The Savage Garden (24 page)

    For much of the following day the back of the villa was crawling with men. Electricians laid a giant spider's web of cables as discreetly as possible; an impressive canopy was erected on the lower terrace near the stand of umbrella pines; smaller tents sprang up elsewhere. Maurizio and his wife, Chiara, had driven up from Florence. They spent much of their time in the company of Signora Docci, deep in discussion with caterers, florists and other official-looking types.

    The sound of raised voices would carry into the study from time to time, whenever Signora Docci and Maurizio crossed swords over some detail, which was often, with Chiara doing her best to mediate. At a certain point, Chiara had had enough. Adam knew this because she said as much when she appeared in the study and monopolized an hour of his time. Whatever suspicions he might have harbored about her husband, he liked Chiara. She was warm, frank and irreverent.

    "Every year they argue," she said, lighting her first of many cigarettes. "Why, I don't know. Everyone will come, everyone will get drunk, and then everyone will go home. Men will meet the lovers of their wives and not know it; women will meet the lovers of their husbands and know it immediately. And lots of people will find new lovers."

    "Sounds like a romantic affair."

    "You are young, not a man still."

    "Not yet a man," said Adam, correcting her English. "Or not a man yet."

    "Exactly. Not a man yet. You believe yet."

    "You still believe."

    She gave a dismissive sweep of her arm.
"Ma, questa lingua di barbari mi fa cagare."
Which translated as "This barbarian tongue makes me shit."

    "What do I believe?" asked Adam, carrying a smile.

    "In life. Love."

    "How do you know?"

    "I see you," she replied, pointing her cigarette at him.

    "What do you see?"

    "I see a boy like my son, but more intelligent. I see the way you look at Antonella." Adam rolled his eyes in what he hoped was a convincing display of amused forbearance. "Yes, I do. And I see that you are"—she couldn't find the English word—
"un osservatore."

    "An observer."

    "Yes. You watch. And you think. You are always watching. But you are .. .
passivo."

    "Passive."

    "Yes, passive."

    "You should meet my ex-girlfriend, you'd have a lot to talk about."

    She laughed, a deep and husky laugh. Adam wondered if she was naturally blond. It was hard to tell from her complexion.

    "Ah, see," she exclaimed. "You are doing it now."

    "What?"

    "Watching. What were you thinking?"

    "Nothing."

    "Liar."

    "Okay. I was wondering if your blond hair is natural."

    Chiara leaned across the desk and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. "I could prove it to you," she said, "but I don't know you well enough."

    There was something so matter-of-fact in her delivery that it stripped the statement of all flirtation.

    This slightly bizarre exchange didn't color the rest of their conversation, even if the image it conjured up never quite left Adam's head. Chiara talked about a trip she had once made to Scotland. She liked the Scottish, she said, they were hill people, like the Italians. Hill Scots people were different. Hills had names, they had stories attached to them. Peaks and passes had been defended, battles had been fought in their valleys. You couldn't ignore hills, they seeped into your marrow, they became part of you.

    Adam put forward a corresponding argument for the flat fen- lands of Cambridgeshire, his father's childhood home, but Chiara refused to allow anything to tarnish her theory, tossing his case out of court.

    She told him about the rugged countryside near Perugia, where she'd grown up, and where she still had a house. She told him about the other houses they owned, the one in Florence and the one by the sea.

    "And how do you feel about moving here?" Adam asked, nudging the conversation his way.

    "It is what Maurizio wants, and it is not so far from town."

    "You have your doubts?" "I have never felt happy here."

    "It's a beautiful place."

    "Yes, I know, of course."

    "Maybe you'll feel better about it when you've redone the top floor," remarked Adam.

    "Maybe."

    "Maria says you have plans."

    "Of course. It's not natural." Her eyes flicked toward the ceiling. "Do you think it's natural?"

    "No."

    "It is like . . ."

    "What?"

    
"E come fossesempre vivo."
It's like he's still alive. "It is not natural. I don't care what Francesca thinks."

