Walking home, I went over some of what she had told me in the weeks since I had met her. Mimmo’s friendship, Vespi’s courtship – both had foundered, come to nothing. These weren’t stories she had dredged up at random. No, they illustrated something fundamental, something she believed – or feared – might be true. How had she put it? Love lost out – as always … Had she turned to me, hoping that I would prove her wrong? Had I squandered the only opportunity I would ever be given?
Back in my lodgings, I was overtaken by a gloom such as I hadn’t known since the early days in Naples, when I received that letter from Ornella. After everything she had said, how could she possibly have fallen for Jacopo? And yet, at the same time, I knew how insistent and bloody-minded he could be. I sat down on my bed. A sinister new reading of the events had just occurred to me. Since I had worked closely with Ornella’s father, he would have been implicated in the charges brought against me. What if Jacopo had cast the Maltese surgeon in the role of my accomplice, and had then blackmailed him? Give me your daughter’s hand in marriage or I’ll ruin you. Was that how the wedding had come about? A sourness around my heart, I lay on my side and sank into a troubled sleep.
I was woken some time later by a constant banging. The wind had got up, and a loose shutter on the building opposite was being blown repeatedly against a wall. I could stay in my room no longer. Thinking I might pay another visit to the dingy tavern in San Frediano, I threw on my coat and hurried downstairs.
As I stepped out on to Via del Corno, a boy seemed to detach himself from the wall.
‘Signore?’
The boy’s face was pale and dogged, but he looked respectable enough, in a serge jacket and a pair of sturdy leather shoes.
‘Dr Pampolini sent me,’ he said. ‘He wants to see you.’
‘Now?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s urgent.’ His hands twitched. ‘It’s very urgent.’
I looked past him, towards the river. There was no one around, only the clammy, windswept canyon of the street, and the scuttle of leaves and vermin.
‘Why didn’t you try the door?’ I said.
‘I was about to.’ He sensed my disbelief. ‘I was. Honest.’
If somebody was dispatched to put an end to me, this, surely, was how it would feel – an innocent face, a few words intended to reassure, a short walk in the dark …
‘Don’t you recognize me, sir?’ The boy went and stood on the street corner, beneath a lit image of the Virgin. ‘I work with Dr Pampolini. My name’s Earhole.’ He shot me a rueful grin. ‘That’s what he calls me, anyway.’
I saw the livid, ragged fringe of skin where his right ear used to be. Earhole. I nodded slowly.
‘I remember.’
My sudden plunge into sleep had muddled me; I felt only loosely connected to my surroundings.
‘Please hurry,’ the boy said. ‘The doctor said it couldn’t wait.’
He led me north, through streets that were pinched between high walls. It was a short cut to the hospital, he told me.
I asked him how old he was.
‘My mother thinks I’m probably about twelve,’ he said.
Though he wasn’t tall, he walked with long strides, his upper body turning constantly to check that I was keeping up.
‘She’s not entirely sure,’ he said. ‘She drinks, you see.’
We passed a candle factory, the stench of boiling cow fat left over from the day. To the west, I glimpsed the Duomo, which hung above the rooftops like an upended cauldron. There was a distant, shimmery peal of bells, but the sound was blown to pieces by a gust of wind.
The boy leaned forwards from the waist, as if straining at a leash. ‘I hope Dr Pampolini isn’t angry. I said I’d –’
A shout stopped his sentence short, and dark shapes sprang from beneath an archway. My knife was out before I knew it. I lunged, and felt the blade sink in. There was a kind of yelp. My hand jarred; I must have hit a bone. The nearest shadow crumpled. The others fled.
I knelt on my assailant’s chest and held my knife to his throat. An awful reek lifted off him. Old sweat, raw garlic. Dried sperm. He looked to be a man of about thirty, with more hair on his cheeks than on his head.
‘Who are you?’ I bent down, into the smell, but kept my blade against his gullet. ‘Who sent you?’
His head moved from side to side, as if he were trying to lull himself to sleep. What he was doing didn’t seem to relate to my questions, but to some internal matter that he found far weightier and more pressing. The wind dropped. I thought I heard the blood leak out of him.
‘Did you hear me? Who sent you?’
‘I’m hungry …’ The man’s cracked lips drew back on his teeth.
‘He’s dying,’ the boy said.
I glanced over my shoulder. ‘What do you know about this?’
His pale face hung before me. He had a pained expression. ‘It can happen to anyone, being set upon. This isn’t –’
‘You’re not answering my question.’
‘I thought you trusted me.’ He peered off down the street. ‘I thought we were getting on –’
‘Dio ladro!’ I shouted. ‘This isn’t about getting on.’
He flinched.
I turned back to the stinking javel who lay beneath me and pushed the point of my knife into the thin skin below his ear. His teeth showed like bits of stained mosaic. He began to mutter. Something about the water. A black cloak. Then the word naked. None of it made any sense.
‘I do trust you, Earhole,’ I said. ‘I have no choice but to trust you.’
‘Those sentences mean two different things.’
‘Was it Pampolini who taught you to argue every single f*cking point?’ I looked round at him again. His arms were dangling by his sides, his hands had fallen still. ‘All right. I trust you. Happy now?’
He nodded, but only after seeming to consider my words, and not without a certain reluctance.
I tilted my face to the brown sky, and the wind lifted again, freighted with drizzle. ‘Gesù maiale, it was me who was attacked.’
‘They would have killed me too, just for the symmetry of it.’ Once again, his hands shook in the air, as if they were wet and he was drying them. ‘You were quick with that knife, though. I don’t think they’ll be back.’
I looked down at the piece of steel, which was dark with blood, its sickly aroma more metallic than the knife itself. I wiped the blade clean on the stranger’s tunic, then stood up.
‘All the same,’ I said, ‘I think it might be best if we took the less deserted streets.’