‘Better find that car,’ said Sandro to Pietro. ‘Hadn’t we?’
Pietro nodded. ‘I’ll call in the details,’ he said ‘You never know, that expensive computer might earn its keep for once.’
Sandro snorted. ‘You try the computer,’ he said. ‘I’ll stick to the old methods. He turned away a little, gazing out over the frozen landscape, and dialled a number on his mobile.
‘Fausto?’ he said. ‘I want you to find a car for me.’ Without even needing to look at his notebook he reeled off every detail the Romanian had given them. ‘Bronze Opel coupé with Modena plates, dented offside wing, no rear fender. Fifteen years old or so.’ He listened a moment, then snorted. ‘Yeah, yeah. A piece of cake for a lad like you. But do us a favour and make it quick, I don’t think it’ll be around long.’ His face was grim as he folded the mobile closed and turned back to Pietro.
18
They walked through the market on their way. The Chapels of the Princes stood proud and calm at the centre of all the tourist tat, the stacked layers of cloisters, library, loggia all surmounted by the dark red dome of the Chapel, the noisy commerce moving ceaselessly around it. When Celia had first lived in the city, she had often come here; now she found it hard to believe that she had once found the stalls exotic. She had bought a leather satchel long since disintegrated, a string of scarlet corals too bright to be real that she still wore. She still had a residual fondness for the place, but today in the grey light it all looked flimsy and cheap, a pedlar’s cardboard suitcase full of tin and glass. The stall-holders stamped their feet, listless and cold in the wind. On a corner there was a news-stand, thin European editions of the English papers already tattered from the snow, but Emma seized on them.
‘That’s what I’ve been missing,’ she said eagerly. ‘A newspaper. Why didn’t we think to ask for the papers at the hotel?’
Lucas shrugged a little. ‘Time enough for that when we get back, don’t you think?’ he said mildly. His indifference seemed unusual to Celia – in her experience men were always obsessed with the latest edition of their usual paper, as though they had to keep in touch with world events at all times. Perhaps Lucas Marsh was above all that.
‘Oh, that’s not like you,’ said Emma. ‘Come on, I’m getting one.’ She took two, and then had nowhere to put them.
‘Let me,’ said Celia; as she folded them inside her bag a small paragraph caught her eye at the bottom of the front page, the photograph of a child she recognized from long ago. She glanced up and saw that Lucas Marsh was looking away, his face even paler than usual.
Some of the stalls had already packed up in the snow, their stock boxed and locked in wooden compartments. But it was still busy enough: handbags dangled over their heads as they walked; the trestles were piled with cheap, bright knitwear and stacks of fake jeans. Tunisians and Algerians bantered across the passing trade, occasionally pausing to ensnare a customer, thrusting the cheap leather jackets at the susceptible. None of them approached Lucas and Emma Marsh; they walked through the crowded street untouched, as though they had arrived from a different planet and had to be treated with caution. Lucas Marsh looked around curiously, eyeing not the produce but the merchants; they seemed to be what interested him. Chinese girls folding locusts and peacocks out of rushes or holding up beaded vests, a Neapolitan selling gilt and marble chess-sets, an Algerian shivering in his ill-fitting leather coat, his skin bleached sallow in the cold. Then they passed a stall selling tiny sheepskin boots for babies, and Emma stopped.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Look at these.’ She pulled off a glove and reached out to touch a pair. The stall-holder eyed her judiciously, smiling and nodding, keeping his distance. Emma unhooked the boots and held them to her cheek.
‘They’re so soft,’ she murmured, looking up at her husband. Celia followed her look; she couldn’t read Lucas’s expression at all, and she felt impatient suddenly.
‘Have them,’ she said impulsively, and she fumbled in her bag, pulled out a note and handed it to the stallholder. Gently he took the little boots from Emma. ‘These?’ he said, looking curiously into her pensive face.
‘Isn’t it—’ Emma darted another look at her husband. ‘Isn’t it bad luck?’ She turned back to Celia, who felt a pang of guilt, then a stab almost of anger, once more obscurely directed towards Lucas Marsh. She felt sure that somehow he had made Emma like this, so fearful.
