Galileo's Room (Noir Florentine Book 1) Read online

  Prologue

  1980

  Luca pressed the binder closer to his chest even though he knew it made him look like a prat. No one else was carrying books. They had all cleared out their desks during the week. Everyone thought he was a prat anyway, books or no books, because of his wet French-sounding ‘r’. It hadn't stopped him from speaking out in class, but even so, he had no intention of mastering the Florentine accent just to make friends. It was a horrendous accent. It sounded more like barking than speaking.

  At the front door of the school, he heard the screams and chants of the last day of classes, of freedom, ricocheting through the corridors behind him and all around the yard. Hurrying past the septic ochre walls, the rows of motor scooters, and the groups perched and sprawled on top of them, he was accompanied from behind by smooching and whimpering noises.

  Cretins, he thought. A picture of his younger self shutting his eyes and bellowing LaLaLa to block out their voices rushed in. He frowned. They were children, mewling and helpless, oblivious to their parents’ behaviours, oblivious to everything. He tried to settle his mind on other things. The villa and Galileo.

  Today in class the girls had gone out of their way to ask him if his shoes were new, which they were, and then all of them, the girls and the boys, had spent the rest of the day taunting him, ambushing him, treading hard on his feet so that his pristine white Adidas trainers were now grey and scuffed.

  They despised him for being from the north (born in Turin and transplanted, kicking and screaming, to Milan, and now to Florence), but they despised him even more for his high grades and the occasional approval of the teachers. He wanted the teachers to like him. No, to adore him. And several actually did, making the inside of the classroom his safe bunker.

  He was headed to an even safer bunker now. The City Archives. He put the binder in his knapsack, crossed to the shadier side of the street and started on the long walk.

  When he arrived, Gianpiero the archivist was already there, standing just behind the custodian at the desk. He threw his hands high in the air on seeing Luca.

  “Ah, our young man. Our promising young scholar. Of course he can come in, Mario. It just so happens that the boy’s mother, Signora Bianchini, and I are the greatest of friends.” Then Gianpiero’s face crumpled a little, took on an expression that Luca had seen a hundred times. “Actually, I was expecting her to come today, too.” He smiled again. “However, pazienza, I’m quite happy to make do with the prodigal son of Mirella Bianchini. Anything I can help you with, Luca, you only have to ask.”

  Then Gianpiero made a furtive “follow me” gesture and led Luca down long corridors, through an abandoned section, into the lower part of the building and back behind the stacks of folders still acrid with the mildew of flood waters. The whole way down, the man was silent, and Luca was afraid that after months of believing this place to be allied territory, his mother might have done something to make Gianpiero angry, and he worried that catastrophe would be waiting for him when they arrived at wherever it was that Gianpiero was taking him.

  But when they finally stopped in a snug corner between two rusting rows of shelving, the archivist looked him directly in the eye and asked, “How is your mother? I’ve been quite worried. Has something happened?”

  Luca shook his head.

  “Is she coming by soon? Because it really has been rather a long time and she promised. Has she mentioned me? She must have mentioned me because we made plans.”

  Luca faltered and shifted his gaze from the wedding band on Gianpiero’s hand up to the eager face. He wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, but instead he kept a sombre expression and said, “Oh yes, Mamma talks about you a lot, all the time, and that’s partly why I’m here, to pass on her message. She says she can't come at the moment because of her project, but she said for me to say that when she’s freed up a little, she is definitely coming to see you in person.”

  Gianpiero became silly with enthusiasm and began to dig around in the pockets of his sagging suit. “I have something for her, oh nothing big, just a little token, but perhaps you’ll give it to her for me. I wanted to give it to her myself, in person, but…” He handed Luca a little package and sighed with exasperation. Luca felt sad for the man, the tall thin archivist with watery dark eyes and thinning hair, because there were so many other, far better, contenders.

  Then Luca told him which holdings he wanted to see and Gianpiero was obliging, unctuous almost. They looked at maps, deeds, registers, letters, and floor plans. Gianpiero finally said something about getting back to work and left Luca alone. Luca was concentrated. He made a few last notes in preparation for next week and the visit.

  On his way back to the bus stop, Luca stopped in the middle of the scalding sidewalk and opened the archivist’s gift for his mother. He yanked off the white ribbon, tore at the royal blue wrapping paper then let it flutter into the road and under the wheels of a bus. The small black box contained a tiny pearl on a gold chain. Luca took the necklace off the blue velvet card and kept walking, looking for a rubbish bin while he ground the tiny chain round and round between his fingers.

  Something black in the gutter between two parked cars startled him, something that at first glance he had taken for old rags abandoned in the street. He stopped and stared. The woman flattened herself even deeper into the gutter, as if melting into an underworld, while above street level, nothing human remained of her but a crone’s hand piercing the brightness with sooty fingernails. He dropped the necklace into her filthy palm and would have gone into the bar to buy himself a large pistachio ice-cream, but he realized she had hold of his trouser leg.

  “Your hand,” she said, and he didn’t resist when her hand shot up to grip his and draw it down, allowing her to look into his palm.

