The two men were friendly. They smiled and greeted their neighbours when they passed them in the village, though they mostly kept to themselves, as you’d expect foreigners to do. One of them was a painter. He’d set up his easel in the garden or the village or at a picturesque spot in the country and spend the afternoon working on a canvas, and the week before they left they’d make the rounds of the galleries in the larger cities in Tuscany to sell what they could. When he wasn’t painting, they lazed in the sunshine in front of the house sipping cold drinks, took long walks, fished the stream, did some repairs on the house or tended the garden. They didn’t go out much or see many people. Sometimes, not often, a few friends – young, good-looking, jet-set types – might come to spend the day with them, or they’d go clubbing in the city one evening, or perhaps disappear for a day or two to visit one of the many tourist sites in the region.

The locals called them nostri americani. Seven years ago they had bought an old farmhouse next to the river outside Le Bolle, at the end of a valley ten kilometers off the road between Florence and Poggibonsi, and had lived in it six weeks every summer for the last five. The first summer they stayed in a pensione in Florence and drove down every day to work on the place and make it livable. They paid a contractor to finish the job, but when they came back to inspect the house at Christmas they were dissatisfied with what had been done, so the following summer once again they stayed in Florence, driving down every day to supervise the work for a month. Then vans arrived loaded with furniture, appliances, kitchen utensils, tools and garden supplies, books, linens, and so forth. The men spent a few days unpacking and setting up, locked it up for winter, and left for America.

Obviously, these Americans had money. Renovating and furnishing the house must have cost a fortune; they drove a Ferrari convertible and wore expensive clothes when they went to Florence for the evening; the friends they entertained resembled the rich and famous. But what impressed the villagers most was the sum they paid the widower Rinsecchi to watch over the property in their absence. No one knew how much they gave him, only that overnight it seemed the old man had money to burn.

The Brodaglia sisters, Pia and Francesca, had fallen in love with them well before their wealth became common knowledge. They were girls, just twelve and fourteen years old, when they heard that two foreigners had purchased the farm, and curiosity got the better of them and they went to see for themselves. They could hear the rock music before they came in sight of the house. “What do we say to them?” Pia asked.

“Nothing. We just look. You know, like little kids. Or we can ask if they have children our age.”

They had expected to find a family. Instead they saw two men in their mid-twenties hard at work under a blazing sun, sawing planks and hammering them together, dressed only in climbing shorts and tennis shoes. The sweat glistened on their muscled bodies. They waved to the girls to come closer and introduced themselves as Michele and Vincenzo. They gave them lemonade to drink and asked about life in the village. Did they know where the younger set hung out? Was there a dance hall in the village? Were there any better radio stations? Where was the closest cinema? Was the hunting good in the countryside?

The girls went home full of stories about the new friends they had made, but were careful not to tell their parents that the men had been half naked.

“So they speak Italian,” their father said. “That’s nice to know. Don’t you go bothering them, now. From what you tell us, they must be very busy.”

In fact they saw very little of them for the rest of the summer, and then kept their distance the following summer as well, intimidated by the presence of the workmen, who pretended to flirt with them when they went to see what was being done to the house. Not until the moving vans rolled through the village toward the end of summer did their curiosity get the better of them, and they ventured to watch them unload, though they had no way of telling what marvels all those enormous cartons might contain.

Over the winter the sisters pumped anyone who might know something for information on the Americans, though no one had much to tell – Rinsecchi, the owner of the caffè, the grocer, the contractor. They made themselves the local experts on the subject. They learned from the postman that all the letters they received were addressed to them both, Mike and Vinnie Larson. So they were brothers, and had translated their names into Italian for them when they met.

“They don’t look like brothers,” Pia said. Vincenzo was a good five inches shorter than his brother and had a dark complexion. He looked very Italian, while the blond, blue-eyed Michele had Nordic features.

“They could be cousins.”

“No, I think they are brothers. Larson is a Scandinavian name. Maybe they have an Italian mother and Vincenzo inherited her looks. Michele must take must after his father.”

