by Sara Poole
He was, in fact, the devil Morozzi.
You will say that I was tired, preoccupied, worried, and you will be right. But there was not an instant’s doubt in my mind as to whom I saw, who had been following me. Morozzi himself did not leave room for any such uncertainty. He stepped a little farther into the street so that I could have a better view of him. As I stood frozen in place, he smiled at me.
I had my knife. Cesare had seen that it was restored to me, cleaned and keenly honed. It nestled in the leather sheath near my heart.
Twenty feet, a handful of steps. He would not expect me to attack him in public, in the midst of a crowd, with no hope of escape. It did not matter. I wanted only to kill, after which I would gladly proclaim to the world why I had done it.
The darkness stirred within me but too slowly, like a poor chained beast hampered by the weight of its own yearning. I took a step through air so strangely thick that I had to push against it as though it were a wall. It occurred to me suddenly that he might be using a charm against me. Not that I believed in such things but with Morozzi all facets of evil seemed possible.
His smile deepened. He watched me a moment longer before he turned back into the archway through which he had come, and vanished.
Scarcely had he done so than my limbs unfroze. I sprang across the intervening distance, heedless of those I shoved aside. Beyond the archway was a wooden door. I thrust it open, startling a young boy who jumped at sight of me. Ignoring him, I raced through the fabric shop, finding myself facing a blank wall on the other side of a narrow lane that led toward the river. Frantically, I looked in both directions but there was no sign of Morozzi. Long moments passed before I finally acknowledged that my adversary had vanished into thin air.
I staggered the rest of the way to the Jewish Quarter without clear memory of getting there. Sofia took one look at me as I entered the shop and hurried to help me into a chair.
“Francesca, what is wrong!”
I tried to speak but my chest was so tight that I could not seem to catch my breath. That good woman pressed a cup of water—she filtered and boiled every drop before allowing anyone to drink it—into my hand. I drank and the tightness eased. After a moment, I was able to speak.
“I cannot believe … He was there, in my sight and I did—nothing. Nothing! Merciful God, what is wrong with me?”
Sofia bent down so that she could look at me directly. Her hands grasped my shoulders. “Who, Francesca? Who was there?”
I took a breath, forcing myself to think clearly, but the image of the mad priest smiling at me continued uppermost in my mind, threatening to block out all else. As though throwing off a yoke, I forced it away and concentrated on Sofia. Her face was creased with worry even as her eyes assessed me carefully. She had more knowledge and more good sense than any I knew who posed as physicians and were as likely to do harm as any accidental good. I knew that I could rely on her.
That knowledge eased me further so that finally I was able to answer her. “Morozzi. He was in the street, following me. I saw him clearly. But when I went after him, he vanished as though he had never been.”
Sofia continued to regard me steadily. “Morozzi? You saw him but he vanished?”
“Like smoke. He went through an archway that led to a shop. I followed but I couldn’t find him. He was gone!”
To my horror, sobs welled up in me. I tried my best to contain them but could not. With a cry, I buried my head in Sofia’s shoulder and clung to her.
“I failed! He was right there, I could have killed him and been done with all of this! What is wrong with me that I could not do it?”
Sofia held me tightly until the worst of the storm had passed. Softly, she patted my shoulder and said, “You carry a terrible burden. It is bound to affect you in ways you cannot imagine. Do not berate yourself for what happened. Perhaps it was only an illusion—”
I straightened with a cry wrung from my heart. “No! He was there, I know it. Morozzi is in Rome and he is so emboldened that he showed himself to me in broad daylight. What am I to make of that? What power protects him?”
In the grip of my despair, ancient fears stirred within me. Was it possible that the man who sought the destruction of an entire people was not merely mortal? Did a demonic force move through him? And if so, how then could I ever hope to stop him?
Sofia was having none of that. Looking me squarely in the eye, she said, “You know as well as I that human beings need no special encouragement to do evil. We are all too capable of it entirely on our own. Morozzi is a man, plain and simple. As sure as you and I are both in this room, there is a straightforward explanation for what you saw.”
Thanks be to God for her sensible nature. It drew me back from the brink of panic. I took a breath, another, and nodded.
“You are right, of course. I am forgetting, Rome is a warren of underground passages. He must have used one of them.”
Sofia nodded. “I will send for David. He will know what to do.”
I was sipping tea that Sofia had brewed for me when the young Jewish leader arrived a short time later. He did not come alone. A fresh-faced boy with a mischievous grin scampered at his side. I had not seen him in several months and was struck by how much he had grown, though his chin still looked soft as a baby’s bottom.
“Benjamin,” I said with unfeigned pleasure. We had become acquainted the previous year when he had tried to pick my pocket on my first visit to the ghetto. Since then, we had become fast friends. “Attending to your studies, I hope?”
“Whenever I can get him to sit still long enough,” Sofia said with a smile. She riffled his dark hair. “At least he claims to have given up his former trade, isn’t that so, Binyamin?”
Her insistence on using the Hebraic pronunciation of his name wrung a groan from the boy but it vanished as quickly as it had come. “I make more money carrying messages and running errands anyway.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. With a glance at David, I said softly, “We need to talk.”
