieri.

Fratelli had shouted and screamed to no purpose. The idea was unthinkable. The doctors felt he could suffer a catastrophic collapse at any instant, one that sudden stress might bring on. Marrone had also noticed uncharacteristic lapses in his capacious memory. The man’s mind, so sharp and sensitive, would fail without warning, lead him to ask the same question twice in the space of a minute, demand the answer be repeated more than once before it seemed to stick. Then, moments later, he would be normal and fail to understand that anything had been wrong.

There was treatment. Drugs and counselling, principally, since the medical advice suggested the tumour was too far advanced for the surgery and radiotherapy which would have been used had the illness been detected earlier.

The consequences were plain and depressing and both men knew it. So, on that dismal sunny day, Marrone asked for his friend’s driving licence and Carabinieri ID card, put them both safely in a drawer, and then the two of them went to Fratelli’s favourite bar in San Niccolò and got stinking drunk.

This was not, on reflection, the best thing to do with someone terminally ill. But that was, for Marrone, and perhaps for Fratelli too, the most infuriating aspect of the business of all. This dying man looked, for the most part, fit and well, if prone to the occasional forgetful moment and angry outburst. Until the final collapse occurred, Fratelli could, in theory anyway, function as well as any other officer inside the stazione. Better than most, if Marrone were honest.

But if a man couldn’t drive a car, how could he act as a maresciallo ordinario? Or perform any more mundane functions — something Fratelli offered to do repeatedly? What price for brilliance against that ticking monster hidden beneath his skull?

All this occurred six months before, during a beautiful bright summer. At the time Marrone could not bring himself to believe that, if the doctors were right, he would be attending Pino Fratelli’s funeral before another eighteen months was out. And perhaps much sooner than that.

Even then, a troubling thought had nagged him. What if the thing consuming Fratelli from the inside was somehow linked to Chiara’s death? Could a man trap poison within his own head and quietly let it grow, year after year? Just as, if he were honest with himself, the city’s authorities had allowed the insidious corruption of Sandro Soderini and his acolytes to spread their venomous talons over Florence and all her institutions.

After a while he’d dismissed that idea as fanciful nonsense. Until that morning in his office, when Fratelli had been on the verge of revealing something, egged on by the attractive and intelligent Englishwoman.

Pino Fratelli had a secret, something pricked by events in the Brancacci Chapel; a drop of that inner poison that had started to wake, and perhaps whisper in the ear of the larger monster inside Fratelli’s head.

Time, never a friend of his, was surely running out.

Marrone was aware he should never have allowed those two to leave his office without insisting Fratelli say what was on his mind. But, thanks to his own embarrassment and cowardice, that hadn’t happened, though he was determined now it would. In the morning, when the gardener was in court and the Tornabuoni case closed as Sandro Soderini wanted.

When talking to his wily friend, however, it was always best to be well informed ahead of the event. This was why, late that afternoon, Walter Marrone had called down to the records department and demanded every file that remained concerning Chiara’s murder. The folders, battered manila ones, shouting their neglected age with every fold and tear, sat in front of him, their contents ranged in orderly piles around his desk. Years before, during one of the periodic clear-outs, he’d insisted nothing from the case be archived as long as he was captain of the station. Chiara’s death was still as real for him as it was for Fratelli, even if there seemed scant chance that it might be reopened with any great enthusiasm.

Marrone had read every page of the reports. Two decades provided him with an interesting sense of perspective. Looking back, it seemed astonishing that anyone could have considered Fratelli a possible suspect at all. If he’d killed Chiara so viciously, why would he have stayed with her body throughout that long, heartbreaking night? What demons could make a loving husband rape and murder his own wife?

The initial suspicions of the investigating team — which Marrone could observe only from afar, since he was known to the man in the interview room — were based entirely on Fratelli’s own condition, one that a more worldly Carabinieri detective, familiar with psychology in a way that was rare in 1966, would have labelled ‘catatonic’. Frozen by sorrow. Rigid and silent.

Uncooperative.

An idiot investigator had scribbled that on the page. Fratelli had nothing to offer them. No pointers, no evidence, no ideas. Only his own misery, and there was a surfeit of that in mud-soaked, tragic Florence at the time. So no one noticed or listened.

This was, Marrone felt, a shame. It was clear from a cursory glance at the evidence that such a crime was surely committed through opportunity, by a man, or more than one, seizing Chiara during that strange, dark night. Four days later, the autopsy reports had confirmed that Chiara had died long before Fratelli reached her, in the early hours when he was raging in the stazione, struggling to reach her, or bravely fighting his way alongside his colleagues, trying to help the stricken in the flooded streets of Ognissanti.

Only then was Pino Fratelli taken off the suspect list, though it would be a full two weeks before he was able once again to speak in a fashion that could be counted normal.

What had really happened? That was the question the Carabinieri sought to answer so often in their work. A simple task, made difficult by the singular, sly and complex nature of humanity. Scanning the peripheral notes, one seemingly minor fact was new to him, however. According to the records, the pathologist had noted the presence on Chiara’s face of a slight smear, one that ran from beneath her lower lips to her upper cheeks. It was light and almost indistinguishable, as if it had been rubbed, perhaps during her attack or possibly by Fratelli himself as he held her or touched her face.

The substance concerned turned out to be scarlet lipstick. The pathologist of the time was a thorough man who had later gone on to greater fame in Rome. Thanks to his persistence, four months after Chiara’s death a report had arrived from a lab in Milan identifying the brand. It was expensive and French — not that anyone took much notice, since by then the case was quietly fading from view.

Marrone could never recall Chiara wearing lipstick. Artifice was not in her nature. She was beautiful without make-up. Why bother? If she died in the early hours of the morning, the idea she was wearing it when she was murdered seemed even more improbable.

And now Pino Fratelli was suddenly obsessed with an act of vandalism in the Brancacci Chapel. One that involved a smear of scarlet paint and a naked woman. Sick the man might be. But when the tumour slumbered he was as sharp and quick as ever. A connection had been made, and it was one Marrone might have heard for himself had he not been so abrupt and dismissive.

Then came another idea. One that left him feeling cold and a touch uncertain. He phoned down to the records office and managed to catch the day man before he knocked off from his shift at seven, the time Marrone’s own duty was supposed to end.

The civilian seemed more than a little put out by a sudden demand for a routine office document from twenty years before. Marrone was not to be denied. He ordered it to be delivered to his desk immediately.

Ten minutes later, the records officer came in with the desk diary for the week starting Monday, 31 October 1966. The last few pages were blank. No one had had the time to write them up once the flood arrived. It was a miracle the book itself had survived the inundation.

Scanning through these twenty-year-old pages, written by officers he barely remembered, Marrone found the days before were as routine as most other weeks in the Ognissanti stazione. Domestic arguments, traffic incidents, minor theft, lost cats, howling dogs, drunks galore.

Right up till the moment, early on Friday morning, when the Arno broke its banks. All the regular events were there. One he was both surprised and appalled to see.

The first Thursday of every month.

The Brigata Spendereccia would have met around seven thirty, as they did today. And back then they asked for seclusion too. It was all there in the diary.

‘A civic event requiring privacy in the vicinity of the Pitti Palace will take place this evening. Security will be provided separately by the organizers. All officers are required to avoid the area and refer any calls in the vicinity to the relevant authority in the Palazzo Vecchio.’

What did they do at this odd event? Marrone had his ideas. Whispers, faint rumours. When he was promoted to captain, with Soderini’s backing, he was invited along once himself. His simple excuse — he genuinely had another appointment — was met with an icy stare. The offer was never repeated. Even today, only senior officers knew of it by name, and that was primarily a lure, a conspiratorial gag to ensure their silence when needed.

How many of the men around him had accepted Soderini’s summons? Walter Marrone didn’t know and didn’t want to. Like all Italian institutions, the Carabinieri comprised multiple layers of separate, sometimes competing, interests. He had no interest in freemasonry or other so-called friendly societies. Those dalliances he would leave to others.

‘Go home,’ he told Rossi, the grumpy civilian from the records office. ‘I’ll keep this. And the rest. Thanks.’

‘What’s going on here?’ the man retorted. ‘These things are twenty years old. There’s a murderer out there right now. And here you buggers are…’

‘You’re paid to file things, not solve them.’

‘That gardener never did it. I saw him when he came in. Weakly little thing. Couldn’t chop the head off a mouse.’

‘Thank you!’ Marrone cried.

Rossi tapped the papers on the desk. ‘Twenty years! And you’re the second one going through all these dusty files today. What’s this damned place coming to?’

Marrone stared at him. He should have guessed. ‘You mean the files on Fratelli’s wife?’ he asked.

‘Bah!’ Rossi waved him away. ‘No, I don’t. That daft lad Cassini was rifling through those yesterday — doing Fratelli’s bidding, if you ask me. He knew what he was looking for.’

‘Did he find it?’ Marrone demanded.

‘I don’t know! You’re the captain here. You ask him.’

‘And today…’

Rossi stamped his fist on the desk diary. ‘The kid came in asking about a man. He said Fratelli tried to tell you but you’d kicked him out of the stazione.’

The records officer pulled a scribbled note out of his pocket. Showed him the name there: Aldo Pontecorvo.

‘Did you find anything?’

The man broke into a sarcastic grin and opened his arms as if to say, ‘You’re asking me?’

‘Did you find anything?’ the captain repeated.

He went downstairs and returned with a blue folder that contained a single sheet of paper and a black-and-white mugshot of a surly, pale-faced man aged somewhere under forty.

‘One more Oltrarno louse,’ the man said. ‘Bastard son of a madwoman who used to live in the Boboli Gardens, opening her legs for the staff there from what I can gather.’

‘This is it?’

‘His mamma died last January. He went a bit mad. Started shouting abuse in Santo Spirito. Stuff about the mayor and his pals.’

Cautioned, the report read. Told to sober up and go home. There was an address and a phone number. He went to the desk and called the place.

He could picture the kind of hovel from the address and the gruff, aggressive tones of the man who answered. A flophouse near Carmine, not far from Pino Fratelli’s house.

Pontecorvo had been thrown out the previous Sunday for unpaid rent. He’d been muttering more threats. The man was crazy so no one took much notice any more.

‘Just another Oltrarno louse,’ the civilian said again when he finished the call. ‘You’re going to put out a call for something like that?’

