He runs his thumb across the back of my hand. ‘If you don’t mention things,’ he says, ‘you soft-soap. If you hit too hard, it’s nothing but an endless diatribe. For some of us, I think, writing about the church in this country is like writing about a parent who you love, but who’s gone crazy. Turned senile and mean.’ Pierangelo smiles, but the smile is sad. Looking at him, it occurs to me that he’s exhausted, and I feel like a heel for even suggesting he come here.
I take his hand, about to suggest that we go home right now, when there’s a commotion. The band starts, then stops and Pierangelo gets to his feet and I stand up too, but I can’t see anything, so I climb a step behind him.
A column of white figures has appeared out of nowhere. Wearing long robes and something weird on their heads, tall pointed hats, they seem to have materialized in the middle of the piazza. Maybe sixty or more of them walk two by two, in a long white snake cleaving the crowd.
A few seconds ago the people below us had been putting their drinks down, happy, ready to dance again, but now a hush falls over the square.
I stand on my tiptoes, holding on to Pierangelo’s shoulders as the column comes level with the fountain, and that’s when I realize that the white figures are wearing hoods, not hats. The tall peaked cones rise from their shoulders and cover their heads, leaving nothing but slits for their eyes.
‘Shit,’ I whisper to Pierangelo. ‘What are they? Klan?’
He shakes his head. ‘Penitents,’ he says. Then he adds, ‘They do this in Spain, during Holy Week, march around the cities, especially Seville. But I’ve never seen it here before. In the last few years I’ve heard of it, in the south, but I’ve never seen it.’
The leader of the column is swinging a censer. Smoke trails out of it in a thin dribble. A Vespa engine coughs to life a few streets away. A dog barks. Colours wash over the white figures, and as they get closer to us I hear something like a swarm of bees, the low, dull, relentless hum of chanting.
They step up and over the dance floor like a column of army ants or sleepwalkers, and the crowd shifts uneasily. Then someone shouts, loud and harsh, and a bottle flies through the air. It explodes on the cobbles, wine splashing up and spattering the long white gowns, staining the material, and dribbling away to pool at the leading penitent’s feet.
The censer hovers, losing its rhythm, and the chant falters. Figures in the back jam into others in front and the column stalls, bulges like a train wreck. I feel Pierangelo tense as the crowd shimmies. Blue lights wash the tips of the trees and the fountain, catching the strange coned shape of the leader’s head as he swivels, the slits of his mask moving across the banks of faces that surround him. Someone yells. The shout hangs in the air. Then the leader looks down, slowly, lifts his foot and steps forward, his hem dragging in the puddle of wine and shattered glass.
For a second I think they are going to come up the steps, maybe even enter the church, but they don’t. Instead, the penitents skirt the bottom of the terrace, throwing strange peaked shadows against the façade of Santo Spirito, and wind away down towards the river into the dark of the city, the smell of incense hanging in the air behind them.
The crowd surges defiantly back towards the fountain bar and the dance floor. The band strikes up again, almost frantic, and as we sink back onto the steps with the other people around us there’s a palpable sense of relief, as though something awful has been narrowly avoided. We are still catching our breath when Billy materializes in front of us like a hologram.
‘Now that the KKK’s left,’ she says, ‘we’re about to order food, and we’d be so pleased if you’d join us.’ She beams, doing an excellent imitation of Beaver Cleaver’s mother.
‘Mary,’ she adds, ‘I don’t believe you’ve introduced me to your friend.’ Pierangelo stands up. They’re almost the same height. ‘Of course,’ Billy grips his hand and looks into his eyes. ‘You’re the handsome man who brought the roses! And gave Mary this beautiful necklace.’ Billy plucks the little nest of gold off my chest and swings it back and forth on its chain as if she’s dowsing. ‘I guess I just didn’t recognize you, after dark.’
‘I’ve aged in the last week,’ Pierangelo says. ‘Significantly.’
It might sound light-hearted, if you didn’t know him, but there’s an edge in his voice. He doesn’t like her and I wonder why. Billy doesn’t catch it. Instead, she laughs, and I gather they’ve been having a good time back at the table, because I swear I can smell alcohol rising off her, layered over the perfume I recognize as mine.
‘We were thinking of going home,’ I say suddenly.
