Claire pursed her lips. A faint tinge of pink filled her cheeks as though she was embarrassed.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “We’re all going to die at some point. So we all have these auras, presumably?”
“No, I only see them when people will die soon, like in the next week or two. And the more quickly the aura moves, the sooner the person will die.”
“What color is it?”
“The aura? It’s clear. It ripples like air coming off hot asphalt.”
Claire’s look of bemusement would have been funny under other circumstances. “This is all a joke, right?” she said eventually.
I shook my head. “No, it’s not.”
“And you’re telling me about this… phenomenon, why?”
“Because you have an aura. And so does Ethan.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Kate. That is totally ridiculous. I always considered you normal. Boring perhaps, but normal.”
“Boring?” I raised my voice. “What’s that supposed to mean?” From the corner of my eye, I saw Federico look over at us.
Claire settled back into her seat, wrapping her arms around her. “Forget I said it.”
“No, really. I want to know. You can’t fling the word ‘boring’ at someone and expect them to agree with you.”
“You can’t fling the word ‘aura’ at people and tell them they’re going to die,” she said. “Oh, wait. You just did that.”
We both fell silent. I stared out of the window. When I glanced back at Claire, she had her eyes closed. I couldn’t tell if she was sleeping or merely avoiding me.
I ordered three coffees from the drinks cart when it came past, and gave one to Federico. I put another down in front of Claire. She can’t have been asleep, I decided, because she immediately sat up straight and emptied a sachet of sugar into her coffee without looking up at me. I couldn’t work out how she stayed so thin with all those calories hidden in her beverages. But I doubted it was diet that would kill her.
“Claire,” I ventured.
She flicked her eyes up at me with an expression I remembered from school. That look of disdain from the popular girl, the look that makes you feel as though you’ve crawled out from under a particularly slimy rock.
“What do you expect me to say?” She took a sip of her coffee and grimaced. Mine tasted fine. Good, even. Not like the coffee on the railways in England. It was an Italian train after all.
“I don’t expect you to understand or to like the idea of auras,” I said. “Frankly, you don’t even need to believe it. We’re both well aware that we’re in danger.”
“So you have an aura too?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see it if I do.”
“That’s convenient.”
“Goddammit. I’m not making this up and I’m not saying it to hurt you. I wish I couldn’t see auras. They’ve changed my life and not in a good way. I didn’t have to get involved in whatever mess we’re in now. If I hadn’t seen an aura over Ethan on Friday night, I’d have assumed he’d forgotten our dinner date. I would have gone home, slept in on Saturday morning, done my laundry, and watched my favorite history documentaries. I’d be at work today, at the job I’m supposed to be doing.”
When I put it like that, it sounded rather tedious. It could be that Claire was right. Maybe I was boring.
I picked up my paper cup, but didn’t take a drink. “The aura changed everything. I knew that Ethan was in danger. That’s what made me come to Florence to bring the book to you. And when I saw your aura, I couldn’t walk away.”
“So now, you’re dragged in even though you don’t want to be.”
“Ethan’s my friend. Of course I want to be here. For you too.”
She closed her eyes again. I finished my coffee. I was already wired. Now I felt worse. Resting my head against the seat back, I tried some deep breathing. It didn’t help.
The train slowed and then pulled into Bologna Centrale, where we descended into a pulsating mass of people, noise, smells and motion. Federico guided us along the platform. I was glad to have him there, but every casual glance or accidental brush with another passenger made my nerves vibrate. When we passed a long sleek train bound for Switzerland, I dreamed of it carrying us to safety through the Alps. But without Claire’s passport that wasn’t an option.
Finally we found the local train to Pianoro, three carriages long and covered in graffiti. It hummed quietly while passengers hurried along the platform and climbed in. We lingered until the last minute and then jumped into the first carriage. Again, there was no sign of a pursuer, but Federico kept a careful watch on our fellow passengers as the train slipped out of the station.
