The Faces of Angels (28 page)

Billy wanders towards the top of the walls that border the Boboli. We're eye to eye with the garden's treetops up here, so close that we could lean over the waist-high balustrade and touch the new feathery leaves. Birds flit back and forth in the branches as Billy scents along the edges of the ramparts like a lazy hound. She nudges little piles of gravel with the toes of her All Stars and peers over into the gardens below. The sun has come out, and the urgency that propelled her up here seems to have slipped away. She bends to talk to a stray cat, and I dawdle.

There's a dreamy quality to this place despite the surreal piles of metal and glass dotted across the ragged lawns and gravel paths. A woozy sense of timelessness seems to come from the villa itself, which, in true Renaissance style, is a perfect cube of stucco. Deep porticos run the length of it, front and back, making it Janus-faced, and when I climb the shallow steps and stand in the central arch I feel as if I'm hovering above time itself.

Looking one way, I see the plain of red roofs, the Duomo and the mountains. In the other, there're the green waves of the olive groves and the striped façade of San Miniato. Below the walls, wild orchids are pinpricks of purple in the long grass, and far away, on the last hill, the sun hits a splash of pink stucco, which must be the villa I peered at through its gates, above the bumblebee houses. The fluorescent bars we saw last night have been turned off for the day, but neon words preaching the meaning of art, oddly enough in English, have been installed around the inside of the portico. Already some of the letters have shorted out. ‘Art is the co text of our li es', they read. ‘All tim passes.'

I look for Billy to point this out, but she's vanished. At first, I think she must have just disappeared behind one of the wretched sculptures, but after I watch for a few seconds, there's still no sign of her.

From where I'm standing, I can see virtually the whole of the ramparts, and suddenly I feel sick. Pierangelo said that the reopening of this site was controversial, not least because not all the walls are safe. The drop over them is a good thirty feet. Some of the city officials were afraid of getting sued.

I walk faster than I mean to down the steps, and almost trip. The cat Billy was patting scuttles across the gravel and disappears under a scraggly hedge of lavender.

‘Bill?' I feel my palms start to sweat. ‘Billy?' Some of the Japanese tourists turn to look at me, but by this time I'm trotting towards the walls that edge the Boboli.

‘Billy!' I call again. By now I can hear my own personal nightmare, the Santa voice singing in my head.

‘Billy!' I jump over a solidified chain curled like a snake, bang into a sign explaining who made it and why, and hear a burst of laughter. The tops of the trees in the Boboli shimmer and sway in front of me, and all I can think is that she must have climbed over the wall, or fallen and somehow survived.

‘Billy?' I call again, and this time she answers.

The laughter's close, and when I spin round I see a shaft of steps sinking into the overgrown lawn, leading down to nowhere. Billy is standing at the bottom laughing up at me. ‘Avon calling,' she says.

About ten minutes later, the guard throws us out. We weren't supposed to go down there. It turns out Billy moved a sign that said so, and he's mad. She curtsies to him when he calls us ‘stupid Americans' and takes my arm going back down the tunnel under the ramparts.

‘The Medici built it,' she explains. ‘There's a door at the bottom so they could escape through the Boboli up into the fort if the going ever got ugly. I guess there's a tunnel too, somewhere. I found it in a thing on the Pitti. Anyways, you're the architect, I thought you'd like it.'

‘I thought you'd fallen over the wall, I really did.' It's not like me to get so worked up, and I'm annoyed with her because of it.

Billy squeezes my arm. ‘Don't be grumpy,' she says. ‘I'm too smart for that sort of thing. And besides, I can fly.'

‘Oh yeah?'

‘Yeah. I have to. It's part of the job description.'

‘What job is that?'

‘Oh didn't you know?' Billy asks as we come out of the tunnel and into the sunlight. ‘I'm your guardian angel.'

T
HE NEXT DAY
is the beginning of the city's Easter festivities, and it starts out badly when the guardian angel wakes up in a very cranky mood. She doesn't tell me why, exactly, but she had dinner last night with Kirk and that, I suspect, has something to do with it. She comes with me to the shop when I go to buy our morning pastries, and when she drops her purse and spills her change all over the floor, she swears so violently that the signora stops talking and crosses herself and Marcello turns as red as his apron. I try to help her pick up the coins, but she bats my hand away. When I ask what's wrong, she only mutters that ‘men always want too much.'

Back in the apartment, I notice that Marcello has given me six
croissants con marmalata
again, instead of the four I paid for, but even this doesn't cheer Billy up. She just ‘humphs' and stomps off into her room. I figure she'll tell me what the real problem is when she feels like it, so I make coffee, empty the pastries onto a plate, and shove the dirty dishes and ashtray aside so I can spread the newspaper over the whole kitchen table.

‘Who's that?' About a half-hour later, Billy comes in and peers over my shoulder at a picture of D'Erreti opening some kind of clinic out near the airport. ‘Oh,' she says as she studies the photo, ‘the hip-church cardinal. Is it true he dresses up in jeans and hangs out so he can parlay with the youth?'

‘I don't know. Is it?'

‘I guess,' she says. ‘That's what I heard anyways. Celibate, my ass,' she adds. ‘Just look at him, he's got it written all over his face. Who's the kewpie doll with him?'

I look at the picture closely for the first time, and sure enough the familiar face is hovering like one of those weird little disembodied angels behind D'Erreti's left shoulder.

‘That,' I say, ‘is the one and only Father Rinaldo.'