‘Well, you can’t leave! You just can’t.’ Billy grabs Pierangelo’s hand. ‘I have money riding on this. A bet. The others think you don’t even exist. They think Mary’s been making you up!’
Pierangelo’s presence has an immediate effect on the Japanese girls. As soon as he sits down at the table, they go mute. Like polite children, they answer questions when he asks them directly, but otherwise they don’t say a word. When the food arrives they concentrate on their plates with the kind of dedication I normally associate only with child-proof aspirin bottles or the New York Times crossword puzzle.
For my part, I’m aware that I owe Henry an apology, but this is hardly the time or place, so instead I end up smiling at him inanely, trying to send some kind of telepathic signal that says I’m sorry for leaving him standing there. Henry is good at this game. He smiles back, and even winks. He makes conversation with Pierangelo, asking him about Florence. As usual, Henry is making an effort, being nice. Kirk, on the other hand, is not being nice.
He leans back in his chair and eyes Pierangelo as if they’re two Alpha male baboons. The situation is not helped by Billy, who’s behaving as though Pierangelo is the most fascinating man she’s ever met in her whole, entire life. She passes him the bread. She leans forward when he speaks. She laughs in a high lilting giggle when he asks what we think of the signora and her academy. And when Kirk asks Pierangelo what he does, it’s Billy who answers.
‘He’s a journalist,’ she announces. ‘A famous one. At least that’s what Mary says.’
Billy gives me her 1950s beam again. She sounds like Doris Day on speed, and I wonder what the hell is the matter with her. After this morning’s sulks she’s all lit up, sparkly and excited, cooking with nervous energy. Or maybe just cooking. Henry’s told me he’s suspected more than once that Kirk has a cocaine problem—that maybe that’s why he’s taking this ‘leave of absence’—and I wonder if he and Billy have been sneaking off and doing lines in the bar bathroom, or dropping Ecstasy tabs into their wine. I try to catch Henry’s eye to run this idea past him via our new lines of telepathic communication, but he’s not looking at me. Like everybody else at the table, he’s watching Billy.
‘So, you’re doing this big thing on the cardinal,’ she says to Pierangelo, making D’Erreti sound like a baseball team. He agrees that he is, and Billy witters about how fascinating it must be and asks what it’s like in the Vatican. Kirk shifts in his chair and drinks more, and the Japanese girls eat, shovelling risotto into their mouths, breaking bread and tamping up the crumbs with their fingers.
‘Well,’ Billy says, after Pierangelo’s said something about the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, ‘it must make a nice change, at least. I mean, after that awful stuff, those terrible murders you covered.’
There’s a silence at the table, like a beat in music. The Japanese girls stop chewing and Kirk puts his glass down. But Billy’s on a roll, and I have a horrible feeling I know where this is going to go next.
‘I mean,’ she goes on, ‘that poor prostitute they found in the park, and the nun, and the nurse. That is so terrible. Mary and I disagree,’ she adds brightly, ‘about how much she should worry about those women.’
‘Billy!’ I start to rise out of my chair, not sure exactly what I plan to do—anything, I guess, to shut her up. But Pierangelo puts his hand on my knee, literally holding me down, and befor
e I have a chance to say anything else Kirk and Henry both speak at once.
‘What women?’ they ask.
‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ Pierangelo says. He smiles and takes my hand. ‘Mary’s right about that. And so are you, signorina. The cardinal’s much more interesting.’ But it’s too late to change the subject. Like Pandora, Billy’s cracked the lid on her box and released all sorts of mischief.
When I catch her eye and glare at her, she smiles, looking awfully pleased with herself. Her deep blue eyes hold mine, defiant as a kid sticking her tongue out, and all of a sudden I get it. She’s been mad because I wouldn’t pay attention to her worries over Ginevra Montelleone’s vigil, and because I teased her and wouldn’t listen to her yesterday at the fort. So now she’s going to rat me out, and enlist the others to help bully me into ‘taking things more seriously’. If I thought Pierangelo would let me up, I’d kill her.
‘What murders?’ Kirk is asking. There’s a high, insistent edge in his voice. Like a shark—or a prosecutor—he smells blood, and he’s not about to be deflected by talk of some guy in a red dress. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he asks.
