The Blue Last

by Martha Grimes

  Nine or ten customers preceded them, which was easily enough to fill the tiny shop. Melrose wedged his way in (“Mi scusi, scusi”) to look at the gloves in the glass case.

  Now it was Trueblood’s turn to carp, trying to lever Melrose out and into a trattoria. Melrose stopped listening; he knew it wouldn’t be long before Trueblood fell hungrily onto this fashion feast, and it wasn’t. After he elbowed an old man so hunched his chin barely cleared the counter, Trueblood was trying different gloves on each hand. This was difficult with his painting pressed under one arm.

  To the old man, Melrose bowed and, with a supercilious smile, waved him to his place at the counter.

  The old gentleman looked at him with considerable distaste: “Lasciami in pace!” he very nearly spit.

  Melrose blinked. “Prego,” he said, but for some reason he did not really believe he’d been thanked. Back to the gloves, let’s see: the black kidskin with the narrow white edging at the wrists would be perfect for Diane; they’d blend with her clothes, her house, her cat. One always had to take back little presents for the ones left behind. This was an excuse to look at (easily) a hundred pairs of gloves. A suede of deep gold, perfect for Vivian. Noxious apple green for Agatha. Two pairs of lilac for Miss Broadstairs and Miss Vine. (They would probably wear them for gardening gloves.) Several more pairs for others. For himself-he looked down the counter.

  Why was Trueblood unwrapping the painting? Why was he now holding it for the saleswoman’s close inspection? Why was she raising pincenez, dangling from a silver chain, up to her eyes? Was Trueblood wanting to fit up St. Who with gloves? If he got testy about it, would the scene resolve itself into Expulsion from the Glove Shop?

  Melrose went back to his own glove buying, trying to ignore the comments and labored breathing of the people behind him waiting for service. He was taking no more chances in being polite. He picked up a pair of soft leather gloves that poured like double cream onto his hand in a color called Midnight Ashes. They were a gray so dark it just missed being black. He certainly had to have those. This next pair were doeskin in a nice fawn shade. As he was debating buying these also, Trueblood shoved in beside him to show him a pair in a shade something like sea green.

  “Nice, eh?”

  “Beautiful.” Fortunately the painting was rewrapped. “Do you like these-” Melrose held up the nearly black gloves “-or these?” He pointed to the fawn gloves.

  “Both. Get them both. See, I bought two.” Trueblood held up the bag that contained his purchases.

  “Yes, but you needed a pair for St. Who. I’m only gloving myself. And I’d feel rather overly indulgent buying two pairs, I mean, at these prices. Of course I realize they’d cost twice this at home, but that doesn’t make them cheaper. No, I think I’ll go for the dark gray ones.” What Melrose was actually doing was giving Trueblood a chance to do his Christmas shopping. He knew Trueblood loved to purchase things on the sly, once he found that one was particularly taken with a certain article. “I think I’ll take one last look at the back, if you don’t mind waiting a tic.”

  “No, no, go on,” said Trueblood, “they’ve some especially nice ones at the back.”

  When Melrose looked back, Trueblood was in close colloquy with the saleswoman, who was nodding and smiling, Si, si. Melrose allowed enough time for the transaction at the front. When they left the shop, he smiled, for Trueblood was securing this last flat little parcel beneath the string around his painting.

  Melrose felt rather humble about this and determined to stop giving his friend such a hard time over his foremost or leading expert or authority in future.

  Twenty-four

  Determined to get to Pietro di Bada in record time, Trueblood told Melrose to turn onto the motorway, a plan quickly scotched by Melrose, who said that if he was going at all he wanted to see the Tuscan countryside, and not from the rush of a motorway.

  “You’ll want to stop,” said Trueblood, churlishly.

  “No, I won’t.”

  Of course, he would, which was why he had insisted on driving. And he did, when he spied from a distance the hill town of San Gimignano. Melrose loved the name and kept practicing, trying to get the accent just right (“San Gim-i’yon-o, San Gim-i’yon-no”). Its needlelike towers bathed in the sun, some nearly encased in vines and flowers, its feudal walls and narrow windows, its medieval stone-all were irresistible.

