by William Bell
A marble terrace fronted the building, and from the north end a wooden walkway stretched into the square to a gallows resembling a cross.
The crowd seethed and shifted. The air trembled with anticipation. The wide oaken doors of the fortress swung open and a hooded man emerged, followed by three monks in manacles and ankle chains, then a number of other men, some in long coats, some in clerical habits. The chained men were stripped of their black cloaks and white habits before the hangman led them along the walkway, their leg irons clanking on the new boards just above the heads of the spectators.
The hangman lifted a ladder from the platform and leaned it against the gibbet, then pushed the first prisoner up the ladder ahead of him, snugged the noose around the prisoner’s neck, tied a chain around his waist, and shoved him off the ladder as if he were a sack of grain. The crowd groaned, all eyes on the dying monk twisting and jerking at the end of the rope. The hangman moved the ladder to the opposite end of the gallows’ crossbar, then prepared and dispatched the second prisoner, whose neck could be heard breaking.
I saw the crowd lean forward when the ladder was moved again. I felt the morbid excitement, the fear, the fascination. What would happen when Savonarola was flung off the ladder to his death? Some whispered that he would take wing, like an angel. Others claimed the devil’s hand would reach up from hell and drag him down. Still others said that when the firewood was set alight the famous friar would learn what hell was like.
The hangman mockingly swept his hand up, inviting Savonarola to mount the ladder. The friar, his body twisted by the strappado, awkwardly climbed onto the lowest rung, his leg irons hindering ascent to the top. The hangman fixed the noose in place and looped the chain around the friar’s waist.
“Oh, prophet,” a voice rang out from the crowd, “now is the time for you to work one of your miracles!”
Was it a sneer or a prayer?
The hangman heaved the famous preacher off the ladder, and the spectators uttered a collective gasp. Savonarola’s bare feet kicked and jerked as the quivering rope throttled him. The hangman descended and walked to the marble terrace, then took the stairs to ground level. The crowd parted as he made his way to the foot of the gallows, an unlit torch in his hand.
Spasms of nausea seized my gut. The three men twisting and wriggling above the platform were to be burned alive. Savonarola struggled, writhing and kicking as if he could somehow free himself from the choking noose.
The hangman had lit his torch, but before he could shove it into the brushwood someone burst from the crowd clutching a burning brand. “Now,” he shouted, his eyes on the friar, “I can burn the man who wanted to burn me!”
And he thrust the flaming brand into the brushwood.
As smoke curled upwards the flames spread quickly, snapping and popping, but not loudly enough to smother the friar’s screams. Some in the mob tossed small bags of gunpowder into the fire. The sacks sparked and burst, feeding and spreading the flames, the conflagration forcing the onlookers back. The bodies on the gibbet blackened and blistered and smoked.
After a time, the burnt arms dropped into the fire, followed soon after by the charred, twisted legs, sending showers of sparks into a sky darkened by smoke. The hangman chopped down the gallows and it crashed into the fire in a shower of burning embers.
I saw a trio of men off to the side, two leaning against a cart, the third holding the halter of a sway-backed horse whose eyes had been covered with a piece of cloth. One of the men never took his eyes off the gallows, and when he was called in by the hangman to pile more wood on the fire, he carefully noted the position of the friar’s charred body parts before he heaped brushwood on them.
“Let there be no remains to tempt the relic hunters,” the hangman commanded. “You know what to do.”
Later that day, when the fire had cooled to a heap of smoking ash, the trio prepared to shovel the debris into the cart. But the vigilant one called a halt. Wading into the smouldering ash, he dug out the three hot chains and tossed them behind him, urging the others not to waste valuable iron. While his companions were occupied, he quickly sifted through the ashes at his feet, stooped, and slipped something into his pocket.
In short order the debris of execution had been shovelled into the cart and transported to the river nearby. At the foot of a covered bridge, the three men dumped the ashes into the swirling brown water, careful to sweep the last speck from the cart.
“That’s done, then,” said one.
“To be sure,” said the other.
The third brushed his hand over his trouser pocket and nodded.
Five
I
LIKE A BUBBLE RISING sluggishly through dark liquid, I slowly freed myself from sleep, and from the horrifying spectacle in the city square.
There was no doubt in my mind that I had witnessed the gruesome death of Girolamo Savonarola, along with that of two fellow Dominicans. When I felt up to it I would check the details later in the prof’s books, but only for formality’s sake. I knew what I’d find.
My bedroom window was full of cheery morning light that mocked the aura of gloom and dread surrounding me. I forced myself to get out of bed, almost tripping on something. Cursing, I tossed the book I had dropped on the floor the night before onto the bed. I staggered down to the bathroom one floor below, scooped water from the tap into my mouth, then stepped under a lukewarm shower. I returned to my room, pulled on my clothes, and made my way to the kitchen.
My father was at the table. Hearing the scrape of my chair legs on the floor, he peered over the top of his newspaper and looked me over.
“Up late last night?” he asked.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“You look like you been rode hard and put up wet, as they say in the cowboy movies.”
“Right.”