Pierangelo almost never smokes, but now he produces a silver cigarette case and matching lighter I’ve never seen before, and lights up slowly. He blows smoke, and eyes Kirk the way a cat eyes a bird on a feeder. I glance around the table, at the shiny bowed heads of the Japanese girls, who are practically counting the grains of their rice, and at Henry and Billy, neither of whom is looking at me. I feel as if I’m in High School again, watching two guys square up in the parking lot, and I open my mouth to say this is all ridiculous but, before I can, Pierangelo shrugs.
‘She’s right,’ he says. ‘There have been women killed in the city, and my paper has written about it. It’s hardly unusual.’
‘Women? How many?’ This is Henry.
Pierangelo looks at him. ‘Four,’ he says.
‘Four!’ Kirk reaches out and takes Billy’s hand, the one with the heart ring on it. He winds his fingers through hers, holding on as if it’s a gesture of solidarity in the face of immediate danger. ‘There’s been nothing about it in the press recently.’ He turns to me. ‘You know about this?’
I nod, fiddling with the stem of my glass.
‘How long has it been going on?’ Kirk is closing on me the way I imagine him closing on someone lying in court.
‘A couple of years, I guess.’ I don’t sound as offhand as I’d like to.
‘So, it was happening the last time you were here?’
Under the table, Pierangelo squeezes my knee. ‘These things happen in big cities.’ He taps his ash on the edge of his plate.
But Kirk’s like a dog with a bone. ‘I mean, what?’ he asks. ‘What are we talking about here? A serial killer? Is that what you’re saying?’
He’s raising his voice now, grandstanding. The people at the next table glance over their shoulders, but there’s too much noise in the piazza for them to make out what we’re saying.
‘Should these women be afraid?’ Kirk waves his free hand across the table theatrically, suggesting that Billy, the Japanese girls and I are all under his care. ‘Is there some maniac running around?’ he asks. ‘I mean, if there is, we have a right to know. People have a right to protect themselves.’ Kirk glares at Pierangelo as if he might wield the knife himself.
Piero doesn’t say anything and in the face of his silence, Kirk goes quiet. He stares down at the table, one pale hand still holding Billy’s, the other playing with his fork, rocking it back and forth on its tines as if he’s about to flip it like a weapon. Then something moves across his face. He twitches, his prosecutor’s instinct clicking in.
‘That’s what happened to the girl in the river, isn’t it?’ He looks up, the histrionics vanished from his face, leaving it cold and still as marble. ‘She’s one of them, isn’t she?’
There’s complete silence at the table. Henry pulls his beard, giving it a little jerk, and Billy stares with total concentration at the edge of her plate. She glances up at Pierangelo, her look distant and considering, as if she’s curious to see how he’ll get out of this one. Mikiko suddenly puts her fork down.
‘She committed suicide.’
Mikiko’s beautiful black eyes are wide, and she’s staring at us as though we’re all crazy, or she would certainly like us to be. ‘Right?’ she asks. ‘That’s what happened to her, right?’
There’s a thin knife-edge of fear in her voice. She looks at Pierangelo, pleading for him to agree with her. ‘Florence is a very safe city.’ Mikiko nods, the dark cap of her hair shimmering in the lights. ‘That girl jumped, from the bridge,’ she says. ‘Nobody killed her. It said in the newspapers.’
Piero stubs out his cigarette. ‘As far as I know,’ he says, ‘she drowned.’
Mikiko favours him with a nervous smile, picks up her fork and dives back into her plate. Henry stops pulling his beard. Kirk reaches for his glass and looks slightly put out, as if he’s been reminded again that you never break the cardinal rule and ask a question you don’t know the answer to. And I just want to go home. Then Billy takes a bite of her food, looks up at Pierangelo and smiles.
‘That’s interesting,’ she says. ‘But let’s just say for a second it isn’t true. Just for the sake of argument. I mean serial killers, they don’t usually stop, do they? Isn’t that something to worry about? I mean, I heard that sometimes it’s even like a game,’ she adds, impaling another tube of pasta with her fork. ‘That they leave clues and stuff, deliberately. For instance, the kind of knife that was used—’
‘Knife?’ Mikiko puts her glass down and stares at all of us. ‘Someone killed her with a knife? But you just said—’
‘Oh for God’s sake!’