18
When we arrived in Pianoro, we wandered aimlessly for a few minutes before asking a passerby to direct us to Viuzzolo Margoli. Number 55 was a neat, white-stuccoed house with a red tile roof, a green lawn, and brick pathways adorned with pots of red and white geraniums. Claire rang the bell and we waited, with no idea who would answer the door. This could be a very short visit if signor Gardi had left no relatives behind.
I heard children’s voices echoing down the hallway, followed by whispers and scuffling at the door. A boy of about ten opened it, holding hands with a smaller child, a little girl in a pink princess costume.
“Is your mother home?” I asked.
The children scampered back down the hall, calling for their mother. A few seconds later, a woman who looked to be in her late thirties came to the open door, wiping her hands on her apron. She didn’t invite us in, but smiled and asked what she could do for us.
“Signora, are you related to Luca Gardi?” Claire asked.
She looked surprised. “Si, certo. I’m his granddaughter.”
I felt a huge sense of relief, although I knew it was premature. There was every chance that the woman knew nothing of what had happened during the war. Yet, I felt a sense of connection, however remote, a positive link with the past, where this story had all started for Claire’s family.
“Could we ask you a few questions about your grandfather?” asked Claire.
The woman’s face changed, withdrawn and wary. “Are you from the Finanza? The government?”
“No, no, of course not. My grandfather was… a friend of your grandfather’s. They knew each other during the war.”
The granddaughter smiled again. “You had better come in,” she said. “My name’s Constanza, by the way.”
Federico said he’d wait outside. We left him leaning against the fence, lighting up a cigarette.
“Nonno will be happy to have visitors,” Constanza said as we followed her down the hallway, our shoes clicking on the terracotta tiles. Claire looked at me, her eyes wide with surprise.
We came to a living room, as neat and pretty as the outside of the house, with vases of flowers resting on well-polished furniture, and a small fire burning in the grate. In a large wingback armchair sat an elderly man with a blanket over his knees and a book in his hand.
“Nonno, there are some people here to see you,” she said, and turned back to us. “Please make yourselves at home. I’ll get some coffee for everyone.” She left the room, leaving us to stare in amazement at Luca Gardi, the man who was dying of TB in 1948.
“Sit down, please, sit down,” said Gardi, his voice strong and vibrant. “I don’t get many visitors nowadays apart from the priest. And he only comes to drink my good vinsanto.”
We took seats in yellow upholstered chairs opposite him. Claire introduced us. “We learned about your connection with my grandfather and wanted to ask you some questions,” she said.
“Your grandfather?”
“Henry Hamilton. I think you might remember him from the war?”
Gardi pulled his grey eyebrows together in a frown as if trying to recall. “Yes, yes, of course I knew Henry Hamilton. I saved him, you know, after that terrible firefight with those art smugglers. I wasn’t one of them. I hope your grandfather knows that. How is he anyway? Do yo
u look like him? I can’t remember the details at my age but I seem to remember he had green eyes like yours.”
“I’m afraid he’s dead, signore. I never knew him, but he left behind the book that you had sent him. The Della Pittura. That’s what we wanted to ask you about, if you don’t mind.”
Gardi’s face didn’t change, no sudden shuttering of the eyes or nervous twitch, no nod or smile of acknowledgement. I wondered if he even remembered anything about the book and its contents. He didn’t have an aura, I was glad to see.
“Go ahead,” said Gardi. “Ask away. I like to talk, you know, but my great-grandchildren are too young and they only want to play games like dominoes. We don’t really talk much.”
Claire smiled at him. “Do you remember anything about the book that you gave my grandfather and the pouch that was hidden inside?”
The old man nodded his head vigorously. “Ah yes, the Custodians’ key.” He looked at her closely. “Do you have it? Did your grandfather give it to you?”
Claire and I exchanged a look. Gardi knew about the Custodians too.
I took the pouch out of my bag pocket and handed it to him. He weighed it in his hand before opening it and extracting the key. My mind was racing. First Falcone, then the note in Simon’s notebook, now Gardi. This was the third mention of the Custodians.
