The Secret Dead (5 page)

“I need some air,” I said, pushing the table away.

Donato was bleeding from a surface cut on his forearm where
the girl had made contact before she was hauled off. His hangers-on fussed
around him while the rest of the tavern stared as they exchanged animated
whispers. Signora Rosaria, who owned the Cerriglio, was berating L’Orso for not
stopping the assault sooner; the crowd pressed in for a better view of the
drama. No one had noticed the girl’s knife lying on the tiles under a
neighboring table. I ducked down and slipped it into my sleeve on the way to
the door.

There was no sign of her in the street. I walked a little
way along between the tall houses, toward the corner of the next alley, thinking
I had lost her, when I caught the sound of muffled sobs. She was crouched in a doorway,
her right arm cradled against her chest. After the initial shock of seeing her
in the tavern, my frantic thoughts of vengeful spirits had given way to a more
logical explanation, but I was still afraid to speak to her.

Alerted by my footsteps, her head snapped up and she sprang
back, her hands held out as if to ward me off. The street was sunk in darkness,
except for the dim glow from a high window opposite and the streaks of
moonlight between clouds. The girl’s face was hidden in shadow.

“I think this is yours.” I offered the knife to her, hilt
first. Her eyes flicked to it and back to me; for a long time she didn’t move,
but I stayed still and eventually she began to approach, wary as a wild dog,
until she was close enough to snatch it. She leveled it at me; I raised my
empty hands to show that I was now unarmed.

“Who are you looking for?”

“What is it to you?” She bared her teeth. “I know you are
one of them. I have seen you here before.”

“
Them?
”

“Dominicans.” She spat on the ground at my feet. “God’s
dogs.”

“You know Latin?” I said, surprised. It was an old nickname
for the Order, a pun on
Domini canes
, the Hounds of the Lord, but I had
not expected to hear it from a woman, especially one who was clearly not
high-born.

“Yes. You think a woman cannot read? Hypocrites.” I thought
she was going to spit at me again, but she restrained herself. “Look at
yourselves. You take vows of poverty and chastity, and yet there you are, night
after night, dicing and whoring like soldiers. And they made you the city’s Inquisitors,
the ones who decide whether others are practicing their religion to the letter,
and if they should die for it.” She let out a short, bitter laugh. “God would
spit you out of His mouth.” She was lit up by her fury, illuminated from
within, every inch of her taut and quivering. She wanted only the slightest
provocation to stick that knife in me, I was sure of it.

“That man you attacked,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “What
has he done?”

Her lip curled; she reminded me again of a dog that knows
it is cornered and is readying itself to fight. “I suppose he is your friend?
Did he ask you to make me repeat it, so he could accuse me of slander?”

“He is no friend of mine. I only wanted to help you.”

“Why?” The word shot back, quicker than a blow. She took a
step closer, holding the knife out as if I had threatened her.

I shrugged. “Because we are not all hypocrites.”

Her eyes narrowed; she did not believe me. She was right
not to, I reminded myself: I was the biggest hypocrite of all.

“My sister,” she said, in a subdued voice, just as I had assumed
she was about to walk away.

“Your twin?” The words were spoken before I could stop
them; she stared at me, her mouth open.

“Why do you say that? Do you know her?”

“No … I …” I blushed in confusion. “I don’t know why I thought
that.”

“Yes, my twin,” she said, lowering the knife, as if the
fight had gone out of her. “That friar” — she nodded past me in the direction
of the tavern — “he saw me in the street one day and followed me to our shop.”

“What shop?”

“My father keeps a shop on Strada dell’Anticaglia, off Seggio
di Nilo. He is a master goldsmith. That man started coming into the shop to
court me. I refused him. I would not be the mistress of a monk, for all his
money. I have no respect for your kind.”

“So you have said.”

A muscle tightened in her jaw. “He would not take no for an
answer. Then one day he came into the shop when my father and I were out and
found my sister instead.”

“He took her for you?”

“I don’t think he cared either way. But Anna was always
flattered by the attention of men.”

