He felt no fear when he saw it. He knew, too, that he would never tell anyone, because he didn’t know if he was dreaming. Not even when it walked to the bottom of the steps and stared up at him as if it knew him. It was white, pure white, as the rumors had said. Thick white fur, with a long tail and green eyes. It will gaze at the moon and it will howl, thought Francesco. It will howl because it must.
But it didn’t. It only turned and walked away into the darkness, leaving Francesco to wonder if the wolf really knew him or not.
CHAPTER SEVEN
FRANCESCO COULD TELL SOMETHING WAS AMISS THE MOMENT HE entered the Piazza Rusticucci. It was normally deserted at this hour, but tonight a small knot of people was gathered around a smoldering fire in the middle of the square, the smoky light lending their faces an eerie cast. He recognized the soap-maker by his scabby, lye-burned face. The wood seller Michelangelo had so recently swindled was also there, standing next to a woman with matching stooped shoulders, no doubt his wife. The pair of them looked to be sixty but were more likely closer to thirty, a ripe old age, given their work-worn lives. Running circles around the fire were a handful of dirty boys who could have been anyone’s or no one’s at all.
“What happened here?” Francesco asked, holding his torch aloft. The fire, he observed, smelled more like burning rancid sausage than wood.
“Fancy man on a horse threw a torch into our shop,” the soap-maker explained. “The walls were so saturated with grease it went up like a torch. Whoosh!” he exclaimed, throwing his hands up over his head.
The boys thought this amusing and were now throwing their hands up in the air too. “Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoo-oosh!”
Oh no! Susanna’s house adjoined his own. If his house had burned … Hopefully she hadn’t come home yet. “It was just the shop, right?” Francesco asked over the whooshing. He held his torch high, only to discover its circle of light and that of the fire did not quite reach the row of houses across the square. Still, he thought he could make out something different, an altered silhouette of their facades.
“Just the shop,” the soap-maker said conclusively. “Torch went through the door just as the rain came down. Good thing too, or it would have burned down the whole row.” He turned to the boys. “Shut up, you little shits!” The whooshing stopped. Satisfied, the soap-maker continued. “Not just the row. The whole city, maybe, though probably not now, since it’s so bloody wet. But if it had been summer …” He let the possibility hang in the air. “Anyway, wife and I were putting wood on the fire. Faster than the Pope can screw an ass, the whole shop had gone up with a whoosh,” he said, leveling a warning glance at the boys, “and the wife was over there knocking the walls down with a log. All in flames those walls were. But we got them down and dragged them out here. So much grease in them, they kept right on burning, even in the rain. Wife burned her hands. No blisters, though. You burn your hands as many times as me and the wife, you don’t get blisters. Skin too hard.” He held up his scarred, leathery hands and showed them proudly, as if his soap-making had been but a means to creating such a marvel.
“No one hurt then, other than your wife burning her hands?” Francesco asked, looking for further reassurance.
“No. Thanks to me and the wife.”
Francesco relaxed. “That’s good, but I’m sorry about your shop.”
“We’re alright. We got a place to go. The wife’s at her sister’s now.” One of the boys had scooped up a rat and now threw it on the fire, provoking a shower of sparks and earning him a solid kick in the behind from the soap-maker. “Reckon we’ll set up shop there,” he continued as the boy let out an exaggerated howl of pain, drowning out the rat’s real one. “Michelangelo has too many enemies. Makes it dangerous.”
“Michelangelo? You think the fire was meant for him?”
“Only repeating what he said himself. Meant to burn him in his bed, he said. But it’s got to be true. Can’t think why they’d send a fancy man on a horse to kill a soap-maker.”
“You got a look at him then?” It was the second time that day Francesco had heard tell of a man on a horse.
“Best I could. Big man on a horse with a torch. Never seen him before, but if I see him again, he’ll wish he’d never been born.”
“Why did you call him a fancy man?”
