Secrecy (26 page)

January came.

Only a few days after Epiphany, Earhole delivered his first report. He had learned next to nothing, he said, largely because Stufa had spent much of the past two months in Pisa, with the Grand Duchess.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘She’s been ill.’

On the rare days when Stufa was in Florence, he moved between Santa Maria Novella and the Grand Duke’s palace. He went to Mass, he called in at libraries and bookshops. He visited the needy. It was almost as if he knew he was being watched, Earhole said, and was deliberately leading a model existence.

‘Nothing unusual, then?’ I said.

‘He’s good with a sword. Did you know that?’

I shook my head.

‘He practises every morning, in a cloister at the back of the monastery.’

Although I praised Earhole for his persistence, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed at how little he had given me. In
trying
to build a case against Stufa, perhaps I was attempting the impossible.

I didn’t hear from Faustina until the third week of January, and then only in the most elliptical of ways. One morning, as I left for work, I found Fiore standing on the street outside my house. Her hair was plaited with animal bones, and she had a knapsack over her shoulder. I could still see the place where Stufa’s ring had marked her face, and though it was little more than a small triangular indentation in the skin, I was reminded of my vow to the signora.

‘Walk with me,’ she said.

I looked at the sky. Clouds hung over the city, and it was oddly humid, not cold at all. ‘Where would you like to go?’

She linked her arm through mine. ‘The gardens.’

I took her to the Grand Duke’s menagerie, where she was delighted by the parrot, recently imported from Brazil. By the time we reached the Viottolone, the day had brightened; the sun struck through the double rows of cypress and laurel trees, and the sloping avenue was patterned with alternating stripes of black and white. There was a fountain at the bottom of the hill, I told her. The granite base had been quarried on Elba, then shipped up the Arno; it weighed so much that it had taken twenty-five pairs of oxen to haul it the last few miles to the palace. As we circled the fountain, she collected some of the delicate, pointed acorns that lay scattered on the ground and slipped them into her knapsack. I asked her what else she had in there. She put a hand over her mouth. She had completely forgotten, she said. It was a package, from a boy. That was the reason she had come.

‘A boy?’ I said. ‘Did he give you a name?’

‘No name.’

‘How old was he?’

She shrugged. She wasn’t good with that kind of question.

‘It wasn’t Earhole?’

‘No. This boy was nice.’

I smiled.

We sat on a bench, a grove of ilex at our back. The package Fiore handed over weighed almost nothing. This frightened me. She watched as I cautiously undid the paper. Inside was
something
soft, dark and glossy, which I took at first to be the wing of a bird. Then I realized it was human hair. I leaned down and smelled the hair. Faustina.
This boy was nice.
I imagined Faustina had delivered the package to the House of Shells herself, and that Fiore had been fooled by the disguise. I felt around in the wrapping, but couldn’t find a note.

‘When did the boy deliver this?’ I asked.

‘A week or two ago,’ Fiore said. ‘He told me there was no great rush.’

Sitting back, I let my breath out slowly. I seemed to see the world through glass – not the costly crystal of the palace
windows
, but glass that was poorly made, full of swirls, air-bubbles and distortions. The hills to the south showed above the city walls, their slopes forested, blue-grey, the sky an opaque
lard-white
. She had chosen not to write a note, which was entirely in character, but she would also have been aware that the package might fall into the wrong hands.
A week or two ago
. Given Fiore’s wayward sense of time, that could easily mean three or four. Faustina would be gone by now – and, obviously, she had tried to alter her appearance. Where was she? Was she safe?

Fiore touched the contents of the package. ‘It’s hair.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I need it for my work.’

She, too, leaned back and stared towards the hills, suddenly seeming much older than her thirteen years.

‘You work so hard, my husband,’ she said. ‘When are you coming home?’

The following afternoon, as I left my house, the sky blackened, and it began to rain. I hurried over the Ponte Santa Trinità, the surface of the river pearly in the half-light. By the time I reached the apothecary, the rain had grown so heavy I could hardly see, and it was pale, too, almost white, as if it had chalk in it. I walked in, water streaming from my clothes. Giuseppe eyed me from behind the counter. He was alone.

