The Thief Of Peace

by Jess Whitecroft

  “Were you serious?” Nicci said. “When you said you’d swear on the book?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I panicked.”

  “Do you want me to come to San Bendetto with you?”

  Teo shook his head. “No. The abbot doesn’t like you. Thinks you’re leading me astray.”

  “Shows how much he knows.” Teo didn’t need leading astray, especially not when his blood was up. “You shouldn’t go alone, all the same. Take the groom with you or something. Fillipo probably isn’t going to take his brother’s arrest lying down, and I need you to stay safe.”

  “All right,” said Teo, and stole a brief touch, his fingers on the back of Nicci’s wrist. “God, will this ever be over?”

  “It will. It has to end. Everything ends, eventually.” The street was too public for the kiss Nicci wanted to give him, so he had to settle for a smile, a lingering look. “When this is over, we’ll sleep for a year.”

  “Never leave the bedroom.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me.” He smiled again, basking in the light of Teo’s dark blue eyes. “Go. Saddle the horses again. I’ll draw.”

  18

  There were fewer pilgrims at San Bendetto today. At first Teo thought it was because word had leaked about the murder, but when he looked in on Brother Sandro he saw why. The queue outside Sandro’s room was thinner and shorter, and people held handkerchiefs over their mouths. The smell could have been worse – not the ripe rot of full decomposition – but its sweetness had shifted subtly from something floral to the rancid sweetness of death. It now held a mustiness than whispered only of things long dead, and while the body was still in remarkable shape under the circumstances, it was clear that the elements were trying to claim back Brother Sandro. In an attempt to preserve the corpse, the brothers had erected muslin screens over the windows, to keep the flies out. When the sun shone upon the screens Teo could see the flies squirming in their eagerness to find a way inside. All it took – he knew – was one fly. In that respect Brother Sandro was no different to a cured ham. A single fly could lay enough eggs to turn a carefully dried and salted hock into an inedible mass of wriggling maggots.

  Teo had brought two drawings with him. One was of Rafaele Ribisi, the other was the picture of Beppe Tornato. That way, he thought, he could weed out reliable witnesses from those whose memory or veracity was more suspect: as far as Teo knew, Beppe Tornato had never set foot in San Bendetto.

  But it was hopeless. Nobody recognised either drawing, and most of the pilgrims said they hadn’t even been there when it happened. Teo searched for the ones he recognised, the ones who had been here at the start and presumably had enough faith in the miracle to stay until the bitter end, but he couldn’t seem to pick them out from the crowd. It was as though he’d become so different a person to the monk who had lived here that he no longer had access to his own memories.

  “Anyone would think you missed us,” said the abbot, with a wry smile that was something like the shadow of his old warmth.

  Teo showed him the picture of Ribisi. “This is one of the men who killed Armando,” he said. “I’m certain of it, and I can prove it. But I need a witness. Think, Father. Do you recognise him?”

  The abbot shook his head. “Do I have to remind you of the commandments, Brother Teo? The one about bearing false witness?”

  Unless you were bearing false witness to a miracle, Teo supposed. Then it was perfectly acceptable to keep pretending that the dead man currently stinking up the cloister had actually been singled out as an incorruptible saint. Still, there was scaffolding around the chapel, and people were working on the roof. At least the coin seemed to be going where the abbot said it was, which was – Teo now realised – about as much as you could expect in these sinful days.

  “I don’t need you to lie,” said Teo. “I just need you to think. Please. Where are the pilgrims who were here at the start? The ones who came when Sandro first died?”

  “Gone,” said the abbot. “They peeled off one by one over time. Faith is finite, it seems.”

  Defeated, Teo trudged back up to the pigsty. The stain of Armando’s blood was long gone, swallowed by mud and late summer rain. Margarita’s litter had lost their pink baby newness and were now solidly and resolutely hog shaped. If there was ever any evidence here Teo had missed it, and now he was sunk. He was already rehearsing what he knew he was going to have to say to the duke. What could he say? Simply confess that he’d lied? That sounded like the best policy, but what if it led to the case collapsing? Then what? A new era of sleeping with one eye open because he expected the Ribisis to – perhaps justifiably this time – settle their old score with him?

