Broken Chord (4 page)

She called, “Come” in answer to a knock, and blonde, gorgeous, Jean Pierre came in with his box of tricks.

“Jean Pierre,” she trilled, “I want to go two shades lighter. Tell me I’m right.”

Jean Pierre gave her a broad smile. “Of course you’re right. It will look divine. Let me get my colour chart out and we’ll choose exactly the right colour for you.”

Another knock on the door and Guido came in. “Darling, I’m just off to Lucca. I’ve got some stuff arriving.”

“Anything lovely?” She tried to keep the tone of her voice neutral but inwardly was still quite angry with him.

“Nothing suitable for us, I’m afraid. Besides the house is getting rather full.”

“Will you be back for lunch?”

“No, I’ll spend the afternoon cataloguing and making a few contacts. I’ll be back well in time for dinner. Have a lovely day.”

Ursula’s eyes swivelled round to look at Jean Pierre who was studiously ignoring them. He was such a vicious little gossip, which was another reason she loved to have him. He always gave her the latest updates on all sorts of interesting situations, but it would be wise to keep her temper under control in front of him. “And you too, my love,” she said with a big smile at Guido.

They blew kisses to each other while Jean Pierre diplomatically searched in his case. Guido had ignored him as usual and he felt slighted, as he always did on these occasions. After all, who was Guido to give himself airs? Everyone knew that he’d come up from nothing. All that crap about his aristocratic family origins might fool Ursula but it didn’t fool him. Only after the door had closed did he speak again, and then in such a hurt tone that she laughed, “Jean Pierre, stop sulking, take no notice of Guido. You know what men are like. He only has eyes for me. He probably didn’t even see you.”

“That’s a comfort.” Jean Pierre kept his counsel, but he knew when someone was available and he had thought that Guido might be, when he’d first met him. It wasn’t the sort of thing that Ursula would notice, but he did.

He thrust a colour chart at Ursula.

“Well, here are the two colours I suggest. We could use one or both, you know, gently shaded in. What do you think?”

“Both please. I love that shaded effect. You don’t think it’s too light?”

“Well, it is much lighter but with your amazing skin colour it will look great.”

“You’re such a flatterer. I do hope you’re telling me the truth.”

“The whole truth. Why should I lie?”

“Dear boy, let’s get on with it and tell me all the latest news.”

Jean Pierre began happily to mix his potions.

Piero drove through the town in a pristine car. He had done a few
chores while waiting for the car to be washed and have the glass on one of the front headlamps replaced. Marianna not only drove without a driving license, she wasn’t even very good at it. Along the road that led from the town to the Villa, a short distance of perhaps two kilometres he ruminated on the startling news he had heard in the bar where he’d stopped for a coffee. Roberto, Marianna’s unsuitable boyfriend, had been the victim of a hit and run accident in the early hours of the morning. It must have happened on his way home from the villa. He’d been on foot, because earlier Marianna had brought him to the villa in her mother’s car. No-one knew exactly at what time it had happened, but Piero who had heard him leave, guessed it must have been at about three. Roberto hadn’t been discovered until first light when a farmer driving out to take a load of fodder for his chickens had come across the young man, unconscious, at the side of the road. He was still alive but rumour had it that his injuries were so severe he might not make it.

Piero kept an eye out for Marianna but didn’t see her on the way home. He guessed she was probably at the hospital, no doubt embarrassing the boy’s family. Well the problem had been solved for now. Roberto, even if he did live, would be out of action for some time and Madam would doubtless make sure that her daughter saw as little of him as possible. He swept into the drive and knew that the news he was bringing would be well received.

