Fanatics (18 page)

“Uh-oh, another dream,” she stated, eyes boring into mine. “Come on.”

She took my hand and led me into the back room, a large space jammed to the ceiling with shelves holding boxes, jars, bottles, clear plastic bags of beans, nuts, grains, and other foods, and furnished with a small table and two chairs. A few cartons with Chinese writing on them sat on the floor by the alley door.

I grabbed her and held her tightly. Raphaella kissed me, then pried herself free and filled the kettle and plugged it in. I pulled her to me again.

“I’m kind of glad to see you,” I said.

She pushed me into a chair. I watched as she bustled around, preparing some kind of drink and searching out just the right nutrition bar for someone who had witnessed a legal murder.

“I saw his execution,” I said. “Him and two other monks.”

“Tell me everything,” Raphaella said, plunking a steaming mug onto the table. “And drink this slowly.”

I did as she asked. By the time I had finished describing
my vision, I had eaten the bar and drunk two cups of the weird this-will-be-good-for-you tea.

“Now we know the answer to the question you asked me yesterday in the library.”

Raphaella nodded. “ ‘Why does the spirit leave the odour of smoke behind?’ ”

“Right. It’s ironic in a gory way,” I mused, folding the nutrition-bar wrapper into increasingly tiny squares and pretending my hands weren’t shaking. “The preacher who wanted to burn certain so-called sinners ended up being burned himself.” I looked up at Raphaella. “But that’s not really justice, is it? Nobody deserves to die like that.”

“No.”

“Are people who design executions so the maximum amount of suffering is inflicted sick? Is something inside them broken, like a cracked microchip or a stripped gear? I mean, just
seeing
it scared the hell out of me.

“I used to think atrocities were a thing of the past. They happened way back in the fog of history. And I thought that the past was like another country, far away, and that things are different now. After I saw Savonarola being tortured I read up on the
strappado
and found out it’s
still
being used, but the information didn’t sink in. I guess I tried to deny it. But that vision last night—the fire, the way the crowd joined in, enjoying the hanging and burning—”

“You’ve been thinking about Hannah,” Raphaella said quietly.

I nodded.

“And what those men did to her.”

Mention of Hannah’s name took me back to a windy starless night more than a year ago, when I had been dragged
from sleep long after midnight by the mournful cries of a woman walking in the forest behind the mobile home park where I was living during my stint as caretaker there. I followed Hannah Duvalier along a path to a grave at the edge of the African Methodist Church burial ground, and later to the ruins of a log cabin where a terrible killing had taken place. Hannah made that same walk every night. She had been dead for 150 years.

“That was in the past, too. But do you know what Mom told me? A few months ago she was researching an execution in Afghanistan in 2005. A woman was stoned to death in front of dozens of witnesses. Legally. According to Islamic law. This was
after
the Taliban were kicked out. And Mom said stoning is still part of the penal code in Iran. It’s promoted by Islamist militants in other countries. Execution by stoning takes half an hour. It’s like being clubbed to death, slowly.”

Raphaella was standing beside my chair now, and she laid her arm on my shoulder. “Garnet, calm down.”

“I don’t get it. How could a crowd of men who knew the woman tie her up, cover her face, and throw rocks at her head, hitting her again and again, until she was dead? What’s
wrong
with people like that?” I looked up at Raphaella and tried to smile. “I’m repeating myself aren’t I? I’m babbling.”

She smiled back at me and said nothing.

Another thought burst in my brain, like those little packets of gunpowder the crowd flung onto the fire in my vision.

“It’s religious law that allows—hell, demands—stoning as punishment. For adultery. The regulations even specify what size of stone to be used. And by the way, a male adulterer gets a lashing and goes home.

“It was the Church that helped execute Savonarola. The Church’s Inquisition burned Jews and heretics. Religious leaders burned the witches in Salem.”

“I’ve always wondered,” Raphaella mused, “is it the religion that’s evil, or the people practising it? Is the religious law an excuse for committing acts they would have carried out anyway? A way to dress up viciousness as holiness?”

