Secrecy - By Rupert Thomson Page 0,9

and his mouth curved downwards. ‘I’m a jester,’ he said. ‘A jester. Well, I used to be.’

Barefoot, he crossed the room and looked through a window that was covered on the outside by a rusting iron grille. We were so high up that only the sky was visible. All the asperity left him, and when he spoke again he sounded pensive, nostalgic.

‘There was a time,’ he said, ‘when I owned more than a hundred costumes. I needed an entire room just for my costumes. Can you imagine? But we’re living in an age of austerity now, and there’s no place for people like me. Jesters are frivolous. Redundant.’

‘But I’ve seen them,’ I said, ‘in the market-place –’

Cuif snorted. ‘Those fools haven’t realized it’s over. What do you do?’

‘I’m a sculptor.’

‘So you’re probably redundant as well.’ He seemed to hope this was true.

‘No, not really.’

‘Why? Is your work popular?’ He gave the last word a scathing twist.

‘I’m interested in corruption and decay.’

‘Oh, that’s all right, then,’ he said bitterly. ‘You’ll probably go far.’

I looked around. He had two rooms, both of which were narrow, with scabby, mouse-grey walls. The room I was standing in was bare except for a strip of matting. On a shelf near the window were half a dozen books that leaned haphazardly against each other like men who had been drinking for a long time and were now very tired.

Without any warning, the small and seemingly ageless Frenchman sprang into the centre of the room. ‘Would you like to see a somersault?’

‘By all means.’

He stood before me, feet together, hands pressed against the outside of his thighs. His face was drained of all expression. He took a quick breath, his birdcage of a chest expanding. Suddenly his head was inches from the floor, and his legs, bent at the knee, were on a level with my face. This was so unexpected that I laughed out loud. Somehow, he managed to hold the position for a moment. Upside-down. In mid-air. When he landed, puffs of dust swirled around his ankles, as if he had been performing underwater, on the seabed, and had disturbed the sediment. He threw his arms out sideways, and his mouth split open in a theatrical grin, revealing teeth that were long and ridged, like a donkey’s.

While I was still applauding, his grin faded. ‘I didn’t get that quite right,’ he muttered.

‘It was wonderful.’

He shook his head, then winced. ‘I think I hurt myself.’ He sat down on the floor and rubbed his right knee. In the window, the sky was beginning to change colour.

‘I should go,’ I said.

He climbed slowly to his feet. ‘Don’t tell anyone you were here.’

‘All right, I won’t.’

I moved across the room. At the door, though, I turned back. ‘You’re Cuif,’ I said.

‘Correct.’

‘I’m Zummo.’

‘You live here?’

‘For now.’

‘You may visit me again.’

I closed the door behind me. The light spilling through the scuttle where the landing ended was a sticky cobweb-grey. As I walked back to the head of the stairs, I was struck by the grandness of the Frenchman’s words, and the plea lying just beneath.

I hadn’t been entirely honest with the Grand Duke. In fact, I hadn’t been honest at all. Though it was true that Siracusa was idyllic, my childhood and adolescence had been anything but, and in the end, only a few weeks before my twentieth birthday, I had made my escape. With every mile I travelled, my heart seemed to diminish, as if it were not blood or muscle but a ball of scarlet wool unravelling. I had been driven from the place I loved, the people I most cared for. I kept thinking I heard footsteps behind me. Voices. My neck ached from looking over my shoulder. I was frightened, but I was also furious. Furious because my life was about to change for ever. Furious because no one had defended me. Furious most of all because I was innocent.

My brother, Jacopo, had taken against me from the very beginning. Seven years older than me, he was tall, fair-haired, and athletic – less like a brother than a reverse image. With my olive complexion and my dark-brown curls, I was always told I resembled my father’s father, who had been a cloth merchant in the south of Spain – like most surnames that begin with Z, Zummo was probably Arabic in origin – but Jacopo had inherited my mother’s looks. Her parents, both light-skinned, had been born in the Piedmont.

One of my earliest memories was