The Phoenix of Florence

by Philip Kazan

  The bell towers of Florence began, one by one, and then in a galloping, tuneless chorus, to welcome the sixth hour of the day. Santa Maria dell’Umiltà’s old, off-pitch bells were clanging too loudly for the stinking air of this last day of August, filling up Borgo Ognissanti, and my head, to bursting. There had been a lovely few minutes before sunrise when a cool breeze had slipped in through the open window of my bedchamber and I had got up and stood naked, looking over the rooftops to where the mountains were just forming out of the darkness, letting the cold air play across my skin. I had gone down to the courtyard, drawn a bucket of water from the well and, still in my nightshirt, poured it over my head. Then I had dressed and slipped out into the daylight, which was as hot and jaundiced as old melted butter.

  The curfew was still in effect and the parish of Ognissanti was silent, though the stench of urine from the dyers’ workshops on each side of the street was so strong that it almost had its own sound: a thin whine, as insistent as a trapped wasp. Piazza della Signoria was empty of anyone and anything, except a flock of pigeons. By the time I got to the Bargello, it was as if I hadn’t slept at all. My boss, Captain Benedetto Scarfa, had already arrived, which was a rarity; I was almost always the first in to the office, and I guessed that Scarfa’s presence didn’t bode well. I was right.

  ‘You’re late, Celavini,’ the captain said. By the sound of his voice, he had slept as well as I had.

  ‘Late for what?’ I replied, looking around pointedly at the empty room.

  ‘For last night’s murder.’

  ‘Late? By a few minutes. The blood was still steaming when I got there, I can assure you, Capo.’

  ‘Keep up, Celavini. There’s been another one.’

  My stomach lurched, even though I had been expecting this. ‘Of course there has.’

  ‘Another one, Celavini.’

  ‘I heard you. Pietro Vennini’s lover, no doubt.’

  ‘You’re a hard man to surprise. But yes, you’ve got it.’ Scarfa crossed himself with a world-weary flourish. ‘She was called Zanobia Linucci, God rest her soul. You’ll find her in Chiasso Cornino.’

  ‘Linucci?’ I frowned. I had expected a name I recognised, the wife of a patrician or a rich merchant. ‘I’ve never heard of her. Are we sure that she’s part of this?’

  ‘The servants say that Vennini was a regular visitor. And the whole city knows Vennini.’

  ‘Who is she, though?’

  ‘That, my dear fellow, is your exciting challenge for today. And a write-up on last night’s little cavort, if you please.’

  I rubbed my stinging eyes and shook my head, wishing it would clear, wishing I didn’t feel as if I had the worst hangover in the world, though I hadn’t touched a drop the night before.

  ‘They didn’t waste any time,’ I muttered at last, settling into my chair. The stack of papers on my desk seemed to have grown in the night, as though the wood had been infected by some particularly aggressive fungus. At least it was quiet right now. The office of the sbirri is next door to the torture chamber of our employers, the Otto di Guardia, the Eight of Public Safety, and the magistrates don’t mind how early they begin to interrogate their suspects.

  ‘Unlike you,’ said Scarfa. ‘Off you go, Celavini. I want a report on all this mess for the magistrates. I want it before luncheon. Well before.’

  I smelt the blood before I had even reached the bottom of the stairs. The narrow house on Chiasso Cornino looked ancient on the outside but the interior was done up in the newest style. I noted a very fine tapestry in the entrance hall, and my shoes sank luxuriantly into the long pile of a Turkish carpet as I walked towards the stairs. The stairwell was lined with crisply carved panelling, and the plastered walls were brightly frescoed with cherubs and greenery in the ancient Roman style. There was a rich scent of polish, of laundry and fine beeswax candles in the air. But over it all was the thick, rank sweetness of blood spilt into August heat. A small crowd of people blocked the top of the stairs: servants, from the scullery maid to the steward, all whispering busily to each other. None of them looked particularly upset. Quite the reverse. I recognised the muted holiday mood that often attended these miserable affairs. I sighed wearily and cleared my throat, and the two footmen who were blocking my way started guiltily and stepped aside.

  ‘Let the comandante of the Bargello through!’ It was the voice of a man who had slept even less than I had, and sure enough, when I peered through the crowd, a square-shouldered man in Medici livery was standing in front of a painted door.