‘No,’ she said slowly, looking at him. ‘You can’t think like that, surely? They’re a present, from me.’
Lucas Marsh looked back at Celia and she thought that, for the first time, he was curious, that she had said something to make him think.
‘She’s right,’ he said almost angrily, taking her by the shoulder. ‘Listen. She’s right, you can’t think like that. A pair of little shoes – that’s nothing, how can they make a difference to anything? Have them.’ His voice caught, but Emma didn’t seem to hear, she just gazed back at him. At last he let her go; she looked at Celia and then at the stall-holder with a dazed expression. She took the little paper bag he held out to her. He watched them go with mild incomprehension; the purchase of a pair of baby boots had never seemed so weighty a matter.
They moved quickly through the chapel; it was gloomy today, dark and almost empty. Emma seemed unfocused, exclaiming over the inlays, the blood-red marble of the high octagon, the jasper and agate of the great sarcophagi, but her mind seemed to be somewhere else and she had a self-absorbed, inward look. She wandered off, standing in the light that fell through the doorway and examining some small piece of carving, dreamily absorbed. It was the kind of look Celia had always imagined pregnant women to have, a look of secret knowledge, private satisfaction; she felt sad for Emma, if all it had taken were those few words of support from Lucas. Her mood seemed precarious, one moment on the verge of tears, the next brimming with excitement and delight. Perhaps it was just hormonal. Celia tried to think how she might feel, pregnant; she found she couldn’t think about it, there was something dangerous even in imagining it.
Lucas Marsh was the one who seemed really to like it in the chapel, from the moment they stepped inside and the thick stone walls of the octagon folded around them. He seemed quite at ease in the strange, cold atmosphere among the gleaming tombs, where the peculiar light was diffused from some indistinct source high over their heads. He asked Celia a number of rather interesting questions about the Medici; she had expected him to want to know about their power and their wealth – many rich people did. But he seemed to be as curious about their kindness, their involvement with the lives of the city’s ordinary citizens, their benefaction. Their bid for eternal life. The tombs themselves seemed to move him to silence, and he stood and stared at their great cold bulk. Celia wondered what he was thinking. She thought she might even ask; she had rather surprised herself by enjoying her discussion with him. But just as she turned towards him to break the silence, Emma, who had detached herself from them as they talked in order to wander rather aimlessly at the other side of the chapel, hurried across the inlaid floor towards them, almost as if to forestall Celia’s question. Her heels rang out on the marble, a neat, sharp sound.
‘It’s rather gloomy in here, isn’t it?’ she said cheerfully as she approached. Her voice was bright and loud in the hushed atmosphere. ‘I don’t know if I’d like all this when I go.’ She swept a hand around the space with its great burden of marble memorial. ‘A nice windswept hillside, that’s what I’d like. An estuary view.’ Lucas looked at her, frowning, as though trying to make sense of what she’d said. And it did seem an odd remark; she stood there in front of them more alive than anything in the place.
‘It’s still quite current, in Italy,’ said Celia. ‘The mausoleum.’ She thought of the miniature mansions the Sicilians constructed for the dead, pink and white and gold, the cult of death. The cemetery up behind San Miniato where Lucas Marsh had wandered off among the crowded tombs to talk in private on his phone. ‘It’s more… a part of life here than it is
in England.’ She realized that she might once have said, at home and meant England; instead it seemed a place quite distant and unimaginable, like something she’d read about long ago. ‘Death is still more… present here. In the middle of everything. Not something hidden.’ She shrugged. ‘There’s probably a reason for that, an anthropological reason, a historical reason. It’s hard to say if it’s healthy, or not, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t mind all this,’ said Lucas, looking around him, his voice a little rusty with silence. ‘Odd, isn’t it? I find it… comforting. Hard to erase, all this marble and stone. Why not make your mark?’
‘Perhaps it’s a man thing,’ said Emma with deliberate carelessness. ‘But it makes me feel cold.’