“There’s some scrambled eggs and grilled bacon in the oven,” Dad offered. “The bacon’s nice and crisp.”
My stomach lurched.
“And there’s toast,” he added cheerily. “But I’m afraid it’s burnt.”
I barely made it through the back door before I retched violently into the flower bed.
AFTER FORCING DOWN a cup of clear tea I walked down the hill to the Demeter, hoping to find Raphaella alone in the store. No such luck. I pushed through the door, setting off a discreet buzz, and was bathed in the odour of yeast, vitamins, dried legumes, medicinal herbs, and peanut butter from the machine at the end of the counter. Mrs. Skye stood behind the pine counter in her usual green smock, fitting a new roll of paper into the cash register. She looked up.
“May I help you?” she enquired impersonally.
“Fine, thank you, Mrs. Skye. And how are you?”
She hated it when I referred to her as Mrs., but sometimes I got fed up with her attitude. She’d known me for over a year but always treated me like a stranger, hoping, I guessed, that if she was rude enough I’d abandon Raphaella.
“My parents are well, too,” I pushed on. “They send their best.”
Mrs. Skye made a psh! noise and turned her back. She stepped over to the table under a bank of little drawers that contained the herbal medicines she combined into prescriptions, picked up a pestle, and began to grind furiously.
Raphaella came through from the back room wearing a green smock with HEALTH IS WEALTH across the front, a caption not up to her usual witty standard. Or maybe I just wasn’t in the mood. When she saw me she stopped.
“Uh-oh, another dream,” she stated, eyes boring into mine. “Come on.”
She took my hand and led me into the back room, a large space jammed to the ceiling with shelves holding boxes, jars, bottles, clear plastic bags of beans, nuts, grains, and other foods, and furnished with a small table and two chairs. A few cartons with Chinese writing on them sat on the floor by the alley door.
I grabbed her and held her tightly. Raphaella kissed me, then pried herself free and filled the kettle and plugged it in. I pulled her to me again.
>
“I’m kind of glad to see you,” I said.
She pushed me into a chair. I watched as she bustled around, preparing some kind of drink and searching out just the right nutrition bar for someone who had witnessed a legal murder.
“I saw his execution,” I said. “Him and two other monks.”
“Tell me everything,” Raphaella said, plunking a steaming mug onto the table. “And drink this slowly.”
I did as she asked. By the time I had finished describing my vision, I had eaten the bar and drunk two cups of the weird this-will-be-good-for-you tea.
“Now we know the answer to the question you asked me yesterday in the library.”
Raphaella nodded. “ ‘Why does the spirit leave the odour of smoke behind?’ ”
“Right. It’s ironic in a gory way,” I mused, folding the nutrition-bar wrapper into increasingly tiny squares and pretending my hands weren’t shaking. “The preacher who wanted to burn certain so-called sinners ended up being burned himself.” I looked up at Raphaella. “But that’s not really justice, is it? Nobody deserves to die like that.”
“No.”
“Are people who design executions so the maximum amount of suffering is inflicted sick? Is something inside them broken, like a cracked microchip or a stripped gear? I mean, just seeing it scared the hell out of me.
“I used to think atrocities were a thing of the past. They happened way back in the fog of history. And I thought that the past was like another country, far away, and that things are different now. After I saw Savonarola being tortured I read up on the strappado and found out it’s still being used, but the information didn’t sink in. I guess I tried to deny it. But that vision last night-the fire, the way the crowd joined in, enjoying the hanging and burning-”
“You’ve been thinking about Hannah,” Raphaella said quietly.
I nodded.
“And what those men did to her.”
Mention of Hannah’s name took me back to a windy starless night more than a year ago, when I had been dragged from sleep long after midnight by the mournful cries of a woman walking in the forest behind the mobile home park where I was living during my stint as caretaker there. I followed Hannah Duvalier along a path to a grave at the edge of the African Methodist Church burial ground, and later to the ruins of a log cabin where a terrible killing had taken place. Hannah made that same walk every night. She had been dead for 150 years.
“That was in the past, too. But do you know what Mom told me? A few months ago she was researching an execution in Afghanistan in 2005. A woman was stoned to death in front of dozens of witnesses. Legally. According to Islamic law. This was after the Taliban were kicked out. And Mom said stoning is still part of the penal code in Iran. It’s promoted by Islamist militants in other countries. Execution by stoning takes half an hour. It’s like being clubbed to death, slowly.”
Raphaella was standing beside my chair now, and she laid her arm on my shoulder. “Garnet, calm down.”
“I don’t get it. How could a crowd of men who knew the woman tie her up, cover her face, and throw rocks at her head, hitting her again and again, until she was dead? What’s wrong with people like that?” I looked up at Raphaella and tried to smile. “I’m repeating myself aren’t I? I’m babbling.”
She smiled back at me and said nothing.
Another thought burst in my brain, like those little packets of gunpowder the crowd flung onto the fire in my vision.
“It’s religious law that allows-hell, demands-stoning as punishment. For adultery. The regulations even specify what size of stone to be used. And by the way, a male adulterer gets a lashing and goes home.
