After Hannibal

  He opened the door to find the figures of a man and woman, both vaguely familiar, standing at the threshold. “Chapman, Harold Chapman,” the man said extending his hand. “This is my wife, Cecilia.”

  “Ah, yes, we are neighbors.” Monti read English easily but spoke it badly, with a strong Italian accent. “Please come in.”

  Inside, the Chapmans were introduced to Fabio, who, by contrast, did not read English and had no idea of grammar but spoke with a passable accent, picked up during his years on the motor-racing circuit.

  “I hope we are not intruding,” Chapman said.

  “But no, not at all. You will take a glass of wine?”

  This involved opening a third bottle. Chapman, without being very sensitive to others, was observant in certain ways. He had noted the empty bottles, the vinous atmosphere, the sense of close colloquy, the absence of women. Had he stumbled on a pair of poofs? His attempts to enlist support for his battle with the Checchetti had been marked by difficulty from the start. First the demented German and now these two. “Well, here’s how,” he said, raising his glass. “Salute. I am making a point of going around and seeing everyone. Everyone that depends on this road, I mean. So far I’ve only been able to see the German chap at the end, Ritter. Now the situation has been complicated by the fact that the Checchetti are threatening to put these stakes in and narrow it down to two meters.”

  This would not have been very clear to his listeners, even in Italian. Chapman always assumed more knowledge than those he spoke to could possibly have. Cecilia had to spend some time explaining things, which she did quietly, with a faint, defensive smile. She was wishing she had found the resolution to refuse to accompany Harold on this outing.

  She was not feeling well disposed toward Harold in any case. They had been that day on a visit to Città di Castello, an ancient and beautiful Umbrian town set among green hills above the valley of the Tiber. They had lunched in a small trattoria, spent an hour in the medieval maze of streets and squares enclosed within the city walls and afterward gone to see the collection of paintings in the municipal gallery.

  It was here that Harold had shown a side of himself not at all attractive. Up to then things had been all right, more or less. Harold had studied the guidebook and was well fortified with facts. He knew the town went back to remote antiquity, had been a center of the Umbri and then of the Etruscans, that it had been a Roman municipality, that Pliny the Younger had owned a villa in the region, that the ruling family in the fifteenth century had been the Vitelli, that the city had come under the control of Cesare Borgia and thence passed into the hands of the Church.

  All this he knew and a good deal more. But when they went to visit the gallery, which—as Cecilia informed him—housed the most important collection in the region after the National Gallery in Perugia, something got into him, some spirit of perverse resistance. He showed himself unwilling to accept Cecilia’s judgments about the paintings. He made disparaging remarks about paintings she loved. When they stood before the huge painting of The Madonna and Child with Six Angels by the anonymous Maestro di Città di Castello, instead of seeing the otherworldliness of it, the way all the faces seemed dazed and stricken with the power of spirit, he scoffed at the diminutive monk kneeling in prayer in one corner. “The whole thing is completely out of proportion,” he said. When they looked at the painting by Giorgio di Andrea di Bartolo which shows the Madonna giving suck to the Infant Christ, Harold sniggered at the total roundness of Mary’s left breast and the way it was detached from the rest of her clothed and composed body, like a pale, round fruit which the Child holds up between them in both hands. “Good catch!” Harold said. “Well held, sir!” At that ribald moment the missionary in Cecilia had understood that Harold was hardening his heart against her, that he wanted to hurt her with his unbelief.

  But it was as they were about to leave the gallery that the real offense was caused. They were in the last room, which was rather small, with a long, curtained window and some paintings of the late sixteenth century on the walls, classical themes, not very distinguished. As they were turning to go, an attractive young woman, one of the gallery attendants, had come toward them and begun to relate in English a legend associated with this room.