The soap-maker shrugged, the scarred palms he was so proud of held at his sides. “Don’t know. Got a velvet cape on. Good horse. Not like Romeo here, with his hunchback and starving donkey.” Romeo, whom Francesco had already recognized as the wood seller, grinned toothlessly from the other side of the smoldering fire. Now here was someone who had sufficient reason to burn Michelangelo in his bed, but Francesco suspected the wood seller was too feebleminded to know he’d been cheated.
“You got a front door now, that’s one good thing,” the soap-maker continued. “You don’t need to go down the alley no more.”
Francesco liked that idea. “It opens then?”
“Michelangelo already came out of it. Running out like his house was on fire!” The soap-maker laughed at his joke until a bellow from across the square stopped him so short he started to cough.
“Francesco!” came the bellowing voice again. Michelangelo’s, of course. It echoed around the square, and Francesco swore it made the wolves in the hills pause. “That you?”
“Yes,” Francesco called back wearily. The crowd around the fire sniggered.
“Then stop gossiping like an old woman and get in here!”
Francesco bid the group good night and crossed the square to where Michelangelo, chicken tucked under one arm, waited for him in their new doorway. Dressed only in his nightshirt and boots, his filthy hair sticking out in all directions, Michelangelo looked even more deranged than usual.
The chicken blinked at Francesco, and Francesco couldn’t help thinking it disapproved of him. “Are you drunk?” It was Michelangelo, not the chicken, who asked, but Francesco felt as if he were speaking for both of them.
“I was,” Francesco said, refusing to look at either. He lifted his torch and regarded the transformation of the house. Beyond being a little charred, a few remaining bits of the shop clinging like barnacles to the facade, there was little evidence it had ever hosted a soap-maker’s shop. “Very drunk and most pleasantly so,” he elaborated, “but I see that, even with a front door, I still live in a shit hole. Only now someone is trying to murder me.”
“Murder you? It was me they were after!”
“I live here too! It could have been me burned in my bed.”
Michelangelo stomped his foot and let out an unintelligible gasp of frustration. “Get in here. This door lets in the cold.”
“Funny door, letting in the cold when it’s open,” Francesco muttered as he stepped past him. Still, it did feel strange gaining entrance to the house this way. It was if he’d acquired a magic power, a sudden ability to pass like a ghost through walls. He turned and looked out on the square from this new perspective. The soap-maker and his party were still gathered around the greasy fire, smoke curling up into the darkness. He caught a flurried movement, a rapid beating of wings, so close he felt a breeze on his cheeks. Bats. Shuddering, he closed the door.
“So you think they were after you?” Francesco asked, turning his attention back to Michelangelo. “Who did you piss off now? Not the Pope again, I hope.”
Michelangelo dropped the chicken onto the table, where it commenced pecking at a plate of wine-soaked bread crumbs. “We’ll see soon enough. I won’t go back there. Di Grassi and Asino must have been up on the scaffold before I arrived today. They were waiting for me at the chapel door. You should have heard them. Blasphemy! Blasphemy! You spend our money on blasphemy! Their faces were bright purple, spit flying everywhere. I want you to write to your sister in England right away. Tell her to get me a letter of introduction. That young Henry has respect for artists, and it sounds as if he’ll be king soon.”
“You read my letter!” Francesco exclaimed. “First you have me f
ollowed by that dunce Bastiano and then you read my letters!”
“I did not read your letter. I could see it was from your sister in the English court. That’s all. And as for having you followed, someone has to keep an eye on you. You tell me your father pays me well for the trouble, but what am I to tell him? That you’re a useless houseboy? Where was my bread today? Nowhere. You didn’t even send Susanna to do your work for you. You do no work and laze around with the likes of Raphael, cavorting with whores and heathens. Do you think The Turk would hesitate to kill you if you interfere with his business? Or Asino and di Grassi? You’re getting a reputation, Francesco. The reputation of someone who puts his nose into places where it does not belong. Maybe that fire was meant for you, and if they killed a blasphemous artist at the same time, it would make everyone happy.”