  Trueblood was reading his guidebook. “There were once something like four hundred towers here. Now it’s only around seventy. What happened to the others?”

  “Is that the point? I mean, what happened to them just doesn’t seem the point of this town.” Melrose brought the car to a halt in the car park, and, breathing hard, they struggled up the steps onto the cobbled road and still climbed. They found a little trattoria in which to lunch on bruschetta, crostini and wine. Melrose exhausted his Italian when he asked for la lista dei vini and acqua minerale and as always came up short when the waiter (impressed by their command of the language) made his own contribution: “Gassata o naturale?” Melrose shrugged his shoulders in a not-caring gesture. Trueblood was having gin and tonic all over Florence because that was the way it was spelled out: gin tonic. Well, they’d never claimed to be linguists, had they? said Trueblood, ordering another gin tonic.

  The lunch was simple and good-when wasn’t it good over here?-and afterward they ambled farther up the hill to come out on a piazza overseen by a charming church. They crossed it and came upon a museum of torture. Here was something to catch Melrose’s interest! Once inside with their tickets, they appeared to be the only torture enthusiasts, for they saw no one else in the first room, where they stopped before an exhibit of a kind of iron headpiece, fashioned so as to fit over the head and keep the mouth shut. Women who passed their time in gossip paid heavily for it.

  In the next, where the relics really got going, a young lad of perhaps ten or eleven was walking about with a gelato, and Melrose wondered how he’d ever got the dripping cone in here. The boy was standing before the iron maiden, licking the ice cream with fervor.

  As Trueblood peeled away and walked pretty much in a trance around the various rooms, Melrose followed the boy. He liked the manner in which the lad could counterfeit the effects of each device. The iron maiden had him pressing his fingers against his chest, distorting his face in pain and emitting low-key shrieks as the spikes penetrated his flesh. Before the neck clamp (another original cure for women with loose lips), the boy turned his hands backward (having finished his ice cream), clutched his neck and stuck out his tongue. A couple of exhibits later in front of what looked like an electric chair, he went rigid, holding out his arms and giving a few quick shivers. Next, to simulate the effect of one’s torso being trapped in the metal box while one’s limbs were being severed, he bent in half and applied an imaginary saw to his arm, scraping it back and forth. The knives, the clubs, the swords, the chains, the pickaxes all fell to his interpretation.

  This kid was in love with pain, thought Melrose. Where were his parents? In the cellar, bound and gagged? The museum was quite entertaining, really, and he wondered the owner didn’t charge more. At the entrance was a sign that explained this was a private collection. Children weren’t allowed as the displays might be too harrowing for them. Harrowed was what this boy was not. The exhibit finished, Melrose and the boy found themselves at the exit.

  Trueblood had ambled out and Melrose saw two adults and a girl, all looking harassed and irritated. The boy’s mum and dad and sister, it would appear.

  The boy had emerged and the mother was extremely quarrelsome: “Gerald! I told you not to go in there! What were you doing?”

  Americans. Did that explain it?

  “Nothing. It was boring.”

  The family turned and walked away. But for one sumptuous moment, the boy looked back over his shoulder at Melrose and winked.

  “What we should do,” said Trueblood, when they were back on the road, “is divide up Long Pidd into contrade.” He h
ad purchased a little guide to Siena and was reading from it.

  “Suits me, as long as Theo Wrenn Browne and Agatha aren’t in mine.”

  Trueblood slewed a look at him. “Don’t you know anything about around here?”

  “I know the medieval cure for gossip.”

  Trueblood grunted. “Well, contrade are something like tribes. In Siena there are seventeen. This division of neighborhoods is as old as the Tuscan hills apparently.”

  “What’s so great about that? There are at least that many in London: there’s Chelsea, Battersea, Knightsbridge-”

  “No, no, no. It’s not the same at all. Those are just geographic; those are postal zones. These are neighborhoods that are very tight,” he said clutching himself, making Melrose think he had a lot in common with the boy back there. “People are very loyal to them, they’ve got their own flag, their particular emblem-like a goose or an elephant-and they’re extremely competitive.”

  Siena sat on its hill, looking down at them at dusk, full of little lights bathed in mist, a city small, earthy and beautiful.