  The gallery, she said, was originally a mansion belonging to the ruling Vitelli family, lords of the city in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One Alessandro Vitelli had owned it but had lived there hardly at all. He had been a soldier of fortune and followed the wars, leaving the vast house empty save for a few servants and a former mistress, a courtesan, past her first youth. The window of the room looked down over the street, which was just inside the city walls—the attendant raised the curtain to show them. Left alone here, the woman had enticed young men of the town, lowering ropes of silk so they could climb up to her chamber. When they had pleasured her she killed them. There had been a secret door—the attendant showed them the outline of it in the wall. Through this the slain lovers had been bundled, landing by means of some kind of chute outside the city walls. “So she escapes the bad fame,” the attendant said, smiling. Her English was not perfect but it was fluent enough—Cecilia could see that the girl had told this story to visitors quite often before, that she was trying to add something to their visit, to make it more memorable.

  Harold, however, had not seen it in this light. He had, with what Cecilia could only regard as a gross vulgarity, appeared to think that this story had been told for him alone, that it was in the nature of an advance on the part of this attractive young woman. He had wanted to dwell on certain details, in particular the sexual energy and Messalina-like properties of the courtesan. “Maybe she gave them such a good time it was worth dying for,” he said, with something close to a leer. “She should have found a man who could satisfy her and keep his mouth shut.” And he had smiled that stretched smile of his and looked rather deeply at the attendant and it had been obvious to Cecilia that he saw himself as this well-endowed and discreet fellow climbing up the rope and the attendant as the lady at the window. Worse still, terribly shaming, it had been obvious to the young woman too. Her manner had changed, become more distant. Her smile had disappeared. As they left the gallery together Cecilia knew that to her dying day she would not forget the ugliness of spirit that her husband had shown in the beautiful town of Città di Castello.

  “We want to make it clear that it is not our fault,” he was saying now. “If they do put the stakes in, that is.”

  “But the people doesn’t believe the Checchetti,” Fabio said, when he had understood. “Everybody knows them. In the time I am living here they quarrel with everyone, they have no friends.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Chapman said. Nevertheless he was somewhat put out. This general distrust of the Checchetti rather undermined the value of his campaign and the worth of the victory that would ultimately be his. But nothing could affect his underlying euphoria, inspired as he still was by the masterly boldness of Mancini’s plan. “I just want you to know that the situation is well in hand,” he said. “That blackmailing crew are about to overreach themselves.” He would have liked to go into it further, explain the beauty of the trap, but he was afraid of ruining things—it might get back to the Checchetti. So he contented himself with praising the author of the scheme. “We have this marvelous lawyer,” he said. “His manner is a bit unusual but in my opinion he has a touch of genius. He is an absolute wizard, believe me.”

  “What is his name?” Fabio asked. “I think I am needing a lawyer myself very soon.”

  It was during this period, while the Chapmans were waiting to see whether the Checchetti intended to carry out their threat, that Blemish and his chosen builder Esposito—a curly-haired, smiling man with a gold crucifix around his neck and a mobile phone constantly to hand—decided to start closing the trap around the Greens. A certain delicacy of touch was needed for this and Blemish was worried that his partner might somehow bungle things. Esposito was not much endowed with that
ability to look ahead and take thought for the morrow which Blemish regarded as one of the fundamental requirements of civilization. Esposito took a short-term view of things. Get what you can while you can more or less summed up his philosophy. Blemish was afraid he might show too much crude haste and put the Greens off in some way.

  Both men knew that a point could be reached, a psychological point of balance, at which the client realized that his control of the situation was slipping away, that he had laid out too much money to begin over again with another builder, that there was no alternative—short of walking away from the house altogether—but to go wading on in the hope of somehow ending up with a home beautifully restored along the lines agreed. By the time he came to see the vanity of this hope and refused further payment, he would have been relieved of a good half of his disposable capital.