‘Go home,’ Marrone ordered. ‘If Cassini or Fratelli come near your office again, tell them they need to speak to me first. Before they see anything.’

‘What’s that they say about stable doors and bolting horses?’

Marrone got his own coat and called home, telling his wife he would be late for dinner, offering no explanation.

Tonight he had other matters to chase — as, he guessed, did Pino Fratelli.

Two flights of stairs through an empty Palazzo Vecchio. Except for the ghosts. They took Savonarola this way after he was arrested on the threshold of the library in San Marco. A few weeks later he walked down the same steps, defrocked, and was dragged to the stake by hooded men in black to greet the flames and the noose and a grim, public death in the square outside.

Her footsteps echoed against the walls. She tried to push that face from San Marco — bloodless, fixed with a cruel determination — from her head.

The door to Soderini’s office was open. His staff gone for the evening. The mayor wore a dark suit with a white carnation in the lapel.

It was hot in the large, ornate room. She took off her coat. Soderini stared at her, the black dress, the pearls. Julia Wellbeloved felt herself being judged, measured, and in other circumstances would have turned straight round and returned to the rainy Florence night.

‘Black,’ he said in his calm, smooth English. ‘Like me. I’m in mourning for poor Tornabuoni. You?’

‘We’re in Florence,’ she said. ‘Speak to me in Italian, please.’

He came to stand in front of her. ‘You’re a very unusual woman.’

She laughed at him. ‘You know that, do you?’

‘I’m paid to judge people.’ He looked her up and down again. ‘You never met Tornabuoni. Still, the thought’s appreciated. How’s this report of yours going, Julia? Have you found time to do your homework while chasing terrorists?’

‘We went to Fiesole thinking it was something to do with the Brancacci.’

‘And was it?’

‘Why not ask Walter Marrone? Is your wife coming?’

A flicker of unexpected emotion ran briefly across his face. ‘My wife? You have been busy.’

‘I can read the paper. Had to go back a bit. No one speaks of it much.’

‘My wife lives in Sicily. Taormina. She rarely returns. It’s best that way.’ He tidied some papers on the desk, avoiding her eyes. ‘She’s half-English. Did you read that too? Her family were one of those aristocratic tribes who came here at the beginning of the century, held their noses while Mussolini was in power. Never quite found the time to leave, or sufficient spine to warrant internment like some of their peers.’

‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

‘No?’ he said with a sardonic smile. ‘In that case why ask? I live a bachelor life. A gentleman with occasional companions when I have the time. This city is my bride if I’m honest. Beautiful, if demanding. I can’t complain if a woman feels she’s unable to compete. Mariani tells me you took your Carabinieri friends to San Marco with you. Why?’

‘For company,’ she said with a shrug.

‘A crazy detective unfit for work and an idiot junior? This Fratelli—’

‘You know him?’

‘I know of him,’ Soderini said with a scowl. ‘A troublemaker. A man who doesn’t know his place. That type never fits. This is why his career turned to dust.’

He brushed something from her shoulder. Something that did not perhaps exist.

‘He’s ill. Retired on medical grounds.’

‘He was as good as retired long before that,’ Soderini retorted. ‘There’s a hierarchy here. One works with it or fails. Fratelli—’

‘Is ill,’ she said again.

‘Were these men helpful? Do you have any fresh answers as to why someone might wish to despoil our treasures?’

Julia thought about this and said, ‘I think I misread the question. Or asked the wrong one. I thought this was about the paintings somehow. I wanted to believe that. It seemed the natural conclusion. The obvious one.’

‘And?’ he persisted.

‘I’m now inclined to think the problem is more to do with the individuals themselves. What makes them the way they are. A flaw in their history that’s affected their character. The painting — art itself — is a catalyst, as it is for the rest of us. A spur. Something that eggs them on, makes them cross a line they always observed before.’

He put a hand to his chin, staring at her. ‘There,’ Soderini said confidently. ‘You have a premise for your paper.’

‘Not really. It’s a matter for the police, not an academic. I can’t invent a reason for their behaviour. Not unless someone finds me a criminal.’

She cocked her head to one side and asked, ‘Do you have one for me?’

‘Here?’ he asked, spreading his hands to indicate the grand office he’d inherited from a line of city burghers and a pope.

‘Somewhere. Tornabuoni’s murder…’ she said, almost in a whisper. Her eyes flitted to the back of the room, in the direction of the square outside. ‘I was in the piazza that night. I might have seen—’

‘What?’ Soderini demanded with a sudden urgency.

‘Someone who looked the spitting image of Savonarola. Hiding in the Loggia dei Lanzi. A troubled man with a pale, distinctive face and a black cloak. Like that of a monk.’

Soderini took a deep breath and waited for more.

‘But then,’ she said brightly, ‘I visited the Carabinieri station and it was clear I was mistaken. The timing was wrong. They have their culprit.’

She walked forward and touched his arm, quite deliberately.

‘Why am I telling you this, Sandro? You know it already.’

‘I knew they had a suspect. I’d no idea you were involved. You should have told me straight out.’

‘I’ve told you now,’ Julia pointed out.

Soderini picked up her coat and held it. ‘In future you’ll come to me when you have doubts. Or problems. I need make one phone call only. This investigation of yours will succeed, I’m sure of it. You know what they say about Rome? Non basta una vita. One lifetime isn’t enough. Florence is smaller than our southern cousin. But Rome is one world. We are many. Give us time.’

She followed him, the same route to the start of the Vasari Corridor she’d taken before.

‘Where are we going exactly?’ she asked as they began to walk past the long lines of self-portraits.

‘I told you. To meet the Brigata Spendereccia.’

‘Which is…?’

‘An evening of food, wine. Pleasurable entertainment. Or so I recall. This job…’ He looked round the palazzo. ‘So many of your questions seem to have little to do with your apparent reason for being here, Julia. Why is that?’

‘Because I can’t think straight walking down a freezing cold corridor, dressed to the nines, with a man I don’t know, going God knows where.’

He looked at her and laughed. So freely she couldn’t help but do the same.

‘The guidebooks will tell you there are four grottoes in the Boboli Gardens. Secret places of delight for the idle Medici bored by the splendour of the Pitti Palace and the public empire beyond its walls.’

‘Grottoes,’ she said softly.

‘Grottoes! Like the Roman emperors used to have. Splendid, private places, built into the hillside of that sprawling garden behind the Pitti. Reminders of another time. Before the Pope’s pronouncements. Before confession and guilt. Windows into a world of the old gods, Pan and his satyrs. Bacchus and his maenads.’

Gardens had never interested her much, nor mythology.

‘Four of them?’

‘So the guidebooks say.’

Sandro Soderini tapped the side of his nose and winked. Coarse gestures. Ones that made him look like a cheap, jumped-up politician for a moment. A nightclub performer or a charlatan selling tricks.

He wound his arm tightly through hers. ‘But guidebooks are for the rabble. You have me now. And I know places the riffraff have never seen. Be grateful. Be attentive. Be…’

She waited, and when he didn’t go on asked, ‘What?’

‘Be good.’

The two men wandered back to the café near Fratelli’s home, to sip coffee, check their watches, talk carefully under the watchful eye of the Grassi dragon. When she ordered her husband to lug some beer crates outside, then slipped into the kitchen herself, Cassini leaned over and whispered, ‘Who’s the battle-axe?’

‘A very good woman,’ Fratelli told him. ‘An angel, of sorts.’

‘Never seen an angel with a mush on it like that. She’d scare the life out of me on a dark night.’

Fratelli scowled. ‘I need to work on your education, Luca. Angels are supposed to scare you sometimes. That’s their job. How else are you to do as you’re told? Speaking of which…’ He looked at Cassini, a big, shambling figure inside his winter coat. ‘What’s your job tonight?’

‘Eyes and ears,’ Cassini repeated from their earlier conversation. ‘We’ve discussed this already, thank you. I’m not stupid.’

‘I know that,’ Fratelli lied, trying to recall if they really had talked it through. ‘And legs, if needed. I can’t run any more.’

‘And this too,’ Cassini said, balling a fist.

Fratelli groaned.

‘If the occasion calls for it,’ the young man added quickly.

‘If the occasion calls for it you’ll get the hell out of there. I’m not having you put your career or your wellbeing on the line. I’ll call the stazione and let them deal with it.’

‘You don’t need to look after me, thank you. Besides, the stazione have been ordered to steer clear.’

‘When Fratelli calls, they come! I’m not looking after you. This is for my sake alone. I don’t want to be saddled with the destruction of what few prospects you possess. I do have a conscience, you know.’

Fratelli glowered at the young carabiniere and muttered something low and vile.

‘No one gives a damn about your conscience,’ the Grassi dragon declared, marching into the café, dishcloth in hand, polishing an old-fashioned glass cappuccino cup. ‘What about your medication?’

‘What about my medication?’ he grumbled.

‘Have you taken it? The right number? At the right time? The way that charming lady doctor of yours—’

‘I’ve taken my pills! I’ve visited the lavatory and washed my hands afterwards. My ears are clean, my hair is combed, my underwear spotless and so neatly ironed the damned undertaker will cut his bill should I fall down dead on the spot and leave you all to clear up the bloody mess! For God’s sake, woman, will people simply listen to me for once? And, after that, kindly bless what little time I’ve left on this earth with some quiet!’

He got what he asked for then. The silence. A shocked one. Fratelli was only aware afterwards, from the ringing of his voice around the walls of the little café, how loud and intemperate he had, in an instant, become.

Signora Grassi’s face was a mask of grief and guilt. Her eyes glassy with tears.

‘Never mind, eh,’ Cassini said gently. ‘I’m sure it’ll all work out fine.’

Fratelli fought to think straight. Did his head hurt? Was he really angry or just… lost?

These moments came from time to time. Not so regularly. Or were they now more common?

Signora Grassi was dabbing at her face with a handkerchief. He found himself racked by a sore sense of guilt.

‘I’m so very sorry,’ he said, reaching across the counter to take her old and wrinkled hands. ‘I’m the most worthless man in the world and do not for one moment deserve your constant, selfless kindness. I reward it with anger and ingratitude and don’t even realize it until after this cruelty of mine is over. But why…’

His hand flew to his mouth. His eyes pricked. His head whirled and for a moment he felt so unsteady his hands gripped the old wooden counter, fighting to keep himself upright. He couldn’t see properly. His head was filled with a sea of hissing tinnitus.