“It was the Church that helped execute Savonarola. The Church’s Inquisition burned Jews and heretics. Religious leaders burned the witches in Salem.”
“I’ve always wondered,” Raphaella mused, “is it the religion that’s evil, or the people practising it? Is the religious law an excuse for committing acts they would have carried out anyway? A way to dress up viciousness as holiness?”
I felt suddenly exhausted, as if my mainspring had wound down. “I’m sick of it,” I whispered. “All of it.”
Raphaella crouched in front of me and took one of my hands. “But we have to see it through. We have to make him go away.”
I kept silent.
“Which means finding out why he’s still haunting the Corbizzi place,” she added.
I drew in some of Raphaella’s energy, the way a sponge absorbs water.
“So we go back… when?” I asked her.
“Tomorrow. I believe the answer’s in the prof’s unpublished book.”
I completed her thought. “Which is why the spirit was messing with it yesterday while we were lounging around outside.”
“I think we’re close, Garnet. I really do.”
II
MY STEP WAS A LITTLE lighter as I strolled back up the hill under the canopy of old maple trees in full summer leaf, but I still had a lot of thinking to do. I was so deep in thought when I got home that as soon as Mom hinted it was time the lawn was mowed I said yes without argument and marched straight from her office to the garage to get the electric mower.
An hour and a half later, hot and sweaty, I took my second shower of the day, stuffed my clothes into the laundry hamper, and put on a clean T-shirt and jeans. As I was heading downstairs something caught my eye. The history book I had chucked onto the blankets that morning had fallen open to a page near the back. I picked up the book and was about to slap it shut when I noticed the words “Appendix: The Arrabbiati.” Strange phrase, I thought.
Curious, I took a closer look. The Arrabbiati, or “Angry Ones,” were Savonarola’s opponents, the offended citizens who saw him as an intolerant puritanical tyrant. They included people from all walks of life, many from well-known families. The author of the book had listed these families alphabetically.
I ran my finger down the column of names, suddenly knowing what I was about to find.
And there it was, in black and white.
Corbizzi.
PART FOUR
Cut off his head, although he may be head of his family, cut off his head!
– Girolamo Savonarola
One
I
I HAD A LOT to think about.
With the discovery that the Corbizzi family had been opponents of Savonarola in the fifteenth century I had found another link between the estate on the shore of Lake Couchiching and an Italian city thousands of kilometres away across the Atlantic Ocean. This was no coincidence. The professor was an expert on the Italian Renaissance, had lived and taught in Florence, and had made Savonarola the centre of his studies, especially the friar’s attempts to set up a government that would rule according to Christian morality, as interpreted by him. The prof had written a new book warning against theocracy, a book that devoted a whole chapter to Savonarola, using the friar’s career as an alarm bell-the chapter Raphaella would be reading next.
Savonarola had contacted me through my dreams, had shown me how much he had suffered. He had made me watch his inhumane execution. Was he trying to win my sympathy? Who wouldn’t have compassion for a man who had undergone imprisonment, torture, hanging, and burning? The trouble was, he had urged that others get the same cruel treatment. And yet he had genuinely wanted Florence to take better care of its poor and underprivileged.
He seemed a brilliant but complex man, one minute inspiring admiration and sympathy, the next contempt. I was no theologian like Savonarola, but I believed that you should treat other people the way you wanted them to behave toward you. I had sympathy for him, but I was revolted by his contradictions-the willingness to torture and burn others, the hatred that soaked his words when he talked about his opponents. It was all symbolized on the medal in the secret cupboard-the friar’s profile on one side, on the other the Lord’s sword jabbing from heaven, warning of swift, certain punishment. When it came right down to it, I saw the friar as a dangerous man who, if y
ou crossed him, would toss you into the fire without blinking, then tell himself he was doing God’s will. For him, that was the ultimate excuse. That was what made him so lethal. And that was what Professor Corbizzi had understood.
Long ago the Corbizzi family had crossed Savonarola by standing against him. For his entire life Professor Corbizzi had opposed what the friar stood for. It seemed clear to me that this visitation by Savonarola’s spirit was revenge, pure and simple. The professor had died under mysterious circumstances that involved a fire. His new book was a focal point of the visitation. The medal was, I thought, just that-a “souvenir” of sorts. The cross? Maybe there was something there, something Raphaella and I had missed.
But with the professor dead, why did the spirit hang around? Why involve me? That was the part of the puzzle that just wouldn’t fit. That was why I needed to take a break from the estate and its library, so I could think things through.
II
MOM WAS SITTING on the sun-splashed steps of the verandah lacing up her trainers when I sauntered out the door next morning.
“You’re up early,” she said, turning and squinting up at me.
“Lots to do,” I replied vaguely. “See you later.”
In the kitchen I prepared ingredients for a Spanish omelette and set them aside to await Mom’s return, then poured a second coffee and carried it outside to the driveway. I collected my toolbox, an old Dutch oven, some rags, and a few litres of motor oil from the garage, then rolled out the Hawk and pulled it up onto the centre stand. I set a low stool beside the bike, took a sip of coffee, and set the mug on the bike’s saddle.