“What do you know about these Custodians?” I asked. “Who are they? How did you know the key belonged to them? Do you know what it unlocks?”
Gardi held up his hand to stop me. “One question at a time. That’s all my old brain can handle. Why don’t I start at the beginning and you can ask questions afterwards. I’m more likely to get it right if I think at my own pace.”
I apologized, and Gardi gave the key back to me. He paused before starting his story. “In ’45, my unit was waiting to join up with the British Eighth near Bologna,” he said. “It was a terrible time, you know, with the Germans determined to hang on, and Italians fighting each other. No one knew whom to trust. One morning, my sergeant told us we were going on a ‘special mission.’ I was excited. Ha, I thought I was in for the big time. That I was going to take part in an operation that would end the war. Such are the delusions of the young and desperate.”
Gardi stared into the fire, lost to us for a few moments.
“It turned out that badly, that mission. By the end, my Italian comrades were all dead, apart from the sergeant who organized our criminal excursion. I didn’t know him well at all. Our units were being reorganized, reshuffled and rescheduled almost daily following the surrender. I was just the unlucky private who had access to a donkey and a cart, the one the sergeant ordered to accompany him.”
“You said it was a criminal excursion?” Claire asked. “What did you do?”
“I’m getting to it,” he said. “There were six of us, all Italians. We went first to a tunnel in the hills that had been a mine of some kind. There were dozens of crates in there and they all had an address in Germany stamped on them. The sergeant ordered us to load them on to the cart. It was more weight than my little donkey could handle, so we pushed from behind, along a dirt track to a railway crossing. By the time we got there, it was almost dark and it had started to rain. We waited an hour, maybe more. Further up the valley, bombs were falling. I was scared, I have to admit. Finally we heard a train in the distance. It was rolling without lights so when it pulled up at the crossing, it was just a big black shape in the darkness. It smelled of smoke and hot metal, I remember.”
He stopped talking as Constanza came in with cups of espresso on a tray and a plate of biscotti. “Grandpa has a sweet tooth,” she said. “Please have some, or he’ll eat them all.”
The children stood behind her at the door, giggling and whispering. She shooed them in front of her as she left. When it was quiet again, Gardi continued his story.
“The sergeant told us to load the crates into a boxcar at the back of the train. The ground was muddy, and it was hard work, but we’d half emptied the donkey cart when a small unit of British soldiers emerged from a line of trees to our right. They approached, with their weapons aimed at us. Their captain asked what we were doing, and threatened to take us all into custody. They argued, and then the sergeant took a shot at him and all hell broke out. The British started firing at us, and the sergeant ordered us to shoot back. The driver started the train and the sergeant, holding a small box in his hands, ran alongside until the driver helped him up. He dropped the box, but he got away.
“By the time it was over, all the Italians were dead, and so were the Brits, apart from the captain who’d been leading them. He was bleeding badly, so I loaded him into the cart, laying him on top of the crates that were left. I picked up the small box the sergeant had dropped and threw that in too. Then we went as fast as I could make that donkey go back to the British HQ. It was just a shelled-out, abandoned farmhouse but I knew there were medics there, and I left the captain at the door.”
“Signor Gardi, did you keep the Della Pittura?” Claire asked. “What happened to the rest of the artworks?”
He looked at us for what seemed like a long time. “I made your grandfather comfortable on the ground and then unloaded all the crates and left them next to him, where they’d be found. I banged on the door, so that someone would come out and find your grandfather. I knew he wouldn’t make it through the night out there in the rain. And then I ran. The Brits would have arrested me once they learned of the bloodbath in the valley and I had no intention of spending the rest of the war in a POW camp. When daylight broke, I realized the small box was still in the back of the cart. I hadn’t seen it in the dark. When I opened it, the Della Pittura was inside, and the key in its leather pouch was inside the book.”
