The Phoenix of Florence

by Philip Kazan

  I could, but this was old death, no more than a spoilt sweetness and an acrid musk. At Orléans, I had been trapped in a strongpoint with a man whose wounded leg had turned gangrenous. It had been a week, in an airless redoubt, in the summer. After that, the world had always smelt more or less bearable to me.

  ‘They scrub down the rowers’ benches in galleys with vinegar. I’m sure that will work just as well here,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘He was lying in that bed. Gone for a few days, in high summer. Around here, bad smells don’t attract much attention, obviously. When he’d missed too many days of work, Scarfa sent us round.’

  ‘No, I mean with this.’ I touched one of the bedposts. It was smooth and solid. ‘The bride.’

  ‘I don’t know very much. Do you mind?’ Poverini slipped past me with evident relief and started down the stairs. I followed. ‘Milanesi was from a good family – not the best, but good. Like me.’ Poverini grinned over his shoulder. I was starting to like him too. ‘His people were silk merchants, I think. He was a second son, or a third. Oldest brother inherited the business …’ Poverini clicked his fingers. ‘The usual stuff. Milanesi became a soldier, went to work for one of the big families in Rome, made enough to come back here and set himself up in his own right. He wanted to get into the silk trade, but his brothers didn’t want him competing with them. He had some connection or other in the Signoria who got him a good position with the Guardia.’ By this time, we were out in the courtyard. Poverini locked the door. ‘Meanwhile, when he’d gone to Rome he’d left his childhood sweetheart behind. When he came back he had the money and the prospects to marry her. And she’d waited for him, apparently. They were betrothed. He bought that bed, poor bastard.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  Poverini went over to the well, opened the moss-encrusted lid and peered in. ‘The girl was from a slightly better family. Her father was a minor banker who’d got involved in financing one of the old duke’s grand schemes. I think it was the new walls of Fivizzano. In any case, he was discovered with his fingers in the money chest. A bit of embezzlement. Very minor – he was able to bribe his way out of it – but his wife decided that he must have been falsely accused. And then she decided that the Otto had been to blame, and that people in the Bargello had conspired to ruin him.’

  ‘So she forbade her daughter to marry Milanesi.’

  ‘Yes.’ Poverini let go of the lid. It fell back with a damp thud. ‘It ruined him. His whole life had been leading to that one thing. He fell prey to the blackest of humours. Melancholy is a terrible affliction, so I hear. A policeman must armour himself against the dark, or it will swallow him: that’s what Capo Scarfa always says.’ He jumped down from the well’s plinth and went over to the door. ‘Well, it swallowed poor Milanesi. After you.’

  We walked out into the borgo. Did he kill himself? I wondered. I must have spoken aloud, though I hadn’t meant to, because Poverini answered.

  ‘I don’t really want to think about it. Do you? The most mortal of sins. Because he was in such a state when they found him I don’t think they know one way or the other. A fever could have done it. He could have had an apoplexy. A stroke. He wasn’t a healthy fellow towards the end. Maybe he had an accident. There are many ways for a man to die alone.’

  ‘It sounds like you’ve thought about it quite a lot.’

  ‘I’m not a person who can bear loneliness, signore. I dread it.’ He laughed cheerfully, to show he was being frivolous, but I caught an undercurrent of something else.

  ‘And the father of his betrothed. The embezzler. Is he still alive?’

  ‘Still alive and thriving. The girl married someone else.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Poverini sighed deeply. ‘Well, perhaps now I should introduce you to some people who can find you a proper place to live.’

  ‘But you don’t need to, Lugotenente. The house is perfect. I just need to buy a mattress, and some furniture.’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘But you’ll be all alone out here! In that place … You’ll never get rid of Milanesi, you know.’ Poverini wrapped his arms around himself. ‘You can feel him.’

  ‘You and I are opposites, Poverini. I don’t fear loneliness. I like it.’ I patted him on the shoulder. ‘And if you’ve been a soldier for as long as I have, the dead don’t bother you. Milanesi is the one who won’t be lonely. I’m bringing so many ghosts with me that he’ll never lack for company.’

