The Thief Of Peace

by Jess Whitecroft

  Inside it was cool, the marble floor and cold stones going some way to repel the blaze of the day. It was quiet. So many people had gone to San Bendetto, where a miracle had taken place. An old monk had died a week earlier, and instead of putrefying rapidly in the summer heat his body had barely decayed. Even more wondrous, in life the old man had borne the wounds of Christ, bleeding daily from his hands and feet. People who had visited the corpse reported sweet smells, like herbs, flowers and holy oil. Cardinals had come to see. There was even talk of the pope coming to Florence to witness the miracle for himself.

  Giancarlo knelt in pretence of prayer. He was relatively spotless today. Nicci hadn’t touched him for a while. That morning Giancarlo had tried to snuggle into the crook of Nicci’s arm, only to be rebuffed. Nicci – who had been up drinking – had pulled the pillow over his head and begged to be left alone. He’d been drinking a lot since he’d come back from Prato, with his cartoon still rolled beneath his arm and all the new, bright light in his eyes extinguished.

  Someone came in. Giancarlo turned and realised the movement of his head was too conspicuous at this angle. He shifted down the pew and then froze, because from here he could see a figure in a red cloak kneeling beyond the carved screen of a side chapel.

  It was Rafaele Ribisi.

  Giancarlo’s heart stopped for a moment. When had the Ribisi come here? They had a church across town near their family home.

  Assuming, of course, that Rafaele was even here to pray. They were monsters, the pair of them. Monsters who knew and heard and saw everything. Why were they tormenting him in this way, asking him things they could have so easily found out for themselves?

  He got up to leave, but as he turned he saw Fillipo entering the church. Looking right at him. His knees went soft, even though he knew they wouldn’t dare do anything to him in the house of God.

  Would they?

  Fillipo cleared his throat. Rafaele looked up from his devotions, kissed the cross and stalked over to join his brother. Giancarlo found himself hemmed in between them, his heart racing and his stomach hollowed out and cold.

  “Saying our prayers, are we?” said Rafaele, reaching out to run a fingertip along the nape of Giancarlo’s neck. “Good for you.”

  “Please,” said Giancarlo. “This is a church.”

  “I know. How does that work, then? You think God’s going to forgive you all the things you’ve done? You drag your dirty little arse in here and go down on your knees…”

  “…he’s accustomed to kneeling, at least,” said Fillipo.

  Rafaele chuckled. “And then what?” he said, his onion breath on Giancarlo’s cheek. “You ask forgiveness? Don’t you know that God doesn’t forgive that?”

  “God forgives everything,” said Giancarlo.

  “I don’t think so,” said Rafaele. “What were the names of those cities again? Oh yes, Sodom and Gomorrah. Not a lot of forgiving going on, if I remember my divinity lessons rightly.”

  “Fire and brimstone,” said Fillipo.

  Rafaele clicked his tongue. It echoed loudly. “Pillars of salt. Abominations.”

  “Please. What do you want from me?”

  Rafaele lowered his voice. “We want the boy, faggot,” he said. “The bastard. Albani’s last son. Where is he? I know he’s in a monastery, and you said you were going to find out…”

  “Why?” said Giancarlo, in desperation. “Why are you doing this?”

  Fillipo’s hand shot out and grasped a handful of his hair. No, they didn’t care. They really were monsters.

  “Why does anything happen?” said Fillipo. “Why does a young man like you, with everything to play for…”

  “…please…”

  “…a young artistic talent…”

  “…fine eye for detail…” said Rafaele, immediately understanding the game. Giancarlo pictured the two of them as boys, roasting ants under a glass, or pulling the legs off flies.

  “…how does a young man like that?” continued Fillipo, giving Giancarlo’s head a vicious backwards jerk. “End up taking it up the arse from a creature like Niccolò di Volpaia?”

  “Such a fall from grace,” said Rafaele. “An accusation like that could ruin a young man’s life.”

  “Or even end it completely.”

  “He’s in San Bendetto,” said Giancarlo, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes.

