The Sign of the Weeping Virgin (Five Star Mystery Series)

by Alana White

  “What's this?” Amerigo said as they strode into the market, where vendors in makeshift stalls pitched their wares. “Bargain day in Mercato Nuovo?”

  “It appears so.” All around the square, rain-soaked silk streamers and ribbons dripped from balcony railings. Banners drooped, mounted on poles. Prominent among the banners was Lorenzo de' Medici's personal standard displaying a golden falcon caught in a net. An odd image for Lorenzo to embrace, or so it had always seemed to Guid'Antonio.

  “Thank God our Lorenzo still flies with the Soderini and the Rucellai families and all the others,” Amerigo said, his voice grave. “The Pazzi dolphins would be sailing over us now, if Francesco de' Pazzi had his way. Damn his soul to hell for plotting Giuliano's murder.”

  A muscle jumped in Guid'Antonio's jaw. “Francesco didn't plot it alone, as you well know.”

  The facts behind Giuliano de' Medici's assassination had been slow in coming—a hard questioning here, sizzling pincers applied to private parts there—and they had led to a startling discovery, since they implicated Florence's powerful neighbors to the south, Rome and Naples. With Francesco de' Pazzi as his pawn, the fall of the house of Medici had been masterminded by Pope Sixtus IV's nephew, Count Girolamo Riario, with the full blessing of the Pope. Fear. Jealousy. Greed. Lorenzo's place as the unofficial ruler of Florence rankled the Pazzi family, particularly Francesco. Francesco's enormously wealthy family of international bankers was equal to the Medicis on Via Larga, or so Francesco believed. Wasn't he the head of the Pazzi holdings? Hadn't he snaked the all-important Papal account from Lorenzo and put it in his own hands in Rome? And in retaliation for the loss of that hugely lucrative account—which Lorenzo's family had held for years—had not Lorenzo then tricked the Pazzi family out of a bountiful inheritance it had expected to collect?

  This was personal: an outrage not to be borne. Girolamo Riario understood this. And he understood Francesco, too. Acting from the Vatican, Girolamo had appealed to Francesco's overblown sense of self-importance, his anger, his envy and frustration. Succeed in killing Lorenzo and his only brother, and the Pazzi family would no longer live under the thumb of the Medici brats. Succeed, and Sixtus IV and Girolamo Riario's mercenary troops could creep closer to Florence's frontiers as part of their private scheme to increase their own family's standing in central Italy. In this, they had enlisted the help of the king of Naples, who had his own personal vision of his place in Italy dancing in his head.

  “Girolamo Riario was damned two years ago, along with his uncle, the Pope,” Guid'Antonio said. “And Francesco is dead.” Pulled naked and bleeding from his hiding place at home in the Santa Croce quarter and shoved from a window of City Hall with his hands bound behind his back and a noose around his neck before Giuliano was cold in Via Larga. As news of Giuliano's assassination and the aborted attack on Lorenzo swept through the streets, the Florentine population had not risen up against Lorenzo and welcomed the Pazzi family as its liberators, as pudding-headed Francesco had hoped. No: instead, they had branded Francesco a traitor scheming to hand them over to their enemies and had thrown their support behind Lorenzo, who had stood before them on the balcony of the Medici Palace, his neck wrapped with a bandage whose fabric was stained with blood: the wounded, singular head of his grieving family.

  Guid'Antonio smiled to himself. Unofficial, indeed.

  “Squirrel pies! Crow pies, cheap!”

  Amerigo said, “Those pies smell like they've been here forever. I wanted a bite to eat, but now my appetite's flown.”

  “In writing, please?”

  “Nonna!” Amerigo called to the old grandmother hawking the tragic little tarts. “You call that dried-up parchment a pie?”

  The vendor screwed up her face, her eyes hot beads as Amerigo passed her cart. “Here's a better question, you rich brat: could your soft belly handle it?” She bit into one of the withered pies and hurled it at Amerigo, grinning, showing the black, rotted stubs of her teeth. The crust split, and a burnt crow's leg popped out.

  “Christ's ankles!” Amerigo slapped the pie to the ground, where a fawn-colored dog, all paws and bones, snatched the pie up, snarling.

  Guid'Antonio glanced at the sun. “Andiamo, Amerigo. We're late.”

  “Jesu! I've never seen such ribs sticking out of a dog! I'd try to get the rope off his neck, but he'd have my hand for something sweet. No fine leather collar for him, now or any other time.”

