Secrecy

One morning I found Signora de la Mar at the foot of the stairs, holding a package that was addressed to me. Some idiot had left it outside the back door, she said, and she had almost tripped over it on her way out. As I turned the package in my hands, I thought of the pistachio-coloured ankle-boots I had bought Fiore a month or two before, and how her face had lit up when she put them on.

‘How is Fiore liking her new shoes?’ I asked.

The signora rolled her eyes. ‘She practically sleeps in them.’

I didn’t open the package until I reached the privacy of my workshop. Inside, in a simple wooden box, was a halved pomegranate, the red seeds facing upwards. A thin glass bottle lay next to it. There was no note, no card – nothing to indicate the sender’s identity. To a Jesuit, the pomegranate had a symbolic value, since the seeds were believed to represent the drops of blood Christ shed when he wore the crown of thorns, but in a secular context it alluded to the tension that existed between secrecy and disclosure, and I knew instinctively, as soon as I saw it, that the package had come from the girl in the apothecary. What was in the bottle, though? I removed the stopper. I thought I could smell roses, but there was also a pungent element, something almost fiery, like a type of pepper. On returning to my lodgings that evening, I asked the signora if she could tell me what it was. She put her nose to the bottle, then straightened up. She had no idea. She had never smelled anything like it.

A day or two later, I called at an apothecary located in a shabby arcade on the south side of the Ponte Vecchio. The three men sitting by the window fell silent as I walked in.

‘Beanpole?’ one of them called out.

The woman who ran the place was so short that the top of her head was on a level with the counter. When I put the bottle down in front of her, she had to look round it to see me. I asked her if she’d be kind enough to identify the contents.

‘Is it yours?’ Her eyes were a bleary blue-black, like unwashed plums.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was a gift.’

I sensed the men behind me, craning to catch a glimpse of what I had brought.

The woman removed the stopper and inhaled once or twice. She muttered to herself; a smile drifted across her wrinkled face. She poured a few drops into a spoon, touched a finger to the clear, oily liquid, and tasted it.

‘Who gave it to you?’ she asked.

I hesitated.

‘Was it a woman?’

‘I think so.’

She nodded. ‘I can’t say I’m familiar with this particular recipe, but when I prepare my own concoctions, which are much in demand, especially among men of a certain age –’ she peered over the counter at her three clients, who shifted and chuckled on their chairs like chickens in the presence of a fox – ‘I tend to favour nettle seeds. Musk too, just a pinch. And –’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but what’s it for?’

She knocked the stopper back into the bottle with the heel of her hand. ‘In my opinion, it’s to increase your potency.’

This was so unexpected that I couldn’t, for a moment, think how to respond.

‘You anoint your parts with it,’ she said.

‘My parts,’ I said faintly.

‘Your root. Your yard.’ She paused. ‘Your pego.’

‘All right, Beanpole,’ one of the men said, laughing. ‘I think he’s got the point.’

I pocketed the bottle and made for the door.

‘She likes you, whoever she is,’ the man added as I left the shop.

‘Careful,’ said another.



On a dark February afternoon, I was summoned to the Grand Duke’s winter apartment. The wind was blowing hard again, and as I hurried across the courtyard at the back of the palace I thought I could smell the river, dank and green. I climbed a flight of stairs to the first floor. It was draughty up there as well; the tapestries, though heavy, were shifting on the walls.

When I was ushered into the Grand Duke’s presence, he was standing at the window, hands clasped behind his back. By his feet was a cockerel, a leather strap running from one of its legs to the leg of a nearby chair. Its comb trembled in the shadows like a small red flame.

‘I haven’t seen you at court,’ the Grand Duke said, staring out over the city. ‘At least, not recently.’

I told him I was sorry. I talked about my work, and how I tended to get lost in it.

‘I understand.’ He sighed. ‘I sometimes find the whole business rather tiresome myself.’

Only a few days earlier, while visiting my workshop, Pampolini had launched into a series of scurrilous jokes about the Grand Duke, jokes that referred to his Austrian lips, his sexual proclivities, and so on. Later, though, he had become more serious. In Pampolini’s opinion, Cosimo would have made a superb cardinal, but he didn’t have what it took to rule a duchy. It wasn’t his fault, Pampolini said. When he was growing up, his mother had surrounded him with priests – bigots like Volunnio Bandinelli – who taught him to treat the secular world with disdain.