  This of course was the model operation, conducted under optimum conditions. Things did not always go so smoothly. But it was something to aspire to, as Blemish said, it was the kind of thing to aim at. Above all, it required patience. These things he tried to explain to Mildred, the companion of his life, while he was waiting for his supper of dragon’s teeth and decorated meatballs in their cavernous kitchen. “Extraction,” he said, “that is the name of the game. It is a process of extraction.” He stretched his neck and blinked softly, watching Mildred’s lumbering yet purposeful movements about the stove. “You need finesse for it. You need professionalism. That is why Esposito will never amount to much.” He paused to drink some Chianti Classico from his long-stemmed, goblet-type glass—they had recently bought a set of these in Perugia, attracted by the medieval shape. “I am what you might call a gradualist in business dealing,” he said. “You have got to keep yourself above it, you have got to take an overall view. I am talking about detachment, Milly. The true professional is always detached. Without detachment there is no mobility, there is no play of mind. The Greens aren’t detached at all, you see. They have set their hearts on a piece of converted residential property.”

  Mildred turned toward him, ladle in hand. “But dearest, we have set our hearts on something, haven’t we? We have set our hearts on a medieval restaurant and swimming pool.”

  “True, my love, quite true, but that is at a remove, it is not in dispute, not at risk. For us the Greens represent just a few square meters of cotto more or a few less. We can afford to wait but they can’t.” Blemish paused and his narrow mouth tightened with disapproval. “The Greens are old,” he said, “but they cling to this idea of a future. That is what the house means to them, a future. It is quite different with Esposito; he doesn’t believe in tomorrow, he wants everything now.”

  In the event Esposito spent most of the time talking on his mobile phone. The Greens had returned home in late afternoon to keep the appointment, having spent the day at Sansepolcro. Their life during this period was a strange alternation between beauty abroad and chaos at home. The first phase of the excavation work on the ground floor had been completed but bags of cement and heaps of gravel and sand and broken masonry lay everywhere about. There were still holes in the walls waiting to be filled in. The roof had not been repaired yet. Pipes had been broken here and there in the course of the work and a pervasive smell of drainage hung about the house.

  To escape from all this, and from the dust and noise of the work itself, the Greens devised a game of visits to the ancient towns of Umbria and Tuscany. Like most couples who live very closely together over long periods, they were given to private pacts and accustomed jokes and time-honored observances. They were also—what is perhaps less usual—quite prompt to add to the existing stock according to circumstance and situation, sometimes in self-defense, sometimes just for the fun of it. It had been like that when they were looking for a house to buy. Those they couldn’t afford they had pretended for a while to own and made a game out of the changes they would carry out. Now, in these days of discomfort and anxiety, they began to make each other gifts of towns. Naturally they would go to see the town together so the gift in the end was mutual. It was Mrs. Green’s idea; she thought it funny, with their house in such a state, to pretend to have whole towns to give away. She began by giving her husband Cortona and he responded with Spello and so it went. On this particular day the town was Sansepolcro, a particularly good choice as it was the birthplace of Piero della Francesca, one of their very favorite painters, and neither of them had ever been there before.

  They were late in starting; it was nearly midday when they arrived and the churches were closing. They visited the imposing, long-fronted house where Piero was born and the little garden opposite with its pine trees and eighteenth-century statue of the painter. They walked down the main street, where noble buildings, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, followed one another in unbroken succession.

  The experience of walking around in a town like this is deepened by the number of times you have done it before, and the Greens had done it often. Like all such small and ancient towns in Italy, Sansepolcro is undemonstrative, unclamorous—it makes no very loud or evident claim on your attention. It exists in its own right, in its venerable and richly layered past and harmonious present. To the Greens, as they wandered through streets and squares, even the sunlight seemed part of this ancient existence, and the pigeons and the flowers on the window ledges. The stucco was peeling, some courtyards of palaces were somber with decay; but the noble proportions of arches and vaults, the beauty of moldings around windows and doorways, these were there still and open to view.

