Poison: A Novel of the Renaissance (13 page)

Apparently, he did understand that very well, for scarcely had I set foot in the alley behind the apothecary shop than I was grabbed from behind. A hood was dragged down over my head, plunging me into darkness. With the memory of the beating I had suffered sharp in my mind, I fought frantically and tried to cry out, to no avail. Before I could draw breath, I was thrown into a rough conveyance, a heavy wood hatch banged down above me, and I could feel myself being rolled away.

For several minutes, I could do nothing except try to steady myself against the sides of what I rapidly determined was a large pickle barrel. Although it had been emptied out prior to my arrival, the wood was saturated with the smell of brine. I could barely breathe even through my mouth and had to use all my strength to
keep from being slammed back and forth against the sides. Even so, I did try to drag the hood off only to discover that it had been drawn tight around my neck and knotted.

In that manner, I traveled a distance that, though short, seemed to take forever. Several more bruises were added to my collection as I was trundled down a flight of steps, coming to rest at last in what I guessed must be a cellar.

Wondering if perhaps it was God’s mercy that I should die before I sinned unforgivably, I tried to steel myself for whatever was to come next. The lid of the barrel was wrenched open and I was hauled out as unceremoniously as I had been dumped in. Hard hands shoved me down onto a stool. For a moment, nothing happened, then I heard a man’s voice.

“What is it you want?” he asked.

What
I
wanted? Hadn’t I been brought there against my will? Why would he assume that I wanted anything?

And yet, there was something I wanted enough to accept that its price was eternal damnation. As I have said, that was oddly liberating.

“I want to avenge my father.” My voice sounded muffled to my own ears, but the words were clear enough. I wondered what the man would make of them.

A moment passed. The hood was untied and yanked off over my head. I blinked in the dim light filtering through slits cut at street level near the ceiling.

“At least she’s honest,” another man said.

I realized then that there were several of them, all mere shadows in the dimness beyond the light. I could not make out any of their faces.

“Or she doesn’t think enough of us to lie,” the first man suggested.
He laughed without humor. “Is that it, poisoner? Are we so lowly in your eyes as to not be worth the effort of deception?”

“I don’t know whether you are or not,” I said. “I don’t know
who
you are.”

“We are Jews,” the second man said. “Isn’t that all you have to know to judge us?”

He had a point. All my life, I had heard, “The Jews this . . . the Jews that . . .” They were spoken of as a single entity, all carrying the same taint, enmeshed in the same plots, deserving of the same fate. Was it the knowledge that my father might have been one of them that made me begin to see them differently?

“What do
you
want?” I asked, hoping to conceal my confusion.

“The same as you,” the first man said, and stepped out into the light.

He was young, only a few years older than I, tall and broad-shouldered. With his dark, curling hair, strong features, and sharp, black eyes, he looked like a Spaniard. But he was a Jew, a handsome Jew, a notion so novel that I could not help stare at him.

“Who are you?” I asked.

He sat on a stool facing me. Close-up, he looked even more like a creation of the painter Botticelli, all liquid eyes and fierce grace. Botticelli shares my fascination with Dante to the extent that he scandalized his peers by illustrating the first printed edition of
La Divina Commedia
a few years ago. No one seriously imagines that mechanical printing can ever replace the handwritten art of creating manuscripts, though it makes for interesting novelties. But I digress. I do that when I am unnerved, and the handsome Jew put me in that state.

“My name is David ben Eliezer,” he said. “I apologize for the way you were brought here, Signorina Giordano, but we have to be careful.”

“Yet you sent a child to lure me. Where is your care for him?”
With fear fading fast, I took refuge in the tart temper to which I am, admittedly, prone.

Ben Eliezer looked taken aback for a moment, but, give him credit, he recovered quickly. “Such tender concern for the well-being of a Jewish child? You astonish me, signorina.”

Only a few days had passed since I had done the same to Borgia, or so the Cardinal had said just before deciding to let me live. Perhaps I would be equally fortunate this time.

