The Orphan of Florence

by Jeanne Kalogridis

  I sent up a formal prayer. Dear God, anything but that.

  As if in reply, my captors’ steps veered away from the tannery toward the butcher shop next door.

  In front of the building, a lad was doing brisk business. His stand, being carefully inspected by half a dozen kitchenmaids and poorer housewives, was overflowing. Here, a basket heaped with the corpses of unplucked birds—chicken and gamecocks and pigeons with wrung necks, their stiff skinny legs sticking straight from their bodies. There, on the makeshift table, artfully arranged, a display of the furry heads of sheep and boar and cows with dark clouded eyes, all seeming to stare back at those inspecting them. Lumps of yellowed ivory lard sat nearby, hard as rocks in the winter and, above them, loosely looped around a trellis like a vine, hung lengths of gossamer white intestines, cleaned and ready for use as sausage casings. Next to them sat pails, some overflowing with lungs, some with hearts or livers or brains.

  The lad, busy with a sale to a particularly suspicious maid, didn’t even glance at us as Stout led the way past the stands and into the building. The goateed man didn’t try to hide the fact that he was dragging me against my will by my arm. Perhaps everyone thought I was an apprehended thief brought back for the administration of justice. They would have been half right.

  The shops on the Old Bridge weren’t large, but crowded side by side, which necessitated a good deal of cramming of both people and wares into too-small spaces. The butcher shop was no different. The air inside was thick from the smell of human sweat and animal blood, piss, and the particularly pungent feces born of fear. It was also hazy with smoke from the apparently never-cleaned hearth. Even so, the fire was poorly stoked, so that the shop was cool enough for the meat.

  Three different men, dressed in once-white aprons now stained yellow and dark brown and bright red, wielded ferocious looking knives and saws and cleavers as they sliced and sawed and chopped away at remnants of their recent victims. One of them glanced up, his plump round face red and sweating, and winked a deep-set eye at Stout; the two bore an uncanny resemblance. The other two men continued laughing and chatting with each other, eyes on their work and their fingers, as if we’d been invisible.

  On either side of the workbench, thick wooden planks had been nailed to the wall; attached to those planks were hooks with tips as sharp as wolves’ teeth, from which hung slabs of trimmed bright red meat.

  Behind the men, a dozen or so chains dangled from the ceiling, and from each chain, the half or whole carcasses of skinned and trimmed sheep and pigs and cows hung upside down from their ankles. A lad of perhaps ten years moved from the back of the room toward the front carrying a pail of fresh lungs, sidling through the narrow passageway between the carcasses—some of them twice his size—and setting them into gentle motion.

  As we passed by the workbench, I saw the pails tucked beneath, heaped with yellow fat to be rendered into tallow for cooking, soap, and candles. Stout led the way fearlessly through the forest of hanging dead, his broad shoulders striking a pink-and-white corpse on either side, setting them swinging like pendulums that struck me and the goateed man as we followed him into the back of the shop.

  We passed out the back door into a poor man’s loggia, a small, walled-in patio sheltered by the building’s rear eaves. The loggia looked down onto the Arno below. The only protection from inadvertently falling into the river was a brick wall the height of my hip—which made this the perfect spot for dumping feces and offal and unwanted urchins into the drink.

  Against the wall opposite the river stood a workbench, and in front of the bench a cheerful older man, uncloaked with his sleeves rolled up and his balding head exposed to the weather, as he had apparently worked up a good sweat. On the bench lay the tools of his trade—knives, saws, pincers, and cleavers in all sizes, including some so large I could never have hoisted them. My fingers involuntarily retracted into fists at the sight of the great cleaver in his hand.

  Next to the bench, a tall ladder had been propped in the corner. A great ewe had been lashed to it by her rear hooves with her belly exposed. Or rather, her backbone, as her organs had been removed, and she was splayed open like a book, her glistening spine exposed, her ribs spread like bony wings. She’d been relieved of most of her innards, which, still faintly steaming in the cold, overflowed from a bucket on the floor beside her. Only her dark little kidneys remained, nestled against a thick slab of fat covering her pelvis. Her face was hidden, but I could still see the last bit of her blood dripping from her nostrils onto the bricks beneath her.

