Secrecy

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘Aren’t you a friend of his?’

  Towne’s laugh was no louder than a sniff. ‘Friend? I doubt the word’s in his vocabulary.’ He reached for the wine. ‘What was that all about, anyway?’

  We drank heavily that night, and were the last to leave the place. By the time I turned off Via de’ Serragli into the side street where I lived it was after midnight and a steady rain was coming down. I was so tired that I decided not to look in on my mother. Instead, I climbed the stairs, thinking I would fall straight into bed. As I reached the first-floor landing, though, I sensed that something wasn’t right. In my drawing room the candles had burned down, but not so low that I couldn’t see the chair that was lying on its side. I stepped warily through the half-open door. The locked drawers in my writing desk had been forced, and my notebooks lay scattered across the floor. At first glance, it didn’t seem as though anything had been taken. My most precious possession – a terracotta statue of Artemis from the Hellenistic period – still stood by the fireplace, and there was money on the mantlepiece. I realized it was my personal papers that had interested the intruder. In one of my notebooks there was a ragged edge where a page had been torn out. I looked at the preceding page, and the page before that. It was my portrait of Faustina that was missing.

  Sober suddenly, I crossed the room and stared at the palazzo opposite, its shutters fastened, rain tipping off its eaves. What would somebody want with a drawing of Faustina? Of everything I owned, why that? As I stood at the window, it dawned on me that my mother might be responsible. Gripped by anxiety, perhaps, or terror, she might have been looking for something that belonged to her, something she had lost in the earthquake. She might have rifled through my possessions, not knowing whose they were, or where she was … I hurried back downstairs. In her room, there were lighted candles on every surface. Though it was stifling, she was lying in bed with the covers pulled up so high that only her face was visible. Eight fingers showed beneath her chin, as if she were clinging to a precipice.

  ‘Jacopo?’ she said.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Gaetano.’

  Her eyes darted about, and the tip of her tongue kept flickering over her top lip.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said. ‘Where’s Lapa?’

  She looked at me, her gaze unfocused, vague. ‘I thought it was them again.’

  I lowered myself slowly on to the bed. ‘Has someone been here?’

  ‘There were three of them – or maybe four. I can’t remember. I didn’t see.’

  ‘Who were they?’

  She looked beyond me. ‘They knocked loudly – so loudly. Lapa answered the door. Then they were in, like a whirlwind.’ She tightened her grip on the covers. ‘They were monks.’

  ‘What kind of monks?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Please try and think,’ I said. ‘What were they wearing?’

  ‘Black. And white.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ The flames of the candles swerved as a draught went through the room. ‘Have you seen any of them before?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But they were past me before I knew it – and there were so many.’

  ‘They didn’t harm you?’

  ‘No. They told me to stay in here, and I did, but I could hear them upstairs, laughing –’

  ‘I’m here now.’

  ‘They were laughing.’ My mother closed her eyes.

  Back upstairs, I righted the furniture and put my papers in order. As I crossed the room I caught sight of my face in the mirror, and was surprised how calm I looked. In the past, if something like this had happened, I would have started packing immediately. I would have been gone before dawn. North to Bologna or Genoa. Or on to a different country altogether. France, perhaps, or even England. But there was a new stubbornness in me: I was no longer willing to do anything to avoid a confrontation. What’s more, people I cared about were implicated, and I didn’t feel I could abandon them.

  Black, she had said. And white.

  Dominicans.

  I lay awake in bed, one question leading to another. Was Stufa behind the break-in? If so, was he acting on his own? Was he getting back at me, in other words, or was it something more orchestrated, more sinister? But why had the monks taken a drawing of Faustina? Could it have been a whim? No, it was more far more likely to be part of a campaign to gather evidence. They were attempting to identify an area in which I might be vulnerable. I didn’t like where this was leading. Did they know about Faustina? If so, how much did they know? And so on, and so on – for hours … Faces loomed and gaped. Plans formed, then fell apart.

