The Blue Last

was something to catch Melrose’s interest! Once inside with their tickets, they appeared to be the only torture enthusiasts, for they saw no one else in the first room, where they stopped before an exhibit of a kind of iron headpiece, fashioned so as to fit over the head and keep the mouth shut. Women who passed their time in gossip paid heavily for it.

In the next, where the relics really got going, a young lad of perhaps ten or eleven was walking about with a gelato, and Melrose wondered how he’d ever got the dripping cone in here. The boy was standing before the iron maiden, licking the ice cream with fervor.

As Trueblood peeled away and walked pretty much in a trance around the various rooms, Melrose followed the boy. He liked the manner in which the lad could counterfeit the effects of each device. The iron maiden had him pressing his fingers against his chest, distorting his face in pain and emitting low-key shrieks as the spikes penetrated his flesh. Before the neck clamp (another original cure for women with loose lips), the boy turned his hands backward (having finished his ice cream), clutched his neck and stuck out his tongue. A couple of exhibits later in front of what looked like an electric chair, he went rigid, holding out his arms and giving a few quick shivers. Next, to simulate the effect of one’s torso being trapped in the metal box while one’s limbs were being severed, he bent in half and applied an imaginary saw to his arm, scraping it back and forth. The knives, the clubs, the swords, the chains, the pickaxes all fell to his interpretation.

This kid was in love with pain, thought Melrose. Where were his parents? In the cellar, bound and gagged? The museum was quite entertaining, really, and he wondered the owner didn’t charge more. At the entrance was a sign that explained this was a private collection. Children weren’t allowed as the displays might be too harrowing for them. Harrowed was what this boy was not. The exhibit finished, Melrose and the boy found themselves at the exit.

Trueblood had ambled out and Melrose saw two adults and a girl, all looking harassed and irritated. The boy’s mum and dad and sister, it would appear.

The boy had emerged and the mother was extremely quarrelsome: “Gerald! I told you not to go in there! What were you doing?”

Americans. Did that explain it?

“Nothing. It was boring.”

The family turned and walked away. But for one sumptuous moment, the boy looked back over his shoulder at Melrose and winked.

“What we should do,” said Trueblood, when they were back on the road, “is divide up Long Pidd into contrade.” He had purchased a little guide to Siena and was reading from it.

“Suits me, as long as Theo Wrenn Browne and Agatha aren’t in mine.”

Trueblood slewed a look at him. “Don’t you know anything about around here?”

“I know the medieval cure for gossip.”

Trueblood grunted. “Well, contrade are something like tribes. In Siena there are seventeen. This division of neighborhoods is as old as the Tuscan hills apparently.”

“What’s so great about that? There are at least that many in London: there’s Chelsea, Battersea, Knightsbridge-”

“No, no, no. It’s not the same at all. Those are just geographic; those are postal zones. These are neighborhoods that are very tight,” he said clutching himself, making Melrose think he had a lot in common with the boy back there. “People are very loyal to them, they’ve got their own flag, their particular emblem-like a goose or an elephant-and they’re extremely competitive.”

Siena sat on its hill, looking down at them at dusk, full of little lights bathed in mist, a city small, earthy and beautiful.

Dark quickly overtook dusk after they’d left the car again in a car park and climbed up steps and down steps and up again. A soft rain fell, more mist than rain, as they made their way along the Via Di Stalloreggi toward the Duomo. Every once in a while, Trueblood would stop and scrutinize the city map, then nod and continue.

“We’re looking for the Via Del Poggio,” he said. Trueblood pointed at a plaque. “See?”

Melrose made out what appeared to be a turtle. “So this is the turtle contrada?”

“I don’t think that’s the way they refer to it.”

They found the Via Del Poggio. Over one door was a small flag. “That,” said Trueblood, “identifies it, too. And there’s the plaque, see?” This door opened and as quickly closed. In this flurry of light, Melrose made out another turtle.

“Here’s Di Bada’s house!”

“Good. It’s getting cold. But if he’s one of your true foremost authorities or leading experts, he probably will not be offering drinks.”

“What’re you talking about?” asked Trueblood, raising the small brass door knocker.

Melrose shrugged. “I don’t know.”

But he did when the gentleman he supposed to be the one they’d come to see opened the door and peered out over the tops of his glasses (which had ridden down his nose), and squinched his eyes as if blinking in an unaccustomed light and as if the light were out here instead of in there. If Aldo Luzi had been erudition’s antithesis, Pietro di Bada was its crowning glory, the very definition of scholar. If symbols could walk! Here was a cherub of a man, quite old and round shouldered, the shoulders covered with a shawl.

Trueblood bowed slightly and said, “Signore di Bada? Professor di Bada? I’m Marshall Trueblood, and this is Mr. Plant-”

“Non capisco, non capisco.” The old man waved Trueblood’s words away, looking irritated that he had been sucked to the door by some fool who couldn’t even speak the language.

Trueblood tried again. Pointing to him, he asked, “Signore Pietro di Bada?”

“Si, si.”

Ah, they were getting somewhere! “Signore Aldo Luzi was supposed to have called you and explained that we were-”

“Parli lentamente!” Signore di Bada exclaimed, annoyed at being kept in the cold doorway.

Trueblood looked at Melrose, and they both shrugged.

“The phrase book,” said Melrose pointing to Trueblood’s pocket. “It’s some command to speak something. Inuit? Senegalese? Who the hell knows?”

“I found it, I found it! ‘Slowly.’ We’re to speak slowly.” Trueblood cleared his throat and with contorted mouth said, “Aldo Luzi. He. Said. You. Were. The. Leading. Au-thor-i-ty on Mas-ac-ci-o.”

“For once he’s right. Come.” His outstretched arm ushered them in.

Melrose said, stupidly (he later realized), “Parla inglese?” It was one of his overworked phrases, and he hoped it wasn’t Spanish.

“Speak English? It is obvious, is not? Why you two speaking Italian?” Di Bada started laughing fit to kill, as if putting one over on them was what he’d been waiting to do all day. He waved them in, still laughing. It was a gasping sort of laugh, a mildly snorting laugh, somewhere between gasp and hiccup.

This little charade didn’t fit the “foremost authority” picture at all. For such a person, humor would be dry, reflective, ironic. Wit, trenchant. However, the milieu reinforced Melrose’s picture: books and papers everywhere, light from a green-shaded desk lamp pooling on the scuffed wood of the desk and beaten-up Oriental rug.

Signore di Bada wrestled a couple of straight-backed chairs free of encumbrance, sending a stack of journals and assorted papers spilling to the floor. “Sit, sit.” He waved them down, neither of them able to put his feet on anything but papers and journals. Melrose scraped some of the papers together and held them out to Di Bada, who said “Grazie.”

“Prego,” returned Melrose.

Di Bada laughed again. He was, apparently, still jubilant over his little practical joke. “Mi scusi.” He wiped the tears from his eyes and blew his nose on a handkerchief roughly the size of Northamptonshire, which he then bunched and jammed into his pocket. “So! Luzi said you wanted help about a painting you think is of Masaccio? It isn’t, but let’s have a look.” While Trueblood carefully unwrapped the painting, Di Bada asked Melrose, “You been to Siena before? No,” he answered himself. “You like Firenze? Si, si, Firenze, who would not love it? I tell you who. We, the Sienese! I tell you a little story about the Black Death, is very funny.”