'Are you sure?'
'Of course I'm sure. Next month.' She lowered her eyes modestly and said in Italian, 'I'm sorry if it's taken longer than you thought.'
Adam despised what he saw in Maurizio's face: the spark of deep satisfaction behind the eyes, the struggle not to smile. He would soon be master of Villa Docci. The long years of waiting were over. Finally, there was a concrete, tangible purpose to his crime.
Maurizio must have sensed Adam studying him, because he shot a quick glance across the table and the look vanished from his face. It was the same sudden composure he had brought to bear in the memorial garden, when Adam had sprung on him the subject of fratricide in Dante's
The mask was not allowed to slip again for the remainder of the meal. Even when it came time for Adam to detail his discoveries for Maurizio and Chiara's benefit, Maurizio's expression never faltered. He was not shaken by all the talk of murder and intrigue. Quite the reverse. He embraced it, heaping praise on Adam for his achievements and firing off questions to keep the discussion alive.
Adam was beginning to doubt the picture of the man he had painted for himself when he witnessed the one other wobble in Maurizio's performance. It occurred toward the end of the evening, just before Antonella left.
Signora Docci mooted the theory that Federico's murder of Flora and her lover, enshrined in the garden, had acted as some kind of curse on the family, coloring the fortunes of the villa's occupants, consigning the Doccis to centuries of ill luck, violence and tragedy.
Her words cast a momentary pall over Maurizio's features, a sadness tinged with a telling self-pity. 'That's very interesting,' he said.
Chiara threw her husband a curious look and said in Italian, 'Since when are you superstitious?'
Since the moment it exonerated him of his own crime, thought Adam; since the moment it allowed him to view himself as a victim of some grander design set in motion by a murderous ancestor. Maurizio had leapt too readily at his mother's wild theory. That had been his mistake, and it shored up Adam's flagging suspicions.
Only as Antonella was leaving did Adam realize he'd paid her hardly any attention. She'd gone to a lot of effort to make the meal a special occasion, buying two magnificent fish, which Maria had cooked to perfection, and he had barely acknowledged the fact. Worst of all, he wouldn't be seeing her again until the party. No one would. Something had come up at work. She hoped to get away early on Friday if at all possible, but she couldn't promise she'd appear much before the first guests arrived. These were about her last words before she disappeared into the night.
Maurizio and Chiara followed suit soon after. Adam noted that they stopped and kissed each other as they made their way across the parterre. When Signora Docci announced that she too was ready for bed, Harry told her to wait a moment, he had something for her. He disappeared inside the villa, promptly returning with his scuffed leather shoulder bag. From it he produced something wrapped in a paint-bespattered piece of cloth. He laid the object carefully, almost reverently, on the table in front of him. It was about a foot long, not too thick—like a slender log.
'I was going to give it to Adam. But it's for you, a thank you. If you don't like it, give it to Adam. And if he doesn't like it. . . well, I'll shoot myself.' He let out a nervous laugh.
That's when Adam realized that one of Harry's own creations lay swaddled in the old rag. Maybe he should have guessed sooner, but he'd never seen anything by Harry on this scale. All the other works had been at least three or four times the size, considerably more in the case of the 'giant mechanical penis.'
This moniker, coined in relative innocence by Adam, had almost brought the two of them to blows right there in the Bath Academy sculpture studio at Corsham during Adam's one and only visit. Welded together from 'recovered pieces'—Harry's fancy phrase for scrap metal—the work in question was part building, part machine, and, in Adam's firm opinion, blatantly phallic.
For a horrible moment it occurred to Adam that the thing on the table, the thing about to be unveiled by Harry and handed to Signora Docci, might actually be a maquette for the same sculpture, a preparatory 'sketch' in miniature.
It wasn't. It was the first figurative piece by Harry that Adam had ever seen. And it was good. He knew it was good the moment he set eyes on it, because his very first thought was that it had almost been his, and now it never would be, not unless Signora Docci didn't like it. But he could see in her eyes that she did.
It was a creature, almost a man, but not quite. Mounted on a slate base, it had long spindly legs of welded steel that climbed to a thick barrel chest, redolent of an insect's thorax. There was no skin as such, just an irregular mesh of slender steel struts, each no thicker than a matchstick, which reached to the heart of the creature, leaving you in no doubt that it had been built from the inside out. The head consisted of two shapeless steel protrusions. The arms, like the legs, were skeletally thin, and were raised above this stumpy nonhead and crossed at the wrists.
Somehow, the little insect-man was both robust and delicate, noble yet fragile, brave yet cowardly.
'It's made of mild steel. Do you like it?' Harry asked tentatively.
'Am I allowed to like him?' replied Signora Docci. 'I want to, but I'm not sure he wants me to.'
Harry beamed, happy with her reply. His head crept around to Adam.
'Well done.'
'Really?'
'Harry . . . really.'
Signora Docci held the sculpture up to the candlelight. 'He's so sure of himself but so frightened.' She paused. 'I see Mussolini at the end, before they strung him up with piano wire in Piazzale Loreto.'
'That's good,' said Harry.
'Maybe it's the way the arms are crossed above the head, but I see you and me in the Anderson shelter down the end of the garden in Kennington when the bombs were coming down.'
'That's good too,' said Harry.
