The Faces of Angels (18 page)

‘So why didn't you tell me?'

The light changes and Pierangelo shifts gears. ‘Because,' he says as the big car shoots forward, ‘I was afraid you wouldn't come back.'

We don't talk any more about Caterina Fusarno or Ginevra Montelleone, or much of anything else that night, and the next morning we sleep late and have breakfast on the roof terrace, eggs and orange juice with the swallows wheeling overhead. Piero's going to be working pretty hard to get his piece whipped into shape, so we take our time, even going back to bed after we've eaten, as if the mere fact of making love can somehow push away the idea of women's dead bodies, bows and masks and red silk bags. Then we take a long shower. In the end, it's well past noon before I let myself into Signora Bardino's apartment and find the postcards on the living-room rug.

There are about thirty of them, all of paintings, arranged in some arcane pattern, which is clear, presumably, only to Billy. The three Graces hold hands and dance. Benozzo Gozzoli's Magi ride up and down jewelled hills. San Sebastian drips with blood. All of Lorenzo's villas are here, and Caravaggio's Medusa, and even Botticelli's
Calumny
. In the centre, Savonarola burns at the stake while tiny people raise their hands and run from Piazza della Signoria. The theme, if there is one, seems half Florence pastoral and half Renaissance gore. I flop down on the couch. Maybe, I think, if I rub my eyes, or stare long enough, I'll see Gianni's weaselly face, or the golden-eyed man and his black and white dog staring back at me. But I don't. Instead, I see Billy.

The photograph of her, a three-quarters shot of her head and shoulders looking demurely away from the camera in the style of the late Renaissance, is disturbingly like one of Lippi's angels or Perugino's sweet-faced, curly-haired Madonnas. So much for truth in portraiture, I think. But it makes me smile anyways, and then I realize I get it. This is Billy's little commentary on the confusion between beauty and virtue; the dichotomy between what we see in front of us and what actually exists.

After a few minutes, the whole thing makes me feel a little dizzy and finally I haul myself up off the sofa and go into the kitchen. The fridge is full of leftovers from the picnic, curling pieces of salami and stale rolls, which is fine, because, although it's lunchtime, I'm not really hungry anyways. The French windows aren't latched properly, again, and when I push them open and step onto the balcony, a breeze hits me in the face. It feels good, and suddenly I think that instead of actually cleaning the apartment, which is what I'd planned to do, I'll go for a walk. Maybe it will help get rid of this scratchy feeling that I can't quite shake.

Now I'm alone, I'm increasingly annoyed with Pierangelo for not telling me about the woman in the Cascine. Not because the fact of her murder scares me especially, but because it brings up the old resentment at being sheltered, babied. If I really 'fess up, I think as I wait for traffic at Porta Romana, I'm also annoyed that he would have thought I'd baulk at coming back here. We didn't ever say it out loud, but I understand that the two killings that have happened this year may mean there's an Indrizzio copycat running around. Admittedly it's not a particularly heart-warming thought, but it doesn't affect me any more than it affects any other woman in Florence, and I'm irritated Pierangelo would think I'd change my life because of it.

The light changes, and I start up Viale Macchiavelli. The boulevard snakes its way through the hills to the south-east of the city and cars cruise by in both directions. Occasionally I pass someone walking a dog. I've ridden up here on the bus, but I've never come on foot. Hedges and walls hide the gardens of big, old-fashioned villas and I get glimpses of bright blue swimming pools, green swathes of lawn. If I go on long enough, this will turn into Viale Galileo and then I'll come to San Miniato, which, I realize, is not something I want to do. The way things are going just at the moment it would be my luck to run smack into Rinaldo and his little band of heavenly followers.

I turn down a lane on my left that leads sharply downhill, back towards the Boboli Gardens. Within minutes it turns to cobble, transforming itself into one of the pockets of Florence that look and feel as if they're a Tuscan village. This is what I love about this city, the sense that it's made of magic boxes, that not only does time slide back and forth—suggesting you might turn a corner and run into Beatrice, or Byron, or the ancient Botticelli, raving, with spittle in his beard and God in his eyes—but that the place plays tricks too. One second you're standing in front of a wild baroque altar, the next you're on a medieval battlement, or wandering in an olive grove. Add Fiesole, and you'll get a Roman bath or an Etruscan shrine.

I stop by a break in a high wall to my right where a potholed drive winds into the olive groves that stretch between the Belvedere and San Miniato. The gate is closed, the old-fashioned latch heavy and rusted, and the sign, which reads ‘La Casa degli Uccelli,' the House of the Birds, is half hidden by ivy. Tall spires of cypress rise on either side of the drive. The façade of the villa glows ochre pink in the afternoon sun. On the slope above it is a similar building, called Villa Magnolia, and across the street is the Casa della Maschera, the House of the Mask, a baroque folly with strange leering faces looking down from its gates.

The buzz of traffic rises behind me, but standing here it seems as if this is the real world, and cars and buses and scooters belong to some other, and infinitely inferior, dream.

