The Phoenix of Florence

by Philip Kazan

  ‘Two hooded men were let into Donna Zanobia’s house this morning around four of the clock. The steward let them in – he’s a sound fellow and a good witness – he says neither of them were her lover, who apparently has a crooked back. The cook, a Riccio of Empoli, was the one who informed on her. I need a warrant for him; he’s a nasty piece of work. The lover calls himself Bartolomeo Ormani, but there’s every reason to believe it’s an assumed name. He ordered the killers to take back all the jewellery and silver he’d given her.’

  ‘Ormani? No one’s—’

  ‘Yes, I know. No one’s carried that name in Florence for centuries,’ I snapped. ‘I’ve got the tax office and the chancery working on him. Donna Zanobia as well – she’s a mystery too. But you should see this.’ I took out the pendant and dropped it into Scarfa’s open palm. ‘The steward thought his mistress came from Pitigliano. And look here.’ I pointed to the tiny shield above the cameo. ‘That’s the arms of the Pitigliano Orsinis.’

  ‘Orsini, eh?’ Scarfa squinted at the pendant, then took the pair of eyeglasses he kept on a cord around his neck and fitted them to his nose. ‘This thing is worth a fortune. I thought you said the killers took everything.’

  ‘Riccio the cook stole this and took it to my friend Umberto to fence. Umberto naturally brought it straight to me,’ I said.

  ‘Naturally.’ Scarfa licked his lips. ‘The magistrates won’t like this. They’re giving me all sorts of aggravation about the business on the bridge. The Grand Duke is upset about it, and I don’t blame His Highness one bit.’

  ‘The men who killed Vennini were mercenaries,’ I told him. ‘I recognised one of the bodies: he was in Flanders when I was there. No doubt Donna Zanobia’s killers were mercenaries as well. I’ve got people checking the hospitals and the shady barber-surgeons. Vennini hurt at least one of them very badly.’

  ‘Good swordsman, Vennini,’ Scarfa said thoughtfully. ‘I suppose you’d have an opinion on that, Don Onorio?’

  ‘He was a braggart, but yes, he was an excellent swordsman. He challenged me once, as you know.’

  ‘And backed out when you accepted. You might have saved everyone a lot of bother if you’d killed him then, Comandante.’

  ‘Less paperwork, anyway.’ We shared humourless soldiers’ grins. He wasn’t a bad fellow, Captain Scarfa. He drove people hard, but he was a Florentine, and as such, a realist at heart. We had probably crossed paths at some point in our former lives, because we had both been mercenaries ourselves not so long ago. Because of that I always knew where I was with him, and him, I suppose, with me.

  ‘I’d better go and talk to the magistrates, or they’ll be hanging on my balls like bell-ringers on Easter Sunday,’ he said. ‘Bring me somebody by sundown, Celavini.’

  ‘I’ll do my best. Does it matter who?’

  ‘No. It really doesn’t.’

  He made a face and headed off in the direction of the magistrates’ offices. I sat down at my desk, wrote out a warrant for the arrest of Riccio the cook and a request to have all the assets of Donna Zanobia Linucci seized, had Gerardo the office boy take them to the magistrates for approval, then went out into the furnace of midday.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I spent the next few hours criss-crossing the city, talking to my informers, calling in favours and handing out bribes. The heat had either drugged people or put them on edge, and I was constantly cajoling and pacifying. Umberto shook his head when I walked past his stall: no news yet. Andrea had rounded up some witnesses to the fight on the bridge, who would be talking to the magistrates later, but now we knew that it had been six men against one. Pietro Vennini really had been an expert and very brave swordsman. What I’d said to Scarfa had been true: I had nearly fought him myself. Shortly after his return from exile, someone had accused Vennini of trying to cheat them over the sale of some property. I had been sent to investigate. Vennini saw this as an affront – typically for a man who spent his life dishonouring others, he guarded his own honour jealously – and had challenged me to a duel. I had joined the sbirri while he had been in exile, so he hadn’t known anything about me. His friends soon told him that the man he had challenged was the victor of the notorious Duel by the Sea, and very soon after that he had, with no little charm, apologised to me and called things off. I understood why: he had wanted to kill a man who had insulted him, not be part of the circus that inevitably surrounds a duel between two famous swordsmen. And there had been no hurt feelings, especially as he had been cleared by the Eight of any wrongdoing. I wondered, now, how it would have been to fight him. It would have come down, as it always does, to which one of us had the most to lose.

