The Wolves of St. Peter's

by Gina Buonaguro

  “I beg your forgiveness, Your Holiness,” Michelangelo said in a servile tone Francesco knew must have nearly killed him with humiliation. “But I cannot enter the chapel when my life is being threatened.”

  “By whom? Tell me and I’ll have the bastard whipped.”

  Francesco could see this invitation was giving Michelangelo pause. He told Francesco to put more wood on the fire, and Francesco obliged, knowing his master was just buying time. The thought of Di Grassi and Asino getting a good whipping would be a delectable notion to Michelangelo, but the artist was not unaware that these men outranked him. To openly accuse them could be dangerous. Still, if he could carefully lead the Pope to draw his own conclusions, victory would be his …

  While Michelangelo was not to be dissuaded from his theories, a sleepless night had only further convinced Francesco of his own. At dawn, he had gone down to the bridge where he’d seen Calendula’s body. He’d found nothing unusual, but it didn’t make him feel any less afraid for Susanna. After crossing the bridge three times, he’d come home. He didn’t know where else to look, but his inaction was driving him insane.

  Francesco lifted the chicken from the topmost log and held it under one arm as he took advantage of His Holiness’s presence to add not one but three pieces of wood to the fire. It might do his own aching head some good, and besides, he couldn’t risk the Pope catching a chill, could he?

  “There have been complaints about my work being blasphemous,” Michelangelo began cautiously, casting a warning glance at Francesco.

  “Your work blasphemous? Jesus Christ Almighty! Who is saying my chapel is blasphemous? It isn’t that ass Asino, is it? I always thought him very deserving of his name. He has the face of an ass too, and not the four-legged kind.”

  “You know him better than myself, Your Holiness, but someone has been spreading vile and baseless rumors, and I fear they’re the reason for the attack on my house last night. Would Your Holiness like to sit? I shall pour some wine. I’m sorry I have nothing more to offer. It is but a humble room.”

  Francesco listened to this as he poked at the fire, relishing the unaccustomed warmth. He would hear about this later. Busy as Michelangelo was at manipulating the Pope’s views of his most trusted servants, Francesco knew that glance he’d cast was a warning against wasting firewood.

  “I like your chicken.” Francesco turned to see the boy behind him. “Why does it have three legs?” he asked quietly. “Is it bad?”

  “It is but an accident of nature,” Francesco replied gently. “And makes him neither good nor bad.”

  Behind the boy, the Pope had taken the chair, and he and Michelangelo were now in earnest discussion, talking in lowered but still intelligible voices, heads close together in a study of ugliness: the Pope with his swollen red nose and beady eyes, and Michelangelo with his sallow, squashed face that had probably not met with a bar of soap since August’s Feast of the Assumption. In contrast, here was this boy with his golden curls, long blond lashes over blue cornflower eyes, clean cheeks with a wholesome flush, and a tiny, girlish mouth. It sickened Francesco to think The Turk might be right about the Pope and this child.

  “There is a parrot in a cage in the Vatican,” the boy was saying. “It has blue and red feathers and can talk. That’s better than having three legs. It can say my name.”

  “And what is your name?” Francesco asked as he looked over the boy’s head to the men, who were now poring over Michelangelo’s sketches for the ceiling medallions. They seemed to have forgotten they weren’t alone.

  “Agnello,” the boy answered.

  Agnello di Dio, Francesco thought. Lamb of God. Or perhaps, more appropriately, I will bring them down like lambs to the slaughter. “What else does the parrot say?”

  “Words I am not allowed to say.”

  “I see,” Francesco said. Words the Pope was very free with and whose meanings the boy was probably well acquainted with. “I won’t ask you to repeat them. Do you want to pet the chicken?”

  Agnello nodded and lightly stroked the bird. It blinked at the boy.

  “I have seen your likeness in a painting,” Francesco said.

  The boy blinked up at him, not unlike the chicken. “I look like a little baby in the picture.”

  “Only because it’s supposed to be the baby Jesus. How old are you, Agnello?”