At the door there was some kind of commotion; where the light fell through glass screens there was movement. Celia heard the voice of the attendant raised as he told some invisible interlocutor he couldn’t come in, not without a booking; at first he sounded reasonable but firm, but then his tone hardened, turning to anger. She imagined an indignant foreign tourist party, unable to believe they couldn’t simply walk in, ill-equipped for the delicate negotiation and elaborate courtesy that had gained Celia entry an hour early. She listened, but what struck her as odd was that there was no strident American or French voice raised in outrage; she could only hear a kind of low, threatening mutter. She detected a movement at her side and saw that Lucas had stepped back out of the light. Emma, meanwhile, took a step towards the door, leaning out to see what was going on.
‘He was looking at me,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘Who?’ said Lucas sharply from the shadows.
‘The man there they don’t want to let in.’ She nodded towards the far side of the crypt. ‘When I was over there on my own. He was just standing inside the door, like he had come in out of the snow, but he was staring at me.’ She shrugged.
‘What did he look like?’ said Lucas.
Emma frowned, concentrating. ‘Tall,’ she said. ‘Scruffy. He had a ski hat pulled down but he had no gloves on, had his hands like this,’ she gestured, ‘under his arms, to keep them warm. But I couldn’t really see his face. The light was behind him.’
‘Look…’ Celia frowned at the familiar details. Could it be the man Beate had drawn, hoping for a handout from a rich man? She couldn’t help thinking what Marco had said about Lucas Marsh, that he was the kind of man that attracted attention. She had no experience with this kind of thing. ‘I’m sure he’s just a beggar, they’re all over the place, this is the worst area for them, too close to the station. Are you worried? Would you like… security?’ Not that she would have had the first idea of how to arrange a minder, but there was always Gabriele. Celia wondered if he was back from the airport, wished he was here.
‘Darling?’ said Emma, looking confused. Lucas Marsh shook his head, looking away from them.
‘No, no,’ he said, tight-lipped. ‘Nothing like that. For God’s sake, it’s just a holiday.’
‘Shall we go, then?’ said Emma, and Celia had the impression she was changing the subject, trying to be obedient. ‘See the library quickly, then back to the hotel?’
‘Can we get to the library through the chapel?’ asked Lucas, looking at the entrance. ‘Do we have to go back the way we came in?’ Celia could see the attendant standing square in the light to block the way, feet apart and gesticulating angrily.
‘Yes,’ she said.
They came out into the cloister through a tiny side door. Celia had only known of the door’s existence because once a young American girl had suddenly felt sick in the chapel. It was the smell, she’d said, she thought she could smell dead bodies, and the sweet, heavy scent of old incense hadn’t helped. They had had to be ushered out into the fresh air by the quickest route available.
She stood there now with Lucas and Emma Marsh, blinking in the white light; the courtyard whirled with snow. The cloister was the perfect antidote to the chapel’s heavy gloom; pale, golden vaulting surrounded a green square planted with box and turning white now, at its centre an orange tree almost forty feet tall, the snow beginning to settle on the stiff, glossy leaves.
‘Oranges,’ exclaimed Emma, delighted, peering to glimpse the waxy fruit under the snow. ‘Are they real?’ She turned to Celia in amazement.
‘Of course they are,’ said Celia, laughing. ‘Can’t you smell them?’ The sweet orange-blossom scent was faint but distinct. They were almost miraculous, she realized, oranges in winter.
Emma perched on the low wall that surrounded the garden, leaned in to get a view of the layered terracotta roofs where the snow was beginning to settle, the loggia, the dome, that all looked in on the green square.
‘Shouldn’t we go into the library?’ said Lucas, looking around them, and for a moment Celia had the impression he was afraid. In one corner of the courtyard was the gate that allowed the public to enter the cloister and his gaze stopped there. The gate stood open; you could see half a market stall hung with football shirts, and people hurrying past in what was becoming a blizzard.
‘Oh,’ said Emma. ‘Can’t we just sit, a bit? We don’t have to do the library, do we? A load of old books.’ She looked at Celia beseechingly. Celia looked from one of them to the other; she was used to this, at least.
