Galileo's Room (Noir Florentine Book 1)

by Strozzi, Amadeus

  “I know. And I don’t want to know anything about him.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You know where to...”

  “Yeah. I have your email address.”

  “I know you’ve been tempted. I know you can find me if you want to. But please don’t look for me. It would just complicate things. I’ll be in touch again as soon as I can. I’ll email you as soon as I can get away for an afternoon. A night maybe. I’ve missed you too. Terribly.” Only then did he notice how tired she seemed.

  He stood up and put his arms around her, then whispered, “Don’t go. Stay here with me. I’m begging you. I hate begging but it’s been a very long two months.”

  Softly, she said, “I know,” then she hardened again and pulled away. He was still holding on to her hand and she wrenched that away too.

  Sam sighed. “Thanks for the blades. I’ll skate you to the door.” He glided ahead of her, then watched, mesmerized, as she climbed into the taxi that had brought her.

  Just before she closed the taxi door, she looked back out at him and said, “I think it's time I told you. I knew Walter. I knew him long before I ever met you.”

  Sam tried to leap forward but the roller-blades wouldn’t budge on the gravel. She pulled the door shut. Just before the taxi drove over the crest of the hill and out of sight, he was able to glimpse the number written on the body of the cab.

  He should have tried harder to make her stay. Interrogated her about the husband. About Walter. But he was just so damned happy that she’d come to see him. She’d been paying attention, thinking about him, keeping track of him, waiting for the right moment to deliver the blow.

  Chapter Four

  The pall-bearers were mustered from those of Walter’s friends still living who had not left Florence to escape the heat. Cavaliere Santucci, Sam’s latest client, was there too. He had the faded good looks and style of a film star, and the expression of someone who expects the paparazzi to leap from the bushes and start snapping photos at any moment.

  Santucci went up to Sam and in a barely audible voice, said, “Samuele, my deepest condolences. It’s a terrible day.”

  “Cavaliere.”

  “How are you? How are you bearing up?”

  Sam looked straight into his eyes and waited.

  Santucci went ahead. “Can we talk about Sofia? Were you able to learn anything?”

  “Yes… First I need to bury Walter.”

  “Of course you do, Samuele… It’s a terrible business. Have they learned anything more about his death?”

  “The police? They’re taking their sweet time. Because of his age, it’s not a high priority.”

  “This damned country. It throws its elderly citizens in the trash. It’s a scandal.”

  “I'll come round to your place, Cavaliere. As soon as I can.”

  “You’ll have to visit me at my sister-in-law’s. The seaside place. I’m going straight back there after the funeral. I’ll expect you. Bring your swimming trunks. But now I think they need us. For the coffin,” said Santucci.

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” said Sam. The Cavaliere stepped forward to join the other pall bearers.

  Barone De Capitani, enormous, puffing and well over eighty, came up and squeezed Sam in a suffocating embrace. “Che dispetto, ma che dispetto Walter ci ha fatto. I should have gone first. We thought it would be me, not him. Me with my cholesterol right over the moon, my bad heart and more complaints than a mother-in-law. We placed bets on it. Rather useless when the winner can’t collect. How are you doing, caro Sam? Ferullo said to say how sorry he was, and so did Gianotto. He wanted to come but he’s not so well himself. And my neighbour Cremini also sends you his best and his most sincere condolences. His daughter’s back you know. She’s a friend of yours, I believe.”

  Sam nodded. “She was. I haven't seen her in a long time.”

  The Barone grasped Sam’s arm and said, “Walter was very disappointed that you never gave him grandchildren, you know.”

  Sam said, “We should both get moving. We wouldn’t want Walter to be late for his final appointment. He was a stickler for punctuality.”

  “In that, caro Sam, he was very un-Italian.”

  Sam wondered if the Barone would live through the short march from the villa to the chapel- his blueish lips and shallow gasping made him an imminent coronary on legs, but he had insisted on being one of the pall bearers. The others included the Borgo baker, Gino (Donatella’s husband and estate factor), a very tall, grey-bearded Swiss tourist staying in one of the houses on the estate, and Porteus Halcro, Walter's assistant, now living in one of the converted farmhouses.