‘Take a seat,’ the Grand Duke said.

Dipping his hand into the barrel that stood next to the window, he scattered a few bits of grain, which the cockerel fell on with a kind of mechanical ferocity. I was curious to know what it was doing in the room, but couldn’t think how to phrase the question. When I looked at the Grand Duke again, he was studying me with his usual glum expression, which always gave me the feeling I had disappointed him.

‘I’ve just come from the chapel,’ he said.

I waited for him to go on.

‘As a rule I find some comfort there, some consolation, but these days –’ He faltered, then pushed out his lower lip. ‘I’ve been having the most frightful dreams.’

I murmured something vaguely sympathetic.

‘My sleep is broken every night. No, more than broken. Shattered. Demolished. Smashed to smithereens. I’m tired all the time.’ He collapsed into the chair beside me and gave me another long look from beneath his drooping lids. ‘I’ve been dreaming about my wife.’

In one dream, he said, he had been laid out on a catafalque. Though dead, he had been acutely aware of his surroundings. There was a ring of jagged, brown rocks above him, as if he were lying in a grotto in the palace gardens. He could also see some arum lilies and a disc of bright blue sky. Then his wife’s face appeared. ‘At last,’ he heard her murmur. And then again: ‘At last!’

‘The cruelty of that.’ The Grand Duke shuddered.

I didn’t think he expected me to comment. All he asked, it seemed, was that I listen.

‘When I woke,’ he went on, ‘I was drenched in sweat. I had to call for Redi –’

The rooster crowed, making me jump; I had forgotten it was there. It looked at me with one eye, the iris a shiny, tawny colour, like polished teak.

‘When I wake, it’s always the same,’ the Grand Duke said. ‘I have the feeling she’s in the palace, and that she’s planning another attack on me.’ Like the cockerel, he looked at me sidelong. ‘She used to attack me, you see? Physically. Once, she kicked me – right here, on the shin. I’ve still got the scar. Another time, she threw a vase. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but I had to have guards stationed outside my bedchamber – to protect me from my wife!’ He let out an eerie, astonished laugh. ‘Even then, I couldn’t sleep. She was so clever; she could talk her way round any man. Can you imagine what it’s like to fear your own wife? Can you imagine what it’s like to love someone who wants you dead?’ He stood up and moved back to the window. Rain slithered diagonally across the glass. ‘Eventually, of course, I realize she’s no longer here, and that she left for Paris more than fifteen years ago – that she’s gone for ever, in fact – but there’s no relief in that. I just feel alone – more alone than you can possible envisage …’

I joined him at the window. We both stared down into the bleak, wet square.

‘You know what pains me most of all, Zummo? I can’t see her in any of my children. Two sons and a daughter, and none of them has her beauty or her spirit. Ferdinando’s charming, I suppose – at least, he was charming as a boy – but now he seems determined to follow in the footsteps of that bestial, sacrilegious, fornicating brother of mine, Francesco Maria, who has transformed our noble family’s villa in Lappeggi into a den of debauchery and filth of every kind, God forgive him.’

The Grand Duke had delivered the sentence without drawing breath; his face had flushed, and the corners of his mouth were white with spit. I thought it best to remain silent, especially as I had never met his brother.

‘Gian Gastone?’ The Grand Duke shook his head. ‘I see nothing of his mother in him, except for a certain wiliness, perhaps, and the occasional glimmer of intelligence. But he has become a shambling drunk, old before his time. Did you witness his behaviour at the banquet in November?’

I nodded.

‘He’s an embarrassment. I’m thinking of sending him to Germany. Lord knows what they’ll make of him. And then there’s Anna Maria. I adore her, of course, but – well – she’s strange. That mannish laugh, that frizzy hair. Still, at least I’ve managed to find her a husband …’

The cock crowed again.

The Grand Duke sighed, then reached into the barrel and threw the tethered fowl another fistful of grain.

‘No, Marguerite-Louise left precious little of herself behind,’ he said, ‘and I find it selfish of her, if that doesn’t sound too irrational. I almost feel she might have willed her absence in her children. Is that possible, do you think?’

I told him there were those who believed that babies in the womb were as malleable as wax, and could be shaped by the imagination of the mother.

‘Though I’m not sure I go along with that,’ I added.

