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

  When he told them Walter Montefalcone had sent him, they handed him a special carrying cage with the creature inside. It had its own passport to boot. Then they gave him another cage full of mice and were quite firm about the fact that the bloody bird needed a lot of live vermin and fur in its diet. Porteus didn’t even look at the cage until he got it back to the villa and Walter.

  Walter handled the bird with uncanny ease, taking the creature out of the cage the minute Porteus arrived. It was a white and grey gyrfalcon, and it wore a little leather hood topped with a scarlet plume.

  The day after that, Walter had disappeared, taken a trip, taken the bird with him and hadn’t said where he was going. Three days later he was back without the bird but had brought the bible with him. Porteus didn’t know what to make of any of it.

  They had been listening to the BBC World News on the old Telefunken, now the third family member with its solid and uncritical varnished cabinet and Bakelite ivory knobs. Well, Dad had been listening, and Porteus doodling, designing a comic book in which women resembling Mum ended each episode by hanging themselves from a tree branch by their own strings of pearls. If Porteus had been paying attention he would have seen how one news item made all the blood drain from Dad's normally florid face and left him dazed, immobile.

  The day after the news item, Dad came home from work and announced that he had bought train tickets and that the two of them would be going abroad for the Christmas holidays. Porteus pointed out that Christmas wasn't for at least another month, but Dad said it didn't matter, he had fixed it with Porteus' school and they were leaving tomorrow.

  Dad bought two new pairs of Wellies for them and filled a couple of army surplus rucksacks with the essentials. They got the train at Victoria Station, travelled down to Dover, and boarded the ferry that took them across the overworked, milky green waters of the Channel.

  It wasn't the first time Porteus had been on a boat - Dad had taken him to the Orkneys before - but the subtle undulation (or perhaps it was the foreignness he was about to encounter) made him lose his appetite. The most conspicuous of his fellow passengers were other British citizens on their way to France for a little Ooolala, and although Porteus was mortified by the behaviour of his countrymen abroad, he was inspired by the miniscule possibility that they might stumble upon his mother along the way. They reached the Santa Maria Novella station in the morning.

  A billet had been found for Porteus and his Dad with a family in Piazza Santo Spirito, in a palazzo with a façade the colour of a dull ochre and rose sunset. There was a monolithic carved front door flanked by iron rings, and a fabulous air of dungeon about the place. A pair of servants, an ancient grumbling Tuscan couple, answered the door, and when Porteus stepped inside, he naturally thought of Mum.

  If she could only see them there, so heroically associating with all that opulence, the hangings, the oil paintings of hunts and landscapes, the portraits (Montefalcone ancestors: ruffled collars, consumptive pallors and dyspeptic stares), the frescoes, the inlaid furniture and chandeliers, the four bathrooms in marble and brass, she would have to love them again.

  They were taken up to the second floor, and led outside through a set of French doors onto a terrace of marble and fat vine-wrapped stone columns. Their room, which was off the terrace, was fit for royalty. Mum would have gone mad for its high ceiling and ancient beams with tiny elaborate patterns, the canopied beds with white sheets and fluffy quilts, the antique wardrobe decorated with exotic flowers, mythical beasts and Moorish dancers, and the vast blue-tiled private bathroom. No feeding coins into the meter in that place.

  They had lunch, actually ladled out and carved by real servants, in the dining room with the old Count Montefalcone, Riccardo - still alive back then. His dentures clicked when he spoke but Porteus could see that he must have been a very handsome man in his youth.

  Walter arrived at the same time as the crème caramel. So charismatic, with that unexpected Oxford accent, and those looks. As if the young Lord Byron had grown a healthy new foot and come to visit Italy in the twentieth century.

  After lunch, the Count explained that his Palazzo had been a monastery in the Thirteenth Century, which accounted for the vaulted ceilings, the pietra serena, the enormous fireplace in the refectory, now the dining room. He said, “Fortunately the water didn't get to the important works in this place. We sandbagged all the entrances.”