  Together the men heaved the casket onto their shoulders and lumbered with it out to the baking cypress-lined drive where the hearse was parked. The entourage of mourners straggled along uphill behind the hearse, roasted faces basted with sweat, until they reached the cool of the parish church.

  Inside, everyone took a place in the ancient wooden pews. Don Paddy began to drone, “Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine.” Sam observed the congregation. There were local Borgo people Sam had known all his life, people who had worked for Walter, expressions of disbelief on their faces. They too had been caught off guard by Walter's death. And tourists, easy to spot, with blanched and seared complexions, bad haircuts and Birkenstocks.

  Except for Barone De Capitani, the people Walter would have wished to have at his funeral were missing. Sam’s mother, Nora, was far away, but even if she’d been nearby, she would have said what she always said. “The only funeral I plan to attend is my own.”

  You couldn’t arrange to have your dearest friends nearby when you died.

  Or were pushed from the top of a lookout?

  Te decet hymnus Deus, in Sion,

  Don Paddy performed and Sam constructed scenarios in his mind; Walter hobbling alone to the top of the belvedere and catching his foot on some stones, losing his balance; Walter crawling on all fours on the belvedere; Walter being marched up to the belvedere and shoved. Walter had been alive when they found him at the bottom. Alive. And he’d spoken. L’ho trovato.

  Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

  Don Paddy was glorying in the sound of his own voice now.

  Questions ragged on in Sam's head, sending a chill through him, an unnamed fear he hadn’t experienced since childhood and the military school. A feeling so lonely it was like drifting irretrievably away from a space station. A life without Walter. An unimaginable life. Without the worthy adversary and the social pillar, par excellence, of the Florence he had always known. Now it would be a flat Walterless Florence. He had criticized that pillar, rejected it, lampooned it, run far from it, and butted horns with it all his life, and now that Walter was gone, he missed him deeply.

  Perhaps Walter had loved him, despite the endless criticism. Sam had given him plenty to criticize. His time with Legion had been like asking his father to consider him dead. Nora had understood. In the years that her marriage to Walter was coming apart, she had been driven to drastic behaviour as well.

  Sam had enlisted in the Legion partly for revenge. Because he knew Walter wouldn’t understand and it would hurt him. Sam had wanted to make Walter suffer, pay for the way he'd treated Nora. Now he knew that Walter had simply been himself. He womanized. It was his raison d'être and he couldn't have helped himself even if he'd wanted to. It was what he had been raised to do, and he had done it with iron-clad style.

  And there was that other thing that had made Sam enlist. Twenty-two years ago, at the age of nineteen, Sam had wanted to die. For quite a few years he'd been dreaming of dying when the idea of doing it gloriously in some filthy backwater of the world suddenly seemed like a glowing solution. But when he was finally far from Tuscany, the weight began to lift, and for the first time in years, he changed his mind. He wanted to survive.

  Sara Porretta, the tiny, exquisite, seventy-something district psychologist, and h
is therapist for most of his life, had twirled her bifocals on an arthritic forefinger and laughed at him, saying, “My sweet Samuele, so many years spent in a Catholic country ought to have taught you that with death comes the risk of rebirth, the risk of redemption. You went out into the desert to die, and instead you had a revelation. You realized you were lucky to be alive. Ha ha. You should have seen it coming.”

  Sam could feel a wild kind of grief rising in him. He clenched his stomach muscles to hold it back and when he couldn’t clench them anymore, he put on his sunglasses. He kept them on all through the last march from the church to the hilltop cemetery and the family tomb, where Walter was finally bricked in forever.

  When the other mourners had given Sam their condolences and trickled away, Sam took off his suit jacket and leaned against the shady side of the tomb, feeling the bony cold of the stone against his back. A keeper came and told him the cemetery was closing and he had to leave. He walked back through the woods of the Montefalcone estate lands until he reached the belvedere. From there, he could see the villa, its lands and all its outbuildings.

