14. Three in the Morning #2
Florence is below the cliff, beginning its morning without us. Dr. Ferrante will be at his hotel. He left with his folder and his flagged note. And a certificate that needed one more question answered before it was complete.
Lorenzo Jr. is somewhere in the villa. If I had to place him, I would say the sketchbook.
The Florentine family, whichever of the three names is right, is somewhere in this city.
One of those names has banking history, offices on Via dei Bardi, a house that went quiet in 1974.
Whether that matters to the Strozzi or only to the archival record is a question I cannot answer from a hotel phone at dawn.
The archivist may know. Dr. Ferrante may know. I will ask at nine.
Somewhere in a life that has nothing to do with ateliers or authentication or cedar cases, the Medici lineage continues in a person whose name I do not know.
The documentation Dr. Ferrante certified is genuine.
Whether anyone beyond Dr. Ferrante and this family cares about that documentation is the open question.
The lineage is real. The heir exists. When the press piece runs, that person may surface, or may not. The three names from the journal will clarify, or they will not. I have questions for the archivist and no answers yet.
That is what I added to the archivist brief at four in the morning. The third name. The banking house. What they held and what they may still hold.
Vittoria Moretti is somewhere. The press strategy is revised and waiting.
The ex-wife's lawyer is unanswered for three days and will be answered before Teterboro.
The work is real and it is not finished and it will be there at nine o'clock and at the February show and in every month between now and then.
The color is coming over the cliff now, filling the room from the top down, the way light enters a room that was built to receive it from exactly this angle, by a man who understood that some things are worth building toward in advance. I stay awake and watch it arrive.
Max, The Wrong Turn
She wakes at seven. The villa wakes around her. By eight the kitchen has coffee and Lorenzo Jr. is at the worktable with the cedar case. By nine I am on the call.
The archivist call ends at ten past nine. One name is right. The third one, as the banking history suggested. Marchesi, Banco Ombroso, dormant since 1974, documents on Via dei Bardi. Clean confirmation. Dr. Ferrante’s flag has a name on it now.
Lorenzo Jr. is in the great room with his sketchbook and the cedar case, two more days of cataloguing ahead of him. He does not need either of us today.
Alex is at the kitchen counter looking at a paper map. Not her phone. A creased paper map of Tuscany with a coffee ring on the corner.
“Where did that come from.”
“Drawer.” She does not look up. “It was in a drawer.”
“Where are we going.”
“South.” She folds the map and puts it in her coat pocket. “I do not know which is south.”
The look she gives me is not the one she carries in rooms. Closer to the one she had at the auction house, the night she put her coffee down and crossed to Vittoria. Decisive. Slightly amused with herself for the decision.
“We are going where the road goes,” she says. “Whichever turn looks correct. You may trust me or you may bring your own map.”
“My phone has a map.”
“Your phone is staying at the villa.”
She holds out her hand. After a moment, the phone goes into it. She walks it to the entry table, sets it face down beside Lorenzo Jr.’s keys, and comes back without it.
The car is the Giulia Quadrifoglio. Sangiovese red, four doors, the Quadrifoglio badge on the front fender small enough that anyone who does not know what to look for sees a sedan.
Anyone who does sees something else. Kept warm in the villa garage since I do not know when, serviced and waiting for a Strozzi who needed it.
“You are not driving,” I say.
“No.”
Alex hands me the keys and settles into the passenger seat with the paper map open on her lap.
“All right.”
The engine starts and announces what it is in the first quarter-second: a 2.9 liter twin-turbo V6 that wants to do more than any road in this region will permit. Recalibration takes a moment.
She watches me recalibrate with what I can only describe as patience.
The villa is behind us in eleven minutes. The road climbs and drops and climbs again. The hills are doing what Tuscan hills do in November: bare oaks against dark cypress, the vineyards stripped after harvest, the air going cold an hour earlier than it would have a month ago.
Forty minutes south of Florence she points at a turn the map does not show. The Quadrifoglio takes it before the inspection of whether to take it has finished running.
“That was not the turn.”
“No.”
“You told me to take it.”
“Yes.”
“For a reason.”
“For the reason that it was the wrong turn.” She glances over. “Max. The point was to take the wrong turn.”
“Noted.”
“You are taking notes.”
