The Faces of Angels (25 page)

‘
Vino e Olio
.' Billy stops and looks at directions she's scribbled on the back of an envelope. ‘How many wine bars do you think there are in this city called
Vino e Olio
? Twenty at least, I'll bet.' She looks around for a street marker. ‘Up here,' she says, and takes my arm and pulls me into an alley that leads towards San Niccolo gate.

According to the posters up around the university, the candlelight vigil for Ginevra Montelleone will leave from the wine bar we are headed for at nine p.m. and process to Ponte San Niccolo, to the exact spot she is supposed to have jumped from. How anyone knows where this is, is open to question, since the wine bar was the last place she was seen alive and, besides, she didn't jump. I point this out, but Billy says, ‘Don't be nit-picky.' She pinches my arm through my jacket. ‘You get all hung up on details.'

‘Anyways,' she adds a few seconds later, as we come out into another street, ‘this has nothing to do with facts. It's about drama. Don't you know anything? College students don't care what happened, they just love this kind of stuff.' She draws ‘love' out so it sounds like a train whistling through a station. ‘Loooove.'

‘They all get to wear black,' she's whispering now because we've arrived, ‘and act tragic.' Billy winks as she pushes the door open, and I follow her into the crowd. ‘You sure you're OK?' she asks over her shoulder.

‘Don't worry about me, Nurse Ratched,' I assure her. ‘Never been better.'

I've worn jeans, my leather jacket and sneakers. With the addition of an unattractive shade of violet lipstick and a lot more mascara than usual, I'm hoping I can at least blend in, if not pass for being a good deal younger than I am. It's not supposed to be a disguise, exactly, but now that we're standing here Billy's earlier suggestion that we might be rubbing shoulders with Karel Indrizzio's Number One Fan is not something I feel as blasé about as I'd like. I wonder if the police have had the same thought she did, and if they're here too, peppered through the crowd, pretending to be students. Maybe I'll see Pallioti sitting in a corner, his tongue flicking for flies.

Billy shoves a glass of red wine into my hand. ‘Oh,' she says, looking around, ‘there's—' I put a hand on her back and push her away.

‘Get outta here. Don't babysit me.'

Billy spends much more time at the university than the rest of us, and a second later I catch a glimpse of her back as she bobs and weaves through the throng of people, already waving to someone she's recognized.

Kirk and Henry stuck to their word and gave this a miss, so now I'm alone, surrounded by a steady stream of people pushing their way through the big wooden doors, letting in gusts of evening air and staccato rattles of traffic. Eventually I end up against the bar, like driftwood pushed to the bank of a river, and turn round to find myself face to face with a framed picture of Ginevra Montelleone. The effect is startling, as if I'd bumped into the woman herself.

This picture is different from both the one I stole from Piero and the one in the paper, and for a second I feel betrayed, as if she's deliberately disguised herself and come here pretending to be somebody different. Mottled blue clouds float in the background behind her head, suggesting that maybe she's in heaven. She's wearing a white blouse and a demure little gold crucifix and her dark hair is brushed loose. Her face has the strange plastic look of studio portraits, the eye shadow's too blue, her lips too pink. A couple of votives have been placed around the portrait. The bartender leans over and lights them, and the touched-up colour ripples and twitches in the candlelight. For an awful second, I swear I see Ginevra blink. She looks as though she's just come to life and is struggling to escape. After a couple of drinks, her lips might move.

Someone knocks my shoulder and a babble of voices explode behind me.
Let me out
, Ginevra whispers.
Let me go!
Jesus, I think, maybe Billy was right after all; I shouldn't have come.

I turn and shoulder my way past a clutch of older people—probably professors, or cops, who knows?—struggling like a fish swimming upstream, out onto the terrace where tight little knots of students bunch around picnic tables. Some of them wear black armbands, and every once in a while there's a bark of laughter that's cut off abruptly because tonight is not meant to be funny. I perch on the edge of the terrace wall, and sip my wine, relieved to be out of the bar, but still fighting a growing case of the creeps.

‘
Ciao
.' The voice startles me so much I jump and spill my wine.

‘Oh no! I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' The guy who spoke laughs and pulls out a paper napkin. ‘Let me get you another!' he says.

He wipes at my jacket and takes my glass out of my hand, and dark and very handsome as he is, once he'd definitely have set my pulse fluttering. But now I want him gone, and it's all I can do not to bat his hand away. The spill was tiny, and he probably means to be nice, but when he vanishes through the doorway with my glass, smiling at me over his shoulder, I realize that if I'm still here when he comes back I'll have to make coy conversation, talk about what I'm doing in Florence, and how tragic this is, and how I knew, or didn't know, Ginevra.

The idea's unbearable, because what's most tragic about tonight is what no one knows: that Ginevra was probably doing fine until some son of a bitch cut her to pieces and drowned her in the Arno. My skin starts to crawl. All at once I'm certain Billy's right. He's here. He's watching me. Maybe he just took my wine glass.

Before I really know what I'm doing, I'm on my feet and edging my way down the terrace, looking for Billy to tell her I'm leaving.

The wine bar is made up of two large dark rooms joined by an archway, and I make for the back one which, mercifully, has no portrait and no votive candles. Instead, there are tables and a couple of harassed-looking waitresses. I don't see anyone I recognize, though, and I'm about to give up and leave, when I hear her voice. ‘It's from Las Vegas,' Billy's saying. ‘Isn't it great?'