Dragonetti was back at the open window smoking again. On the other side of the busy road were the massive walls of Lucca. They were unique, in that the whole of the old town was enclosed within their circumference, which had remained intact over the centuries. They rose, built with a warm coloured brick, compact, and surrounded by the wide, well-tended, lush grass field that had once been a moat, now reduced to a small stream. They were crowned with huge trees in full summer leaf now. The effect was spectacular and had stunned generations of tourists. The many spires of the churches and towers of notable villas were just visible and he knew some of them quite well now as he had spent a few of his lunch hours visiting them. Today he was going to visit the
Duomo, San Martino. At lunchtime he left his office and went out into the heat. It was like walking into an oven, and within a few minutes he could feel his hair damp against his collar. He crossed the main road streaming with traffic and walked along past the fortified gate of St Peter until he came to a small path that cut through the field and led towards an invisible opening in one of the huge round ramparts. The walls were so big that there were roads inside them. An exhibition had been set up in there showing how Lucca had evolved over the centuries, with huge papier mâché knights on horses, maps of the town and boards with illustrated summaries of historical events. Baroque music played continuously in the background.

He emerged from the tunnel and climbed up to stand on top of the tree-lined walls. It was a little cooler up here, and tourists cycled lazily on the bikes or tandems that were available for hire. He went down a flight of steps cut into the grass embankment, and into the town. When he reached the Duomo of San Martino he paused in the piazza to look at the façade. Intricately sculpted columns supported three asymmetrical arches that lined the front of the church. The facade then rose in three tiers above them. Entry was through a side door and he plunged into the dark interior of the church, grateful for the comparatively cool air. He made his way to the small, octagonal temple within the main body of the Cathedral, where the Volto Santo, the Sacred Countenance, could be viewed. He found a curious wooden statue, a thirteenth century replica of the original said to have arrived from the Holy Land, carved from a cedar of Lebanon, apparently depicting the true face of Christ, and executed by none other than Nicodemus, his contemporary. Although a crucifixion, the Christ wears a long robe-like dress and, he read in his guide book, ‘it is speculated it was originally the statue of a virgin who grew a beard to avoid an arranged marriage with the king of Sicily (thus inevitably losing her virginity) and who, as a consequence, was crucified by her father’. This strangely barbaric effigy of the Christ was annually decked out heavily with gold, though no longer carted about in a procession. Drago was not religious
but did admire both sacred music, art and architecture. What he disliked intensely were pilgrims totting up the count of the shrines they had visited, as though that conferred extra virtue on them, and he had a real problem with the sanctimonious and evangelists.

After paying extra he was admitted to the tomb of Saint Hilary, another virtuous woman, who had died young in childbirth. Her grieving husband had commissioned the tomb sculpted by Jacopo della Quercia. At her feet lies a dog, symbol of faithfulness. Dragonetti remembered that the restoration of this sculpture some years back had caused a furore with serious accusations from various experts, of work badly carried out. Not being an expert himself, he thought it looked good, the marble gleaming as it surely must have done when it was first put there.

After that he went back out into the heat, half blinded by the sunlight but did notice on the wall beside the entrance door a sculpted labyrinth believed to predate the more famous one in Chartres Cathedral. The inscription in Latin recited: ‘This is the labyrinth built by Dedalus of Crete; all who entered therein were lost, save Theseus, thanks to Ariadne’s thread.’

At the first bar he found he grabbed a toasted focaccia oozing with melting mozzarella and grilled aubergine. He ate it standing up and then quickly downed an espresso. While walking back to his office he smoked a cigarette, wishing he could have smoked it while drinking his coffee. Smoking was now strictly forbidden in all public buildings and that included his office. He spent the afternoon twiddling his thumbs while he listened to Radio Toscana Classica which transmitted classical music all day and half the night.

At the end of another uneventful day Dragonetti drove home through the heat on the motorway, past the amazing modern church of San Giovanni Battista, the church of the motorway. The green copper roof swooped and curved and the church always reminded him of a sort of Noah’s Ark floating on the waves of the traffic. He exited at Florence North into a hectic city filled to the brim with tourists and those who live off them. The African street vendors, who lined the pavements, their goods spilling over into
the road where he lived, chatted among themselves in their own tongue, pausing only to harangue passing tourists as they pointed at their wares, the fake Gucci handbags or Armani jeans. “Only ten euro, only fifteen euro, real leather!”