  Margarita leaned up against the fence.

  Teo swallowed hard, his eyes stinging. He wondered what it said about him that he was so grateful that a pig remembered him, but he picked up a suitable stick and set to work, scratching her flank the way he had a thousand times before.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said. “You were always such a wonderful conversationalist. And you probably saw everything, didn’t you? It’s a shame you make such a poor witness.” He waved the portraits under her nose. “Two grunts for yes, one grunt for no,” he said, and allowed himself a bleak laugh at the idea of walking into the Palazzo Vecchio with a pig on a string. Excuse the porcine condition of my witness, your Grace, but I can vouch for her scrupulous honesty.

  He saw someone coming up the hill and glanced down. It was a woman, the old lady who had been one of the first pilgrims, the mad one who had insisted that there would be another miracle at San Bendetto when Brother Sandro rose from the dead and walked on his pierced feet. The abbot had said that all the pilgrims had gone, but this woman had the look of one who had been overlooked her whole life. Her dandelion hair was tangled and her eyes too fierce. In a sling around her neck she carried a couple of barn cats, feral little balls of fur that she had somehow tamed.

  “There you are,” she said, as if she’d known him all his life. “I know you didn’t come back to this place to scratch a pig with a stick.”

  “No,” said Teo. “No, I didn’t. Do you…do you remember me?”

  “Of course I remember you. Good looking lad like you, hiding yourself away among all these oddities and old men? You stood out like a rose on a dung heap.” She nodded to the drawings under his arm. “I heard you had a picture to show people. Of a man who might have committed murder?”

  “Why? Did you see something?”

  “Yes. Nobody listened to me. Nobody ever does, but I saw him. Saw him going up to feed the pigs that night, but I looked twice, because I thought it was you, and it wasn’t. It was the other young one…”

  “Armando?” said Teo, his heart suddenly racing. He couldn’t be this lucky. Could he? “What else? Did you see anyone else?”

  She nodded. “Saw a man behind him. Pilgrim in a dark cloak.” Her fingers, bent and stained, reached for the drawing. “Show me.”

  Teo showed her the picture of Beppe Tornato. She gave it a long look, sucking at a hollow tooth the whole time, and Teo waited for her to say the words that would prove her either a liar or mistaken.

  But she didn’t. Instead she shook her head. “No. That’s not him,” she said. “You got another one there?”

  She gasped when he showed her Rafaele Ribisi. “That’s him,” she said. “That’s the man I saw following the monk to the pigsty.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Nobody ever listens to me, but I’m telling you. That’s him.”

  “I believe you,” said Teo, almost laughing in wonder and relief. Miracles really did happen at San Bendetto after all. “I do. I believe you.”

  *

  Nicci looked up at the lattice wall once more. The picture was clearer in his mind now. He saw a baptism overlooked by angels, creatures of light and air gazing down from either side of the central panel. He saw the decorative columns, the marble frieze carved with the boar devices of the Albani, the tricks of paint a
nd perspective he would use to make the scene look as though one could walk forwards into the wall and feel the sun on their face and the waters of Jordan lap at their feet. He’d explained all these things to Giancarlo several times, but the young man still wouldn’t stop frowning, making Nicci concerned that he’d missed something in explaining his vision.

  “Tell me,” Nicci pleaded. “What is it that you don’t see? Do you think it won’t support the weight of the marble above? What is it? Tell me.”

  Giancarlo, kneeling in front of the drawings spread on the church floor, sat back on his heels. “It sounds fine,” he said. “Really. It all sounds wonderful.”

  “Then why do you have that look on your face?”

  Giancarlo rolled his eyes. “Oh, for the love of…” He stood up. “Has anyone ever told you that you can be very self-centred? For all I know right now Fillipo Ribisi is sharpening his blade to come after me.”

  “He wouldn’t dare,” said Nicci. “It would just make them look guilty. Besides, how do you know he hasn’t been arrested along with his brother?”

