The Phoenix of Florence

by Philip Kazan

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ Grand Duke Francesco de’ Medici frowned. ‘Do you know anything about feldspar? I’m having difficulty with temperature and flux.’

  ‘I’m afraid not, Your Highness,’ I said. ‘I believe you wanted to talk to me about last night’s business in Borgo la Noce.’

  ‘You have the tax figures from the brothels, do you?’ Duke Francesco said wearily. ‘Please don’t bother me with those again. Just leave them.’ He started to kneel again.

  ‘No, Your Highness,’ I said hurriedly. ‘I tried to arrest a man called Girolamo Ellebori. Unfortunately, he was killed.’

  ‘Ellebori …’ The duke stood up again. ‘Ellebori. Yes. Yes indeed.’ His whole demeanour seemed to change. His back stiffened, and the look in his eyes changed from disappointment to a sullen hardness. ‘You’re the one who investigated the murders. Who discovered that the woman was the Count of Pitigliano’s bastard sister.’

  ‘Yes, Your Highness.’

  ‘Sit down.’

  I looked around for a chair but found nothing but a rope-bound barrel. I perched on the rim and watched as the duke fished out an empty packing case from beneath an easel covered by sheets of paper which were almost black with scrawled figures and obscure geometric symbols. He upended the case and sat down opposite me.

  ‘Tell me everything you know,’ he said, gripping his knees. He was almost rigid with attention. So I told him.

  ‘Niccolò Orsini is an old monster, but he still has teeth,’ the duke muttered when I was finished. Suddenly his attention had shifted elsewhere. I wasn’t sure whether he was even talking to me. ‘My father spent a fortune in gold and men to try and take Pitigliano. He should have taken it when Duke Niccolò sided with the Sienese and lost in 1555, but he let the old devil get stronger again.’

  I knew men who had fought on both sides of the little wars between Pitigliano and Sovana, but I said nothing.

  ‘My father played Niccolò and his brother Orso off against each other,’ the duke went on. ‘Orso took Pitigliano and we supported him. But Niccolò had Orso killed two years ago and has taken back the county. So I have decided to support the old swine, who is afraid his son is planning to depose him. In return he’s let us put garrisons in the county. But now I hear that somehow, he has contrived to marry this bastard, who must be the sport of one of his Jewish concubines, to a notorious bandit. He sees an alliance of the old feudal lords, no doubt about it: Aldobrandeschi, Piccolomini, Orsini, Ellebori.’ His fingers were claws digging into the stained black serge of his hose. ‘Doomed. Yes, doomed: his son Alessandro will get rid of him, and Alessandro is deep in my pocket. But to give a villain like Ellebori permission to act against us, to set Augusto Ellebori up, to puff him up so that he feels sufficiently bold to come and go in our city, to cause scandal and disgrace, bloodshed …’ The duke trailed off. His eyes were fixed on the far wall, burning with cold rage. Despite the suffocating heat in the room, I could almost feel a chill radiating from him.

  ‘Your Highness, surely the matter is solved. Ellebori …’ I paused. It felt dangerous to be uttering his name in this little underworld of a room. ‘He has killed Orsini’s daughter, so surely the alliance is at an end.’

  Duke Francesco cracked his knuckles. He was still staring at the wall. ‘Oh, I doubt that! I doubt that very much! Niccolò Orsini can spare a bastard daughter! She hardly matters. She’s in her box and forgotten.’ He waved his white hand and it passed through the air like a claw. His eyes narrowed, as if he was exploring some vivid idea that had come to life inside his skull. I imagined his mind must be like the easel: a mass of dark scrawls and speculations that only he could decipher. Then he grunted and seemed to relax.

  ‘Comandante,’ he said. ‘Do you enjoy serving us?’

  ‘Of course, Your Highness!’ I said quickly. Sweat was starting to pool in the hollows at the base of my spine.

  ‘You have a soldier’s loyalty, a soldier’s fixity of purpose. Your Capo …’ He frowned, and I realised that he didn’t know Scarfa’s name. ‘He recommends you highly. All well and good. I require something from you.’

  ‘Of course, Your Highness.’

  ‘I would be pleased if you would forget everything about this business.’

  ‘My lord, I’m not sure what you are asking me,’ I said, aware that my voice was little more than a whisper.

  ‘I want the Vennini affair forgotten about. The dead are buried. Let their memories, and all that you have found out, be buried too.’

