The Flood

December 1986

Snow beyond the windows of the private room. Bare trees in the distance. A city turning white beneath the blizzard. Foreign voices in the corridor outside.

This is not home, Pino Fratelli thought. This is not a place to die.

He lay on the hard hospital bed feeling drowsy from the drugs and the disease. The doctors and nurses had left them for this brief moment before the theatre. Now Julia Wellbeloved and Luca Cassini sat on either side of him; Julia on his right, squeezing the hand that still had a little feeling, Luca making small talk.

Whatever happened now, this last month had been filled with something he’d missed for many a year. Something he’d excluded from his life — deliberately, spitefully almost. A sense of friendship, of family. An unexpected and ridiculous form of love.

‘You get in there and get that operation done,’ Cassini said, repeating an admonition he’d uttered only a few minutes before.

‘That is the general idea, I believe,’ Fratelli replied with an exasperated sigh.

‘The food here… Ugh.’

‘No lampredotto, Luca,’ Julia noted in her beautifully accented Italian. ‘No lardo or trippa, no finocchiona, no glass of Negroni—’

‘Stop this!’ Fratelli cried. ‘Stop it now.’

He knew her game. She was as cunning as a vixen. Wave a carrot on a stick. Hope the donkey will smile and follow out of interest. But the donkey was ill. Beyond hope, or so Ambra Neri believed. Julia’s father, a doctor too, one with connections to specialists in London, had found a surgeon who felt there was a chance, however slender. He seemed willing to — in the man’s own cheery words — ‘give it a whirl’.

‘We have pies, Luca,’ Julia went on. ‘You like pies?’

‘Oh,’ he said with enthusiasm, ‘I like pies. Who doesn’t like pies?’

‘Shut up about food, will you?’ Fratelli begged. ‘I will ask one more time only and on this occasion I demand an answer. How for the love of God can I pay for all this?’

They looked at one another in silence.

‘Answers,’ Fratelli demanded.

‘Sandro Soderini,’ she said. ‘He insisted when he heard.’

Luca Cassini was chuckling so much that his big shoulders were heaving.

‘Soderini?’ Fratelli asked.

‘You don’t have a monopoly on guilt, you know,’ Cassini told him. ‘He was dead cut up about what happened. Wasn’t he, Julia?’

‘You got it out of him,’ Fratelli said, jabbing a finger at her.

She nodded. ‘Sandro’s rich. He’s got enough trouble on his plate as it is. True, the bad Brigata… Tornabuoni’s orgies… happened when he wasn’t around.’

And were there bargains? He didn’t ask. A stupid part of him was jealous. He knew how Soderini looked at her. Knew too that she found this amusing. Perhaps even flattering.

‘He was an accomplice to this nightmare,’ Fratelli declared.

‘I don’t think so.’ She stroked his hot brow and he barely felt it. ‘Really. He rarely went. From what Walter’s gathered, most of them absented themselves when it got… sleazy.’

‘Sleazy?’ Cassini asked. ‘Bit more than sleazy, if you ask me.’

‘Sandro thought it was just a bit of naughty fun. He’s such a sad old playboy. Really. That’s all. And now he’s got the press on his back asking awkward questions.’

‘So I’m part of his rehabilitation, am I?’

She smiled, shrugged.

‘He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s paying for this. Even you.’ A shrug, an Italian gesture; one perhaps she’d learned from him. ‘I warned Sandro you’d get it out of me. You’re good at that.’

Fratelli grunted a quiet curse. His left hand went to his head, felt the rough, shorn scalp there.

‘Now you’re indulging me. They cut my hair. My hair! My long and beautiful mane.’

‘Good thing too,’ Cassini told him. ‘Too bloody long, it was. The captain would kick my arse if I showed up to work like that.’

Walter Marrone had accepted Cassini back into the Carabinieri with eager, open arms. Luca was no longer the stazione idiot, the unwanted boy.

Fratelli asked himself: was that why he took to this callow, monosyllabic but utterly charming young man from the start? Not just his transparent, dogged honesty, but the fact that he was, in a way, an orphan too? Was he drawn to the lost and the abandoned? If so, why had he not come across the damaged and dangerous Aldo Pontecorvo, a solitary, crazed pawn in someone else’s plans, a victim who had lived only a few streets away from his own home in Oltrarno?

‘You care too much,’ he said out loud.

‘Who does?’ Julia asked.

‘I do. You told me that once. Didn’t you? You can’t care for everyone. You said that. I’m sure. Or maybe I dreamt it.’

She went back to squeezing his hand in her gentle fingers. He could feel a little of the warmth. Not much.

‘You’re babbling, Pino,’ Cassini interrupted. He nodded towards the door. ‘Get that head of yours in there and come out fixed.’

I will, one way or another, Fratelli thought.

The notion of death didn’t bother him much. He’d lived with it for too long to care. But the idea he’d never see Julia Wellbeloved again… that he’d never know how Luca Cassini fared in the ranks of Marrone’s Carabinieri. All this was unthinkable.

‘I should go,’ he said. ‘Time to… give it a whirl. Tell them. I’m not afraid.’ He smiled. ‘Well, a little.’ His good hand went to his shaved head again. ‘My hair…’

‘Your hair will grow again,’ she told him. ‘You’ll wake up feeling dreadful. And then…’ She shrugged and brushed her fingers across his cheek. ‘Then you’ll feel better. Before long you’ll be back in Oltrarno. Sitting in your little bar in San Niccolò. Drinking a Negroni. Picking at a plate of salumi.’

‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ Luca Cassini said very sagely.

Both of them stared at him.

‘Who told you that?’ Fratelli asked.

‘You did, Pino.’ The young carabiniere scratched his short black hair. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘My God,’ Fratelli groaned, ‘if Luca Cassini is quoting Nietzsche at me, this world is surely too interesting to leave. Call the nurses, Julia. Have them stab me with their needles and place a mask over my face. Let’s get this done with.’

‘Three cheers for that,’ said the young carabiniere, then winked and left them alone.

White shapes around him. A line in the arm. Soon they’d wheel him from this private room into the theatre.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

Her fingertips traced the place on his head where they’d drawn their marks — the guides for the incisions and the saw to come.

‘You told me all this came from some poison inside. From the time they took you from your parents in Rome. Or when Chiara died. From the flood. That it was a monster waiting inside, wondering when to wake.’

‘I talk drivel sometimes. Haven’t you noticed?’

There were tears in her eyes and he hated to see that.

‘Is it gone, Pino?’

‘I want to go to Rome. The Ponte Sant’Angelo. I ought to tell the stone angel I’ve no need of the name Ariel Montefiore. They can use it for another. Pino Fratelli will do. Perhaps I can show you those tortoises in the fountain. And…’

So many things unsaid, undone. Sitting in a quiet cabin in the Bardini Gardens above San Niccolò, drinking in the view of the city with its churches and belfries, its domes and towers. Ambling along the verdant lanes of Bellosguardo. Omissions unnoticed until they seemed out of reach.

‘Is it gone?’ she asked again.

The nurse was at the door. The surgeon stood by her side, tapping his watch.

Pino Fratelli shook his head. ‘Why ask such a question, Julia? You killed it, didn’t you? And now your friend will remove its corpse.’

With that Julia Wellbeloved rose from her chair, bent over, kissed him on both cheeks. Her hair fell all around him. Her fragrance filled his aching head. The nurse had a hypodermic and gently fed its contents into his arm.

The flood came for him then, cold and roaring and relentless. Dismal past and hopeful present locked together as one, mingling into the unknown nothingness called future.