    "Apparently it was her husband's wish."

    "Pah!"

    It was a surprisingly eloquent utterance, as was the gesture that accompanied it—a dismissive flick of the hand.

    "Benedetto was obsessed, everyone said it.
She
said it. Then when he died, she did nothing."

    "Maybe he asked her not to."

    "That's what she says; before he died he made her promise. But he did not make Maurizio promise."

    "Have you ever been up there?"

    "Only one time. When it happened."

    "You were here when it happened?"

    "We all were, in the house by the farm."

    They had been celebrating, she explained, a big meal with lots of wine. Maybe a little too much wine, with hindsight—Emilio had a tendency to become belligerent when drunk. They had good cause to be happy, though. The Allies were at the gates of San

    Casciano and they'd received word from the German officer in command of the villa that he intended to disregard his orders and pull back to the next German line of defense, just south of Florence.

    This wasn't cowardice on his part. He knew that to make a stand at Villa Docci would quite possibly result in the destruction of a building he'd come to love. He was a good man, said Chiara, a very tall and very cultivated man from Hamburg, and it was sad that he hadn't outlived the war. She still remembered the tears in his eyes as he was leaving, when Emilio told him that he would always be a welcome guest in their home once the hostilities were over.

    They had survived the German occupation and were all in high spirits when the sound of gunfire shattered the silence of the night. They knew that a small detail of men had been left behind to finalize the withdrawal from the villa, and their first thought was that these soldiers had been surprised by an advance party of Allied troops. On rushing outside, however, they also heard the sounds of music and laughter coming from up at the villa.

    It was Emilio's idea to go and investigate: a matter of pride to him. It was chiefly thanks to his subtle diplomacy that Villa Docci and its occupants had come through the various phases of the war unscathed. Despite what people now said—and what she herself had thought at the time—Emilio was never a Fascist, he was a pragmatist. He did whatever was required to protect his family and the estate, happy to don any mask that served this end, regardless of the damage to his reputation.

    She had since discovered that on at least two occasions he had used his influence with the Fascist authorities in Florence to protect Maurizio from certain "difficulties"—problems arising from his association with underground socialism.

    And just as Emilio had worked those men of importance in Florence, so he had won over the German officer sent to establish a command post at Villa Docci, sitting up late into the night with him, talking about art, literature, science and philosophy. Not a single artwork had been damaged or pillaged, not a single laborer on the estate ill-treated. It had been an entirely painless cohabitation. Then, just as it was drawing to a close, Emilio was presented with the sight of antique furniture—precious family heirlooms— being tossed from the top windows of the villa by a couple of foot soldiers.

    Unfortunately, they were not men he knew well; they'd recently been assigned to Villa Docci, plucked from the hordes of German troops retreating northward. Emilio and Maurizio had burst in on the pair as they were hefting yet another piece of furniture toward the window. They were reeling drunk, laughing, and some German song was blaring from the gramophone player. Emilio took in the room—the broken mirrors, the slashed paintings and the bullet- holes in the ceiling frescoes—then he drew his pistol and fired a shot into the gramophone, killing the music. For a few stunned moments the four men in the room just stood there in the deafening silence, a frozen tableau.

    Tempers quickly flared. There was much gesticulating and shouting, the words lost on Maurizio, who didn't speak German. The Germans glanced at their own pistols, abandoned nearby. Emilio ordered them to move away from their weapons. And that's when Gaetano the gardener entered the room, drawn to the villa by the rumpus.

    Chiara made Adam swear never to repeat this particular detail of the story, the precise and unfortunate timing of Gaetano's arrival, because in many respects poor Gaetano was unwittingly responsible for the death of Emilio.

    As Emilio turned instinctively toward the door, one of the Germans snatched up his own pistol and fired twice, hitting Emilio in the chest and the head. He crumpled to the floor, dead. Gaetano dipped back outside the room, but with nowhere to flee, Maurizio found himself staring down the barrel of the German's gun. His life was saved by the other German, who persuaded his companion not to pull the trigger. The two of them then fled.