  “That’s just it,” said Giancarlo, brushing dust from his knees. “We don’t. We don’t know that at all.” He shivered, in spite of the thick doublet he wore, cleverly padded to give him shoulders and the illusion of a broader chest. Without his clothes, Giancarlo was as skinny and pink as a denuded rabbit. “He’s probably lurking in the sacristy, waiting to put a rope around my neck. Wouldn’t be the first time he’s threatened me. In this very church, too.”

  “If he tries, we’ll deal with it,” said Nicci, glancing at the sword he’d laid next to the wall so that he could kneel more comfortably. “Anyway, if family resemblance counts for anything he probably talked his way into a set of chains the moment the officers knocked on his door.”

  “I know. I can’t believe he did that. For a moment I thought he was going to start ranting on about his stupid cousin again.”

  “Cousin?”

  “The drunk,” Giancarlo said. “Remember? I told you.”

  “No,” said Nicci, although he did remember. That thing. The other missing piece. The thing that Giancarlo had said to him when he’d been all fogged up with a hangover and thinking with his prick besides. It had been in front of him all along. “Yes. Maybe?”

  “No maybe about it. I did. The cousin was a brawler. A drunkard. Always picking fights. Anyone could have killed him, but then he turned up—”

  “—full of more holes than a pincushion,” Nicci said, remembering Teo on that bizarre night when he first left San Bendetto. I lost count of how many times I stabbed him. Oh, he was an idiot, and Teo had been right all along. It had been retribution. “Oh sh…oh no. I remember. You did tell me. You told me and I never made the connection until now.”

  “What connection?”

  “The cousin. What was his name? Ribisi?”

  “No,” said Giancarlo. “Cesaro. He was a cousin on the mother’s side, I think.”

  “And his family crest was a serpent wrapped around a sword.”

  “Was it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nicci, his mind racing. “But I’m willing to bet it was. Go back. Remind me. What happened with the cousin? When did he die? Five years ago? Four years ago?”

  “Yes, that sounds about right. I told you. He died. Probably picked a fight with the wrong person. The Ribisi blamed the Albani, but Duke Cosimo threw out the case for lack of evidence…”

  Nicci groaned. “And because Cosimo knew it was the Albani family and he’d already hushed it up. Because the Albani who killed Cesaro was no longer a problem: he’d confessed to the killing and – in his shame and remorse – decided to take holy orders at the monastery of San Bendetto.”

  Giancarlo stared open mouthed at him for a moment. “Teo?”

  Nicci nodded. “It was self-defence. This Cesaro attacked him in an alleyway when he was only fifteen years old. Teo always believed that someone would come after him for Cesaro’s death. He argued that Armando’s murder was retribution and I said it made more sense as part of a family feud, but it turns out we were both right. This is it.”

  “This is the reason why all of this has happened?”

  “I think so,” said Nicci, gathering up his drawings and his sword. He had to tell Teo. “It all makes sense now. The only thing that doesn’t make sense is the timing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why now?” said Nicci. “If the Ribisi have known all along that Teo was responsible for their cousin’s death, why did they strike now, and not five years ago? Think about it. Do they strike you as the kind of people who would sit on information like that?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  They stepped out, blinking, into the bright sunlight of the piazza. A small flock of pigeons flapped up from the paving stones and fluttered at them, close enough for Nicci to smell the dust on their wings. “What the hell…?” he started to say, then saw the reason why the birds were scattering towards them. A hooded figure, approaching at a run.

  Giancarlo turned to flee, but it was too late. There was a flash of metal and he fell, clutching his side. Instinctively, Nicci reached for his own freshly buckled sword and drew. He jabbed clumsily and felt something – flesh, muscle, horrible – give beneath the end of his blade. Of course Teo had sharpened the damned sword for him.

