The Faces of Angels (4 page)

I pointed this out to Billy the other night, and she laughed and blew smoke through her nose. ‘Welcome to Florence,' she said. ‘City of the Uncommon Delusion.'

Signora Bardino interests me, not only because of what she has morphed herself into, but because she's a friend of Pierangelo's soon-to-be ex-wife. Piero suggested her academy in the first place, and I've watched her to see if she has any inkling of my real connection to him. So far there's been no evidence, and it's certainly not something I feel inclined to reveal. To Signora Bardino or anyone else, for that matter.

It's not that I keep Pierangelo a secret, but I've been here almost a month now and I've noticed that none of us enrolled at the academy spend much time discussing who or what we are when we're not here. In my case the reasons for this are obvious—I don't talk about what happened to me with anyone—but generally I think we don't do it because it would ruin a vital part of what we're paying for: the illusion that this really is our life.

I don't know for sure what the others have done to increase the viability of their own particular dream worlds, but the first thing I did when I got here was change how I looked. I had my previously boring long blonde hair cut into a pageboy and dyed chestnut brown. Then, yesterday, I went a step further and had it striped. Now, I run my fingers through my metallic streaks, thinking what a fit the nuns at the convent summer camp I used to go to would have if they could see them, and watching the lights switch off in the apartment opposite. The sound of water burbling in our pipes tells me Billy's pulled the plug in her bath and is on her way to bed, which is a relief. Not because of her, but because, more and more, I think of this city the same way I think of Pierangelo; as an intimate, a lover. And I relish the time we spend alone together.

Florence knows things about me no one knows. These narrow, hemmed-in streets, the blank grey faces of these buildings with their huge doors that conceal their secrets, in turn know my secrets. This city knows where I was unfaithful—where I held a hand, stole a kiss. It has heard my laughter, my footsteps and my cruelty. Heard me tell Piero how Ty always followed me, never left me alone, and how it drove me crazy. It has listened to me complain that I was fettered by Ty's love, and watched while I stood on street corners, or sketched a building. It has seen me naked, standing at the window of a borrowed apartment. And tied up. And gagged, lying in the grass, a paper face laughing at nothing while consciousness flickered like a firefly. Florence has seen all that, and the idea would be repellent if stones judged. But they don't. They merely witness.

Love. Hate. Luck. I'm sure that's what the stones would tell me if they could speak, that I was lucky, and caution me not to forget it. And I don't because it's true. It was the first thing I thought of this evening when Kirk mentioned the girl.

Kirk's Italian is not as good as he thinks it is, and he was labouring over the paragraph in the evening paper when he finally announced, ‘It was a rower who found her.'

After that, he read on, his voice faltering over the longer words, sounding out the syllables, and more often than not getting the stresses wrong. But despite that, or maybe because of it, that first phrase stuck in my mind—
It was a rower who found her.
I closed my eyes and instead of Piazza Santo Spirito, where we were sitting, I saw the muddy green band of the Arno. And the boat. The oars rose and dipped and rose again, as the scull flew across the water, fast and smooth as a skate on ice.

Sometimes, just after dawn, I go down to the bridges, so in all likelihood I've seen him, the man who found this girl. He'll be thin and agile, a water-borne greyhound, and I imagine him, just as the sun is rising, glancing backwards, throwing a look over his shoulder and not realizing what she was at first, because by then she probably didn't look much like a person any more. I imagine her putty white, mottled blue, her limbs heavy with death, already something less than human. Maybe he thought she was nothing but driftwood. Garbage that had been abandoned and left to rot in the neon green of the reed grass that grows below the ramparts of Ponte alle Grazie.

And it must have been a shock, spotting her like that. Hardly what you'd expect on an early spring morning. So I think the rower should be forgiven if the first thing he wanted to tell himself was that she was just a drunk, passed out. That's the natural reaction, to feel not fear, or even pity, but the pang of revulsion that sets the dead apart. I can't blame him if the first thing he did when he saw her was reach for the belief that the girl lying there in the grass could not be in any way like him. That she could never be his daughter, or his wife or sister, but must instead be a vagrant. A junky. One of the lost. Nothing but a broken rider of dreams who'd crashed to earth in Florence.

‘Can I see?' I asked.

Kirk shrugged and handed me the paper. The picture of the girl was small and grainy and stared up at me as he reached for his wine glass.