  Dark quickly overtook dusk after they’d left the car again in a car park and climbed up steps and down steps and up again. A soft rain fell, more mist than rain, as they made their way along the Via Di Stalloreggi toward the Duomo. Every once in a while, Trueblood would stop and scrutinize the city map, then nod and continue.

  “We’re looking for the Via Del Poggio,” he said. Trueblood pointed at a plaque. “See?”

  Melrose made out what appeared to be a turtle. “So this is the turtle contrada?”

  “I don’t think that’s the way they refer to it.”

  They found the Via Del Poggio. Over one door was a small flag. “That,” said Trueblood, “identifies it, too. And there’s the plaque, see?” This door opened and as quickly closed. In this flurry of light, Melrose made out another turtle.

  “Here’s Di Bada’s house!”

  “Good. It’s getting cold. But if he’s one of your true foremost authorities or leading experts, he probably will not be offering drinks.”

  “What’re you talking about?” asked Trueblood, raising the small brass door knocker.

  Melrose shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  But he did when the gentleman he supposed to be the one they’d come to see opened the door and peered out over the tops of his glasses (which had ridden down his nose), and squinched his eyes as if blinking in an unaccustomed light and as if the light were out here instead of in there. If Aldo Luzi had been erudition’s antithesis, Pietro di Bada was its crowning glory, the very definition of scholar. If symbols could walk! Here was a cherub of a man, quite old and round shouldered, the shoulders covered with a shawl.

  Trueblood bowed slightly and said, “Signore di Bada? Professor di Bada? I’m Marshall Trueblood, and this is Mr. Plant-”

  “Non capisco, non capisco.” The old man waved Trueblood’s words away, looking irritated that he had been sucked to the door by some fool who couldn’t even speak the language.

  Trueblood tried again. Pointing to him, he asked, “Signore Pietro di Bada?”

  “Si, si.”

  Ah, they were getting somewhere! “Signore Aldo Luzi was supposed to have called you and explained that we were-”

  “Parli lentamente!” Signore di Bada exclaimed, annoyed at being kept in the cold doorway.

  Trueblood looked at Melrose, and they both shrugged.

  “The phrase book,” said Melrose pointing to Trueblood’s pocket. “It’s some command to speak something. Inuit? Senegalese? Who the hell knows?”

  “I found it, I found it! ‘Slowly.’ We’re to speak slowly.” Trueblood cleared his throat and with contorted mouth said, “Aldo Luzi. He. Said. You. Were. The. Leading. Au-thor-i-ty on Mas-ac-ci-o.”

  “For once he’s right. Come.” His outstretched arm ushered them in.

  Melrose said, stupidly (he later realized), “Parla inglese?” It was one of his overworked phrases, and he hoped it wasn’t Spanish.

  “Speak English? It is obvious, is not? Why you two speaking Italian?” Di Bada started laughing fit to kill, as if putting one over on them was what he’d been waiting to do all day. He waved them in, still laughing. It was a gasping sort of laugh, a mildly snorting laugh, somewhere between gasp and hiccup.

  This little charade didn’t fit the “foremost authority” picture at all. For such a person, humor would be dry, reflective, ironic. Wit, trenchant. However, the milieu reinforced Melrose’s picture: books and papers everywhere, light from a green-shaded desk lamp pooling on the scuffed wood of the desk and beaten-up Oriental rug.

  Signore di Bada wrestled a couple of straight-backed chairs free of encumbrance, sending a stack of journals and assorted papers spilling to the floor. “Sit, sit.” He waved them down, neither of them able to put his feet on anything but papers and journals. Melrose scraped some of the papers together and held them out to Di Bada, who said “Grazie.”

  “Prego,” returned Melrose.

  Di Bada laughed again. He was, apparently, still jubilant over his little practical joke. “Mi scusi.” He wiped the tears from his eyes and blew his nose on a handkerchief roughly the size of Northamptonshire, which he then bunched and jammed into his pocket. “So! Luzi said you wanted help about a painting you think is of Masaccio? It isn’t, but let’s have a look.” While Trueblood carefully unwrapped the painting, Di Bada asked Melrose, “You been to Siena before? No,” he answered himself. “You like Firenze? Sì, sì, Firenze, who would not love it? I tell you who. We, the Sienese! I tell you a little story about the Black Death, is very funny.”