I felt suddenly exhausted, as if my mainspring had wound down. “I’m sick of it,” I whispered. “All of it.”

Raphaella crouched in front of me and took one of my hands. “But we have to see it through. We have to make him go away.”

I kept silent.

“Which means finding out why he’s still haunting the Corbizzi place,” she added.

I drew in some of Raphaella’s energy, the way a sponge absorbs water.

“So we go back … when?” I asked her.

“Tomorrow. I believe the answer’s in the prof’s unpublished book.”

I completed her thought. “Which is why the spirit was messing with it yesterday while we were lounging around outside.”

“I think we’re close, Garnet. I really do.”

M
Y STEP WAS A LITTLE
lighter as I strolled back up the hill under the canopy of old maple trees in full summer leaf, but I still had a lot of thinking to do. I was so deep in thought when I got home that as soon as Mom hinted it was time the lawn was mowed I said yes without argument and marched straight from her office to the garage to get the electric mower.

An hour and a half later, hot and sweaty, I took my second shower of the day, stuffed my clothes into the laundry hamper, and put on a clean T-shirt and jeans. As I was heading downstairs something caught my eye. The history book I had chucked onto the blankets that morning had fallen open to a page near the back. I picked up the book and was about to slap it shut when I noticed the words “Appendix: The Arrabbiati.” Strange phrase, I thought.

Curious, I took a closer look. The
Arrabbiati
, or “Angry Ones,” were Savonarola’s opponents, the offended citizens who saw him as an intolerant puritanical tyrant. They included people from all walks of life, many from well-known families. The author of the book had listed these families alphabetically.

I ran my finger down the column of names, suddenly knowing what I was about to find.

And there it was, in black and white.

Corbizzi.

I
HAD A LOT
to think about.

With the discovery that the Corbizzi family had been opponents of Savonarola in the fifteenth century I had found another link between the estate on the shore of Lake Couchiching and an Italian city thousands of kilometres away across the Atlantic Ocean. This was no coincidence. The professor was an expert on the Italian Renaissance, had lived and taught in Florence, and had made Savonarola the centre of his studies, especially the friar’s attempts to set up a government that would rule according to Christian morality, as interpreted by him. The prof had written a new book warning against theocracy, a book that devoted a whole chapter to Savonarola, using the friar’s career as an alarm bell—the chapter Raphaella would be reading next.

Savonarola had contacted me through my dreams, had shown me how much he had suffered. He had made me
watch his inhumane execution. Was he trying to win my sympathy? Who wouldn’t have compassion for a man who had undergone imprisonment, torture, hanging, and burning? The trouble was, he had urged that others get the same cruel treatment. And yet he had genuinely wanted Florence to take better care of its poor and underprivileged.

He seemed a brilliant but complex man, one minute inspiring admiration and sympathy, the next contempt. I was no theologian like Savonarola, but I believed that you should treat other people the way you wanted them to behave toward you. I had sympathy for him, but I was revolted by his contradictions—the willingness to torture and burn others, the hatred that soaked his words when he talked about his opponents. It was all symbolized on the medal in the secret cupboard—the friar’s profile on one side, on the other the Lord’s sword jabbing from heaven, warning of swift, certain punishment. When it came right down to it, I saw the friar as a dangerous man who, if you crossed him, would toss you into the fire without blinking, then tell himself he was doing God’s will. For him, that was the ultimate excuse. That was what made him so lethal. And that was what Professor Corbizzi had understood.

Long ago the Corbizzi family had crossed Savonarola by standing against him. For his entire life Professor Corbizzi had opposed what the friar stood for. It seemed clear to me that this visitation by Savonarola’s spirit was revenge, pure and simple. The professor had died under mysterious circumstances that involved a fire. His new book was a focal point of the visitation. The medal was, I thought, just that—a “souvenir” of sorts. The cross? Maybe there was something there, something Raphaella and I had missed.

