Inquisition (27 page)

‘Come out, so we don’t have to come in and get you,’ said one of the guards, running the bolt across. ‘The Inquisitor’s waiting.’

Gerardo crawled out of the cell on all fours and then slowly got to his feet. This time the two giants let him walk between them without dragging him along.

Opening his eyes in the dark, Hugues de Narbonne began to feel afraid. When he had come round, he remembered everything, although in a slightly bleary fashion as though in a dream. Gerardo had brought him home and then left him alone and come back with the physician. Hugues recalled a terrible pain in his head and then a strange feeling, as if air had entered his skull. The physician must have trepanned his cranium, and he had lost consciousness.

Given that he was now lucid, the operation had been successful despite the constant throbbing pain in his head. But why didn’t they untie him before they left? Was it possible that they had discovered his secret?

In his mind’s eye, Hugues ran over every corner of the house in search of clues that Gerardo and Mondino might have found, but he was certain that there was nothing. Nothing at all. Books, documents and objects that might have compromised him had all been well hidden in toledo, where he had moved after leaving the templar House at Tortosa.

Unfortunately he had succumbed to nature’s call and the smell coming from his own excrement made him nauseous.

From the change in the light filtering through the shutters he thought it must already be afternoon. Why did no one come? Could they have left him there to die of hunger and thirst? no, it didn’t make any sense. They had no reason to kill him and if they had wanted to, they would have found a quicker way. And they wouldn’t have wasted time operating on his head. No, they were obviously coming back, but something must have happened.

Again he tried to loosen the cords that held him to the bedposts in the sitting position. There was nothing he could do, the knots were too tight. The gag was also well tied around his head, tight enough to force his lips open. Hugues had already tried shouting with all his might, but he’d only managed to produce a low and indistinct growl that it would be difficult to hear outside because of the closed shutters.

Besides, every time he struggled and tried to shout, the pain in his head became intolerable.

He flopped back against the bedhead, exhausted. He tried to sleep in order to build up his strength, but in that position it was almost impossible. As well as the continuous sharp pain above the nape of his neck, he also felt pain in his wrists, ankles and shoulders. As soon as his head began to nod, he would wake up, only to fall back into a light and agitated sleep and then wake again.

At one point when he was slipping between sleep and wakefulness, he thought he heard a sound. Suddenly he was awake and alert, with all his senses straining. Another sound. A door closed.

Someone had come into the house. Gerardo or Mondino, or perhaps both of them. It was the moment that Hugues had been waiting for, and yet he wasn’t ready to tell them the truth. First of all he had to convince them to untie him.

Perhaps, if they found him asleep, they would undo the knots, at least so he hoped. And until he knew their intentions, he would continue to pretend to be unconscious. Hearing the sound of steps, he closed his eyes and dropped his head on to his chest.

‘Good morning, sir,’ said a woman.

Surprised, Hugues forgot his plan and looked up sharply. Standing before him, with a candle in one hand and a cloth bag in the other, was Fiamma, the banker’s daughter. They had sent her to help him. At last Hugues de Narbonne felt relief flood through his veins.

‘When I heard you were hurt I came as quickly as I could,’ said the girl. ‘It’s lucky that you are still alive.’

It was kind of her to take such trouble over him. Looking at her closely, Hugues had the feeling that she reminded him of someone. Who knows, perhaps he had known her mother in Tortosa. He had had dozens of amorous adventures in the lands of Aragon. Although he would surely have remembered a beautiful woman as Fiamma’s mother certainly would have been.

The young woman took the candle over to another in an earthenware stick on the chest and lit the wick. Then she spilt some drops of wax on to the wood and pressed the candle into it, so that the two candles stood side by side. Finally she pushed the chest over to the bed.

‘Better to see well,’ she explained. ‘I wouldn’t want to cut in the wrong places.’

Now that it was lighter, Hugues felt a mortifying shame at the stains of excrement on the mattress. It certainly wasn’t the ideal situation in which to meet a woman. As soon as she freed him, he would open the window to get rid of the smell and go and wash.