  Porteus looked through the anteroom’s French doors to the cloister colonnades outside and beyond those, to the real Italian garden, miraculously spared from the flood. It was a symmetrical combination of pathways, box hedges, and high walls covered with Virginia creeper. A lone persimmon tree stood at its centre, withered orange globes dangling from dark bare branches, and leaning against the trunk of the tree was a girl smoking a cigarette. In that moment, the weak winter sunlight caught the girl's hair, making it exactly the same colour as the persimmons. She was the most beautiful thing Porteus had ever seen.

  Nora. Samuele's mother. Age seventeen. She was a student that year, visiting from Dublin, a guest of the Montefalcones. Her digs became uninhabitable after the flood hit. So they'd taken her in. Shortly before Walter ruined her life forever.

  Porteus' thoughts of Nora at seventeen were blasted apart by the words “Divide et empera.” Porteus wondered if they were coming from inside his head or if someone had actually spoken up there at the top of the Duomo. He heard the words again, clearly, in Walter's voice, and he was afraid to turn, afraid that if he looked he would see Walter there in flesh and blood. The words came again with the same force, “Divide et empera,” followed by the sound of a bird screeching.

  Porteus was going mad. Well, of course he was. And he had every right to. Walter had applied the “Divide and rule,” motto to his finances. He had never given any one banker, commercialista or financial adviser the whole picture. It was, Walter had told him, to prevent them from blowing the horn or absconding with all the loot.

  The bloody bird. And the bible, the bible. And then he saw it again, the whole episode, the day that Walter asked him to go and get the bird. Sorry dear fellow, in rather a hurry, could you be so kind as to do this little errand for me? Ah, I’ve always known you were a chap I could rely on.

  Following the instructions, Porteus had driven out into Chianti country, absolutely foul day, pelting with rain, and gotten lost three times before he found the place, I Falconieri della Regina, The Queen’s Falconers, an aviary of raptors managed by a group of unusual young men and women who dressed up in Renaissance garb and travelled the country exhibiting their falconry techniques.

  The bible had appeared on Porteus’ work table shortly after Walter had come back from that trip, so he had just assumed that Walter had left it there the night before for the usual restoration job. Porteus had gotten down to business, cleaning the gilded cover, taking out each stone, attempting to remove the filth of decades, putting each stone back, when Walter had appeared, looming above him, a ghastly expression on his face, and snatched the bible away. “Who told you to touch this? If you touch this again, I’ll have your guts for garters.” And then he had quite blatantly put it away in the hiding place under the step in the stairs to the cellar, almost as if he had been daring Porteus to touch it again.

  Walter had certainly been distracted this past year. He’d become obsessed with the villa. Well, who wouldn’t be obsessed with a villa like that? He’d been spending more time at home and only a couple of days a week at the shop. He’d even insisted that Porteus move into the estate’s upper farmhouse with his new wife, at a fair (but not particularly low) rent, so they could do some of their business from there.

  The shop. Of course. The post. There would be several days’ deliveries and no one to open up as long as Samuele was still out of town. Walter had told Porteus that keeping his son in the country to help with the family business was like pulling teeth.

  A euphoric calm descended over him. Taking deep inspired breaths, he practically fell back down t
he cupola's narrow spiralling steps and it was all he could do to keep from shouting at the lumpen tourists blocking his way with their snail-like progress. He left the Duomo behind and made his way along Via Calzaiuoli, then down to Via Por Santa Maria. He danced his girth across the Ponte Vecchio and past the precious metal, stone and filigree blinking in the shop windows.

  The anxiety and weariness that had been dogging him for the last few months gave way to a feeling of lightness, a rush of youthful energy. He needed to get moving. He might just make it in time.

  Sure enough, as he trotted along Via Maggio, he was just in time to see the postman coming away from the shop, having found the metal shutters still down. He was looking around for somewhere to leave his delivery, when he recognized Porteus, nodded, said 'giorno and gave him the handful of mail. Porteus took it and thanked him. He unlocked the rolling aluminium and yanked it up, went through the front door and locked it again behind him.