  Poverini just shook his head in bemusement. ‘What is there to like in loneliness? You might as well say you like rainbows at night,’ he said.

  He left me on the steps of Santa Trìnita. His mood had risen as soon as we had left Borgo Ognissanti, and by the time we reached the church he was his cheerful self again. He gave me the name of a merchant who could help me with a mattress, and promised that a small army of Bargello servants, armed with vinegar, would have Milanesi’s house as clean as a nunnery by tomorrow night. He kindly offered to put me up at his own house, but I turned him down as politely as I could, though in the end he was so insistent that I had to make up a story about an old friend I had promised to visit. When he had finally gone, I went into the church and lit a candle in the del Forese chapel. There were still crumbs of mortar on the tiles in front of his tomb.

  Later I went in search of the Florentine branch of the bank whose services I had used for years and drew some money against my letters of credit. I’d never had a chance to spend the money I had earned over the years and I guessed that, by most men’s reckoning, I was rich. That had never meant anything to me, until now. Now, I had a house, and a door that locked.

  Then I found a soldiers’ tavern on the far bank of the Arno that I’d heard about. It was half empty, and the landlord was happy to give me a room to myself, the only one with a door that locked from the inside. I wrote a short letter to Captain Scarfa, formally accepting the position as commander of the Bargello. When I gave it to the innkeeper’s servant to deliver, together with a large coin, his face went through a complicated procession of emotions when he heard the address: surprise, distrust, curiosity and fear. Then it closed completely, like a mask. I nodded to myself. I’d made the right decision after all. I had the landlord send my supper up to my room and went to bed to await my ghosts.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  My first week as a policeman was a bravura lesson in boredom. In other words, it was exactly as I had expected it to be. How different, after all, could a police force be from a mercenary company? Most of the sbirri were ex-soldiers. We operated a military hierarchy. Policing the streets of Florence would be no different, in many ways, from keeping order in a big military encampment. The Bargello opened its doors to me, and I slipped inside my new life, leaving barely a ripple.

  I arrived at the Bargello at dawn on the first day, this time earning a proper, if still grudging, salute from the guards on duty at the baleful entrance. By doing this I had thought I might gain myself an hour or two in which to quietly establish myself in the quarters of the sbirri, but no sooner had I stepped inside the big chamber, which was lit only by the wavering light from a candle and had the expectant feel of empty space, when a rasping voice hailed me from the far side of the chamber, which had seemed to be empty.

  ‘Good morning to you, Comandante!’ A shadow loomed up behind the candle, and Captain Scarfa made his way towards me between the desks. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Capo,’ I said hurriedly. ‘We never formally discussed …’

  ‘Formally? Christ and the Virgin, man!’ The captain was moving stiffly, as though he had been sitting behind his desk all night, which, I reflected, might in fact be true. ‘But of course, I’m forgetting that you are still fresh from soldiering. We are not very formal here, Celavini. Except when we are. Who decides, you are wondering. Well, I do.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have dared assume otherwise, Capo,’ I said,
resisting the urge to salute. Did they – we – salute in the sbirri? I had no idea.

  ‘But then, I am merely an extension of the Grand Duke’s will. Which has decided to keep me here all bloody night, looking at informers’ reports.’ Scarfa stopped in front of me, put his arms behind his head and stretched. The bones of his spine popped like chestnuts in hot coal. He smelt of unwashed clothes, old spittle and ink. He must have known it, too, because he dragged his fingers down his unshaven cheeks and winced. ‘Anyway, welcome, sir.’ He stuck out his hand, and I took it. ‘You’ve done me a good turn, taking this job. A damn good turn.’ He grinned. ‘And in recognition of that, I’m handing you those bloody reports. Those towers of papers on my desk. You remember where your own desk is? Excellent. I’m going to get some breakfast.’

