The Faces of Angels (3 page)

They got him, of course. The Italian police are really very efficient, and they picked him up in a matter of hours. He had our blood on his hands, literally, and under his nails, and on his clothes. His name was Karel Indrizzio, and he was a half-Albanian drifter from the Po Valley who'd been known to sleep rough in the gardens and had been in trouble with the police before, for purse snatching and fights outside bars, and once for exposing himself to a bunch of schoolkids who came across him in one of the grottoes. When they found him that evening, he was curled under a bush singing hymns to himself. Our wallets were in his back pocket. When the police questioned him, he pointed out that he didn't think we'd have minded him taking them since the last time he saw us he was pretty sure we were both dead.

Even taking into account its sensational nature, the attack on us might have been seen as nothing more than a potential rape and robbery gone wrong, except for one tiny detail, one thing the mounted
carabinieri
who finally found me almost missed in their eagerness to make sure I was still alive. At first glance, it was just a miniature papier-mâché mask, the kind of thing you buy in any souvenir shop in Venice for a euro. A cheap, nasty little face, it rested, hollowed-eyed and grinning, in the long grass beside me. To the investigating officer, however—a dour-faced man called Pallioti—it was manna from heaven. Once he established that it had never belonged to me, and that it wasn't from a key chain, or a cheap ornament one of Ty's students had given him, the tiny mask became the first break in a much publicized case involving the murders of two other women, a nun called Eleanora Darnelli and a nurse named Benedetta Lucchese.

The police had had nothing at all to go on for Eleanora, and in the absence of any other leads had fancied Benedetta's fiancé for her killing. But the mask changed all that. Both women had been killed with a knife almost identical to the one used on Ty and me, which was readily available in any kitchen shop, so that was not the cause for excitement. What excited Pallioti was what the police had kept to themselves: the fact that, like me, each of the other women had been left a souvenir. In Eleanora's case, a white ribbon tied around her left wrist, and in Benedetta's, a burnt-out candle folded into her hands.

They went to work tying Indrizzio to the two previous killings, and in the meantime charged him with Ty's murder and my assault. Despite the fact that he wiped it off, the blade that went into my lung must have been dirty, because the wound got infected. For a day or two they actually thought I might die, but eventually I recovered and was flown back to Philadelphia, where my husband's parents had delayed his funeral until I was well enough to attend. After that, I went back to the apartment Ty and I had bought in Philly and waited to return to Italy to testify at Indrizzio's trial.

Pallioti had told me it wouldn't be until the New Year. But in the end, I didn't have to wait that long, because just five months later the whole thing was over. Pierangelo gave me the news. A newspaper editor, he picked it up on the wire, and called me to say that Karel Indrizzio was dead. They'd been moving him to a high security prison outside Milan when a tractor-trailer had jumped the median on the
autostrada
. The driver of the prison van and one of the guards had survived. But the others, handcuffed inside, had died before the emergency services could get there.

So, that's how it ended. And now there's nothing left of that day but the grains of sand. The heat. The stone in my shoe. The knowledge that words slipped off the board.

I have made myself a promise I intend to keep: that what happened in the Boboli Gardens will not run my life, that I am a person beyond that, and I will not give Karel Indrizzio the power to rob me of the city and the man I love. And so I try not to think about it, what happened to Ty and to me, and Eleanora and Benedetta, and how Indrizzio himself must have died. And most of the time, I succeed. Or at least I did. Until I returned to Florence.

I'm not surprised by this. I expected it. But it is not, as you might think, because I've returned to ‘the scene of the crime.' No matter what they say, you carry that inside you. So, no, it's not the physical proximity. It's not that at all. It's because memories breed here. In fact, sometimes I think that's all Florence is, layers and layers of the past. A city made not of stone and mortar, but of memories and secrets and the fevered imaginings of men, all of them piled like transparencies one on top of the other until they form the illusion of something solid. Golden buildings. Grey walls. Stone. In the early mornings, if you walk along the Lungarnos or stand on the misted spans of the bridges, you can almost believe the churches and piazzas and towers are nothing more or less than dreams. Of the Medici. And Michelangelo. And Dante. And Botticelli. And Galileo. And a million other more ordinary human souls who've passed through this place, shedding the shadows of their lives like the skins of snakes.