Anna.
I thought of a flayed leg thrown into a
makeshift coffin like an animal carcass, stripped to the crimson muscle and
white bone. She had had a name. Her name had been Anna.

In this girl’s face I saw again the lines of her dead twin.
A whore, Fra Gennaro had said. Was that his lie, or Donato’s? My skin felt
cold, despite the warm wind.

“And she went with him?”

“She started sneaking out after dark to meet him. She never
told me where she was going, but I followed her one night. She made me swear to
secrecy. She knew it would break our father’s heart.”

“He would have been angry?”

“He would have killed her.” As soon as she had spoken the
words, her hand flew to her mouth. I felt something lurch in the hollow under
my ribs, some pulse of hope. The girl’s father found out, he killed her in a
fit of rage, perhaps by accident; so Fra Gennaro’s story could be true. Even as
the idea formed, I knew it was absurd.

“I meant only …” she faltered, through her fingers. “He has
never lifted a hand to either of us in our lives. But the shame would have
destroyed him.”

“Back there, you accused the friar of killing her,” I said.
“Was that a figure of speech too?”

She drew her hand slowly away from her face and took a deep
breath. It escaped jaggedly, like a sob. “My sister is missing. She went to him
last night, and she has not returned. I know she has come to harm.”

“Perhaps she has run away.” As I spoke, I felt as if there
was a ball of sawdust lodged in my throat. My voice sounded strange to me.

The girl shook her head. “She would never have done that.
In any case, I followed her last night too. I was afraid for her.”

The ball in my throat threatened to choke me. I feared she
could hear the thudding of my heart in the silence.

“To the Cerriglio?”

“No. She went to San Domenico and waited for him by the
gate. I saw her go in, and she never came out.”

A warm breath of air lifted my hair from my forehead and
cooled the sweat on my face. Beneath my feet, the ground felt queasy,
uncertain, as if I were standing on a floating jetty instead of a city street.

“You must have missed her,” I said, but the words barely
made a sound.

“I waited until first light. I could not have our father
wake and find us both gone. I would swear she did not leave. Unless there is
another entrance. But then, why did she not come home?”

I felt my palms grow slick with sweat at her mention of
another entrance. I should have let her go then, but I had to be sure of how
much she knew. “Why do you think he meant her harm, if they were … involved?”

“Because she—–” Her face darkened and she turned away. “Her
situation had changed. She was going to ask him for something he could not
give.”

“Money?”

The slap came out of nowhere; she moved so fast I barely
had time to register that she had raised her hand. Rubbing my burning cheek, I reflected
that at least she had not used the hand that held the knife. I stretched my jaw
to assess the damage, but she was already stalking away around the corner.

“Wait!” I ran after her, into another, narrower alley. She
turned, eyes blazing out of the darkness.

“My sister was no whore, whatever he says.” She paused, and
I saw that she was fighting back tears. “She believed herself in love with him.”
She swiped at her eyes with her knuckles. “What is any of this to you? Why are
you following me?”

“If your sister was inside the walls of San Domenico last
night, someone must know something.” I was surprised at how level my voice
sounded, how carefully I controlled my expression. Only a few months since my
vows, and already I had acquired the Dominican talent for dissembling. Though
it was a skill that was to serve me well in later years, in that moment I
despised myself to the core. “What is your name?”

“Maria.” Most of the women in this city were called Maria,
but she hesitated just long enough for me to wonder if she was lying “Yours?”

“Bruno.”

“Well then, Bruno. You know where I can be found. But I
will not hold my breath — I know your kind always stick together. Whatever has
happened to my sister, he will not face justice for it. Not in this city. A
family like mine, against a man of his name?”

I wondered what she meant by that, and recalled the quiet,
deliberate cruelty of Donato’s last insult to her. “Why did he call you — that?”
I asked.

Her expression closed up immediately. “I expect it was the
worst abuse he could think of.”

We looked at one another in silence for a moment, her eyes
daring me to question further.

“What about the locket?”