Dragonetti was an expert at driving along the narrow streets without killing anyone though at times he felt almost homicidal. Florence had changed, like most other towns and he thought it was difficult to live in any large town these days. The traffic was horrendous, especially in the rush hour, and Florence as a tourist attraction was packed for most of the year. He was a true Florentine, his home a decaying Palazzo that had been in his family for generations and, despite all the drawbacks of living in a busy town centre, he knew he would never want to live anywhere else. He was more attached to his home than he liked to admit. He always joked about it in an offhand way, calling it ‘the mausoleum’ and referring to it as ‘the crumbling stately pile’, to hide his fierce attachment. He liked to think of his ancestors living there, and his own childhood, in a different, less hectic Florence, had been spent in this building. At that time the family had been larger. Apart from his parents, his grandparents were still alive then, as well as two aunts, one a widow, one a spinster, all living there. There had been live-in servants too and everyday life had had a certain formality, with rituals that repeated and an old world feeling that would have been unthinkable now except for the extremely rich, which he wasn’t.

He had been an only child and had played alone in the palazzo, learning to know it intimately. Now, of course, he only lived in a part of it and the rest had been closed up. Occasionally, he would unlock the dividing door and walk alone through the musty rooms where furniture was swathed in sheets, themselves dusty now, where family portraits loomed and he could recognise himself in a sixteenth century ancestor, who had the same black hair, the same heavy-lidded green eyes, and the full sensual lips that he had hated so much as a child. As he walked he would remember himself as a skinny lad who had invented companions to accompany him in his games.

He parked the car in the tunnel under the house, beneath a vaulted ceiling. It amused him to refer to this as his fifteenth century garage. Vanessa’s little car was there and there was room for that and another couple of cars. He stepped out of the vehicle and walked to the end of the tunnel and through the small gate which led into the courtyard garden. Suddenly, all the noise vanished, the car horns, the babble of passing pedestrians and the shouting vendors disappeared and in the cool grassy yard he was transported back through the centuries.

A small shadow ran silently towards him and brushed against his leg.

“So you’re still here,” he muttered. He opened the door and followed the little animal who rushed up the stairs and waited for him to reach the door of the flat, where he was again greeted rapturously. He opened the door and let it in. He smiled and said, “You win, but I don’t know what Vanessa will say.”

The flat was vast and cool. When he had modernised it, quite simply, with the inconspicuous addition of central heating, and two bathrooms, unwilling to desecrate the building unnecessarily, he had also had air conditioning put in and had never regretted it. He threw his jacket onto a chair and went into the kitchen to make himself a coffee, one of the two things on which he admitted he was dependent. The other, of course, was tobacco. He lit up and took a deep drag on his cigarette. Supper was his next thought and while he waited for the coffee to come up he considered which restaurant to go to. He didn’t want anywhere too formal but the cheaper places would be thronged with foreigners. He opened the fridge on the off chance that there might be something he fancied and after a brief inspection of the uninspiring contents closed the door firmly. He didn’t want to eat smoked salmon or mozzarella and tomatoes again and he didn’t feel like cooking. He phoned a small family-run
trattoria
the other side of the river. “Dragonetti speaking.”

He was greeted with cries of joy, “Ah Dottore! Of course we have a place for you. On the terrace? Certainly. I will make sure you are not disturbed.”

He terminated the conversation with a smile. Of course there would always be a place for him. He was part of the legal system of law enforcement and anyone who knew who he was and what he represented would fall over himself to make sure he got whatever he wanted. The kitten sat back on its haunches and mewed. Jacopo had forgotten to buy cat food so he took the smoked salmon from the fridge and opened the packet. He put half of the contents on a plate, cutting it up into small pieces, and replaced the rest in the fridge. “This is wild salmon, my friend,” he told it.

He threw his clothes off and took a tepid shower. He hated the heat in Florence in the summer. Anyone with any sense left the city during the hot months when the humidity made it so uncomfortable. All his favourite bars and restaurants took on another character in the summer as they competed for foreign customers by lowering their prices and as a consequence, their standards. He shuddered at the thought of the average all-in tourist menu. Things would be better in the autumn and by winter he would feel more at home again. Florence would be returned to him and he would begin to enjoy her once again.