  The next morning my mother woke up complaining that she couldn’t breathe. I sat by her bed and held her hand.

  ‘It’s the dust,’ she gasped. ‘It’s all the dust.’

  I looked at Lapa, who rolled her shoulders fatalistically and turned away.

  My mother gripped my hand so hard that her nails left a series of tiny crescent moons imprinted on my palm.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said.

  I had only slept in snatches, and my head ached from all the wine I had drunk with the Englishman. I was still struggling to make sense of the break-in and the missing page, but my questions had become mundane, prosaic. Who had the drawing? What did they want with it?

  My mother’s grip loosened, then tightened again. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For letting me live here. For taking care of me.’

  ‘You’re my mother –’

  She looked at me, and something shifted deep down, at the bottom of her eyes, and I remembered all the insults Jacopo had flung at me.

  ‘You are my mother, aren’t you?’ I said.

  Her gaze tilted, then flattened, like the slats on shutters. She seemed relieved, even grateful, and I had no idea why that might be so.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

  Towards the end of the afternoon, Francesco Redi appeared with his physician’s green leather case, his long, almost womanly face more solemn than usual. He had just been subjected to another of Vittoria’s infamous tongue-lashings. She didn’t believe he had studied medicine. He knew nothing. Nothing. He wasn’t even fit to tend an animal. He opened the saphenous vein just above my mother’s ankle and bled her, then he administered a sedative. Of course, he ought to be used to the Grand Duchess by now, he went on. He’d been treating her for long enough.

  Later, as I showed him out, I asked if he thought she might be dying.

  ‘There have been moments,’ he said, ‘when I almost wished that were the case.’ He crossed himself, then stepped into the street.

  I returned to my mother’s bedside.

  ‘I behaved badly,’ she murmured.

  ‘Don’t worry about that now.’

  ‘I was weak …’

  I sat with her until she fell into a shallow sleep. Her eyes flickered beneath their lids; a pulse beat feebly in her neck. She had not defended me. She hadn’t even realized I needed defending. I no longer blamed her for that. No one had stood much of a chance against Jacopo. I would rather have chosen my life than had it shaped by somebody who wished me harm, though who was to say it would have been better?

  As I prepared to set out for the apothecary I was filled with an agitation that verged on panic. I felt paralysed by even the smallest decisions – what coat to wear, which route to take. I hurried down Via de’ Serragli and over the nearest bridge. The moon that hung above the Grand Duke’s granary was red and swollen, almost close enough to touch; it looked as if it might burst at any moment, soaking the streets of Santo Spirito in blood. On Porta Rossa, I came across two men locked in such a struggle that they had become a single, staggering beast. Edging past, I saw an arm break loose and land a fierce blow. The creature, having harmed itself, let out a bellow. A nearby puddle shivered.

  By the time I reached Via Lontanmorti, it was after eleven. At the end of the street, in a high recess in the wall, was a statue of the Virgin, illuminated by a s
ingle candle. That was all the light there was. I didn’t want to wake Faustina’s uncle, nor could I afford to draw any attention to myself. Remembering the passageway she had told me about, I moved beyond the apothecary, passed beneath a low, grimy archway and turned left into a cul-de-sac. She had said the entrance was halfway along. I ran my hands over the wall until I located it. No wider than my shoulders, it had the dimensions of a small door. I entered, inching forwards, one step at a time. The ground sloped downwards, beneath the building, then disappeared. I had reached the ditch or drain that she had spoken of. I stopped and looked behind me. A ghostly grey rectangle shimmered in the blackness. The alley. It didn’t seem as if I had been followed.

  I faced back into the dark. A cold, sour smell rose out of the drain. Far below, I thought I could hear running water. Bracing one hand against each wall, I reached out with my right foot. I judged the gap to be about the length of one long stride. My left foot placed at the very edge of the drop, I stepped back with my right and then sprang forwards, into nothing. When I landed on the other side, I felt I had crossed a bottomless pit filled with the predatory, the unwitting – the dead. It was peculiar to think that Machiavelli might have done the same.