‘How much do you want to bet,' Kirk said, ‘that somebody's picking them off? That it's the population protecting itself, fighting back against the Scourge of Art Students.'

‘Does it say she was an art student?' asked Henry. Henry is a big bear-like creature of a man who refers to himself as ‘A-psychologist-from-Baltimore-who's-on-sabbatical-maybe-permanently'. He has a beard and wears glasses and strange baggy trousers with oddly placed loops and pockets. It is not hard to imagine Henry as Baloo, the bear in
The Jungle Book
. Once, not long after we arrived, he entertained us all by drinking too much wine and singing, ‘Get Happy.' Billy took a picture with one of the disposable cameras she loves and now it's taped to the door of our tiny refrigerator.

‘Nope,' I replied. The paper didn't say anything about who she was. It didn't even give her a name, or age. The picture suggested ‘young', and I held it up so the others could see. Henry grimaced, but Kirk ignored it.

Like Billy and I, they share an apartment, and Kirk is Bagheera to Henry's Baloo. The only thing that isn't pantherish about him is his red hair. It's long, and when he tucks it behind his ears, as he does frequently, he reminds me powerfully of my Second Grade teacher, Mrs Cartwright, who was memorable mainly for her carroty hair, and for the fact that she once fainted in assembly. Kirk, however, is not a Second Grade teacher. According to his ‘get to know you' note on the signora's website, he's a lawyer from Manhattan, but from the way he works a crowd, even one as small as the three of us, you'd be forgiven for thinking he's a stand-up comic. A sly smile snuck across his face.

‘You know,' he said, ‘the art students here. It's probably like the body fighting viruses. Or trees developing resistance to Dutch elm disease. Or maybe it's natural selection, the death of the weakest. The last into the Uffizi shall die.'

Kirk says his ‘little sojourn at the Academy della Bardina' is a treat to himself for surviving three and a half glorious decades before he has to finally grow up for good and start a job in DC with the Justice Department, but I have to say that the idea of him going to work for the Feds strikes me as unlikely. Kind of like hiring Avril Lavigne as a front woman for the Young Rotarians. On the other hand, Justice probably knows what it's doing, because if his performances in the bar are any indication, Kirk's a killer in court.

He leaned back in his little metal chair, his long black coat flapping on either side of him, and elaborated. ‘In my opinion, it is distinctly possible,' he said, ‘that the art students have started killing each other because things have gotten too crowded, like those animals—what are they, lemmings?'

‘Rats,' Billy said. ‘Lemmings jump over cliffs.'

Billy was watching the far side of the piazza as she spoke, spinning the stem of her wine glass between her thumb and forefinger, making the strip of lemon peel inside dance on a whirlpool of tepid Pinot Grigio. ‘Somewhere in Canada, I think,' she added. ‘Or maybe Newfoundland.'

‘Well, same idea.'

‘Canada and Newfoundland?' Billy raised her eyebrows.

‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact.' The intrusion of geography made Kirk petulant. ‘You cannot dispute,' he insisted, tapping the table as though we might, ‘you absolutely cannot dispute that Florence has a superabundance of art students. Just think about it. Just consider for a moment how many Junior Years Abroad are passed in these poor, benighted streets. In fact,' he added, ‘I would guess that the population of Uffizi-goers toting fanny packs and indulging in bad art theory is reaching something dangerously close to critical mass.'

‘What is “critical mass”?' Billy asked. ‘I mean, exactly?'

Henry put his beer bottle down and snorted. He likes to drink Nastro Azzuro and peel the labels off the side. There are usually little piles of shavings where he's been sitting. ‘Are you seriously suggesting,' he said, pushing his glasses up his nose, ‘that this woman was killed because she said something stupid about Botticelli? Does it even say she was killed?'

‘No,' I said, but everyone ignored me.

Kirk grinned, his pale foxy face looking as if it had been cracked with a cleaver. ‘If she said it loud enough. And elaborated. Right in front of the
Primavera
.' There was a silence as we considered this. ‘I mean, who among us,' Kirk asked, ‘who among us can honestly say that they have not been tempted to homicide when trapped in the Uffizi and forced to listen to some halfwit reciting
Art 101
?'