  ‘We have enough to bring Augusto Ellebori to justice,’ I said, thinking that perhaps he wasn’t aware what had happened yesterday.

  ‘Would two hundred scudi be enough?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

  ‘For your silence, man. For your promise to leave things exactly as they are.’

  I stood up. The smoke had thickened, and was hanging like a heavy, gently rippling blanket. Some of the taller objects in the room were poking through it like mountains rising through mist in some dreary, hellish dawn. ‘With the head of the family removed, the rest of his band will run away,’ I said, struggling to hold on to what I was, a soldier, and officer of the sbirri. ‘The bandits could be eradicated.’

  ‘This matter will not be settled by destroying a few bandits. It will not be settled by a … by a …’ He looked me up and down with a sort of revulsion. ‘By a policeman.’

  ‘But justice, Your Highness!’

  ‘Three hundred, then. Would three hundred scudi satisfy you?’ He sighed in exasperation. ‘I wish to reward you, man. I am offering you a choice. This reward, or its reverse. You talk of justice, but every law, every judgement ultimately rests with me. And I am not a kindly judge. Do as I say and rise like the sun in the service of Tuscany. Refuse me, and you will be meddling in affairs of state. Which I would judge to be the action of a traitor.’ He stood and turned his gaze absently towards the curved ceiling. His eyes were bored again. Eternally disappointed. ‘Three hundred and fifty scudi, Comandante,’ he said. I could tell by his voice that his mind had already drifted away from these worldly matters. ‘You were a mercenary. We believe that is an excellent rate of pay.’

  ‘Your Highness …’ My collar was limp with sweat, which was trickling down my neck and into the binding around my breasts. I tugged the stiff linen away from my scar, and swallowed, wincing. And at that moment I understood that the emotion I was feeling was not revulsion or shame, but a strange sort of peace.

  ‘I am at your service, Your Highness,’ I said.

  ‘Very good. Ruspi will see to the details.’ Duke Francesco turned his back on me and squatted down in front of the brazier. As he leant over the glass vessel, the light from the burning charcoal cast a dull orange halo around his head. I watched him feeling around with one of his white hands for a pair of tongs, his dirty fingernails scrabbling through drifts of cinders and ash. I opened the door, and he didn’t look back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ‘Tell no one about this,’ Ruspi said. We were strolling like a pair of old friends through the Mercato Nuovo.

  ‘My God, sir! Who would I tell?’ I snapped. The stink of the Grand Duke’s alchemical smoke was all over me. Whatever sense of peace I had felt in the studiolo had dissolved in the heat of noon. ‘Signor Ruspi, is this the way the Grand Duchy of Tuscany usually conducts its affairs?’

  ‘You are the police, Comandante Celavini. What do you think?’

  ‘I think that His Highness has a great deal on his mind, though little of it relates to the running of this city. And that is his right. Who am I to question the dealings of princes? But as the police, as you call me, what I see is …’ I paused. I didn’t know this man. But he plainly lived and worked in a wholly different world from mine, and I had now stepped across into it as well. ‘The sbirri have been wading through blood these past four years, since Duke Cosimo’s death,’ I said. ‘Florence, and Tuscany beyond it, has become lawless and bloodthirsty. In the other pan of the scale, His Highne
ss has found the secret of making porcelain. As I said, it is far beyond my remit to look into the mind of a prince.’

  ‘And my remit also,’ said Ruspi. ‘We’ll go to His Highness’s bank and get your money – you drive a hard bargain, Comandante,’ he added approvingly. ‘You think like a magistrate and act like a soldier. There will be certain advantages if you please His Highness. You’ll find you won’t have to worry about advancement. If indeed you worry about that at all.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said, shortly.

  ‘I believe you. But you aren’t beyond wants and desires, Comandante.’

  ‘I keep my desires simple. Work and solitude.’

  ‘You’d have made an excellent monk. Though that would have been our loss. But you aren’t being entirely truthful. I think you desire justice.’

  ‘I want it. Otherwise, why would I have joined the sbirri?’

  ‘Want and desire are different things, Comandante.’ He stopped for a moment and regarded me with those hollow eyes. ‘You care a great deal about women,’ he said. ‘I’ve noticed how you work. The Linucci woman, for instance: you seem to have been more touched by her death than by Vennini and the others. When you speak of justice, I think you mean it in a particular way. Unfortunate women, girls in trouble, wives killed by husbands … And yet you live alone.’