Cassini was there in an instant, saving him with his strong arms, feeding a chair beneath Fratelli’s backside, lowering him down into the seat and safety.

A long moment punctuated by nothing but the ticking of the grandfather clock at the end of the bar, beneath the purple football scarves and photos of old Fiorentina football squads.

Then the metallic rhythm of the clock stopped completely and Pino Fratelli felt his heart freeze with a sharp and unexpected fear.

Was this the instant? No. That would be too cruel. He had work to do. Broken circles to close. A few final deeds, some ghosts to be laid, vile spirits exorcized.

Not now.

He’d pray to a god he didn’t recognize to escape that. Just for a while. Long enough to know some final peace.

He was sweating; breathing in short, pained gasps.

The beast inside was blind and dead. It would wake at a time of its own choosing, regardless of any exterior consequences.

Then the clock ticked again. Fratelli opened his aching eyes and realized they were all there — Grassi and her henpecked husband, Cassini too — holding a glass of water in front of him.

He took it, sipped shakily.

How long? A second? A minute? An hour? He’d no idea.

The pressure in his head eased. It was not pain, not really. More a nudge from something alien inside him, wishing to make its presence known, then, once recognized, roll over and return to sleep.

Fratelli looked at the clock. It had barely moved. A minute perhaps. No more.

He finished the water, shrugged off Cassini’s arm and, as he did so, said, ‘Enough of this. I stood too long at the counter. That’s all. I have an important question for you, Luca. What’s your job tonight?’

The silence again.

Fratelli leaned forward and gazed into his blank young eyes. ‘What is your job?’ he repeated.

The young carabiniere paused, glancing at the other two in embarrassment. ‘I’m your legs, Pino,’ he said eventually.

Fratelli could read those looks. ‘I asked before, didn’t I? That very question.’

‘You did,’ Grassi’s husband told him.

‘When?’

The café owner shook his head and said, ‘Get yourself home, Pino. To bed. We’ll take you. Rest. Sleep for a while.’

‘Sleep? Sleep?’

It was November in Florence. A black, wet night. Just like the one twenty years before when the river rose and engulfed the city in its foul, dank waters, letting loose a heartless creature that still lurked in the shadows somewhere, waiting for another moment, a second opportunity.

He’d sent Julia Wellbeloved out there knowing all this, using it to encourage her natural curiosity and sense of decency and justice. So a part of this creature lay within him. Came from him. Perhaps the spur now, the catalyst, was nothing more than the shrieking cries of a dying maresciallo ordinario gnawed by the cancer of guilt over his wife’s brutal and unexplained murder, willing to sacrifice anything and anyone in order to salve and bury that pain.

‘The time?’ Fratelli asked, too weak to look at the grandfather clock. Or perhaps too frightened, afraid it might cease its ticking once again.

‘It’s ten past seven,’ the husband told him. ‘You looked at the clock just now. Go home.’

‘I was making conversation,’ Fratelli said, forcing himself to his feet. He straightened his long silver hair as best he could, smoothed down his old creased coat, reached into his pockets and, very slowly, with no small difficulty, pulled on his old and tattered calf leather gloves.

His mind was returning. The signs of distress — that dizziness, the ringing of a million tiny bells, the fringing and lack of focus of his vision — were surely diminishing.

‘Luca and I have an appointment,’ he said, convincing himself he felt better already for getting upright. No, not better.

Fine.

Good.

Well.

‘We have?’ Cassini asked.

‘Why else do you think I brought you here? You must learn to ask questions. To demand answers. I had to wait until the due hour before I could act. So we took a coffee. Do I make idle decisions? Am I a man who wastes what time we have?’

Cassini looked a bit offended by that.

‘Who are we meeting then?’ he asked.

Fratelli drew himself up to his full height, which brought him up to Luca Cassini’s chin, and said, ‘A fat naked midget. Who else on a night like this?’

Outside it was cold and wet. For once he was glad to feel the cold sharp rain on his face.

As they strode through the Vasari Corridor, across the Ponte Vecchio, Soderini spoke all the time: of Florence, of history, of his ancient clan and how it had held power here in varying degrees for six centuries or more.

He possessed the soft, persuasive tone of one of those academics who moved so slickly to a career on TV, filling in the spaces for the ignorant while always managing to remind them there was more to be said, though not for them. Knowledgeable and articulate, acutely intelligent yet adept at explaining complex ideas in simple, rational terms, Soderini’s personality was both repellent and magnetic. She could imagine how a man like him might acquire the mayor’s chair, even without that aristocratic blood in his veins.

A natural master, seemingly born to rise to the top of any society or milieu he occupied. There was a genuine love there, too, for himself and his surroundings. The paintings on the walls of the Vasari Corridor, the church, the bridge, the river… all these things he spoke of as if they and the city itself were a part of him, a fifth limb, a visible, tangible facet of a personality that, through his Florentine blood, spanned the centuries.

Then they entered the final narrow portion of the corridor and she saw the sharp right turn towards the Pitti Palace. The fruitless visit to Vanni Tornabuoni’s office seemed an age away. The last few days might have been a week or more. In that time she’d seen Pino Fratelli turn from an eccentric, retired cop into a charismatic and troubled man who interested her greatly; for his character, his damaged nature, and the burning pain he sought, in an absent-minded, haphazard way, to lance.

When she had waited impatiently in Tornabuoni’s office two days earlier she’d cursed the absent cultural director, blamed his absence on the arrogance and lousy timekeeping of all the men she’d known. Her brief husband, more than any.

But she was wrong there. Tornabuoni was probably dead already; shot, headed for that terrible revelation in the Loggia dei Lanzi that evening.

By a man who looked like Girolamo Savonarola, perhaps believed himself to be the heir of the troubled and troublesome priest. That was fact, whatever Walter Marrone and the others thought. Fratelli had never doubted it. He’d understood she was right from the beginning, and quietly led her to San Marco and that painting in the hope of proving his hunch without once revealing his game.

She forgave that sly yet necessary trick. Julia Wellbeloved had come to believe she would forgive Pino Fratelli quite a lot.

They came to a halt by a small door in the corner of the corridor junction. Soderini pulled a key out of his pocket, and turned on a light. A winding staircase circled down. He led the way and soon they were outside.

Even in her thick winter coat, Julia Wellbeloved shivered. The air was damp and chill, rank with the smell of mould and vegetation. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw they had emerged on a slope by the edge of the Boboli Gardens. The palace stood to their right, a vast, dark mass. There were lights at a gate by the public street — a guardhouse, she guessed. To her left, barely illuminated by a few lamps, was an artificial cave built into a strange building encrusted with sculpted vegetation and strange mythical figures. Two marble Roman statues stood on either side. Above the arched roof, embedded in the curious ornamentation, was the Medici coat of arms: six palle; spheres set in a shield.

She thought she could hear sounds — music and voices — from the depths of the grotto.

‘Is this a good idea?’ Julia Wellbeloved asked, half to herself.

‘New horizons,’ Soderini said, and pushed open the iron grille ahead of them. ‘They’re always good.’

He stood there, a handsome, confident middle-aged man, illuminated by the yellow lamps in the mouth of the cave. His hand was out, a gesture of open invitation.

‘You’re coming.’

It wasn’t a question.

A sound, or a sense of someone close by, made her glance back towards the distant gate at the palace end of the corridor. A shape shone in the light there, pale and glistening in the rain. It seemed too grotesque to be real.

Then Sandro Soderini took her arm and the Grotta Grande consumed them.

There were three men waiting for them by the side gate of the Pitti Palace, though only two were made of flesh and blood. The third sat squat and glistening in the light evening rain. Luca Cassini laughed at him.

‘I remember that fat little clown from when I was little,’ he cried.

Fratelli never felt entirely comfortable with the statue of Morgante the bearded dwarf, jester to the court of Cosimo I. Obese and ageing, with a grizzled beard and a hand outstretched to mimic the pose of the great statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Campidoglio in Rome, the clown sat naked on a tortoise spouting water from its beak. The pose was a parody of the Campidoglio masterpiece, a beautiful piece of sculpture with an ugly intent, to mock the physical grotesqueness of the Medici’s personal entertainer. There was something obscenely callous about the thing; especially the way the dwarf’s genitalia were exposed — not hidden as was the case in an obscure and troubling portrait of Morgante in the Uffizi, naked again, younger though no less deformed, his manhood concealed behind a passing butterfly.

Perhaps it was his Roman blood, but Fratelli loved the original, the statue of the great emperor on his horse, hand outstretched to the empire, noble and, in reality, an interesting and intelligent ruler. The Medici, a lesser breed, would have identified with Marcus Aurelius in their stature as grand dukes of Tuscany, patrons of the arts that made the city the gem of the Renaissance. And here was their sad little slave, potbellied and hideous, riding not a horse but a squat tortoise, frozen forever in stone by a wall under a cover of shrubbery beneath the Vasari Corridor. What a wonderful joke it must have appeared, for the beholders anyway. Humour was often attached to cruelty, it seemed, and cruelty troubled Pino Fratelli. It always had.

‘You’ve never been here since you were a schoolboy?’ he asked, shaking himself out of this sudden and unwanted reverie.

‘It’s a garden,’ Cassini responded, drawing himself up to his considerable height. ‘I don’t mind looking at paintings from time to time. But gardens. I mean, honestly…’

He scratched his crewcut. Sometimes he looked more like a strapping, ingenuous sportsman, not a carabiniere at all. ‘No offence but… gardens are for old people, aren’t they?’

The two men who’d met them by the gate glared at him in silence.

‘Sorry, sir,’ Cassini added, looking at the taller of them. ‘I didn’t mean any offence. I’m sure gardening’s all well and good once you’re up for it. If you’re a gardener, that is…’

‘I’m the captain of your Carabinieri stazione,’ Marrone boomed. ‘A place that appears to have lost its sense of discipline.’

‘Too loud, too loud,’ hushed the man next to him. He wore a long blue overcoat and a hat with the badge of the Pitti Palace. Ludovico Ducca was a shadow of the virile young cop who’d helped Pino Fratelli on that grim day twenty years before. Illness had taken its toll on his frame and finally ended a modest career with the Carabinieri. But the city looked after some of their own. Ducca became a guard for the Pitti Palace, not an onerous task. The moment Fratelli had realized that had to be the destination for Julia’s meeting with the Brigata Spendereccia, he’d called his old colleague and arranged for the two of them to meet. Marrone’s presence had not been planned.

