The Faces of Angels (6 page)

We both laugh, but the truth is that, despite his posing, or probably because of it, Florence's cardinal is popular. Very. He did some time in Africa and the U.S., where he apparently picked up some tricks from Evangelists, and when he's in town D'Erreti's appearances at the Duomo are as packed as rock concerts. I haven't actually heard him preach, but I gather that on occasion he's borrowed a page from his namesake's book and even evoked a black cross hanging over Florence. Personally, I never was too into fire and brimstone, even back in the days when I went to Mass. But I realize I'm in the minority.

‘The odd thing about D'Erreti,' Pierangelo says, picking up his glass and shaking his head, ‘is that despite the fact I disagree with him about basically everything, I know why people admire him. I even feel myself doing it sometimes. Whatever else he may be, he's not a hypocrite. And then there's the whole power trip. And the history.'

Pierangelo told me once that he was an altar boy. It just slipped out, and it surprised me at the time, both because of how he feels now, and because his parents were university professors, one a mathematician, the other a historian. He doesn't talk about them much, or about his brother, who lives in Milan and is some kind of big shot at Fiat, but as far as I know, they weren't particularly religious. As he puts his glass down and turns back to the cutting board, I realize that while I know what drove me away from the church, I've never asked him what made him change his mind, or drew him in the first place, for that matter. And now I wonder if it's some residual love, or revulsion, or a combination of the two that draws him to D'Erreti.

‘What's this piece on, I mean, exactly?'

‘Our fiftieth birthday.' Pierangelo glances over his shoulder at me as he says this and bursts out laughing. ‘You should see your face,' he says. ‘Don't panic,
cara
, Savonarola is not my long-lost twin. The paper's just doing a profile in honour of his half-century.' He shakes his head, grinning, and checks the contents of a bright copper pan. A spout of steam erupts like a mini-Vesuvius. ‘You know the kind of thing,' he adds, ‘modern man—goes to the gym—rides a motorcycle—but radical reformer—and beloved of the people—Is This the New Future of Mother Church?'

‘And is it?'

‘Well, maybe. But I certainly hope not.' Pierangelo begins dropping the baby artichokes one by one into the boiling water. ‘For a start,' he says, ‘D'Erreti would probably like to do things like have all homosexuals forced to publicly recant. Or, if they refuse, have them rounded up and shipped to God knows where. Some island somewhere, along with all the other undesirables. You know, women who want to be priests, men who think women should be priests, women who need abortions, doctors who perform abortions, NGO workers who don't believe starvation offers a neat opportunity for conversion. Oh yeah, and anybody who believes that condoms might actually stop people from dying of AIDS and that you aren't necessarily criminal if you want a divorce or use birth control.' He stops and looks at me. ‘But the fact is,' he says, ‘a lot of people think that's just what the church needs. To stand like a rock. Be firm hand on the tiller in this sea of moral relativism. And provide an apartment for every child molester in Vatican City.'

‘It won't work,' I point out. ‘It will only alienate more people. Besides, it's mean.'

‘Right,' Pierangelo agrees. ‘But I am not in the college of cardinals, and neither are you. So, when it comes to one of the most powerful institutions on earth, we don't get a vote. Instead it's in the safe hands of the men in red, the little gremlins the Pope appoints in the first place.' I'm surprised by the anger in his voice.

‘So, you think this is real?' I ask. ‘You really think D'Erreti's in some vanguard, that this is where it's going?'

Pierangelo shrugs. ‘I think it would be a tragedy, but I don't see why not.' He sweeps a pile of chopped parsley onto a saucer and reaches for his glass again. ‘D'Erreti's backed by Opus Dei, for what that tells you. They think he's great.'

The Opus, the Work, as they call themselves, was founded in the 1930s by a Spaniard, a big admirer of Franco's who's since been canonized, some think with unseemly haste. It operates like a free radical in the body of the Catholic Church, unanswerable to most of the usual channels, and awash in money, how much, nobody really knows. Rumour says a justice of the Supreme Court, at least one United States senator, a British cabinet minister, and God knows how many other political movers and shakers are members. In point of fact, God may not even know. The Opus like to call themselves discreet, but most people would probably use the word ‘secretive'. Some mutter ‘sect.'

There's a school of thought that says they're deeply sinister, but I have to admit I find them kind of silly. Fanatics, especially when they think they're being subtle, tend to overdo it like cops in old movies. I discovered after I'd known him for a while that Rinaldo was Opus, and once, back when we were bosom buddies, he introduced me to some members of a prayer group he led up at San Miniato. The whole episode was like a bad satire on religious cults. Rinaldo primed me by talking about how ‘we're all alone in the world and need real friends' and when I met them his disciples murmured and fluttered around me with such extreme godliness that it was positively cloying. Even if I hadn't already been seeing Pierangelo, they would have been enough to send me straight out into the streets to do some serious sinning.

As it was, Piero and I laughed about it in bed the next afternoon, and he still teases that if he hadn't bought me a Martini one rainy day maybe I'd be sleeping on a board in an Opus Dei house right now. Doing the Work. Turning my pay cheque over to Rinaldo for His Bank Account's Sake, and greeting every morning by kissing the floor and wrapping barbed wire around my thighs for fun.

