Siena
The weather had favoured them so far. Sunny autumn days, warmer days than many an English summer, and they had drifted up and down cobbled streets, without faction or acrimony.
Rod had been pleasantly surprised to find his children still not averse to culture after several days of exposure. They had listened patiently while he explained the frescoes in the Sala dei Nove at the Palazzo Pubblico, the allegories of good and bad government, meat and drink to a politician—which he described as “refreshingly secular, not a Madonna and bambino in sight” without any of his children sniggering.
And they had wandered around the Duomo in awe of the Tuscan blue-starred ceiling, baffled by the marble floor panels, until Rod had told the story of the Sybil—how Tarquinius Superbus did one of the worst deals in the history of the second-hand book trade, letting the Sybil burn six of the nine before he finally stumped up the money.
“So she’s a pagan myth, right, Dad?” Nattie asked. “In a Christian church?”
He floundered a little at this.
“I suppose she is.”
Troy came to his rescue.
“She’s a myth, the books were real.”
“They were?”
“Mentioned by Tacitus in his Annals. How Augustus scoured the empire to reconstruct the text. Finally lost forever in the fifth century.”
But, at last, as they all knew she would, Sasha spoke up—just as they were leaving, stepping into the Piazza del Duomo as the afternoon sun faded and beat her in a contest to bring a chill to the air.
She pointed at the statues of Romulus and Remus that framed the space, as they did so many of Siena’s public piazze.
“OK, smarty-pants. Explain this. All these kids and all these bloody wolves. I’ve never seen so many babes sucking on wolf tit in my life. I ask you … one or two statues? … wouldn’t be in bad taste perhaps … but a suckling wolf on every street corner? I don’t know about you, but I am frescoed out and I am titted out!”
“Oh God,” Rod sighed. “She’s off again.”
“I’ve bumbled around enough for one day,” Sasha was saying. “You can have too much of a good thing. Certainly too much fresco and too much tit. I’m going to put me feet up. One of you pick a decent restaurant and let me know when dinner’s up.”
The gender divide divided. In less than a minute the three men, Rod, Alex, and Troy, found themselves alone.
“Was it something I said?” said Rod.
“It’s nothing,” said Troy. “Di niente. Let’s find a bar on the Campo and watch a blue sunset. There are things I need to tell you, and Alex is a journalist …”
“Yep,” said Alex simply.
“… So nosiness is second nature to him.”
At the top of the Campo’s fan-shaped slope Rod seemed to be searching for something, looking at tables, then turning around to check the view over the Torre del Mangia.
“What’s up?”
“The old man brought me here when I was thirteen. Blowed if I can remember where we sat.”
“I can.”
“You weren’t here.”
“No. But I came with him in ‘39. And we sat there, one rib of the fan and two bars over.”
Troy pointed to an empty table. Rod stood in front of it.
“Y’know, I think you’re right. OK, let’s get a waiter and a bottle of Brunello over, and hope we don’t get one of those blokes who insists you have to eat beef with it, because I’m going to drink it neat.”
So they did.
As Rod poured himself seconds, as Troy stared at the cobalt sky above the palazzo, the moment arrived.
“You’re not up to anything, are you? Either of you?”
“Not with you there, Freddie. Explain.”
“Alex, you’re not investigating anything … shall we say … dodgy in your cub reporter’s outfit?”
“No. I’m lucky if I get to cover a jumble sale in Primrose Hill.”
“Rod?”
“Such as?”
“Have you been assigned a bodyguard?”
“Now you’re just being silly. Bodyguard? No member of the opposition gets a bodyguard. If Macmillan called an election they’d assign a Special Branch bloke to Gaitskell, but only to Gaitskell. Who cares if the rest of the shadow cabinet gets shot before the votes are counted? Why are you asking daft questions?”
“Because we’re being followed.”
“What?”
“I spotted him in Paris. Wasn’t wholly certain, but as we sat on the stone bench at the Porta Romana yesterday, he passed by on the far side. An old trick. Get ahead of the person you’re following. When we passed the Ospedale Psichiatrico, on the way back into town, he was just inside the gate. He gave us about thirty paces and then resumed tailing.”
“I don’t fucking believe this!”
“Then try harder.”
“If we’re being followed, then where is this bloke now? The Campo’s deserted. We’re the only customers at this bar and I doubt there’s more than a dozen drinking at all the other bars put together.”
“I don’t know. I last saw him near the Duomo just before we went in. He won’t be far away. There’s a dozen alleys leading off in every direction. He could be watching us from any one of them, and we wouldn’t be able to see him.”
Alex intervened, “Dad, there’s nothing preposterous in what Freddie’s saying.”
“On the contrary, it’s cloak-and-dagger bollocks.”
“But,” Alex went on, “he won’t be following me. So which of you two is it?”
“I don’t know that either,” said Troy. “But I’ll find out.”
“How?” said Rod.
“I’ll take a walk after dinner. If he follows me, then it’s me. If he doesn’t, it’s you.”
Rod’s exasperation showed in the vigour with which he beckoned the waiter and ordered a second bottle, and the scarcely audible repetition of “I don’t fucking believe this.”
Alex said, “In 1939? Wasn’t there a war on?”
Troy admired the boy’s tact, switching back to the ever-present subject, his grandfather and namesake, Alex Troy.
“It hadn’t got far. Poland was a battlefield. France was still safe, and Italy still neutral. We were, I found out on this very spot, on our way to Rome to meet Mussolini. I think your grandfather saw himself as the fixer who might persuade him to stay out of the war. Probably futile, but we never got there.”
With another glass in his hand, Rod began to mellow.
“That was our dad. The fixer. The man for all seasons. The Sybil.”
“Eh? The Sybil?”
“He sat where I’m sitting now and prophesied. 1921. The first war had been over less than three years. A Europe desperate for peace, and he sat here and told me, a spotty thirteen-year-old, to think of it as a cricket match.”
“Eh?” said Alex again.
“Peace as a cricket match played in an English village over a long summer weekend. Sooner or later rain would stop play.”
“And you think I’m a cynic,” Troy said.