‘Discipline?’ Fratelli added, coming to stand in front of his former boss. ‘That’s a bit rich, isn’t it? Luca wasn’t in the station when you issued the orders to steer clear of this place. He can’t disobey an instruction he never heard.’

‘No, I can’t,’ Cassini added firmly. ‘If anyone had bothered to tell me…’

‘Shut up,’ Fratelli ordered, then dragged Marrone by the arm and took him a few steps beyond the obese stone dwarf and the spouting tortoise.

‘Well?’ he asked when they were out of earshot of the others.

‘Well what?’ Marrone retorted. ‘Am I answerable to you now?’

‘I know why I’m here. It’s because you don’t want to be.’ He turned and waved at the vast spreading gardens stretching up the hill behind them. ‘My friend Julia is up there somewhere. At Soderini’s blasted party. Which is called, I gather—’

‘The Brigata Spendereccia,’ Marrone interrupted.

There was a moment of silence, and embarrassment on the part of both men. Marrone for disclosing his secret knowledge; Fratelli for innocently forcing it from his friend.

‘Is it an interesting spectacle?’ Fratelli asked.

‘Do you think for one moment…?’ Marrone exploded. ‘Good God, Pino. If you’d listened to my advice a little over the years you’d be in the position I’m in now. Party to some of the nonsense that goes on in this city, powerless to do a thing to stop it.’

‘That’s why I ignored you—’

‘No it’s not,’ Marrone cut in savagely. ‘You ignored me because you’re you.’

‘Do you expect me to leave that Englishwoman on her own? At an event you’re too timid to police? Is Chavah Efron here too? And a man called Aldo Pontecorvo…’

‘Am I meant to be psychic? You’re the most arrogant and impudent human being…’ Marrone cried. ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

‘Yes. Alone. Spare me the insults. Where does this bacchanal of theirs take place? I don’t intend to march in there without good reason, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be far away.’

‘I don’t know! How could I?’

‘If one hair on that woman’s head comes to harm…’ Fratelli began, stabbing a gloved finger in the captain’s face.

‘You sent her there, didn’t you?’ Marrone’s florid face came close to him in the moonlight. ‘This was your doing. Not mine. And why?’

Silence.

‘Why?’ Marrone demanded again.

‘I have my reasons,’ Fratelli muttered, glancing at the hill. ‘Besides, she wanted to go, and I suspect there’s no stopping her. Not when she wants something.’

There were lights in curious places. Somewhere to look. To stand and wait.

‘I also have my reasons,’ Marrone said. ‘To do with a friend. A man I’ve known all my life, loved like a brother, tried to help as much as I can. And still he won’t confide in me. Still he runs away, hands on ears, tongue-tied when he should be speaking. When I could help if only…’

Fratelli took one step towards the rising incline ahead of them. The lights were becoming clearer. They had a kind of order. Some were close and appeared to be coming from what appeared to be an ornate cave, one of the follies rich men and cardinals built for themselves as amusements, a place he dimly remembered from visits here.

‘Do not turn your back on me!’ Marrone barked, then, with a strong hand, took Fratelli by the coat collar and dragged him round so that they stood there in the gentle rain, two men in early middle age, staring at each other as if they were squaring up for a street brawl.

‘What is this?’ Fratelli said, shaking his long white hair. ‘Why are you so mad at me?’

He felt weak for a moment again, and recalled how close he’d come to passing out in the Grassi dragon’s café. He was stronger now, but not recovered by any means. So he held on to Marrone’s outstretched arm, grateful for the support. Then the brief giddiness was gone. Pretty much, anyway. The monster inside him was like an infant. It slept as readily as it woke.

‘How did I offend you so badly, Walter?’ he asked quietly. ‘Truly…’

He removed Marrone’s hand from his collar and stepped back. ‘Sometimes… I don’t know what I’m saying. Or doing.’ He paused then whispered, as if to himself, ‘We’re in the Boboli Gardens. Somewhere nearby Julia is attending the Brigata Spendereccia with Soderini and his fellows. Perhaps Aldo Pontecorvo, the cook, is present, who certainly committed that strange damage in the Brancacci, and perhaps murdered Tornabuoni too. I care about none of that. Only Julia. She’ll leave if she’s offended. I’ve told her so, though she’s a good and wise woman and would have worked this out for herself.’

He turned on Marrone.

‘Where are your men? You have a suspect. Pontecorvo was there in Fiesole. I guarantee it.’

‘I’ve added him to the list. Be assured of it. But we’re snatching at ghosts in the dark. I can’t march in there on the basis of your guesswork…’

Fratelli looked back towards the gate and the white dwarf glistening in the rain. Cassini and Ducca stood next to the statue, shuffling their big feet. Good men, he thought.

‘All my life,’ Marrone went on, in a hard, embittered tone that Pino Fratelli did not recognize, ‘I looked up to you. Sympathized with you. Covered for you when you went off the rails. All my life…’

Fratelli placed a hand on the captain’s arm. ‘Walter. Now is not the time.’

‘When was? When you recovered from Chiara’s death and could have talked to me then? Over the years when we worked alongside each other? Drank ourselves stupid when we felt like it? When I told you my secrets? And you kept yours locked inside, as if all the grief in this city belonged to you alone? My God…’

‘What are you talking about?’

Marrone stepped back and glowered at him. ‘Or was it yesterday? When you came to my office with your Englishwoman? What was it she yelled at you? Tell him. Tell him, Pino.’

Fratelli felt cold and tired. ‘This is a stupid argument about nothing,’ he said. ‘You’re here. We both know why. To make sure Soderini’s little party doesn’t get out of hand. I’d advise you bring more men…’

‘I know!’ Marrone roared.

The angry words rang out in the black, cold night and echoed off the rusticated stone of the ugly, hulking palace by their side.

‘I know,’ Marrone repeated, more gently.

Fratelli felt another headache coming on. A Negroni would have killed it. The gin and the vermouth. A plate of finocchiona. Five minutes with Julia, bandying clever chitchat across the table.

‘Know what?’ Fratelli asked, and regretted the words the moment they’d passed his lips.

Marrone came close and peered into his face. ‘I read the files from twenty years ago this evening. Every last one of them.’ He sighed. ‘I should have done it long before. I thought it wisest not to. I’d hoped you’d buried her. My prurient interest seemed an imposition. A pointless one. Now I know—’

‘Know what?’ Fratelli screamed at him.

A moment of hesitation, then Marrone said, ‘I know something was smeared on Chiara’s face too. Just like Eve in the Brancacci. By the man who killed her. I know that twenty years ago it was an expensive French lipstick, of a kind she’d never have worn.’

‘It was?’ Fratelli asked, suddenly calm and interested. ‘You’re sure?’

‘French. Chanel. There was a forensic report came in three, four months afterwards. We wouldn’t let you near the files, would we?’

‘No.’ Fratelli put a hand to his chin. ‘French lipstick, twenty years ago. The blood of a slaughtered rooster, perhaps killed for Soderini’s private feast tonight. That’s quite a contrast, don’t you think?’

The carabiniere in Marrone surfaced. ‘You can link this to the Brigata somehow?’ he asked.

Fratelli shrugged. ‘If I’d had access to those papers, who knows? We might not be here tonight. And Vanni Tornabuoni—’

‘In the circumstances,’ Marrone interrupted, ‘we had no choice. How could we allow a man to investigate the murder of his own wife?’

Fratelli looked at him and said nothing.

‘The lipstick—’ Marrone continued.

‘It was smeared on Chiara’s face like a frown,’ Fratelli cut in. He shrugged. ‘As you said. Just like the Brancacci two days ago. I’m sorry. I would have told you yesterday but you seemed to think you had your man. Also, I had the impression you couldn’t wait to get me out of there. I’m an embarrassment, Walter. No, no. Don’t object. I am an embarrassment. I know this better than you.’

‘You could have told me. Bella and I loved Chiara too. You owed us that.’

Evenings out in the city eating cheap pizza, drinking red wine. Fratelli with Chiara, Marrone with his charming, too-loud Neapolitan wife. She’d left him for a lawyer ten years before but they stayed on good terms. Marrone proved a fine father to their twins, even though the lawyer was a crooked villain with a poor reputation in the city. Four lives tied together by amity and love two decades before, now irrevocably severed by time.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because I was broken. I didn’t know what was real and what was part of the nightmare. I felt my world had disappeared and something bleak and dark and evil had taken its place. Then, later… You had problems of your own.’ His hand went to Marrone’s shoulder. ‘Was I wrong?’

‘Yes,’ the captain replied in a curt whisper.

Fratelli found himself stifling — successfully for once — a rising sense of anger.

‘When I woke up I was in that sanatorium. And you were visiting every day, with chocolates and smuggled bottles of booze. I was fighting to find a little of who I was. To understand Chiara was gone from me. Besides, neither of us wanted to talk much, did we? Not then.’

‘Perhaps not,’ the man next to him agreed.

‘Is there more?’ Fratelli asked.

‘You know there is. You asked Cassini…’ He nodded back towards the gate. ‘You told him to check the file. You suspected it was there.’ The captain laughed, a short, dry sound. ‘You always were one step ahead of everyone else, weren’t you? And as usual you never thought to mention it.’

‘Would you have listened?’

‘It would have pained me. Not as much as you, of course. But it would have hurt. And I would have listened,’ Marrone insisted. ‘How could I not?’

‘Then what is it I know?’ Fratelli asked.

‘That the night Chiara went missing there was a Brigata meeting. Our men back then were told to avoid it. Just as they are now, two decades on. Who was there… we’ve no information…’

‘Soderini and Tornabuoni,’ Fratelli told him. ‘Along with half their peers. Haven’t you noticed the governance of this city is handed down from generation to generation? Slowly, with a pretence of fairness. But we’re theirs, Walter, and they know it. As do we.’

Marrone sighed and stuffed his hands deep into the pockets of his coat.