  Sitting down at Walter's desk, he went through the stacks of mail piece by piece. There were Sotheby's and Christy's catalogues, a world whose purpose and importance now seemed vague, a number of other catalogues and flyers for gallery openings and auctions. There were also two payment cheques for a total sum of three thousand, six hundred and forty Euros. If Porteus was careful, he could make it last one month.

  Another of the envelopes was postmarked Milan, and from a legal studio, informing Walter of the death of a Signora Mirella Bianchini, by heart attack, several months ago, and information regarding a rebate for those months of residency overpaid to Villa del Bosco following her death. Both names, Mirella Bianchini and Villa del Bosco rang a distant bell but Porteus couldn't bring them into focus. It was a two-page letter and when he lifted the first sheet, the proof that God existed flew up from the pages and fluttered to the floor. He picked it up. It was another cheque and a substantial one, from the Villa del Bosco's administrative offices and made out to Walter for a date that preceded his death.

  The amount was decent. Seven thousand, three hundred and twenty seven Euros, tax included. Villa del Bosco was clearly a very exclusive place. Porteus did the calculation. The three cheques together would buy him time.

  Porteus' heart was filled with a new kind of love, undeserved until this moment, for Walter. He opened the desk drawer, retrieved Walter's gold-nibbed pen, wetted it, made a few marks on the blotter, and held it above the first cheque with a steady hand.

  He was an artist, after all. It was just a matter of another little restoration job. The restoration of Walter's signature to the back of these cheques. It would not be the first time. Although he had never signed cheques in Walter’s name, over this last year there had been numerous authorizations and customs documents that Walter couldn’t be bothered with. After one short warm-up on a separate piece of paper, he executed it. It was good enough. He set the pen down and sighed. God was smiling on him. He looked up and smiled back, then began his search.

  He knew there would probably be nothing in the back room safe. Walter had been held up twice in the past, at gunpoint, and avoided keeping anything important or particularly valuable in it. Recently he had posted a sign over the safe, which read.

  To all thieves, I keep no cash or valuables in the shop or safe. However, in the elegant sideboard to your left, you will find a fully stocked bar. Help yourselves, the drinks are on me. Salute. The proprietor.

  In the back room, Porteus shifted the heavy book shelves and tables that stood on the rug, which he rolled back, revealing the ancient trapdoor to the cellar. He pulled it open, switched on the light and climbed down the narrow stone steps. Where an orderly chaos had prevailed before, mostly made up of religious paintings peeping from behind their covers, and wall shelving filled with large and small wooden packing cases, there was now emptiness.

  Porteus wondered when Walter could have moved it all without his noticing. Porteus went to the hidey-hole and lifted the stone. There it was, wrapped in its black velvet cloth. The bible. The beautiful Mekharist creation. God had come home and put his feet up.

  Chapter Three

  When the plane touched down, Sam took the train from Rome and a taxi all the way from the Santa Maria Novella station to Fiesole. It was going to cost him more than his plane ticket, but when he reached the eroded lions on the gateposts and caught sight of the family villa, Le Falde, at the top of the cypress drive, he forgave himself the expense. As the taxi bumped its way up the pitted gravel drive to the top, the driver muttered, “Your potholes might be noble but my garage bills are going to be majestic.”

  They pulled into the courtyard, a circular mosaic that had once hosted horse-drawn carriages. Sam ignored the knot in his stomach, paid the man and watched him drive off and out of sight.

  Before he’d had a chance to ring the bell or even approach it, the four hundred year-old wooden door swung open and a voice from the dim entrance said, “Samuele, at last.” It was Donatella, the housekeeper.

  Sam stepped into the vestibule and dropped his carry-all on the black and white diamonds of the marble floor. The tags on the handle had been ripped in half and read ANADA and ISH AIRWAYS, as if he’d travelled to and from somewhere far more exotic than Canada or the U.K..

  “I got the first available flight.”

  Donatella grabbed his face with scrawny red knuckled hands. She was shorter and stringier than he remembered, and the shiny pink bald spot beneath her black dyed permanent had widened.