  Le Falde.

  The books called Le Falde a jewel. Sam thought of it as a white elephant with a missing tusk. The elephant was his now, unless Walter had gone crazy and let Don Paddy talk him into leaving it all to the church. The crumbling heap dated back at least as far as the thirteenth century. Then confiscated by the Medici in the late 1400s, it was transformed into a grandiose villa by the architect Silvani. Covered arcaded balconies, towers, and the terrace that encircled the entire villa were added. It was given a park, with cypress-lined avenues, neo-Medieval gates, a classic Italian garden of symmetrical hedges and ponds. And then there were the woods, and the Ragnaia, the Spider’s Web, where in the Renaissance, nets had been strung between oak ilex and stone pine, to capture small birds for eating. The same woods where they had found Sam that summer so long ago.

  An anglophile Montefalcone had peppered the Ragnaia with fake ruins in the nineteenth century, adding a round Medieval tower, the Belvedere- now ruined and dangerous - a square tower, a Dionysian temple, an obelisk, small stone bridges, grottos, a large pond, and a water theatre. There was even a fake medieval village at the edge of the woods, including a fake church with an empty bell tower.

  Sam's childhood in this place had been suggestive, unreal. Sometimes he indulged the bright memory flashes, of swimming in the pool on summer days, or raiding the estate’s grape vines and orchards with friends, or playing hide and seek in the neglected rooms of the villa. But the same cold fear that had always stopped him from venturing further back was still there, the same nausea and vertigo.

  Sam's recollection had become stunted and he had allowed it to happen. The child's conscious act of remembering events, keeping them vivid and alive, rehearsing all the details for the sake of personal history, had slid into a sludge of forgetfulness.

  The pool was dry and leaf-filled now, the fruit trees diseased, and there were parts of the villa that Sam had no desire to see. Sara Porretta put that vortex and discomfort down to his parents’ divorce, Nora’s retreat to Ireland without him. It wasn’t his mother’s fault that Sam, aged eight, had been left alone with Walter. Italian law would not permit her to take him out of the country, and she had tearfully explained many times that she’d had to leave for her own sanity. “It was as if,” she said, “every time I climbed into the bed, I had to share it with all of Walter’s other women. He didn’t even bother to lie to me.”

  Sam walked up and through the higher trails until he came to the edge of the bluffs, the highest point of the property, overlooking the fields, land, and distant mountains. He went over to what was left of the belvedere, the pitted stone mosaic crescent and ancient iron railing rusted and swinging dangerously free. There was police tape, flapping and crackling in the hot wind, nailed at their ends of the belvedere, perhaps an indication of Walter’s point of departure, though how they could have come to that conclusion was not clear.

  Twenty meters directly below the belvedere was a larger balcony and at its centre, the statue of a female figure representing Abundance. Leading from the sides of the balcony were curving staircases that went down to the ground. On the same level as Abundance was the grotto and water theatre. A body outline in fluorescent orange paint on the balcony next to the statue marked the spot where Walter had allegedly made his crash landing. There were blood stains where his head had hit the paving stones.

  Sam stretched out on the rocky bluff next to the guttering police tape. Walter, had he been there, would have scolded him, saying that a gentleman looks after his clothes, especially his best suit. Sam wanted to move his arms and legs, make angels in the dirt, be sure the grime got into the folds. He wanted to do something primitive, wash his face with mud, run it through his hair, rub it all over his body. Grieve.

  In his climbing life, he’d slept in all sorts of narrow crevices hundreds of metres above the void and it was always revealing, cathartic. He closed his eyes and allowed the exhaustion to pull him in. In the dream, the blood stains had expanded across the entire surface of the belvedere. Blood began to drip from seams in the cliffs. A red stream ran into the water theatre and the pond below was now filled with blood as well.

  From the ilex and pine trees behind the bluffs, Walter appeared. He was dressed for a safari, complete with pith helmet and antique elephant gun. He observed the scene with a disdainful expression and said, “Frightful mess I’ve made here.”