‘Still, if anyone could do it, she could,’ the Grand Duke said. ‘She tried to kill them, you know – before they were born.’

I stared at him.

‘I only found out later. She took all sorts of abortifacients – everything she could lay her hands on: pennyroyal, squirting cucumber, lozenges of myrrh. She rode her thoroughbreds flat out. She danced all night. She walked up every hill she could find. With hindsight, it was a miracle any of our children survived.

‘And when she left, she left without them. What kind of woman abandons her children? It’s not natural. But perhaps she saw too much of me in them. Perhaps she couldn’t bear to be reminded of her dreaded marriage …’

Once again, I thought of Ornella Camilleri. In Naples, two years after my flight from Siracusa, I had started writing to her. I must have sent a dozen letters, but I only ever received one brief reply. She thanked me for thinking of her, and said she regretted that our friendship had ended. She admitted she hadn’t stood up for me; she hadn’t been strong enough, she said, to swim against the tide. Then came the news I suppose I should have been expecting all along: she was going to marry my brother, Jacopo. I crushed the letter. Dropped it on the floor. She was going to marry Jacopo. I walked out on to my terrace. It was summer. The sea showed as an upright strip of blue between two salt-stained buildings. Further to the east, the dusty slopes of Vesuvius lifted against a hot white morning sky. Behind me, I heard the letter crackle as it began to open out; it hadn’t finished with me yet. Back indoors, I spread it flat on the table. Searching between the lines for traces of what she might once have felt for me, of what she might still feel, I realized she had believed the story that had gone around. Everybody had believed the story. I rested my forehead on her short, cold sentences. That was as close as I would ever get.

Looking up, I saw that the Grand Duke had also retreated into himself, and I decided to take a risk.

‘It seems to me, Your Highness,’ I said, ‘that we’re not unalike, you and I. We’ve not been treated kindly.’

He appeared to wake from a deep slumber. ‘Really, Zummo? You too?’ He gripped my shoulder. ‘I knew it all along, somehow.’

The rain had stopped. A pink light filled the square.

‘I have a proposal,’ the Grand Duke said. ‘Well, actually, it’s more of a request.’

I told him I was at his disposal. He only had to ask.

‘This is highly confidential,’ he said. ‘It must remain between us.’

‘You have my word.’

‘I want you to make a woman.’

‘A woman?’

‘Out of wax.’

I was reminded of the dream I had had on my first night in the city. That long walk through the gardens, the sudden accusation. The mysterious closed hand. I stared at the Grand Duke’s profile, then down at my shoes. Why would he ask such a thing?

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘This isn’t where your talent lies. This is beneath you.’

I tried to keep my face expressionless. Don’t reveal anything. Let him talk.

‘Forgive me,’ he went on, still looking out into the square. ‘I shouldn’t be asking this of you. You’re a great artist. You have enough ideas of your own.’

‘A woman,’ I murmured.

‘Yes.’ Encouraged by the fact that I had spoken, he turned to me. ‘Life-size. Reclining. In her natural –’ His right hand began to caress the air. ‘A kind of Eve. Don’t you see? This is a chance for you to create something of extraordinary beauty.’

I could think of nothing to say. My thoughts had scattered, like sheep startled by a thunderclap.

‘Who knows, you might even find it a challenge. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it – a woman – and yet …’

Stepping away from the window, the Grand Duke began to talk faster, and more persuasively. As an artist, he said, surely it was my duty to push at the boundaries of my talent, even if it involved neglecting what I might think of as my strengths. I should dare to venture into territory I had not imagined. Come face to face with the unknown. He had happened on the kind of argument he had been looking for, one I would find it hard to take issue with, and one that would also, conveniently, free him from any awkwardness or embarrassment. With the lightest of touches, he had managed to transfer all the responsibility and pressure to me – and he knew it. As he moved back towards me, the corners of his mouth curved a little, then hid in the soft pouches of his cheeks. His hand reappeared on my shoulder, more stealthy now.

‘Make her,’ he murmured. ‘You won’t be sorry.’

I told him I would do my best.

As I turned to go, he spoke again. ‘Take all the time you need. But remember –’ And he placed a plump, jewelled finger against his lips.

Not until I was walking down the slope that led away from the palace did it occur to me that I had forgotten to ask about the cockerel.