  In her, I saw my fate.

  The butcher was whistling as he swiped his cleaver against a whetstone, and when Stout moved up and tapped him on the shoulder, he turned and smiled at us, as if it had been perfectly natural to find Stout accompanied by a man frog-marching a reluctant lad. The butcher set down the knife, quickly wiped his sleeve across his blood-spattered face, and his hand on his blood-and-fat smeared apron before thumping Stout’s shoulder. This man, too, bore a resemblance to Stout—no surprise to me that it was a family business.

  The butcher shot a quick glance at me, then back at Stout’s bruised face and powdery tattered cloak. “He’s a small one, but he looks like he gave you a bit of a go, Girolamo.” Despite the sullen lack of reply, he continued, “I sent for ’em, of course. Uppity bastards sent back a message to call for ’em once you got here with your prize.”

  Stout grunted in annoyance.

  “And who’s your friend here?” the butcher asked pleasantly, as if we’d all come for a chat.

  Stout shot the goateed man a narrowed, sidewise glance and opened his mouth to speak, but my reticent captor answered first.

  “Giovanni,” he said stonily, in a way that discouraged further conversation.

  Stout snickered. Even I, in my drunken sleepless state that alternated between resigned euphoria and base terror, caught the sarcasm in the reply. Half of the men in Florence were named Giovanni because San Giovanni, John the Baptist, was the city’s patron saint. Stout lifted his brows approvingly and nodded as if to say, Giovanni it is, then.

  But the butcher remained oblivious and cheery. “Well met, Giovanni, well met.” The butcher turned to me and his grin grew smug. “Have a seat, laddie,” he said, gesturing graciously at the uneven brick floor, where a small puddle of blood lay congealing.

  Relieved, Giovanni flung me down onto the slimy bricks. I sat down beside the crucified ewe and closed my eyes as the butcher took up a large cleaver and began hacking at her forelegs. A wave of nausea hit me, in part because of the poor ewe and the stink of blood and bowels, but also because of the acrid aged piss smell coming from the tanner next door. I put my freezing ungloved hand to my brow, took off my cap, and leaned my bare head against the cold stone wall.

  I suppose I dozed. I was too tired to know if I was sleeping or waking, but regardless, the realization came to me that magic might be of use. Abramo had said that magic had brought me back to him. Perhaps now it could perform another miracle. At the very least, it might distract me from the nausea.

  And so I cast a circle in my imagination. I wasn’t physically facing east, but in my mind’s eye I corrected my orientation and saw myself standing at the low wall overlooking the Arno, spreading my arms as if to fly or to embrace the waters. I chanted the Hebrew words of power silently, imagining that my voice was low and powerful as Abramo’s had been, that the vibration of it went out into the air and surrounded me, filled every corner, expanding until it filled the entire sky.

  My enemies had the daggers, not I, but Ser Abramo had shown me that I needed no weapons, no tools, no altar to save my own soul. I traced the circle and the stars carefully with my finger. Perhaps it was my teetering on the brink between sleep and waking that made the magic feel so powerful, more powerful than it ever had been before: strong enough to change the world and everyone in it, including me.

  Your heart’s in a furnace, Giuliano …

  In the east, I summoned the Archangel Raphael,
who appeared shimmering, yellow-flecked with tiny bursts of purple light. In the south, I called out to Michael, composed of red flames faintly tinged with green; to the west, watery Gabriel, in deep undulating blue glinting with orange from the setting sun. Uriel stood in the north, solid and earthen, her hair jet against terra-cotta skin, her pregnant body clothed in shades of forest and grain.

  Silently, I spoke to them all. Help me. Help me, and keep Tommaso safe. Keep Florence safe, and help Lorenzo.

  I felt as though I had imbibed a large dose of the poppy. The dreaming world intruded upon the waking, leaving me uncertain as to which was which. I called out to the one whose face I most yearned to see, the one to whom I most desired to speak, the only departed saint on whom I could rely.

  Ser Abramo, I prayed. Dear Abramo, come to me. Help me now.