    Chiara saw the room the following day. Emilio's body had been removed, although his blood still stained the floor near the fireplace, where he had fallen. Allied soldiers arrived in the afternoon, but they seemed less concerned with what had happened than in turning up any intelligence left behind by the Germans. As soon as they were gone, Benedetto closed and locked the doors at the head of the staircase. It was a few days before he announced that the rooms would remain just as they were. He gave no explanation and he refused to discuss the matter further. With time, everyone grew to accept this unusual state of affairs. It only became an issue again when, years later, Benedetto himself died and Signora Docci announced her intention to leave the top floor sealed off.

    "It is not right," said Chiara, stubbing out her cigarette and getting to her feet. "We have German friends. They will be at the party. It is an insult to them. It is not right. It is the past."

    There was more that Adam wanted to ask, but he'd already shown an undue interest in the episode, cajoling her with questions, extracting from her the closest thing to an "official" account of the killing as he was ever likely to get. Somehow he couldn't see Maurizio being quite so forthcoming, not that he would ever have risked approaching him on the subject.

    He accompanied Chiara outside onto the terrace, fleeing the fog of smoke that now filled the study. Amazingly, she immediately lit another cigarette before going in search of her husband and her mother-in-law.

    Adam stood for a while at the balustrade, going over the conversation in his head, trying to make sense of it. He watched the workmen toiling away on the terraces below, and he saw just the place to call his thoughts to order.

    The air in the chapel was surprisingly cool, almost damp. Alone this time, he surveyed the interior with a more critical eye. It was as plain and simple a place of worship as he'd ever been in. There were no false lines or proportions, no signs of excess—no writhing baroque baldachins bolted to the wall, no fussy frescoes or elaborate carvings. It was as if the building itself had shunned these things over the centuries, successive generations of Doccis somehow sensing its dislike of such frivolities.

    Standing there, breathing the building in, he was left in no doubt that the same deft hand that had fashioned an imposing villa for Federico Docci had also shaped this little house of God.

    He had done some research: Signora Docci had been right; almost nothing was known about the reputed architect of Villa Docci—Fulvio Montalto. He appeared to have been an apprentice to the Renaissance sculptor and architect Niccolo Tribolo. A letter in the Tribolo archives alluded to a meeting between Federico Docci and Fulvio Montalto—the master being absent—at which the plans for a new country residence were discussed. Maybe Tri- bolo had conceived the plans himself but, given his onerous workload at the time—he was overseeing the construction of the Boboli Gardens for Cosimo de' Medici—it seemed more likely that he had simply handed the commission to his young charge. Fulvio Montalto had more than repaid the confidence placed in him, and it was unfortunate that he had then vanished from the map.

    Adam found his feet carrying him to the spot near the south wall where Emilio lay. He thought of him there, down in the dank, dark earth. What did a body look like in a coffin after fourteen years? Liquefied? Mummified? Had the walls of the coffin given way? Were his bones already mingling with the rich Tuscan soil?

    He dumped himself on a nearby pew, dejected. He knew the reason for his mood; it had begun to settle on him the moment Chiara mentioned Gaetano the gardener's untimely arrival at the villa on the night of Emilio's murder. This one small statement had crushed the seed of Adam's suspicions underfoot.

    Everything he'd concocted in his head over the past days sprang from Fausto's claim that Gaetano had been inconsistent, that he'd changed his story about his exact whereabouts at the moment of the killing. Well, of course he had. Who wouldn't have changed his story in his position? His sudden arrival on the top floor had distracted Emilio, enabling the German to lunge for his gun and open fire. Gaetano must have been devastated, Maurizio sympathetic. It was easy to imagine them presenting an altered version of events to the world in order to spare Gaetano's feelings, just as it was easy to imagine local gossipmongers like Fausto latching on to any inconsistencies in Gaetano's account and gleefully misinterpreting them.