  Years later he was to wonder whether it was not what she saw in his palm that determined his future, but the terrible look she gave him afterward and the way the old gypsy thrust his hand away as if he were the unclean one. At the time though, his only thoughts were that he needed to wash his hands, get that pistachio ice-cream, and get home before his mother left for class.

  Since the modelling had begun to dry up, Mamma had decided to study, to go back to university. The University of Florence. At her age. It offended Luca and his perception of scholarliness, but he kept it to himself. She was actually researching something (Villa Le Falde, the Montefalcone family). All of a sudden she had a whole new group of friends, students and professors, who felt an inexplicable bond with her because her face had once been on billboards and magazine covers. Though they couldn't quite recall where they'd seen her before, they always had the feeling that they knew her intimately.

  They didn't know her. They didn't know about her and her projects and how hollow and peculiar they made Luca feel.

  When the bus came, Luca climbed on board, punched his ticket and found a seat at the very back. He leaned his head against the window glass and closed his eyes, letting the hot wind bombard his face.

  After a year, he still missed Milan. He missed his old life, his friends, the skiing holidays, their big apartment, his mother's parties. He had even managed to kiss that girl from the Liceo Artistico who lived on the ground floor of their building. It was exactly like Mamma to drag him away just as things were getting interesting.

  Luca knew that he was never going to marry, he was already sure of it. He would be like Galileo. Galileo lived out his whole life as a bachelor. He’d had a woman and three illegitimate children but no wife to stand in the way of his studies, his research, none of the messiness of marriage.

  Messiness. His mother’s word. Though how could she know because she’d
never actually been married herself? Hers was an outsider’s perception. Here in Florence, because everyone was so provincial, Luca told them that Mamma had been married once but was now a widow and he hadn’t known his father. Mamma let him get away with the fiction because it made her life easier too. And anyway, her tacit acknowledgment of the lie had gone on too long for them to change the story.

  Luca got off the bus in front of his building, a chocolate brown two-story post-war box. He climbed the one flight of stairs and let himself into the apartment with his own set of keys. He could hear water running, his mother in the shower. He crept into his room, shut the door, put his knapsack on the bed, took out his books and set them on the desk.

  Thanks to Gianpiero, he knew all about Villa Le Falde now. He knew that Galileo had once been a guest there, and that in preparation for the visit, a special tower and more had been built by the host. It excited Luca (and at the same time, exhausted him) to learn about the lengths to which certain noblemen had gone to have Galileo come and stay.

  It must have been quite a time, with the illustrious guest shattering the crystal sphere where the stars were embedded, the Aristotelian conception of the Heavens, and leavening the flat immobile earth into something round and spinning.

  The front door buzzer jolted him out of his thoughts. She wouldn’t hear it in the shower. He let whoever it was go on buzzing. Probably Claudio, the landlord. Mamma had some kind of arrangement with him. She’d met him at Jab, where he worked as a bouncer. She always had one muscular type hanging around, just in case. Someone who kept a gun tucked in the glove compartment.

  The house had belonged to Claudio’s parents, both dead now, but it was as if they were still alive because all their things had been shoved into boxes and stuffed into the attic to make way for him and Mamma, the new tenants. Luca had been through each box and helped himself to a few small but choice items; a brass letter opener with a dragon handle, a carved ivory ball within a ball within a ball, and some square gold cufflinks that he was going to pass off as having belonged to his father.

  The buzzer finally stopped. Luca stretched out on the bed. The date of the visit stared down at him, marked in thick black felt pen on his calendar, an astronomer's calendar, nailed to the anaemic psychedelic avocado spirals on the wallpaper of his dark bedroom. He got up again, went over and sat down at the desk, where he began reading through his notes.

  Ten minutes later, his bedroom door opened and his mother came in. She was wearing only a short bathrobe.

  “Ciao amore. You’re back so late. I was starting to worry.”

  “Mamma…” he complained.

  “It’s awfully stuffy in here, tesoro. Let’s open up. And I’ll bet you didn’t have any lunch. You need to eat something.” She began to yank up the blinds.

  “Leave them down.”

  She stepped away, shaking her head.

  The room in the daylight depressed him, and that wallpaper made the pit in his stomach worse. Living with someone else's taste in wallpaper was like wearing ill-fitting hand-me-downs.

  “But sweetheart, you'll go blind reading in the dark like this.”

  “I'm studying up on Galileo's visit,” he said.

  Her mouth twisted a little.

  “We are going, aren't we?”

  His mother, who was so dark and beautiful in that Audrey Hepburn way, with the bathrobe slipping disturbingly off one shoulder, looked anxious. “I've been thinking about it.”

  “Here we go. I knew it.”

  “I think I should go alone.”

  He raised his voice. “You are such a liar.”

  “Luca, I forbid you to speak to me like that.”

  “You promised.”

  She nodded and stared at him for a long time. “If I take you, and that's only if, you have to be on your best behaviour. I've told him about you. We have to be very careful. It’s still early. I don't want you showing off. And don't talk too much. Walter doesn't like children who speak out of turn.”

  Luca flushed with anger. He was no child. He was intelligent and mature, and if she were a better mother she would realize it. Nothing was simple with her. Nothing had just one answer, or one possible ending. His heart washed up and down like a ship in a storm with each new promise she made and didn't keep, and sometimes he just wanted it to stop.