“Twenty-four years of training me not to take wrong turns. Recalibration takes a moment.”
“Take the moment.”
The road has not yet declared what it is. Stone wall on the left. Vineyard on the right. The light is going amber against the hills and this, demonstrably, is the wrong turn.
The not-minding is the surprise.
We round a curve and the road opens onto a small piazza.
Banners between the buildings. Lanterns being lit in the dark.
A handwritten sign at the entrance: Sagra del Vino Novello.
The new wine festival. Half a Tuscan village in coats already crossing the square toward what is clearly the band setting up on the far side.
A turn into the strip of dirt at the edge. Engine off.
“This was not on the map.”
“No,” she says. “It was. I checked.”
She gets out of the car.
Max, The Dance
The piazza is small. Stone buildings on three sides, the fourth opening to the hill below.
Lanterns strung in three swooping arcs from the bell tower to the bakery roof.
Two chestnut braziers at the entrances throw orange against the cold.
The smell is woodsmoke and grilled bread and something with garlic and porcini.
Perhaps eighty people. Old men in coats and caps, women in scarves and good wool, children running. A boy on the stage tunes an accordion, badly, while a man with a fiddle waits.
No one in this piazza recognizes either of us. The freedom of it is being catalogued before its meaning lands. Then it lands. We are in a room where no one’s opinion needs managing. A long time since any room has done that.
Alex has her hands in her coat pockets, reading the room. Not assessing. Just looking.
“It is happening.”
“What is.”
“The thing where you accept the wine when it is offered.”
A woman with a tray is moving toward us. Small glasses, the new wine, deep ruby and slightly cloudy in the lantern light. Vino novello before it has decided to be more than itself. We take.
She says something fast in a Tuscan that is not the Italian I learned in school. Alex answers with what sounds like complete fluency. The woman laughs and moves on.
“What did she say.”
“That the wine is for drinking, not evaluating, and we should remember the difference.”
The wine is not what was expected. Light, slightly fizzy, tasting of the year. Not of any year, but of this year. A thing wine in a bottle has had taken out of it. This wine has not had it taken out.
The line arrives without permission.
“This is the only wine I have ever had that knew what month it was.”
Alex looks at me. A pause that is its own beat. She does not laugh. Not yet. Something in her face does the thing that happens before a laugh, the real one, the one before the performance of it. She files the line.
“Maxwell,” stunned.
“Alessandra,” stunned.
“What was that.”
“I don’t know.”
She shifts her weight onto one hip and tilts her head slightly, the precise angle she uses when she has decided to investigate something formally.
“You don’t know.”
“It came out of my mouth before clearance for departure.”
“Do that again.”
“Cannot do it on demand.”
“That is exactly what you should never say to a woman who has just heard you make a joke.”
"Yeah. That was a joke."
The reply is still going when an older woman with very white hair and a tremendous wool shawl materializes beside us, takes one of Alex’s hands, takes one of mine, and pulls.
Her grip has the absolute confidence of an authority figure who has not been refused since 1962. Alex says, “Sì, sì,“ yes, yes, and laughs, and we are being walked into the circle of dancers in front of the stage.
The dance is unfamiliar.
Alex does not know it either. She is doing it wrong in the manner of someone who has decided that doing it wrong is the correct strategy.
The circle moves sideways. We move sideways. The accordion does something. The fiddle catches up. A shuffle-step in time with claps that I am missing one beat in three. Alex misses two beats in three and laughs about it.
The circle picks up. Her hand is in mine, then it is not, then it is again two passes later, and the second time she does not let go even when the dance suggests she should. This is, I observe, against the rules.
The accordion lands on something faster. The circle whips. Alex is laughing now, the real one, the one I heard in the seminar nine years ago and not in any room since.
Her hair has come loose. We are dancing badly in a Tuscan village and at some moment I do not catch, the cataloguing has stopped. The doing has begun.
This is what it looks like, then.
The accordion finishes on a flourish. The circle whoops. Alex turns with her hand still in mine and her face flushed from the dance and the cold, and the understanding arrives.
What has been carried for nine years is not a problem managed. It is a person. Standing in front of me. Out of breath.
The man on my left claps me on the shoulder and says something approving in his Tuscan that does not need translating.
Max, Vino Novello
The long table.