‘I was just about to close,’ he said.

‘I won’t keep you.’ I took out a handkerchief and wiped my face and neck. ‘Have you seen Faustina?’

‘I was about to ask you the same thing.’

She had disappeared suddenly, he said, about two months ago. He was disappointed in her. She had always been
independent
, even wilful, but it wasn’t like her to let him down like this. She knew he couldn’t manage on his own.

‘Could she have been arrested?’ I asked.

He had made enquiries at the Bargello, he said, and at the hospital – he had been worried – but no one had been able to tell him anything.

‘I was hoping,’ he said, a slight tremor in his voice, ‘that she might be with you.’

I reached into my pocket and took out her hair. ‘She sent me this.’

He moved to touch it, but his hand stopped short in the air. His eyes had sloped down at the edges; his mouth had shrunk.

‘She did that once before,’ he said. ‘After her father died. She was about fourteen. When she first came to work for me, everyone thought she was a boy.’

‘I’m sure she wouldn’t have left you unless she had a good reason.’

‘You sound as if you know something about it.’

I shook my head.

While we had been talking, the rain had slackened. I looked over my shoulder. Tucked into a niche or recess on the other side of the street was a man in a flint-coloured cloak and
downtrodden
boots. His face was in shadow. Though he was hard to make out, I instinctively felt he wasn’t there to take refuge from the weather.

I asked Giuseppe if he knew the man.

He peered through the window. ‘My eyesight’s not too good.’

I stepped outside. The storm had moved on, and the air had a glazed, shivery feel.

‘She’s gone.’ Cocking his head, the man gnawed at the skin on the side of his forefinger. ‘Neighbour told me. Right busybody. Doesn’t miss a thing.’ He eased himself forwards into the silvery light. His face was furtive and whiskery, and a glossy red cyst disfigured his left eyelid. ‘She knows all about you, for instance.’

‘You’re one of Bassetti’s people,’ I said.

‘Who’s Bassetti?’

‘Don’t bother denying it. You’ve got that look about you.’

‘There’s no need to be insulting.’

‘How much is he paying you?’

The man was chewing his finger again, and didn’t answer.

‘Just tell me,’ I said. ‘How much?’

He allowed himself a thin, pinched smile.

Infuriated, I thrust my hand into my pocket and flung a fistful of loose change at him. The coins bounced off his
forehead
, his chest and the wall on either side of him, and dropped, jingling, to the paving stones.

About a month later, I was in my workshop when I heard
footsteps
outside, in the stable yard. I opened the door. Earhole was standing in the dark, hands twitching. He glanced back towards the gate, as if he thought he might have been followed, and I was reminded of myself, the way I had been for so many years.

‘A soldier let me in,’ he said. ‘He remembered me, from the last time.’

As he stepped past me, into the room, I noticed that his clothes were smudged with black, and he was limping. I asked him what had happened. He didn’t answer. Instead, he
unwrapped
a soiled cloth containing stale bread and a piece of sausage and took a bite of each.

‘I haven’t eaten anything all day,’ he said.

Since he had started working for me, he had developed a sense of his own importance, and his behaviour had become more self-conscious and high-handed. He seemed to want to emphasize my dependency on him.

‘Well?’ I said. ‘What have you found out?’

He began to pace up and down. For the first few days, he said, it was exactly like before. The same old routines and rituals. The monastery, the palace. The monastery again. He was on the brink of despairing of the whole endeavour. And then, finally, he had a moment of inspiration.

‘It was so strange,’ he said, turning to me, face bright, hands frantic. ‘It was as though everything suddenly made sense – all the bewilderment and brutality, all the fear.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ I said.

He could keep it to himself no longer. ‘The mystery: I think I’ve solved it!’

That afternoon, Earhole had decided to see the monastery of Santa Maria Novella for himself. Appearing at the gatehouse, he had claimed he was thinking of becoming a novice, and his enthusiasm for the Dominican order had been so convincing that an ancient monk had taken him on a tour of the place and bored him half to death with interminable lectures on its history and ethos. He was beginning to regret having been so
conscientious
when he was shown into the Spanish Chapel, famous for its fourteenth-century frescoes, and it was then that he saw the dogs.