  ‘Good morning, Andrea,’ I called, and saw one of the servants, a lady’s maid by the quality of her dress, frown at the harsh, cracked sound of my voice. It was worse than usual this morning; the heat and the lack of sleep had dried out my throat, and I knew I must sound horrible. No more horrible, though, than what was behind that door. ‘Something of a fairground up here. It’s worse down in the street.’

  ‘No one ever gets bored of blood,’ said Gherardi.

  ‘Really? I’m getting a little tired of it, for one. Seems like we’ve been wading through it lately. When did you get here?’

  ‘I stayed on duty last night, Comandante.’ He looks as rough as I feel, I thought.

  ‘And someone came and reported the crime?’

  ‘Someone …’ He scanned the gaggle of servants. ‘That one there,’ he went on, pointing at the youngest footman.

  ‘Time?’

  ‘Around four of the clock.’

  ‘And you’ve been here ever since?’

  Gherardi rubbed his stubbled chin. Twenty or more years older than I, like most of the police, the sergeant drank too much and was ageing by the minute, so it seemed, under the strain of trying to marry off his three daughters. ‘Well …’ He looked down knowingly at me. ‘There wasn’t any need to hurry, was there?’

  ‘No?’

  He shrugged. ‘Dead is dead, Comandante. Am I right?’

  ‘And she was dead?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Gherardi chuckled grimly. ‘There wasn’t any rush. Well, you’ll see, sir.’

  He shifted to one side and opened the door. I paused. ‘Anyone else been inside?’

  ‘The priest just left.’

  ‘All right. Thanks, Andrea.’ I ducked under the sergeant’s arm and stepped into the bedchamber.

  The heavy curtains were still drawn across the windows, and the room was dark, except for one candle burning in a candlestick that stood on the floor, carefully placed in the centre of one of the geometric medallions of the rug, a few inches from the naked foot of the young woman who was half lying, half sitting against the side of the four-poster bed. Her nightdress was rucked up around her splayed thighs, its white linen dark red now and plastered to her body. Her head lolled back against the coverlet at a right angle. There was almost nothing to hold it in place: the wound that divided the waxy skin of the woman’s neck was so deep that I could see the yellowish bone of her spine. Her eyes, already filmed with dust, gazed blindly at the coffered ceiling, and her lips were drawn back in a rictus, exposing white teeth and blackened tongue.

  ‘Donna Zanobia,’ I murmured. I knew her name; it seemed impolite not to use it. I walked carefully across the room, noting the bloody footprints that dotted the bright colours of the rug, guessing that the priest had knelt on one of the clean patches. He hadn’t wanted to get too close. If he was the parish priest, then I knew him: a fastidious little man who would be upset by stains on his cassock. You should have closed her eyes, I thought, bending over the woman. I reached down and touched her cold eyelids with my fingertips, pulling them gently down over the glassy pupils, but when I took my fingers away one lid opened again, slowly. Nothing but a reflex of dead tissue, yet there was something almost complicit in the way the eye continued to stare. We both know what we see, the dead woman seemed to be telling me.

  ‘I know, I know,’ I said to the empty room. I shook myself, trying to shift the stifling mood that had been weighing on me ever since I had walked into th
e house, went over to the windows and pulled open the curtains. ‘No one is surprised, are they? Not even you.’ I turned back to the bed and saw that the low sunlight pouring in through the windows had made the body more grotesque, less human. It was a relief.

  I squatted down on the carpet and pinched out the candle. The dead woman’s bare feet, stained crimson where she had slipped in the cascade of her own blood, had perfectly manicured nails.

  ‘Come in here, please, Andrea,’ I called. The sergeant came round the door and stood, looking bored, at the edge of the bloodstain that had swallowed half the rug. ‘Any witnesses?’

  ‘Plenty.’ Andrea scratched his nose idly; the dead woman was keeping him from his breakfast.

  ‘How so?’

  The sergeant shrugged. ‘The steward was woken by a banging on the door – as I said, around four of the clock. Two men with their faces masked—’

  ‘Masked? What sort of masks?’

  ‘Hoods with eyeholes cut in them. Black. And they wore black robes. Like the Misericordia, is what the witnesses all said.’

