The Painted Altar

Chapter Nineteen

It came as a relief when the bustle and noise gave way to the relative calm of the riverside. The necklace of streetlights lay fractured and  gently bobbing in the southward-flowing water, the river's source located somewhere amidst the peaks which had once more re-emerged to our right, their height and steepness discernable by the faint scattered lights of the mountain villages.

"Just over this bridge," Lucio indicated, once more checking the map.

As we stepped out across the street, he began to outline his strategy.

A plan, yes. I hadn't thought to consider one myself. Like a foot soldier who had complete faith in her general, I'd just somehow known that  he would have come up with one.

*

The building was river-facing, a five-storey affair. Old, seventeenth century perhaps, its age evident in the slight crookedness - its lines on close inspection not quite straight, its angles not precisely ninety degrees. The place was well-maintained though, its facade like many of its neighbours washed an earthy terracotta shade. A dwelling place of the city's well-to-do, its doctors and lawyers and academics.

Its retired art restorers...

Lo Bianco's name was the uppermost on the elegant brass intercom list beside the entrance door.

"Must live on the top floor," concluded Lucio.

It wasn't Lo Bianco's button he then pressed index finger to however, but some randomly selected other.

"Out," he concluded, half a minute having ticked by without response.

His second selection was more successful, the hiss of the picked up receiver almost immediate.

"Chi e'?" croaked an elderly female voice. Who is it?

"Pubblicita'" responded Lucio, the pretence that he was delivering advertising material which needed to be deposited in each of the hallway letterboxes the first part of his plan.

There was a dutiful electronic twitch, the door squeaking invitingly open before us.

"We're in," nodded Lucio encouringly, a hand indicating that I step through first. As I did so, the tension began to manifest itself as a firm, steady thud of my heart. Just one doorway left now to breach. One final obstacle to overcome and the story would reach its conclusion. Ettore Lo Bianco, the man who had craned neck to that altar wall beside my father, mixed colours, blocked out bases. Who had been there right next to him all the way through, from the provincial barracks in Lecce to the battle of Tobruk, on then to Kenya, finally England... Surely he would know whose bones they were which had been dug up from the Lincolnshire soil. Whatever manner of fate it was which had befallen my father.

The entrance hall was neat, high-toned, its floor a chessboard of worn red and beige stones. A lemon tree in an earthenware pot stood centrally, its fruits still to yellow. Along one wall was a row of black letterboxes; judging from the cluttered overspill of mail and advertising material, a couple of the residents were away - off on early-season holidays perhaps. Lo Bianco's box, however, was empty.

Thankfully, there was a lift - one of those open affairs with clanky folding iron doors. The shaft some late-nineteenth century structural modification, clearly.

The upwards journey was rickety and juddering, the restricted space causing Lucio and I on a couple of occasions to bump into each other like rag dolls whirling around a washing machine. At one point my nose  padded against his chest, the unbuttoned section of his sleeveless shirt beneath throat. There was the soapiness of his recent shower, yes, but also some spicy undertone. A faint hint of alluring Mediterrannean zest.