The Flight of the Falcon

by Daphne Du Maurier

  I understood the reason for Toni’s despondency. No encounter with his girlfriend in the piazza della Vita, or a trip round the via delle Mura on the vespa.

  “What about the cinema?” asked Toni sullenly.

  “The cinema by all means,” answered Giuseppe Fossi, “provided you are back home by nine o’clock.”

  Toni shrugged, and muttering under his breath lifted one of the empty crates to bear it back to the van. Should I say anything to my superior about Aldo’s invitation to the meeting at the ducal palace? I waited for the other assistants to move out of earshot, and then approached him.

  “Professor Donati was good enough to give me a pass this evening for the ducal palace,” I said. “There is to be a meeting to discuss the Festival.”

  He looked surprised. “Then that is the responsibility of Professor Donati,” he replied. “As Director of the Arts Council of Ruffano he will be well aware of tonight’s regulations. If he chooses to issue invitations to comparative strangers to the community it is his own affair.”

  He turned his back on me, obviously grudging the supposed honor done to me. I felt for the disk my brother had given me. It was safe in my pocket, alongside the forty-year-old letter from my father to Luigi Speca. I looked forward to showing this to Aldo. Meanwhile, I supposed that I too must obtain the late pass from the Registrar if I wanted to go to the ducal palace. It would not matter to my brother if I turned up or not, but my own curiosity was strong.

  We closed down at the new building at seven o’clock and I walked across to the Registrar’s office, which was already besieged by students applying for late passes. Most of them, accompanied by anxious relatives, had made plans for dinner which were now threatened with cancellation. The pre-celebration of the Festival would go by the board if the passes were not forthcoming, and the relatives would be left to languish in their lodgings and hotels. “It is completely childish,” was the comment of one angry father. “My son is in his fourth year, and the authorities take it into their heads to treat him as an infant.”

  The patient clerk repeated for the second time that these were the orders of the university Council. The students had brought it upon themselves by disorderly behavior.

  The disgusted parent snorted in contempt. “Disorderly behavior?” he said. “A little healthy fun! Haven’t we all done the same in our time?”

  He looked about him for approval, finding it. The parents and relatives queuing for passes were unanimous in blaming the authorities for being some twenty-five years behind the times.

  “Take your son to dinner, signore,” said the harassed clerk, “but have him back at the students’ hostel by nine o’clock. Or in his lodgings, if he is quartered in the town. You will have all the opportunity you require for celebrations tomorrow and the day after.”

  One by one they turned away rejected, followed by their disgruntled and protesting young. I put my head in at the window of the Registrar with small hope of success.

  “The name is Fabbio,” I said, “Armino Fabbio. I’m an assistant at the library, and have an invitation from Professor Donati for a meeting at the ducal palace this evening at nine o’clock.”

  To my surprise, instead of instantly rejecting me the clerk consulted a list at his side.

  “Armino Fabbio,” he said. “That’s quite in order. We have your name on the list.” He handed me a slip of paper. “Signed by the Director of the Arts Council himself.” The clerk even had the courtesy to smile.

  I took the slip and edged out of the queue before the parent behind me had time to protest. Next problem, where to eat? I had no intention of pushing my way into the already crowded restaurants in the town—what few there were—or of joining the Silvani dining-table. I decided to try my luck at the university canteen. Here there was standing room only, but I did not mind. A bowl of soup and a plate of salami, a pleasant contrast to the octopus of the night before, soon took the edge off appetite. The mass of students were so busy eating and declaiming at the same time against the detested curfew that I passed unnoticed, or at any rate was taken for granted as a lesser member of the university staff.

  The general intention, so I gathered, both ears alert, was to make up for this evening’s treatment by painting the town red on the Thursday and the Friday nights. All hell would be let loose.

  “They can’t stop us!”

  “We can’t all be expelled.”

  “I’ve got my degree anyway, so shit to the lot of them.”

  One of the big-mouthed students was standing at the far end of the counter with his back to me. This was lucky, because it was the fellow who had wanted to douse me in the fountain on the Monday afternoon.