  I grimaced. The city confraternities who tended the dying and collected the dead hid their identities, for modesty’s sake, behind black hoods and robes. And they would be along, shortly, to collect Zanobia Linucci. ‘The Misericordia, or the Battuti Neri.’ The masked men who also accompanied those condemned to die on their last journey to the gallows pulled on their legs to make sure they died quickly.

  ‘They had a sense of humour, at least.’ Andrea scuffed idly at the rug with the toe of his shoe. The dead woman was nothing more to him, now, than an impediment to breakfast.

  ‘Is that what you’d call this?’

  ‘I mean, after what happened to Pietro Vennini, she might as well have been waiting on the gallows.’

  ‘That seems to be what everyone thinks.’

  ‘Everyone.’ Andrea nodded in placid agreement. ‘You still need me, Comandante?’

  ‘Yes. Who was she?’ I asked.

  Andrea cast a weary glance ceiling-wards, giving me a view of the bloodshot whites of his eyes. Then he shook his head. ‘Good question. As far as I can gather, she’s a widow from down south …’

  ‘South? Naples? Rome?’

  ‘South in Tuscany. No one’s very clear about where.’

  ‘Siena?’

  Andrea shrugged. ‘Can’t get a clear answer.’

  ‘But she’s a widow?’

  ‘That’s what they say.’ Andrea looked around the room. ‘Married young and married very well, by the looks of this place. Rich husband with the decency to turn up his toes before she lost her looks.’

  ‘She was carrying on with Vennini, but she’s a widow. Why kill her?’ I looked down at the carpet. It had a decidedly masculine air about it. Would a young-ish woman have chosen it for her bedroom? ‘So she was someone’s mistress. Kept. Who owns the house?’

  ‘Give me a chance, Comandante!’

  ‘Get the witnesses together so I can question them. Then you can go. I want the deeds to this house on my desk before lunch.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  Andrea went out and closed the door behind him. I looked around the room again: fine old furniture, a well-painted portrait of a man in armour with a bullish face, another painting of a classical nymph. Above the table, which was scattered with pots of face creams and paints, a Venetian mirror was hanging, from which I was staring back at myself: a small and slight man, a head shorter than my sergeant, with close-cropped, straight brown hair under my neat cap. Clean-shaven, with an old scar running up from the high collar of my doublet, scribbled like a crack in porcelain across my pale skin, a red line from the hollow of my throat to just under my left ear. A fresher scar, hardly healed, smeared across my right temple. Small and rather fine nose, broken at some point, skilfully reset. Brown eyes, almost unnaturally large in the setting of a delicate face.

  I turned my back on him and knelt again on the rug. It was new, I saw: golden-yellow medallions like knotted stars laid out across reds and purples and blues, everything geometric, repeating obsessively. A muffled hubbub came to me through the door, but the loudest sound inside the room was my own measured breathing. I traced one of the golden patterns with a finger, smoothing the soft nap of the wool. Complicated, but once my finger had travelled through every angle, it arrived back at the point where it had begun. The stars were mazes with no way out. In that way they reflected the life and now the death of their owner. I stood up, drew in a deep breath and took hold of the corpse under its arms. The dead woman was heavy and beginning to stiffen, but I lowered her as gently as I could to the floor, straightened her legs and crossed her arms over her chest. I pulled a sheet from the bed and covered her with it, watching as the fine white cloth ballooned gently before settling on her limbs and face. Then I knelt beside her and began to pray.

  The steward shifted uncomfortably against the carved panelling of the main room. He looked like a disgruntled bullock trying to scratch an itch. A large, dark-haired man with bramble eyebrows and steel-blue bristles on his cheeks, he wasn’t happy that I had caught him trying to slip away through the kitchen.

  ‘Who killed your mistress?’ I asked, for the second time. My voice gave the words a jagged edge. The man shrugged. ‘You can tell me now, or I’ll put you in front of the Otto. You can tell the magistrates. You’re a big fellow: not ideally suited to the strappado, I wouldn’t think.’

  The man swallowed. ‘Why would they torture me? I’m just a servant.’

