Authors: Alex Preston
He is aware of a sound creeping into his dreams. It is the darkest heart of the night, so hot he’d left the windows and shutters open. He drags himself slowly from sleep and opens his eyes, searching the darkness until he recognises the trilling of the telephone in the library, echoing up the stone steps and into the apartment. He slips from bed, sticky and fuzzy-headed, and pads down the corridor. Gerald is standing in the doorway of his room.
‘What time is it?’ he asks, yawning.
‘Search me. Two?’
Fiamma joins them in her nightdress. It seems to Esmond that every door and window in the house has been left ajar, all of the fans turning, but there is still no air. They walk down the steps and enter the library together, the old-fashioned stick phone shrieking on a desk beside the window. Gerald crosses to pick it up.
‘Hullo. Yes. Right. Bugger. We’ll be over shortly.’
He hangs up and pinches his fingers at his forehead.
‘Bugger,’ he says.
‘What is it?’ Fiamma asks.
‘No time,’ he says, striding back towards the doorway. ‘It’s Norman, he needs us. Meet in the courtyard in five minutes.’
Wearing shorts and a linen shirt, Esmond stands in the moonlight watching moths as big as hummingbirds circle the lit windows of the apartment. Occasionally a bat swoops down to snatch one from the air. Gerald and Fiamma come down together.
‘We need a car. Norman’s in a fix and we must get him out of Florence. We could head up to L’Ombrellino and borrow George’s but it’s a hell of a way.’
Esmond pats his pocket.
‘I’ve got the keys to the church. Father Bailey keeps his Alfa in the garage at the back. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. If it’s an emergency, I mean.’
They cross the Ponte Santa Trinità, then down the via Maggio, past the sleeping birdcages and quietly through the wicket gate of the church, tiptoeing along a passageway and into the garage. The room is full of half-assembled engines, bicycles without wheels, a pony trap resting on its haunches. Esmond slides open the doors which give onto the Piazza Santo Spirito. The square is empty, cardboard boxes by the roadside for the dustbin men, a small pyramid of wine bottles leaking onto the earth outside a bar.
The key is in the ignition. Esmond sits beside Gerald in the front while Fiamma squeezes into the seats at the back. The engine starts with a roar that makes them all jump.
‘I haven’t driven in a while,’ Gerald shouts over the noise.
As they edge out into the square, Esmond looks back to see that a light has come on in the apartments next to the church. He thinks he sees Bailey outlined in the window, looking at them. They pull through the square and through the silent streets of the Oltrarno, along the south side of the river. Moonlight has turned the city to bone. Finally, they drive across the cobbles of the Ponte alle Grazie and pull up outside Davis & Orioli.
Douglas steps from the shadows of the alleyway beside the shop. He is wearing a lady’s straw sunhat and a neckerchief pulled up over his face like an outlaw. He carries a small pigskin travelling case and looks nervously up and down the road. The tremors that Esmond had seen outside Santa Maria Novella now cause the old man to quiver like a mystic, surprised by the truthfulness of his vision. Esmond climbs over to sit alongside Fiamma while Douglas sinks down beside Gerald in front.
‘Where do we go?’ Gerald asks.
‘Pisa,’ Douglas says, pulling the neckerchief down around his neck and clamping the hat on his head with one hand. ‘One of Pino’s friends will put me up for a few nights. Then they’ll bung me in the back of a lorry to Menton. It’s all part of the game, isn’t it? What I always say. Everything’s interesting. All right!’
Gerald turns the car back towards the bridge, through the Oltrarno and past the basilica of San Frediano. Soon they are on the viale Etruria and moving at a smart pace through dark hills, shadow-clad cypresses rising and falling beside them with the swell and sink of the land. Douglas turns round to speak to Esmond, the red coal of a Toscano glowing at his lips.
‘Filly you spotted me with earlier,’ he says, raising his voice over the wind. ‘Turns out her father is a
Centurione
in the MVSN. Someone saw us walking back from our gelato.’ He rolls his eyes at Esmond. ‘Knew I shouldn’t have let her out of the house.’
Fiamma’s hair is streaming out behind her and Esmond grows cold as they hit fifty miles per hour on the empty road. There is a tartan rug on the floor and he pulls it over their laps and puts his arm around her shoulders. She nestles her head in the crook of his neck and closes her eyes.
‘Probably a good thing,’ Douglas says, throwing his cigarillo into the night and forcing the hat down with both hands. ‘Needed to get moving. Can’t stop in one place for too long.