  Vennini must have been going home after sleeping with Donna Zanobia. He would have known that Ormani was a dangerous man to cross – his lover would have told him, and also, I guessed, Simone the steward had tried to save his mistress by warning Vennini away. But it hadn’t made a difference. He’d been careless, and that is what kills us in the end.

  I was rolling these thoughts around as I walked across the Ponte Santa Trìnita. The blood had been washed away, more or less, but at the far end there were still gobs of Vennini’s hair and brains between the cobblestones. What did he have to lose? I thought. Nothing much. It was always going to end like this for him. This was the disaster he had been courting his whole life. But Zanobia Linucci: she had also been made to pay horribly for her lover’s carelessness. And Vennini probably wouldn’t have cared, if he’d lived to hear the news. He had been the sort who makes love to women but is really making love to himself. Donna Zanobia’s life was not the first he had ruined.

  It wasn’t far from the bridge to Chiasso Cornino. The house was under guard, and I had a few words with the soldier at the front door. But I didn’t go in. Instead I carried on up the street to the little church of San Biagio. The priest, Father Iacopo, was in the vestry. He greeted me with polite distaste. Father Iacopo was a fastidious man, neat and correct in appearance, habit and manner, and he knew my presence meant untidiness in his life. Because his parish bordered on the seedy edges of the Mercato Vecchio district I had dealt with him a few times in the past and had found him censorious and judgemental when it came to the less fortunate members of his flock.

  ‘Comandante,’ he said, putting down the chalice he was polishing. ‘No doubt you’ve come to ask me about the unfortunate Linucci woman.’

  ‘Unfortunate might be understating it, Father,’ I said. ‘You saw what they did to her.’

  ‘A most unsettling experience,’ the priest said, and pursed his lips. You didn’t even bother to close her eyes, I thought.

  ‘What can you tell me about her?’ I asked.

  ‘Very little, I’m afraid. I was not her confessor.’

  ‘But she worshipped here?’

  ‘Yes. She was diligent.’ The man’s narrowed eyes told me that he would have preferred it if she had worshipped somewhere else.

  ‘Who did she come with?’

  ‘I only ever saw her with her maid and the steward, Simone.’

  ‘Never with Bartolomeo Ormani?’

  The priest frowned. ‘Who?’

  ‘The man who kept her in that house. You knew she was someone’s mistress, didn’t you?’

  ‘I keep my opinions to myself, Comandante.’

  You bloody don’t, I thought. ‘You’ve never heard that name mentioned in the parish? Ormani? It’s unusual. And he was a hunchback or crippled in some way. A crooked back.’

  ‘Oh. Indeed, I have seen a man fitting that description. He comes and goes, you know.’

  ‘I don’t know. I want you to tell me, Father.’

  He winced, as if using his memory on my behalf was too much of an imposition. ‘I would say that he appears fairly regularly. Once a month, perhaps? No, every six weeks. Always with a small retinue of rough-looking fellows.’

  ‘Rough?’

  ‘Soldiers. Or ex-soldiers.’

  ‘I expect you’ve heard about Pietro Vennini.’
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br />   ‘I do not waste my time with gossip.’

  ‘Ah! Then you’re the only man in Florence who hasn’t heard that he was cut to bits on Ponte Santa Trìnita last night, and that he was Signora Linucci’s lover, which is why …’ I chopped the edge of one hand into the palm of the other. The priest sighed.

  ‘A woman like that will inevitably collect the wages of sin sooner or later,’ he said.

  ‘A woman like that?’ I repeated, aghast.

  ‘A courtesan. A whore, Comandante.’ Father Iacopo picked up the chalice again with a contented little smirk.

  ‘She seems to have been a lady of noble birth,’ I said. ‘And by the way, she will be laid to rest in this church after a fine and proper funeral. I’m sure I’ll see you here, conducting the proceedings with the respect and piety you accord to the worthiest members of your flock.’