  Shocked at what he had done, Nicci drew back. The man in the hood folded onto the ground, his face still hidden. Nicci reached for Giancarlo, who lay about a foot away, blood staining the spaces between his fingers. “Let me see,” said Nicci, and gently pried the boy’s hand away. Giancarlo threw his head back, closed his eyes and moaned, but it wasn’t so bad, not really. He was cut, but it wasn’t deep. His quilted doublet had taken more punishment than he had. “It’s all right,” Nicci said, ignoring the small crowd that was now gathering. “It’s a scratch. Just a scratch. We’ll patch you up. Don’t you worry.”

  He heard the rasp of metal on stone and turned back to the other man, who was reaching for his sword. Nicci stamped down hard on the blade with his foot and reached for the hood. He’d been so ready to see the face of a Ribisi beneath it that when he didn’t he cried out in horror.

  It was Vicini.

  *

  The hallway smelled of blood, and something far worse. Some whiff of offal, like a pierced bowel. There was nothing that could save Vicini now. When the priest stepped out of the bedroom, Teo expected him to say that it was over.

  “He’s asking for you,” said the priest. “But it won’t be long now.”

  “All right. Thank you.”

  In the bedroom, the shutters were already closed. Vicini had complained that the light hurt his eyes. Everything was too bright, he said. The smell was thicker here, meaty and intestinal, like uncooked chitterlings. Despite everyone’s best efforts, the bed was soaked in blood. Vicini himself was as pale as parchment against all the red. His thin lips were so white that they had vanished. His dark eyes already had that distant look that Teo recognised from Brother Sandro’s deathbed, when the dying man had seemed to look through Teo, as though he were insubstantial as glass or shadow. And maybe he was, because that was the look of someone about to leave this world and stare eternity in the face.

  Teo didn’t like to think too hard about what that looked like for Vicini.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” he said, still reeling at everything he’d learned in the last hour or so. “There was never anything wrong with your hearing. After all these years you still have the ears of a bat. You heard us talking about Beppe Tornato, and you were the one who had his execution brought forward, before he could ruin everything.”

  Vicini swallowed. “I have to…” he said, and his voice sounded echoey, as though the loss of all that blood had left him literally hollow. “Please. I have to…”

  “Confess?” said Teo, drawing closer to the bed. “Yes. You do. And not just to God, but to me. When you’re gone, Vicini, you’re gone. No family to pray for you, only the family
you served. And betrayed. So talk, and maybe – just maybe – I’ll see my way to praying for your wretched soul.”

  “I swear, Teodoro…” Vicini moaned and clutched his side. “You have to believe me. I didn’t know they were behind Giacamo’s death. Not at first. I thought it was the husband. If I’d known they’d killed Giacamo I would never have taken them up on their offer, but what else was I to do? They had the ear of the regent. They had sons. Continuity. Everything your family no longer had. I’ve served the Albani my whole life, but there was only Giovanni left. And you were a monk. Where would that leave me when your father died?”

  “Rich, Vicini,” said Teo. His skin felt hot and too tight. He dug his nails into his palms. “It would have left you rich, but that wasn’t enough for you, was it? You had to find another host to feed upon, like the tick you are.”

  “It wasn’t personal. The Ribisi family offered me a new opportunity. That was all. The extinction of your family was inevitable at that point, until your father…” Vicini winced and paused to suck air through his teeth. “Your father hatched that stupid plan to get that…that sot to drag you out of the monastery.”

  “And it interfered with your plans, didn’t it? To quietly inherit a fortune from my father and then slip off and serve a new family. An ascendant family. One who had Francesco’s favour.”

  “If your father had only left you alone, I wouldn’t have had to…”

  “Had to what?” said Teo, although he knew what was coming next.

  Vicini gulped. The faraway look in his eyes was growing more distant. “Tell them. What you did.”

  He’d known all along, that Teo had killed Cesaro. He’d been part of the cover up, part of that complicated system of back scratching and bribery that had kept the Ribisi quiet and Cesaro’s death just the unsolved murder of a drunken young man who had been far too fond of fighting in the first place.

  “Had to?” said Teo. “You had to tell them? Why did you have to tell them, Vicini? To prove your new loyalty to them?”