‘We could leave the library, just see the vestibule,’ she said, momentarily forgetting her qualm about the place in her eagerness to find a compromise.
‘The what?’ said Emma, laughing.
‘It’s a kind of lobby,’ said Celia. ‘An enclosed foyer, leading you to the library. It’s by Michelangelo. It’s just here, in the corner.’ She pointed along the cloister.
‘All right then,’ said Emma. Celia noticed that she was looking pale again. ‘How long can a vestibule take?’ And she slid awkwardly off the wall, brushing a chalky trace of plaster dust from her red coat. Lucas took his wife’s arm with what Celia took at first to be solicitude: but seemed also to be a kind of nervous haste. She began on a simple explanation of the origins and significance of the vestibule, the birth of mannerism, the unusual proportions, but she had the impression neither of them was paying much attention.
There was no attendant beside the sign to the library that stated it was open; the place seemed deserted. It was a quiet time, Celia supposed, and perhaps he had been called into the chapel to deal with whatever was going on in there. Certainly there was no indication here of any disturbance; it was preternaturally quiet. They pushed the door open; it swung to behind them, and suddenly, abruptly, all the light and movement, all the whirling snow, the brilliant white sky, the scent of oranges, turned to stillness.
The lobby to the library, which Celia had seen and admired and explained so many times – the sweeping, liquid staircase, the blind, internal windows, the impossible towering proportions – had never before struck her so forcibly as sinister. Perhaps it was because they had all fallen silent at once, and so there was no commentary to distract them; perhaps it was the unexplained disappearance of the attendant, leaving them alone there. Or that each one of them had been trying to keep a certain, secret anxiety at bay before they even entered. It was something to do with the man shouting at the entrance to the chapel, the man who had effectively trapped them in here.
‘I don’t like this,’ said Lucas Marsh suddenly, turning his head sharply, as if to catch someone behind the blind stone windows staring back at him. ‘I – I—’ His voice was oddly stifled, strangulated; he seemed to have run out of breath. As Celia stepped forward to ask if he was all right she heard hoarse shouting outside, and the brisk approach of footsteps on the flagstones.
One of Luisa’s regulars came in wanting an evening dress for Christmas, and gossiped on and on as Luisa brought out what she had, only pausing to dismiss each one – not tight enough, not sexy enough, too dreary. She wanted a miracle, as usual, but for once Luisa didn’t feel it in her to work it; her mind was worrying over something far away from party dresses. Sandro, out there in the snow. In trouble.
The woman was talking about her husband, too.
‘He’ll complain, if I don’t look sexy enough, you see. You can’t let yourself go, not for a minute. He hates me all covered up. What about this?’
She seized a corseted, strapless creation in zebra stripes; even Gianna, across the room, raised her eyebrows.
‘Not in your size,’ said Luisa, pretending regret, lying mechanically. Her hair dyed flaming red, the customer was too old for bare shoulders but she was the kind of woman who didn’t notice, who saw herself through a twenty-year-old lens. Why not? thought Luisa, almost too weary to judge, or perhaps she was losing her critical edge; it was no more than a learned reflex now: don’t let them walk out looking ridiculous. She brought out something in silver-grey satin, nicely cut and clinging enough, but the straps were too long. Luisa got out the little pincushion, fastened it to her waist and began to pin them up. Narrowing her eyes to admire herself, the woman went on, ‘Well, he’s a very important man, you see, temptation comes his way all the time.’
Luisa didn’t want even to listen to this drivel, but she couldn’t help it. Had she let herself go? The awful thing was, she couldn’t imagine Sandro being tempted, ever, as if there was something inside him that had died off, through neglect. She fumbled with the pins, her fingers stiff and cold, and the woman standing in front of her in the grey satin let out a cry of pain.
‘What are you doing?’ she snapped, outraged, and Luisa began to apologize.
‘Almost done, Signora,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry, the light – it’s the light. There.’ She stood back. Mollified, the woman looked at herself in the mirror with grudging approval. As Luisa had said, the shorter straps made all the difference, a little more coverage over the bosom; she turned this way and that.
A Florentine Revenge Page 18