‘Dogs?’ I said.

Black-and-white and savage-looking, with thick leather collars, they were at the bottom of the fresco on the eastern wall, strutting and skulking at the fringes of the crowd. When he saw them, he came to such a sudden standstill that the monk asked if there was something wrong. He had always been frightened of dogs, Earhole told the monk, ever since he was attacked by one when he was a baby. The monk said there was another reason to be frightened. The dogs represented the Dominicans in their role as inquisitors, as guardians of the faith.

‘Dio di merda!
’ I said.

Despite his limp, Earhole was almost dancing on the spot. ‘You see? You see?’

I fetched the jar down off the shelf. We put our faces to the greenish glass and stared at the sinister, floating piece of skin.

‘The snout, the ears, the teeth …’ Earhole’s hands were twitching furiously at the edge of my field of vision. ‘It’s the same as the fresco. It’s all exactly the same.’

I looked past him, into the darkness of the stable yard. Things came together with such velocity and force that I almost lost my balance. I was thinking of the man I had killed on that windy night in 1692, and the words that he had muttered:
water, black cloak, naked.
Earlier that same night, though I had not known it then, the girl had died – or been murdered – and had ended up on a piece of waste ground near the river. Had I
inadvertently
done away with the only witness to the crime? And had I then, equally inadvertently, come to the aid of the murderer by disposing of the body? I flashed forwards to Stufa staring at the jar just before he hit Fiore. I played all these moments off against his nickname, Flesh.

‘What if Stufa killed the girl?’ I said.

Deep lines appeared on Earhole’s forehead, and I had a glimpse of how he might look when he was in his thirties or forties. ‘We don’t know she was murdered,’ he said. ‘And even if she was, we wouldn’t be able to prove it.’

‘Maybe not. But it’s grounds for suspicion, isn’t it?’ I gave him a couple of scudi. ‘You’ve done well, Earhole. Really well.’

He thanked me and pocketed the money as carefully as usual. Almost immediately, though, the corrugations on his forehead were back again. ‘I can’t work for you any more.’

‘Is it your leg?’

There was an aspect of the afternoon, he said, which he had so far failed to mention. Eager to submit his report to me, he had rushed away, leaving his guide dumbfounded. As he rounded a corner near the library, though, he ran straight into Stufa. In the collision, Stufa dropped the books he was carrying, and Earhole was knocked clean off his feet. The monk who was with Stufa – a smaller, fatter man – seized Earhole by the collar and asked him what on earth he thought he was doing. Before he could answer, Stufa, bending to pick up the books, looked into his face.

‘Wait a moment,’ he said, straightening. ‘I know this boy. I’ve seen him before.’

‘I work at the hospital,’ Earhole said. ‘Just over there.’ He pointed in the rough direction of Santa Maria Nuova.

‘Just over there.’
Stufa imitated Earhole’s fearful voice, then laughed unpleasantly. ‘In fact, I’ve seen him more than once.’ He took hold of Earhole’s chin and tilted his face towards the light. ‘Do you know something? I think he’s been following me.’

‘Why would he do that?’ the small monk asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Stufa said. ‘Maybe he’s taken with me. Maybe he likes my looks.’

The small monk grinned.

In that moment, Earhole felt the grip on his collar slacken, and he was able to jerk free. Luckily, he remembered where the gatehouse was. He was out of the monastery in seconds. Thinking the monks were after him, he did what any criminal would do: he made for the ghetto. Down Via de’ Banchi, on into Cerretani, a right turn, a left turn, and he was there. Once inside that warren of passages, staircases and walkways, he found a burnt-out building and hid among the blackened beams until his heart slowed down. Later, as he re-emerged, a rotten floorboard gave beneath him, and he twisted his ankle. It had taken him an hour to reach the palace.

‘I wasn’t expecting Stufa to be there, you see?’ he said. ‘Recently, he’s been spending his afternoons with the Grand Duchess, up at Poggio Imperiale.’ He shook his head. ‘All the same, if I hadn’t been running, it would have been all right.’

‘You got away,’ I said. ‘That’s the main thing.’