“That’s all well and good,” I said, “but you haven’t told me what I am doing here.”

Although by then I had a fair idea. Even if my father had been a Jew, which I still could scarcely credit, I did not believe they would share my desire to seek vengeance for him, not under such desperate circumstances and given stakes so high. That left only one other possibility. I waited, scarcely breathing, on the hope that fate had conspired for us to share a common goal.

Ben Eliezer hitched his stool a little closer and dropped his voice. “You know about the edict, about what Innocent intends to do. That cannot be allowed to happen.” His face hardened. “Enough Jews have died, are dying, will die. While the rabbis and the merchants dither, that madman will kill us all.”

I understood what Ben Eliezer was saying, that the leaders of the ghetto were not willing to move against Innocent directly. They would go so far as to strike a deal with Borgia but no further. And who could blame them, really? If they were even suspected of considering so heinous a crime as the murder of a pope, all the hounds of Hell would be unleashed against them. There would not be a Jewish man, woman, or child left alive in Rome. Nor would it end there. All of Christendom would rise up in a bloodletting to rival anything seen in the history of the world.

Yet the edict Innocent was preparing would have much the same result. Ben Eliezer and the others gathered in the shadows behind him recognized that.

“There is only one way to stop him,” I said.

We looked at each other. I knew, and I assumed he did as well, the enormity of what we were contemplating, each for our own reasons. But if what I believed was true, we were not the first.

“Do you know what my father was doing?”

Ben Eliezer turned and gestured to someone behind him. Sofia stepped out of the shadows. I was only moderately surprised. Obviously, someone had brought me to the notice of Ben Eliezer and his associates.

“I hope you can forgive us,” she said. “We had to have a better sense of your seriousness before we could risk approaching you.”

She took a stool beside us so that we formed a small circle, sitting huddled together in a small ring of light isolated from the darkness. I tried to muster some annoyance at the lies she had told me but could not. Matters were moving too quickly to allow for pettiness.

“I told you that your father was seeking a way to bring about a seemingly natural death.” When I nodded, she continued. “You will understand that we don’t know what causes disease. When plague strikes, people who seal themselves up in their houses are as likely to sicken and die as is anyone else. Those who flee to the countryside may or may not escape. When fevers come in the summer, some are stricken, others not. The pox kills some, leaves others blind and horribly scarred, and doesn’t touch others. There is no rhyme or reason to any of it.”

“God’s will—” I began, but Sofia shook her head.

“If we say it is God’s will,” she said, “what does that avail us? All
inquiry becomes pointless. Your father believed—and so do I—that we can use the reason God gave us to discover how to help ourselves.
That
is God’s will.”

It was a startling thought. The great Saint Augustine taught that Man possessed free will as a gift from God. But he also taught that God knows our fates from the beginning. How can what is divinely known be subject to human choice? But if there is no choice, how can we fairly be held accountable for our sins?

You see the circles we Christians entangle ourselves in with our effort to know the unknowable?

Better to concentrate on matters closer to hand. “What did my father’s reason lead him to?” I asked.

“He came to the conclusion that some people are more likely to get some illnesses when they are in close contact with people who already have them.”

That much seemed obvious. Most physicians, priests, and the like will not go near anyone they suspect of contagion unless they are richly paid, and even then they are fainthearted in their duty. Sofia was very much the exception in that regard.

“No one suspected of being ill would be allowed near the Pope,” she went on. “Therefore, your father had to find another means to bring the contagion to Innocent.”

“And did he find it?”

She hesitated for so long that I began to wonder if she would answer, but finally she said, “He thought that it might be possible to use blood to transmit disease.”

“Why blood?” I asked. “Aren’t all four of the humors equally important?” Certainly, that was what I had been taught, the knowledge dating back to the Greek, Hippocrates, and being upheld by every physician since.

“So it is generally thought,” Sofia agreed. “Blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm all have their part to play in temperament and well-being. Too much yellow bile, for instance, disposes one to anger easily, whereas an excess of black bile causes sleeplessness and a tendency toward irritability. Each of the four has a different but equal effect on the body.”