  After lunch they went to the Civic Museum, main object of their pilgrimage, and gazed for long at Piero’s painting of the Resurrection, alone on its wall in pride of place, Christ not emerging from the tomb but fully emerged, motionless. No gravity-defying ballet dancer this, but a being whose power was expressed in utter stillness. The knowledge of torture and death in his eyes still, he has supped with horrors. He rests one foot on the sarcophagus, now the pedestal of his conquest. The guards sleep below, in the grossness proper to sleep, bodies sprawling, faces slack. There has been nothing to rouse them, no violence, no struggle of escape. The lid of the sarcophagus is still in place …

  The splendor of this virile Christ was still present to their minds when they returned but it did not long survive the encounter with Blemish and Esposito. It was going to be necessary, Blemish explained, to dig a trench a meter wide and a half meter deep all the way around the house and fill it with concrete. “We will have to secure the base of your house,” he said. “Mr. Esposito has come to this conclusion and I must say it makes sense.”

  Hearing his name, Esposito nodded and smiled. He had a quantity of gold about him in addition to the crucifix—a ring, a bracelet, a watch with a thick chain of gold links. His car, an electric-blue Alfa Romeo, was parked at the side of the house.

  “Yes, I must say it makes sense,” Blemish said. “The interests of the client come first with us. That is part of our philosophy, it is the way we operate. This is an earthquake zone. Extra precautions have to be taken.” He was in best British gear for this crucial meeting, in hairy tweed jacket and corduroy trousers, despite the hot and rather humid weather.

  “Why was this not discussed beforehand?” Mr. Green said. “How come we only learn about it now?”

  “It was assumed that the house was resting on a shelf of rock. In our experience the majority of houses in the region south and east of Lake Trasimeno make use of the limestone base as a means of ensuring protection against earth tremors. With your house this is not the case. Esposito, who is a very good and experienced builder, will bear me out in this.”

  He turned and spoke in Italian to the builder, who smiled and shrugged and seemed about to reply when a call came through on his mobile phone. He strode some distance away and spoke loudly into the instrument.

  “Esposito is very busy,” Blemish said fondly. “He has several projects on hand. When you get a good builder that is always the case. No, you see, this need of a band of concrete to secure the hou
se at the base, it could not have been foreseen at the outset. Even Esposito, with all that expertise at his command, could not have foreseen that. There are things you can’t know until you start digging.”

  There was something, some inflection in the way this was uttered, that caused Mr. Green to look at his project manager rather sharply. “Work not foreseen. Is that what is called an imprevisto in our contract? It is charged extra to the estimate we had agreed?”

  “That is so, yes. It will give you a band of reinforced concrete—”

  “How much extra?”

  “I think we can keep it down to twenty million lire, including the cost of materials.”

  Silence followed this announcement. Esposito had retreated to his car, where he sat talking on his mobile phone. There was a steady sound of dripping water. Somehow or other Esposito himself or one of his North African workmen had pierced a pipe leading from the kitchen. Water ran down an inside wall and fell drop by drop onto the newly laid concrete of the ground floor.

  “We’ll fix that pipe in no time,” Blemish said. “Once we have got the other matter sorted out.”

  It was to occur to both the Greens, in the light of later events, that a sort of threat was contained in these words. But at the time they were too busy grappling with the sum of twenty million lire.

  “That is something like thirteen thousand dollars,” Mr. Green said. “We will have to think it over.”

  “Of course. Bear in mind that you will have a band of reinforced concrete a meter in width encircling the premises, holding them in a grip of steel.” Blemish was carried away into poetry by his desire to get the Greens to agree. “Firm against tempest and storm,” he said. “Steadfast and sure while the billows roll. I don’t know if I mentioned this but we are proceeding on the advice of our surveyor, what they call a geometra here, whom you haven’t met as yet, I think, but he is very aware of safety precautions in this area, which as we all know is an earthquake zone. He is a real stickler for safety, our geometra. Of course, Esposito, I daresay Esposito would accept it if you said you didn’t want this work done, but we might run into trouble over the planning permission and then the work would have to be suspended while they went fully into things.”