‘I’ve never turned my back on a crime in this city,’ he said. ‘Nor would I. Whoever was the perpetrator—’

‘Oh, please!’ Fratelli complained. ‘We’re too long in the tooth to mince words with one another. If a villain presents himself… of course not. But do you look?’ He waved an arm around the vast gardens ahead of them. ‘Or do you hide when they order it? We both know the answer. This is how the world works. Ours, anyway. Soderini and his acolytes were council men twenty years ago. I checked. The Brigata’s a secret, private civic institution. I have no proof, no piece of paper to say it. Do you think they keep an attendance book? But they were there. I’m sure of it…’

‘If you’re sure, you’re sure.’

Fratelli shook his head. ‘There’s a worm in this dark place. There always has been. Perhaps it’s a part of us, a part we seek to dismiss, to ignore and pretend it doesn’t exist. Unless you’re one of them.’

The vast stone bulk of the Pitti Palace, a hideous fortress brimming with gorgeous treasures, loomed over them, casting a shadow beneath the sickle moon. The heavy downpour of early evening was turning to light drizzle. This wasn’t twenty years before, when the heavens had turned on the city in constant, howling blasts.

‘Perhaps we’re the fools,’ he whispered. ‘The deceivers. Blind to what we really are.’

The taller man came forward and held Pino Fratelli in a tight bear hug. Then he whispered in his ear, ‘Lead and I will follow. But remember this…’ Marrone let go, stood back, shook a finger at him. ‘We’re equal, and that’s the way it’ll stay! No more sly secrets. No more of your trademark trickery. You’re a cunning old fox and I’ve always followed like a willing ignoramus. But please. Together now, Pino. Bring your friend the dullard along with you. This is an unfinished funeral for me as well.’

Fratelli shook his head. His eyes felt moist for some reason and his throat hurt.

‘Pontecorvo would have been seventeen that night,’ Marrone added. ‘He lived with his mother in a hovel here. Close enough to your house.’

‘Seventeen?’ Fratelli muttered. ‘Not much more than a child…’

‘We pulled him in for unruly behaviour in January when his mother died,’ the captain went on. ‘Last Sunday he was thrown out of his lodgings over debts. He was ranting, bellowing threats against all and sundry. There’s your catalyst. You always want one, don’t you?’

It had to be said.

‘There’s a man in his grand office in the Palazzo Vecchio who thinks he owns you, Walter. Along with every other brick and cobblestone in Florence. I’m just a dying, failed maresciallo ordinario. You’ve a career and a reputation. You could give me your weapon and leave this to me. I’ve not got a damned thing to lose.’

‘Let me worry about that,’ Marrone told him. The captain glanced back at the gate. ‘We’ve got Ducca, who’s not fit for much, if I’m honest. And one mindless young cadet…’

‘Don’t speak of Luca that way. He’s a fine young man who deserves better.’

Marrone cast his head to one side and frowned.

‘And they’re all we’ve got,’ Fratelli added.

‘Good,’ Marrone said, then rubbed his hands and grinned. It occurred to Fratelli he hadn’t seen that happy expression in a long time.

Julia Wellbeloved found herself in a place so curious she had to unwind her arm from Sandro Soderini’s and stand in the middle of the Grotta Grande, wide-eyed and lost for words. A gently curving artificial structure now held them like a monster’s mouth enfolding its victims, ready to swallow. The fantastical cavern was a riot of decoration, a rich lunatic’s junk room crammed to the gills with the dreams of several warped imaginations. The walls were covered in shaped mortar and stalactites festooned with shells and pebbles and hunks of quartz. When these encrustations retreated, the gaps were filled by frescoes of Arcadian landscapes, paintings of strange, exotic creatures, leopards and monkeys, goats and mountain bear. As her eyes adjusted to the half-dark, she could see — emerging among the flamboyant mortar half-formed figures there — satyrs and leering shepherds, fantastic anthropomorphic creatures chasing capering nymphs.

She followed him through the interior arch and entered a tiny chamber dominated by a single statue: a muscular, naked man abducting a beautiful, protesting woman. The fingers of this virile attacker bit into his victim’s flesh in a cruel and physical way that reminded her of Bernini. This was too good a work to hide in the darkness beneath the hill of the Boboli Gardens.

‘Any ideas?’ Soderini asked.

‘About what?’

‘About the statue, of course. You said you studied art. Let’s have a little proof.’

‘Is this a game?’ she asked testily.

‘Most things are. Indulge me.’

Shaking her head, amused by this man in spite of herself, she checked the paintings on the walls in this tiny antechamber, her mind straying to the lights in the room beyond, and the rising sound of company somewhere close by, yet hidden.

Classical scenes. Warfare. Rape and pillage. The subject she saw everywhere in Florence; on the ceilings of the Palazzo Vecchio, on the walls of the Uffizi. Old legends, great fairy stories that enchanted the aristocrats of the Renaissance, many of whom wished to trace their lineage back to the ancients.

She walked round the smooth and delicately sculpted marble, touched the man’s strong thigh, the woman’s solid arm, looked at her lovely face, turned away from her abductor, yet half smiling in the alluring way that certain men seemed to feel might happen in circumstances such as this.

Rape in classical times always had a touch of beauty, of the spiritual, about it. Men were there to dominate and subjugate, women to be their subjects. That was the way of the world.

‘I suppose you think she was asking for it?’ she said, turning on Soderini.

‘Who was?’

‘Helen of Troy,’ she guessed. ‘This’ — she slapped the male statue’s thighs — ‘is Theseus.’

Soderini nodded, impressed. ‘Very good. And this?’ he asked, gesturing at the final room.

She strode through into the last of the three chambers. It was taller than the others with a circular window at the top. The glass there was grubby. Through it the weak rays of the moon fell upon a single pale statue in a fountain set at the centre. Vicious horned satyrs clung to the edge beneath the feet of the lovely woman depicted above them, their cruel faces set in expressions of lust and hate.

Hand across her breasts, placid face staring down at humanity. The pose was close to that of Botticelli’s depiction of Venus, new-born, emerging from a scallop shell, brought into being when the Titan cut off the testicles of his own father, the primordial god Uranus, and flung them into the bright blue waters of the Mediterranean.

A sudden keen memory from the Palazzo Vecchio. The quarters of Cosimo I, the man who created this labyrinth of underground temples. A vast ceiling painting of the moment of her creation: the vengeful son taking a scythe to the loins of his prone and grizzled father.

A canvas by whom?

She felt the smothering weight of Florentine history begin to bear down on her, linking the living to the dead, the past to the present in a constant, circling nexus as real and as heavy as the stones of the city itself.

By Vasari, who else? The man who built the corridor all the way from the fortress on the other side of the river to this very spot, and designed, with Buontalenti, the interior cave in which the Medici worshipped other gods. A willing slave to the feverish imagination of his masters.

‘They practised alchemy here,’ Soderini said.

‘I thought they burned people for that,’ she said without thinking.

‘No. In Florence they burned people for disobedience. Here…’ His hand gripped the head of the nearest satyr, which was clinging to the bowl beneath Venus, eyeing the beautiful woman above it with a naked hunger. ‘They tried to turn base metal into gold. Not because they needed it, of course. But to unlock the secrets of eternal life. To reverse what lesser men would call the laws of nature.’

‘They failed, Sandro,’ she said.

‘But they tried, Julia.’

The sounds of revelry were closer, yet just as elusive in their source. Soderini marched to the furthest wall and stared at a hideous face that grinned at them from the mortar. Dusty, probably terracotta, she thought, it resembled that of a man turning into something else. A creature of the sea, half flesh, half seaweed. The muffled sounds were coming from beyond.

‘The books will tell you there are three chambers in the Grotta Grande,’ Soderini said.

He found a handle on the grim face on the wall, pulled, and the masonry began to move.

‘The books lie.’

Voices and music. Then a sudden wave of heat.

The caves were nothing more than fanciful decorated rooms set inside a series of small, interlinked buildings attached to the lower side of the Boboli hill, covered in part with earth, then decorated and made to look real, natural.

A small reservoir was created above the complex. It provided sufficient pressure to power the fountains inside, a sink in the kitchen and a tiny washroom. In summer, hidden shafts were opened to allow in fresh air. In winter, gas heaters brought a stifling, damp heat to the final, secret cavern where they met and dined. A narrow lane at the rear allowed food and other goods to be brought in without spoiling the theatrical illusion at the front.

‘You know this place,’ Chavah Efron said. ‘What next?’

They stood outside by a catering van. She had the bag from Fiesole heavy in her hand.

‘We serve them,’ he said.

Then one more death and we flee. Take what money we can steal, walk to Santa Maria Novella and catch the first train south — to Rome, to Naples; to somewhere warm with the promise of sun and a different life.

No more seedy assignations beneath the Boboli earth. Twelve times a year. Two hundred and forty Brigate in all. He’d worked every one, as skivvy and waiter; then, latterly, following the butcher Bertorelli’s incarceration, as master of the kitchen in San Marco. The only source of a pitiful income, as his solitary mother grew meaner and madder with the years, relying on him to do everything until the very end.

And all the time the grotto lived in his head like a disease, as it had since that distant night of the flood.

Drink this now, boy, and everything will be fine.

They’d lied to him then, for their own purposes. In the intervening years they would lie to many others, often in his presence, as if he didn’t exist. So he’d stood and watched, a craven figure, half hidden in the shadows, feeling the atmosphere change, the innocent and the cowardly depart, the hardened figures in the gang grow drunk and bitter as the evening turned from louche carousing to riot to debauchery then worse. When the screaming started he stayed there too, watching those who had taken his place, knowing he was as much use to them as any of the stone satyrs leering from Vasari’s hideous mortar.

Afterwards came that siren, wheedling voice. A word in the ear. A rank, breathy introduction with an offer. A job, a threat, a simple promise: be silent and await your reward. He saw them now, faces at the back of photos in museums and institutions. Mostly women, but not always. Tornabuoni, a man who would consume anything, saw to that.

This was about submission as much as rape. They would be made tame and timid, loyalty bought through a small gift or preferment, the memory of their loss cemented in place by an inner sense of shame he understood only too well. These were the hierarchies, made up of the bones and corpses of centuries, upon which Florence — his city, as much as Tornabuoni’s or Soderini’s — was built. A man like Savonarola, retrieved from those lost ashes scattered on the Arno from the Ponte Vecchio, would recognize it in an instant, and shriek his curses into their ears, all of them, high and low.

