Fanatics

by William Bell

  “I see.” I didn’t see at all.

  “Not exactly light reading,” Raphaella remarked, “even if the book is for the general public.”

  “Speaking as a member of that public, I’d say there are quite a few heavy-duty polysyllabics in that thesis.”

  “The key one is theocracy-government by priests or ayatollahs or the equivalent who claim to rule according to God’s laws. The prof claims theocracies are dangerous. It works like this: God wants us to live according to his laws, which have been written down as Holy Scripture like the Qur’an, the Torah, the New Testament, whatever. God inspired the Scriptures, so what they say is true.”

  “But people have been arguing for centuries over interpretations of those books.”

  “Exactly. In a theocratic government there’s always someone, or a small number of men-and it’s always men-who claim special knowledge. They’re usually priests, or the equivalent-imams, rabbis, the Council of Seven. They-and only they-have the correct interpretation. So they say. To go against them is therefore to go against the will of God. There’s no room for disagreement by ordinary people.”

  “So there’s no real democracy,” I said. “The average citizen is left out.”

  Raphaella nodded. “And no tolerance. If there’s only one divinely inspired holy book, there’s only one ‘true’ religion. And if the laws are based on the book, they’re infallible.”

  I stated the logical conclusion. “And if you oppose the government, you’re going against God. I can see why the prof was worried enough to write a big thick book.”

  “He was distressed, that’s for sure.”

  “I’m reading one of the prof’s books. It’s called Savonarolan Theocracy.”

  Raphaella sat up. “In the manuscript, the prof devotes a whole section, which I haven’t read yet, to your Dog of God monk.”

  “I think I can guess what he’ll say.”

  “Ready for a couple more polysyllabics?” Raphaella asked.

  “Fire away.”

  “Okay. Throughout history two related movements occur, then fade, then emerge again, in a sort of cycle-puritanism and fundamentalism.”

  “Aha! That fits with another of the prof’s books, Puritanism, Fundamentalism, and Theocracy. I’m familiar with both terms. Puritans are the American Thanksgiving guys in their black suits and funny hats, right? And fundamentalists are the ones who rant against movies and books that have too much sex.”

  “Um, not exactly.”

  “I knew it couldn’t be that simple.”

  “Originally, ‘puritan’ meant someone who thought his religion had wandered off track. Puritans wanted to go back to the basics in their worship and doctrines. There was the feeling that this purity had been lost somewhere along the way. A fundamentalist was very similar. He was afraid his religion had become watered down or corrupted, and he wanted to get back to the fundamentals of his faith. In both cases, these people take their holy books literally. They tighten up on the so-called interpretations and say there’s nothing to interpret. It’s the words of God coming through the prophets, or the Prophet. It means what it says. Period.

  “The prof wrote that history shows these movements usually shift toward theocracy. What started off as an attempt to improve the religion ends as an intolerant and undemocratic form of government, like in Salem, Massachusetts, where witches were burned, or like today’s Islamist political movements or governments.”

  “Everything I’ve read about Savonarola so far suggests he was a puritan.”

  We were silent for a moment, each of us fitting ideas together, attempting to make a clear picture from the bits we had discovered so far. Raphaella’s eyes suddenly widened.

  “Do you get the impression that the Corbizzi mansion is a battleground between the long-dead monk and the recently dead professor?”

  I nodded. “And we’re standing between them.”

  I looked out over the lake, suddenly overwhelmed by what I had gotten us into.

  “Raphaella, I wish I had never gone to the Half Moon that morning and talked to Marco. I wish I hadn’t come to this place and made that agreement with Mrs. Stoppini.”

  “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

  “I’m sorry I dragged you into all this,” I said.

  Raphaella lifted her face to the sky, removed her barrettes, and shook her hair free, allowing it to tumble over her shoulders and down her back, as if she was preparing herself for a challenge. Then she turned to me and smiled.

  “I go where you go, Garnet.”