“You’re right. I bet their mother is Italian. They speak the language very well.”

The next summer, shortly after their return, the Americans had a housewarming, one of the rare occasions when they entertained guests. They spent half a day shopping in Florence and returned with provisions to feed an army and enough spirits to drown it. In the evening they set up a pavilion in the garden. Hired servers arrived the next morning with rented tables and chairs, but no caterer. They prepared dinner themselves.

They must have invited about thirty people in all. The guests started arriving at about two o’clock. The villagers watched them drive up the single main street in their shiny sports cars. Some stopped to ask directions in fluent Italian, with or without a foreign accent. They looked like movie stars, young and casually dressed in the latest designer fashions. A few of the women wore outfits that revealed more than was decent, and would have shocked the villagers had they been less awestruck and intimidated.

Francesca and Pia could talk of nothing else all day – the elegant guests in their fancy cars, the pavilion and buffet tables, the uniformed servers.

“There you go again, making a nuisance of yourselves!” their mother exclaimed.

“How are we a nuisance?” Francesca asked. “We passed the farmhouse on our walk. We have eyes.”

“And noses!” Pia added, remember the lovely aromas wafting from the kitchen.

“Noses that well brought-up young ladies don’t go poking into other people’s business.”

“We didn’t bother anybody.”

“You’re bothering me,” their father said, cutting them short. “I’ve heard enough about their party for one day. Show me your invitations and I’ll escort you there myself.”

The party lasted until long after midnight. The dance music, laughter and loud talk carried as far as the village, but the farmhouse was too far away to disturb anyone until the guests had to drive through the village on their way home and the unaccustomed sound of cars in the middle of the night woke people up.

Pia went to the window to see what was happening.

“What is it?” a sleepy Francesca asked from the bed.

“The party’s over. Everybody’s leaving.”

“What time is it?”

“Three in the morning.”

“Good. Michele and Vincenzo will sleep until noon. We can get up early and have a look around.”

“All we’ll see is trampled grass,” Pia said.

Pia was wrong. The pavilion was still up and half-empty wine glasses and plates of half-eaten tiramisù lay scattered on the tables. The girls couldn’t resist having a little taste.

“Mamma would never go to bed without clearing the table after dinner,” Pia said.

“Mamma wouldn’t allow dinner to go on until three in the morning either.”

The sound of an approaching lorry sent them scurrying around the side of the house. The servers had returned to clean up and fetch the chairs and tables back to the rental agency. They started scraping the plates into a trash bin, rinsed them quickly with the garden hose, and packed them away in boxes.

“But they’re still dirty!” Pia whispered.

“Shhh.”

“No, really. Aren’t they going—”

“They’ll wash them at the warehouse. Now be quiet or they’ll hear us.”

“What’s that piece of paper they’re writing on?”

“The inventory. Shhh.”

Michele, barefoot and in pyjama bottoms, stepped out of the door and called, “I’m afraid we broke two wine glasses. Is everything accounted for? Good. I’ll write you a cheque.”

The second he disappeared into the house, the sisters slipped away down the hill to the river, made a wide circle back to the road, and dashed home.

“Where have you been?” their father asked.

“Just out for a little walk,” Francesca said. “It’s such beautiful weather.”

“Without your morning coffee?”

The girls’ close call cured their snooping for a time, but not their fascination with the men they called the fratelli Larson. The villagers always stopped to exchange a few words when they passed their Americans in the street, but Francesca and Pia managed to run into them more often and chatted with them longer. At first their mother had thought nothing of it. Little girls develop crushes. It wouldn’t last; the men never stayed longer than a few weeks. But little girls grow up to be young women, and every summer was the same story. Signora Brodaglia was a widow now, and therefore all the more cautious. Although she trusted her daughters not to do anything improper, she knew that people have tongues and that young women need to watch their step.

“Don’t throw yourselves at them,” she told them. “They’ll take advantage of you.”

As usual, Francesca took on the role of spokesperson. “What makes you think so? They’ve never made a pass at us. They always behave like gentlemen.”

