“The mare came from Sicily, or so the dealer said. They are hard on horses there. There were signs she was beaten.”
“How awful.”
“Let me assure you we would never commit such barbarism here. She is a beautiful horse, so this man took a chance on her. But she bit and kicked, so he grew impatient.”
“Did he hurt her?”
Gatti evaded. “She threw him off. It was a competition, and his father was present. It was an embarrassment. He sold the horse to Signor Barrico, the butcher. The butcher’s truck was in the shop, but he was coming soon to get her. When I went to feed the horses the next morning, she was gone.”
“Robertino knew she was being sold to the butcher?”
“Yes. He screamed at the man. He offered him everything he had for her. But the man refused. He wanted her dead.”
“That’s awful. If Robertino did take her, where could he hide her?”
Gatti threw up his hands. “Anywhere. In the forest, in an abandoned farmhouse. But this man, he will find his horse. He is not a man you should cross.”
The British instructor was coming toward them, glowering. Signor Gatti looked like he wanted to run and hide. “Ciao, amore,” he said to her, and Scottie realized they were a couple.
“Who is this man?” Scottie asked quickly.
“Tenente Pisano.”
3.
Tenente Pisano was staring at an ad on the wall in the passage above Piazza Mercato. Large notices were common all over Siena. Banns were published—to the tenente’s right, Guido Muzzi announced his intention to wed Elisa Sodi, and invited anyone objecting to step forward. A black-bordered poster with scrollwork announced the death of Annalisa Savini, aged 103. Then there were the posters for festivals—there was a sagra, or feast, in San Gimignano, a wild boar hunt in Buonconvento, and a Festa delle Rane, or Festival of Frogs, in Chiusi. The classic antique Palio posters were ubiquitous. But squeezed in the corner above a jutting brick was a square notice in blue announcing that the Palio was a tool of the Fascists. DON’T BE FOOLED, it read. TRADITION IS OPPRESSION. Minaccia Rossa, it was signed. Red Threat. What was this Red Threat? Tenente Pisano had never heard of this group, and he made it his business to know the names of every club, team, organization and society within the city. His first inclination was to laugh it off—attacking the Palio, a tradition beloved by all? This was political suicide. But Tenente Pisano did not like the implication that all was not as it should be in Siena, that there were dark forces at work. He hated dark forces. Most irksome of all, the poster lacked the necessary stamp of the advertising division of the Questura. He reached up, tore it down and stalked off, already late for his mother’s trofie al pesto.
4.
“I missed you,” Michael said. It was the kind of thing Duncan hated, and he only dared to say this because he had been such a good, good spy, having planted an article about Luce coming to the Palio. The city was all excited about her visit, thanks to him. Yes, he had had to tell Scottie he was CIA, but she was already proving useful. He decided not to tell Duncan about running into Julie at the Palio, and again at Gordon’s. He didn’t want any mention of her to ruin what he imagined would be a jubilant visit of shared secrets. They were at St. Peter’s, staring up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It was a veritable biblical cocktail party, with Noah at the bar; David slaying Goliath; Jesse, David and Solomon doing their thing; and of course God creating Adam with the touch of a lazy fingertip. Duncan was in a mood, which Michael assumed was because Michael’s train had been two hours late.
But how could you not feel uplifted by the Sistine, Michael thought. He couldn’t wait to tell Duncan about Minaccia Rossa. Michael had created the fake political movement after remembering his training at Camp Peary about “false flag attacks.” Michael recalled the instructor explaining that it was a clever way of creating opposition to someone you didn’t like. “Simply become one of them,” he said. “And become the most extreme of all.” Good, solid people in the middle didn’t like extremists, didn’t like violence. They would vote into office whomever they saw as being safely opposed to such acts, whoever would Keep Order.