A few nights later, I left my lodgings and set off towards the river. The temperature had dropped sharply; the cold air scalded my lungs. Crossing the Piazza del Gran Duca, my boots crunched on dozens of irises that had been dumped on the ground, their purple petals frozen, crisp. I came out on to the Lung’Arno. The top of the embankment wall was encased in ice. The river lay beyond, flat and dark and still.

I turned to the west. My thoughts circled back to my conversation with the Grand Duke. My first instinct had been to view his proposal as a test or a trap, and even now that several days had passed I still felt I might have blundered by not saying no. It would have been so easy. The Grand Duke himself had provided me with the perfect excuse. All I had to do was to agree with him: I just don’t think I’m the right person for the job. Or craftier, and less obstructive: It’s not beneath me, Your Highness, so much as beyond me. And then I could have looked for someone who could take the work on in my place. To have disappointed the Grand Duke, though – that would also have had its consequences.

It was a delicate situation.

The Grand Duke hadn’t felt the need either to explain or to justify his request, but, knowing what I knew about his marriage, I thought I understood. He wanted me to provide him with a woman who would not despise him, or torment him, or wish him dead. A woman he could worship with no fear of ridicule or rejection. All the same, the idea teetered on the brink of the illicit – and this from a man who visited six or seven churches a day, a man who, if the gossip was to be believed, spent so many hours in prayer that the prints on his fingertips had worn away … In the end, though, I didn’t think I could refuse. I was in Florence at his personal invitation. He was paying me more than I had ever been paid before. He had even given me a workshop, free of charge. I was in his debt – in every sense. He had talked to me openly, and I had listened. As a result, he was drawing me deeper into his private world. And yet …

While I no longer suspected him of trying to tempt me into activities that were dubious or unlawful, I kept returning to the dream. What had the Grand Duke been holding in his hand? What could he have been holding? I simply could not see the whole of the picture. For that reason, perhaps, I still felt the commission was fraught with danger. If I made this woman for him – this Eve, as he had called her – would I not be putting myself in a vulnerable position? He had emphasized the need for absolute discretion, but what if the whole thing came to light? I knew what I would do if I were him: I’d act the innocent. It was Zummo’s idea. I’m not sure what he was playing at. Trying to corrupt me, I suppose. I should have known. Those Sicilians, they’re not like us. I would be held responsible, and in the current climate, which was so repressive, so quick to judge, I would be lucky to escape with my life.

At the same time, I couldn’t ignore the fizzle of excitement in my belly. The apparent simplicity of the commission was deceptive. To create something that was pure surface. To make it vivid. It was diametrically opposed to the work I usually produced. Not a trace of putrefaction or disease. Only youth and health. Only beauty. My skills would be tested as never before, just as the Grand Duke had suggested.

I kept veering – now this way, now that …

All thought of sleep blown from my head as if by some internal gale, I plunged down into the alleys on the south side of the river and stopped at the first tavern I saw, a dingy place with a boar’s hide nailed to the outside wall, the blunt, bristly head and oddly dainty trotters still attached. I pushed the door open. The place had brown walls and a floor of beaten earth. It was almost empty. I walked up to the bar and ordered wine. I still couldn’t get over the ease and deftness with which the Grand Duke had manipulated me. He was more of a politician than I had taken him for, and I doubted I was the first person to be wrong-footed by his vague, morose demeanour.

‘Zummo?’

I looked round. Sitting at a table in the corner was the Englishman I had met in the palace the previous November.

‘Towne,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I could ask the same of you.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting to see anyone I knew.’

‘Me neither.’

We both laughed.

He invited me to join him.

When I was seated, I asked him how he came to number Cosimo III among his clients. They had met many years ago, he told me, when His Highness was travelling in England. The occasion was a banquet in the Earl of Pembroke’s house in Wilton. Did I know Wilton?

‘I’ve never been to England,’ I said.

‘Well, it’s an exquisite house.’

‘You certainly seem to go to all the right banquets.’

‘One should embrace everything life has to offer,’ he said, ‘don’t you think?’

I smiled and drank.

The Grand Duke wasn’t a typical collector, he went on, but then again he – Jack Towne – wasn’t a typical dealer.

‘He’s a complex man,’ I said. ‘More complex than he appears to be.’

Towne looked straight at me. ‘He’s a fox.’