“That they pay you any attention at all is cause for concern. What do rich Americans have in common with you contadine? Their lives are elsewhere. Believe me, men are interested in one thing only – italiani, stranieri, all of them. And these men never go to church.”

“Vincenzo wears a cross,” Pia objected.

“Vincenzo, is it? You should call him the signore. The cross doesn’t make him Catholic. Besides, they’re married.”

“How do you know that?”

“Their wedding rings. Wearing a cross doesn’t mean anything; a wedding ring does.”

“Then why don’t they ever come with their wives?” Francesca asked pointedly.

“All the more reason to distrust them.”

“Mamma has to be right,” Pia told her sister later. “If they have wedding rings, they must be married. Do you know why they never bring their wives?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Their wives would have nothing to do here; they’d be bored. One of them comes for a few weeks to paint, and his brother comes with him. It’s just a hobby. Remember that half-done landscape we saw on the easel outside their house? You don’t really think all that money they have comes from selling paintings!”

Their mother had exaggerated when she reprimanded her daughters for their behaviour. True, everyone in the village knew of their infatuation, but only under the strictest and most traditional standards of etiquette would one call it throwing herself at a man if a young woman said buon giorno to him before he greeted her, and Pia and Francesca were thoroughly modern girls. Although they had grown up in a small, isolated village, they did own a television and they listened to rock music. What’s more, they’d been educated in Florence, at a convent school. To be sure, the sisters kept close watch on them, but Florence is Florence, and girls fifteen and over were allowed out unchaperoned every afternoon for two hours provided they stayed together.

Signora Brodaglia’s assessment of the situation was not unfair, however. While the girls didn’t flirt openly, they spent twice as long grooming themselves and dressed in their prettiest clothes when the Americans were living at the farm, and they made a point of going for a stroll in the village at times they thought they would find them sitting outside the caffè. Only the two Americans seemed not to notice, whether because all American girls behaved that way or in order to hide certain none-too-honest intentions, she couldn’t say.

It wouldn’t have surprised her to learn they harboured a sinister purpose. Both girls were very attractive. The younger sister, Pia, was the prettier, but Francesca’s vivaciousness more than compensated for her lanky, big-boned frame and filly-like gait, and she had bigger breasts. If the men were looking to have a good time... Normally she trusted their better judgment. They were good girls, and dressed modestly. They didn’t even own a pair of jeans. But it seemed they had lost their heads over the Americans.

Signora Brodaglia had no idea how far her daughters had dared go that summer. Only the girls themselves knew what they’d been up to. The year before they had gone to say goodbye to their americani, not knowing they had already left. Poking about the property, they discovered that the men had built an open-air shower in back of the house, enclosed on three sides only.

“Do you think they really use this thing?” Pia asked.

“Why wouldn’t they? I bet if we hid in those bushes across the river we could watch them showering without being seen.”

“Don’t be silly. How would we know when they were going to take a shower?”

“When they’ve been for a long walk or having been working in the garden on a very hot day. We wouldn’t know for sure, but sooner or later we’d catch them at it.”

“Oh, Francesca! You wouldn’t!”

“Wouldn’t I, though? Have you ever seen a man naked?”

“At the museum...”

“I haven’t either. I’m sure Michele is as handsome as the David. Let’s wade across the stream and see.”

They took off their shoes, hoisted up their skirts, and crossed to the other side.

“It’s too far,” Pia said, “just as I expected.”

“I don’t think so. Wait here and I’ll go back to the house and pretend I’m taking a shower.”

Francesca went back to the shower stall and pretended to wash herself, turning round and round. She opened her blouse, held her breasts in her hands and bounced them up and down. She even lifted her skirt as if she were flashing her sister. Then she waved and signaled her to come.

“Well, how much could you see?”

“Less than I thought I would. We’ll need binoculars.”

“Then we’ll buy some.”

“You must be crazy! What will we tell Mamma when she asks us to explain why we need binoculars?”