So Michael had become Minaccia Rossa, the Red Threat. He had typeset the leaflets and posters himself, from the set of inkstained metal hand type he had bought at a secondhand store in Rome. The small printing press came from a Florence bookbinder, paid for in cash. He had carefully incised the hammer and sickle on a block of wood. All of it was stored in the locked cabinet at the Ford office. He was inciting the Sienese to throw off tradition, wealth and foreign interference and vote Communist, or else. Hopefully people would be so outraged and frightened by the threats of Minaccia Rossa that they would vote the Catholic Vestri into office in a landslide, and the world would be safe for democracy, of a sort.
He knew Duncan would love the entire idea, but somehow the Sistine Chapel felt like the wrong place to reveal it. He’d rather tell him in bed. He stared out of the corner of his eye at Duncan’s patrician profile, his sleek combed-back hair, his smooth cheek. A roommate of Michael’s had once described Duncan as a tedious, balding snob, and he could not disagree, but in his warmer moments he reminded Michael of Dorothy Sayers’s fictional detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. Aristocratic, intelligent and aloof. He longed to run his hand along Duncan’s jawline, kiss his perfect pink ear. Desire was a sour taste in his mouth.
“Is it true that Michelangelo was gay?” Duncan asked.
“Don’t you see how he’s fetishizing the male body?” Michael pointed up. “And all his women, look at them, are Amazons. He sculpted both the Pietà and the David before he was thirty. Amazing. They called him Il Divino.”
“Another talented fag.”
Michael blinked, shocked. They didn’t talk this way to each other. Duncan had always insisted that being homosexual made them elite, better than other people. It was Michael who wrestled with Catholic guilt and feelings of sin. Duncan had always been coldly dismissive of such weakness of mind, seeing his desire as a badge of status, membership in an elite secret sect of men who were smarter, more artistic, sensitive and sophisticated. “Of course they hate us,” Duncan had argued. “Because we’re so clearly superior in every way. Alexander the Great, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Whitman, Wilde, Cole Porter.”
“Liberace,” Michael had teased. But he loved this confidence of Duncan’s.
“What’s the matter?” he asked Duncan now.
Duncan was silent, but in front of the Bernini altar, he turned to Michael.
“Julie’s pregnant again.”
Michael paused. “Congratulations.”
“She’s asked that we be more of a family.”
He wanted to shout at Duncan that he had seen Julie at the goddamn orgy at Gordon’s, and the baby probably wasn’t even Duncan’s, but he knew that if he humiliated him this way, Duncan would cut him out of his life forever. “Scottie’s pregnant, too,” he said.
Later, they stood on the bank of the Tiber in front of Castel Sant’Angelo. Duncan said nothing for what felt like an hour.
“Benvenuto Cellini was imprisoned in there,” Michael said. “He was gay, too. And kind of an asshole.”
It was meant to make Duncan laugh, but he didn’t. Instead he looked up at the tiny windows of the cylindrical fortress, his hands sunk deep in his pockets, and said, “I hate this life. I don’t want to be this way.”
TWELVE
LA PANTERA, THE PANTHER
“MY CHARGE STRIKES EVERY OBSTACLE”
Who decided that the best tree to line a driveway was the cypress? And who realized villas are prettiest when they’re yellowish gold with green shutters? Who thought terra-cotta roofs looked best? Large urns of lemon trees? Clinging vines with orangey-pink trumpet flowers? In short, who was responsible for the stunningly beautiful cliché that is any Tuscan villa?
Scottie did not care. All she was thinking about was what attitude to take with Carlo. Only hours after their tryst in Florence, he had left her at
the villa—completely forgotten about her, apparently, as if she were an umbrella. Yes, Franca was having some sort of breakdown, and as her husband he had to take care of her. It was all for the best, of course—but still. She had no car; if Michael had not arrived, she would have had no way to get home. Carlo’s rudeness was shocking, and she felt angry and offended whenever she thought of it. The fact that she was going to see him at all was probably ill-advised, but … he was still their landlord, and he knew Pisano. It would be good to normalize things with him, make it clear that she did not care that he had bedded her and dropped her. Although “bedded” was a stretch, since that was the only place they hadn’t actually made love. Really, she was so nervous that her hands on the scooter were clammy and her heart was thumping.