  “Six.” Old enough to be apprenticed out to a tradesman. Old enough to be a houseboy. But when would the Pope decide the boy was too old to be his “companion”? When he was as old as the boys on The Turk’s boat? How old were they anyway? Ten, The Turk had said. And what would happen to Agnello then? Where would he go? Would he be made a member of the court or be pushed out the door to fend for himself? Francesco was still haunted by those boys on the boat. Freed or stolen, had they perished in the cold, been eaten by wolves, or been taken by their “rescuers” to be sold into bondage elsewhere? He couldn’t save them, and he stood even less of a chance of saving this one.

  He looked over at the Pope and the artist, who were too engrossed in their own conversation to care what he and the boy were talking about. “There will be no more visitors to the scaffolding. Your assistants, myself, and no one else,” Pope Julius was saying. “This is my legacy, and I will not have it jeopardized by a couple of jackasses. Five hundred years from now, people will see that ceiling and thank me …”

  “Where is your mother, Agnello?” Francesco asked the boy quietly as the Pope continued to eulogize himself.

  “In Hell, sir.” It was as easily answered as if his mother had gone to market or been doing her needlework by the window.

  “You cannot think that of your mother.”

  “His Holiness says she is in Hell because she was a whore.”

  “Do you know her name?” Francesco realized they were whispering now, the chicken under his arm looking from one face to the other as if following the conversation with interest.

  “My mother was the Virgin Mary, sir. She was in the painting with me. Before she went to Hell.”

  Francesco saw nothing but innocence in Agnello’s eyes, and it saddened him to realize that this boy, never knowing his own mother, had decided, because of this painting, that it was Calendula.

  “I shall put di Grassi and Asino in charge of your safety,” Pope Julius was saying. His chair scraped over the floorboards as he rose. “There will be no more trouble.”

  “You think it wise, Your Holiness?” Michelangelo asked. Francesco could imagine his nervousness, even as he sensed victory.

  “Sometimes it is wise to let the fox guard the henhouse,” Pope Julius said. “You’ll see, Michelangelo. There will be no more problems, for it will be on their heads if there is. And it saves me the trouble of pointing a finger at them.”

  Francesco could see this meeting was swiftly coming to a close. His Holiness would leave, take the boy with him, and Michelangelo would return to the chapel. Just another day. If only Susanna were home.

  And then he heard it. Another scrape, a muted thud. Footsteps even? All from the other side of the wall. He strained to hear. Please let it be Susanna. If he were to go over there only to find Bastiano again, or another intruder, he would kill him.

  He no longer regretted not having more time to talk with the boy. He only wanted them to leave, but Michelangelo was holding up the Pope with almost slavish thanks and grandiose promises for the ceiling’s swift completion.

  The boy went and stood next to the Pope, holding his cloak again, stroking the soft white cape with his clean, dimpled hands. He did not look at Francesco again. I will bring them down like lambs to the slaughter.

  MICHELANGELO was triumphant on the Pope’s departure. “At last I am free of that pair of papal leeches,” he said to Francesco once the door had closed. Francesco thought Michelangelo might break out into a jig, he looked so happy.

  “Who was that boy with Julius?” Francesco didn’t think he could use the title “His Holiness” ever again. From now on, he’d just be Juli
us.

  “A nephew, maybe? The boy seems to do well by him.”

  Francesco didn’t enlighten him, but he was certain he could add “willfully blind” to Michelangelo’s many character flaws. But for all the things Michelangelo was—a petty, obstinate, obsessive, proud, stingy, moody hypochondriac, for a start—Francesco knew he didn’t have one drop of the Pope’s evil in him.

  He left Michelangelo in probably the best mood he’d ever seen him, happier even than the night he’d swindled the wood seller. No doubt he felt he’d one-upped Julius, along with Asino and di Grassi, and was now free to finish the ceiling without interference. Francesco would never tell Michelangelo, but he felt the artist’s talents were wasted on this city.

  AS anxious as Francesco was to investigate the commotion next door, he opened the door with trepidation. Not wanting to alert a possible intruder, he opted to enter without knocking, and the door swung slowly inward on its leather hinges.