Her mouth dropped open, the fury in her eyes displaced by
fear.

“What do you know of that?”

“Nothing. Only that I heard you accuse Fra Donato of taking
it.”

Her hand strayed to her throat; an involuntary gesture, I
supposed, as she thought of her sister wearing the locket. I could think only of
the bruises around the dead girl’s neck.

“If he has taken it …” She faltered. I sensed that she was
weighing up how much to say. “It has little value for its own sake. But it
belonged to our mother. I
must
have it back.” The note of desperation in
her voice told me she was withholding something. She feared that locket’s
falling into the wrong hands — but why?

I stood foolishly staring at her, wishing I could offer
some consolation, cursing the weight of what I knew — the truth she would spend
the rest of her life raking over and not knowing. Or so I had to hope.

“You know where to find me if you hear anything,” she said
again, with a shrug. I was about to reply when, silent as a cat, she turned and
disappeared into the blackness between the buildings.

*
* *

I crashed through the door of the infirmary, careless of
the hour, careless of the noise I made. Fra Gennaro was bent over the bed of
old Fra Francesco by the light of a candle, applying a poultice to his sunken
chest to ease the fluid on his lungs. Gennaro started at the sound of the door,
but as soon as he realized it was me, his expression told me he had been
expecting this.

I glanced along the length of the infirmary, my ribs
heaving with the effort of running through the back streets. Four beds in the
row were occupied by elderly friars who wheezed and grunted in concert; they
might have been asleep, but they might also have been quite capable of hearing
and understanding. It was all I could do not to blurt out my accusations;
Gennaro saw the urgency in my face and gestured me toward the dispensary,
whispering words of reassurance to Fra Francesco as he stood to follow me.

“She was not a whore, was she?”

He closed the door behind us and set his candle down on the
dispensary bench, signaling for me to lower my voice.

“I told you only what was told to me,” he said. His tone
was clipped and cold, tight with suppressed anger.

“And you chose not to question it.”

He was across to me in one stride, his hand clamping my
arm, face inches from mine.

“As I recall, Fra Giordano, you also swore an oath to ask
no questions. Who have you been talking to?”

“I didn’t have to talk to anyone.” I dropped my voice to an
urgent whisper. “Tonight her mirror image walked into the Cerriglio and accused
one of our brothers of murdering her twin.”

He stared at me, his grip slackening.

“She was never found in the street by soldiers. She died
inside these walls, didn’t she? That’s why you would not speculate on who
killed her. Because you already knew.”

He breathed out hard through his nose, his eyes fixed on me
for a long pause, as if I were a favorite son who had disappointed him. Eventually,
he let go of me and rubbed his hands quickly over his face, like an animal
washing.

“Where would we be, you and I, if we were not here?” he
said, looking up.

I blinked at him, unsure whether it was a rhetorical
question. He raised his brow, and I realized he wanted an answer. “If you had
not come to San Domenico, Fra Giordano, what would you have done with your
life?”

“I would have tried to obtain a place at the royal
university,” I mumbled.

“Would you? The son of a mercenary soldier? With whose
money?”

I looked at my feet.

“My father was well born, but he died desperately in debt
to a Genoan banker,” he continued. “If I had not come to San Domenico, I would
most likely have had to beg for a position as a tutor to idle rich boys. And
you, Bruno — I doubt you would by now be the most promising young theologian in
Naples, whatever you claim.”

I said nothing, because I knew he was right.

“We are alike, you and I.” His voice softened. “Neither one
of us, in our hearts, desired the constraints of a religious life. But it was the
only door open to us. You acknowledge that, surely?”

I gave the briefest nod.

“Then you also understand that it is not the likes of us
who keep San Domenico afloat. Our scholarship may contribute to its reputation,
but it is men like Fra Donato, with his name and his father’s vast endowments,
who ensure its continued prestige and wealth. We are the beneficiaries, and we
would do well to remember that.”

“So he must be protected, at any cost. Whatever he does.
This man who might be prior one day.”