  “He would have wanted you to be here at the end,” she said. Translation: Where were you, you lousy excuse for an only son?

  Sam’s voice bit back. “If I had been here, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Have you eaten yet?” The most important question in the Italian language.

  “I had something on the plane.” And who said gin-soaked lemon slices and four smoked almonds couldn’t be called lunch? But Sam knew that Donatella, whose spit on a handkerchief had assaulted his face on and off throughout his childhood, saw right through him. She said, “There’s a tray of lasagna in the kitchen. You’ll want to see him first though.”

  “Yes. Where is he?”

  “In the dining room. We brought the old refectory table in from the hallway and set him on that.”

  Sam hurried in that direction, Donatella at his back. The murmur of women’s voices grew louder as he approached and when he reached the dining room, he was met by a circle of Borgo matrons seated on wooden kitchen chairs all around the casket. They chanted the Rosary as if their lives depended on it, as if it were a spell to keep them too from being sucked into the mahogany and white silk void.

  They all stopped, looked up, and uttered a chorus of, “Samuele, finally.”

  It would have been generous of him to put on a display for them, to roar and moan with grief, but his overriding feeling was one of disbelief and he couldn’t gratify them. The whole village would soon be mumbling about what an unfeeling bastard he was.

  Sam stepped up to have a look. The corpse was elegant in a brown Savile Row Harris tweed and gleaming Ferragamo shoes. Although the haemorrhage was visible all around the left side of his scalp to the back of the head, they’d done a fine job of hiding the damage. Even in death, his father had not relinquished his power. It was in the mere arrangement of his bones, the prominent forehead, the magnificent nose and cheekbones, the mouth that was still censorship and authority in two thin strips of flesh. There was even serenity in Walter’s face, as if he’d actually gone to a better world. Impossible though, since Walter had always claimed that an afterlife, especially a Christian one, was piffle, no place for a thinking human being.

  Sam turned and said to the prayer circle, “I’m here now. Thank you all so much for coming but I don't want to keep you any longer. I’ll watch over him now.”

  The women didn't budge.

  “I don’t imagine your husbands have had any lunch. They’ll be cranky.” The women grumbled to their feet, folded their fans, slid their Rosaries into pockets, smoothed creases in
naphthalene-scented skirts, and tottered toward the door.

  “Go on, Donatella, you too. It’ll be fine. I’m here now. I’ll watch over him.” Although Sam wasn’t sure what he'd do if his father actually sprang back to life. Possibly slam the coffin lid shut and sit on it hard until the Resurrection passed.

  Sam accompanied the women to the front door. Just as he was about to close it, a dirty white Cinquecento pulled into the drive. It was Don Paddy, Borgo's priest.

  Don Paddy had come from Newfoundland seven years earlier, bonded immediately with the wine and the food, and never left. He and Walter had managed, through something bordering on moral blackmail, to ensure he always had a posting in the parish of Borgo. The locals used the Italian name Patrizio, for Patrick, but Walter had always called him Don Paddy so Sam did the same.

  When Sam saw Don Paddy step out of the car, he had to look hard to see that it was the same man. In the past, the priest had hauled his bulk and lumbered about. Years before, when he first arrived, he had been a bulbous, pigeon-toed man in his early forties with an asthmatic wheeze, a pink complexion and a head of thick brown hair, with one lock that flopped boyishly over his eyes. This new Don Paddy was gaunt, grey and consumed. His eyes were pink-rimmed as if with excessive crying or excessive drinking. Perhaps both.

  His outfit was the same, though now everything hung loose. White dog collar, shabby black pants and black cotton shirt adorned with cigarette ash and historical food spills. When First Communion rolled around each year, he was the butt end of the kids’ jokes. The catechism classes rewarded him with spit-balls, vinegar in place of Communion wine, any number of well-timed raspberries and miscellaneous flatulent noises. Don Paddy had always been good about it. He said he remembered being their age. He expected it, forgave it, said that God could be a bit of a joker himself.