But with the professor dead, why did the spirit hang around? Why involve me? That was the part of the puzzle that just wouldn’t fit. That was why I needed to take a break from the estate and its library, so I could think things through.

M
OM WAS SITTING
on the sun-splashed steps of the verandah lacing up her trainers when I sauntered out the door next morning.

“You’re up early,” she said, turning and squinting up at me.

“Lots to do,” I replied vaguely. “See you later.”

In the kitchen I prepared ingredients for a Spanish omelette and set them aside to await Mom’s return, then poured a second coffee and carried it outside to the driveway. I collected my toolbox, an old Dutch oven, some rags, and a few litres of motor oil from the garage, then rolled out the Hawk and pulled it up onto the centre stand. I set a low stool beside the bike, took a sip of coffee, and set the mug on the bike’s saddle.

Working on the Hawk was a little like cabinetmaking. It took my mind away. It required some knowledge and skill, asking me to think and remember. I puttered away in the shade of the ancient maple that stood beside the driveway, entertained by rustling leaves and the conversations of robins and sparrows.

I drained and replaced the crankcase oil, then spent half an hour or so adjusting and lubricating the chain, the clutch, and the brake cables. I wiped the bike down from front to back, taking extra time to polish the aluminum frame and swing arm. A motorcycle was like any machine—it liked to be clean, lubricated, and properly adjusted—but more so, because it operated outdoors in all weather, under conditions like yesterday’s, with dirt and dust and a certain amount of abuse.

Some people liked hard saddlebags on a motorcycle, but I preferred my old black leather bags with their chrome-plated lockable buckles. I polished them once in a while and cleaned them out with every oil change. Fetching the portable vacuum cleaner from its rack on the kitchen wall, I opened the right-side bag, half-surprised at what I found there. With everything that had been going on lately I had forgotten the bagged cellphone I had tossed inside in a panic to get away from the paintball camp.

I set it on the saddle beside my coffee and finished what I was doing. Up in my room, I took the phone from the bag and looked it over. It was a common, slightly upscale model you’d see anywhere. It was Internet-capable, but a quick look for emails or a search engine history proved that function had been unused. The call list contained a lot of city exchange numbers, but there were no photos stored in the unit.

What to do? Arriving at a decision took less than a second. I rejected calling a random number from the list and reporting that I’d found the cell. How would I explain my snooping around the paintball camp, trespassing, and discovering the phone? No, the phone would share the same fate as the
GPS
and end up in a garbage bin.

It was then that I remembered I hadn’t erased the photos I’d snapped out at the camp from my own cell. I turned it on and activated the camera and reviewed the few images I had of the camo-boys in the clearing. There was something about the picture of the leader that intrigued me.

I hooked the phone to my laptop and uploaded the pictures. On the bigger screen the details were much clearer. I focused on the leader, standing in the clearing, the cabin off his left shoulder, the tents to the side, his paintball gun hanging from a strap diagonally across his chest.

“Wait a minute,” I heard myself say.

I looked closely. I wasn’t an expert, but I could see that was no paintball marker. It was a machine pistol. A real gun. A lethal—and illegal—weapon.

I sat back in my chair, thinking, wondering what I had stumbled into out there in the bush. Downstairs, the front door opened and closed. Mom was back after her run.

“Anybody home?” she called out.

And then, like the pins and tails of a dovetail joint slipping into place, interlocking smoothly, a plan came together in my devious little mind.

B
Y THE TIME
M
OM
padded into the kitchen on bare feet, a towel at her neck, I was placing her omelette on a plate beside a slab of toast. She poured a coffee and sat down.
I slipped her plate in front of her and sat opposite, steeling myself for the conversation ahead.

“You’re not eating?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I ate earlier.”

“Umm.”

“Dad’s off giving a music lesson?” I asked.

Mom eyed me with suspicion. “You know he is.”

“Yeah, true. Guess I forgot. Temporarily.”

I lost the offensive after that. I was up against a pro. A pro journalist and—what’s even more intimidating—a pro mother.