Florence is a drag without Pino. I haven’t been able to write for weeks.’ He prods at the bag in his lap. ‘Latest book. Cultural history of Paphian love. Start off with the Greeks. Theognis, Solon, Anacreon, Alcaeus, Ibycus. Know any of them?’ He doesn’t seem to expect a reply. ‘Magnificent stuff. Meeting the girl caused a blockage. Good to be shot of her.’
It is as they are passing the lights of Empoli to the north that Esmond is first aware of the cars behind them. There is, before anything, a sense that they are being followed. Then, coming up very fast out of the darkness, two sets of headlights. Soon their engines are audible even over the growl of the Alfa and the rush of air. They are moving up into hill country around San Miniato. The car shudders as they accelerate up a long, steep incline. Fiamma looks back, her hand held to her eyes as if shading them against sunlight.
‘The cars,’ she says.
‘I’ve seen them,’ Gerald replies, putting his foot down. ‘Bugger.’
They have reached the crest of the hill and are now coasting into the valley. For the moment the cars are out of sight and Esmond hugs Fiamma to him. He can see that Douglas is shuddering in the front seat, his arms on the dashboard, his head on his arms.
‘Pull yourself together, Norman,’ Gerald says. ‘I’ll need you to navigate once we hit Pisa.’
The Alfa seems to skim the surface of the road, riding the trail of moonlight before them. Gerald drives with one hand, his elbow on the windowsill, a cigarette between his lips. Fiamma is sleeping, breathing softly into the hollow of his neck.
‘I’m sorry, you chaps,’ Douglas says quietly, barely audible to Esmond. ‘It seems I can’t help myself. You see I still think of myself as your age, hale and hot-blooded. Shocks me to look in the mirror sometimes. Expect to see a strapping young bounder
and instead––’ He turns to Esmond with grey eyes, swinging jowls. ‘I’d have liked to die in Italy, but France won’t be so bad.’ He begins to sing. ‘
It’ll all be the same in a hundred years.
’
Villages appear and vanish, dark and dreamlike. Douglas smokes constantly, throwing the stubs of his Toscanos out into the air. Esmond leans back and looks at the moon, remembers floating in the pool at Emmanuel with Philip. He takes a deep breath and feels Fiamma stirring against him. ‘Where are we?’ she asks sleepily.
The engine begins to sputter around Pontedera. At first a wheeze, then a definite cough. There has been no sign of the pursuing cars for half an hour or so, and they are approaching the turn-off for Pisa. Now the Alfa begins to bark and a cloud of blue smoke plumes out behind them.
‘What’s wrong?’ Esmond asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Gerald says. ‘We have a quarter tank of petrol, so it can’t be that.’ There is a thud from the engine and the car shudders. Gerald slows and pulls over. ‘I know nothing about cars,’ he says, getting out and walking round to open the bonnet. ‘Bugger. It’s hot.’
After a few minutes, a throb of engines is audible in the distance. Esmond looks back towards Florence and sees the first faint brightening of the horizon at the end of a long stretch of road. It is quarter to five by his watch. He gets out and goes to stand at the open bonnet of the car. Fine steam is rising from the engine. Gerald pulls his hand inside the sleeve of his jacket to unfasten the radiator cap.
‘It’s the water, I think,’ says Gerald. ‘Look in there.’
Esmond looks. The tank is empty. The roar of engines is closer and, looking back down, he can make out that the cars are Fiats, in procession, coming out of the sky to the east.
‘Let me see if there’s anything in the back.’
He opens the boot and finds only a small can of petrol, a few maps. ‘Nothing,’ he says. Douglas is staring backwards, down the road to where the Fiats are, closer now, their rumble building with each turn. ‘Piss in it,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Piss in the tank. Always works. Had a Siddeley Special Six back in Blighty. Was forever blowing up. Piss, I tell you.’
‘Are you sure?’ Gerald asks, looking at Esmond. He shrugs and closes the boot. They stand, side by side, cocks out, watching the Fiats approach. Esmond whistles, trying to drown out the sound of the engines. Gerald is the first to send down a heavy stream onto the hot metal, splashing and fizzing around the mouth of the radiator tank. Esmond follows shortly after. Fiamma has her hand to her mouth. Douglas is watching around the side of the raised bonnet. They finish, shake and leap inside the car. Gerald turns the key in the ignition.
