Suicide Kings

by Christopher J. Ferguson

  Siobhan and Francesca obeyed without a word. Diana watched them go with a sinking feeling. She ran the fingers of her good hand through her hair, forgetting they were matted with blood.

  “The servants told me you’d been injured. I’ve heard as well about the incident at the church,” her father explained, his face unreadable. “Is the injury bad?”

  She put her good hand against an unused stove to steady herself. “I lost most of a finger. Could have been much worse though I suppose.”

  He nodded, made no move to come closer to her. “You left five dead behind you I’ve understood.” She nodded. “These men were involved in your mother’s death?” he asked after a moment’s pause.

  Diana nodded again, finally looking him in the eye.

  “Then it’s over?”

  She shook her head. “These men were only hired by others. I still don’t know who wished her dead.”

  “Well, at least we can be sure her death was not a suicide now.” He nodded to himself, “That’s something at least.”

  Her soul would be in heaven, not trapped forever in Hell is what he meant, Diana figured.

  He looked at her evenly. “I would prefer not to lose a daughter as well as a wife. Can what you’ve accomplished thus far not be enough? Let Savonarola take care of the rest. He has as much reason as you to destroy this…Sacred Council.” So, her father had been brought fully up to speed, no doubt by friends within the government.

  His statement retained some truth. If she stepped aside now, Savonarola might very well press ahead where she left off, rooting out the Sacred Council once and for all. She could stop now, resume some semblance of a regular life.

  Her father sighed, looking at his feet, probably guessing before even she did she would never turn back. “I could never imagine the little girl I once held in my arms would leave half a dozen dead in her wake.”

  His words broke her heart. She looked down at the floor, eyes remaining transfixed on a droplet of her own blood.

  A moment passed. Her father sounded so weary when at last he spoke. “I always relied on your mother to act as an intermediary for us. She seemed always to know what to do, what to say to you. I suppose I never allowed myself a proper chance to understand you. I haven’t been much of a father to you. For that I am sorry.”

  Diana looked up at him, watched him for a moment. “Perhaps neither of us have come to understand the other. If you haven’t been much of a father to me, I haven’t been much of a daughter for you.”

  Her father pursed his lips. “I don’t suppose it’s the same thing, do you? I should have known long ago you weren’t meant for the typical course of a woman from Firenze. I just don’t know how to support you on whatever course you are on.”

  Diana’s eyes burned and she sucked in a deep breath to keep her emotions under control. In his way, he was trying to apologize, she knew. Still, within the apology she couldn’t help miss the note of despondency; that she could never be the daughter he expected…the daughter he wanted.

  “Whatever I have that you need,” he said softly. “Money, the Swiss Guards, whatever it takes for you to finish this safely, you take it. You needn’t ask.”

  “I haven’t been…” she replied, unable to stop from breaking into a wide but fragile smile. He smiled back at her as well, a rare moment of warmth and connection passing between them. “Thank you, Father,” she said at last.

  He nodded. “Be safe.”

  ****

  The prisons of Firenze were much as Diana expected, and worse. True to her imagination, the cells were dank and dark, a central corridor between the bars running with a thin turgid stream of water, leaked down through a cracked ceiling from melted snow in the streets above. Diana hadn’t anticipated the stink, the stinging smell of fermenting urine and worse. She nearly gagged as the first wall of this smell hit her when the jailer opened the main door. The inmates receded into the corners of their cell, visible only by the flash of lantern light against a scuffed boot, or scab of flesh. These were a quiet lot, paying a woman in their midst no mind at all. Death awaited these men and women, enemies of Savonarola to a name. Some had been prominent in former lives, others scoundrels through and through. Most had spent their time on the rack and now merely awaited the Mad Friar’s final decision on their fate. No hope emanated from any of the cells.

  The jailer, a stiff young gendarme practiced in the arts of suppressing compassion pointed out the cell of the Boar to Diana. She thanked the jailer and went to the bars at once calling out the Boar’s name. “Pietro. It is Diana. Are you there?”