  ‘Because you’re acting a bit suspiciously, aren’t you, Simone? First you open the door to a couple of masked men who swan upstairs and butcher your mistress, and then you try and sneak out when the comandante of the sbirri arrives.’ I cocked my head. ‘If I was the Otto, I’d torture you, to be honest. Give you a couple of drops, whether you needed them or not.’

  ‘All right! All right. But I don’t know who killed Donna Zanobia. They were wearing masks, like I said. That’s the truth.’

  ‘Who sent them? Actually, no, let’s not waste time here. Who kept Donna Zanobia? Whose mistress was she? Who owns this house?’

  ‘Donna Zanobia owned it.’

  ‘Do I look like a simpleton? Who bought it for her?’

  Simone pursed his lips until they were white, then let out a deflated sigh. ‘God in heaven. I warned her, you know. I told her what would happen. But she knew what she wanted, and, well …’

  ‘The house, Simone.’

  ‘But she really did own it! I worked for her; we all did. Donna Zanobia came up from the south two years ago. Her husband had died: he was a gentleman from Pitigliano. A wine merchant or something like that. Brother of a bishop, I think. I was hired after the house was bought, to arrange for her arrival. But you’re right, Signor Celavini. I don’t think any of this was paid for by Donna Zanobia. It was very clear that she had been installed here in the city as a man’s mistress. I wasn’t happy about that. My career has been respectable …’

  ‘No doubt.’ I let myself soften a little. ‘So, this man.’

  ‘Will I be safe? If I tell you, I mean?’

  ‘You’re going to tell me or the Otto, Simone.’

  ‘But all these deaths!’ The big man wasn’t being shifty, I saw; he was terrified.

  ‘You’ll be a witness in a murder case. The magistrates have every reason to keep you safe.’

  He gritted his teeth and let out a sort of moan. ‘I … I know he didn’t kill Donna Zanobia, because I’d have recognised him, mask or not.’

  ‘Oh yes? Why?’

  ‘Because he has a crooked back.’ Simone arched his spine back and to the side. ‘Like this.’

  ‘So he’s a hunchback?’

  ‘No. Not crooked like that. He isn’t exactly a cripple, just twisted. As if he’d had an accident: fallen off his horse, or been wounded, but a long time ago. He doesn’t accept it, if you know what I mean. If he’d been born that way, he wouldn’t be so … angry about it.’

  ‘About his
back?’

  The steward groaned. ‘I don’t know what I mean. All I can tell you is that he’s tall and his back’s twisted. His name is Don Bartolomeo. It isn’t his real name, though, I swear.’

  ‘Bartolomeo? Just Bartolomeo?’

  ‘No, no. That could be real enough. It’s his family name. I just never believed it.’ He relaxed slightly. ‘I’m a Florentine, signore, and my people have lived here since Caesar’s time. I have a little education, and the history of our city is my passion.’ He crossed his arms over his chest, warming to his subject. ‘I daresay I know the name of every family, great and small, that has lived inside these walls since before the Duomo was built. The Black Guelphs, the White Guelphs—’

  ‘I believe you. But I don’t want a history lesson. I want a name.’

  ‘That’s just it. Don Bartolomeo’s family name hasn’t been used in Florence for centuries.’

  ‘Bloody hell …’

  ‘No, signore! Listen to me. It used to be a really important family, one of the most important. But they died out in the time of Dante’s exile.’

  ‘Fascinating, Simone.’ I pulled at a strand of my hair, something I only did when I was at the limits of my patience. Next, my hands would be around his neck. ‘And what is this extinct name?’

  ‘Ormani, signore. The man who kept Donna Zanobia calls himself Don Bartolomeo Ormani.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘Ormani?’

  ‘Yes, signore. Ormani. They were one of the prominent families in the Quartiere Santa Maria. Some of them changed their name to Foraboschi, the rest were exiled or died out. But that was two and a half centuries ago, at least.’

  I swallowed. My throat was closing up. ‘And that’s why you think it’s a false name?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He drew himself up proudly. ‘And I’ll gladly tell that to the Otto.’

  ‘That’s good. That’s … good.’ I scratched the scar on my neck. It was beginning to throb. ‘Where does he live, this Bartolomeo Ormani?’

  ‘That I don’t know,’ said Simone eagerly. We were friends now, apparently. ‘But not in Florence. He comes into town once every six weeks or so, stays for a few days and leaves again.’