‘That's him?' Billy leans in for a closer look.

‘In the flesh.' I'm not surprised he's there, since Rinaldo's a big follower of D'Erreti's, but Billy's right, he does look kind of like a kewpie doll, I'd just never noticed it before. He's grinning as the cardinal cuts a ribbon stretched across the door.

Billy raises her eyebrows. ‘That's the one who tried to get you to join God's Children and give up the Rose Petal?'

‘The very same. I'm surprised you don't recognize him,' I add. ‘He's the priest who came here looking for me.'

Billy peers at the picture and shrugs. ‘I didn't have my glasses on,' she says. ‘Anyway, all priests look the same to me. Like pigeons. Or chorus girls. Get 'em in their costumes, it's hard to tell the difference. Listen,' she adds, ‘I'm sorry I was such a bitch earlier. I think maybe I just need some time to myself.' Billy looks at me and laughs. ‘Not you, honey,' she says, ruffling my hair. ‘Kirk. He's driving me crazy. He's so intense sometimes he makes me feel like running a hundred miles. Or doing my old act: the Disappearing Woman.'

‘One of my favourites. You want to hide out here, I won't tell.'

‘I just might do that,' she says. ‘Or, since it's Easter, maybe I'll go away for three days and come back again.'

Billy grins at her little joke and pours herself the rest of the coffee. She grabs a croissant and a shower of crumbs falls across the newspaper.

‘Have you seen Elvis?' she asks, a second later. I shake my head and she puts her cup down and begins to rummage through the kitchen drawers. ‘I can't find him anywhere.'

She pulls out a corkscrew, a wine stopper and a paring knife, and dumps them on the counter. A minute later she bangs the drawer shut. ‘Are you sure you haven't seen him?' she asks again, and I nod, but I'm not thinking about Elvis, I'm reading about the preparations for Easter. There are piazza parties—like the one we're going to in Santo Spirito—across the city tonight, and D'Erreti's booked like a rock star all week, holding court in the run-up to his big Easter performance when he sparks off a lot of fireworks outside the Duomo.

‘If Kirk's kidnapped Elvis, I'll kill him,' Billy announces, and lights her cigarette from the stove, holding her hair up so she doesn't set it on fire.

Around noon, Pierangelo texts me to ask where I will be tonight, and I text back that we are going to the party in Piazza Santo Spirito. It's billed as a cross between a rave-up and a concert, and I have a sudden fit of inclusiveness. Why doesn't he join us? I ask. The fact that he's never met the others is getting sort of silly. He doesn't reply, which annoys me.

I love Piero, but he can be high-handed, and I know he basically considers Americans to be inferior beings, except for me, of course. My irritation with his silence builds through the afternoon, and finally I try him again, this time by voice, and leave a message. I tell him we'll be at the bar from seven o'clock onwards and he'll know me because I'll be the most beautiful woman there.

By this time, Billy is in the shower, and as I hang up I can hear the sound of running water, punctuated by the lyrics from
The Wizard of Oz
. A few seconds later, the door opens and she shouts, ‘Bathroom's all yours!' As if I am at least halfway across the city.

Her mood appears to have rebounded, and she's spent the better part of the last few hours painting her nails and ironing her dress. Then she packed her hair in hot olive oil that she infused with rosemary on top of the stove. Half of it is still sitting in a sludge in the bottom of one of Signora Bardino's fancy little copper pans, and I stir it desultorily as she sticks her head round the door.

‘The rosemary's great,' she says. ‘You should use it. I don't know what it would do to your stripes, though. Might turn 'em green. By the way,' she asks, ‘all that eye of newt and crap'—she is referring to the various potions and soaps from the Farmacia Santa Novella that Pierangelo orders for me—‘does it actually work?'

‘I guess,' I say. Pierangelo insists I use them, and although I like the smell of acacia too, I revolted once over the stuff for my scars, said it was pointless, which made him all ratty, so I gave in. I think he took it as a personal insult. He swears the recipes are ancient Florentine elixirs, and maybe they are. Although, as far as I can tell, most of it's made from distilled weeds. Enormously rare ones, if the price is any indication. ‘I mean,' I add, ‘the stuff costs enough so you feel as if it works.'

‘Ah,' Billy says, ‘illusion and marketing.' I've noticed that she's become increasingly prone to these Zen pronouncements, and I remember Kirk's love of sushi and wonder if it's his influence. ‘It's a gorgeous night,' she adds rather more concretely. ‘So the piazza's going to be packed. We don't want to be late.'

This is a not very veiled warning to me. One of the many odd things about Billy is that she's fanatically punctual. I, on the other hand, am what Mamaw used to call ‘born five minutes behind'.

By the time we leave the apartment, we can hear music. The city lights are trapped under a thick scrim of cloud, and threads of sound, the ripple of a saxophone and the higher whine of a violin, corkscrew into the hazy yellowed darkness. In the street, a crowd is moving towards Santo Spirito. Billy locks the gate and drops her keys down the front of her red dress. She wriggles until they nest somewhere in her cleavage. The dress itself is a recent find, the result of one of her excursions to the markets up behind Santa Croce, and in its boned corset, nipped waist and flared full skirt, Billy looks like a crimson ballerina. She even has red satin shoes to match.

The hum of the crowd grows louder, swelling and gathering like surf. Beams of coloured light shoot into the sky, and suddenly there's a blast of sound and the band starts. All around us people murmur. Some clap, some even cheer. By the time we step into the piazza, it feels as though we're at a carnival.