  I could feel the priest’s stare consigning me to hell as I left the church, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t stand priests like Father Iacopo, squatting like toads in their parishes, growing fat on the gifts of their rich patrons and ignoring the poor. It was getting on for five hours past noon, and I walked north, back to the Mercato Vecchio, where Umberto was packing away his stall, loading cheeses onto a handcart to which the pustular Cadere was harnessed.

  ‘Comandante!’ he said. ‘I’ve had the pecorino and the caciotta sent around to your place. And …’ He lowered his voice and led me towards the Column of Dovizia, where ragged children were playing jumping games over the chains that surrounded the pillar. ‘My lads combed the city. Combed it, mind, as finely as a monkey mother checking her kids for nits.’

  ‘Good. And?’

  ‘And they found a surgeon who’d treated a man for a sword wound in the arse. The arse!’

  ‘That’s excellent, Umberto. Is he still treating him?’

  ‘No.’ Umberto rolled his eyes apologetically. ‘He left around noon.’

  ‘Fuck. Who, and where?’

  ‘The surgeon’s name is Spinelli, and he lives on Via dei Macci, just across from the Poor Clares.’

  ‘Thanks, Umberto. I’ll see that your boys find their efforts have been worthwhile.’

  ‘You always do, Comandante. Incidentally, about that pendant and ring …’

  ‘You can’t have them back. They’re evidence.’

  ‘Ach.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s plenty more in that cabinet. Which, at the moment, I’m disinclined to remember ever having seen,’ I said. ‘Let alone where you keep the key.’

  It was a long walk in the heat to Via dei Macci, and when I got there, Spinelli was not at home, or in any case he didn’t answer when I banged, with growing irritation, on his shabby door. Fine. I would come back tomorrow with a warrant.

  It was getting dark by the time I got back to the Bargello. Scarfa had gone over to the palace for a meeting. Andrea Gherardi told me that Riccio the cook was in custody, and I told him to arrest Spinelli as soon as he showed himself.

  ‘You look wrung out, Comandante,’ he said, after I had leant back in my chair and closed my eyes. ‘I’m going home. Scarfa won’t be back tonight. You should go home too. Get something gentle to eat. Something easy on the stomach. There’s a veal torte waiting for me.’

  It wasn’t my stomach that was bothering me, but I didn’t tell Andrea that. My head was throbbing, from walking miles in the heat, and from something else. Yes, I would go home.

  I did, but not before stopping at the chapel attached to Santa Maria dell’Umiltà. It was a small, shabby room which smelt of boiled kale and laundry, the cross on the altar looked as if it had been picked off a dust heap, and the framed Virgin and Child that hung above it hadn’t been painted by a maestro, but it was where I always came to pray. The only people I ever found in there were girls and women from the Pietà: orphans, rejected girls, abandoned girls, who spun raw silk into thread and wove cloth from dawn until dusk. The prioress, Sister Brigida, was a tough, solid woman who had spent her whole life in the orphanage. I had helped her a few times when her girls, as she always called them, many of whom worked outside the Pietà, got into trouble with their employers, or were accused of stealing or selling themselves. They were never guilty, those girls, and invariably I would find myself threatening some lustful weaving master or shopkeeper who believed all poor women had been sent by God to satisfy the itch between their legs. I knelt down to pray, and time drifted by. I prayed to the Virgin, and to my patron saint, Santa Celava, who finds things that are lost. When at last I rose, rather stiffly, and reached into my purse for something to put in the offering box, my fingers found, among the coins, a metal hoop. Zanobia Linucci’s ring. I took it out and held it up to the nearest candle.

  It was a thick, gold circle formed out of the long bodies of two hounds, their tails entwined, their heads encircling a cushion-shaped bezel inlaid with a rough-cut diamond the size of a grain of wheat. I felt a shock go up my arm, or perhaps I imagined it, but the next thing I was aware of was the sensation of cold tile against my cheek. I looked up: there was the altar, the candles, one of them bleeding a neat line of black smoke from an untrimmed wick. The pinkish light of the faint was receding from my eyes. I hadn’t eaten anything all day, I told myself. The heat, the miles walked … I rolled over and got up onto my haunches. There was something in my hand. I opened it, and there was the ring.