  Four

  I

  WE STROLLED SLOWLY back to the house, our energy drained by the soft summer afternoon, the drone of bees in the flower beds and the gloom that followed in the wake of our reading. We had been dragged into an otherworldly conflict, like swimmers in a riptide, and we knew our only defence was to go with the current until it lost some of its strength, then strike off in another direction. Not a cheerful thought on a beautiful summer’s day far removed from the world of Professor Eduardo Corbizzi-and that of the cranky Italian friar who had been linked to him by events or forces Raphaella and I could so far only vaguely understand.

  As we turned the corner of the mansion, I stopped. And groaned. Something had flickered behind the library window.

  “Not again,” I muttered.

  Raphaella looked at me, eyebrows raised.

  “Did you see that?” I asked.

  “What? Where?”

  “In the library. Something moved.”

  At that time of day, with sunlight slanting across the yard, throwing shadows over the lawn, the window glass was a pattern of reflected sky and treetops so deceiving that birds might fly directly into the glass thinking they were winging through the trees. But I could have sworn I had caught sight of someone moving inside the library.

  “I can feel something, but I didn’t see anything,” Raphaella whispered. “Are you sure?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know.”

  “Well, I feel better now that you’ve cleared that up. And why am I whispering again?” she added, annoyed with herself.

  “We’re both on edge.”

  “The edge of sanity, I’d say. Let’s go in.”

  Any doubts I had held about my vision disappeared as soon as we closed the library doors behind us. The acrid odour of smoke was so strong it stung my nostrils. Raphaella stood still beside me, sniffing the air. A cold fingernail of dread scratched the back of my neck.

  “Where there’s smoke there’s-”

  “A ghost,” Raphaella cut in, drawing air through her nose like a professional wine taster, analyzing the ingredients of the invisible smoke the way I had seen her nasally exploring the medicines in the Demeter. Dealing with herbal remedies required a finely tuned olfactory organ, she had often told me.

  “This is what you’ve been telling me about?”

  “It’s him again,” I said. “But the smell is stronger this time.”

  “I see-smell-what you mean.” Raphaella wrinkled her nose. “Burnt wood, cloth,” she murmured, as if taking inventory, “leather, hot iron, paper. And-ugh-underneath it all, something fetid. But why smoke?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why would this presence leave behind the smell of burning?”

  “I assume because he caused the fire that led to the professor’s…”

  “Maybe,” Raphaella mused. “But you’d think-”

  “Look,” I exclaimed, leading the way across the room. “Something’s disturbed the manuscript.”

  “I left it in two neat stacks.”

  The bitter stink was more pronounced here. The books I had been using lay open where I had left them, but the manuscript had been tampered with. Several pages were askew. I checked the window. It was closed and locked as it always was when I left the library, so no breeze had moved the pages.

  I looked around, alert for any more signs of the spirit’s presence. Was he here now, I wondered, keeping himself invisible
? My eyes probed the alcove. The bookcase door hung open, exposing the secret cupboard with its rolled-up door and empty shelves. The cross gleamed on the tabletop, untouched, with the small wooden box beside it.

  “There’s a page on the floor,” Raphaella said, bending to retrieve the sheet. Between trembling hands she clutched it, with its lines of neatly typed letters and pencilled scribbles here and there, and sniffed it.

  “Smoky,” she murmured.

  “Look at the edges,” I pointed out.

  Along one margin and across the top of the typed page, the thick white paper showed a faint brown stain. I had seen marks like that on lots of old books. Books that had been near a fire.

  II

  “I’D BETTER PHOTOGRAPH the pages now,” Raphaella cautioned. “Just to be safe.”

  We worked fast. Raphaella leaned over the stack, snapped a picture, I removed the page, the camera clicked again, and so on. When the PIE’s memory was full, she emailed the images to her address at the Demeter, cleared the memory, and started shooting once more. It was a tedious process, but we got it done.