  Fillipo released Giancarlo’s hair. “There’s a good boy. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  “What about the del Campo woman?” said Rafaele. “I hear she’s been sniffing around, causing trouble.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. I wasn’t there. It happened at the house in Prato.”

  “We told you to watch everything.”

  “Including Prato.”

  Giancarlo felt something hard and sharp digging into his side. “Please don’t.”

  “Do better,” said Fillipo. “And then maybe we won’t have to.”

  Giancarlo fled from the church and kept running. By the time he reached the house his legs were shaking and his stomach was in wild revolt. He sagged against a pillar in the courtyard and drew in several long, whooping breaths. His dry mouth was suddenly swimming with water and he thought he was going to be sick. Dark spots danced at the corners of his vision.

  He spat, swallowed and fought to compose himself. His hands were trembling and in spite of his fear he was also furious. It wasn’t the first time he’d been threatened like that, and he knew it wouldn’t be the last.

  Nicci was in the dining room, drinking and doodling. He had covered page upon page in angel wings and bare feet, and although it was barely afternoon he was already deep in his cups. “Where have you been?” he said, looking up with unfocused eyes.

  “Church.”

  Nicci snorted. “Good luck with that,” he said, and filled his cup again. “We’re both going to Hell.”

  Giancarlo took the jug from the table and peered into it. It was almost empty, and it was on the tip of his tongue to tell Nicci that he wasn’t going out for more. He was sick and scared and longed for some warmth, but since Nicci’s last return from Prato he had been less affectionate than a rock. And while that soothed Giancarlo’s conscience just a little, it didn’t slake his thirst. “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Why are you saying these things?”

  “Because it’s doctrine,” said Nicci. “We’re fucked, you and me. Because…well, because we fucked. We’re sinners. We commit abominations every time we crawl into bed together. Seems a bit much, doesn’t it? Eternity of hellfire just for touching another man’s cock.”

  Giancarlo sat down on the edge of the window seat and sighed. After everything he’d been through today he was in no mood for self-pity. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe God was the one who made you this way?” he said.

  “Oh yes. Which begs a whole new set of questions, doesn’t it?”

  “Like what?”

  “Why?” said Nicci. “Why would God do that? What kind of God would send me to Hell just for feeding my simple human need for love?”

  Love? Once that word might have caused Giancarlo joy or pain, but the Ribisi brothers seemed to have scooped him hollow of every emotion other than fear.

  “I’ll tell you what kind of God,” Nicci continued. “Same God who put curiosity in the hearts of humans, then planted a tree in Eden and told them they couldn’t touch the fruit of that tree. And he knew what would happen, because he’s God. He knows everything. Man was destined to fall. I’m destined to…to want what I can’t have.”

  “You could try,” said Giancarlo. “To get what you want.”

  “Nope.” Nicci shook his head. “Did that. Got sent back from Prato with my tail between my legs. You saw what happened there. The only reason I’m still on Albani’s payroll is…well, I’m not even sure myself anymore, actually.”

  “I am.”

  “Oh?”

  That boy. The one in San Bendetto. Giancarlo had never met him, and felt
sure he’d never love him, because Teodoro degli Albani seemed to be the source of so many of his recent miseries. He hesitated for a moment, but as soon as he asked the question in his mind it demanded to be given voice. “Are you in love with him?”

  “No,” said Nicci, too promptly. Too loud. “No, of course not. It’s not like that. He’s…he’s innocent.”

  “Unlike me.”

  “He’s a fucking monk, Gianni. His life is nothing but endless prayer. And work. The highlights of his days are noon and night when he goes to take the pigs their feed and give the old fat sow a friendly scratch with a stick. She’s the only other living creature he’s really allowed to touch. He’s definitely not allowed to touch me. Not even allowed to touch himself. Probably has to use tongs when he takes it out to piss, even. Just in case he touches something unholy.”

  Pigs. Noon and night. Giancarlo found himself taking mental notes of this speech, and despised himself for it, but he knew – as clearly as he knew that one day he was going to die – that if the Ribisi demanded this information of him, he was going to give it. Perhaps he would even volunteer it to save his own hide, and the Albani boy would just have to take his chances.