It suddenly occurred to me that the commission might have been in the Grand Duke’s mind for quite some time. Could that have been the real reason why he had invited me to Florence?

‘Is something wrong?’ Towne asked.

‘No, it’s nothing.’ I glanced over my shoulder. Apart from us, there was nobody in the tavern. ‘When we first met, in the palace, you said all sorts of people shared your taste. How would you define that taste exactly?’

Towne began to talk about the liminality of many of the works he bought and sold. Their meaning shifted, he said, depending on the nature of your passion and the angle of your approach. He offered an example. In a village east of Florence there was a man called Marvuglia, who modelled life-size animals out of clay. I should visit Marvuglia one day, he said, if I could spare the time. He spoke about my plague pieces too, heaping praise on them, but, in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on, he seemed to be including me in a club to which I wouldn’t have said I belonged, and this gave me an unnervingly removed feeling, as if, by virtue of talking to him, I had become somebody else, somebody I didn’t recognize. I didn’t argue the point, though, or even interrupt – not, that is, until he told me that he would very much appreciate the chance to watch me working.

‘No,’ I said.

The word came out louder than I had intended.

‘No?’ He leaned forwards, hands clasped on the table in front of him.

‘I’m sorry.’

I didn’t think I needed to explain that my working methods were a private matter. I was sure he understood the impulse towards secrecy – its attractions, its demands – and, judging by his easy, slightly knowing smile, I was also sure that my response had not surprised him.

Later, as I headed along Via de’ Bardi, my thoughts took an intriguing turn. What I would have to do, I realized, was to build an element of what Towne called ‘liminality’ into the commission. I had to make a piece of work that functioned on at least two levels. How, though?

I walked the streets for hours, nothing concrete in my head, just a possibility, a riddle – a dilemma. All the inns and taverns had long since closed. As I approached the Ponte Rubaconte, I met a man pushing a handcart heaped with ghostly, gleaming blocks. Part of the river had frozen, he told me. Higher up, beyond the Pescaia. He was hoping to sell his load to the ice house in San Frediano. Near the Duomo, I came across two police officers, recognizable by their swords and their grey jackets. They were rousing a man who was slumped against the gates of a palazzo. Sleeping on the street was illegal, they told him. He should go to the Albergo dei Poveri – the Paupers’ Hotel – where he would be given a bed. Not long afterwards, as I passed behind San Lorenzo, I saw a woman leaning against a wall, one hand propped on her hip, a jaunty yellow ribbon in her hair.

‘You look sweet,’ she said, her breath like smoke. ‘Not Jewish, are you?’

A whore could be flogged for sleeping with a Jew. This was one of the Grand Duke’s recent initiatives.

‘I’m Sicilian,’ I said.

‘Cristo santo, I’m not sure which is worse.’

I don’t know whether it was her smile, which was charmingly crooked, or the slight catch in her voice, a kind of huskiness, but I followed her across the street and up a creaky flight of stairs to a small back room with an unmade bed and a brazier of hot coals in the corner.

‘Nice and warm in here,’ she said.

She took off her clothes and lay on the bed, and I could see from the smooth, faintly concave stomach that she was young, no more than seventeen. I leaned down and kissed the mossy darkness of her armpits.

‘No one ever did that before,’ she said.

I drew back. With her arms flung behind her head and a sheet twisting down between her legs, she reminded me of Poussin’s ‘Sleeping Venus’ – she had the same boldness and sensuality – and I decided there and then to reacquaint myself with the Frenchman’s paintings before I started work on the commission.

The young woman asked me, lazily, what I was looking at.

‘You’re giving me ideas,’ I said.

She laughed.

I leaned down again and ran my tongue from her belly-button to her *oris, taking my time to connect the two. Her skin tasted of rose-water, and also of saltpetre, and I was reminded, incongruously, of the Guazzi twins.

‘No one ever did that either,’ she murmured.

‘Maybe you should be paying me.’

‘Cheeky bastard.’

She twisted round and took me in her mouth. Unlike other women I had known, she didn’t hurry. It felt more like an exploration than a rhythm, her lips still, only her tongue moving. She understood how to make the pleasure last, and swallowed everything that came out of me.

‘Aren’t you going to penetrate me?’ she said. ‘I like to be penetrated.’