As she and Ecco putt-putted up a rutted driveway on the scooter, her gaze was stuck on a small herd of jet black horses inside a hand-hewn wooden pen. She spotted a heavy-headed stallion. Scottie didn’t like stallions—they were bratty and often dangerous. She was riding a mare through public land once in California, unaware that the leaseholder had turned out a stallion along with his mares, and had ended up as the lettuce in a horse sandwich, her legs pinned under the stallion’s forelegs as he mounted her mare. That adventure had been impossible to recount to her father that evening at dinner, or ever. Ladies didn’t say such things.
A thunderstorm was hot on her heels as she rode past the stables and up the driveway to the castle. The sky behind her was nearly black, and lightning flashed in her rearview mirror, but she counted the seconds and calculated that the storm was still miles away. Ecco whined and looked up at her.
As her tires crunched to a stop on the gravel in front of what seemed to her a villa and not a castle, Carlo came out of the large front door, surprised to see her. He was dressed once again like a buttero in loose brown riding pants and a forest green vest and fedora.
“Cara,” he said in surprise.
How dare he call her “dear.” She feigned a cool detachment she did not feel. “So this is the castle?”
“Actually, that’s the castle.” He pointed to a short, stubby stone tower about fifty yards from the villa that seemed to have collapsed in on itself. Ivy grew over the piles of rocks, and doves sat in gaping holes in the masonry. “Built as a Saracen watchtower around the year 900,” he said. “It stood tall until 1943. Someday my ship will come in and I’ll rebuild it, but for now it’s just a dream.”
“You were going somewhere,” she said. “How is Franca?”
His face darkened. “Not good. I think she’s gone up to the mountain, to a little house we have up there. She goes there when she needs to be alone. This is the worst I’ve ever seen her.”
He was so sincere, so clearly worried, that she felt ashamed of her pique.
“I’m sorry I don’t have much time. The weanlings are in the low pasture by the river. I want to move them before the storm comes. My fattore’s in Grosseto today buying fencing.” He didn’t ask her why she’d come. He seemed worried, preoccupied.
She was suddenly overwhelmed with the idea that she could get on a horse, right now, today.
“I can help you,” she said.
“Are you sure?” he said. “In your condition?”
She had friends from Vassar who spent their entire pregnancies lying in front of the television watching soap operas, eating ice cream and growing as big as houses, but that wasn’t her style. “My child may as well get used to riding horses now,” she said.
“But your clothes—?”
“I can ride in anything,” she said quickly. “But boots would be better than sandals.”
She tried not to inhale his scent as she followed him into the entry hall, full of the daily detritus of living in the country—coats and hats hanging on pegs, seed packets, farm equipment catalogs, a jumble of ivory-handled walking sticks. Piles and piles of bills covered a small desk in the corner of the hall. So the marchese’s life wasn’t all champagne and fancy dress balls. She made Ecco wait outside.
Carlo said, “È un casino.” She liked that word. It so perfectly conveyed a mess.
From a vast assortment lined up under a portrait of a man in a red uniform, she found a pair of boots that fit her. Carlo gave her some rough wool socks. As she sat down on the stairs to pull them on, he offered her coffee, which she agreed to, although she was already jumpy.
“So, is that your father?” she asked, pointing to a neat charcoal sketch of a man who looked like Carlo.
“Yes.” She could hear caution in his voice.
“Is he alive?”
“No,” said Carlo. He turned away, but then turned back, as if he had made a decision to face something. “He was shot, at the end of the war. He was close with Mussolini.”
“Oh,” she said. Was Carlo close with Mussolini, too? She didn’t want to know the answer. “My father is dead, too. He was a thief.”
Carlo laughed at this, and so did she, at the wild absurdity of it. “Like Billy the Kid?” he asked.
“If Billy were an accountant,” she said, still laughing.
“You are constantly surprising me,” he said, and her stomach flipped over, and not from the baby kicking her.
She should never have come.