  ‘As I told you, I like solitude,’ I said.

  ‘Every sort of opportunity – you have a good position, some money. And access to less … genteel pleasures. The city has its legs open for you, Comandante. But unless you are a far more secretive man than you appear, you ignore it all.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I said, taking great care not to show anything. ‘My work is to seek redress for misery, not add to it.’

  ‘You take the side of women, but you haven’t sought out one of your own?’

  ‘Of my own?’ I let the fissures in my voice hide the outrage I felt. ‘No, signore. I don’t have one of my own.’ I rubbed my throat, trying to ease the words. ‘My life would not be a good one to share. I have been alone for a long time, and I have seen and done dreadful things. I don’t wish to share the battlefields of Flanders or the corpse pits on Malta, because those would be my gifts to a wife, together with melancholy and bad dreams. Who would deserve that?’

  Ruspi touched my shoulder reassuringly. ‘You are right. How could that be a good thing, indeed? How I prattle on! We’re almost at the bank, and then we should say our goodbyes. We understand each other, I think.’

  Gherarda had already left when I got back to Borgo Ognissanti. It felt strange to wash myself in daylight, and I had the unpleasant feeling that Signor Ruspi was watching me with those dark-ringed eyes of his, so I put on a long shift before I went outside and washed myself through the clinging linen. It took me only a few minutes to pack my old valise and to change into the clothes I had been wearing when I first came to Florence: slashed pumpkin hose in black serge, a black leather doublet of defence with sleeves in the darkest maroon, a soft, faded black cap that I could pull down to shade my face. The shiver of pleasure I felt as I pulled on my riding boots surprised me. There was a journey ahead. Solitude, and a road on which to enjoy it. I hadn’t been dissembling when I’d confessed to that desire of mine. I decided to take my old German sword, as it had always brought me good luck; and I wrapped my good Brescia pistol in oilcloth and stuffed it down the side of the valise, along with a powder flask and bullets. When I was packed, I took out the bloody sheet from last night and my soiled cloths, and tied them up into a neat parcel. I counted out fifty scudi and put the rest into a leather purse. Making sure the bedroom door was securely locked, I wrote a brief note for Gherarda and left it on the kitchen table along with two weeks’ worth of wages.

  Sister Brigida was in the entrance hall of the Pietà, arguing with a man I assumed was a silk jobber, no doubt trying to underpay the girls who made his cloth. I waited until they had come to an agreement and asked her to step into the chapel with me.

  ‘Here,’ I said, handing her the leather purse that held Duke Francesco’s gold. ‘This is for your girls.’

  She hefted the purse and her eyes widened. Then she looked at my valise, my riding boots.

  ‘Surely you aren’t leaving Florence, my son?’ she asked. ‘Will you come back?’

  ‘I don’t know, sister,’ I said. ‘I have to do something.’

  ‘But there is enough here for …’ I could almost see her thoughts: a new roof, a bigger infirmary, new beds, a laundry.

  ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘I give it with all my heart. Thank you for helping me.’

  I left before she could say anything else. Out in Borgo Ognissanti the vapours from the dye vats were so strong that people’s eyes were running, so no one noticed that I was crying, though I wasn’t sad. I was thinking of the abandoned girls, of Sister Vittoria and the Mother Superior of Izvor, and the tears were tears of gratitude.

  I kept my horse at a livery stables next to the convent of Santa Anna, near the Porta al Prato. On the way, I threw the bundle of stained linen onto a rubbish fire that was smouldering on one of the patches of waste ground beyond the dyers’ yards. The horse, a young roan I called Sultan, seemed pleased to see me, though I was surprised that he remembered my face: I hadn’t ridden him for weeks. We went back through the city, across the Porta Santa Trìnita and through the Porta Romana. The guards at the gate knew me well, and I had to stop and gossip with them for a while. They asked where I was going, and I said I was planning to visit some relatives near Orvieto. One of them decided that I must be going to meet a prospective bride, and I didn’t try too hard to deny it, so that when I finally rode off, I was followed by shouts of good-natured ribaldry. I waved and put my heels to the horse. Sultan was glad to stretch his legs, and we raised a cloud of dust until I could see the walls of the monastery at Galluzzo. I reined him in then, because I needed to think. Now I was outside the city, I was aware of two things: the first was that it had been so easy to leave; the second was that I was going back to Pietrodoro, and I had no idea what was waiting there for me.