  From the darkened recesses came a stirring and a shadow emerged. In the dim light she saw his teeth first, the great tusks rising up from his lower jaw. Then she saw the bruises that covered the remainder of his face, evidence of the beating he assuredly took at the hands of his captors. “Lady Savrano, it is the greatest of pleasures to receive your company,” he said, the words struggling to form properly around his massive teeth.

  She felt a tingle in her spine and a heaviness in her heart at the sight of him. Always a pitiable creature, to have fallen to such a depth. Could God have smiled on poor Pietro any less? “Pietro, I must confess I never expected you would be captured. So wily and clever you always seemed.”

  The corners of his mouth, torn from abuse, nonetheless curled upward into a kind smile. “Unfortunately all things must come to an end. No matter how clever you are, there is always luck to work against you. Fear not for my fate; all will happen as it should.” He gripped the bars between them to support his weight. “I have heard much about your travails, and what I hear impresses me greatly. You are truly from your mother’s blood.”

  A pronouncement no doubt containing both good and bad implications. “Niccolo Machiavelli told me you were here. Have they treated you with any decency at all?”

  “Firenze is not known for the clemency of its courts nor the mercy of its inquisitors,” he answered with a wry smile. “What time we are allowed together will not be well spent lamenting over my inalterable fate. You’ve come to ask some last questions.”

  She didn’t know to what degree she could trust Pietro, but he had been her mother’s friend. To hear him speak with such finality troubled her. This affair had brought death to so many. “Mancini is dead. In his last moments he still insisted he hadn’t been the one to slip my mother the poison. Nor that he knew who hired him to try. He had no reason to dissemble in those last moments.”

  “Nor any incentive to tell the truth. Still, I suspect one would hire the sort as Mancini when one wants an assassination known to the public, not disguised as natural death.”

  “It’s frustrating. Even as I progress forward it seems I know nothing more than I did at the start. I understand in your own dire circumstances, helping me must seem a trivial matter.”

  “I assure you, it is not. My difficulties in the end, were brought on only by myself—allowing my own seduction by this mystery cult as a salve for loneliness. Better by far had I kept to my rooms and the shadows. I might have contented myself with the life of a monster rather than the death of a heretic.” He regarded her with sorrowful eyes for a moment. “If Mancini speaks the truth, it would seem two individuals, likely both within the Sacred Council, wished death upon the Lady Isabella, your mother and my friend. Her first error, shared with myself, came in seeking solace with the Council, her second error in vocalizing her intent to leave perhaps not only to myself, who ranked below her in the Council, but perchance also to that person above her, whoever had recruited her to the membership and whose identity, like my own, would be known to her. In leaving the Council, she presumably raised fears she might go to Savonarola with what she knew about the group. Those in the leadership position presumably were those to hire Mancini. However, whoever recruited Lady Isabella for the cult, his or her identity would be known by your mother and have particularly much to fear. In some impatience, they may have taken matters into their own hands.”

  Diana felt the
familiar pain growing behind her forehead. “So the Council raced itself to kill my mother.”

  Pietro offered a sad smile. “Unfortunately that is one weakness of a masked mystery cult. Membership at differing levels don’t always communicate well. One element of the group did not know what the other planned. The lesser plan…that of the singular individual to poison your mother might have worked well, had not the greater plan already been in motion. Unnecessary though he might have been, Mancini nonetheless arrived in Firenze. He soon was recognized by his former paramour, the nun you knew as Sister Maria Innocentia, probably one of the most poorly named of all nuns.”

  Diana furrowed her brows. “Was not Maria Innocentia herself part of the Council?”

