The Faces of Angels (27 page)

I have no desire to discuss theology with Rinaldo, and I clamp my lips together. Otherwise I am going to scream.

‘Your pain is my pain, Mary,' he says. ‘It always has been. That is the true meaning of God's love, if only you can surrender yourself to it.'

His hand is beckoning me again, obscene and pink. The pale fingers look like maggots, things that grow fat on the dead, and I feel my stomach heave. I back up and bang against the stack of canvas chairs. Rinaldo steps towards me. He's droning on in his low sticky voice, about love and God and salvation, and suddenly I think this was a very bad idea.

‘Leave me alone. For ever.'

The words seem an incredible effort, and if Rinaldo hears, he doesn't take any notice. Maybe I didn't say them after all. Maybe they never got out of my mouth. He steps forward again, and for the first time it occurs to me that Father Rinaldo is a big man.

Sweat breaks out across my chest, in my hairline. Rinaldo's voice is low and heavy, his words bricking me in. He's nothing but a dark shape moving towards me, and I am stepping backwards, wiggling around chairs, trying to avoid the touch of his hand as he drives me towards the heavy arched columns and the line of pews.

‘Father,
buongiorno
!'

‘We hoped to find you!'

The voices crack into the crypt like gunfire, and Rinaldo and I both spin round, shocked and guilty as discovered lovers.

Two women are standing on the stairs. One has what looks like a basket of flowers in her hand, the other is holding a vase.

Rinaldo recovers first. ‘Signore,
buongiorno
,' he says, his voice drippy with welcome. And as the women begin to come down the steps, talking about flowers, I flee.

I catch one glimpse of their startled faces as I skinny through the line of pews, dodge past a confessional booth and bound up the right-hand set of steps. Then, as if I'm going for sprinting record, I run down the long corridor of the nave, bolting for the shaft of sunlight that falls through the open door.

Outside on the terrace, I stop and lean my hands on my knees as though I've just run a three-minute mile. Rinaldo's words bat around my head, and I wish there was a water cooler up here because I have a very bad taste in my mouth.

The bells have not started yet, but people are beginning to arrive for Mass, climbing up the stairs from the road in twos and threes. At the top they pause to catch their breath and admire the view, then they head towards the church doors, skirting me as if I'm an awkwardly placed piece of furniture. By the time the third pair almost bump into me I decide it's time to go, so I straighten up, look around, and see Billy.

She's on the far side of the terrace, perched on the edge of the parapet above the cemetery, watching me. As I walk towards her, I wonder how long she's been here.

‘Hey,' she says as I get up close.

‘Hey yourself.' My breathing has almost come back to normal, but I'm still not sure my voice sounds quite right.

Billy smiles, but her eyes are skimming over my body as if she's checking it out for signs of something, looking straight through my jeans and jacket to the beads of sweat I can still feel curdling on my skin. Two spots of colour bloom on my cheeks, and to my horror I realize I'm embarrassed, as though I've just been caught in the act with a lover. Rinaldo never did actually touch me, but all of a sudden it feels like his soft white hands have travelled all over my body. I don't want Billy to see, so I rest my elbows on the parapet and lean out, pretending to drink in the view.

‘What are you doing here?' I ask.

‘I was coming to Mass,' Billy says.

‘Bullshit.'

‘Bullshit yourself. I'm Irish Polish, why shouldn't I be Catholic?'

I snort, and Billy jumps off the wall. ‘OK,' she says. ‘I saw you go out, and I followed you. I thought I'd be discreet and wait out here until you were done. There's something I want to show you.' She's already walking away as she speaks, and I find myself trailing after her. She waits for me at the top of the steps and grabs at my hand as I catch up. ‘Come on,' she says, ‘it's almost eight-thirty. We can have coffee up there.'

‘Up where?' I have no idea what she's talking about, and all I really want is to go home and have a shower, scrub even the hint of Rinaldo's maggoty fingers off my body. But apparently it's not to be.

‘The fort.' Billy looks at me as though I'm dense. ‘They reopened it yesterday.'

She points to the Belvedere fort that sits on the crown of the hill straight across like a giant starfish beached, high and dry, above the city. Apparently the views from up there are spectacular, but it's hard to know for sure since the site's been closed for as long as anyone can remember. Like ageing movie stars, the fort and the Medici villa in the centre of it have been permanently ‘
in restauro
'.