The Fiats have pulled abreast of one another and are perhaps two hundred yards away. Blackshirts lean from the windows of each car and Esmond can see revolvers in their hands; one of them carries a shotgun that he waves from side to side like a baton. The Alfa’s engine turns over, fails. The sun has begun to rise behind them as the cars close in. The engine turns over again and fires a plume from the exhaust. Gerald stamps on the accelerator and, with a spray of pebbles, they pull away.
The Fiats are yards behind them. The Alfa is heading up a slope towards a coppice, harried by the two cars. The sun appears above the dark mass of the Sienese Clavey and light floods the plain, pouring down like water from the peaks. There is a sound like a sharp intake of breath followed by a high whistle. Esmond looks back at the cars and, as he does, there is another whistle and the front windscreen of the Alfa shatters, sending shards of glass splintering over hands and faces. He can see that Douglas
is badly cut: a wide gash has opened above one eye, his cheeks flecked with blood. The old man sinks down, trying to curl into the footwell, shivering and sobbing.
Bullets ping off the bodywork of the car, fizz overhead, explode in the tarmac on the road beside them. The Blackshirts shout and one of the cars pulls alongside the Alfa. Esmond looks over and sees Carità at the wheel, a snub pistol in one hand, the white tuft in his quiff fluttering in the wind. He grins eagerly and steers the Fiat into the side of the Alfa. There is a crunch of bent metal, a shudder as the two cars scour and then the Alfa lurches on. Carità is standing up in his seat, steering with one hand and popping at them with his Beretta. Esmond puts his arm around Fiamma and hauls her down into the cramped space behind the front seats, pulling the tartan rug across their backs. Fiamma is moaning quietly, her cheek pressed against his in the rumbling darkness, her breath in quick pants.
‘Fascist bastards,’ she mumbles.
They are down there for what seems like hours. Esmond thinks of trips to London with his parents as a child, when Anna and he would curl up in the back seat of the car as their father drove the Lagonda home to Aston. He remembers the feeling of weightlessness, the sense of flying through the night as they snuggled under blankets, his sister’s head on his shoulder. And then, pulling into the gravel of the house’s turning circle, he would pretend to be asleep so that his father would have to carry him from the car, hauling him over his shoulder like a fireman and gripping him with his good arm until he laid him out on the bed, helped him from his clothes and smoothed his hair.
The car slows. He hears Gerald and Norman speaking and lifts himself carefully onto the seat. They are coming into the outskirts of Pisa. There are other cars on the street, a bus taking workers to their offices, but no sign of the Fiats. The car is
covered in scratches and pocks. A few pieces of glass hang tremblingly from the metal frame of the windscreen. Gerald and Douglas are ashen, their hair clumped with blood, their mouths and teeth stained with it.
‘Turn here,’ Douglas says. ‘Now there. On the left.’
They make their way through a gateway into the courtyard of a long house. Gerald brings the car to a halt and turns off the engine. There is a mulberry tree in the centre of the yard with a car parked beneath it. Gerald begins to laugh.
‘Christ. I mean, Norman, bugger. I thought we were goners. What in God’s name are we going to tell the priest about his car?’
Douglas begins to laugh, too, and Esmond joins him, reaching down to draw back the blanket from where Fiamma is crouched in a terrified huddle on the floor, her face pressed into Gerald’s seat.
‘You can come out now,’ he says. ‘We’re safe. We’re all safe.’
He leans down to help her, reaching behind her head. He feels wetness.
‘Fiamma?’ he says, with a sudden lurch in his chest. ‘Fiamma?’ He turns her over and sees the whiteness of her face, the dark red, almost black pool formed beneath her. Gerald has turned and looks down at the girl now stretched out on the seat as Esmond searches her neck for a pulse.
‘What do we do?’ Esmond asks, looking first at Gerald and then at Douglas. She is not breathing, there is no heartbeat, just a small hole in the nape of her neck through which blood is seeping in a slow trickle. Esmond reaches round and puts his finger into the hole, but there is little blood left, and he prods through to tendons, wet gristle. His mind feels as if it has lost its surface, its ability to grasp hold of the car, the dusty courtyard, Douglas or Gerald. It is all depths, horror, and he lowers himself down to lie against her frail, sunken body.
Douglas turns to get out of the car.
‘I can’t have anything to do with this,’ he says. ‘After everything else. They’d kill me.’ He backs away towards the house, leaving the boys with the body of their friend. They hear a door slam, the sound of conversation. Douglas comes out of the house followed by a small man with yellowed hair and thick-rimmed spectacles. They get into a Topolino parked underneath the mulberry tree. Neither of them looks at the Alfa or its contents as they pass.