By this time Billy had stopped watching the piazza or, presumably, wondering about critical mass, and she turned and looked at us. Billy's six foot if she's an inch, her hair is long and blonde and kinky, her eyes are the colour of sapphires. Of the sky. A summer day reflected in deep, deep water. Billy's eyes are the eyes little girls draw on the faces of princesses. ‘In the bathroom,' she said suddenly. ‘In the basement of the Accademia. They brush their hair over the sinks.'

‘They always have long hair.' Henry was getting into the spirit now. He pushed the too-long sleeves of his sweater up over his wrists in a gesture that suggested he was getting serious, and waved his big, blunt hands. About a week ago, Henry told me that he'd always wanted to be a sculptor, not a shrink, but sadly he had to make a living. I told him he looked like Michelangelo, which is actually true, and two little pink spots of pleasure appeared on his cheeks.

‘It's tribal.' Kirk poured the last of his little bottle of Campari into his glass. ‘The hair,' he announced, ‘is a form of ritual identification, best known to twenty-year-olds. They signal by shaking their heads. Like horses, I believe. Studies have been done. In the case of the female, the long hair is absolutely essential for sitting in cafés and attracting Romeo. He pulls up on his Vespa and tells her she looks like a Renaissance angel, after which energetic, if largely uninspired, sex takes place.'

‘I don't know,' Billy said. ‘All I can tell you is, they hog the mirrors. And spend hours putting on lip gloss that's clear anyways. I never did get the point of that.' She tapped the last cigarette out of her pack and crumpled the paper in her fist. ‘Clear lip gloss, I mean.'

‘Smoochability,' Kirk said, leaning across to light her cigarette. ‘All the heavenly legions wear lip gloss. And the Virgin Mary. They get a bulk discount. Like Sam's Club.'

‘Well,' Billy said, ‘I bet Mary Magdalene wears Chanel.'

Henry picked up his bottle and looked at it sadly when he realized it was empty. ‘Lip gloss aside,' he said, ‘the evidence would certainly seem to suggest that some thinning of the art student population is in order.'

And at that, we all turned and looked at the table where the Japanese girls were sitting, as though we didn't count.

Apart from the four of us and Ellen and Tony, a couple from Honolulu who have rented an apartment up in Fiesole and as a result almost never show up at the bar, the Japanese girls are the only other students presently enrolled at the academy. There are three of them, Ayako, Mikiko and, we think, Tamayo, although we're not sure on the last count. Kirk insists they're stewardesses from Cathay Pacific who got laid off during the SARS crisis, but Billy says she doesn't think this is true.

What is true is that, just like us, the Japanese girls come to the bar at Santo Spirito almost every evening but, unlike us, they almost never drink anything. Instead, they order one pot of tea between the three of them, which pisses the waitress off, a fact they don't seem to spend a lot of time worrying about. They don't spend a lot of time coming to lectures, either. In fact, as far as we can tell, the only thing they do seem to spend a lot of time doing is buying tiny pieces of designer leather. Key folders from Prada. Credit-card sleeves from Piero Guidi. Miniature coin purses covered with someone else's initials. The smaller the better, as if they are shopping for a colony of dwarfs.

Every afternoon the Japanese girls compare their purchases at a sandwich bar in Piazza della Repubblica, then they go to Vivoli and eat ice cream. After that, they usually show up at the bar.

Ayako and Mikiko and Tamayo come here and don't drink in much the same way they come to Signor Catarelli's lectures on ‘The Rise of Perspective' and ‘The Decline of the Byzantine' and don't talk. Instead, while the hapless signor mixes up his slides and babbles happily about Piero della Francesca, they watch us. Well, not us, exactly. Kirk. His translucent skin and lean neurotic looks appear to fascinate them. Or maybe it's his red mane, or the fact that he wears his black coat all the time, even indoors when the heat is on, like that guy in
The Matrix
. Whatever the reason, the Japanese girls are obviously far more impressed by Kirk than by Signor Catarelli. So much so, in fact, that we have noticed that whenever he writes anything down, they do too. It didn't take Billy long to suggest that Kirk scribble furiously whenever Signor Catarelli says goodbye or hello or makes a bad joke, just to see what would happen. We figure that in a few weeks the Japanese girls will have comprehensive notes on the words
ciao
and
arrivederci
, and the fact that that-fellow-Uccello-was-certainly-no-bird-brain.