  Melrose was already laughing.

  “In fourteenth century, one of our principal fountains was the Fonte Gais. A group of Sienese found and dug up a statue of Venus and set it atop the fountain. Then came the Black Death, and the preachers and soothsayers said it was having that pagan statue up there that caused it. So one night, a little group disguised as peasants stole it away, broke it to pieces and then sneaked across the border to bury the pieces in Florentine land, so the Black Death would turn from Siena to Firenze.” Here came that hiccupy, snorty laugh that made the old man shake like a bowl of jelly. He seemed always on the verge of it. Any old joke or prank, good or bad, was better than no joke at all for Signore Di Bada.

  “Oh, the panel you brought-” He set it on the floor, holding it at arm’s length. “Hmpf! It looks as if it could be one panel in a triptych-”

  “Polyptych,” said Trueblood, eager to move the identification along.

  Thick eyebrows floated above black-rimmed glasses as Di Bada peered at Trueblood. “You know so much, my friend, why do you come to me?”

  Trueblood washed his hands around in air, saying “No, no, no. Sorry. I only meant it was suggested to me by this antiques dealer that it might be part of the Pisa polyptych… possibly?”

  Di Bada rested the panel against the end of his desk and crossed his small hands on top of it. He shook his head slowly back and forth, seemingly at Trueblood’s folly. “Signore Trueblood, you realize how you are an idiot? Oh, it’s true, quite true, that nearly a dozen different parts of that polyptych have turned up, but in places such as ancient churches-”

  “I believe that’s where she said she found it. The church in San Giovanni Valdarno.”

  Di Bada held up a hand, palm out, as if to push back this absurdity and said, “That is Masaccio’s birthplace. That a painting so important could be overlooked in that church? For centuries?” Di Bada flapped his hands as if wishing them away. “Signore Trueblood, this is ludicrous.”

  Trueblood objected. “But isn’t that the way things often are found? By some strange confluence of place, time and person? Several pieces of the Pisa polyptych were found in just that way, weren’t they?”

  Di Bada was waving the words away before Trueblood was half finished. “Perhaps, yes, but I tell you, not by somebody in an art gallery. You go to Pisa? No, it is a shame that the St. Paul in the Museo Nationale is taken dow
n. They feared for its safety, I think. You have got in your own country, in London, the center of the altarpiece: Madonna and Child Enthroned. Then there is Berlin, where there must be four or five of the panels, and the predella of Saint Julian; one in Naples; another piece in some city in California no one can remember. No, Signore Trueblood, I fear you have been-” he tapped his temple with a finger “-what is the word? ‘Duped,’ ah yes. Duped.”

  Melrose, who thought he would never take up Masaccio’s cause after all of this trouble he’d been put through, still, even he was irritated by Di Bada’s attending more to himself than to the panel.

  As if he read Melrose’s brain waves, Di Bada shoved his glasses up on his head, and brought the picture so close to his face his nose was all but touching it. “Masaccio. Hmpf!”

  Melrose interpreted the “Hmpf!” not as a sound of dismissal but of curiosity. He watched Di Bada rise, move to one of the many bookcases, reach down a dusty-looking volume and riffle its pages. “Masaccio was a man possessed,” he said, turning pages. “It’s all he cared about-art. He neglected everything else, everyone, including himself. There were long periods when he saw no one. He belonged to this guild-the Speziali-who had grocers among its members, and I’ve always been amused by that. Well, Masaccio got so bad, so afraid others might steal his work, he became-what is the word?” He snapped his fingers several times.

  “Paranoid?” Melrose suggested.

  “Paranoid, sì. So paranoid the only person he would admit to his lodgings was this grocer. For a time when he forgot to eat he enlisted the grocer’s aid, told him to bring bread and cheese. The grocer had no more to do with art than to be a member of the same guild as the painters. He was trustworthy. He was completely disinterested. Why not trust the person who can gain nothing, eh? Why not trust the grocer?” Di Bada returned to his chair behind the desk and sighed. “You know he died when he was very young-”