He nodded and laid a hand on Benjamin’s shoulder. “Do us the courtesy of pretending that you don’t hear what we have to say, all right?”
The boy shook his head at the folly of adults but went over to the side of the room and slid down against a wall. He drew a cat’s cradle from his pocket and made a show of occupying himself with the string.
After I had described my brief encounter with Morozzi in considerably calmer terms than I had managed with Sofia, I said, “Clearly, he is using underground passages to come and go as he pleases. If I could get a better idea of where they lie—”
“They are everywhere,” David said. “Rome is crisscrossed with catacombs, buried streets, tunnels, sewers, everything imaginable. No one knows the full extent of them.”
“But Morozzi must have some considerable knowledge,” I persisted. “Otherwise, he would not be relying on them. If he knows that much, someone else must as well.”
“We can make inquiries,” Sofia offered.
“Please do so quickly. We have little time. An envoy is coming from the Spanish monarchs to tell Borgia that in return for their support he must withdraw his from you.”
“So we have heard,” David said quietly.
I was not surprised. Although thousands of Jews had been forced to flee Iberia the previous year, others managed to stay on by declaring themselves conversi, converts to the “one true faith.” Such men and women lived under a pall of suspicion but so long as they gave no evidence of backsliding, Their Most Catholic Majesties had to tolerate their presence or risk discouraging all conversions to Christianity.
“Don Diego Lopez de Haro,” David went on, “is expected to reach Rome in ten days. He intends to enter into negotiations with Borgia regarding several matters, of which we are regrettably one. However, the primary purpose of his visit is to reconcile His Holiness with the King of Naples.”
“Reconcile how?” I asked. This was crucial. That Borgia sought an end to his troubles wit
h Naples was unquestioned, but there was only so far he would—or could—go. He was counting on the Spanish monarchs, once sufficiently bought, to devise a solution he could accept.
“By convincing Borgia that his interests do not lie with Naples’s enemies, namely the Sforzas.”
The family to which His Holiness, in recognition of his debt to them, was about to give his daughter.
“The Spanish want to stop the wedding,” I said. It was an appalling thought, raising the specter as it did that by so doing, Borgia would not only be stripped of a vital ally just as the trouble with della Rovere was heating up but that in the process of disappointing the Sforzas, he would acquire them as a powerful enemy.
Carefully, I said, “His Holiness expects a more helpful approach from Their Most Catholic Majesties in return for his very generous gift of whatever it is that the great Colombo has found.”
David shrugged. “He can expect whatever he likes but the plain truth is that, now that they’ve gotten a look at him as pope, the Spaniards are appalled by Borgia. They don’t expect the Vicar of Christ to be a saint but he goes too far even for them.”
“Are you saying they want to see him deposed?” If that was true, worse was piling on top of bad. When that happens, catastrophic usually isn’t far off.
“Not necessarily,” David said. “For all their religious posturing, Ferdinand and Isabella want what will best serve their own power. A weakened Borgia in thrall to Spain for his very survival would suit them well enough.”
Sofia had been listening with care to everything we said. Now she broke in. “We cannot allow that to happen! As Borgia goes, so do we.”
“I despise the man,” David said. He had never been one to stand on ceremony but now anger fueled his candor. “However, I don’t see that we have any choice. The merchants and rabbis can yabber over this all they want, trying to figure out where to throw their money, but we have to act.”
“If Borgia’s position could be strengthened,” I said. “If he was not under threat from Morozzi and through him from Savonarola—” And if the threat from della Rovere could also be removed. I would not speak of what His Holiness had charged me to do but it was uppermost in my mind. Della Rovere’s death could resolve a great deal, so long as it was not laid at Borgia’s door.
“We have less than a month to the wedding,” David said. “If Morozzi and Il Frateschi aren’t defanged by then, I fear the worst.”
“We must find where they are hiding,” I said.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Benjamin look up. He carefully removed the cat’s cradle from around his fingers, tucked it back in his pocket, and stood.
“I think I know a way,” he said.
14
“The who?” I asked. In the quiet of Sofia’s apothecary shop, empty of customers at the hour between late afternoon and the first stirring of evening, I thought I must surely have heard Benjamin wrong.
“The king of the contrabbandieri,” he said in a tone that suggested my ignorance of so august a personage was difficult to credit. “You must have heard of him?”
We adults glanced at one another with mingled uncertainty and incredulity.
“I don’t think so,” I said finally.
“Well, perhaps that is not so strange,” Benjamin said, brushing off the lapse with a wave of his hand. “A man in his position has to be careful who he trusts.”
“What exactly is his position?” David asked.
“He is king of the smugglers, or at least a lot of them. It’s like a guild, of sorts. Alfonso the First—that’s his name—had the idea of starting it so that they weren’t all competing and fighting with each other. At first there was a lot of skepticism but Alfonso is clever; he didn’t try to force anyone but instead let them come to their own conclusions when they saw for themselves that he treats everybody fairly. Now most of them wouldn’t want to go back to the old ways, even if some still grumble from time to time.”