A month ago he’d watched, more closely than ever, not knowing why. There was something about the victim they picked this time. Someone, a local, infrequent visitor one of the kitchen hands said, had seen the girl performing at a private function in the city. Brought her along, paid for her to wear her Egyptian costume, a bikini with a flimsy golden skirt barely covering her hips, a top just as skimpy, a jewelled headband, a transparent shawl. Then, after the dinner, she’d danced for them again, a more lurid and sensual performance. Twelve men, three women guests. When the direction of the evening became obvious, the women left, then most of the men. They’d seen Chavah Efron, the dancing girl brought in to shake and tremble her naked thighs and hips in their faces, lean down and show them her breasts as they slavered over their cups, eyes glazed and full of heat.

The rest knew what was coming.

Drink this now, boy, and everything will be fine.

That was the biggest lie of all. Just two of them took her, threw her screaming into the shadows, did whatever they wanted. The rest retreated and it was always like this. Always them. The same pair from twenty years ago, assailing her as once they’d assailed him.

‘What would you have done?’ he asked. ‘You and Ari?’

Chavah Efron stood there, a small, muscular determined woman, and said, ‘Killed them all. That beast Tornabuoni first…’

‘I dealt with him,’ he said.

‘You cut off the snake, not the head…’

‘The head goes on forever,’ he whispered.

The head is us, he thought. This city, running through our veins as the Arno runs through it, in a muddy, swirling flood.

She had him by the collar, so close he could smell the sweetness of her breath. ‘If you lack the courage, why are we here?’

‘To find the last one…’ he began.

‘They’re all the same. Can’t you see? All…’

‘We could go south…’

She laughed and then he knew. This was a dream, had been from the moment of his birth, would be till the end. They were living through the Anni di Piombo, the Years of Lead. A time of bombs and bullets, from left and right, Cagliari to Milan; blood and chaos throughout an Italy shrieking beneath the mass of its own corruption.

A noise. A quick movement of her foot. She kicked the flap of the bag open, and as she did so he saw again the weapons hidden there, metal shining in the half-light.

I shall spill flood waters upon the earth. You shall know them, and in them shall be your blood.

The flood did not recede. It ran through you, stormed greedily down your screaming mouth, lurked within your heart, craving justice.

‘The first,’ she said, ‘is yours.’ Then Chavah Efron picked up the bag, reached for the weapons inside and offered him the first to come to hand.

Franco Mariani, the man from San Marco, stood near the entrance, a little drunk, his walrus moustache now drooping more than ever. Julia soon realized she was the only woman, the idle focus for the attention of a dozen men in all, every one of them middle-aged, dressed in a dark suit and downcast in mood — even Soderini now, it seemed. This chamber was perfectly circular, with a door in darkness at the rear through which a couple of waitresses were emerging bearing drinks.

The walls here were frescoed, with none of the mortared stalagmites and encrustations of the previous rooms. Instead they offered a panorama of a riotous Arcadian age: battling warriors, screaming women, rampant satyrs, lust and violence, passion and a searing animal thirst for life. The contortions of naked skin, of grin and grimace, death cry and lustful croak, travelled around the circular space, all pointing to a focal point, back behind her, above the secret door through which she’d entered.

She sought the centre of this tumultuous, rolling fray; found it finally. Above the dark arch which had led them past the figure of Helen’s abduction, past the statue of Venus and her stone satyrs, was a large fresco that depicted a naked couple wrapped in each other’s arms, on the point of coupling ecstatically in an artificial pose, upright, locked together against a tree of orange fruit. This was Masaccio’s stricken couple, the newly fallen Adam and Eve, stumbling into the world that awaited them. The real world. That of Florence; of Sandro Soderini, his ancestors and his heirs.

Gone was the shame, gone the despair. Their nakedness was displayed openly. Their beautiful faces were wreathed in anticipation, not coarsened, as they appeared in the chapel, but made more beautiful by this open acceptance of who and what they were.

It was Eve’s mouth that drew Julia’s attention above all else. The lips were full and carmine, raised in an ecstatic grin that was the mirror image of the gory smear she’d seen defiling the calm, pure face of Masolino’s Eve on the column opposite in the Brancacci.

The couple above the tiny door looked ready to consume each other. She took in the careful, exact detail of their perfect, powerful bodies, all the physical facts that artists of this time were supposed to ignore: hair and flesh meant to be hidden or carefully ignored by the Renaissance artist’s brush. In Vasari’s hidden cavern, beneath the earth of the Boboli Gardens, all was revealed, displayed proudly for the voyeuristic audience below.

Soderini eyed the circle of tables set for dinner, then raised his glass to her. Soon they would sit down and the meal begin.

‘I told you, Julia. This is our secret. Yours now, too.’

Briefly, for no more than a second, there was a face at the door. A tall man, with a pale and bloodless look, beaked nose, beady raptor eyes full of hate and misery, gleaming skull.

She felt as faint and weak as she had in San Marco, tried to steady herself on Soderini’s arm. When she looked again, the shape at the door had vanished.

‘Are you all right?’ Soderini asked.

‘Never better,’ she murmured automatically.

There was a waitress with them. A striking young woman with dark hair and an interesting, engaged face.

‘Is everyone here?’ she asked. ‘Is it time to start?’

Soderini glanced around the room. ‘They’re here,’ he said.

The woman smiled and left. The face hadn’t reappeared. It was a trick of the light, her imagination feasting on the atmosphere and the half-seen faces in the shadows. That was all.

Luca Cassini pushed at the iron gates on the Grotta Grande. The sound of voices was muffled and subtle. But it was there, and so was the Brigata Spendereccia, with Julia Wellbeloved among them.

‘I can get in,’ Cassini said. He tested the ironwork again. ‘Kick it down if you want. But…’

‘But what?’ Fratelli asked.

‘What if it’s just a party? Bunch of men getting plastered with a bit of pretty company. I mean… if Julia’s in trouble, no problem. But what if it’s… innocent?’

‘Do innocents scurry beneath the earth to have their fun?’ Fratelli asked, watching the way Marrone and Ducca stared at the damp ground, shuffling their feet. ‘Tell me truthfully, Walter. What’s happened here over the years?’

Marrone took a deep, pained breath. ‘Nothing. No complaints. No tearful women racing to the stazione. Nothing…’

‘Because?’ Fratelli demanded.

‘Because they get something to keep their mouths shut,’ Ludovico Ducca said. ‘People talk. I’ve heard them.’

‘Heard what?’ Cassini asked.

‘They get the nod. Stepping on the “up” escalator for no good reason. Women mainly. Not always. Oh, please. You’ve never noticed? Not seen someone turn up one Monday morning, fresh desk, new chair? Nice comfy job in the office. A seat on the council. A place on one of those well-paid committees. And you ask yourself: where the hell did they come from? How come they got that, not me?’ He grimaced. ‘Boy or girl. Vanni Tornabuoni…’

He glanced back at the grim shape of the palace behind them.

‘I found a lad in his office one morning. Naked, shivering. Covered in scratches. Scared witless. Orphan from one of the charities. God knows what that animal got up to.’

‘You could have told me!’ Marrone complained.

‘Then we’d both be out of a job. You know what that kid was doing when I saw him next?’

Ducca leaned over and winked at Walter Marrone in the moonlight. ‘Sitting on a horse outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Blue cap. Pretty uniform. Municipal police officer, telling off tourists for dropping litter. I’ve seen it happen in your own stazione. And so have you. So would Pino here, if he wasn’t so damned blinkered he thinks the only bad in the world lies out there…’

Ludovico Ducca waved his arm towards the outline of the palace and the lights of Oltrarno beyond.

‘It’s there that bothers me right now,’ Fratelli cried, jerking his thumb at the Grotta Grande.

‘Do you lot want me to break down these bloody gates or not?’ Luca Cassini demanded.

‘Can you open it… gently?’ Fratelli asked.

Cassini placed his strong right shoulder to the metalwork, dug his feet into the damp gravel and pushed.

Nothing.

Fratelli joined him, putting his weight against the gate. A moment later Marrone was there too, and then Ludovico Ducca.

It wasn’t gentle. Certainly not quiet. When the lock on the gate finally gave, it did so with a high-pitched crack that rang around the mortared walls of the grotto like a gunshot. All four men fell through, stumbling forwards with its collapse. The grating held briefly in their hands, then through its own bulk and momentum detached itself and crashed down on the first low circular marble fountain near the entrance, shattering the rim, dispatching shards of stone into the darkness.

When the ringing of the metal subsided, they went inside the Grotta Grande. A hubbub of distant voices drifted to them from somewhere ahead in the dark.

Then something unmistakable broke the indecipherable babble.

A scream.

Soderini watched the two walk through the door, saw what they were carrying, thought for a moment and stepped back into the shadows. There he felt for the small black handgun he’d kept with him ever since the strange, threatening messages began to appear. He was out of sight in the small, overheated cavern. The crowd had gone quiet the moment the pair emerged — the woman shouting, the man behind her silent and sullen.

Tall, bald, imposing, in the food-spattered uniform of a chef. Vaguely familiar, Soderini thought. A Brigata minion, a permanent fixture. The woman was the waitress. Her eyes sparkled with anticipation.

He looked around. Julia Wellbeloved was nowhere to be seen. Mariani stood at the front, shouting and waving his arms like the pompous buffoon he was.

‘What is this noise?’ he bellowed. ‘Be gone! You disturb the evening…’

The idiotic rant went on. Soderini didn’t listen. Instead he caught the glint in the woman’s eye and retreated further into the darkness, slipping the handgun by his side. There was no clear shot for him, not through the forest of bodies ahead; a dozen men in suits, civil servants and businessmen, hangers-on and Florentine arrivistes, milling around this angry, strange couple.

Many things happened in these caves and never found their way out into the light of day. Perhaps they thought this was one more show, another theatrical performance to amuse the satyrs frozen in the walls: two figures like comical, avenging chefs, marching from the kitchen, looking for someone. That was clear.

The man had a pistol low in his right hand, the woman some kind of larger semiautomatic.

What was a small handgun against a weapon like that? Soderini, a practical, careful man, knew the answer.

A hole in the wall of the final chamber, a secret door crammed with flailing bodies, men in suits, drunk and fearful, trying to squeeze their way through.

Fratelli’s head felt strange. The closeness of the caverns, the heat, the noise, the damp and noxious air… all these things conspired to bewilder him, to fill his fevered mind with fear and uncertainty.

It happens soon, he thought. And there are still such matters to be dealt with.