  Pietro half shrugged. “A recent addition, low ranked, and quite addled besides. A shadow of whatever murderous assassin she had once been when at the side of Mancini. No doubt Ophelia brought her into the fold of the Council, and likely regretted it soon after. It was unwise to bring one such as she into the Council, although she might have done the damage that she wrought, regardless. Mourning the death of your mother, of whom she was fond due to your mother’s charity to the sisterly order, and seeing the arrival of her former lover Mancini, she cleverly connected the two. My relationship with your mother was not very secret, and she managed to steal from me part of the note your mother had written to me detailing her concerns. It must have come as a shock to poor demented Maria Innocentia who had found some comfort in the mysteries of the Council.”

  “But she was fond of my mother and her memory and, hoping to find my mother some justice, spoke to me at my mother’s funeral.”

  Pietro nodded. “By then however, the Council had caught on to her and one of them chose to eliminate her. Again, whether a solitary choice, or the action of the leadership, it is difficult to say.”

  “So this entire plot is founded on foolishness and fear.”

  Pietro’s eyebrows raised a bit. “Fear of the stake. Fear of Savonarola. Fear of the fate that even now awaits me.”

  She shook her head. “People are so idiotic.” Even as she said it she wondered what she truly meant. Were the Council foolish for following their errant beliefs down a disastrous road to its inevitable conclusion? Or were men like Savonarola and the Borgia Pope imprudent for turning the love of God into such a bloody business? How was it that men with such ease twisted the love of God for their own cruel instincts? Or perhaps she herself was simply naïve and God truly was the vindictive and jealous entity the priests sometimes made Him sound.

  “You look despondent,” Pietro observed.

  “I never managed to get any closer to the Council themselves. Even with Mancini dead, I still have no idea who killed my mother.”

  Pietro smiled at her kindly. “Your accomplishments have been wondrous. You have the Council on the defensive. You’ve done so much more than Savonarola ever managed on his own.”

  She cringed at his name. “It does not bother you at all to find I have become his pawn?”

  “You each use the other for a mutual purpose. Predictable and I imagine, temporary.”

  “Let us hope.” Diana went silent for a moment. “I would never have imagined how deeply mired in death I would become. I suppose I understood it might be necessary to use violence from the moment I took my father’s pistol. Even then it seemed such a fantastical idea. At first I worried I wouldn’t have the stomach for violence. Now I worry it has bothered me so little. Perhaps I am no better than the men I hunt.”

  “You didn’t begin this,” he reminded her. “And many people would be surprised by what they are capable of when put to the test.” He licked his tongue along the outside of one of his tusks, an absentminded gesture. “I may be able to help you bring an end to the Council.”

  She raised her eyebrows, listening.

  He went on. “I’ve told you recruitment into the Council is hierarchical. As your mother recruited me, so I recruited a colleague as well. Aside from your mother, the only individual I ever considered a friend. Some way I have returned that favor, is it not? Assuming the Council still meet, following him could lead you to the rest. He’s only a low-level member, undoubtedly innocent of your mother’s death. I’ll give you his name under the condition you do not pass it on to Savonarola. He does not deserve this fate.” He motioned to his jail cell.

  Diana nodded. “I agree to your condition. I will protect the identity of your friend to the best of my abilities.”

  “That will suffice. His name is Rogelio Bercuoli. He is a cobbler of some repute, of average physique but possessed of mannerisms that alienate him from his fellow man. As with my physical afflictions, the result has been to isolate him from those who would be his companions. The Council offered him a social congress unavailable to him through more typical channels. I suppose this to be the case for many who joined, myself no exception.”

  Diana consigned the name to memory. “Thank you, Pietro. I wish I could do something to alter your own fate. A word with Friar Savonarola, perhaps?”

  Pietro chuckled. “Do not mistake a piece of paper with your name and his signature for real influence. To associate yourself in his eyes with one such as me even in the name of mercy would only be detrimental to your own self. Savonarola has no mercy in his soul.”

  He was right of course. Diana felt helpless, a perpetually familiar sensation. “Very well. I’ll wish you a miracle then.”

  “They do occasionally happen,” he smiled.