“They’re for watching birds, of course.”

“And when did we suddenly become birdwatchers?”

“Just now, or the next time we’re in Florence. I’ll buy a book all about birds, one of those birdwatchers’ guides. We can say we got the idea from Leonora.”

“Leonora doesn’t watch birds. She watches boys.”

“So? Isn’t that what we’re going to do?”

They got their mother’s permission to spend a couple of days in Florence to go Christmas shopping. They’d stay with their school friend Leonora. Signora Brodaglia remembered her as an angelic little girl who had come to visit for the weekend two or three times many years before. The sisters took a change of clothes which they didn’t wear. They had a large box of cosmetics and a whole wardrobe stashed at Leonora’s flat – stylish handbags, jeans, jean jackets, halter tops, mini-skirts, and leather boots that came up to their knees. They got into them as soon as they arrived and went with Leonora to look for gifts.

They stopped at the bookshop first. Francesca took down a pocket-sized volume of colour photographs called Uccelli Europei and began leafing through it. “What do you want that for?” Leonora asked.

They explained their plan. They’d been telling her about their dreamboat Americans for years.

“You’ll have to take photos,” Leonora said. “I’ve been dying to see what they look like.”

“But we’d need to buy an expensive camera with a zoom lens!”

“You can borrow mine. To take pictures of birds.” She winked.

“We’d have to have them sent out to be developed in Le Bolle,” Pia objected.

“Fine. Now let’s go shopping for binoculars.”

They hadn’t expected a good pair of binoculars would cost so much. “Have you anything less expensive?” Francesca asked the shopkeeper.

“Were you thinking more in the line of opera glasses?”

They looked at Leonora. She shook her head no.

“They’re just for watching birds,” Pia explained.

“Oh, but then you’ll need the very best. You want to see everything, don’t you?”

The sisters didn’t know what to say. They did want to see everything.

“They’re just beginning,” Leonora said. “All they need is something halfway decent. They aren’t going to count the feathers. Here, let me choose.”

She tried a few pair by looking through the storefront across the piazza. “These will do.”

Her friends’ eyes bulged when they saw the price. They still had to buy gifts for mamma, one from each of them; also something for Leonora, and for each other as well. They wouldn’t have enough left to pay for a disco that night.

“I’ll make that my Christmas gift,” Leonora said.

Before her friends left Florence, Leonora again offered to lend them her camera. “I won’t believe you unless you have something to show for it,” she said. But they shook their heads no.

All winter long they made a show of studying the pictures in Uccelli Europei and in spring they watched birds, and now they had spent most of the summer watching the brothers, who, as it turned out, showered outdoors fairly often. The girls studied them more closely than the David, dwelling on every detail.

“Aren’t they lovely?” Pia said.

“Yes, and aren’t we wicked?”

“Do all men have such nice arses?”

“I’m sure none of the men in the village are half as good looking. They’re like movie stars. Which of them do you think is cuter?”

They’d stay up in bed whispering till all hours, giggling over what they had seen.

“What do you suppose they’d say if they knew we watched them naked?”

“The question isn’t what they’d say, it’s what they’d do.”

“Oh, Francesca! Shame on you!”

“Shame on both of us! But what difference would that make? We’re utterly shameless!”

Vincenzo and Michele stayed on an extra three weeks that summer. Some people speculated that they had moved to Le Bolle for good, but at the end of August they finally left.

“To their wives,” Signora Brodaglia remarked curtly.

“Do you think those are wedding rings, like Mamma says?” Francesca asked her sister. “They’re very fancy, not plain gold bands.”

“But they match.”

“They’re brothers, aren’t they? Anyway, they have them on the wrong hand.”

“Maybe it’s different in America.”

“I think we should find out. If they are married, I mean.”

“How?”

“We can steal the key from where it’s hanging in old Rinsecchi’s shed and go have a look inside their house.”

“He’ll see it’s missing.”

“We’ll replace it with another that looks like it.”

“What if he tries to get in?”