It's on the tip of my tongue to ask Pierangelo if he's come across the good father lately, but I don't. It's bad enough that suddenly I swear I can feel the soft pressure of Rinaldo's hand on my shoulder. The puff of his breath in my ear. Any minute now, I'll hear him whispering his recipe for salvation. I reach for one of the olives on the counter and bite into the bitter green flesh.

The veal is perfect, tender enough to cut with a fork and crispy on the outside. Asparagus was a serious treat when I was growing up, something we ate only at Easter, and I can still remember my aunt scolding me one year for cutting all the tips off and leaving a large serving plate of nothing but stalks. The idea of repeating the trick is tempting, but I content myself instead with slicing my artichokes and pairing them off with what's left of my veal while I listen to Pierangelo talking about his daughters.

Angelina is at Bologna and wants to be a lawyer, although that's probably just because she's dating one, while Graziella, on the other hand, takes after her mother, and is mainly interested in shopping. Frankly, Piero says, he might just as well have handed her a credit card, sent her to Milan, and forgotten about the university altogether.

I have never met either of the twins, but I have seen their pictures in his study. Unidentical, they are still obviously a pair, as lean and fragile as gazelles, with wide eyes, their father's height and their mother's golden hair. Both of them were still living here when I first met Pierangelo—Monika waited to leave until they had gone off to college—but now their rooms are like empty boxes.

Pierangelo gets up, takes my plate, and ruffles my hair. ‘I bought you strawberries,' he says, ‘from Sicily. The first ones. They were in the market at Campo dei Fiori, but I forgot the bag on the train. Senility setting in. How about I take you for
gelato
instead?'

‘Only if I get a double.' As he pretends to consider this, the intercom buzzes.

Piero's building doesn't have anything as vulgar as keys. Instead, all of the doors are controlled by security numbers that you punch into little pads. I stand up and take the dishes from him as he goes to the door. A moment later I hear another urgent buzz.

‘
Pronto.
' Pierangelo releases the locks, and just for a second I am absolutely convinced it's Monika, that she's standing down in the street, has come to tell him she's changed her mind, grown tried of her toy boy, and still loves him. Wants him back. But I'm wrong. I didn't hear what was said through the intercom, but I know from the sound of his voice, which has become flat and quick, that whatever this is, it has to do with work.

Our visitor turns out to be a motorcycle courier. As I come into the room, he's already on his way back into the open elevator in the vestibule.

‘Important?'

Pierangelo shrugs, studying the envelope he's just been handed. ‘Stuff on a story they want me to check before tomorrow.'

‘I'll get my jacket.'

He nods, OK, but he's concentrating on the envelope, not me, and as I walk past he spills the contents out onto the dining-room table. Piero runs his hand across the pages. On top is a blow-up of the photo I studied last night, a grainy eight-by-ten of the girl they found by the river.

‘Are you going to write about her?'

Pierangelo shrugs and licks his ice-cream cone as we wander across Piazza della Signoria. The rain didn't materialize, just a drizzle which has left the paving stones slick and bright. Rising from the middle of his fountain, Neptune glows in the floodlights, and the bronze circle marking the spot where Savonarola burnt is surrounded by tiny puddles that shine like fragments of a broken mirror.

‘We're thinking about a piece. More on the university, than the girl specifically. Profile of students today, that sort of thing.'

‘She was a student?' I try to keep my voice nonchalant, as though this doesn't really interest me, but I can't help feeling that somehow Pierangelo knows, that he's magically gotten inside my brain, and even as we walk here he can see me folding last night's newspaper into my bag and, later, ogling the contents of the manila envelope I keep hidden in my bottom drawer like porn.

‘Yup,' he says eventually, ‘in her final year at the university. She was pretty well known. Some kind of activist.'

‘And does she have a name?'

Piero knows this is a pet peeve of mine, the fact that the dead, and even the victims of crimes who manage to survive, are usually referred to as objects. In most of the pieces I've collected, for instance, Ty is called simply ‘her dead husband' and I'm usually ‘the woman who was attacked', as if any other identity we might have had became irrelevant the second Karel Indrizzio got out his knife.

‘Sorry. Ginevra Montelleone. Twenty-one years old. From Impruneta.' It's a village on the outskirts of the city, known mainly for producing huge pieces of pottery, urns so big you could hide in them, outsize copies of the Venus de Milo, that sort of thing.

‘I'm just not sure what the story is here,' he adds. ‘Or even, really, if there is one. You know, if it's bigger than she fell off the bridge, or jumped, or whatever.' He takes a lick of his cone, his tongue as fast and agile as a cat's. ‘So she killed herself.' He shrugs. ‘You know how college students are.'

He smiles as if we're sharing a joke, the full, sensuous curves of his lips at odds with his tone of voice, and I start to reply that, no, I don't. At least, not if he's suggesting that jumping off bridges is some sort of adolescent rite of passage, something that maybe Angelina or Graziella might do, when they get sick of dating lawyers and shopping. But then I stop. I don't feel like arguing and, besides, I know it isn't fair. I know I'm hearing the newspaper editor, not the lover, or the father. A cold gust of wind comes up and riffles my hair, blowing it into the top of my ice cream.

‘
Bella
!' Pierangelo picks the strands that are plastered in
frutta de bosco
out of the cone with his free hand. ‘Very good,' he says, and hands me a napkin. ‘Almost matches your other stripes!'