Henry picks up a carafe and splashes dark red wine into our glasses. Some of it spatters and spills on the white tablecloth, spreading like an ink blot under the breadcrumbs. ‘Come on, you guys,’ he says. ‘It’s a party tonight. Let’s cut it out. OK? Some women were attacked, a long time ago, and a girl jumped off a bridge. We’re not talking about the Monster of Florence here.’
I could kiss him.
Ayako pats Mikiko on the shoulder. ‘See,’ she says. ‘No monsters in Florence.’
She hasn’t understood Henry’s reference to the city’s most famous serial killer, and no one feels the need to enlighten her. Kirk’s collapsed back into his chair, and even Billy’s shut up.
‘Well, it is pretty scary! Like a bad movie!’ Mikiko laughs and lets Henry pour her more wine, and Tamayo even joins in.
‘Miki is a really big coward,’ she says.
This is almost the first thing Tamayo has said all evening, and the fact that she is speaking at all takes us by surprise. Normally, she’s incredibly shy. Billy looks up from the pattern she’s been tracing on the tablecloth with her fingernail, and Tamayo looks around as if she realizes her own shock value and finds it funny.
‘Miki can’t watch scary movies,’ she announces, giggling. She picks up her glass and shakes her head in disbelief. ‘She puts her head in my lap. Even pictures scare her, in museums. Fraidy Cat!’ She laughs. ‘You should have seen her in Mantua!’
‘What did you guys do? Go see Son of Dracula with Signor Catarelli?’ Kirk actually manages a smile, and when Mikiko laughs and makes a face at the idea we all laugh with her, the black mood around the table splintering into tiny bright pieces.
‘Nooo. Yuck. But there was this picture by Mantegna,’ Ayako says, the wine flushing her face and making her suddenly voluble. ‘I was telling Billy, it was really gross. Hate was in it, and she was like a horrible old monkey, and she had these bags of seeds hanging from her shoulders.’
The band has started again. A wave of jive music washes across the piazza, and some people start to clap. Couples get up from tables around us, and clamber over the plastic hedge to the dance floor. One woman is drunk and half collapses on the spiky fake leaves. I see her open mouth, but I can’t hea
r any sound. I feel as though my ears are blocked up and I’m in a plane that’s climbing to a place where the pressure in my head will explode.
‘Bags?’ At first, I’m not sure I’ve said anything because Ayako doesn’t seem to have heard me. Then I realize she’s returned her attention to her food and doesn’t want to talk with her mouth full.
Billy has taken her free hand out of Kirk’s and reaches for her wine glass. The wine meets her lips, and she flicks at it with the tip of her tongue. Now I know what she was talking to the girls about earlier. It was their trip to Mantua. It was the picture they had seen, of Hate and her bags of seeds. That’s what set Billy off.
Ayako finishes chewing and nods. ‘Signor Catarelli explained it. Somebody is trying to chase Vices from the Garden of Eden. And Hate is like, you know, this monkey-woman. She’s all shrivelled up, and she has only one breast and these four bags hang from her shoulders.’
Billy makes a point of not looking at me. ‘Four?’ she asks.
‘Right,’ Ayako says.
‘And they’re filled with the seeds of evil. Isn’t that what you said?’ Billy mentions this as if it’s perfectly normal, as if what we’re discussing here is nothing more than the effect of Classicism on the Renaissance.
‘Yeah. And they’re scarlet,’ Mikiko adds. ‘The colour of sin,’ she laughs. ‘You know, just like you, scarlet woman! You should go to Mantua.’
‘You really should.’ Tamayo nods in agreement. ‘It’s a beautiful town. And an amazing picture. Mantegna is really an interesting artist. You’d like it.’
‘I bet,’ Billy says. ‘I just can’t wait.’
Chapter Fourteen
PIERANGELO AND I decide to leave a few minutes later.
Kirk has led Billy off to dance, and the Japanese girls seem to have changed their mind about Henry’s coolness, or lack of it, because they set on him like a trio of Munchkins, giggling excitedly as they drag him over the plastic hedge and out onto the floor where couples are clutching each other, stumbling slightly and swaying to the slow syrupy music.
The Faces of Angels Page 21