  He appeared before me in the air above the glimmering river, like Christ interrupted in mid-ascension, his hands spread slightly, beneficently to either side as if to bestow a blessing. He was dressed as I’d last seen him: in the brown robes of a Franciscan friar. Shadows accentuated the severity of his strong hawkish nose, his coal brows, the lines around his lips. That face had frightened me once, but now I saw the kindness in his expression, the softness in his uncovered eyes.

  His lips never moved, but I distinctly heard him say, I never left you. As I watched, his angelic apparition grew closer to me with each second until we touched, until he, shimmering like an archangel, sat down upon the bloody bricks beside me.

  I don’t want to die, I told him.

  He answered: It’s not the worst thing that can happen, you know. But we won’t let it come to that.

  I meant to ask him who “we” meant, but I was jostled awake, this time by a kick to my shoulder. The butcher had disappeared, but Stout was smirking down at me, smug in anticipation of my suffering and demise. Beside him stood three men, none of whom had made the slightest effort to fit in with their surroundings. One wore a mantle of the finest wool, trimmed lavishly with costly brown marten fur; his indigo velvet cap was edged with the same, as were the gloves on his hands, which pressed a perfumed lawn kerchief to his nose in an effort to lessen the stench. The first of his companions had neither a cap nor a strand of hair upon his head, nor eyebrows, nor even eyelashes, nor the faintest trace of a beard, which made his face seem naked, almost infantile, compared to his tall, overly muscular body. He wore a plain, black-wool mantle and gloves, and his posture toward the wealthier man was that of a respectful guardian. The second companion had the same mien and clothing, but was even taller, even more muscular, and definitely hairier, with an unstylishly long beard, brown with shocks of brassy gold. They had no kerchiefs and the stony, humorless expressions expected of professional bodyguards.

  Giovanni was nowhere to be seen. I assumed he had been dismissed.

  The rich man’s black hair and eyes gave me pause. He seemed faintly familiar, and I struggled to place him.

  I finally did: He had fled alongside Niccolo immediately after Ser Abramo had been murdered.

  A Roman, Ser Abramo said helpfully.

  “I know,” I said aloud, which made Stout and his Romans lift their brows.

  “She’s mad,” Stout explained to his visitors, who accepted this news without comment or surprise.

  With a flourish, he produced a thin sheaf of partially tattered papers—the ones that he’d stolen from the cellar, the ones that contained the possible rendezvous sites where Lorenzo would meet La Perla, the king of Naples’ ship. Stout fanned them out on the butcher’s viscera-covered workbench, ignoring the fact that the edges of the paper had already started absorbing blood.

  “For you, Ser Andrea,” Stout said proudly.

  The rich man, his expression one of distaste, leaned over the papers without touching them, the perfumed kerchief pressed fast to his nose. “And you found these…?” His voice was muffled, but his faint accent identified him as having been born in the Romagna, the countryside just north of Rome. It wasn’t thick enough to decisively incriminate him as being from the Holy City, but it was thick enough for my keen ears.

  “In a secret workshop,” Stout said proudly. “It was locked up tight—none of yous could have got in. But see, the guards, they knew me. I even drove some of ’em there from the Medici palace. That’s how I got in and killed ’em, see. They wasn’t expectin’ it, but they wasn’t afraid of me. They thought maybe I had a message fer ’em. I got the keys off the first dead man and let myself in.”

  The dark-haired Roman waved an impatient hand for silence. “I don’t need details of your heroic exploits. Just tell me where this damned workshop was.”

  “In the Oltrarno, back in the countryside. Not an easy place to get to, but I can take you there if you want.”

  “Where is it?” the Roman snapped.

  Stout’s red face grew even redder. “You goes to Santo Spirito in the Oltrarno. And head due south as the crow flies, through some fields and a dead orchard, about four miles beyond where the road stops. There’s a wall with tangled vines onnit, and normally you needs the keys”—he pulled at his neck and they jangled, muffled, beneath his mantello—“to gets in, but I din’ bother to lock it back up. In a bit of a hurry and preoccupied with this one here, y’know.” He jerked his chin in my direction. “As I says, I can take you—”

  Ser Andrea waved his hand imperiously again, cutting off Stout, who twisted his lip, pouting at the snub. “Niccolo’s coming. He has been there before, yes?”

  “Yes,” Stout answered reluctantly.