An hour later, as I walked back to my lodgings, a woman opened a first-floor window and leaned out. I jumped backwards, thinking she was about to empty a chamber pot. She laughed and offered to lower her price, seeing as how she had given me such a shock.

‘You’re too late,’ I said. ‘I’ve already been with someone.’

The woman looked back the way I had come. ‘I hope it wasn’t Cristofana. She’s got every disease under the sun.’

Her cackle followed me as I moved on.

Dawn was a slit of rose in a brown sky. The streets creaked in the cold. I was no closer to solving the conundrum I had set myself, but I felt I had learned something, both from the Englishman and from the whore, and as I climbed into bed I comforted myself by repeating the Grand Duke’s words: Take all the time you need.



At the end of a day’s work, I would often wander in the palace grounds. Sometimes I would pass the modest garden that backed on to the convent of San Giorgio, attracted by the perfume of its many exotic plants. Like the Vasari Corridor, it was reserved for the Grand Duke and his immediate family, and I wasn’t allowed inside. Other times, I would visit the menagerie, where monkeys swung fluidly through the upper reaches of their cages, frowning like old men, and vultures shifted and sulked, their plumage the stiff dull black of widows’ weeds. Crevalcuore, the man who tended the animals, made himself scarce whenever I appeared. Like me, he guarded his privacy fiercely. Or perhaps he was just shy.

One evening in March, I found myself on the Viottolone, a grand sloping avenue lined with laurel trees and cypresses. Halfway down the hill, I turned left, making for the circular maze near the eastern wall. I was thinking about the girl who had waited on me at the banquet. I couldn’t forget how her arm had grazed the back of my hand, igniting that secret place in my left heel. She had chosen not to look at me, it seemed, and yet the atmosphere between us had thickened and crackled, like the air when a thunderstorm is coming. It had been months since I had seen her last, and the interval between the two encounters had been so long that I had begun to think I might have been mistaken. There might be two entirely different girls. If that was the case, though, which one had left the package at the House of Shells? With its blind alleys and its dead ends, the maze seemed to embody my frustration.

The sun dropped behind the trees; light drained from the gardens. I was following a path that led back to the gate on Via Romana when I sensed that I was not alone. I stopped. Looked round. A man stood at the entrance to a covered walkway, his glittering eyes perched on ledges of bone, his complexion sallow, damp-looking. I had the curious impression that he was there because of me. That something in me had summoned him. Brought him forth.

‘Did I scare you?’ His voice was quiet but scratchy, harsh.

My vision darkened and began to pulse, a black flower slowly opening and closing its petals.

‘No,’ I said.

‘You’re lying.’

I stared at the man. He seemed familiar, and I couldn’t work out why.

‘I can smell it on you,’ he said.

That rasping whisper – I had heard it before, on the night of the banquet, when I was hiding on the stairs.

‘I know who you are,’ I said.

It was dusk now, and his face hung like a mask among the leaves, his high square shoulders hunched, the rest of his body invisible. ‘Oh? Who am I, then?’

‘You’re Padre Stufa.’

‘And you are?’

I felt sure he knew exactly who I was, but I told him anyway. His thin-lipped mouth stretched sideways. I thought of Tacitus, and his famous description of the emperor Domitian, who was never to be more feared, apparently, than when he smiled.

‘You’re the artist,’ Stufa said. ‘You make those sculptures.’

He took a step forwards and peered at me as if I were half in shadow. He was wearing a white scapular and a black hooded cloak. The emerald on his left hand hoarded the last of the light.

‘Not that I have much time for that sort of thing,’ he added.

Though his features were gaunt, almost starved, his body was big and hollow-looking. His ribcage would be the size of a barrel.

In the distance one of the Grand Duke’s peacocks screamed.

‘I mean, what can you show me,’ he went on, ‘that I can’t see every day, out on the street?’

‘Maybe I can show you yourself.’

Before he could speak again, I walked away. Perhaps I should have been more diplomatic, but there was an abrasiveness in him that provoked retaliation, and I began to understand why Bassetti had snapped at him on the night of the banquet. Even as I approached the avenue of cypresses and laurels, I could feel his gaze on me, the inner canthus of his eyes unusually sharp and curved, like the knives used in the harvesting of grapes. Only then did I realize that he was the man who had brushed past me, the morning of Bassetti’s visit to the House of Shells.