  It wasn’t far to my house. I unlocked the outer door and stepped into the courtyard. When I locked it behind me, I was alone, quite alone, for the first time that day. The courtyard, no more than six paces from end to end, had a brick well with a worn marble cap at its centre. One side was the street wall. Adjoining houses made up two other sides, but their windows and doors had been bricked up a long time ago. On the third side was another, slightly newer door, two small windows on either side and one larger one above, all pointed in the ancient style. My house was at least three centuries old and it seemed a kind of miracle that it had survived that long, as the mortar was crumbling between its stones. In the courtyard the air smelt of old stone and cats, and the things that grow in places where the sun can’t be bothered to shine, but the throat-catching fumes of the dyeing vats of Borgo Ognissanti had barely seeped in. Orange and grey lichens mottled the walls with streaks and bullseyes. There wasn’t really enough light for the orange trees and the date palm I had planted in big pots and they were looking sickly. Sparrows were making a racket in the leaves and in the vine growing up the side of the house. I told myself I should consult a gardener about the trees, and then wondered how I had managed to have such an ordinary thought.

  My housekeeper had left hours ago. I closed the shutters on the windows that gave out onto the street and stood for a while in the dusty near-dark. Then I went upstairs. Though the house was empty, I locked the door of my bedroom. Old habits are hard to break. I shuttered the window and pulled the curtains against the last gleam of dusk that was coming in through the cracks. I let the darkness swaddle me, then I groped for the tinder box on the dresser and lit some candles. The room was sparsely furnished: the dresser, a high-backed chair next to the fireplace, an ornate bed in dark, richly carved wood that had come with the place. The walls were bare, except for an oblong frame draped in heavy black velvet.

  The housekeeper had left me a clay jug of wine and a glass on a pewter tray. The clay, beaded with moisture, had kept it cool. I poured a glass and took a deep drink. Then I began to unbutton my jerkin. Even though it was my lightest, it was still too heavy for August: dark grey, almost black leather, pinked in lines and studded with silvered steel, designed to stop a knife thrust or the attentions of an unskilled swordsman. I shrugged it off and let it drop noisily to the floor, rolling my shoulders until the muscles understood they had been released. I unbuckled my belt and stepped out of my breeches. Then I unlaced the collar of my shirt and pulled it off. The binding around my breasts had somehow worked itself tighter through the day, and I tugged at the knot impatiently, loosening the fine linen bandage and unwinding it until I
was free. I stretched gratefully, feeling the blood return. Kicking off my breeches, I went to the chamber pot in the corner and squatted. Then I stood for a moment in front of the black-draped frame before pulling at the velvet and letting it drop to the floor. There I was, reflected.

  Thin, white as milk, still almost young; breasts streaked with red where they had been crushed against my ribcage. I took a deep breath, and then another, letting my flesh settle and become itself again for a little while. I stretched again, staring at the woman in the silvery glass. There are always a strange few moments, a sort of slack tide in my head, before I remember that I am Onoria, not Onorio. Then it passes, because I know who I am again.

  My mirror. It is where I find peace, in so far as I ever really am at peace. I take off my armour, my false skin, my actor’s clothes, and let Onoria be at ease. Alone and behind a locked door, I am still hiding, though not from myself. You might say that a locked door makes a prison. Ah, yes, but I have the keys. The thing of metal that fits the lock is one, but Onoria can’t just turn it, open the door and be free. The real key is the bandage for her breasts, the commander’s costume, the proud codpiece laced over a very different sex. When Onorio goes out, Onoria must stay behind to guard our ghosts. In a way, the locked door is really for them.

  I talk to myself. That is another of my secrets. We talk in the same voice, Onoria and I: the same broken voice. We tell each other the things we have never been able to say out loud, the things that come to us every night when we sleep, but which we can’t allow out into the daylight. Our ghosts. We … I sometimes have to remind myself that we are the same person. I can live with these ghosts locked up inside me. If they haunt my dreams, I suppose that’s the bargain I have made with them: they may live while I am dead to the world, but when I am awake and trying to live, they have to return to their graves. It is a reasonable exchange for the living to make with the dead, and it has served all parties well – until now.