The Savage Garden (7 page)

    Despite this, Fausto seemed to harbor a grudging respect for the German military machine, which had so successfully slowed the Allied advance northward, mining bridges and roads, its troops fighting a relentless rearguard action against overwhelming odds, taking severe casualties but never losing their discipline or their fighting spirit, forever melting away, withholding their fire until you were right on them, and always ceasing fire at the first sign of the Red Cross.

    Fausto was speaking from firsthand experience. He'd been a member of a partisan group who'd assisted the Allies in their push on Florence, fighting alongside the British when they entered the city, men from "London Liverpool Manchester."

    And Hastings?

    No, that was something else, Fausto explained—an interest in historic battles.

    He was lying. He knew more about the Battle of Hastings than was healthy for any man to know. They were well into the third bottle of wine before Harold even got the arrow in the eye.

    Fausto was enacting this event with a slender breadstick when Signora Fanelli appeared at the table.

    "Fausto, leave him alone, look at him, he's half dead."

    Fausto peered at Adam.

    "Leave the poor boy alone. Go home. It's late," Signora Fanelli insisted, before returning to the bar.

    "A beautiful woman," mused Fausto, helping himself to yet another of Adam's cigarettes.

    "What happened to her husband?"

    "The war. It was a bad thing."

    "What?"

    Fausto's dark eyes narrowed, as if judging Adam worthy of a response.

    "We were fighting for our country. Our country. Against the Germans, yes, but also against each other—Communists, Socialists, Monarchists, Fascists. For the future. There was . . . confusion. Things happened. War permits it. It demands it." He drew on the cigarette and exhaled. "Giovanni Gentile. Do you know the name?"

    "No."

    "He was a philosopher. A thinker. Of the right. A Fascist. He had a house in Florence. They went to his door carrying books like students, carrying books to fool him. And then they shot him." He took a sip of wine. "When they start killing the men of ideas, you can be sure the Devil is laughing."

    "Did you know them?" asked Adam.

    "Who?"

    "The ones who did it?"

    "You ask a lot of questions."

    "It's the first chance I've had."

    Fausto cracked a smile and he laughed. "I talk too much, it's true."

    "What?" called Signora Fanelli from across the room. "I don't see you for months and now I can't get rid of you?"

    "I'm going, I'm going," said Fausto, holding up his hands in capitulation. Turning back to Adam, he leaned close. "Things can make sense at the time, but as you get older those consolations no longer help you sleep. It's the only thing I've learned. We all think we know the answer, and we're all wrong. Shit, I'm not sure we even know what the question is."

    Adam drew his own consolation from the words: that Fausto was even more drunk than he was.

    Fausto drained his glass and rose to his feet. "It's been a pleasure. You be careful up there at Villa Docci."

    "Why do you say that?"

    "It's a bad place."

    "A bad place?"

    "It always has been. People have a tendency to die there."

    Adam couldn't help smiling at the melodramatic statement.

    "You think I'm joking?"

    "No . . . I'm sorry. You mean Signora Docci's son?"

    "You heard about Emilio?"

    "Not much. Only that he was killed by the Germans during the war."

    Fausto crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. "So the story goes."

    There was no time for Adam to pick him up on this last comment.

    "Out!" trumpeted Signora Fanelli, advancing toward them wielding a broom.

    Fausto turned to meet his attacker. "Letizia, you are a beautiful woman. If I were a richer man I would try to make you my wife." "Ahhhh," she cooed sweetly. "Well, you're about to become even poorer. Three bottles of wine."

    "I'll pay," said Adam.

    "He'll pay," said Fausto.

    "No he won't," said Signora Fanelli.

    Fausto delved into his pocket, pulled out some crumpled notes and dropped them on the table. "Good night, everybody," he said with the slightest of bows. "Fausto is no more."

    He left via the terrace, the life somehow draining out of the room along with him.

    Signora Fanelli set about stacking chairs on the tables. "Fausto, Fausto," she sighed wearily. "You mustn't take him too seriously, he's a bit depressed at the moment."

    "Why?"

    "The Communists did not do well at the election in May . . . only twenty-two percent, the poor things," she added with a distinct note of false sympathy.

    Twenty-two percent sounded like a not inconsiderable slice of the electorate.

    "You're not a Communist?" Adam asked.

    "Communism is for young people with empty stomachs. Look at me."

    He had been, quite closely, and he would happily have paid her the compliment she was fishing for if the Italian words hadn't eluded him.

    "Fausto isn't so young," he said.

    "Fausto was born an idealist. It's not his fault."

    He had wanted to sit there, chatting idly, observing the play of her slender hips beneath her dress as she worked the broom around the tables. But she had dispatched him upstairs with a bottle of mineral water and firm instructions to drink the lot before bed.

    This he had failed to do.

    Instead, he had flopped onto the mattress and set about constructing a gratifying little scenario in his head. His last memory before drifting into drunken slumber had been of Harry barging into the room just as Signora Fanelli was peeling off an emerald green chenille bathrobe.