“As if he ever goes there except when he knows they’re coming!”

“Fine, so we snoop around their house. What would we look for?”

“I don’t know. Letters...”

“They’d be in English.”

“A photo album, maybe. Who knows what we’ll find?”

“It’s risky.”

“We won’t do it right away. We’ll wait a few weeks, when everyone’s forgotten about them. Come on. Don’t you want to see what their house is like inside?”

Getting their hands on the key was easy. Finding an excuse to leave the village and wander off in the direction of the farmhouse was a challenge, and it was getting on toward the middle of November. What if the brothers decided to come for the Christmas holidays as they’d done once before, and Rinsecchi discovered he had the wrong key?

One morning over coffee Francesca announced that she wanted to pick mushrooms. Pia looked up, startled. Then she understood. “Yes, let’s,” she said.

Their mother couldn’t believe her ears. “Che pazze! You girls won’t find anything this late in the season. Our neighbours will have picked the woods clean.”

“It can’t hurt to try.”

“Fine. You know where the basket is. How long will you be gone?”

“Two hours, maybe three.”

“It’s a cold day. I’ll make more coffee and put it in the thermos.”

The farmhouse was locked up tight, the windows were shuttered and the electricity had been turned off. It was too dark to see. Francesca wondered aloud if they dared open the shutters, but Pia stopped her.

“Then that’s that. We ought to have brought a candle. We can’t risk coming here again, can we?”

“Was that a lantern we saw on the shelf by the door?”

It was, and it had kerosene in it, but they had no matches to light it. They groped their way into the kitchen and fumbled about by the stove in search of them. It took some time. When they finally got it lit, Pia exclaimed, “Why, it’s nearly as big as a banquet hall!”

The kitchen dazzled them. An array of gleaming copper pots and sauté pans hung on the walls, along with a colander, a flour sieve, ladles and spatulas, everything a person would need for cooking and more. In addition to the modern gas stove there was a large fireplace with a brick oven built into it, and on either side of the stove a long, marble-topped counter. Several wooden cutting boards lay stacked at one end and next to them a block with every imaginable kind of knife. The dining table in the centre seated ten or more, and the empty refrigerator, its door open, could have held enough food to feed a regiment.

Francesca concluded that one of them had to be a chef. It explained why they’d done their own cooking for the dinner party. She opened a cabinet and found it full of wine bottles lying on their side. “See,” she said, “I was right. But we won’t find anything here. Let’s try the other rooms.”

The furniture in the sitting room was all covered over with sheets. They walked down the hall and opened what they thought might be a bedroom door. It was the bathroom, all tiled in marble and with a whirlpool almost the size of the dining table. They knew what it was, though they’d never been in one. Pia wanted to try it out.

“The water will be cold – if they haven’t had it turned off.”

“Oh, dear! Do you think they have? I need to pee.”

“If they did there’ll be enough left in the tank for one flush. That little door by the stairs must be the lavatory. Don’t pull the chain in case I have to go too.”

They found the bedroom next to the bathroom. The furniture hadn’t been covered. It contained a night table and lamp, a dresser, a heavy armoire, an upholstered rocking chair, and a large double bed which unsettled Pia. “They don’t sleep together, do they?” she asked.

“Why shouldn’t they if they’re brothers? Don’t we share a bed? But I’m sure there’s a second bedroom upstairs.”

“Whose do you think this is?”

“Vincenzo’s. That’s a photo of his family on the dresser.”

It showed Vincenzo and a slightly younger woman standing on one side of an armchair, seated in it an older woman whom they took to be his mother, and a girl about Francesca’s age on the other side.

“Then he is married,” Pia said, “and I suppose the girl must be his sister. But why isn’t Michele in the photo?” Then she noticed another photo in a matching frame that had fallen face down. She turned it up and saw Michele and Vincenzo with their mother and father. “Their mother doesn’t look Italian,” she said.

“It isn’t the same woman.”

“Then they can’t be brothers.”

“Maybe they’re half-brothers. They have the same last name.”