Julia was here. He’d sent her into the presence of the man who’d murdered Vanni Tornabuoni; someone who was there that distant, dismal night of the flood when Florence succumbed to the cold embrace of the river and Chiara died on the staircase of their house not far from the tragic couple in the Brancacci.

The painful round of self-hate was interrupted. From somewhere came the low rattle of a weapon and the shrill sound of a human scream.

Bodies poured towards him, scattering tables along the way. The mass seemed impenetrable, the panic a human flood; a relentless, inevitable tide, impossible to hold back.

Fratelli found himself praying for a weapon, anything to smash a way through this screaming mob. Finally Luca Cassini drove past, bellowing, using his fists and elbows, his massive strength and size to get through.

The mechanical chatter of gunfire — a quick, heartless burst — broke the din again, but Cassini was beneath the entry arch by that time, dragging Fratelli behind him as they squeezed their way through the narrow gap in the wall.

More light, the smell of food and drink, the sharp and brittle tang of fear. Fratelli felt his foot catch on something — a rock, a fleeing reveller from the disastrous Brigata, he never knew. Cassini’s hand left him and all he saw was a forest of limbs, trampling, stumbling. Head down, white hair flying around him, he wondered if this was where the long and fruitless journey ended, in a smashed skull on the rock floor, his life, his ambitions eking out as nothing but the dreams of an impotent old fool.

Then another hand came out and took hold of his jacket, jerked him into the corner, the shadows, a place of momentary safety.

Pino Fratelli found himself looking into the face of Sandro Soderini. The mayor had his back to the wall, a small handgun in his right hand, his hawkish eyes flashing between the man before him and the room. Fratelli followed the line of his gaze. The banqueting tables were thrown to the floor, dishes and drink and food scattered across the stones. At the centre, scattered like a cast-off toy, a body, bloodied face upright. The museum official, Mariani.

Luca Cassini was fighting to reach the two figures with the weapons, Marrone and Ludovico Ducca behind, trying to drag him back, speaking words of warning, of sense. Fratelli felt his skin grow cold as he recalled the way Luca had smirked when they’d first met and showed him that massive balled fist.

Bit of a fight? I’m your man.

Not now, Fratelli said to himself.

Not with Savonarola’s double marching through the tables, staring at Cassini as if he were a lunatic, barking, ‘Where is he? Where is he?’

‘Get back, Luca,’ Fratelli shouted at Cassini, who took not a moment’s notice.

Instead the young officer waved his arm ahead and yelled, ‘Put that weapon down, will you?’ As plainly as if he were dealing with a drunk in the street. Then, at the woman, Cassini bawled, ‘And you. I’ve got your dog, you know. There’s going to be more carabinieri in here in a moment than you two have seen in a lifetime. Put those bloody guns down, I say…’

Crazed, fixated, Pontecorvo hunted for a single victim among the mob.

Soderini stayed in the shadows, didn’t protest when Fratelli reached out and demanded the gun. Holding it down by his side, out of sight, he then stepped out into the waxy yellow candlelight.

I’m a dead man, he thought. What does it matter where and when?

‘Where is he?’ Pontecorvo yelled.

‘In custody,’ Fratelli declared as he strode boldly into the room to confront them. ‘This nonsense is at an end, Aldo. And so, please, is your anger. Righteous or not.’

The museum man was gone, no doubt about it. It was a miracle he was alone. This wasn’t slaughter for slaughter’s sake. Not yet.

‘He’s in our custody.’ Fratelli smiled and held out his free hand, keeping the gun hidden by his side in his left. ‘As you must be now. You…’ He nodded at the lean, pale figure behind her. ‘And your friend. Put down the weapons. Come with us. Tell us what you know. We have as many questions for these people as you. Help us and we will find you justice…’

‘Find what?’

It was the woman, and her voice possessed a cold and stony vehemence. She raised the ugly black weapon in his direction.

‘Find justice,’ Fratelli said more loudly. ‘For you. For all of us.’ He kept his eyes on the man and it occurred to him that the handgun in those long, powerful arms looked utterly out of place, as if he had no idea how best to use it.

A cook. Someone familiar with knives and the butchery of meat. Vanni Tornabuoni’s severed head was his. The bloody corpse of Mariani hers.

Pino Fratelli watched him carefully as he said, ‘Twenty years ago my wife died on the steps of our house in Oltrarno, not far from here. Raped and murdered.’ His eyes never left those pale, grim features. ‘Left with a scarlet frown of lipstick.’

The pale and featureless face broke in a howl of wordless grief and terror.

‘Talk to me,’ Fratelli demanded, keeping the weapon down in his left hand, walking forward, furious, his head full of heat and pressure and so many urgent questions. ‘Tell me why.’

The woman was the crazier. No grief, no agony on her face. Only anger and insanity, and a growing sense of puzzlement. She was turning towards the man behind her.

‘What did you do?’ Pino Fratelli asked as his head began to swim.

Twenty years before and the memory of that night was still turning, screaming in his head.

In the darkness of the cave where it began came a picture: their make-up on his face, lipstick too, the same as he had in his pocket. Drugs and drink. And something else. A virus that lived inside his blood, a wriggling, screaming memory.

‘Filth!’ his mother said when he ran shrieking to her, slamming the door in his face, leaving him alone. A bastard child, stranded by the grim cruel thing called fate.

Lost, unable to think, he’d staggered down the road, following the pair of men ahead. In a narrow street near Carmine, an open door. A woman beckoning them in. The rising tide of mud and filth around them. He watched, he followed, hid in the downstairs room amidst the washing and the junk.

Listened to the sounds from above and felt the hellish grotto had followed him all the way across Oltrarno into this modest little house.

Two decades on, and Aldo Pontecorvo thought of the church of Carmine, the place his mother dragged him every Sunday, to confess his sins, never hers. To pinch him when he stared at the naked women on the columns.

Which were you?

That was one question. Another…

The creature behind the tree. The beautiful, blonde head atop the curving body of a serpent, as sinuous and deadly as the long, wide wave he’d seen rising out of the muddy waters of the Arno.

Who, in truth, was she?

The answers had been there all along. He had simply wished to avoid them. And had done so, since when the lights had failed and the waters receded a little, he’d stumbled out of that dread house, gone home, let his mother beat him, knowing all the time he was changed forever just as surely as the angel’s bitter, violent fury had transformed the fleeing couple as they were driven from the Gates of Paradise.

Two decades to see a chance of salvation. It was with him now in the sweaty, confused interior of the cavern, leering satyrs watching from the crumbling walls.

The woman who’d seduced him. The white-haired man he’d followed from afar for years. A serious, talented detective. Though not wise enough to save his wife.

He watched as the woman turned towards Fratelli, weapon rising in her hand. She’d killed the first man she’d seen, a drone who always left the Brigata early. Would murder them all. That was her intent all along. The hunger was in her blood, unstoppable, and always had been.

‘What…?’ Fratelli began.

Now the detective stood in front of him, oblivious to the woman with her weapon and her rage.

The carabiniere had a gun. That was to be expected, though he didn’t seem ready to use it. Not yet.

‘I will show you…’ Pontecorvo began.

But saying it brought back the dread pictures, robbed his throat of the words.

‘Show me what?’ the man demanded.

There were no easy beginnings, no simple answers, and what responses there were lay buried deep, hidden beneath the stultifying layers of time and hurtful memories.

‘Enough,’ Chavah screamed, turning, flecks of spittle flying from her furious lips, the weapon tight in her strong, bronzed arms.

Fratelli took one step forward. A mistake.

Aldo Pontecorvo watched her start to move and, as she did, he placed the handgun from the Fiesole farmhouse close to the back of her head and pulled the trigger.

The second shot he’d ever fired. The second death after Tornabuoni’s.

A scream in the miasmic, close cavern air, and a small, taut body tumbling, arms flailing, towards the suited corpse upon the floor.

Three more shells fired wildly around him as Pontecorvo stumbled backwards, making his way by the dim light of the wan candles. He fell upon the ancient fountain at the rear and, with all his strength, heaved at the central statue there, toppling it, sending the marble figures crashing to the floor.

The weight and pressure in the hillside cistern was released at that moment, as the Arno had been twenty years before. Chill water gushed out of the shattered mouth. Voices bellowed and shrieked behind him.

He pushed through the torrent, raced out into the cold open air, found the first van at the back of the cavern. Behind him he could hear the freed waters gushing wildly from the shattered fountain. The flood was here again.

A lunge for the driver’s door, someone in the way, not moving.

The memory came quickly. The Loggia dei Lanzi on another damp, dark night; Vanni Tornabuoni’s head in his sack bag, a boatman’s hook to hand, waiting on the moment.

She wore a black evening dress with pearls around her smooth, white throat. Her hair was silver in the moonlight, her eyes intelligent, as indignant as scared.

Shrewd enough to flee the cavern once Chavah walked in and shook that rifle at them. To hide somewhere she must have thought as safe a place as any.

‘Who are you?’ he began.

‘No one,’ she answered in that same English accent he remembered. ‘Let me go.’

What are you looking at? Niente, niente, niente.

The same answer, the same lie.

He thrust her through the door, forced her into the driver’s seat. A face more serene than Chavah Efron’s. Not so far from that of the first beautiful Eve on the Brancacci wall.

‘Drive,’ he ordered, raising his pistol to her face. ‘Where I want to go. Drive. Or I shoot you now.’

Luca Cassini was there first, so quickly he managed to bang on the door of the van as it struggled along the lane towards Oltrarno. Moments after, he was leaping into a second vehicle, screaming at them to get in.

Marrone made it into the rear. Fratelli, in the passenger seat, watching Cassini struggle with the ignition, heard an unexpected voice.

‘This isn’t a place for you,’ the captain said.

‘I’ll decide that,’ Soderini replied, scrambling in beside him.

Cassini managed to bring the engine to life. And then they lurched off down the passageway.

It was narrow and winding, but not so much that Fratelli expected to see Pontecorvo’s van ahead. There it was, anyway, on the main road from the Ponte Vecchio, slowly heading for a side-street corner, back into the warren of houses and alleys that stretched along the river.

‘Where on earth’s he going, Pino?’ Cassini asked. ‘You’re always full of ideas.’

Fratelli barely heard. His blood was racing, veins pulsing in his temples. He was glad of the seat, that he could hold on to the door with his hand as Luca Cassini chased after the fugitive Pontecorvo. The monster was stirring, choosing its time, as he always knew it would.