Gardi drained his espresso, lost in thought. He put his cup down on a little table next to his chair, his hand shaking. “I guessed, from the way the sergeant had been holding on to it, that it had to be valuable and I thought about selling it. Right after the war, life was brutal, with the rationing and no money. But I didn’t. I hid it and managed to find a job, earning just enough to look after my mother. Our house had been destroyed, so we bought a bombed out wreck of a place for practically nothing. I did it up by myself.” He looked up at us and smiled. “I was only a kid back then, with plenty of muscles. Not like now, eh?”
Constanza peeked into the room. “More coffee?” she asked. We all said no. I was impatient to hear the rest of signor Gardi’s story.
“Then just a year after the war ended, I fell ill,” he said. “The doctor said it was TB and that I didn’t have long to live. So I decided it was time to wipe the slate clean. I managed to locate your grandfather through the war records office and I arranged for a courier to take the book to him. After that, I went to a sanatorium in Florence, where I was treated for my illness. It was rudimentary care compared to what the doctors can do now, but I’m not complaining. I’m still here, so they must have done something right.”
He paused, crumbling a biscotti on his plate but not eating it. “It’s odd,” he said. “I recall so much more about that time than any events of last month or last year. It was the excitement, I suppose, that imprinted those memories on my mind— and the fear. I remember being afraid much of the time.”
He sighed, his eyes unfocused, perhaps contemplating his past.
I was wrestling with the concept of a memory from seventy years ago. My memories didn’t even span three decades.
“Anyway,” Gardi went on. “I spent weeks in Florence in a ward full of men like me, all thinking we were going to die. Some of them did, of course. The man in the bed next to mine used to prattle on about a vault full of treasure hidden somewhere in Florence. He was sure that if he could find it, he could pay for better treatment and get well. We thought he was deranged, you know. A lot of men were after the war. To be struck by illness on top of all the suffering and pain they had endured for so many years was a blow that some of them couldn’t deal with. There were a few suicides while I was there.
I was too much of a coward to take that way out. Just as well, huh, considering I’m over ninety now and still going.”
The old man laughed until his eyes watered. “Where was I? Oh yes, the vault full of treasure that the patient next to me kept talking about. One day someone came to visit him. A stranger, well dressed, a Florentine, judging from his accent. He wore a peculiar gold ring with a symbol on it. I noticed it because I was well enough to be up and about that day, and offered to bring in some coffee for the visitor. The hospital staff didn’t do that kind of thing. Still don’t. Anyway, the symbol on his ring was of flames with the letter C in the middle. It looked just like the key in the leather pouch that I’d found inside the book.
“Well, I was curious, so I hung around as close as I could and heard them talking about a vault. The stranger mentioned the word ‘Custodians’ and said they were a charitable organization and had lost much of their assets during the Nazi plundering, and it was his job to locate them. They would offer a reward to anyone that could help them. I didn’t like the look of him and I didn’t believe his charity story. That patient died two days later, which I thought was odd, but the medical staff were so overworked that no one took much notice. So after I got better and was home again I began to ask around and learned a little more about the Custodians.”
I leaned forward and patted his hand. “I’m so glad you recovered. You have a beautiful family.” I glanced towards the door where the children had gathered again. They hid their faces, giggling.
“Yes,” said Gardi. “I was lucky. My wife, God rest her soul, was a wonderful woman, more than I deserved. She died a few years ago.”
“So did you find out anything about the Custodians?” Claire asked.
He looked at her for a few seconds as though he’d forgotten who she was. “Not much. An old wartime friend worked for the Italian intelligence services after the war so I contacted him and he said he’d help me. I think he liked the idea of doing something useful and a little clandestine. He was one of those who missed the war. Daily life in peacetime was very dull by comparison. He had access to some archives, and was able to find out that the Custodians were a highly secretive group who had a vault full of old art and some other artifacts hidden somewhere in Florence. You know that Florence is built on top of the ancient Roman city of Florentia? There are miles of Roman foundations running under the medieval streets. I always enjoyed that thought, one civilization building on the ruins of another, hiding the past’s secrets.”
The Complete Kate Benedict Cozy British Mysteries Page 69