The Malice of Fortune (5 page)

The pope studied me for several heartbeats. “I am sending you to Imola.”

“To examine what is left of her?”

His hand flew at me and struck the top of my skull so hard that the stars winked at me; he clutched my hair as though he wanted to rip my scalp away with it, forcing back my head. “You will go to Imola and wait in lodging provided you by the Holy See.” The words seethed through his teeth. “You will wait there until you receive instruction from me.”

I looked into a satyr’s leering face, so close that our noses briefly touched. I could no longer smell the wine on his breath. Instead this was the foul, earthy stench of a long-buried corpse.

I thought:
Hell smells like this
.

After a moment the pope released me, nodded again at Beheim, then left the room.

In the arch above the door where you entered a moment later, Pinturicchio had painted the Holy Madonna displaying her Child to the adoring saints. Your grandfather’s people had already dressed you in a little hunting costume, with a padded jerkin and red morocco boots that reached to your knees. In your arms squirmed a dear Tenerife almost identical to our precious Ermes, licking at your face.

“Mama! Mama! Look!” you cried out like a carillon of tiny bells. An angel’s voice. “I have met my
nonno
at last and he has given me Ermes’s brother! In the morning we shall go back to our house and get Ermes and mend the cut those evil men gave him! I’m going to stay here with the dogs while you are away and receive instruction in fencing and riding!” You bounded into my lap and the fluffy Tenerife now licked madly at my face, eager for the salt in my tears. “Mama,
nonno
says we are all going to live here when you get back!”

I had hardly composed my sobs when I observed that your
nonno
had returned to stand behind you. His Holiness’s fleshy lips trembled as they drew a tauter line. “Now you understand why I have every conviction you will go to Imola and do as I say.”

“I understand,” I whispered, “that you have made your own grandson hostage to my obedience in this errand.”

Your grandfather nodded at Beheim, who gently tugged you from my embrace. At once I felt the pain of birth, when a mother first parts with the child of her womb. Yet I knew that if I clung to you, I would only frighten you.

It is through love, Plato said, that all conversation between God and man is conducted. Thus the vow I whispered to you was for God’s ears as well as your own. “I will come back and hold you again, my most precious darling. Soon. As soon as I am able. Until then you will be brave and do what you are told. And whenever you think of me, you will know that I am thinking of you and how I adore you more than the love that turns the stars, and that is when you must smile for me.
Even if it is a hundred times every day. Even if it is only once. Each time you smile, my heart will know it.”

You had no sooner left my arms than you offered me the first of those winsome smiles, sly and a bit sad at once, reminding me of your father. You turned and offered the second as you passed beneath the immense gilded arch that framed the Madonna and Child, the little dog in your arms peering back at me as well, his wide eyes lingering longer than yours.

Your grandfather did not witness our farewell. Instead, again he stared up at his own lost son. For the first time that night, I was alone with him. And I cannot say why, but I felt between us a communion so powerful that I sobbed, as though we were the last two mourners standing at Juan’s bier.

“The Orsini and the Vitelli are no longer in my employ.” The pope’s voice was hollow. “Last month the
condottieri
met in a secret conclave at the fortress of La Magione and declared an armed rebellion against Duke Valentino, the Holy See, and our entire enterprise in the Romagna. Vitellozzo Vitelli has already attacked our garrisons in the same fortresses and towns I paid him so liberally to secure for me only months ago.
Impicatti
. The Orsini and Vitelli have betrayed their Heavenly Father no less than their duke, their pontiff, and the pledges they gave us.”

“So the
condottieri
are no longer useful to you,” I replied. “And now I am.”

The pope remained fixed on Juan’s image.

“Five years, Your Holiness. That is how long you have husbanded your hatred, every day putting away a bit more, like wine in your cellar. But it will be a sour vintage if you believe I had anything to do with those men. Perhaps this unfortunate woman had a connection with the
condottieri
. Most likely she did.” My sigh was weary. “But if I ever knew her, it was not because of some mutual association with the Orsini or the Vitelli.”

The pope spun about, his eyes as glaring as black glass in the sun. Yet knowing your grandfather as well as I did, I observed a certain subtlety of his expression, from which I drew the faintest cause for hope.
I had seen this same doubt twitch across his face when he raised the golden chalice full of Christ’s blood on Easter morning in San Pietro; as often as he had sold God’s forgiveness, His Holiness could not be certain he would ever receive it, at any price. He could taste the stink of Hell on his own tongue.