  “Then we have no immediate need of your services in that regard. This is all there was?” the Roman demanded. “Nothing else?”

  Stout’s tone was deflated, faintly petulant. “There was a funny-lookin’ block of wood, with magical writin’ on it. I told you, they did magic in there. Devilish stuff.”

  My heart felt as though it had tried to flip itself over in my chest. With the sensation came a wave of fresh nausea. Now the questions would begin, and my refusal to speak about the funny-looking block of wood, and the torture …

  But the Roman merely smiled beneath his kerchief. I supposed he thought the cipher wheel to be some sort of magical implement. “I’m not surprised to hear of it here in this godless city,” he said. “Magic and men carrying on with boys the way you do. In Rome, the lad would be burned in the public square.”

  “I’ll put a curse on you,” I hissed drunkenly at Stout.

  Stout crossed himself—a performance, perhaps, for his visitors.

  “I dunno why you set such store on Niccolo, Ser Andrea,” he said grudgingly. “I’m the one you should’ve trusted with the murder. I’d a seen to it that both the crypto—crypto-man or whatever he’s called—and ’is little sidekick ’ere would both be dead and buried, no question.”

  “Niccolo is of especial use to us,” Ser Andrea said. “He knows the Medici compound intimately. He knows Lorenzo’s habits.”

  “Then why isn’t Lorenzo dead yet?”

  Stout’s question evoked an uncomfortable pause.

  Ser Andrea finally answered, “I haven’t time to discuss this. Lorenzo is never unattended by bodyguards, and there was a great falling-out between Niccolo and certain … members of the household, which led to his coming to us.” Ser Andrea cleared his throat and shot a fleeting glance at the wiry-bearded bodyguard, then back at Stout. “Your services are appreciated, but they are no longer needed, Girolamo. That will be all.”

  Stout looked rather deflated by the dismissal, but a thought made him suddenly cheerful again. “There’s one thing you will be wantin’ to know—about Lorenzo, that nobody but me and those in the Medici palace know. If you want to speed things up and catch the bastard yourselves instead of worryin’ over all this silly spying. Because I know where he’s gonna be, and I know when he’s gonna be there. But first I want money. Five florins, no less.”

  In other words, a small fortune, an amount of money no one would be walking around with.

 
; The inner edges of Ser Andrea’s eyebrows rose in skepticism. “Please. We both know he’ll be heavily guarded. He never goes anywhere without guards.”

  “You has archers, don’t you? There’s a way for ’em to get a clean shot when he leaves the house, but there’s a secret only I knows.” Stout’s devious enthusiasm convinced even me to believe him.

  “All right then. Five florins. But if your information is useless, we’ll take it back, along with your life. So what is this information?”

  Stout’s tiny eyes narrowed even further; one side of his lip curled up in a smirk. “I ain’t as stupid as this one here,” he said, nodding at me. “Money first.”

  He crossed his arms—clearly expecting to have to wait for a while as one of Ser Andrea’s men headed for the bank. Instead, Ser Andrea stuffed his kerchief into the top of his leggings, reached under his mantello, pulled out a purple velvet purse, and set five gold florins, one by one, in Stout’s waiting hand while I gaped.

  Dazzled, Stout smiled down at the gold.

  “Details, please,” the Roman said, as he put his purse away and retrieved his kerchief.

  “Talked to a stablehand myself as I was followin’ this one today,” Stout replied, with a tilt of his head to indicate me. “A small group leavin’ today, in two hours or so, though I don’t know where. Lorenzo and his mother. He tries to throw folks off by riding alongside the carriage, on a horse, like he’s one of the guards. You put an archer on a nearby roof—the Church of San Lorenzo, across the way, maybe—and he can pick ’im off just like that.” Stout snapped his fingers.

  “Two hours or so,” the Roman murmured, apparently so distracted that he lowered his kerchief to reveal a handsomely formed nose and chin. “Not much time to alert archers and get them into place.”

  “My wagon’s out front,” Stout said. “I can get ’em there. Just tell me where to go.” He turned, ready to leave, but said rather snidely over his shoulder, with a nod at me, “Good luck gettin’ that one to talk. He had a blade right to his throat, and all he’d sing was palle, palle. Crazy loyal to the Medici, for God knows what reason.”