  “There you are!” Susanna said. She stood scrubbing down the table while behind her a small fire burned in the grate. He could see she had rescued the notice he had angrily placed there—Devils in the Guise of Wolves Eat our Children! “I was just about to come looking for you. Did you miss me? I brought some good bread for you. Olives and cheese too.”

  The flippancy in her tone angered him most. After he had spent a sleepless night worrying about her safety, how could she stand there and so lightly ask: Did you miss me?

  “Where were you?” he demanded. “I was ready to have the Tiber dragged for your body.”

  “Whatever for? I was only gone for a day.”

  “Who were you with?” Now that he knew she was safe, his jealousy returned.

  “No one.”

  “No one? That’s not what I heard.”

  “And what did you hear?” she asked with seemingly genuine puzzlement.

  “That you left with a tall man on a horse.” He was still irate, but her bafflement and his recollection that the information had come from Bastiano, not the most trustworthy of sources, tempered his tone.

  She laughed. “Are you jealous?” she asked, putting down the scrub brush and wiping her hands on her apron. “I like it when you’re jealous. You pay attention to me then, instead of pretending I’m that other woman.”

  He held up his hand for her to stop, realizing as he did so that there was truth in her words. He was jealous. Still, he wasn’t quite ready to forgive her. “Is it true? Did you go with a tall man on a horse?”

  Susanna gave a snort of exasperation. “Yes, I went with a tall man on a horse. A messenger. He delivered a letter to your house and was heading on to Ostia. I went with him to see my father. I wasn’t going to see Benvenuto, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  He wasn’t. He was trying to reconcile the tall man on the horse who’d delivered his letter and taken Susanna with his tall man, big man, fat man theory. Had he been wrong about everything? “Your father?” he asked, wondering now if he should tell her his ideas. “In the country?”

  “Can’t a girl visit her father? I’ve told you before he lives just outside of Ostia.”

  “And did you return with the same man just now?”

  “Is that why you’re angry? Because someone saw me with the messenger? I didn’t share his bed, if that’s what you’re implying. He stayed at the inn in Ostia. I came back with him today only because he was returning to Rome too. I can’t believe you’re jealous. You’re such a little boy.”

  “I am not jealous,” he lied. “And so the same man brought you home today?”

  “Yes. I just said that.”

  Francesco stared at her and decided she was probably telling the truth. It seemed very unlikely the man would have taken Susanna all the way to her father’s, ridden back, thrown a lit torch into the soap-maker’s shop, then returned to Ostia, picked up Susanna, and brought her back to Rome. But then he was no further ahead in learning the identity of either the man who lit the shop on fire or the man who’d taken Calendula’s body. Unless the fire really was the doing of Asino and di Grassi, but he didn’t believe that. “Did you come in by way of the square today?”

  She shook her head. “I came by the alley. He left me by the port. Why are you asking me all these questions? At first I thought you were jealous, but now you’re just being … strange.”

  Francesco went to the front door and signaled her to follow. They stepped out into the square, and Susanna gasped as Francesco pulled her back into the doorway and out of the way of a pig being chased by its owner, a scraggly man with an equally scraggly beard, bearing a heavy cudgel. The pig careened and skidded through the square, squealing like a demon, splattering mud, and sending chickens scurrying. A big black dog joined in pursuit and was rewarded with a blow to the head. The dog dropped to the ground with hardly a whimper, and Francesco was sure it must be dead, but moments later, it struggled to its feet and staggered off between two houses. But Susanna hardly noticed. She was staring aghast at the empty space where only yesterday the soap-maker’s shop had leaned.

  “There’s been a fire! What happened?”

  “The soap-maker told me a fancy man on a horse threw a torch into the shop, and someone else”—he omitted telling her it was Bastiano—“said you left with a tall man on a horse.” Daylight revealed the full extent of the damage. The walls of Michelangelo’s house were blackened, and it was clear that parts had indeed caught fire. Had it not been for the rain and the soap-maker’s wife’s calloused hands, the house would certainly have burned to the ground.

