Alex Preston - In Love and War

‘Hmm,’ Carità has taken Anna’s collage off the wall and is scrutinising it. Esmond can feel Ada’s breath on his cheek. He thinks of Tatters with a stab of sadness. ‘I know the little bastard holing up here. He’s a pathetic little faggot, nothing to worry about.’

Alberti is still standing in front of the triptych. ‘I will make a gift of these paintings to the Reichsmarschall when he arrives,’ he says. ‘To welcome him to Florence.’

‘Fine,’ Carità replies. ‘I’ll have my men bring them down to San Marco today. I’ll take this one for myself now, though,’ he says, tucking the collage beneath his arm.

They stomp back down the stairs. Esmond listens for the sound of the door slamming and then looks out of the window as a motorcycle and sidecar pulls through the front gate. ‘Shit,’ says Ada behind him. Esmond runs down and out to where Tatters is lying, a red patch spreading slowly across his wiry white fur. Esmond kneels down beside the dog’s body, which is still warm, and cradles it in his lap. He begins to cry. For the dog, certainly, but for Alessandro, too. For Oreste Ristori. For his baby. He’s still crying when Ada comes down and takes his head against her and speaks soothingly. He feels the flatness of her stomach, the bony undulations of the ribs above them and lets out another sob.

‘We need to get out of here,’ she says. ‘I radioed down to Maria Luigia at CoRa. Bruno’s coming to take us to Monte Morello. We should go up and pack.’

‘I need to do this, first,’ he says.

Esmond takes the dog’s body down into the garden and lays it beneath the umbrella sculpture, from which the dead fingers of last summer’s vines hang down. He brings up stones from the terrace by the swimming pool and soon he has constructed a small cairn over the body. He walks back up to the house, his eyes now dry, his mouth set in a firm, bloodless line.

He fills his morocco bag with clothes, runs down to the drawing room to grab an armful of books, then back up to the bedroom, where he places the books with his revolver and a bundle of letters in the top of the bag. He and Ada stand staring at the triptych together.

‘I suppose it’s goodbye,’ she says.

He looks at the painting of Christ, the two smaller panels either side. ‘Don’t be so sure,’ he says.

‘But the centrepiece is too big to—?’

‘He can stay,’ he says. ‘Cast his judgement on the Germans. Maybe one of them will catch a glimpse of something that keeps him from the worst.’

When Bruno pulls up half an hour later, they are standing on the gravel driveway with two small bags beside them. In Ada’s arms, she holds the painting of Mary Magdalene. John the Baptist leans back against Esmond.

‘You realise how conspicuous they’ll make us?’ Bruno says from the window of the car.

‘We’re conspicuous already,’ Ada says. She and Esmond sit in the back seat while the paintings jolt and bounce in the front beside Bruno, as they make their way over mule tracks and through vineyards to the hills.

After forty minutes of driving, they begin to climb steeply. Pine trees clamber up the hillside, then gorse bushes and heather. The road takes them under the lip of rocky bluffs, winding along ridges looking down on deep valleys. Finally, after driving through a pine forest so thick it’s like night has been called back, they pull into a clearing, where Elio is standing, waiting for them. The university bus is parked to one side, branches teepeed over it. Nets covered in camouflage material hang over the mouths of three caves inside which Esmond can see figures, the glow of cigarettes.

‘You heard about Alessandro?’ Elio asks as they get out of the car. Esmond nods grimly. ‘What are those?’ Elio points to the paintings which, despite the journey, look sublime as ever. Ada embraces him and soon Antonio and Tosca are out with other assorted deserters and partisans, some of whom Esmond dimly recognises from those first meetings at the Palazzo Vecchio. He reads Alessandro’s death in each face.

They are led into the wide mouth of a cave, where sleeping bags are arranged, each within a neatly marked-out area, most with boots and guns and small personal items beside them. They go deeper inside and Elio gestures to a small alcove formed by a group of glittering stalactites that drip down from the roof.

‘We thought you might like this spot. It’s darker, of course, but there’s a little more privacy. Your bed-rolls and sleeping bags are there, candles. I hope it’s all to your liking. I know it’s not L’Ombrellino, but we try.’

‘It’s fine,’ Ada says, putting down her bag on the rock floor of the cave. They bring the paintings inside, leaning them against a wall which still finds some daylight from the mouth. The two figures seem lost without their Lord. Esmond takes Ada in his arms and they look at the saints.

‘They’re alone now.’

‘They have each other.’

‘I loved being with you,’ Esmond says. ‘Up there at the villa.’

‘I loved it too.’ She pauses. ‘But this feels real. We can get things done here. After Alessandro, we need to.’ He can feel the hardness of the Beretta, which Bruno had given her the night they’d killed Gobbi and which she’s kept in her pocket ever since, digging into his thigh. That night, Esmond is woken by the skinny howling of mountain wolves. He reaches out for Ada’s hand in the damp darkness, squeezing it tightly.

They go after Carità in the middle of March. The spring of ’44 is a warm one and the partisans in the hills are buoyed by the mild weather, by the news coming out of Monte Cassino, where the third battle has just ended and the Allies at last scent victory. In the north, there is a wave of crippling strikes in the factories, further rumours of a deterioration in Mussolini’s mental state after, under pressure from Pavolini, he is forced to execute his son-in-law Ciano.

Elio and Bruno have drawn it all up in great detail. There have been rehearsals in the clearing in front of the cave. There are fallback plans taking in any number of contingencies, a broad range of less and less likely outcomes. Each of them is given a card with typed instructions as to where they must be, what they must do as the assassination unfolds.

It is eleven in the morning. Esmond, his blond hair under a beret, is sitting at the Caffè Gilli beside a round-topped laurel bush. He sips at his second orzo espresso of the morning and tries to remember not the taste but the buzz, the lift he used to feel when drinking real coffee. He can see Tosca’s blonde head in the shadows of the triumphal arch. She is standing back from the road, her bag at her feet, looking young and carefree and entirely uninterested in the workers hurrying past, the German soldiers who glance at her, the Blackshirts who wolf-whistle. In the other direction, down towards the via Calimala, Antonio leans back against a wall with a copy of the Corriere della Sera held up to his face.

There are businessmen at the tables around Esmond, mostly Italian, their conversations carried out in low, confidential voices. He sips, looking at his watch and then along to the Paszkowski next door, where German soldiers eat pastries with their coffee, the golden flakes lifted skywards by the breeze that drifts up from the Arno. An SS Hauptsturmführer leafs through a copy of Der Schwarze Korps, licking his finger to turn the page. Waiters come and go, nodding their heads and muttering a half-insolent Danke when one of the Germans settles his bill.

Ada comes to sit at Esmond’s table, her hair tucked up under a cloche hat. ‘Hello,’ she smiles thinly at him, her voice cool and businesslike. She puts her purse on the table and from it draws out a make-up compact, dabbing a thin layer of powder under her eyes. ‘He’s coming,’ she says, without looking up.