That is, until yesterday, when the site was suddenly opened up in time for Easter week. There's a new installation of modern sculpture, some of which apparently features neon. I know this because Piero mentioned it, and also because, like San Miniato, you can see the Medici villa from almost anywhere in the city. Normally it just fades discreetly into the dark. But alas, no longer. Walking home from the vigil last night, we looked up and saw its porticos lurid with streaks of red and blue. If we'd been in the States, Billy commented, they would have spelled out an ad for pizza, or for a bar with a name like the
Dew Drop Inn
, but since we're in Italy it's Art.

Now she drops my arm. ‘Come on,' she says again. ‘There's something I want to show you.' Billy smiles at me, making me feel like a selfish rat. After all, she's followed me all the way up here, and it's practically on our way home. ‘Really, I promise,' she adds. ‘It's cool. You'll like it.'

The bells start to ring as we come down the steps and walk along Viale Galileo, and a few seconds later my phone cheeps in my pocket like a baby bird. When I pull it out, the screen is dark. This happens occasionally. Pierangelo will start to either text or call and get interrupted.
Hi Love U
, I punch in and send.

Where R U?
comes back on the screen a second later. Piero does this, asks me where I am all the time, and I imagine him with a big map of the city, sticking pins in it to track me, reaching out with his fingertip to touch the piazza or street corner that I am standing on. Billy has stopped to tie one of her Converse All Stars.
Risposta?
my phone asks, and I reply,
San Min on wA2 Bel4tere
.

Luv U2
, Pierangelo says, and Billy straightens up and looks over my shoulder as the tiny screen goes black.

‘You guys!' She rolls her eyes. ‘You're worse than teenagers!'

A second later we turn off the big road onto Via San Leonardo, a lane that runs straight across the ridge of the hills to the city gate and the fort's entrance. This is the road Benedetta Lucchese's sister lives on, and I can't help thinking that we're tracing the path she took the night she died.

When we reach number forty-five, Billy slows and looks at the gate. I can't remember whether or not I told her about Isabella Lucchese, but she must have figured it out somehow, because she hasn't picked this place by chance.

‘This is it, isn't it?' she asks, confirming my suspicion. ‘The sister's house?'

I nod. The gate's iron, like all the other gates around here, and the black paint is flaking, which doesn't mean a thing. Florence is one of those places where a certain amount of rot implies status. The requisite wisteria spills over the villa's walls, the buds puckered tight as purple beans. There's a battered red sign wired to the railings, with a bad drawing of a German shepherd on it and the words ‘
Attenti Al Cane
.' All the gates around here have them, whether or not they have dogs. You buy them in the hardware store for five euros. Billy peers in, then shrugs and turns away.

‘You know,' she says, ‘all that stuff, Indrizzio's little presents? It's all to do with the church. White for purity. The goldfinch for Christ's passion. Candles mean transubstantiation.'

‘How do you know?'

She smirks. ‘I looked it up in
The Dictionary of the Italian Renaissance
.'

‘Smarty-pants. And there I was thinking you were Catholic.'

‘Was Indrizzio?'

‘I guess so.'

‘But not a mask. That's weird.'

‘What is?'

Billy shrugs again. ‘I couldn't find anything churchy about masks. All I could find was distinctly un-churchy.' Despite myself, I feel an unwelcome clench in my stomach at the thought of the tiny grinning face.

‘Deception,' Billy is saying. ‘At least that's what it stands for in Renaissance art.' I don't tell her I already know this. ‘Not really a toughie, I guess,' she adds. ‘If you think about it. But I drew a blank on the red bag. Wasn't that what he left with her? Ginevra?'

I nod, but I really don't want to dwell on all this, so I try changing the subject. ‘These houses, what do you think it would really be like to live in one? I mean, it might be great, or it might be really creepy.' Billy can usually be distracted by this sort of stuff, but not this morning.

‘Mary,' she says. ‘I wish you would take this more seriously.'