  “I see,” she said. She looked at him, arms crossed over her chest, her face scrunched into a comical picture of concentration. “You thought I left with a tall, fancy man on a horse and then he came back and burned down the soap-maker’s shop?”

  He nodded. “But obviously it wasn’t the same man.” He suddenly noticed that her hair was clean, shining despite the dullness of the day. She must have had a bath at her father’s. Her brown dress seemed cleaner too, and she had a new white apron.

  “Where are Rocco and Rocca?”

  “Who?”

  “The soap-maker and his wife, of course. I hope they weren’t killed in the fire.”

  This was the first time Francesco had heard the pair’s names. They’d always just been the soap-maker and his wife to him. It seemed fitting they shared the masculine and feminine versions of the same name. “No, they’re fine. They’re going to stay with her sister and set up shop there. It looks like they’ve already been back for the cauldron. I can’t say I’ll miss the stink.”

  “Why would anyone want to burn down their shop? It’s such a mean thing to do.”

  “I’m not sure if it was intended to burn down the shop or Michelangelo’s house.”

  “You think this was meant for Michelangelo?”

  “Michelangelo does. And he thinks di Grassi and Asino are behind it. They’re angry about the ceiling.” The bells of Santa Caterina began to toll the midday hour.

  “They would try to kill a man because they didn’t like how he painted a ceiling?” Susanna asked over the clanging bells.

  “I know, it sounds foolish. But they think it’s blasphemous. All those muscular naked men, I guess. But I’m sure that’s just an excuse. Julius has cut their allowances, and they think all their money’s going to Michelangelo. Julius was just here, and he seemed to believe Michelangelo, or at least he was willing to humor his suspicions.”

  “Did you say Julius—His Holiness—was here? In your house?” The bells subsided with one last lopsided peal, and Susanna beckoned him back through the door. She offered him some bread and cheese, and he accepted with something very close to contentment. How good it was to have the jealousy removed and to know Susanna was safe. Maybe afterward they would lie on her bed …

  He forced his thoughts back to the conversation at hand. “Julius wanted to know why Michelangelo wasn’t at the chapel today.”

  “That’s an honor for Michelangelo and should put di Grassi and
Asino in their place.”

  “That’s what Michelangelo is hoping. But I’m sure they had nothing to do with the fire.”

  “Well then, who did?”

  “I don’t know. But I wonder whether it could be the same man who stole Calendula’s body.”

  “Why would he want to burn down the soap-maker’s shop?”

  “He might have been trying to kill me. Maybe he knows I’ve been asking The Turk questions. The Turk was supposed to go to the mortuary today to see what he could find out.”

  “Then why not burn down The Turk’s house?”

  “I don’t know,” Francesco said. Mention of The Turk reminded him of the boys who’d escaped from The Turk’s ship. “You must be silent about this. But when we saw Asino and di Grassi at the port, they were there to buy boys. Very young boys for carnal pleasure.” He had a sudden thought. “I don’t want to upset you, but I think that’s where Julius got that little boy from.”

  “I already know what he does with that boy.”

  “You do?” He remembered the night when they’d stood out in the rain talking, the first night they heard the wolves. “But I thought you said the Pope can’t sin.”

  “He can’t,” she said with finality. She threw a couple of sticks on the fire and gave them a poke.

  “Then what do you call what he does to that boy?”

  She shrugged. “When I was small, the priest took me after Mass to this secret room. It had a fireplace, and there was a table with books and a human skull. He took it out … not the skull … you know …”

  Francesco felt ill. “That’s not sin?”

  “He told me to do what he said and not to tell my father, or demons would take me to Hell and burn me forever with hot pokers. I didn’t want to do it, but I didn’t want to go to Hell and be burned, either. The priest took the poker from the fire and put it right there,” she said, pushing her finger against her skirts to indicate the inside of her thigh. “He showed me how it would feel. And so I did what he wanted.” She spoke matter-of-factly, busying herself with preparing the food she’d promised Francesco. “He got me pregnant. I couldn’t tell my mother, so I went to the midwife to make me bleed. I bled so much I almost died, and then I never bled again …”