It was quite a rant, even for someone as practiced as Michelangelo, but that didn’t stop Francesco from teasing him. “My dear Michelangelo. It’s kind of you to worry about me and my safety. I think you’ve grown fond of me. Like a son.” The chicken flew up to the shelf above the window as if to improve its vantage point or else to stay clear in case objects started flying about the room.
“If you were my son, I’d whip you thoroughly and teach you to respect your elders.”
“And you respect your elders? The man who tried to run away from the Pope just so you wouldn’t have to paint his ceiling?”
“I was not running away from the Pope. And I should not be painting that ceiling. I’m a sculptor, and the best there is.”
“We won’t split hairs on that one. But I want you to call off Bastiano. I won’t have that idiot following me. And where the hell is Susanna?”
“I don’t know. Out casting spells with all the other gypsies and witches?”
“Stop it. I am very serious. Bastiano said she went off with a tall man on a horse this morning. The same man she went off with the other night when she said she was with the silversmith.”
“But she was with the silversmith.”
“That’s what she told me. But Bastiano said it was the same man, and you said yourself it was too quiet. It seems like you were right, and the silversmith was never here.”
“I never thought I’d hear you say I was right, but in this one instance your faith in me is misguided. The silversmith was here. I spoke with him myself.” Michelangelo picked up one of the wine-soaked cubes of bread the chicken had left behind and put it in his mouth. “He was staying the night before going on to Ostia. I was just trying to get your goat—”
“And have a good laugh with Bastiano at my expense.” Francesco finished the thought for him. Michelangelo didn’t answer, only ate some more of the chicken’s dinner while Francesco poured some water from the pitcher into the cleaner-looking of the two pewter cups on the table. All the wine he’d drank with Raphael had left his throat parched and launched a dull headache. Even if the silversmith was there the other night, Bastiano had said Susanna went with a tall man this morning. “But,” Francesco continued, “there’s one other thing. The soap-maker said a big, fancy man on a horse threw the torch into their shop. Could this big, fancy man and the tall man be the same?”
“Well, that solves it then. Susanna has hired a big, tall, fancy man on a horse to kill us. Probably had enough of doing your work.”
“Be serious. Do you think it could be the same man?”
“I told you, it’s Asino and di Grassi’s doing. They hired someone to do their dirty work. I don’t know who carried Susanna off this morning. Probably Bastiano was just trying to escape a beating by turning you against her.”
“Well, she must be somewhere.”
“Probably floating in the Tiber like your last whore.”
Francesco slammed the door on his way out. Not the new front door, but the familiar back door. He kicked open the gate to Susanna’s and picked his way through the dark yard. But inside the house, it was as he expected: complete darkness and as cold and damp as a tomb. She had not been back, and now he was worried. Since he’d been in Rome, she’d never been away for the night. Where was she, and who was the man Bastiano saw her with? That is, if there had been a man at all. But he didn’t think Bastiano was lying on this point. He had waited until she was gone to search her house for the money. He must have been confident she wouldn’t be back any time soon to interrupt him. Was it possible Bastiano had arranged for her to be abducted so he could search the house for her money in peace?
Francesco wasn’t tempted to stay in her bed for the night, not even to avoid Michelangelo’s snores. He didn’t want to be found there by God-knows-who in the morning, and it was too cold anyway. Except whereas before he had been angered by her disappearance, he now just felt a knot of dread. Probably floating in the Tiber like your last whore. Not that Calendula was his whore … And it was true he’d probably been viewed as taking too much of an interest in her disappearance. But by whom? Not Di Grassi and Asino. What would they care of his interest, unless it had taken him a little too close to The Turk’s boat, with its cargo of young boys. Except their secret didn’t seem well kept and, like Imperia’s brothel, appeared well tolerated if not completely sanctioned by the Pope himself.
But there were no answers to be found here, especially in the dark. Francesco decided to ask the soap-maker if he’d seen Susanna leave that morning, only when he went out her front door, the square was empty.