  I turned right. In complete darkness, I groped my way forwards, hands outstretched. The atmosphere was damp, and oddly thick. Whenever I paused, I was deafened by my own breathing. I turned left, then left again. At last, I emerged into the yard Faustina had described. I tipped my head back and gulped fresh air from the sky, then began to explore the back wall of the building. When I had found the piece of wire, I followed it downwards until my hand closed around a key.

  I had heard it said that if you want to know what paradise smells like, you only have to visit an apothecary. Alone, at night, this seemed more true than ever. As I crept through the back room, all kinds of scents and perfumes made themselves known to me. Rose petals one moment, mustard seeds the next. Then ginger. Molasses. Sage. I found the stairs, began to climb. In the silence, my heart sounded noisy, clumsy, like someone running down a street in heavy boots.

  I stepped out on to the third floor and was about to reach for Faustina’s door handle when the door opened, and her face appeared. She jumped when she saw me. I slipped past her, into the room. She closed the door, then moved towards me.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I wanted to come earlier –’

  ‘Not so loud. My uncle’s only one floor down.’

  I told her about the theft of the drawing.

  The small space between her eyebrows darkened, as if it had been shaded in. ‘You think it means they’re interested in me?’

  ‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ I said.

  ‘I hope they don’t know. About who my mother is, I mean.’

  ‘How could they?’

  She shrugged.

  I asked if she had noticed anything unusual recently.

  ‘Like what?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know. Has anyone been watching you?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘We’ll have to be careful from now on,’ I said. ‘Even more careful.’

  We made love silently, furtively, as though we, too, were thieves, and pleasure was something it took two people to steal.

  Every now and then, we stopped to listen, thinking we had heard her uncle’s bedroom door or voices in the yard below.

  When she came, I put my hand over her mouth.

  Halfway across the Ponte Rubaconte, a cold wind gusted, and I was glad of the English coat the Grand Duke had given me earlier that year. I wore it buttoned to the neck and kept my head lowered. My third winter in Florence.

  The day before, I had called on Pampolini and asked if I could have a word with Earhole. Pampolini said he hadn’t seen the boy all week. His mother had lost her job at the slaughterhouse, and she was drinking heavily. They lived on Via delle Poverine, near the Campo della Morte. He gave me directions and told me to watch out I wasn’t robbed.

  Ever since the break-in, I had been trying to come up with strategies. I didn’t think I had much chance of talking Stufa round. He had told me I was a dead man, and I doubted he had it in him to relent; the best I could expect was to delay or deflect his animosity. That said, it didn’t seem a bad idea to acquire some ammunition of my own. As yet I had nothing except a few rumours spread by an out-of-work French jester. I was going to need more than that. In the meantime, I had to hope that Stufa’s life was going well. You should always wish success on your enemies. If they’re happy and fulfilled – if they feel blessed – they’ll be far less likely to turn on you.

  Bassetti presented a different problem. On the face of it, he had always been agreeable. If I had twinges of uneasiness, it was because I suspected he had registered the fact that the Grand Duke and I had grown closer. Whenever he saw us together, he would assume an indulgent look, as if we were wayward but harmless children, but I knew he would not take kindly to being upstaged or excluded, and once or twice, while the Grand Duke and I were discussing some aspect of the secret commission, Bassetti had entered the room unexpectedly, and we had broken off in the middle of a sentence, an abrupt, artificial silence that a man of Bassetti’s social sophistication could hardly have failed to notice. He must have realized that something was being kept from him, and I was always bracing myself for a confrontation. It never came. Was I imagining tension where none existed? Was it possible that Bassetti actually approved of my role as the Grand Duke’s confidant? It was one of my strengths that I saw things other people didn’t see. Was I now seeing things that weren’t there at all? I had written Bassetti a note, asking for an appointment. I wanted to convince him of the fundamental innocence of my relationship with the Grand Duke. I had to be certain he was on my side.

