The Kingdom of Light (29 page)

Pietra carefully studied his feverish face. Then she exploded into coarse laughter. ‘So you tried it on with that woman? Her too?’ She laughed again, scornfully. ‘And did you enjoy yourself?’

‘That’s enough,’ Dante said, feeling sick to his stomach.

‘Wouldn’t you like a real woman, so you can forget that other one?’ Her feline appearance was accentuated by her short, straight nose and her full lips. She wore a light tunic over her thin body, with the narrow hips and the broad shoulders of an adolescent boy. She leaned against the wall, her body arched, her erect little breasts stretching the cloth of her garment. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she repeated, stretching her hand towards him, as if to establish a boundary between them. Then she looked all round the room, her eyes finally settling on the scattered papers. ‘More words. That’s all you know how to do. Say words.’

‘They are the consolation of the man on his own. His words.’

‘You want to be on your own because you’re afraid of being abandoned,’ Pietra replied mockingly. Dante was about to answer, but she didn’t give him time. ‘Words, on your own.’ She picked up one of the pages and furiously threw it into the air. ‘So many pointless words.’

The burning vice still gripped the poet’s brow. Tottering, he dropped on to the bed.

Pietra had been following his movements. ‘That illness of yours again?’ she asked coldly.

He didn’t reply. The girl stepped forward until her breasts brushed his forehead. Then she passed a hand behind the back of his neck, pressing his face delicately against her own body and gently stroking the tendons on his neck.
Dante
caught the perfume of her skin, a mixture of cheap essences from the other side of the Arno and a hidden, subtle stench that rose up from her belly. He closed his eyes, surrendering like a child in his mother’s arms. He felt his eyes filling with tears, and sobs shook his chest. Then he felt a feeling of warmth stirring within him.

He looked up. Pietra, ceasing her caresses, brought her lips down towards his. Then she caught his mouth in an endless kiss as his hands rose up her legs, raising her tunic to her belly. He kissed her taut, freckled skin, then drew her on to his bed, tore off her clothes and plunged into her body as if entering a dark sea.

H
E REMAINED
motionless for an incalculable length of time. The girl, lying next to him propped up on her elbow, studied him with an enigmatic expression.

‘Pietra, I …’

‘Don’t say anything,’ the prostitute broke in, putting a finger to his lips. ‘Don’t keep ruining everything with your words. Don’t say anything more,’ she murmured, kissing him again. But now her mouth was cold. He thought she was only obeying the rules of her profession, when the time came to say goodbye.

‘Why did you come?’ he asked in a low voice.

She didn’t reply, merely shrugging. ‘Who knows. Perhaps I felt like seeing you.’ She was hurriedly getting dressed,
her
thoughts already elsewhere. In the doorway she turned towards him again. ‘You are in danger. You and the other people involved in this business of yours.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You know. Lagia told the Inquisition everything. They talked about you.’

‘What did you find out?’

‘I only heard a few words. But you’ve got to get away from here,’ the girl said again with an unexpected flash of tenderness in her eyes. ‘They were saying that your plan had been discovered. They talked about an “accursed son”.’

Dante ran over to her and grabbed her by an arm. ‘Are you sure? Is that what they said?’

She pulled away from him and escaped along the portico.

Left on his own, the prior began thinking furiously. So Acquasparta knew about the plot to restore the imperial dynasty. But did he also know the name of the “accursed son”? Perhaps not, given that he expected a confession from Dante: he seemed sure that the poet was in on the secret. Could it be that in the recesses of his mind he held all parts of the secret, and just hadn’t noticed yet? Was he really a victim of a joke played by fate?

8

After midday, 13th August

H
E MUST
have fallen asleep without noticing. And yet he felt as if he had closed his eyes only for a few moments, yielding to the confused hubbub of sounds and images that seemed to rise up from the wooden floor. He felt as if the ancient, uncovered tombs of the dead buried in the church lay beneath his feet, as if their shades had risen up to him, to watch him and spur him on to action. When he opened his eyes again, the cell was flooded with light. He looked around, his mind still fogged, trying to calculate from the height of the sun how much time had passed. That star had already passed its zenith and was beginning to fall towards the west. He leaped to his feet, trying to impose some order on his thoughts.