  “Best wishes, Pietro.” She turned slowly away from him, feeling there was more she could say to him but no words came. When finally she emerged back into the light she realized she had held her breath, not against the foul odors of the jail, but against the stench of hopelessness and of death.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Foretold

  Finding and tracking the youth Rogelio Bercuoli proved an easy enough task. The young man lived alone above his cobbler’s shop, which, as Pietro had indicated, enjoyed a fine reputation despite the social limitations of the proprietor. From what Diana could observe in several days of watching him, Rogelio lived a solitary existence, had few friends, rarely smiled. He seemed little more than an accidental interruption in the normal flow of entropy with his living cells merely waiting for their eventual release back to the natural chaos of things. He worked hard during the day and at night, though he refused to become a shut in, his nightly outings were solitary and he dined alone in a regular circuit of fine establishments in the city. Diana felt sorry for him. Such a bleak and lonely existence, his seemed. What confidants he did have appeared to be cut from much the same cloth as himself and Pietro, the undesirables of Firenze.

  For their expeditions to track him, Diana hired a carriage at her father’s considerable expense. Hardly the least conspicuous method of surveillance but Diana could not stomach lingering on street corners for endless hours in the cold. At least in the carriage, Diana and her compatriots could share warmth. Diana decided it had been a wise decision. Several days of scrutiny led them no closer to the Council. At least Rogelio appeared to take no particular notice of them. They began watching him from the time he closed his shop each day until after midnight when he appeared most likely to have retired for the night. Diana reasoned he wouldn’t be able to leave his shop during the day, and it would be difficult to coordinate meetings later at night when few people would be sure of the exact time. This plan left most of the day uncovered. Yet they were not professional gendarmes. It wouldn’t be safe to watch him alone, and they had to sleep.

  By the third night, they began to wonder if this effort wasted their time.

  “Are we sure we can even trust your friend Pietro?” Siobhan whined, visibly becoming increasingly uncomfortable cooped up in the carriage hour after hour, night after night. “Maybe he’s still working for the Council and leading us off on a wild chase.”

  “If so, they would have ambushed us in the carriage by now if they’re smart. It’s what I would do.” Diana looked up
to see two pairs of eyes watching her in the dark. “What?”

  “Those who live by the sword, die by the sword, Diana,” Francesca chided.

  “Lots of people who don’t live by the sword still die by the sword. At least having a sword gives you a fighting chance,” Diana replied.

  Francesca actually groaned, causing Diana to give her a scowl.

  “Maybe the Council figured out Rogelio is a weak link, recruited by Pietro, and didn’t invite him to any more of their meetings,” Francesca added.

  Diana kept silent, but inwardly admitted it could be possible. What a waste of time this would be. “Even if it’s true, we’ve got no other alternatives. No other information.”

  “It’s fine, Diana. I’ll be out here with you as long as you need,” Francesca assured her.

  “Yeah, me too,” Siobhan added with a downward inflection. “I’d just rather be doing something active, like strangling one of them.” She shifted in her seat. She wore the same rapier as during the fight in the church, and now added No-Nose’s former pistol to her arsenal. From her constant fidgeting, the weapons made it hard for her to get comfortable.

  “Maybe their plan is to just let us freeze to death out here in the cold,” Diana groused.

  “It’s not so bad,” Francesca offered with a shrug.

  “You’ve been living in a cave carved into the side of a convent the last few years,” Siobhan observed. “This must be luxury for you by contrast.”

  Francesca gave her a cool glare. Diana felt a surge of pride for Francesca. Slowly the girl seemed to be heating up a bit, not just recovering physically, but throwing off the freeze in her development set in during years spent in near isolation as the anchoress. Seeing a little spunk in the woman seemed right. Then again, it was a matter of perspective perhaps, and Diana couldn’t be sure that her perspective on things made much sense at all.

  “Our fellow is leaving,” Siobhan announced. Indeed Rogelio closed the door to his store and apartments, dressed in a heavy robe, arms kept close to his side. He didn’t look around as he set out and, as best they could tell, took no notice of them. He kept his eyes down on the street, and looked no one in the eye as he passed them.