  Via delle Poverine was aptly named. There were no paving stones, only potholes. Palaces had given way to shacks and sheds, their walls patched with rotten wood, loose stones and handfuls of river clay. Looming above the rooftops, sheer and forbidding, was the tower of San Niccolò. Nearby, huddled on a mud embankment, were half a dozen grubby children. As I drew level, the sun broke through a veil of cloud and turned the puddles silver. The leader of the group was a boy of about thirteen. His hair hugged his skull like fur.

  ‘Nice coat.’

  He bounced a pebble on his palm. In place of eyebrows he had two slightly swollen ridges of bone.

  I said I was looking for Nuto.

  ‘Nuto?’

  ‘He’s about your age. He’s only got one ear.’

  The boy tilted his head, playing deaf. ‘What’s that?’

  His cronies sniggered.

  They knew who I meant, but weren’t about to help.

  I moved on. A pebble skipped over my boot.

  ‘I thought you were looking for Nuto,’ the boy called out.

  A second pebble struck the back of my leg. I swivelled round. The children were already on their feet.

  ‘Any more of that,’ I said, ‘and someone else is going to lose an ear.’

  The boy’s arm flashed in the dim air. A stone whirred past my head. I started towards the embankment. By the time I reached the place where the children had been standing, they were fifty yards away, on the far side of a gully filled with slimy, stagnant water. His face expressionless, the boy looked straight at me and drew his forefinger across his throat.

  Earhole lived in the last shack in the row, part of it propped on wooden piles and leaning precariously over the Arno. When he answered the door, he didn’t seem surprised to see me. Had he, too, learned to mask his feelings?

  There was only one room. A small child sat on the mud floor, gnawing on a twig. Probably its teeth were coming through.

  ‘My niece,’ he said. ‘I’m minding her.’

  He handed me some wine in a clay cup. Through the cracks in the walls I could see the river sliding past, the colour of phlegm.

  I told him I wanted him to follow someone. His brief would be to gather inf
ormation. I drank from my cup and made a face.

  ‘This stuff is foul.’

  He grinned. ‘It’s what my mother drinks.’

  He was trustworthy, I said. He had good powers of observation, and he knew the streets. He would be perfect for the job.

  He accepted the praise with a certain complacency, as if his qualities and talents were beyond dispute. ‘Who am I to follow?’

  ‘Stufa.’

  He turned away, the ragged outline of his ear reddening. He clearly knew the name.

  ‘If it’s too much of a challenge,’ I said, ‘or you’re afraid to take it on, I’ll understand.’

  ‘I’m not afraid. I’m just not sure it’s politic.’

  I smiled at his vocabulary. ‘Maybe not. But I don’t have any choice.’

  ‘What kind of information are you after?’

  ‘Something I can use against him.’

  ‘That won’t be easy. I imagine he’s pretty careful.’

  ‘He is, and he isn’t.’

  Stufa was Vittoria’s protégé, I said – in her eyes he could do no wrong – and this, paradoxically, was where his weakness lay. Since he believed himself to be invulnerable, he took more risks than one might expect.

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘I’ve been watching him. Besides, it’s how the powerful behave.’

  Earhole looked through the gap in the wall that served as a window. Though he wasn’t entirely reassured by my answer, I thought he could see that it made sense. It’s the people who don’t have any power who have to watch their step.

  The door banged open. A woman stumbled in and dropped heavily on to a stool. She laid her head on her arms, her white scalp showing through her hair. She smelled of urine and cheap wine.

  ‘My mother,’ Earhole said.

  He gestured to me. I followed him outside. We stood near the mud embankment, and I mentioned the children I had seen earlier.

  ‘It’s not a very good area,’ he said.

  I smiled again.

  I told him what I knew about Stufa, then handed him some change as a retainer. He asked if I had cleared it with Pampolini. I said I had. I watched as he concealed the coins, one by one, about his person. He should come to my workshop, I told him, as soon as he had something to report.