  I joined the Via Francigena a few miles south of San Gimignano and reached Siena the next day. I left my horse at a modest tavern I had used before and went straight to the Palazzo Pubblico. I knew the commander there from a few public functions in Florence. Another old soldier, blunt and cynical, we had both fought at Jemmingen, though on opposite sides, though that meant nothing to mercenaries. Paolo di Monterrigione was his name, and he was on duty in the prison at the side of the building. We embraced warmly, and he immediately brought out a jug of wine and began to cut up a salami with his dagger. We ate, drank and talked shop for a while: I told him the same vague story about being on my way to Orvieto, we swapped a few bits of gossip about our offices and we brought each other up to date on the most notable crimes in our respective cities.

  ‘Which reminds me, I don’t know how fast our news reaches Siena, but did you hear about the murder of Pietro Vennini?’

  ‘Vennini … Vennini.’ Paolo scratched his grey stubbled chin. ‘We haven’t got wind of that one yet. So many killings in Florence, though, Onorio. It’s as bad as it was before Duke Cosimo came along.’

  I told him about the bloodbath on Ponte Santa Trìnita and he shook his head. ‘A man’s greatest fight, and no audience for it,’ he said. ‘Where’s the fairness in that?’

  ‘Knowing Vennini, he’s bragging about it in purgatory as we speak,’ I said. ‘Meanwhile, the woman he’d been sleeping with was murdered in her own bedroom.’

  ‘Ah. Jealous husband.’

  ‘She was the mistress of a certain Bartolomeo Ormani.’ I paused and washed down a mouthful of salami with some wine.

  ‘I know an Ormani,’ Paolo said at once. ‘Bartolomeo, yes. Fellow from Pitigliano. He’s rich: he’s been buying property here in Siena and Montalcino. So he’s got himself in trouble, has he? I can’t say I’m surprised.’

  ‘Oh, no?’

  ‘No. He puts himself about as one of those coun
try noblemen with a pedigree going back to Julius Caesar’s third cousin, but he’s very rough around the edges. Mind you, a lot of them are, down that way. Old republicans, the lot of them.’ Paolo thumped his cup down. The authorities in Siena were all Medici loyalists; even now, twenty-five years after the fall of the Sienese Republic, there were many who hated Florence, and it was worse the further south you went. Nothing ever really changes, I thought to myself. ‘Yes, he has a brother and a couple of sons, all ruffians,’ Paolo went on. ‘No word of any wife, though. As far as I knew, he was a widower. And he has a twisted back. I believe he tells people he was wounded at Scannagallo.’

  ‘Does he, indeed,’ I muttered. ‘Have you seen him recently?’

  ‘I thought you said you were on your way to Orvieto,’ Paolo said, raising his eyebrows knowingly.

  ‘I am. But that whole business has really got under my skin,’ I said.

  ‘I know what that’s like. Don’t worry, I’ll put my ear to the ground,’ Paolo said. ‘Talking of Pitigliano, did you hear about the count? Old Niccolò finally got kicked out by his son. Happened yesterday, by all accounts. A messenger came charging through here this morning, on his way to the Signoria. Well, it’s Count Alessandro now. I’d say it’s over for the county. Alessandro’s reckless, and a spendthrift, and he doesn’t have the sense of his ogre of a father.’

  ‘Really? That’s interesting news.’ Don Francesco can move quickly if he wants to, I thought. Or perhaps it was just coincidence, though I doubted it.

  I told Paolo where I was lodging, and he told me to come back in the morning. I spent the evening wandering around the city, looking for a bookseller, because I’d forgotten to bring anything to read. When I found a little shop belonging to a man called Sigismondi, my eye was caught by a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I paid Sigismondi more than it was worth, but it seemed like an omen, or perhaps a talisman. I was going back to where I had first read these stories, although my mother would never have allowed me to read a translation. At the tavern I had my dinner sent to my room, which was expensive because it had a door that locked. When the noise of the tavern had faded, late in the night, I took out the book-sized leather case I had packed, carefully wrapped in a Turkish silk shawl, in my valise. Opening my mirror, I set it on the table and stood in front of the glass. In the light of the cheap tallow candle I looked tired, with wan skin and soft, sexless limbs. Onoria, who had stood before a grand duke and somehow been given the thing she had desired above all other things but could never had asked for.