  “He's fought bears, then been left to rot.”

  “For all that, he's managed to survive. And escape.”

  “He's a Florentine.” Along with the sound of his nephew's voice, Guid'Antonio heard the dog's labored breathing and caught the smell of cat urine and moldy bread intermingled as they entered a side street.

  “You do know he's following us,” Amerigo said. “What manner of cur is that?”

  Guid'Antonio glanced back. The dog was huge. Black mask across the muzzle, cropped ears, a short, matted dense coat, and curled-down toenails. “A mastiff, a cane corso Italiano in a better life.”

  “Even sadder. An ill fate for a magnificent dog.”

  “Go on!” Guid'Antonio shooed the animal away. “Give him one bite and we'll have him forever.”

  “He's already had one bite. The filth posing as a pie, remember? Speaking of filth, I managed a quick bath this morning, given this meeting with the Lord Priors. Still, my body feels whipped as that dog, who's still following us at a safe distance, by the way.” Amerigo gave Guid'Antonio a sly glance. “We haven't seen the last of him.”

  “Au contraire,” Guid'Antonio said.

  They stepped into Mercato Vecchio, where daylight was a patch of pale sky overhead, and Amerigo's stomach growled with hunger. “Apparently, despite that burned tart, you've not lost your appetite,” Guid'Antonio said.

  “Though embarrassed, I will confess it.”

  City Hall was not far ahead. In a few moments, the Republic's foremost governing council would gather in the Great Hall to hear Guid'Antonio present his report regarding his mission to France. Beside him, Amerigo's stomach roared. “Oh, all right. We'll eat on the way,” Guid'Antonio said.

  “Grazie! I've had my fill of French cassoulet and pork with prunes. I want something satisfying. Something Italian.”

  “So do I,” Guid'Antonio said.

  He approached a fruit stand, a sagging assembly of rotting wood pegged together in a ramshackle suggestion of shelves. From behind a stack of baskets, an old man appeared, his ferret eyes keen, darting over them.

  “What do you want?” the man said, one calloused hand pushing back his hood of coarsely woven cloth.

  Guid'Antonio stepped back. The peasant stank of sheep and sweat. “Two apples and some pecorino.” He opened his scrip and tendered a silver penny.

  The farmer's gnarled fingers snatched the coin. The apples the man handed him were as brown and withered as the man's face, the sheep's-milk cheese Guid'Antonio bit into, rancid. “Ugh!” He spat the cheese into the dirt.

  The mongrel dog launched his body forward and lapped up the found meal. Two in one day? Unbelievable! Growling down in his throat, one dull eye rolling up, the mastiff kept close watch on the proceedings.

  Repelled by the foul taste of spoiled cheese, Guid'Antonio wiped his lips with his handkerchief, all snowy white linen.

  “Scuttle back to your palace kitchen if you don't like my wares,” the farmer said. “In the markets, you'll find the pickings slim.”

  “Slim? Looks to me as if they've given up the ghost,” Amerigo said. “What do you expect us to eat?”

  The man's stare was as contemptuous as it was hard. “Do you think I care? What do you expect from war?”

  Amerigo opened his mouth to speak; gently, Guid'Antonio touched his arm. “Everything will improve, friend, now the war's ended and we have peace again.”

  The old man barked a laugh. “Where've you been hiding your head? In the well at your country villa?”

  Amerigo gasped. “Old man! Have a care
!”

  “Messer Vespucci!” a friendly voice called out in the piazza. “And Amerigo!” A heavyset fellow hurried toward them, holding up the hem of his brown lucco to keep it tidy as he bustled around the water well in the center of the marketplace. “Welcome home, welcome!”

  “It's good to see you, Luca.” True, but Christ, here was another delay.

  “When did you arrive?”

  “Dawn today.”

  “And already you're out and about in the city. Well, no rest for the weary.”

  “There doesn't seem to be.”

  Guid'Antonio knew Luca Landucci better than he did most other men who were not part of the city's ruling elite. In Florence, he often visited Luca's apothecary shop, the Sign of the Stars, to purchase medicaments for the family and sometimes to enlist the druggist's assistance with one or another of Guid'Antonio's private cases of an investigative nature.

  “Ser Landucci,” Amerigo said, “how's Gostanzo's performance in the palio this summer? Exciting as always?”