Meanwhile the sounds and voices around him were becoming more clearly defined. There was a frenetic coming and going under the portico. Dante walked to the door and threw it open.

One of the Bargello’s men appeared breathlessly in the doorway. ‘Please come! There’s been another murder!’

‘Where?’ Dante asked, alarmed, dashing outside.

‘In Santa Croce. At the house of the Lombard, Maestro Alberto.’

‘What happened?’

‘Maestro Alberto … He’s been murdered in his workshop – come!’

The prior set off, fury poisoning his blood. The
bargellini
tried to escort him, opening up a path through the crowd, but their long lances were too cumbersome for the job, so he reached the door of the workshop on his own. The man lay on the floor, drenched in blood, beside the tools of his trade still neatly arranged on his workbench. As far as Dante could tell, nothing had been touched. The cases and cabinets had not been forced, as if the murderer hadn’t been interested in their contents. It seemed that whoever had killed the man had taken nothing away.

‘Where is Hamid, his servant?’ he asked the Bargello, who was standing in the doorway.

‘He made off after murdering his boss. The whole of the local guard is on his tail. He won’t get away for long,’ the head of the guards replied triumphantly. ‘We’ve checked, but nothing’s missing. Upstairs in the bedroom there’s a little coffer full of florins. It was not a thief, but the vengeful hand of his servant that killed him.’

Dante grimaced with disappointment. If the
bargellini
got
their hands on that innocent boy, nothing could save him, he thought bitterly. Not even his own authority as a prior, which would shortly expire. In a corner he saw that poor wretch’s prayer-rug, and on it the book.

He picked up the volume and went on looking inside it. Whoever it was that had killed the
mechanicus
with two knife-blows to the neck must have been looking for something else. He congratulated himself on his farsightedness in putting the device in a safe place.

At the same time he went on thinking furiously. Maestro Alberto hadn’t been part of the conspiracy, and yet his death was plainly linked to the strange plot that was unfolding in Florence, something to do with the great Emperor. And clearly to do with the mechanism that the victim had reconstructed.

But the murderer hadn’t looked for anything in the workshop, a sign that he knew the machine was no longer there. So why had he killed? There was only one logical answer: he wanted to ensure that the only man capable of constructing a similar mechanism lost his life. It was the secret that he had wanted to snuff out, rather than Alberto’s life.

The murderer? Dante suddenly thought back to the mechanic’s wounds, so similar to the ones that had killed the others. Why one murderer? The same pattern seemed to be repeated in all the corpses: two blows a short distance apart, only one of them fatal. And what if two people
were
in fact responsible for the crime? Two men accustomed to fighting and striking in pairs, capable of attacking from both directions, leaving the victim unable to defend himself. Accustomed to sharing death as they were prepared to share everything: bread, their horse, a woman … A sudden idea flashed into the poet’s mind. The crazed fragments of the plan seemed to assume a definite shape: in his memory he ran through the dialogue on the bridge. Of course, that must be it. The statue of Janus reappeared before his eyes.

But if that was so, perhaps there was still a chance of interrupting that chain of horrors. He leaped to his feet, passing before the disconcerted eyes of the Bargello.

He reached the Angel Inn. On the ground floor he met the landlord, who was busy decanting wine from a big jar.

‘Is Messer Bernardo upstairs?’ Dante asked as he passed, making for the stairs.

‘No, Prior, he went out a short while ago. I think someone was waiting for him outside.’

‘You didn’t see who it was?’

‘No. Messer Bernardo seemed to be ill. He asked me if anyone had come looking for him. I told him they hadn’t and he sat down and asked for something to drink. But he was obviously waiting for someone. Every now and again he got up and went to the door to look outside. Then, the last time, he waved his hand and left. But I didn’t see who was with him.’

Dante nodded, then headed for the little room on the first floor. The door was unlocked, as if Bernardo was not afraid for his possessions. Perhaps he thought no thief could be interested in written pages, or that in a city of thieves no one would bother to appropriate knowledge, Dante thought bitterly.

