The Painted Altar

Chapter Nineteen

Plot reminder: Mary and Lucio have travelled to Verona in the hope of speaking to Ettore Lo Bianco, who was Vincenzo D'Ambra's closest wartime friend. Over the phone the previous evening the old man had mysteriously refused to broach the subject of his wartime experiences and hung up.
During their long journey north, Lucio recounted to Mary how his pregnant wife had died while attempting to save a drowning child from the sea.

~~~~~

It was a little past eight o'clock that we checked in at our hotel; a little before nine that, freshly showered and changed, I scuffed sandals along the corridor and rapped a knuckle against Lucio's door, this three down from my own. He appeared almost immediately, as if he'd been awaiting my knock. His hair was damp, the curls more tightly coiled, the usual striking silver darkened to an ironlike tone. His image seemed both familiar yet at the same time somehow modified, like a photograph of oneself taken from an angle inaccessible to the flat reflective stare of a mirror. Such a subtle adjustment of aspect had perhaps less to do with the fact that only minutes earlier he'd stepped out of the shower, and more that I was viewing him through a new filter, some delicate shift of chromatic shade. No longer just Lucio, that erudite knight in shining armour who'd dragged me across three of Italy's three corners in search of truth and justice - in search of myself - but a widower whose wife and unborn child had been so cruelly snatched from him. Who still, more than three decades later, hadn't yet quite come to terms with his loss. Of course he now seemed different - his dimensions deeper, the downcast shade of facial contours somehow longer, darker. How could it have been otherwise?

"Fifteen minutes Mary," he eagerly informed me, brandishing the same complimentary city map which had featured amongst the tourist leaflets piled atop the bedside cabinet in my own room. "Lo Bianco's address, I calculate it is only a fifteen-minute walk from here." A biro point had been at work -  a firm, jiggering line curving between one x and another, this second adjacent to the snaking blue stripe of the river.

As I briefly perused our route, I could feel his inquisitive gaze upon me.

"Unless of course you would prefer to wait until tomorrow."

I looked back at him: decisive, determined.

"No," I replied. "No, we must go there tonight."

*

As the lift beeped the end of its short downward journey moments later, the sliding doors revealing the marbled, plant-strewn elegance of the hotel foyer, I could feel the tension build in my stomach. Could feel it like a fist tightly clenched around my insides. Somehow, I just knew. Tonight was going to be one of the most fundamental, the most soul-shaking, of my entire damned existence.

As we passed through Piazza Bra I would of course pause for a some moments before the majesy of the uplit Arena - a smaller but much less crumbled cousin of Rome's Colisseum - but it was mostly out of a sense of duty that I did so, my gaze cursory, my words of appreciation as automatic as some banal social pleasantry. A simple act of politeness, that was all, like being ushered into an acquaintance's front room and remarking on the antique mahogany dining table.

As for Verona's numerous other treasures -  the ancient Ponte Pietra bridge, Piazza Dell'Erbe, the Capulet house and its iconic balcony - all that could wait, indefinitely so if necessary. Now that I was there, so close, my sense of urgency had become all-consuming. What did Ettore Lo Bianco know about that tragic night of September 1943? What was he trying conceal? And perhaps just as significantly, why?

His map every so often tilted towards overhead streetlight, Lucio steered us eastwards through the milling Friday evening crowds, along stone-paved sreets, beneath the renaissance-era frescos which adorned the cramped groaning buildings to either side. A boisterous early-summer procession of bars and pizzerias and ice-cream shops.