    THE WALK TO VILLA DOCCI FAILED TO CLEAR HIS HEAD; all it did was shunt the pain from the front of his skull to the back of it, where, he knew from hard experience, it would remain lodged for the rest of the day. The heat was building fast under a cloudless sky, and his shirt was clinging to him by the time he arrived.

    He had anticipated having to force a decision on himself. In the end, it came naturally, when he was not even halfway through his brisk tramp around the memorial garden.

    There was something not quite right about the place, and this was where its appeal lay. There were no great questions clamoring for answers; they were more like restless whispers at the back of his mind.

    According to the records, Flora had died in 1548, the year after Villa Docci's completion, so why had her husband waited almost thirty years—till the very end of his own life—to lay out a garden to her memory? Then there were the small anomalies within the garden itself, not exactly discordant elements, but somehow out of keeping with the mood and tone of the whole. Why, for example, the triumphal arch on which Flora's name was carved in its Italian form? It was such a pompous piece of architecture, crowning the crest above her like some advertising. At no other point in the itinerary did the garden look to declare its purpose. Rather, it encrypted it in symbols and metaphors and allegory.

    He was honest enough to know that a more pragmatic consideration was also pushing him toward a study of the garden over the villa: the file prepared by Signora Docci's father. It offered a model from which to work, a template for his own thesis, a document easily massaged, expanded, made his own with the minimum of effort. It was short, and a tad dry, but thorough in its scholarship. There were numerous references in both the text and the footnotes, most of them relating to books or original documents to be found in the library. It would take a few days, but all of these would have to be checked out first, their suitability as potential padding material carefully assessed.

    Retreating to the cool of the villa, he found Maria prowling around, marshaling a couple of browbeaten cleaning ladies and handing out chores to Foscolo, the saturnine handyman.

    Adam set up shop in the study. Light and lofty, it occupied the northwest corner of the building just beyond the library, with French windows giving onto the back terrace. Unlike the other rooms of the villa, which were plainly and sparsely furnished, the study was crowded with furniture, paintings, objects and books— as if all the incidental clutter conspicuously absent from the rest of the villa had somehow gathered here.

    On the wall beside the fireplace was the small portrait panel of Federico Docci that Signora Docci had mentioned to him the previous day. It showed a handsome man of middle years whose sharp features were only just beginning to blunt with age. He was represented in half length, seated in a high-backed chair, his hands resting lightly on a book, and through a window in the wall behind him, hills could be seen rolling off to a distant ocean. Painted in three-quarter face, there was something fiercely imperious in the tilt of his head and the set glare of his dark, slanting eyes. And yet the suspicion of a smile played about his wide and generous mouth—a contradiction that seemed almost self-mocking, attractively so.

    A vast glazed mahogany cabinet filled the wall behind the desk. Its lower shelves were given over to books, the majority of them relating to the Etruscans. A large section was devoted to anthropological texts. These were in a variety of languages—Italian, French, English and Dutch—and were decades old. The upper shelves of the cabinet were home to all manner of strange objects, mostly of an archaeological nature: clay figurines, bronze implements, bits of pottery, fragments of stone sculpture and the like. On the very top shelf were two skulls, their hollow eye sockets deep pools of shadow behind the glass.

    Adam opened the cabinet door and, with the aid of some steps from the library, found himself face to face with the macabre display. They weren't human skulls, but they weren't far off—primates of some kind. Although similar in size, there were distinct differences. The skull on the left was narrower and less angular. Its partner had longer canines, jutting cheekbones and a bony crest rising across the skull from ear to ear, met at its apex by two ridges running from the sides of the eye sockets.

    Adam reached out and ran his hand over the skull, his fingers tracing the cranial ridges.

    That's when he heard the footsteps.

    He turned to see Maria enter the study from the terrace. The reproachful cast of her eye would have driven him from the library steps if he hadn't already been descending.

    "Very interesting," he said pathetically, nodding behind him.

    "Would you like some coffee?"

    "Yes, thank you."

    Maria stopped and turned at the door to the library.
"Orango-tanghi,"
she said, her eyes flicking to the skulls.

    "Oh," he replied in English. "Right."

    The moment she was gone, he reached for the dictionary.

    He hadn't misunderstood her.

    Despite her offer of coffee, Maria barely concealed her relief at not having to feed him at lunchtime. Toward three o'clock, she appeared in the study with a summons from the lady of the house.

    He found Signora Docci sitting in her bed, patting at her face and neck with a wet flannel. A typewriter sat beside her on the bed, an unfinished letter in its jaws.

    "I've asked Foscolo to prepare a bicycle for you," she said. "To spare you the walk every day."

    "Thank you, that's very kind."

    "I don't want your death on my conscience, what with this heat."

    She asked him how his work was going, and he came clean about his dilemma, now resolved.

    "You like the house?"

    "I do. A lot."

    She looked on approvingly as he spelled out why exactly. He asked her who the architect had been.