There was really nothing in the room that anyone could have stolen. Just a modest chest at the foot of the bed, with a few rough items of clothing. Bernardo must have been in a hurry when he abandoned the work he was busy with: the
Res gestae Svevorum
. Open on the desk was a thin, bound volume and beside it some sheets of cloth-paper and an ink-well.

He started reading out loud: ‘The name of this book is the
Cronica federiciana
, and concerns the affairs of my sovereign, the wonder of the world …’ Dante looked up for a moment, then back down to the parchment. ‘… whom I, Bishop Mainardino, saw, and whose memory I leave to the just: compilation commenced in the year of Our Lord Christ MCCLV.’

Startled, he raised his eyes. ‘The
Chronicles
of Mainardino,’ he murmured. ‘Frederick’s great biographer. So it really does exist. Bernardo wasn’t lying.’

He quickly scanned the pages, frantically running through years of exploits and glory. The almost miraculous birth at Jesi, the struggle for the crown. The triumphal entry into Jerusalem of the hundred towers, the triumphs
and
the defeats, the insatiable desire for knowledge and the splendour of Frederick’s court. His poems …

He skipped to the last page. The bishop’s solemn prose sang out the end of the Emperor in the tones of a classical drama. The agony of illness, the false hopes of apparent recovery. The troubled tangle of passions and rivalries around his death-bed. Then he was startled to see a note that Mainardino recorded as if in passing: ‘… news was brought to Frederick of the death of a little son of his, a novice with the Franciscans. And Frederick wept over him.’

Shortly after this the bishop returned to the affairs of court. Dante stopped to reflect, biting his lip. Could this be the son of Bianca Lancia? But if he was dead, upon whom did the Ghibellines rest their hopes? The whole venture of Rome was based on the charisma of the imperial blood. And wasn’t it the return of the clan of the Antichrist that Cardinal d’Acquasparta was so afraid of?

Fascinated, he began reading again. Page after page of deeds, of pain, of glory, which his mind drank in as a thirsty man drinks water. At last, having finished the manuscript, Mainardino described the poisoning of the Emperor, ‘killed by the hand of the incomplete man, who was’ …

Dante turned the page, hoping that the text might continue on the other side. But the sheet was blank: and the last scrap of parchment had been carefully torn away, as if to remove the final lines that mentioned the murderer’s name.

If someone had been seeking to protect the man responsible for the crimes, why not get rid of the whole previous page, or indeed the whole book? Why hide only the name of the murderer, when it would have been possible to erase all traces of the crime itself?

Or had it been Bernardo himself, perhaps to remain the sole guardian of so terrible a secret? But if he was about to make his work public, why destroy the very text that could have backed up his claims?

He had to find the historian at all costs. He looked around, trying to find some answer to the doubts that haunted him. For a moment he had imagined himself close to the solution of the mystery. Or at least to the discovery of the guilty man and his shadowy accomplice.

But Bernardo’s disappearance dealt his theory a fatal blow. If the man was one of two murderers, he would surely be far away by now. The poet suddenly felt uneasy. Apart from the book, there were no objects of value in the room, nothing that a thief could not easily have abandoned without regret. If, on the other hand, his theory was incorrect, then at that moment Bernardo was close to the deadly blade, and with his death the last chance of solving the mystery would be lost for ever.

He turned towards the stairs, in the hope of seeing the shadowy figure of the historian, safe and sound.

Down below, someone was sitting at the communal table.

Dante climbed down the stairs and silently walked up behind him.

But somehow the man must have noticed his presence. ‘Welcome, Prior. Sit down,’ he heard the man whisper.

The prior threw caution to the winds. He walked past the table and stopped in front of Marcello. The doctor was sitting there with his eyes closed, motionless, with a big book in front of him. On the corner of the table there was an hour-glass: all of the sand had collected in the bottom half, as if the man had spent some time immersed in his work.

‘You seem to be able to see in the dark, as cats do,’ Dante exclaimed with surprise.

‘Your step is light, and yet it has an unmistakeable tone.’

The prior moved slowly along the edge of the table, trying to make out, by the faint candle-light, what Marcello had written.