  “I’m just not standing for it,” he said. “My father can pull strings, and if there’s any trouble he’ll get some of these professors on the university Council sacked. I’m twenty-one, and they can’t treat me like a child of ten. I shall ignore the curfew and stay on the streets until midnight if I feel like it. Anyway, the curfew isn’t intended for the C and E students. It’s for all these little teachers who study Latin and Greek and go bye-byes at the students’ hostel.”

  He looked about him, hoping for trouble. I had caught his eye on Monday and had no desire to catch it again. I slipped out of the canteen and made my way downhill to the ducal palace. The piazza Maggiore already wore an air of festival. Although it was barely dusk the palace was floodlit, and the Duomo too. The rose walls of the first had an incandescent quality, and the great windows of the eastern façade, luminous and marble white, came suddenly alive. The palace was no longer a museum, a gallery hung with tapestries and pictures round which the tourist would prowl his indifferent way, but a living entity. Thus the linkboys saw it five hundred years ago, under moonlight and with flares and torches. Horses’ hooves rang on the cobbled stones, mingling with the clink of spurs. Harnesses jingled as saddles and trappings were removed, grooms and servants scattered, and through the great carved portico walked or rode the returning scion of the Malebranche, his gloved left hand upon his sword.

  Tonight the students, with some twenty minutes or so still to spare before curfew, strolled up and down, arm in arm with visiting relatives. A group by the fountain began to whistle and call at two girls who pattered by, feigning the inevitable disdain. Somewhere a vespa spluttered, somewhere there was a shout of raucous laughter. I went to the side entrance and pressed the bell, feeling like a wanderer between two worlds. Behind me lay the present, slick, proficient, uniform, the young the same the globe over, mass-produced like eggs; and before me stood the past, that sinister and unknown world of poison and rapine, of power and beauty, luxury and filth, when a painting could be carried through the streets and worshipped by the rich and by the rabble alike; when God was feared; when men and women sickened of the plague and died like dogs.

  The door was opened, not by the night-guardian, but by a boy dressed as a page. He asked for my pass. I handed him the disk Aldo had given me and he took it, saying nothing, and lifting the flare from the stand beside him preceded me across the quadrangle. There were no lights. I had not thought how dark the palace would be without electricity. I had seen the torch-lit apartments above on Saturday, but here below, and on the stairs, the normal lighting had been switched on. Not so tonight. As we mounted the great stairs the torchlight turned our shadows into giants. The page who climbed before me, in his belted doublet and hose, did not seem to be in fancy dress. I was the interloper. The gallery surrounding the quadrangle was black as pitch. One single flare, stuck in a bracket, cast a baleful stream of light upon the door of the throne room. The page knocked twice upon it. We were admitted.

  The throne room was empty, lighted in similar fashion to the gallery outside, with two flares set in brackets, and we went across it to the Room of the Cherubs at the further end, where the session had been held on Saturday. This too was empty, and lit by torches. The doors leading to the Duke’s bedroom, and to the audience room, were shut. The page knocked twice upon the door
of the first. It was opened by a young man whose face I recognized as one of those guitarists who had made so merry upon the stage at the theater on Monday. I recognized nothing else. He wore a jerkin of bottle green, the sleeves slashed with purple, and his hose were black. On his heart he wore the emblem of a falcon’s head.

  “Is it Armino Donati?” he asked.

  My second name, unused for at least seventeen years, surprised me.

  “Yes,” I said cautiously, “sometimes known as Armino Fabbio.”

  “Here we prefer Donati,” he replied.

  He jerked his head for me to enter. I did so and the door was closed, the attendant page remaining in the Room of the Cherubs. I looked about me. The Duke’s bedroom was half the size of the preceding room, and it was lighted, like the others, by flares in brackets, these flares placed on either side of the one great portrait on the wall to throw it into relief so that it dominated the room. It was the portrait of the “Temptation of Christ,” Christ bearing the likeness to Duke Claudio.