Still, knowing sleep would be elusive at best, he crossed the square and stood by the still-smoldering pile of timber. He picked up a charred board and gave the coals a poke, encouraging them back to life. He was rewarded with a small flame, and he stood close to it, holding his hands out to warm them. Somewhere a rooster crowed.
It had been good to see Raphael. The distraction—the wine, the excellent dinner, the drunken trip to the chapel—had been welcome, but now it somehow seemed as though he’d betrayed Susanna. Should he have been looking for her instead of enjoying himself? Of course, at the time, he’d been convinced she was taking pleasure in another man’s bed, but now he couldn’t shake Michelangelo’s words from his mind. Floating in the Tiber like your last whore. Floating in the Tiber. In the Tiber. The Tiber. The Tiber …
Francesco pictured Calendula’s body turning on an eddy of filthy water, the yellow dress pulling her body under as if she were being dragged down to Hell by an invisible hand, her beautiful hair all muddied and matted with seaweed and blood. But as he stood over the fire, picturing this in his mind’s eye, her hair turned from gold to black. Black gypsy hair. Susanna’s hair …
A tall man on a horse had taken her away. A big man on a horse had thrown a torch at his house. And a fat man had taken Calendula’s body. Could all three be the same man?
IT wasn’t until the Pope and his boy entered through their new front door a few hours later that Francesco remembered the wolf outside St. Peter’s. It was His Holiness’s cape of white fur that brought back the memory, and for a moment he even wondered if the same wolf was now adorning the Pope. But of course that was impossible, and besides, the fur was shorter and softer, perhaps that of a winter hare. Lined with red velvet, the cape was slung over a long white robe, while the cap covering the Pope’s thick white hair was made of the same fabrics but reversed, with the fur on the inside. The hem of his white robes was splattered with the muck of the street, and Francesco realized His Holiness had not taken a carriage or a litter but had walked here himself. It was a good thing they now had a front door. He could not envision the Pope picking his way through the alley. Susanna would have said the appearance of the new front door had not been a coincidence. Surely, she’d say, a divine force had guided the man with the torch to open the door just in time for His Holiness’s visit.
With his head grazing the low beams, Pope Julius filled Michelangelo’s house. Francesco had only seen the Pope from afar, and he was overwhelmed by the man’s powerful presence. He might be a white-haired old man of sixty-five, but he didn’t look it, and Francesco could well believe t
he stories that he still fought alongside his men in battle.
Nicknamed Il Papa Terribile, the man christened Giuliano della Rovere had waited a long time to become Pope and had been bribing, slandering, and perhaps even poisoning his rivals for decades. Now that the position was his, he was making up for time he saw as lost. He had taken the name of Julius after Caesar himself, and it was his goal to see Rome restored to an empire worthy of his namesake.
Following Michelangelo’s lead and bearing in mind rumors of the disease that was said to riddle the Pope’s feet with sores, Francesco kissed the air above them. Feeling weak and nauseated from a sleepless night of worry, he fought against the rising bile in his throat. Did the Pope share the same disease as the port’s prostitutes? Would this be the man’s undoing? Would it eat away at him until he, too, was forced to wrap his face in rags?
The boy stood serenely next to Pope Julius, one dimpled hand stroking the fur of his cape as if it were a pet. If anything, he was even more beautiful than Marcus’s portrayal of him in The Marigold Madonna. His golden hair, washed and combed in soft curls, shone in the dim room as if it contained its own source of light. And when he looked up, his eyes were of the softest blue.
“Why aren’t you at the chapel today?” the Pope demanded in a booming voice. “Your assistants tell me you had a fire, and yet I see you are unharmed.” Pope Julius tugged at his long white beard as he spoke, each finger on his large hands adorned with an enormous ring. He seemed to have a special liking for rubies, perhaps because they matched the lining of his cape. They match his nose too, Francesco thought, the red nose of a mean, gouty old man.
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