I turn round and see her holding court at a table with four or five people who are obviously students from the university. The guys appear completely enthralled. The girls are sulking.

‘You can't even buy them at Graceland. They're a limited edition.'

She reaches over and plucks her pink Elvis lighter out of one of the boys' hands before he can pocket it, then she waves at me. ‘Mary!' she calls. ‘
Ciao!
This is my friend Mary,' she announces, as I edge towards them. ‘Maria.'

Five faces look up at me. The two girls are very pretty, and as I come over they breathe a sigh of relief, as if I offer some hope of stopping Billy from seducing their boyfriends, leading them away like the Pied Piper with her Elvis lighter.

One of the boys jumps up and pulls out a chair, and although I'm intending to leave I find myself sitting in it.

‘I'm very sorry about what happened to your friend.' It's sort of a stupid statement, but I can't think of anything else, and I feel I ought to say something.

One of the girls pours me a glass of wine from a pitcher on the table. ‘We didn't know her that well,' she says. ‘It just sucks, you know, when anyone feels that bad about their life.'

There's an awkward silence while Billy plays with Elvis. After a few seconds, to fill it, I say, ‘Your English is excellent.'

The girl smiles at me and shrugs. ‘I did an exchange year. The University of Chicago. We all did,' she gestures at the table. ‘Ginevra was going in the fall, post-grad, I guess. Before they kicked her out. My name's Elena, by the way.' She stretches out her hand, which is long and fine boned and has bright green nails. The other girl introduces herself as Elissa and I don't catch the boys' names.

‘Why were they going to kick her out, exactly?' Billy is watching me out of the corner of her eye as I sip my wine, which is true student grade, essentially paint stripper. Normally just smelling it would give me a headache, but I'm feeling a little desperate.

‘Eggs,' Elena says. ‘She was in a protest, to get more funding for a clinic at the university, and she threw eggs at Savonarola.'

‘At Savonarola?' I put my glass down. My estimation of Ginevra, whatever it was before, goes up.

Elissa shrugs. ‘It wasn't really that big a deal,' she says. ‘Lots of people threw eggs. And other stuff. Ginevra's problem was, she didn't miss.'

One of the boys laughs, then covers his mouth with his hand.

‘Isn't Savonarola dead?' Billy looks from one to the other of us, and before I can explain, another of the boys says, ‘It's what we call His Eminence, the Cardinal. You know, on account of his left-wing views.'

Elena lights a cigarette. Using a match. ‘The university didn't think it was so funny.' She lets the flame burn down almost to her fingertips before she drops it in the ashtray. ‘Since they invited him to come. Although God knows why,' she adds. ‘He's an asshole.'

‘He's a good speaker.' This comes from the third boy. He looks younger than the others, and more intense. But maybe I just think that because he's skinny. ‘I'm sorry,' he says. ‘But he is.' He looks around the table, bracing himself for argument. ‘I don't agree with him,' he adds. ‘But at least he believes in something. And he has the balls to say so.'

‘Yeah,' says Elissa. ‘That we all love God his way or go to hell.'

‘When did this happen?' I'm wondering where Pierangelo was at the time, if maybe he was standing too close to D'Erreti and got caught by one of Ginevra Montelleone's eggs.

‘A few weeks ago,' Elissa says. ‘The beginning of Lent. That's why he was speaking, you know, about what we were all supposed to give up and sacrifice and shit. In his opinion, incidentally, that included most of our rights. Anyway,' she adds, ‘nothing really happened at the time and everybody thought it had been forgotten. But there was a picture in the paper. So, sure enough, they hauled Ginni up in front of a disciplinary board. I guess she heard a few days ago, and that's what did it.'

‘I suppose there's no question she committed suicide?' Billy doesn't look at me as she asks this.

Elena picks up her glass and drains it. ‘Well, that's what it's usually called,' she says, ‘when you jump off a bridge.'

Her voice is so matter-of-fact she might have just suggested we all go for a pizza, and I stand up faster than I mean to, mumbling something about a headache and a glass of water. My bag snags on the back of my chair, and Billy starts to stand up too. She asks if I'm OK, but I say I'm fine, I just need to get something at the bar.

Outside, I lean against the terrace wall. I did get something, but it wasn't water, and after that wretched Chianti, this Brunello's like silk against my tongue. It was expensive, but I don't care. I roll it around my mouth, trying to take the bad taste away, and tell myself that in a minute, when I calm down, I'll get the hell out of here and call Pierangelo.

I shouldn't have let Elena's tone of voice upset me, but it did. It made me want to reach across the table and slap her. And now I can't stop my own picture of Ginevra from hanging in my head like a poster, can't stop thinking about the strips of her flesh, and the fact that he brushed her hair. And pinned a goddam bag of birdseed to her shoulder. I look around for something else to focus on, and that's when I notice the girl.

It's getting chilly now, and people have begun to filter back inside, so she has one of the picnic tables to herself. But that's not what sets her apart, the fact that she is virtually alone out here. Nor is it her blonde hair, so pale it's almost white, or the vivid clashing stripes of her sweater. What makes this girl different aren't her dreadful clothes or her outdated punky haircut, it's the listless, dull hunch of her shoulders, and the way she hardly seems to be aware of the fact that she's crying, that tears are welling up and running down her cheeks and blotching the backs of her hands as she half-heartedly wipes them away. What sets her apart is that she's the first person I've seen here who's genuinely upset.