The Faces of Angels (22 page)

‘Well, do you want to use my phone to call him at least?'

She shakes her head. ‘Neh,' Billy says. ‘He'll live. He'll be fine. I'll tell him I was sick,' she adds, and raises a pink-gloved hand like Marie Antoinette, beckoning the waiter to bring us a couple of menus.

He obliges, sniffing a tip, and when it arrives I open mine, suddenly starving after my missed lunch.

‘What looks good?' Billy's flicking the heavy pages.

‘Not sure yet.'

I glance up. She's tugging my gloves off, finger by finger. ‘Yum!' She picks her menu up again, and peers over the top of the fake-leather folder. ‘What?' she asks.

But I can't answer. My mouth has gone dry and I feel cold. I see her nose broken, a rime of blood crusting her upper lip. She should have a broken thumbnail. And if I look long enough, be holding a goldfinch.

‘What?' Billy asks again. She narrows her eyes. ‘Mary, why are you looking at me that way?'

‘I'm not,' I flounder, and blink hard to make the image go away, to drive the picture back into the sealed envelope in the bottom drawer of my bureau where it belongs. Finally I ask, ‘Where did you get that nail polish?'

Billy looks at her hands. ‘It is a little dominatrix, maybe. Not very “you,” but cool.'

‘Me?'

‘I thought it was yours,' she says. ‘It was in the bathroom.'

I shake my head, wondering if I'm really going crazy now, but Billy just shrugs and vanishes again behind her menu, leaving me watching her fingers on the fake leatherette, studying her perfectly shaped nails that are painted black, just like Caterina Fusarno's.

Kirk does live. But he isn't fine, and now he and Billy are standing in the piazza at Fiesole, fighting. She shakes her head as he digs his hands into the pockets of his black coat and presses his lips in a thin hard line. Billy has only spent one night in the apartment at Torquato Tasso this week, and that, along with her blowing him off for dinner last night, is what this fight is about. And maybe, I think, something more. Kirk knows the dynamic in our group has changed, and he's started looking at me strangely.

Billy's voice is shrill. I can't make out the words exactly, but lovers' quarrels are essentially the same, so we all get the gist. She chops her hands through the air as Henry and I and the Japanese girls try not to pay attention, which is difficult, because this whole outing was her idea.

Due to the Bardinos' elaborate Easter festivities, Signora Bardino is not able to accompany us on field trips for the next two weeks, and with Signor Catarelli away, visiting his family in Genoa, we have been left to our own devices. Signora Bardino explained this in a handwritten note of apology she sent to each apartment. She could not be with us, she said, because her husband's family had ‘traditions'. Our note—stuffed into the downstairs letter box along with circulars from a Dominican charity and a city flyer concerning garbage collection—prompted Billy to wonder out loud what sort of traditions? Perhaps, she speculated, Signor Bardino dressed up as a rabbit? When I pointed out that I didn't think they had the Easter Bunny here, she shrugged and suggested we all come up to Fiesole for lunch.

So because she suggested and arranged it, Billy's the hostess. She's the one who looked up the bus and booked the table. Fiesole would be perfect, she pronounced at the bar a few days ago. It was meant to be beautiful and, personally, she was just dying to see the Roman amphitheatre and the Etruscan ruins.

Finally Ayako and Mikiko and Tamayo, and Henry and I get sick of looking at our feet and commenting on whether or not it will rain again, and Henry takes charge and leads us to the trattoria that fronts Fiesole's main square, where we find a table reserved for ‘Signora Billy' under the outside awning. Henry orders drinks while we wait for Billy and Kirk to stop fighting, and for Ellen and Tony from Honolulu, who live just down the hill and are supposed to be joining us. Ellen has volunteered to act as our guide because she says she now knows absolutely every little last thing about Fiesole.

The Japanese girls chatter. Their voices rise and drop like a smattering of high-pitched music as they talk about their trip to Verona and to Mantua, and about Juliet's balcony and how they are planning to go back later in the summer to see
Aida
in the amphitheatre, with live horses. The carafes arrive, and Henry turns our glasses over one by one and pours our wine while we all try not to watch Billy yanking her arm out of Kirk's hand and marching across the piazza towards us.

‘Warning,' Henry mutters, ‘incoming.' And the Japanese girls squeal with delight. Today they have abandoned their hats, but they're still wearing their sunglasses. As Billy sits down, they turn towards her in tandem, like three baby birds.

Ellen and Tony arrive a few minutes later, on bicycles, and by the time we actually finish eating, a thin spit of rain has begun to fall. It's been threatening all day. Kirk insisted during lunch that he felt drops on his head, which Billy said wasn't possible, given his hair and the awning. Their argument is apparently over but, like cracks under wallpaper, you can see the fault lines between them. During the meal they snark at each other, or smile and finger each other's hands, both of which make the rest of us uncomfortable, so we are glad, finally, to dive away, even if it means getting wet.

In Fiesole, one ticket gets you into the little art museum, the archaeological collection and the ruins themselves, which are only a few steps from the cathedral and the piazza where we have just had lunch. It is Henry who suggests we go and look at the pictures first in the hope that it might stop drizzling by the time we come out, and Ellen agrees and immediately volunteers to lead the way. She crosses the street, making for the tiny museum without even pausing for breath as she describes the contents in detail.