I
COULD SAY
that coming back here was Pierangelo's idea, but that wouldn't be true. It was mine. All he did was what the best friends and lovers do: read your mind and give life—or, in this case, words—to the dreams already blossoming in your head. Even that didn't happen right away. It was a good six months after Karel Indrizzio was killed before Piero mentioned the possibility of my returning to Florence.

Once he did, it wasn't a hard sell. My marriage to Ty had been a mistake, and if I hadn't known it at the time, I realized soon after. We were bound by the years we'd spent together, and by dishes and books and wine glasses and an apartment, and by the fact that he loved me. All of which might have been enough, but wasn't. And yet that didn't make his death easier. If anything, it made it worse.

In those first awful months back in Philly I spent night after night with Father Rinaldo's words scrabbling through my head, running like rats on bare boards, whispering that I was damned. It is generally agreed that masks stand for deception, and when I looked in the mirror, I sometimes thought I saw an empty face. On occasion, when I dreamed, I traded presents with Eleanora Darnelli and Benedetta Lucchese—a candle and a ribbon. Sometimes I even spoke to them. Because they had been where I had been. We three in all the world had received Karel Indrizzio's kiss.

Our friends in Philadelphia assumed I was drowning in grief, but, try as they might, none of them could help because none of them knew the whole truth: that Ty was killed because of me but I had never loved him. The only person who knew that was Pierangelo, and when I finally heard his voice on the phone, it didn't sound like damnation. It sounded like someone throwing me a lifeline. Like being in prison and hearing rain against a window, then the rattle of a frame, and the first sweet shattering of glass.

Six months later, he had to come to the States, and we met in New York. During that week, Pierangelo told me that his twins, Graziella and Angelina, had moved out of the apartment in Florence, gone to university in Milan and Bologna to find their own lives. Shortly afterwards, about the time Indrizzio was killed, his wife, Monika, left too. Their marriage had been fracturing for years. They had never been happy, had stayed together for the same reason they were married in the first place, because of the girls, and Monika pointed out they'd soon be fifty. She said she, at least, still had a chance for a life.

Pierangelo loved me. He wanted me back. And now, we were both free. After he left, I returned to Philadelphia, which felt more and more like exile. That night, as Piero's plane arced across the Atlantic, I lay on the couch and watched his words flutter against the ceiling. Flying in and out of the light, they made shadow patterns, and in them I saw a map of the future.

Getting a chance at something you never thought you'd have is like a dare. It's like life throwing down the cards and saying:
OK, you finally got your winning hand, now can you play it?
The truth was, I didn't know, but I was certainly determined to try. And this time I decided not to make the mistakes I'd made before.

I make my living writing on design, for Sunday papers usually, and sometimes magazines, those glossy, heavy things with perfume inserts and endless lust articles on other people's terraces and bathrooms. Don't ask how I fell into it, I'm not sure myself, it was a detour that became a career, but it's not, so to speak, part of my long-term life plan. I used to paint. Drawings and watercolours of period buildings mostly, and I toyed for years with doing a graduate degree in art history. It wasn't Ty's fault, but while he was alive we couldn't afford it. Now, ironically, I could. He left me with a decent life insurance policy, and we owned our apartment. If I rented it out, I'd have plenty to pay for an art history course in Florence.

It didn't escape me that the death of his dreams was the beginning of mine, and the course wasn't just an excuse to be with Pierangelo. Having seen my mid-thirties come and go, I wanted to see if I could be a student again, just putting my toe in the water to start with, and even if I never slept a night in it, I knew I had to have a room of my own. Having been caught by the sheer force of domestic inevitability once, I wasn't about to let it happen again. For my sake and Pierangelo's. I can bear a lot, but I don't think I could bear to become something he'll regret. Which is why, tonight, while he's in Rome, I'm sitting on the balcony of my own apartment, roughly a stone's throw from Santo Spirito.

It's old, this building. I don't know how old for sure, but I'd guess four hundred, maybe five hundred years, which I confess I find comforting. Like a lot of Americans, I'm fascinated by the age of things. When you grow up in a place where two hundred years old is ancient, half a millennia of footsteps crossing your courtyard, five centuries of ghosts hanging around in the doorways, either terrifies you or seduces you. Personally, I'm relieved to be reminded that nothing, nothing at all, dreams or fears, are new.