  Raphaella tidied up the manuscript and tucked it back into its file case, securing the flap with a stouter than necessary knot. She tossed the PIE into her backpack. I returned the Compendium and cross, box, and manuscript to the cupboard and locked up.

  “We have to make sure we do this-return everything to the cupboard-whenever we leave the library,” I said.

  “Right. Well, I’m ready,” she said, looking around nervously.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  Tucking the little brass keys into their place under the rosary in the box and closing the escritoire drawer, I was unable to shake the feeling that the spirit was watching every move.

  We found Mrs. Stoppini sitting at a small desk in the main-floor room she called the parlour, writing letters on thick creamy paper with a fountain pen as if she was still in the last century. She insisted on seeing us to the door.

  “See you soon,” I said.

  “I shall look forward to it.”

  Outside, Raphaella kissed me goodbye and slid behind the steering wheel of her mother’s car. She waved out the window as she drove off down the shady lane. She had a few hours’ work to do at the Demeter.

  I went into the shop, gave the refinished table a quick final inspection. It looked great. Dad will be pleased, I thought as I locked up. I pulled on my jacket and helmet, mounted up, and piloted the motorcycle through the estate gates, glad to be leaving the place and wondering once again how Mrs. Stoppini could live in that house without contact with the spirit that I was more and more sure was full of dark intentions.

  And not for the first time I felt guilty leaving her alone there. I reminded myself that she had been by herself in that big house when I met her, and beyond her fear of the library-which I could now fully relate to-she had showed no signs of knowing about any spiritual visitations.

  I rode straight into town, heading for the public library across the road from the Olde Gold. The beginnings of a plan were moving around in my mind, like puzzle bits scattered across a tabletop.

  AN HOUR OR SO later I walked in the back door of my house with two books on Savonarola under my arm-the same titles I had been reading in the prof’s library. In our kitchen I listened for signs of activity from Mom’s study. All was quiet except for the ticking of the clock above the kitchen sink.

  “Anybody home?” I called out.

  Things had been tense since Dad and I had ganged up on my mother about the Afghanistan assignment. For a day or so it had seemed she had given up on the idea, but she had never said so in so many words. All three of us avoided the subject altogether-which made it one of those “elephant in the living room” things that just kept everybody on edge.

  So I was kind of glad to have the house to myself for a while. Tension was one thing I didn’t need right then. My nerves were tight as piano wires as it was. I fixed a mug of tea and took it up to my room, dumping the books on the desk.

  I set up my recliner on the balcony beside a small table, then took my notebook, library books, and tea outside. There was just enough breeze to stir the leaves on the maples along Brant Street and to bend the column of steam rising from the mug. I picked up the book I had been reading at the mansion, found the page where I had left off, and settled back in the chair.

  III

  WITH HIS FIERY ZEAL and deep intelligence, Savonarola quickly established himself among the Dominicans at Bologna, gaining a reputation far and wide as a fiercely intense, repent-or-burn-in-hell preacher. He had lost none of his hatred of the world, his disgust with the Church and its riches and corruption, his puritanical opposition to art, literature, costly garments-anything that in his sour view would lead a person away from religious devotion. He still wore his scratchy hair shirt under his clothing, and had added a spiked belt to punish his flesh even more. According to my reading, that kind of “mortification of the flesh” was widely practised at the time. After seven years he was sent in 1482 to San Marco’s priory in the most important city in all Italy.

  The friar from Ferrara was thirty years old when he walked through one of Florence’s twelve gates, bound for the Dominican convent at San Marco Church and bursting with zeal to clean up a republic with a reputation-among fundamentalists like him-as one of the most sinful in Europe, a cesspool stained by every shade of wickedness. One of the largest centres in Europe, enclosed by a high wall and divided in two by the Arno River, Florence contained almost 42,000 “souls,” sixty parish churches-one for every 680 inhabitants-and dozens of friaries, convents, and religious brotherhoods. You couldn’t walk down one of the narrow streets without bumping into priests, nuns, or monks. Religion-and only one religion-coloured every part of a person’s life.