And in the same fashion, he was not entirely certain of my guilt. If I could connect the
condottieri
to a faceless woman who was murdered while carrying Juan’s amulet in her charm bag, I might yet prove to him my innocence.

“Very well, Your Holiness,” I whispered. “We have an understanding. I will establish myself in Imola and wait there for your instruction.”

There is one final thing you should know about that night: Everything your grandfather told you was a lie, except for the Tenerife being our precious Ermes’s brother. I am all but certain that Ermes and the little dog His Holiness gave you came from the same litter, born two months before your father was murdered.

II

Fortune is fickle by her very nature. As a dear friend once observed, that malignant bitch knows that she cannot drop us to our ruin unless she first lifts us up. So it was that I returned to my violated house in Trastevere that very night to prepare for my journey to Imola, only to find Camilla there, quite alive. She had already delivered the body of dear, brave Obadiah to our little community of Jews and paid for his services and burial; she had given Ermes his rest in the herb garden behind our house. I found her with a bucket of water and lye, preparing to clean a great patch of blood from the mattress upon which I had last seen her. Before we could even embrace and keen like Trojan women for our lost little boy, our sad eyes met and she told me, “It is not my blood, Madonna.” I did not inquire further. Like your mama, our beloved Camilla came from nothing, and that has made her a most resourceful woman.

Before Camilla and I took our leave of Rome, I was able to sell most of my medallions and cameos, thus obtaining the means to purchase those necessities the Holy See would not provide, as well as redeeming some of my best dresses from the pawnbrokers. Within three days of my forced visit to the Vatican, Camilla and I stood in the little garden behind our run-down house, preparing to mount the mules that waited out front, laden with our traveling chests. In our five years in that little house, the two of us had labored so much to make this garden
as lovely as it was useful, planting our cabbages, garlic, lettuces, and all our herbs and flowers; grooming the fig, pear, and lemon trees; building paths and a pergola.

A gentle rain provided almost a lens, through which our foliage glowed beryl and emerald. Yet this shower occasioned a foreboding—if we did not have reason enough to fear our journey—because even as we watched, snowflakes began to flutter down within it.

“This will be the coldest winter,” Camilla said mournfully, having warm Neapolitan blood. “All the birds have gone already.”

I knew how much she and our Giovanni loved to go out into the garden with Ermes, to watch the antics of the swifts and wrens, and sometimes chase them. I folded her in my arms. “I have a little hope,” I said. “The pope has left me that thread, and I will cling to it. I believe if I can discover the truth about Juan’s murder, I can bring our precious little boy home. That is my faith, my darling. We will come back here. All of us. The sun will shine again.”

“I am remembering it,” Camilla said, looking around with wonder, as if seeing our garden for the first time. And then she smiled at me, with the remarkable innocence she has kept throughout the most dreadful times. “If you remember something well enough, you are sure to come back and see it again.”

I will not waste words on the details of our transit, except to say that we spent a week on the backs of those mules—and the snow on the mountain passes was so thick that where it had been piled beside the road, it reached above our heads.

Imola lies at the very foot of the Apennines, upon that great carpet of rust-colored soil, known as the
pianura
, that stretches to the Adriatic Sea, one of those cities the Romans strung along the Via Emilia like beads on the reed of an abacus. You could fit all of Imola into Rome’s Campo Marzio, but the city itself is not a great pasture like so much of Rome. There is a thick stone wall all around it, with everything packed tightly inside, and there are fewer tottering old brick towers than we have in Rome and just as many modern palazzi. With all the soldiers
there and the army of opportunists that has followed them, you could count just as many souls in Imola on the day I arrived as you could count in Rome on the day I left.

We entered the city through the gate that faces the Apennines, thus called the Mountain Gate, passing through a wall thick enough to build a house within. Just inside we found a crowd flailing about like crabs in a sieve: candle-shop streetwalkers painted so heavily their faces looked like Carnival masks; porters with bundles balanced on their heads and peasants with baskets of eggs or sausages atop theirs; merchants in fur-trimmed capes, monks in coarse brown cowls, and cardsharps wearing velvet jackets short enough to display codpieces that might have been stuffed with cabbages. Order was kept by the local militia, rosy-faced mountain boys in jackets and puffy breeches, all striped with Borgia vermilion and yellow.