“Why then did my father only consider blood?”

“Because,” Ben Eliezer said, “that was our best hope for reaching Innocent.”

The look on his face—he was enjoying this—warned me I would not like what I was about to hear.

“For several years now,” Ben Eliezer said, “your Pope has sought to maintain his health and stave off death by suckling at the breasts of nursing mothers.”

I had heard this, of course. Who in Rome had not? The city wallows in rumor; it is our sport, our entertainment, our tool, and our weapon. At times it seems to be the very reason for our existence.

But Ben Eliezer had more. “Recently,” he said, “Innocent has become convinced that milk is not enough. He needs blood, specifically the blood of young boys.”

I would like to tell you that I was shocked, but that was not the case. People do all sorts of things in an attempt to cheat death. The more powerful they are, the more bizarre the efforts they resort to. I myself have known those who dined on the placentas of the newborn, ingested gold, and engaged in all manner of other activities, some of which I suspect actually hastened their demise.

“You are aware of the
cantoretti
school in the Vatican?” Sofia asked.

I had heard the rumors, the same as everyone else. It was said that the choral masters of the Vatican were adopting the Byzantine practice of castrating certain promising boys. So altered, the castratos’
voices remained extraordinarily pure and flexible, producing, it was claimed, the music of the angels.

The practice was very controversial, being both foreign—the Muslims favor it—and a violation of God’s will that we should be fruitful and multiply. It also strikes visceral horror into most males.

“What about it?” I asked, without revealing the extent of my knowledge.

“Some of the boys dedicated to the school have been directed to another purpose,” Sofia said, “one Innocent has decreed is higher.”

“Keeping him alive?” I guessed.

Ben Eliezer nodded. “They are allowed to remain intact, apparently because the Pope fears his own virility, such as is left of it, will lessen if he receives the blood of castrati
.
However, few of them survive the procedure by which he is . . . supplied.”

“Why is that?”

“Perhaps they are bled too often,” Sofia said. “At any rate, your father had the thought that it might be possible to replace blood taken from the boys with the blood of someone who was dying of disease. The hope was that the Pope, too, would sicken and die.”

“Was such an attempt actually made?” I asked her.

“We don’t know. Giovanni broke off all contact with us for our own protection, as I have told you. But there is always sickness in Rome. It is possible that he acquired tainted blood elsewhere. Perhaps he even found a way to get it to Innocent.”

“The Pope’s condition did worsen at about that time,” Ben Eliezer reminded me. “Unfortunately, we don’t know for certain if that happened because of your father’s efforts. At any rate, Innocent did not die.”

No, he did not. He was still very much alive and, if the word on
the streets of Rome was to be believed, currently enjoying improved health.

“How does he receive the blood?” Already, my mind was working to address the problem. How had it been done? How might it be done more successfully?

“He drinks it,” Ben Eliezer said. “Perhaps he believes that God transmutes it into wine for him.”

He did laugh then and several others still in the shadows did the same. The notion of the Holy Father, the leader of all of Christendom, engaged in such a travesty of the sacred Mass might have amused me, too, if I hadn’t been thinking about the boys.

“Who prepares it for him?”

“His physicians, we assume,” Sofia said. “And no, before you ask, none of them is a Jew. Innocent won’t let any Jews near him, or Muslims, either.”

“What about
conversi
?” I asked, remembering what Borgia had told me.

“That’s a different matter,” Ben Eliezer acknowledged. “There are rumors, to be sure, but we don’t know for certain that there are any such in the Vatican.”

“You would be the last to know.” Any
converso,
being naturally fearful of discovery, would avoid any connection to the Jews. If my father had been one, and I still did not accept that he was, he would have been the exception. Much as I did not want to think it, that might help to explain what had happened to him.

We were all silent for a moment. I was thinking about what I had learned and how I might turn it to my own ends when Sofia said softly, “Will you help us?”