She faces me, exasperated, and I feel stubbornness rising between us, my refusal to dwell on the murders colliding with Billy's apparent desire to make me. Telling her everything was a mistake, I think, suddenly. It was relief for me in the short run, sure, to get those black birds off my chest, but a mistake if she's going to keep this up.

‘Billy,' I say, finally, ‘I do take it seriously. But I told you, I can't live in a state of permanent alert. I won't. Besides, for me, it's over. And I don't know what you want me to do, anyways. Leave? Hire a bodyguard? Not have a life? Give up Pierangelo and go live in purdah somewhere? What?'

We stand there facing each other. Billy opens her mouth, but before she can say anything there's a sound like the rumbling of an oncoming train. She grabs my arm and yanks me to the side of the narrow lane just as a huge black motorcycle comes barrelling round the corner doing at least fifty miles an hour. Despite the fact that we're flattened against the wall, it almost sideswipes us.

‘Slow down, asshole!' Billy yells, but there's no sign the driver hears her, covered in black leather and helmeted as he is.

‘Jesus!' She steps back into the street, genuinely rattled, something I haven't seen before. ‘I hate those things,' she says. ‘I mean, what is it with guys and bikes? Even normal guys?'

The sound tunnels away from us. It buzzes up towards the fort, and we stand there on the cobbles outside Isabella Lucchese's house, neither of us saying anything, waiting until it fades completely and we have the morning to ourselves again.

We don't discuss anything more to do with the murders, and the momentary tension between us dissipates as the sun gets warmer and we walk on. As we come around the last corner, we see that despite the early hour we're not going to be the first people to arrive at the Belvedere. We've been beaten, if only just, by a group of Japanese tourists. Their leader holds what looks like a broken TV antenna with a plastic rose taped to the top of it and waves it in the air as she barks at them in a high staccato voice. The couples, all of them in raincoats despite the sun, line up behind her with the orderliness of well-behaved school children. Most of them look sad. Frowning and clutching their cameras they stare up at the fort as if they're about to be imprisoned in it.

A minibus, probably theirs, and a couple of cars are pulled up by the fort's walls. Suddenly Billy stops. Beside the bus is a motorcycle, a big black one, about the size of the Smart car on the other side of it. A helmet is padlocked to the handlebars and the engine is still warm, we can hear it ticking.

Billy drops my arm, walks over to it and kicks the front tyre, hard. ‘Fucker!' she says. Several of the Japanese people start to laugh. Billy glances at the line. ‘Shit,' she mutters to me, ‘maybe we should go through the other place.'

‘The other place' is a way into the fort that we discovered on one of our previous walks, when the Belvedere was still closed to the public. It's nothing more than a tear in the chicken-wire fence that fronts the wide grassy skirt at the base of the walls. The trampled grass and scrub on either side suggest it's the entrance of choice for junkies and amorous teenagers. I'm sure it's used mainly at night, and the idea of us sneaking up there in broad daylight and getting caught breaking and entering into cultural monuments—and exactly how we would explain it to Signora Bardino after we got arrested—is enough to make me laugh out loud, which makes Billy cross.

‘Well,' she points out, as we step into the line that is snaking towards the ticket booth, ‘you have to admit, it would save four euros. And that buys you breakfast. If you don't eat much.'

I have no idea why, exactly, Billy was so anxious to come here, but I'm pretty sure it's not for the art. The first thing we see as we climb up through the tunnel that leads to the top of the ramparts is what looks like a big pile of smashed-up cars. The Duomo floats behind it. In the distance we can see the mossy green hills of Fiesole, while below all of Florence is at our feet. The Medici knew a good building site when they saw one.

On closer inspection, the smashed-up cars turn out to be old plane parts, created, if that's the word, by someone from Texas. I guess the juxtaposition is supposed to tell us something about the human condition, but I'm not sure what. The other installations are equally weird. There's a grid of aluminium bars set out on a triangle of grass, and a tiny mini-park raised up on stilts, complete with a street lamp and turf, hovers a few feet above the ground. In the centre of the main terrace is a large pile of broken glass that is supposed to mimic, a plaque informs us, the sundial on the front of the villa, shattering our concept of time in the process. Beyond it, a huge black basalt egg squats on the grass. The Japanese group files obediently past it, even their antenna-waving guide reduced to silence. Several of the men slip off and take videos of the view.