“You sound doubtful.”

“Just a silly thought I had. Let’s go upstairs and check the other bedroom. We might find something there that will clear up the mystery.”

There was no other bedroom. The upper storey was a single large room set up as an artist’s studio with an easel and tubes of paint, different size brushes resting in glass jars, and stretched canvases, mostly local landscapes, lined up six deep against the wall.

A strong smell of turpentine permeated the space. Pia went to sit on a narrow camp bed that had been pushed into a corner of the room. “Is this where Vincenzo sleeps?” she asked. “He is the painter, after all.”

Francesca was busy inspecting the paintings. “That’s just for him to stretch out on. Who would sleep in a room that smells of oil paints?”

“It does make you dizzy, doesn’t it? It’s why I had to sit down. The smell must get to you, too. Francesca? Are you listening?”

“I knew it. He hid them behind the landscapes.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Finocchi. See for yourself.”

Behind the front row of paintings were dozens of full-length portraits of naked men, half of them recognizable as the two they had observed so carefully and so often that they could have sketched them from memory, including a few of them together.

Apparently the word finocchi hadn’t sunk in. Pia only said that the paintings were a lot less handsome than the models. “Are there any women?” she asked.

“None that I saw, not even dressed.”

“Why did he make their cozzi so much larger than life?”

“Why do you think? Tear your eyes away from those two for a second and look at the others.”

“Oh, my God! They’re... I don’t want to say it.”

“Then I will. They’re doing every disgusting thing under the sun.”

“Who would pose for something like that?”

“You’d be surprised what some people will do for money, and our Americans have plenty of it, Lord knows.”

“But in the paintings of Michele and Vincenzo they aren’t...”

“Who are you kidding? You know what they are. Aren’t you glad now you didn’t try their bath? Let’s get out of here. Unless you want to flip through his sketch books. You’ll get quite an education, I’m sure.”

“I want to look at them anyway.”

“What for? They’ve lost all their glamour.”

“To see if there’s something I can take home with me. As a souvenir.”

She could feel her face burning and Francesca’s eyes on her as she slowly turned the pages. Many of the drawings were more graphic than the paintings, with Michele and Vincenzo as the principal actors.

She found a page of pencil sketches of different body parts from below the neck. She held it up and asked Francesca if she could tell who they were of.

“The blond,” she grunted, and turned away. She wouldn’t even use their names!

In the end Pia chose a full-page drawing of each of them, two sketches highlighted in places with a watercolour wash. They were actually quite lovely. She ripped out the pages, folded them carefully, and put them in her blouse.

“Can we leave now?” Francesca asked. She was anxious to go.

Pia nodded. Francesca relented somewhat and added kindly, “Let me see the sketches. You know, on second thought I’m glad you took them. We can show them to Leonora so she’ll know we weren’t lying about spying on naked Americans. Do you think she’ll be able to tell they’re finocchi? There are plenty of them in Florence.”

A few hundred yards from the house Pia stopped and said, “We have to go back.”

“What for?”

“We forgot to flush the toilet. They’ll know someone’s been in the house.”

“Good. I want them to know. They’d have figured it out anyway.”

“Because I stole the drawings.”

“That and because I stacked all the landscapes together and left their pornography in plain sight. Your piss in the toilet will be an extra insult.”

“They’ll blame poor Rinsecchi.”

“All the better. If they complain to him he’ll find out about them, and the whole village will know. I’ll switch the keys the first chance I get.”

Pia had never imagined her sister would be so vindictive. The Americans had always been very nice to them. “At least we know now why they have the same last name,” she said, “and why they have wedding rings.”

“You think they’re married? Think again! They’re pretending. It wasn’t legal anywhere seven years ago.”

Pia walked the rest of the way in silence, wondering where she could hide the sketches she’d taken. Maybe Leonora would keep them for her.

Signora Brodaglia crowed when they got home. “I see your basket’s empty,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t find any mushrooms.”

“We came across a patch of wild finocchio,” Francesca told her, “but it had gone to seed.”