  Chapter One

  2012

  Walter Montefalcone was not supposed to die. He was supposed to live forever. And if forever couldn’t be pulled off, then a respectable hundred years or so would do. Not the paltry seventy-eight he’d managed before falling from the bluffs above the estate's crumbling belvedere.

  Samuele Montefalcone was furious with his father for dying. Especially in his absence. And especially now that they had finally been getting along. Sam had even – in the most tortured of peace offerings - suggested he could lend a hand with his father’s antiques business. Part-time, of course, and only when he didn't have other things to do.

  And what in Hell’s name had Walter been doing up on that bluff anyway? Sam could clearly remember Walter announcing in that slightly Italian Oxford English, “I have no intention of taking exercise, my dear boy. I’m rather afraid I might fall, break a hip, provoke a blood clot that would then bring on a stroke and leave me as helpless as a baby. And then I’d be at the mercy of some charming refugee nurse who, rather than stimulate what is left of my brain with urbane conversation, will punish me by prattling on in pigeon Italian or her own language, mortifying me the rest of the way into my grave.”

  The fact was that Walter had become terrified of heights. So terrified that he refused to climb any of the numerous stairs in his own villa. Last year, Sam had helped him transfer his entire bedroom to a large neglected second sitting room on the ground floor. Piedi per terra is what Walter had insisted on. Both feet on the ground. No. Walter would not have been up on those bluffs of his own free will.

  Sam had been passing through London at the time of the ‘accident’. In the long distance call, the Florence police assured him that they had not ruled anything out, manslaughter and homicide included, but they were hesitant to blow things out of proportion. They hadn’t ruled out suicide either, Commissaria Marta La Stella told him, but they had a backlog of far more urgent cases.

  “More urgent than manslaughter or homicide?” Sam protested.

  “We don’t know that it was either of those. He may just have wanted to go while the going was good. We all know how intensely Walter lived, don’t we, Samu? I mean, he wasn’t so young. When all is said and done?”

  “Christ, Marta, they switch your medication?”

  “Spiritoso. Samu, listen to me. He was elderly, maybe he was confused or maybe it was just his time. Anyway, he lived a full life, fuller than most people around here.” There was more than a hint of reprimand in La Stella’s voice.

  “That’s not the point…” Sam tried to say, but either the line had gone dead or she’d cut him off.

  She’d gone too far. Just because she and Sam had unbuttoned each other a little did not entitle her to use that tone. That tone that told him, in her opinion, which was not humble at all, that Samuele Montefalcone was just another spoiled Florentine noble going slumming. She’d been quite insulting about his most recent occupation.

  It had never been Sam’s intention to take these jobs. They’d been dropped into his lap by friends of his father’s, wealthy Florentines in need of someone discreet and capable of blending in. The first one had been pushy, had cajoled, needled, shoved and then, practically on bended knee with tear-filled eyes, begged him to help.

  And Sam was happy to do it. It was something to keep him busy while resting and training, while planning the next big climb. And he was good at it. Most of the jobs came from agonized parents. They were people he’d known all his life, and they worried that their children, sometimes fully grown children, might be with cattive compagnie. Unsavoury acquaintances. They wanted Sam to go in and find out everything he could.

 
He'd known these sons and daughters as infants, watched them grow, bumped into them in town, at social occasions. He understood that a real community, especially a Florentine community, at the risk of appearing to be a gang of busy-bodies, looked after its members.

  But now Sam was putting everything on hold to get back for Walter's funeral. At the airport, he raced down the embarkation ramp and found they’d just started taxiing out. A full eight minutes ahead of schedule. He took a big breath then hissed at the girl in uniform, “Could you bring back the plane, please, if it's not too much trouble?”

  It was only thanks to that little commercial spot he’d done for Acqua Cristallina last spring that the hostess called the pilot and told him to bring it back those few metres. She’d recognized Sam. He could tell by the way her features drooped and then lit up. Everybody recognized him these days.

  The executive producer of the commercial (an Italo-American woman with a face like a leather bag) had told him the day they hired him, “You’ve got it. Are you kidding? Buff and brooding? That come-back-to-bed hair, blue eyes and cruel mouth? I’m telling you, Heathcliff, we get you up there clinging to the Alps with a bottle of fancy water in your hands, they’re gonna fuckin’ love ya to bits.”

  Although on board the plane, they treated him frostily at first. He understood all too well that an explosive temper was tantamount to a real explosive these days. He had no desire to explain that he couldn’t afford to miss the plane because Walter had passed away, because his corpse had already been slapped onto the slab, mauled by the police, washed, dressed, and set out in funeral garb by the women in the Borgo.

  But in the end, Sam weakened. He apologized for his curtness and told the airline staff the truth, that the corpse wouldn’t keep a minute longer in the heat of a Florentine summer. Count Walter Amerigo Gianmaria Prospero Montefalcone had to be buried before he started to stink, and Sam had to be there. The hostesses were all over him after that, bringing on the gin-and-tonics, the smiles, the phone numbers scrawled on the drinks napkins.