  There were twelve men in the room, including the guitarist who had admitted me. They were all dressed as courtiers of the early sixteenth century, and wore the insignia of the Falcon. The scrutineers who had examined our passes on the Saturday were among them, and the two duelists, and others I had seen on the stage on Monday evening. I felt, and no doubt looked, an idiot in my modern garb, and to give myself assurance strolled over to the picture to examine it. No one took any notice of me. All were aware of my presence, but they chose, perhaps from delicacy, to ignore it.

  The Christ Duke Claudio, lit by flares, stared out with greater power from his frame than he did by day. The crudity of the modeling did not show, and the rather awkward stance, the hand upon the girdle, the inelegant feet, were now subdued. The eyes, deep-lidded, distant, stared into a troubled future that might have seemed imminent to the painter’s mind, threatening his world, or else quiescent, not to erupt till centuries later. The tempter, Satan, was the same Christ in profile, suggesting, not a lack of models, but a rash attempt at truth. The portrait might have lost its power to terrify, but not to cause unease. I wondered that it had survived five centuries, to confound the vandals and to mock the Church. Today the tourist, with his eye upon his watch, the message missed, would pass it by unquestioning.

  I felt a hand upon my shoulder. My brother stood behind me. He must have entered the room from the small dressing room and chapel beyond.

  “What do you make of it?” he asked.

  “You knew once,” I said. “I used to act him, as I acted Lazarus. But never willingly.”

  “You might do so again,” he said.

  He swung me round, showing me to his twelve companions. Like them, he was wearing the same period dress, but for the color. Like the tempter, he was all in black.

  “Here is our Falcon,” he said. “He can play Duke Claudio at our Festival.”

  The twelve men looked at me and smiled. One of them seized a saffron-colored robe that was lying on a stool near the chapel entrance and belted it around me. Another picked up a golden-curled wig and clapped it on my head. A third brought me a mirror. Time was no longer with me. Neither this time, nor the time of centuries past. I had gone back to childhood, to my bedroom in the via dei Sogni, and stood still to obey my brother’s commands. The men who surrounded me were his companions of the liceo long ago. As then, protesting that I did not want to play, I stammered now, in what I hoped were adult words, “Aldo, I’d rather not. I came here to watch the rest of you. Not to take part.”

  “One and the same thing,” said Aldo. “We are all equally involved. I’m offering you a choice. The part of the Falcon, one short hour of glory and adventure in your life which will never come again; or to be turned loose tonight in the streets of Ruffano without a pass, when you will be picked up and, your identity established, given a grilling by the local police, who, so I was told earlier today, have been continually in touch with the police in Rome.”

  None of the young faces crowded round me was hostile. They were friendly; they were also ruthless. They stood there, waiting for my answer.

  “Here you are safe,” said Aldo, “whether with me or with them. All these twelve lads have sworn to defend you whatever happens. If you go out of the palace alone who knows what may happen to you?”

  Somewhere, either in the city center, or parading in plain clothes up and down the via Rossini, or watching by the porta del Sangue or the porta Malebranche, could be my police agent from Rome, waiting to question me. Useless to tell myself that they could not prove me guilty. The question was—should I be able to establish my innocence? Both Aldo’s alternatives appalled me, but the second frightened me the more. The voice that came from me was not my adult voice, but sounded to my ears like the ghostly echo of a child of seven, who, wearing the blanket robes of Lazarus, was thrust into his living tomb.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked my brother.

  16

  We went through to the audience room. It was here that the tapestry on the western wall concealed the door leading to the second of the twin towers, where the guardian had ejected me on my first visit nearly a week ago. Tonight there was no guardian, only Aldo and his bodyguard, and the tapestry hung as usual, with no suggestion that behind it lay the hidden door and the narrow twisting stairway beyond.

  The audience room was lit by flares also, and to the left, upon its easel, stood the portrait of the gentlewoman which my father so much loved, and which put me in mind of Signora Butali. Someone had placed a long wooden table in the center of the room, and upon it glasses and a carafe of wine. Aldo went forward and poured wine into a glass for each of us.

