Free A Rich Full Death by Michael Dibdin Page A

Privilege and Will: these grim memorials to the mighty Dead, who so terribly outnumber—outeverything!—us.
    The streets, glimpsed from my window, presented a prospect which was uninviting in the extreme. The rain had turned hard and punchy, coming down in squally showers beaten into every corner by a nasty wind which roamed the streets like a mob in search of victims. It found few enough, for sensible folk stayed at home, and listened to it howling in the chimney. But I could not, alas, and so, bundled up in every protection against the elements I could lay my hands on, I set off across town towards the Ponte Vecchio.
    Having noted that Mr Browning is extremely particular about punctuality, I had taken care to pay him the politeness of kings myself, and was therefore both surprised and mildly annoyed when Aere was no sign of him by the time the nearby churches had finished ringing nine o’clock. I was still puzzling over his non-appearance when my attention was drawn by a crowd of men in the standard Florentine garb of slouch hats, short cloaks and cigars, clustered around a doorway to my right.
    As Mr Jarves has said, Florence is a city where you may see ten men watching an eleventh buy two oranges from a street-trader with a degree of lively interest which an American crowd might bestow upon one of Mr Barnum’s raree-shows. But the natives’ aversion to foul weather is even more marked than their curiosity, and for a crowd to collect on such a day as that the spectacle, I felt, must possess some greater intrinsic interest than orange-trading. After another five minutes’ fruitless wait, I therefore walked over to investigate.
    When I reached the fringes of the crowd I heard my name called, looked up—for the voice had come from above—and found Robert Browning waving at me from a window of the house before which the onlookers had gathered. The next moment he disappeared, but I shouldered my way through the crowd, which parted reluctantly to let me through, and when I reached the doorway Browning was there to lead me past the police constable on guard into the dry empty echoing spaces of the vestibule.
    His eyes glittered with a hard intense brilliance.
    ‘It is all over!’ he hissed excitedly. ‘Come!’
    We mounted the shallow slab-like steps to the first floor, three at a time. I asked what had happened, but my companion would say only that he wished me to see for myself.
    Another policeman guarded the door to DeVere’s apartments, and once again Browning’s word was enough to gain us entrance, and I could not help remarking on this astonishing volte-face in the authorities’ attitude to my companion. A few days before he had been the object of a police interrogation, his house was watched and he himself followed by a police agent — for all the world like a man under suspicion. Yet here he was, a foreigner with no official standing, ordering the local constables about like one of their own officers! How on earth had he effected this miraculous transformation?
    ‘Commissioner Talenti has pestered me no more since I called his bluff by challenging that ruffian in Doney’s—he wouldn’t dare!’ Browning explained. ‘As for my status here, it is the result of a little bluffing of my own. I was on my way to keep our appointment when I noticed the crowd outside the house. The police had just been called, but by feigning to be a friend of DeVere’s I was able to gain entrance on the pretext of representing his interests until an official from the embassy arrives.
    He is expected at any moment. But there is just time, I hope, for you to see what there is to be seen.’
    We had entered the main room, a noble salon overlooking the river. Now when I say ‘the river’, you are not to imagine some stately body of calmly-proceeding water such as the Thames, the Seine, or for that matter our own Charles. The Arno is quite another type of beast: a moody Latin, either thrashing about in spate and threatening to