  Scarfa limped off without another word, leaving me alone. After he had gone, I looked around again. I was here at last, and yet it wasn’t as I had expected it to be. There were stacks of ledgers everywhere, heaps of documents, shelves full of rolls trailing seals and ribbons. Where was I going to begin? Why be impatient? I told myself. Begin here. You have your orders. Do your duty.

  Feeling oddly self-conscious in the empty chamber, I dutifully transferred the piles of documents to the desk that had been Milanesi’s. Only when I had sat down in front of them did I realise that Scarfa hadn’t told me anything about them. They must be reports of crime or criminals – that much was obvious. But what was I supposed to do with them? Put them into alphabetical order? Sort them by severity of crime? As I knew almost nothing, that morning, about the Grand Duchy’s criminal code, they were as open to me as a book written in the holy language of India. Nevertheless, I began to sort through them, because I had nothing better to do, and because I couldn’t help wondering whether Scarfa had not gone to get breakfast at all but was watching me through some crack or spy-hole.

  The documents were letters – some several pages long, some no more than pieces of paper or parchment – written in hands that varied wildly from the neat script of well-educated men to the wild scrawls of the barely literate. I flipped through the larger pile first, hoping that Scarfa had done most of the work already, but there was no order that I could discern. The smaller pile – much smaller – seemed to concern people and events in Florence, so I went back to the larger pile and found that, while almost every letter had an origin within the borders of Tuscany, they came from places as far afield as Empoli, Pistoia, Borgo Sansepolcro and Grosseto. Most, though, were from or about Florence, and so I began to methodically put these onto the smaller pile. It was still barely light outside, and the room was in near-darkness. I had found an iron candlestick with three good wax candles to light my work. My eyes are sharp, but not as sharp as a youth’s, and some of the writing was so bad that I could only make out one word in ten, if that. As sergeant of a fighting company I had done my share of ledger work; in fact, I had had a reputation for efficiency and had enjoyed the simple pleasure of bringing order to jumbles of figures, facts and names. But I had never intended to make a career of it, and now I was wondering if that was precisely what I had just done.

  In the interests of speed – I hoped this was some sort of test that Scarfa was inflicting on me that I needed to pass as quickly as possible, so that I could be released for something more active – I merely glanced at the letters at first, enough to see on which pile they belonged (I had added a second pile, for places beyond the city), but as I worked, my eyes naturally drifted across the lines of text. Names began to snag my attention, then, without my intending it, I began to notice patterns in the words, which when I followed them, became voices whispering in my head. The handwriting, the way the words came into being from the scarring of paper with ink, the strange sensation of being talked to by a man – they were all men, these writers – whom I had never met, and who might be ten, twenty, a hundred miles away. It was enthralling.

  Because I had never received a letter, except for the one from Don Orazio, calling me to Rome. I had, in fact, taken great care to avoid getting involved with anyone to the extent that they might, perhaps, choose to write to me with … with whatever it was that people, ordinary people, wrote to each other about. Things like dowries, and being chased for unpaid bills, and horses for sale. And love. I had heard men read aloud their letters from home countless times, around campfires, or sitting in dirty, stinking revetments in France or Flanders. I had myself read aloud to men who had no schooling and could not read the pages they had been sent. I had listened, and thought about how complicated it all was, and whether I should be envious. I was, a little. But I’d always found it stifling as well, all the connections, all the bindings. I had enough of those already.

  Most of the correspondence dealt with laughably petty stuff: suspicions, proof of minute wrongdoings, hearsay about other men’s wives and daughters, or fathers, or uncles. It seemed extraordinary to me that the state of Tuscany should bother itself with any of it, let alone that someone like me should be getting paid, albeit poorly, to deal with such nonsense. But, petty or not, it was fascinating, like eavesdropping on a great crowd of gossips in full cry. I finished an accusation against a friar-priest accused of swindling one of his parishioners out of a hog and picked up the next document. It was written in a strong, ugly hand, and something about it made me guess that the author was a soldier. Something had happened in the Maremma, that marshy, fever-ridden land between the sea and Monte Amiata. A group of bandits under the command of a nobleman had captured the mule train of a salt trader. I gathered from the report that this had happened before. It was the name of the nobleman, though, that caught my attention: Vico Aldobrandeschi. I put the letter aside and kept reading.