  Guid'Antonio listened with half an ear, aware of the farmer's disdain, the miserable dog retching into the dirt, and the shadows lengthening around them in the market as Luca spoke glowingly of his younger brother, Gostanzo Landucci, of Gostanzo's horse from Barbary, Il Draghetto, the Little Dragon, and of the horse races held throughout the year in Tuscany. Prato, Montepulciano, Santa Liperata, and Cortona: those tight little piazzas. Thundering hooves slid on loose pebbles. Horses crashed over stones and into shop walls, leaving the animals and their riders in a tangle of bones, blood, and sweat. The goal? A coveted spot in the championship race in August. “Palio!”

  “Neither my brother Gostanzo nor any other man takes the banner when Lorenzo de' Medici puts a horse in the mix,” Luca grumbled. “No doubt he'll claim the grand prize again next month.” Luca muttered something about judges. “Ah, well, Messer Vespucci. How long will you bless Florence with your presence this time around?”

  “I won't be leaving again.”

  Amerigo clasped his chest. “Christ's bones! Does our Lorenzo know?”

  “Right now, Luca, we're bound for the Lord Priors,” Guid'Antonio said.

  The forgotten old farmer spat a gob of phlegm at Guid'Antonio's feet. “Priors? Bastards, is more the like! When you see those nine fools tell them to come into the street so we can whip their Medici asses!”

  Amerigo stared, aghast. “Do you want to spend the rest of your days in the Stinche?”

  Guid'Antonio looked into the farmer's glowing stare. “Why are you so angry?”

  “You're a palleschi!” the farmer said in reference to the Medici family's emblem, a varying number of palle, or balls, in red on a gold field. “A Medici man born and bred.”

  “Yes,” Guid'Antonio said with the confidence born of his family's alliance with the Medici family for the last half century.

  “Because of Lorenzo, we went to war with God!”

  “Not with God,” Guid'Antonio said. “With Pope Sixtus IV.”

  “The Pope and God are one and the same!” the farmer said, trembling.

  “No.” Guid'Antonio shook his head. “Sixtus IV, not God, declared war on us when his nephew's scheme to cripple our government failed. We have a treaty with the Pope now.” Surely the old fellow knew this?

  At the first sign of discord, a crowd had started to gather, not unusual in these streets. “What we have,” a man shouted from the throng, “is Turks at our gates!” The mastiff eased up onto his haunches, his dim gaze roaming the assembly.

  Amerigo's hand flew to his cheek. “Turks? No.”

  “There are no Turks in Italy,” said Guid'Antonio.

  A black-gowned woman, as stout as one of the market's empty grain barrels, stabbed her finger in his direction. “You're wrong, Messer Whoever-You-Are in your fine red cloak! They mean to capture us and sell us as slaves, just as they've done to sweet Camilla Rossi da Vinci!” Shouts of alarm underscored the woman's shrill cry.

  Guid'Antonio and Amerigo exchanged wary glances. Fear and half-truths ruled this gathering. Guid'Antonio turned to Luca. “What's this about?”

  The mastiff, shifting his rheumy gaze from Guid'Antonio to the druggist and back again, slid onto his bony ribcage, prepared to listen and wait.

  Luca squared his shoulders. “A little over a week ago, a young woman was traveling out from here when Turks chanced upon her.”

  No way in hell. With Constantinople as his base, Mehmed II had continued his career of conquest with an eye to converting souls to Islam, yes. As part of his holy war, the Ottoman leader had extended his empire in Europe to the Danube and the Aegean and tightened his control over the Black Sea and had also begun a sixteen-year war with the Venetian Republic, the strongest naval power in the Mediterranean, a war that had ended just two months ago. The northern end of the peninsula was as far as the Turks had ever penetrated, however, and they had not ventured into Italy again. If they had, Guid'Antonio would know about it.

  Surely.

  “By whose word?” he said.

  “That of the Lady Camilla's nurse and her attendant. Praise God, the old woman and the boy escaped the Infidels and lived to tell the tale.”

  “ ‘Boy’? Camilla's son, you mean?” All around the piazza, people pushed forward to hear Guid'Antonio and Luca's conversation, their expressions grim.

  “No, no, she's sixteen and married but has no children. I mean the boy from the country of the teste nere.”