Down the hill, the lane opens out into a small village-like square. To the north, the huge star-shaped fort of the Belvedere rises out of the olives, and behind the little square is what I realize must be the back wall of the Boboli. The buildings radiate from a central piazza, each of their façades imprinted with a bumblebee, suggesting they're a remnant of one or another of the assorted Napoleons who set up shop in Italy. It's a settlement of doll's houses with glossy front doors painted in red or navy blue. Neat front walks cut perfect straight lines through tiny front gardens. The place feels oddly deserted, like one of those villages in science-fiction books and fairy tales where everyone vanishes or falls asleep. My running shoes squeak on the warm sidewalk as I wander down past the window boxes already filled with tight-budded petunias and the bright, upturned faces of pansies. Then I reach the bottom of the street, and the charm turns sour.

A huge old villa sits in the shadow of the Boboli wall. Its side faces a little piazza, and I suspect the bumblebee houses sit in what was once its garden. Tear tracks of soot run down either side of its boarded-up windows. The pale plaster is dirty and the wide front doors, their paint flaking, are riddled with woodworm. A rusted chain with a shiny new padlock twists through the iron handles, and two squat towers crouch on the roof. What once might have been a portico running between them is now nothing but an empty balcony with a jagged, broken rail.

The sidewalk dead-ends here, falls away abruptly and turns wild with weeds that converge on a tall fence that runs from the wall of the Boboli, dividing the bumblebee houses and the villa from the broad avenue beyond like the demarcation line of another world. There is a gate, which was once probably magnificent, but it too is now looped through with a chain. Not, I realize, that this stops the inhabitants from coming and going. As I sit down on the villa's steps, a well-dressed woman, sleek with prosperous middle age, passes me, picks her way down the worn path in the weeds and ducks through a gap in the fence where a couple of railings have been removed.

The sight is vaguely surreal, and made more so when she stops on the far side, reaches into her large leather shoulder bag, and deposits a tiny dog in a plaid coat on the grass at her feet. The dog scampers off to lift his leg against a bush, then trots after her as she walks along the edge of the Boboli wall and stops to chat with the man who sits just inside a cottage at the garden's exit. I watch her for a moment before I realize with something of a shock that this must be where they brought me out.

If I am right, and I'm sure I am, the Mostaccini fountain is directly behind this wall. The ambulances probably pulled up not twenty yards from where I am sitting now. They would have screamed up the avenue beside the Art Institute, wheeled around the dozens of parked cars, and jerked to a halt on the scrub grass where the woman is standing chatting. Did people gather, I wonder. Was there a crowd of onlookers as they carried me out? And where was Indrizzio? Was he among them, reaching into his pocket and fingering the thin, dark fabric of his hood as he watched? Or was he sitting right here, on these very steps?

The thought makes me get up faster than I mean to, and I almost collide with a tiny old man and his dog. The dog is an ancient grey poodle, and she peers up at me with clouded eyes and wags her stumpy tail. The old man touches his hat and jerks on the dog's leash, then he says, ‘Out of the way, Perla! Out of the way for the Madonna of the Steps!' And bursts into a cackle of laughter.

An hour later, when I get back and walk into the kitchen of our apartment, a huge bouquet of overblown pink roses, which Pierangelo knows are my favourite, are sitting in a vase in the centre of the table. Propped against them is a florist's card which simply reads, ‘I'll miss you this week.' Billy has stuck a yellow Post-it note on the vase's rim that says: ‘Handsome man brought these by for you! Meet us at Flavio later?'

I push my face down into the blossoms and inhale the sweet, heavy scent. When we first met, Pierangelo used to buy me these all the time. He swears they are the very same roses Catherine de Medici had distilled and sent to Paris when she was miserable, a balm for homesickness that started the craze for what the world now calls perfume. They're better than any walk, and I call Piero and thank him. Then decide I will go to Flavio. I haven't been very pleasant lately, at least to Billy, and I should make up for it.

Flavio, however, isn't cheap, and I decide I'll earn all this living high off the hog by spending what's left of the day cleaning the apartment. The kitchen is still a mess and so is the living room, although the postcards have vanished. In the bathroom, I notice my toothbrush has vanished too. This causes me a momentary pang of severe irritation, and a quick trip to the pharmacy down the street for a new one, but the flowers make up for pretty much everything. I remind myself of that when I get to my room and find Billy's ‘borrowed' my make-up again. This time, though, it at least looks as if she tried to disguise it. But she can't fool me. The lipsticks have been put back in the wrong order.

B
Y THE TIME
I reach Flavio, the rough face of Santa Maria del Carmine is bathed in faint golden light and the last pigeons circle the sky. The trattoria is in the corner of the piazza, which tends to serve as a giant parking lot, and as I weave through the rows of tiny Fiats and motorcycles that are as big as cars themselves, I can see that tables have been set up outside. A few of them are occupied, but not by anyone I recognize, so I go inside and right away spot Kirk's red hair and hear Billy's laugh.