The Japanese girls follow her reluctantly. They feel like they shouldn't because they have been watching Kirk for cues, and every time Ellen opens her mouth he rolls his eyes as though he's on the verge of an epileptic fit. Finally he says he won't go into the picture museum at all, which leaves them in a quandary. Kirk has the status of at least a demigod in their book, but the Japanese girls also like to pick off pictures the way hunters pick off birds, and there is a very famous pregnant Madonna here. For a few seconds they actually dart back and forth in the road like squirrels in front of a car, but eventually culture wins out, and they trail behind Ellen into the Pinacoteca like sulky children.

‘Pregnant Madonnas,' Ellen announces in her loud flat voice as she reaches the top of the stairs, ‘are extremely rare in Italian art. The most famous example is Piero della Francesca's
Madonna del Parto
in Monterchi. The pregnant Madonna here is generally considered inferior.'

‘Well, she's certainly gotten her money's worth,' Billy mutters. ‘She's now fully qualified to drive anyone in any museum in the world completely nuts.' We sidle away from them into the next room and come face to face with a painting of St Agatha holding her breasts on a plate.

‘Look,' Billy says, ‘that's interesting—' She points at the painting of the slant-eyed saint, but before she can finish her sentence, an alarm goes off.

‘
Attenzione! Restare indietro della linea rossa!
' a mechanical voice shouts, and Billy jumps back behind the faded red line on the floor as if she's been burnt. She tries again, but virtually as soon as she raises her arm the voice yells again. This time a young woman in black Lycra pants and mean-looking glasses comes to the doorway and glares at us, so we abandon the saints and move to the other end of the room where there are three extremely strange panels entitled
The Triumph of Love, Modesty
and
Eternity
.

Eternity
is pretty straightforward, a conglomeration of angels, deities and adoring civilians, but the other two are downright weird. In the first, Love drives a triumphal carriage with degenerate types dancing around it, while in the second, he's come a cropper and is tied up as one angel kicks him and another breaks his bow across her knee.

‘Mean old angels,' Billy mutters.

I don't even want to think about what Ellen will have to say about this, so we move on to a few pallid ‘school of Botticelli' Madonnas before she descends on the room. By the time she does, braying about the Sienese school and the evolution of the Virgin's depiction in medieval art, even the Japanese girls have begun to fidget. Ayako looks at us, positively begging for salvation.

‘Come on,' Billy hisses, ‘let's get out of here.' She grabs me with one hand, and Ayako with the other. ‘If the lions are too much for you,' she says, ‘head for the Romans.'

‘The Roman theatre is meant to be very beautiful,' Ayako announces. ‘Very complete.'

‘You bet.' Billy virtually pushes us down the stairs. ‘And I am just dying,' she announces, ‘to see what it looks like.'

What it looks like is a pile of rubble.

Chunks of grey stone are strewn everywhere as if a giant, possibly Vulcan himself, lost his temper with a sledgehammer. To be fair, this is not true of the whole site. Ayako is right, the theatre itself, and some of the Roman baths, are largely intact. But in this far corner where I am standing behind a scrim of ragged cypress trees, walls have fallen and what might have been an altar has cracked in half. There is nothing either beautiful or complete about the place where Eleanora Darnelli died.

I waited until the others had gone down into the amphitheatre, then picked my way here, climbing over stones and slipping more than once on the livid green patches of moss, the soles of my loafers sinking and squelching in the mud that oozes through a thin layer of grass. Three naked, empty archways tower against the sky behind me, and when I look back I see the heads of the others, Kirk, Henry and Ayako, bobbing against a background of grey and green.

They are moving through the Roman baths, walking along the furred paving stones that once made up ancient streets, and the arches make it feel as if I am looking backwards through a one-way mirror, watching them framed in another world. Somewhere in the town a dog begins to bark, then another joins it, and another. The baying rises up to the mottled grey sky and drifts like smoke through the broken columns.

I step over the low cornice of a wall that might have been the entrance to a Roman house, to a couple's bedroom or their kitchen, and find myself standing in a semicircle of stones. I know I have found the right place, because the first day I met Pierangelo, in the bar where the ladies swam in the mirror like fish, he showed me pictures. After he told me about Eleanora, he pulled them out of his wallet, snapshots he'd taken himself and carried around in his pocket like talismans. They were sans body, of course, but he pointed out where she'd been found. He said the first time he came here there were still traces of her blood.

They weren't obvious. There were no great streaks or spatters dashed across the worn lumps of granite or dribbling down the sharp edges of the shattered marble. Those had been cleaned away by the police. But if you knew how to look, Pierangelo said, if you adjusted your eye, you could see small ochre spots, like lichen, or the speckles on a bird's egg.

Pierangelo told me he had closed his eyes and run his fingers across them because that was all there was to touch; all that was left of Eleanora Darnelli in this world. And now I do the same. I can't help it. I crouch down and put my hand on the rock, close my eyes, and think I see her.

‘This is where she died, isn't it? The nun?'

Billy's voice comes out of nowhere, and I feel as though I should be surprised, but I'm not.

‘How long have you known?' I open my eyes and see tiny cold specks of granite clinging to my palm.