  “Babbo. You’re back.”

  “My dear boy, I suggest you aim for the elephant. Aim well then shoot it in the eye.”

  “Stay.”

  “Oh no, I must be off. I have a voyage to make. You, on the other hand, should consider staying closer to home.” Walter was already walking away, back into the woods. Sam tried to stand up to follow him, but his feet were trapped in molasses.

  “Don’t go, Babbo. Stay and talk to me. Tell me how you know Katia.”

  “Katia, Katia, Katia. Lovely girl. So sorry, dear boy. Must be off. Ta Ra.” And Walter was gone. Sam knew it was a dream but he was willing to settle for even the scantiest remnants of Walter. His frustration woke him up.

  The day was easing into dusk and tiger mosquitoes were assaulting him now, biting him right through his shirt. A strain of music floated up to him and he squinted down in that direction. It was coming from the lower farmhouse. Faint lights flickered, probably citronella torches, and voices mingled with the music.

  Sam dusted himself off and began his descent back down along the high trails, then the lower ones, then fighting his way along the paths overgrown with broom, juniper, and ivy until he reached the edge of the olive groves and open fields that led down to the estates' outbuildings.

  He came to the clearing in front of the upper farmhouse. Walter had overseen the renovations fifteen years earlier, insisting on doing away with all rustic features, outhouses in particular. Modern kitchens and bathrooms had been installed in all the rental properties and this was the nicest and largest. It was occupied by Porteus Halcro at the moment.

  Sam was hidden by the scrub. The shutters were open and the lights on in the living room so that Sam could see everything. Porteus sat on the couch with his head bowed. A woman was holding forth in the centre of the room, pacing, then standing still, then pacing again. And ranting. Back and forth like an over-wound clockwork figure. Porteus lifted his head with great weariness, as if trying to listen but not quite able to manage it. He reached for a large glass of red wine, swirled it then took a sip.

  Porteus was getting upset now, and his colour was blooming into a hot pink. Sam couldn't quite make out what he was saying so he moved closer while the woman stomped and turned in front of a mahogany bookcase that Sam recognized as the one Walter had moved into his most recent downstairs bedroom. And Sam wasn't sure, but the books in the bookcase looked a lot like the first edition Scottish Enlightenment volumes that Walter had kept under lock and key in the library.

  Sam h
ad a persistent memory of Porteus that might have just been exaggerated family gossip, that Porteus had been tolerated because he had a few precise skills, some ability at restoration, a knowledge of rare books and paintings. In the past, there had been some trouble with women, wives and girlfriends; he always had a couple on the go at the same time, attractive intelligent women, and Sam had to marvel, because Porteus was in the hinterland of his sixties, chunky and florid. As a young man he had been rake thin with a pale papery complexion, as if endowed with some chameleon-like talent for blending in with the old books, but Tuscan gastronomy had done its work on him over the years.

  He had also been notorious for his frugality, years ago. Whether he was as poor as he made out, no one really knew, but his reputation was that of a famous scrounger, always hanging on the edges of any event that could provide a free bite and a drink. And Walter had allowed it at Le Falde. While he had valued him for his skills as a restorer, he had often passed him charity in the guise of odd commissions. Walter had once told Sam that it was the family way. It was what his grandfather and his grandfather’s friend Enrico Caruso had done. Caruso used to have his whole entourage play cards with him, briscola, scopa, and then lose to them so that their pride wouldn't be hurt by any blatant charity.

  Porteus' voice was almost a whisper. It was impossible to understand what he was saying. The woman continued with her rant, which seemed to be about how useless Porteus was and what was he going to do about it. He launched her a faint smile, a parent indulging a spoiled child, and took another sip of wine. She came over to him and grabbed him by the wrist, almost spilling the contents of his glass. He looked as though he might smack her, but then he remained frozen. She was still gripping his wrist. He said, “Ilaria, there is nothing to be done. Because he's dead. Don't you understand?”

  Sam heard the Italian accent in her English, “Understand? What is there to understand?” She let go of him and turned away.