“I’m glad you came,” Carlo said as they headed out to the stable. “I’ve always wanted to ride with a cowgirl.” He raised an eyebrow and a slow grin spread across his face. “To show her how much better riders the butteri are.”
“Ah!” she laughed. “As I welcome the chance to show you how to ride.”
“I have the perfect horse for you,” he said. “Vispa like you.”
The thunder was getting closer as they mounted their horses and headed through a swinging gate. The wind rolled around them. She had left Ecco inside the villa, and she hoped he wasn’t chewing anything ancient or precious.
It felt so unbelievably good to be back in the saddle again, as if she had been holding her breath for months and could finally exhale. The only way she could pop her lowest vertebrae was by lifting both feet in the stirrups at the same time—she did, and all tension left her body. The smell of the leather, saddle soap and the ozone in the air put all her senses into play at once. She had wondered if being pregnant would make her feel awkward in the saddle, but for now at least it didn’t. She smiled as she thought, Baby’s first ride. She was finally bonding with this child inside her. What did it matter whose sperm this began with? This was her baby.
“What do you grow on your estate?” she asked as they skirted a large field of tall grass.
“Grapes, wheat, sunflowers. Plus Chianina cows, Cinta Senese pigs and Persani horses as well as the Maremmani.”
“And you have a lot of houses.”
He gave a little snort. “Yes. Most of them are falling down. Not every inheritance is a good thing. Probably they should all be sold, but I am sentimental.”
She patted the shoulder of the black mare she was riding. Short but sturdy, she had sniffed Scottie’s hand approvingly when Scottie offered it to her before mounting. She was a little heavy on the bit, but responded by arching her neck and using her back and hindquarters when Scottie gave her some leg.
“The Persani were used by the cavalry, right?”
“Yes. But they sold them all. They are becoming very rare now. No one wants them.”
“Even though Raimondo D’Inzeo rides one?”
“It helps,” he said, brightening. “Merano is a lovely horse, isn’t he?”
She nodded.
“It is helping me sell them. A man from Belgium came the other day. Some people still remember the charge of Izbushensky in ’42. The Italian cavalry, seven hundred men mounted on Persani, outflanked the Russian infantry. Hundreds of black horses flying at full gallop across a field of sunflowers a thousand miles from home. It was the end of five thousand years of history, the last battle on horseback that will ever be waged.”
“Were you there?”
He turned and looked at her, hi
s face strange. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. You won’t understand, but it was the most beautiful moment of my life. We carried sabers. Sabers.” He laughed and shook his head at this.
Sehnsucht, she thought. He’s a man of another era.
He jumped down to open a gate whose latch was stuck. “The horses have been leaning on it,” he said. “Missing their mothers.”
The raindrops were just starting to hit the dust.
“Let me help you.” She jumped down and lifted the gate as he undid the rusty latch. They were side by side, and she could smell him again. Horses and sweat. Molasses and hay.
The gate swung open, but neither one of them moved. The rain began to pelt their faces. He was almost unbearably attractive. She felt like a moon being pulled into the orbit of a powerful planet.
A cow mooed somewhere, and it broke the spell. They remounted and rode along the treed edge of a plowed field.
“It’s the next field,” he said quietly.
She could hear the river in the distance.
I love my husband, she told herself.
They crested a rise, and a large grassy meadow spread before them, sloping down toward the fast-moving river.
“There they are.” The weanlings—six of them, all bays and chestnuts—were running up and down in youthful giddy panic. They neighed when they saw Carlo and Scottie’s horses and came trotting toward them, tossing their heads.
Scottie watched as Carlo got behind them and drove them forward slowly, not panicking them, letting his adult horse’s presence keep them calm and show them the way. So simple, and yet almost no one could do it.
She coaxed her mare into a canter and rode over to a gate in the hedge. This one was well oiled, and swung open when she shot the bolt. She backed her horse up, just away from the gate, and helped Carlo move the weanlings into the safety of the fenced lane.
“There’s one missing,” he said, locking the gate.
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