‘Pino!’ Cassini said, fighting with the wheel as he shook Fratelli’s arm. ‘Are you OK?’

‘He’s taking Julia back,’ Fratelli said in a quiet, weary voice.

‘Back where?’

‘To Chiara…’

Cassini swore. The van ahead had lurched off to the right, was tearing down a single cobbled lane. Away from Fratelli’s terraced house.

‘Any other ideas?’ the young officer asked.

Fratelli was about to speak when his shoulder shook violently.

‘My gun,’ Soderini ordered, and a hand appeared.

‘Carmine,’ Fratelli muttered, ignoring the man behind. In his head he could see the figures on the wall: two peaceful and beatific, two in agony. It might have been Chiara’s face for Eve. Or Julia’s. He was no longer sure.

‘My gun!’

Fratelli turned, pistol in hand, aimed it gently in the mayor’s direction.

The van slowed down. There was silence in the dark interior.

Silence even from Sandro Soderini, wild-eyed and furious as he stared down the man in front of him.

‘This is mine,’ Fratelli said as they approached the low church steps and saw a tall figure fly out of the door, dragging Julia with him. ‘And so is he.’

The Brancacci in moonlight. A naked couple frescoed forever on the pillars.

Fratelli took three difficult steps forward, listened. The hissing sea of tinnitus was starting in his head. His mind couldn’t focus. And still he had Soderini’s gun tight in his right hand, clutched to his waist.

Voices in the shadows, among the still and watchful crowds on the walls.

A man’s wild chattering. Julia’s quiet tones.

Trying to reassure him. To say…

Calm down. Be reasonable. All this will end. And end well.

Such an English response. So civilized and in this of all places, the sacred, ancient corner of Oltrarno where humanity’s dawdling trek out of the Dark Ages was supposed to begin.

A burst of dim light. A handful of the bulbs in Carmine’s interior began to come to life.

Marrone was talking frantically into his radio. Luca Cassini came and placed his burly frame in front, the way he always would. And Sandro Soderini…

The briefest of glances around revealed nothing.

‘You stay out of this, Pino,’ Cassini said as Fratelli walked on.

He saw them now. The tall, miserable figure of Aldo Pontecorvo, in the centre of the chapel; Julia in his arms, a gun to her throat.

She didn’t look so scared. More angry, Fratelli thought.

‘Keep back!’ the young carabiniere yelled and tried to hold him.

Fratelli raised Soderini’s weapon to the ceiling, loosed off a shell. Listened to the shot boom around the nave.

‘I don’t wish to hurt you, Luca,’ he said, elbowing the young cop aside. ‘So kindly keep out of my way.’

No sheets or scaffolding any more. The restorers’ work almost done. No bloody smears from a cockerel’s neck; no dust of the ages or stains from that terrible inundation two decades before.

This was a world, a universe, in miniature. The eternal couple either side, beckoning the congregation into a sea of humanity; behind them faces speaking another old story, that of Saint Peter, played out on frescoed walls.

Fratelli could remember his mother — the only true mother he could accurately picture — telling him those stories. Peter healing the cripple, raising the dead Tabitha and the son of Theophilus. Curing the sick with his shadow. Arguing with the magician Simon Magus in front of the cruel emperor Nero. Finally crucified upside down in front of a set of medieval walls that might have been the Porta San Frediano a few footsteps beyond the door.

And all the while the world watched; ordinary men, ordinary faces, Florentines through and through, peering from the brushstrokes left by Masaccio, Masalino and Filippino Lippi half a millennium before.

Pontecorvo and Julia seemed to be part of this visual narrative, distantly observed from the vaulted ceiling by a flock of curious angels and a Virgin, enthroned on high.

His mother’s dead voice whispered in his ear, the words he’d first heard forty years before.

‘We’re all part of this story, Pino. We always will be.’

Not me, he thought. I didn’t believe that then. I don’t now. We’re what we make of ourselves, not the product of another’s imagination.

The man in front of him stood still, waiting it seemed, Julia firm in his grip.

Fratelli stepped forward, struggling to keep his balance. His head was ringing with sounds, voices, memories. It was a struggle to raise the gun ahead of him, to say in a shaking voice, ‘Let her go, Aldo. For God’s sake, no more blood.’

A booming, hollow sound, like wood exploding. The main doors to Carmine thrown open. The shouts of men. Carabinieri, Fratelli didn’t doubt it.

‘You let your wife go!’ Pontecorvo cried. ‘What about her blood? Who are you to speak?’

‘Pino,’ Julia said. ‘Don’t come closer. Don’t…’

Fratelli raised the gun again, loosed a second shell into the ceiling, felt fresco and plaster fall around him like hard rain.

For a moment his vision blurred, went black. He could hear his own breathing. Feel the blood racing through his veins.

When his sight came back, he was aware of something else. Behind Pontecorvo and Julia a figure in black, hunched in the corner. Couldn’t see who. Anyone might have dashed through the shadows of Carmine, got into that place unnoticed.

Men behind, low voices. Marrone issuing orders. The metallic snap of weapons being prepared.

The black shape shot out of the corner, arm raised, silver blade glinting, fell on Aldo Pontecorvo’s back, stabbing, shrieking, flailing at the tall man’s back.

A howl of agony and shock. Julia slipped free. Fratelli seized her arm as she fell forward, dragged her forcefully into his arms. Then the two of them fell to the wall, against the faces of dead Florentine nobles, locked together, breathing in anxious gasps.

Two shapes on the floor, entwined like one. An arm rising, falling, a long knife smeared in blood.

Marrone was there, Cassini too, yelling, swearing.

Pino Fratelli wasn’t holding Julia any more. She was holding him. Something in her eyes… Fratelli was unable to find the words to frame the question.

A final scream and the black shape rose from the chapel floor. Aldo Pontecorvo lay on the tiles, face up, eyes glassy, mouth open, blood on his neck, blood everywhere.

A breathless man climbed to his feet and stood over him, dagger in hand.

‘Bruno?’ Sandro Soderini said, walking through the crowd of carabinieri, into the chapel’s heart.

Marrone followed, eyeing the priest and the weapon in his hand. Luca Cassini too, bending down on the floor to check the still figure there.

He didn’t look up when he said, ‘Well, this one’s gone. That’s for sure.’

All eyes on the parish priest of Santa Maria del Carmine. Father Bruno Lazzaro. A man Fratelli had known since childhood.

‘I heard a noise.’ His wild eyes ranging the chamber. ‘While I was in here working. This…’ His hand gestured to the dread shape on the ground. ‘This animal had a woman with him. A weapon. I had to act. It wasn’t…’

Julia’s arms left him. Fratelli clung to the wall, head clearing at that point. Mind focusing.

‘He told me, Priest!’ she said without the least hesitation, pointing back towards the column with the fallen couple. Then, more quietly, as Bruno Lazzaro glared at her, ‘He told me. The cockerel was for Tornabuoni. The shape above the snake…’

Her hand swept the fresco. Julia Wellbeloved glanced at Fratelli.

‘It was a dog collar, Pino. Not a halo.’

Fratelli closed his eyes and wanted to laugh.

‘He thought Lazzaro would be at the Brigata tonight,’ she went on. ‘And when he wasn’t, he came for him here. For you. Because—’

‘What are these lies?’ the man in black bellowed, raising the knife.

Cassini was on him like a shot, forcing the blade from his hand with a wrench of the wrist and a simple, ‘I’ll have that, thank you.’

Julia circled the priest. ‘You and Tornabuoni raped her. Then you murdered her.’

‘No!’

‘Both of you, while Aldo Pontecorvo, a frightened, broken child, someone you’d used already, listened. Watched. And when you’d fled and he could think of nothing else, he painted that dismal frown on her dead lips.’

She went quiet, for Fratelli’s sake. No need. He could picture this already, every moment, each step along the grim and bloody way.

With a nod he walked into the centre of the chapel, looked at the priest, beckoned with his gloved hand, the gun still in it and said, ‘More.’

‘These are lies!’ Lazzaro cried. ‘I saw nothing.’

Fratelli raised the weapon to the priest’s head. No one moved. No one spoke.

‘It wasn’t me, Pino! Chiara called us in from the street. Tornabuoni… my back was turned. I was downstairs. She said there was a little dinghy you used for fishing. I went looking for it.’

A gesture as if from the pulpit, then hands to his face, despair and sorrow.

‘When I came back that beast—’

‘He told me,’ Julia cut in. ‘Everything he’d never dared before. He heard her screams.’

‘No!’

She walked forward, stood next to Fratelli to face the priest directly. ‘Then, on the staircase, you held Chiara’s arms while Tornabuoni throttled her.’ A stabbing finger in his face. ‘You!’

‘And you’d believe this filth?’ Lazzaro asked, and fetched a kick at the slashed corpse by his feet. ‘You trust his word over a man of God?’

‘But God wasn’t there, Bruno,’ Fratelli said calmly. ‘Not on that long and miserable night just when you needed him. He’d left you on your own. Hadn’t he?’

Fratelli took one step closer, passed the weapon to Cassini, looked at the man in black and waited.

So many faces on them at that moment. Marrone’s men and Soderini. Julia. The young carabiniere Pino Fratelli had so come to admire. And the stern, judgemental citizens, given a kind of immortality by the brushes of artists long dead.

A cruel scowl crossed the priest’s face. He surveyed them all. ‘You pompous, craven asses. You sin like animals and pass the guilt to me.’ He stabbed his chest with a bloody hand. ‘It was the end of the world.’

Cassini had got a pair of handcuffs from somewhere and was unwinding them.

‘The end of the world,’ Bruno Lazzaro murmured. ‘Am I owed nothing? No pleasure? No company?’

The young carabiniere took his hands, slapped the cuffs on his wrists.

‘This is what you’re owed, chum. And the rest to come. Pino?’

Fratelli’s head felt as if it was clearing. He wondered what might replace the terrors and fears and fury that had festered there so long.

Then something new began to rise inside him, cold and roaring, as big as the world, as determined and inevitable as death itself.

The flood. It was here now. In truth it had never gone away.

The bright and vivid colours around him lost their lustre. Not long after, his limbs failed too. Pino Fratelli felt himself falling towards Carmine’s hard cold stones and the fast-approaching dark.