  They’d never go to a monastery to harm someone, would they?

  He knew the answer already. Oh God.

  “They say there are miracles at San Bendetto,” he said, wanting Nicci to agree, to tell him that the place was overflowing with pilgrims, and far too busy for an assassin to do his work with the necessary stealth.

  “There aren’t,” said Nicci. “There’s more than one way to make the palms of your hands bleed, and none of them are holy.”

  “They say the body is incorrupt.”

  Nicci shook his head again. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Nobody knows the mysteries of what happens to the human body after death. It’s one of the things we’re not supposed to know, but I’ve seen more than my fair share. I’ve seen corpses turn to soup in the summer, but in the same conditions I’ve seen others that barely decay at all. They merely seem to shrink a little. The eyes sink back in the head somewhat, but other than that you’d think they were sleeping. The skin dries out and turns to something like leather, or wax.”

  “Incorruptibles?”

  “Hardly,” said Nicci, getting up from the table. “I’m talking about bodies that came from the gallows, in some cases. Rapists. Thieves. Murderers. Not a candidate for sainthood among them.” He swayed towards the door. “Let them have their fun at San Bendetto. There’s no miracle there that I can see.”

  *

  San Bendetto was overflowing.

  The view from the pigsty, once a vision of uninterrupted greens and golds, was now marred with the addition of tents and other crude shelters. Pilgrims came pouring into the monastery, bringing with them their illnesses, their anxieties and their shattered faiths.

  And they brought gold. There was a chest in the abbot’s room. At first it had been a carved wooden bowl, a little thing passed around in the hope of donations, but the bowl had filled rapidly, and not just with coins. As the word spread, people brought jewels, rosaries, silver spoons and gold loving cups. As the word spread the bowl had become a box, then a chest, and now even that threatened to spill over.

  Nicci hadn’t come for almost two weeks now, and maybe that was just as well, because Teo already knew the shame that would come of having to eat his words: Brother Sandro was now a sideshow.

  He had been moved out of the chapel to a room at the end of the cloister. There was always a queue. People cried and prayed. Some even fainted. The pilgrims whispered about lilacs and roses and the rare perfumes of holy oil – myrrh and spikenard – the costly scents that had clung to the hair of the prostrate Magdalene, after she had anointed the feet of the Lord.

  When Teo walked into the room he smelled nothing but a faint sweetness that could easily have been the beginnings of decay. It was true that Brother Sandro’s preservation was astonishing, especially in summer, a time when the gravediggers of Florence usually hurried to get bodies underground. The blood on his hands and feet had dried to a dark crust, and his eyes had only sunk back a little in his head. If the tips of his fingers, toes and the end of his nose were beginning to turn grey, nobody said anything about it. Instead they said he looked as though he was merely sleeping, and some even went so far as to say that they had seen the light of the angel who kept Brother Sandro’s body from decay. One mad old woman, with hair like dandelion clocks and an entourage of barn cats, insisted that there would be a third miracle at San Bendetto, and that Brother Sandro would not only bleed in life and fail to rot in death, but also that he would rise from the dead on the third day just like the Lord. He didn’t, of course, but the miracle watchers always wanted more. It wasn’t enough that there was a dead stigmatic who appeared to be incorrupt. There had to be angels, and resurrections, and heavenly sweetness, and Teo was surprised to find how annoyed that made him. Greed. That’s all it was. Just another form of greed. God had sent them a miracle and still they wanted more, the claims becoming ever more outlandish as the abbey’s coffers overflowed.

  There were too many people here. As he crossed the courtyard he caught a bearded man staring at him as though he recognised him. Impossible, of course. Unlike the legitimate sons of Albani, no portrait of Teo hung on the wall of his father’s house. No likeness, no real resemblance. Nobody – besides the old man and Nicci – knew he was here.

  You entered this place as Teodoro da Mila. And that’s who you are, as far as everyone else is concerned.