  “You don’t have to do anything,” he said, answering at last the question which I had put to him in the other room, “except do as I tell you, when the time comes. Acting won’t be required of you. As a courier you will play your part to perfection, because it will come naturally.” He laughed, and raising his glass said, “Drink to my brother!”

  One and all lifted their glasses, crying “Armino!,” their faces turned to me. Then Aldo introduced them one by one, walking the whole length of the table, tapping each one upon the shoulder as he called his name.

  “Giorgio, born near Monte Cassino, parents killed in the bombardment, brought up by relatives… Domenico, born in Naples, parents died of tuberculosis, brought up ditto… Romano, found abandoned in the hills after the German retreat, brought up by partisans… Antonio, ditto… Roberto, ditto… Guido, Sicilian, father killed by the Mafia, ran away from home, brought up by Sisters of the Poor… Pietro, parents drowned in floods in the Po valley, brought up by neighbors… Sergio, born in a concentration camp, mother living… Federico, ditto, but no surviving parents, brought up by an uncle… Giovanni, born in Rome, abandoned in a church, brought up by foster-parents… Lorenzo, born in Milan, father died, mother married again and stepfather a pervert, ran away from home, worked in a factory to save enough to enter university… Cesare, born in Pesaro, father drowned at sea, mother died giving birth to him, brought up in an orphanage.”

  Aldo came to the far end of the table and put his hand upon my shoulder. “Armino, known in the family circle as Beo, or Il Beato, because of his curls and his cherubic disposition. Born in Ruffano, father died in an Allied prison camp, mother fled to Germany with retreating German officer, taking the boy with her, later married in Turin. And now you all know each other—or shall I say recognize one another?—for what you are. The lost and the abandoned. The despised and the rejected. Kicked along in the world to date by relatives and others who did what they had to but little else besides. I drink to you.” He raised his glass and nodding to the twelve, and finally to me, drank his toast. “And now to business,” he said, setting down his glass.

  The lad nearest to him, Giorgio, brought forward a map, which Aldo spread upon the table in front of him. It was a large-scale map of the city of Ruffano. I drew near, with the others. The introductions, totally unexpected and fantastic
, had the effect, temporary, perhaps, of making me lose my identity. I was not Armino, a lone courier without aim or mission, hunted possibly by the police, but another Giorgio, another Lorenzo.

  “The course will run, as you know, from the piazza del Duca Carlo to the piazza Maggiore,” Aldo said. “In other words, from the northern hill down to the city center at the piazza della Vita, and uphill by the via Rossini to the ducal palace. The course will be clear until the piazza della Vita, and then the fun will begin. The citizens, represented by the C and E students, will converge upon the piazza from all five roads, with the exception of the via Rossini, which will be held by the Court, in other words by the Arts and Education students. The fighting will start immediately the cortège of the Falcon has passed the piazza della Vita and has begun to ascend the hill. You, and the courtiers on guard here at the palace, will keep the citizens back until the Falcon has passed safely through your ranks and has crossed the quadrangle and ascended the stairs to the ducal apartments. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly,” agreed Giorgio, who seemed to be spokesman for the rest.

  “Good,” said Aldo. “Then all we have to do is to assign a given spot on the via Rossini to every courtier, which you can arrange with the volunteers, and hand over the plan of the side streets to the C and E leaders. We shall be outnumbered by about three to one, but that’s the glory of it.”

  He folded up the map. I hesitated before speaking. The query was so obvious as to seem absurd.

  “What about the general public? Who will clear the streets?” I asked.

  “The police,” said Aldo. “They do it every year. But this year their instructions will be more explicit. No one but performers allowed in the area after a stated time.”

  “And where will the public watch from?” I persisted.

  “From every available window,” answered Aldo, smiling, “beginning with the piazza del Duca Carlo and so down to the piazza della Vita, and up the via Rossini to the palace.”