  Florence was also one of the richest cities, but most of the coins were tucked away in the pockets of a few fabulously rich banker/merchant families or in the strongboxes of the Church, whose high offices were filled by men from those same families. It was a dangerous place, where sometimes blood ran in the streets and mutilated bodies littered the city squares because of conspiracies and power struggles between families.

  As time passed, Savonarola honed his preaching skills and was soon in such demand he delivered his frightening sermons in the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. By now he was claiming that God spoke directly to him. He made prophesies. His visions of doomsday, he ranted, had been revealed to him by God, and he recorded them in his Compendium Revelationem. He began to interfere in the government, criticizing it for ignoring the poor and underfed. But most of his energy went into forcing his brand of strict morality down people’s throats.

  Savonarola urged the passing of laws to burn homosexuals alive, to publicly beat prostitutes, whom he called “pieces of meat with eyes.” He sent bands of youths through the city to harass men and women who dressed too richly, to force their way into houses and confiscate “vanities”-books, sculpture, fine clothing, paintings, jewels-and to burn them in great bonfires.

  In his sermons he attacked the Medici family, calling Lorenzo, the top man, a tyrant-which he was. He railed against Pope Alexander VI, saying he was corrupt-which he was-and unfit to be God’s representative on earth. In this way, Savonarola pitted himself against two of the most powerful tyrants in Europe. There was no discussion with Girolamo Savonarola. To oppose him was to stand against the will of God.

  Some Florentines saw the friar as an enemy of their power and wealth. Many became his followers, but just as many considered him a puritan and fundamentalist who claimed he spoke in the name of God when he censored or destroyed literature, art, music, and all ideas that were not in agreement with his. He had become, they said, a fanatic.

  IV

  I TOOK A BREAK from my reading when my eyelids threatened to close permanently.

  My parents had come home, and supper was almost ready. Mom sat at the kitchen table, her plate shoved aside to make room for the newspaper. Bowls of steaming v
egetables waited in the centre of the table.

  Dad pushed through the door. He gave me a look, then set a platter of barbecued steaks beside the bowl of carrots. The look meant things were still a little tense on the home-front. I knew the cause: Mom hadn’t turned down the Afghanistan assignment yet.

  “Ready,” Dad said with forced enthusiasm.

  We ate without much conversation, and after dessert all three of us seemed to have pressing things to do. My parents went to bridge club. I watched TV for a while, but the sitcoms seemed inane and childish, completely divorced from the real world. Turning off the TV, I laughed out loud.

  “A TV comedy is make-believe, but a ghost in a loony library is real?” I asked myself.

  I returned to my room and got into bed, the last light of evening fading from the sky. I yawned, picking up the history book.

  The last chapter described how Savonarola had made so many enemies that after only three years or so at the height of his influence the city turned against him, including many of its priests and monks. The pope, who was Savonarola’s boss, wanted him dead. The Medici wanted him dead.

  So he was kicked out of the church, excommunicated, and commanded to cease preaching. He ignored the pope’s orders. He was arrested-charged with, of all things, crimes against the church-and executed in 1498. The order to torture and hang him was signed by Pope Alexander VI.

  I tossed the book down in disgust. Images from my dream swirled into my mind. The dark damp cell, the victim kneeling in agony, the candle illuminating papers bearing the pope’s seal.

  “The pope,” I muttered. “God’s representative on earth.”

  I lay back and dropped off to sleep.

  IN MY DREAM I saw three nooses dangling from a gibbet, swinging lazily to and fro in the morning breeze, their shadows flickering across piles of brushwood stacked around the base of the gallows platform. Around me was a vast city square enclosed by six-storey stone buildings and densely packed with spectators. Their collective gaze was fixed on the closed doors of a stone fortress whose soaring bell tower pierced the clear morning sky. From the crenellated fortress roof, guards watched the crowd, pikes in hand, the pale morning light gleaming on breastplates and helmets.