  Between the pillars, Teo caught sight of a flash of red, expensive and out of place. A cardinal, bright in his scarlet finery. The abbot, deep in conversation with the cardinal, spotted Teo out of the corner of his eye and beckoned him over.

  Teo bowed and pressed his lips to the cardinal’s ring, a dark sapphire the size of a finch’s egg. “Illustrissimo.”

  “This is Cardinal Gatti,” said the abbot. “Come all the way from Rome. This is the young man I was telling you about, your reverence. Teodoro degli Albani.”

  Cardinal Gatti smiled. He had sharp white teeth, to match his name. “I knew your father,” he said. “Many years ago, while I was still a bishop here in Florence. How is he?”

  “He is well.”

  “Brother Teo, perhaps you would like to show our guest the gardens?” said the abbot. “Forgive me, illustrissimo, but these pilgrims keep us all very busy.”

  “Of course,” said the cardinal.

  Teo, struggling to hide his outrage at being unmasked in such a fashion, steered the cardinal towards the path. “This way, please,” he said. “The orchard is beautiful this time of year.”

  The back of his throat burned as he led the way. It was happening again. That endless circle of bowing and scraping as soon as someone knew that your family name was one of consequence. And worse. Who knew he was here?

  “I was sorry to hear of your father’s losses,” said Cardinal Gatti, as they walked beneath the peach trees. “Three sons. I can’t imagine his devastation.”

  “It’s hard, yes.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “I…I can’t recall,” said Teo. “Truthfully, my devotions here keep me very busy.”

  But the cardinal no longer seemed to be listening. He was gazing up into the branches. “Do you mind?” he said, and reached for a peach, his wide red sleeve slipping back to reveal a cuff trimmed with Venetian rose point lace. He took out a small knife from under his belt and began to peel the fruit.

  “You know, there are some cardinals who say that the kitchens of Rome are a blight on the Holy See,” he said. “Gluttony. Sins of the flesh. And yet they all eat the food, just the same.” He bared his sharp teeth. His eyes were the pale green of unripe grapes. “Nobody eats as well as the Curia. I was part of the last conclave…oh yes. Four whole months shut up in the Capella Paolina. And you should have seen the dishes some of them requested. Varnished fowls with the beaks gilded. Rolled veal st
uffed with artichokes. Pesto Genovese. All manner of sinful sweets.” The peach peel fell from his knife. “But do you know what the Florentine in me craved more than anything?”

  Teo shook his head.

  “A Tuscan peach,” said the cardinal. He cut off a slice and offered it to Teo, who took it from his fingers, uncomfortable. For a moment he’d been afraid that the cardinal was about to try to feed it directly into his mouth.

  The cardinal’s gaze lingered too long. Teo chewed, and somehow managed to swallow.

  “You don’t resemble your father in looks,” said Cardinal Gatti. “Although I’m sure people tell you that all the time.”

  “I don’t really talk about him, to tell you the truth. I don’t want anyone to see me as any different from any of the other brothers here.”

  “Your modesty does you credit, Teodoro.”

  “Modesty has nothing to do with it, your reverence. I’m here for a reason. To serve God. To help the poor.”

  “The poor you will always have with you.”

  Teo’s eyes were once again drawn to the exquisite lace cuff. It probably cost more than an entire family might make in a year.

  “If you ever wish for something better,” said the cardinal. “To serve God in some higher capacity, I do hope you’ll remember me.”

  “You’re very kind, illustrissimo,” said Teo. “But my place is here.”

  Somehow he managed to keep up the polite small talk on their way around the rest of the gardens, but by the time the cardinal took his leave Teo was quietly seething.

  “Father, could I have a word in private, please?” he asked, turning to the abbot.

  They went to the abbot’s room and closed the door.

  “Cardinal Gatti was most taken with you, Teo,” said the abbot.

  “I gathered,” said Teo. “Why did you introduce me in that way? I came to this monastery as Teodoro da Mila. Did you think it would reflect well on you to have an Albani under your roof?”

  The abbot blinked. “Brother Teo, lower your voice at once.”