Now that I thought about it, I supposed that made sense. With excise taxes high and every lordling eager to take advantage of them, it is no wonder that enterprising individuals find ways to buy and sell goods more economically. Indeed, the more taxes and other difficulties mount, the more the business of the city is forced underground. And in Rome, it is literally underground, as goods of every description come and go through the very passages I wished to discover.
Even so I remained hesitant. “How is it you know of him?”
Benjamin’s grin split his face from one side to the other. “Because he used to be one of us—a pickpocket, I mean. We’re his fratelli. He still trusts us more than anybody else.”
He—whoever he was—might also judge that children were inherently more trustworthy than adults and in that regard, I could not disagree with him. On the other hand, I was concerned that Benjamin remained a part of the world I thought he had left.
So, apparently, was Sofia, for she said, “Don’t you mean that you used to know this person, Binyamin?”
To give the boy credit, he had an explanation ready to hand. “If I worried that everybody I do errands for is obeying every law, there are two nuns in Santa Maria Maggiore who I might be able to work for. And you, too, of course. That’s about it.”
He was exaggerating—slightly, but I took his point. Besides, this was no time to stand on niceties.
“I should meet this man,” I said.
Immediately, David said, “I’m going with you.”
“He might not like that,” Benjamin cautioned. “It would be better if Donna Francesca and I went alone.”
I saw the boy’s point—a child and a woman were bound to appear less threatening than would a man of David’s stature and manner. But at the same time I was relieved when he rejected the idea.
“Neither one of you is going alone,” he said. “If the great Alfonso has a problem with that, he can take it up with me.”
I was more concerned about what the smuggler king would think of Benjamin for daring to bring strangers into his domain. Out of respect for the boy’s pride, I did not say so but I resolved to make sure that he came to no harm.
Taking leave of Sofia, who urged us to have every care, we made our way to the Piazza di Santa Maria in front of the ancient church dedicated to the Virgin, although some say far more ancient deities are also worshiped there. The usual crowd of women was gathered around the old octagonal fountain, drawing water and, far more important, exchanging gossip. They glanced at us as we passed. I averted my face and was relieved when no gust of chatter erupted behind us. In those days, there were still places that I could go unrecognized, although increasingly they were rare. Idle apprentices—lingering unnecessarily over errands set them by their masters—passed the time of day leaning against the walls of the stone houses framing the square and watching the girls go by. A few young noblemen, always on the outlook for trouble, ambled through. The silliest of them strutted with their hips turned out to emphasize the size of their genitals displayed beneath snug particolored hose and short doublets. More than a few made use of the horsehair wadding that had become all the rage among a certain class of males. Truly, it was a wonder they could walk without continually bumping into whatever happened to be in front of them.
As we crossed the piazza, David found a moment to put a private word in my ear. “Take no unnecessary chances with this fellow. I have never heard of him, whoever he really is, and there are others we can turn to for help.”
Why it is that seemingly everyone I know believes that I rush into danger without a second thought bewilders me. Rather than argue about it, I assured David that I would be cautious. We proceeded down a narrow lane that constricted further into an alley before seeming to end at a blank wall draped in ivy.
“Are you sure this is the way?” I asked.
Benjamin grinned at me over his shoulder, reached under a swath of the ivy, and lifted it to one side. Beyond I glimpsed a black opening just large enough for a single person at a time to enter.
&nb
sp; “There are many entrances to the underground,” he said as we followed him within. From the sack that dangled at his waist, Benjamin drew a flint, iron pyrites, and a small bundle of rushes set in a steel lamp to which he set a spark with such ease as to make me wonder exactly how often he ventured into the stygian depths.
“You can find them all over Rome but you have to know where to look.”
I nodded but did not speak. The narrowness of the passage and the weight of the darkness relieved only by the faint glow of the rushes pressed in on me. I am not one of those unfortunates susceptible to acute unease in small places but even so I was relieved when I saw, before we had gone very far, a faint glow up ahead.
It proved to come from a shaft cut toward the surface, admitting the slanting light of late afternoon. We encountered other such openings as we continued on. I felt a slight breeze stirring air that would otherwise have been stale at best and possibly too spent to sustain life.
“It’s not much farther,” Benjamin said.
True to his word, we came shortly to a wider passage lit on both sides by torches set in brackets along the walls. At its end, the stone and brick walls widened out into a broad chamber that, at first glance, appeared to be filled with a haphazard jumble of crates, barrels, chests, and objects of indeterminate shape. Only as my eyes adjusted to the light did I realize that a cluster of people were gathered at the far end around a raised platform.
“Come on then,” Benjamin said. “But both of you let me do the talking, all right?”
We assured him that we would as I tried to comprehend my surroundings. The walls bore the faint tracings of murals in which men and women in the garb of the old Romans gazed out at us with varying degrees of solemnity and amusement. The floor showed a scattering of mosaic tiles that had covered it in the distant past. The air smelled of old stone, dust, earth, and wood smoke. I concluded that I was in a villa long since covered over by the layers of the city built above it and reoccupied by those with reason to stay out of sight.