  The next day, Scarfa assigned me the same task. And the next. The other men – a big sergeant called Andrea, two more sergeants who spent most of their time out on the streets, a pair of corporals and a number of clerks who seemed to drift between our offices and those of the magistrates next door – made no attempt to be friendly, and watched me with slightly hostile indifference, a gang of shabby owls. On the sixth day, I waited until the captain had come back from his lunch and went over to his desk with the letter concerning the Maremma bandits.

  ‘What happens with things like this?’ I asked. Scarfa put on his eyeglasses and glanced at the letter. His eyebrows went up, and he chuckled.

  ‘Looking for some action already, Celavini? Good luck. The state doesn’t have the money to fight bandits in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘It’s just that I came across something like this when I was coming north with Don Orazio’s body. I gather that there are noble families around Amiata and in the Val d’Orcia who run their own little kingdoms. I was surprised, as Duke Cosimo is renowned for enforcing the rule of law.’

  Scarfa tutted. ‘The further you get from Florence … Amiata is under the jurisdiction of the Bargello of Siena, which in turn is under us – in theory. In practice they turn a blind eye until the situation gets too bad, then do something half arsed, claim they’ve solved the problem, and the whole thing starts all over again. I think – and I’m not alone – that old Sienese families like the Aldobrandeschi and the Piccolomini, who used to run things when Siena was a republic, have a lot of support down there.’

  ‘The ones I heard about, down near Radicofani, were the Ellebori,’ I said, innocently. ‘Lodovigo Ellebori. Has his own village.’

  ‘Ellebori? Oh, yes. Plenty of stuff about the Ellebori in our files,’ said Scarfa.

  ‘Surely it would be a good thing to guard the pilgrims on the Francigena,’ I said. Scarfa rolled his eyes and was about to reply when a man in the red and white livery of a sbirro burst into the room, sweating and out of breath.

  ‘Capo!’ He saluted reasonably smartly.

  ‘Renzi?’ Scarfa said, eyebrows raised.

  ‘You need to send some men to Chiasso di Malacucina,’ Renzi panted. ‘There’s a mob gathering.’

  Scarfa folded his arms and looked at me. ‘What happened
?’ I asked.

  ‘A whore stabbed a customer,’ the man said, and twisted his face to show just how monstrous this was. ‘Now the mob wants to lynch her.’ He looked from Scarfa to me and back again, as if waiting for our approval.

  ‘Will you deal with this, Comandante?’ Scarfa asked. ‘I sense that you are bored with all that correspondence.’

  ‘Gladly,’ I said.

  ‘Take some men with you.’

  ‘If I need reinforcements, I’ll come back for some,’ I said. My sword belt was hanging from my chair. I buckled it on and told Renzi that I’d follow him.

  Chiasso di Malacucina is one of those narrow, smelly streets just to the north of the Mercato Vecchio and inside the brothel quarter administered by the Onestà, the Magistrates of Decency. As soon as we had crossed Via Calimala, we were swallowed up in a welter of noise. Women were leaning out of windows overhead, some dressed in the sheerest muslin that hid almost nothing, some simply naked from the waist up, yelling and cackling at the men down in the street, who were prowling, alone or in groups, furtive or unabashed, drunk and sober, singing and yelling back at the women. I watched the men: most of them were young, hardly any older than twenty-five, but there were older men too, and several red-faced, round-eyed specimens who were plainly visitors from foreign parts. Renzi’s uniform attracted a barrage of hoots and cat-calls, and some choice and inventive insults. Towards the middle of the street a crowd had blocked the thoroughfare, and more people, all of them men, were joining it. Renzi was carrying a halberd and he had to use it to force a way for us through the press of bodies. The smell of wine-spiked sweat, unwashed clothes and male excitement was almost too much to bear in the airless street. We finally reached an open doorway, which another uniformed policeman was desperately trying to block with his halberd.