  “A black boy? Come all the way from Ethiopia, then.” Amerigo's eyes shone with wonder. “There's a fair distance. Across the dark green sea to the slave market at Lisbon, probably. Does he speak Italian?”

  “Amerigo.” Guid'Antonio put up a finger, a gentle request for quiet. To Luca, he said, “So the boy's the lady's slave.”

  “Yes.”

  “How old?”

  Luca shrugged. “Twelve or so. The three left Florence and stopped before nightfall in San Gimignano. They were on the road to Bagno a Morba the following day when the Turks attacked.”

  The Baths of Morba in the Apennine foothills. A thought flickered across Guid'Antonio's mind, but he could not contain it. “Why Turks?” he said.

  “They announced themselves with swords flashing and threats in the name of Islam.”

  Preposterous. But not, Guid'Antonio knew, to the people hanging on their every word here in Mercato Vecchio.

  “And her name was Camilla?” Amerigo said.

  “Yes. Camilla Rossi da Vinci. Married to the wine merchant Castruccio Senso of the Green Dragon district.” Across the river in the Santo Spirito quarter of Florence and from the hilltop town of Vinci, Luca meant.

  “They never killed her but made her their slave and whore!” shouted a man in the crowd, a butcher by the look of his blood-spattered apron.

  Guid'Antonio grunted. He thought Camilla Rossi was more likely run away with a persuasive young lover than murdered or enslaved by anyone. “Has there been an investigation?”

  Luca nodded. “Palla Palmieri conducted one but uncovered nothing.”

  Guid'Antonio considered this briefly. If his sometimes ally, if not quite friend, Palla Palmieri, Florence's chief of police, had not turned anything up about the missing girl, chances were good this case was closed and forgotten by the authorities, if not by the popolo minuto, the people in the street.

  A grizzled old monk stepped forward. “Messer Vespucci, the Turkish invasion is a sign from God.”

  So it was an invasion now. “Of what?” Guid'Antonio said, sharply aware of time slipping through his fingers.

  “Of His profound displeasure with Lorenzo de' Medici for taking us to war with Holy Mother Church,” the monk intoned, his holier-than-thou voice and the pious expression on his face maddening.

  “We are not at war with the Church. We never were,” Guid'Antonio said. “Only with the Pope. And Lorenzo did not take us there. It was the other way around.”

  “Blasphemy!” the monk cried, shaking his fist. “Because of Lorenzo w
e've been cast into hell!” Tightly packed, people closed in, their eyes glittering with a fear that verged on madness. The mastiff, struggling to his feet, stood his ground, teeth bared, growling menacingly.

  Guid'Antonio felt the breath of the malcontents hot against his face and was beginning to step back when a man hidden in the throng shouted, “What right does Lorenzo have to play the lord over us? He's no duke or king! Would he had died with his brother!”

  For one moment, Guid'Antonio stared, speechless.

  “Who spoke?” he said, his voice shaking with anger. “More than your gate latch has changed in this town,” Cesare had said this morning. “Come forward!”

  In the eyes of the people, there was a restless shifting.

  “Cowards!” He strode into the gathering.

  Amerigo glanced at Luca. “Here we go.”

  Wide-eyed and fearful, people cringed back. “You would disparage Lorenzo, casting him down?” Guid'Antonio said, his words echoing in the square, bouncing and whirling against stone. “You would mock and crush everything the Medici family has done for you in the last half century? For our city, pouring thousands of florins into convents and monasteries? Yes, as far away as Jerusalem! How dare you imply Giuliano deserved his fate! He was an innocent!” Guid'Antonio's head pounded, about to explode.

  Somewhere a solitary bell began ringing, as though in complete concert with his words. “Not dukes or kings, you say? Yet who does Europe consider the voice of the Florentine Republic—France, Spain, even the king of England, Edward IV? Not to mention the Sforza dukes in Milan, King Ferrante of Naples, the Pope, and the Doge who governs Venice? Lorenzo! And you, wherever you're hiding, you would challenge this? Rue the day a duke or king rules this city! Or a Pope! As it is, we have the brightest voice and the steadiest hand between us and them.”

  Nearby, Amerigo stood solemn-faced and solid as an oak, the tips of his fingers touching the hilt of his dagger. Guid'Antonio's glance raked the crowd, his pulse hammering in his fists. Eyes round and bright stared back at him. Surely, the devil owned Guid'Antonio Vespucci, just as he owned his accomplice, Lorenzo.