The balcony looks down on a courtyard. Tonight it's quiet, but often there's the sound of a piano from the apartment opposite, or the tinny voice of the radio news leaking up from the floor below. Signora Raguzza listens every evening, and sometimes I can hear her swearing at the prime minister or encouraging the Pope. I love that about Italy; the noise. In the States, silence is sacred. Success is your own quarter acre, a long driveway and a high wall. If you've really made it, an electronic gate. But not here. In this city lives are piled one on top of the other. You hear footsteps, singing, shouting. You know what the people downstairs are eating because the smell wafts up, and you know what their kitchen will look like because these palazzos are mostly the same; old, old shells inhabited by new lives.

The kitchen of this apartment, for instance, is beautiful and narrow and impractical. The ceiling is twenty feet high. The French windows that open on to the balcony do not bolt properly and rattle in the wind. The light is a Murano chandelier no one can reach to clean, and the cups and saucers in the dresser are as translucent as eggshells. Heels click on marble floors and the metal shutters that cover the windows run up and down like trains on ancient tracks. There is a silvered mirror in the hall that makes everyone who passes it look as if half their face is missing, and in the stairwell a tiny elevator no larger than a coffin creaks and winds from landing to landing.

In Milan, the capital of sleek, all this might be looked down on. But in Florence it is highly prestigious. So much so that Signora Bardino, who owns not only this apartment but also the art school I finally enrolled in, claims she doesn't normally rent it out at all. But one look at me and the woman I share it with, Billy Kalczeska, the signora said, and she felt sure we would appreciate the apartment's finer points. The ormolu desk. The Murano glass. She could tell just from looking at us that we had a sense of history. The comment made Billy, who was standing behind the signora at the time, roll her eyes and stick her finger down her throat.

The Florence Academy for Adult Education, where Billy and I are ‘students,' is Signora Bardino's personal brainchild. Having come to Florence and fulfilled her own fantasies, she apparently decided to franchise the idea, and the result is an impressive web page that promises, though we may think it is too late, we can still Live Our Dreams of the Renaissance! For a hefty fee. Which explains why I have a room-mate. I hadn't planned on it, but the advantages, expense-wise at least, were obvious. The signora, whom Billy calls the SignEuro, charges what I will bluntly call ‘a whack load' for us to exercise our sense of history, and splitting the rent, and the apartment, was actually her idea. She hadn't met Billy when she made the suggestion, but that didn't stop her from assuring me by email that Signora Kalczeska was ‘delightful'. This was a few weeks before I arrived, and I looked Billy up on the academy webpage, where all of us were supposed to have posted a picture and a brief ‘get to know you' biography, but there was nothing there.

This is appropriate in a strange way because the Florence Academy for Adult Education isn't really ‘there' either. In fact, it isn't anywhere, except possibly in Signora Bardino's basement—a cavernous set of rooms in an equally cavernous palazzo near San Ambrogio. We meet there once a week for wine and cheese and slide shows presented by a retired professor called Signor Catarelli, who guides us through our adventures in the Renaissance, telling bad jokes along the way. For the rest of the week, we're free to indulge in a smorgasbord of ‘activities'. For each three-month ‘semester' Signora Bardino arranges for her ‘students' to attend lectures on art history at the university, and the British Council, and anywhere else where someone might be talking about Massaccio or Pisanello, or ‘The Development of Perspective' in English.

She also wangles discounted entry for us at the Uffizi and the Accademia, and a few stranger places like the Museum of Precious Stones, and the Specula, which features pickled body parts and a selection of perfectly preserved autopsies. In addition, we go on field trips once a week, in a minibus driven by one of her endless supply of nephews, outings that invariably end at a trattoria run by another nephew, where Signor Bardino—who is tall, lugubrious and very Italian—sometimes joins us. On these occasions, the signora's accent, which is impenetrable already, grows even thicker, something I have appreciated all the more since Piero told me that she comes from Westchester, New York. This fact alone makes her almost as much a product of her own imagination as her academy is.