Secrecy Read Free Page B

‘I can tell him you’re busy if you like.’
    ‘Perhaps I’d better see what it’s about.’
    I followed her down to the parlour.
    Standing with his back to the window was a man in opulent dark robes. He was heavily built, with a greying moustache. I put his age at about sixty.
    ‘The House of Shells,’ he said. ‘It’s some years since I was here.’ His voice was rich and succulent, a voice that was used to being listened to. ‘You know the story, I take it?’
    I shook my head.
    The signora’s husband came from Salamanca, he said, which was famous for pies filled with scallops. There was a house in the city that was tiled with scallop shells, apparently, and it had been the Spaniard’s dream to recreate the house in Florence. The winters were too wet, though, and the shells kept coming loose. Or else people would steal them. Little by little, he lost his strength, his sense of purpose.
    ‘And it was shellfish, oddly, that killed him in the end.’ He fingered his moustache. ‘You’re from Sicily, aren’t you?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘How long since you were there?’
    ‘Sixteen years.’
    ‘You don’t miss it?’
    ‘I miss it, yes.’ Why did his gentle probing unnerve me so? He was probably just being polite. ‘And you, sir? Where are you from?’
    ‘You don’t know who I am?’
    ‘You haven’t told me.’
    Though my visitor remained quite motionless, he appeared, in that moment, to writhe or undulate, reminding me of something I had seen in the market in Palermo once – a snake rising, charmed, out of a basket. It only lasted a second. I pinched my eyes.
    ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I’m the Grand Duke’s private secretary . My name is Apollonio Bassetti.’ He rolled the syllables on his tongue like pieces of soft fruit. ‘His Highness has been asking for you.’
    I watched Bassetti carefully. He seemed to be taking an interest in the dust that had gathered at the edges of the room.
    ‘So far, though,’ he said, ‘you have failed to present yourself.’
    I had known full well that I was expected at the palace, and yet, for reasons I could not explain, I had found myself delaying the moment. I had been sleeping late, and walking the streets, sometimes with Fiore, sometimes on my own. I had spent evenings in the tavern, drinking the local wine – red by all accounts, though it had blackened my lips as if poured straight from an inkwell. While there, I had fallen into conversation with men who earned their living in any number of strange and desperate ways. One sold unguents door-to-door and occasionally wrestled bears. His name was Quilichini. Another – Belbo – oversaw the execution of criminals on a piece of waste ground beyond the eastern gate. A third collected dead animals and dumped them in a boneyard called Sardigna.
    ‘I was settling in,’ I said.
    ‘You were settling in …’
    I didn’t think Bassetti was being sarcastic or disparaging. If he had repeated my words, it was in the hope of understanding them.
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    ‘His Highness will see you at noon tomorrow.’ He moved past me, out of the room. Then, by the front entrance, he swung round, one hand foraging in the folds of his robes. ‘I almost forgot.’ He produced a small glass jar with a cork stopper and held it up to the light as if it were a jewel. ‘Something to welcome you to Florence. A local speciality.’
    I thanked him.
    As I examined the jar, which contained a root or tuber that was round and mud-coloured, about the size of an apricot, I was aware of a movement to my right, in the gloom at the far end of the hall. A man came down the stairs, huge but silent, passing me as if I were not there, and though I didn’t see his face properly I registered a certain gauntness, and a mouth that was like a razor-cut – that still, shocked moment before the blood wells up into the wound. Bassetti followed the man into a waiting carriage. Then they were gone.
    The signora appeared at my elbow. ‘Is that a