Fiamma took a knife out of her cloth bag and came towards him. Hugues felt a second of panic seeing her point it at his chest and not at the stout cords binding his wrists, but he relaxed when she began to cut his tunic. She obviously wouldn’t want to touch his clothes as they were dirtied by blood and shit. She’d cut them and leave them on the bed. In that way she would see him naked, but if it didn’t matter to her, Hugues had no objection either. Despite his age, his body was still firm and muscular; nothing to be ashamed of. It was a pity about the bed being reduced to a pigsty and the piercing pain in his head. Otherwise as soon as he was free, he would have pulled her towards him. But then again he might have waited until he had washed and eaten, he thought with a slight smile. Fiamma bared his solid chest to reveal a coat of blond hair sprinkled with white. Then she carried on down, opening the whole tunic, without touching his breeches. As she moved his clothes, the smell got stronger, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was concentrating hard, careful only to cut the material and not to nick his skin. Hugues was thinking that she really was very beautiful, with her silky tallow-coloured hair, intense expression and breasts straining against her white tunic. Even the scar that disfigured her cheek couldn’t diminish her beauty. The girl moved away from him and emptied her cloth bag on to the chest. Some metal objects rattled on to its wooden lid. Why didn’t she cut the cords at his wrist? Hugues tried to speak, but the gag transformed his words into an incomprehensible mumble.

Fiamma turned and looked him long in the eyes without speaking. Then she said, ‘I had to knock the others out and then immobilise them with a potion that paralyses the limbs. You have had the decency to be waiting for me already bound and gagged.’

Hugues finally understood. With the clarity of mind that often precedes death, a memory came to him of the little girl with the slashed face. He hadn’t recognised her until then because he had thought her dead and because the woman before him retained very little of the delicate appearance of the child. Now, however, he had no doubts. She was the one who had killed Angelo da Piczano and Wilhelm von Trier and now it was his turn.

As Fiamma came back towards him with the knife and started to cut his skin, he yelled with all the breath he had in his lungs, but through the gag there only came a pathetic whine.

When she had finished her job, Fiamma went into the kitchen, took off her bloody clothes and washed carefully in the basin that she had prepared on her arrival. Her revenge was almost complete and yet she felt no satisfaction. She was tired and much sadder than she had thought she would be over the years in which she had planned it all.

She dried herself with a piece of hemp hanging from a hook above the fire. Then she took her clean clothes out of the bag and put them on. A dark brown shirt and gown and a white cap; anonymous clothes that would allow her to blend into the crowd, once she had given the alarm. Before she left, she went back to the door of the bedroom and stood for a moment contempLating her handiwork. Hugues de Narbonne had been the leader without whom the other two might not have gone so far. He deserved to suffer the most. Before she had killed him, she had told him who she was and his eyes had filled with terror as she made her incisions in his skin, marking the edges of the cuts that she would then sever with the saw. She had even shown him the worms that she would put in his brain. Hugues was still tied to the bed in the same position in which she had found him. The room was crimson with blood. The heart of iron stuck out of his chest like a malignant flower, and his skullcap – with what remained of his blond curly hair – lay on his genitals. The head had been opened, sawn just above his eyebrows, and was full of whitish larvae, of the type that form in the scavenged morsels found by stray dogs. Fiamma had spent years planning how she would kill them.

All three knights had their heart turned into iron to signify the absence of mercy and compassion, as well as a symbol for each one’s specific crime. Angelo, who had wanted to stop the violence but hadn’t, would have his hands amputated as a sign of a lack of action. Wilhelm, the old man who had cut her face, would be paid back in kind with a cross carved into his face. And Hugues, whose rotten brain had been behind the massacre, now had a head full of worms.

In her mind she had nicknamed them Pilate, Longinus and Caiaphas, after Christ’s killers. The first had washed his hands of the Redeemer’s blood. The second had pierced His side with a lance, and the third had been the principal schemer for His death. And, though well aware that she could hardly liken herself to the son of God, she didn’t think she was so dissimilar in her violated innocence; a sacrificial lamb who was powerless to escape her fate.

Without further ado, she turned away from the cadaver and walked out of the house, leaving the door open. The street was full of people and the afternoon sun flooded everything in a warm golden colour. She took a deep breath and let out a terrified cry. Then she began to run, shouting that there was a dead man lying there dismembered with his heart turned into a block of iron. In an instant there was mayhem and the street turned into an ant’s nest disturbed with a stick. People were running all over the place. Many tore into their houses, the shopkeepers began to shut their shops; the paper-makers tried to put away their piles of paper and notebooks before the crowd trampled them, the women screamed and shouted, passing on the horrifying news.

Fiamma walked away undisturbed with her bag over her shoulder. She still had one more person to kill, but she had done enough for one day.

XIV

Uberto da Rimini looked at the young man in front of him with ill-concealed satisfaction. First he had found the missing corpse and now the person who had stolen it, after committing murder and setting fire to the house. Soon the Archbishop would have all the proof he needed. But there still had to be a confession.

With a flash of irritation, Uberto imagined Rinaldo da Concorezzo’s ascetic face as he said, ‘
We have a corpse and we have an arsonist. But where is the proof that the corpse was really in that house and that the arsonist is also an assassin
?’

Rinaldo’s obsession with respecting the law was bordering on ingenuity, to say the least. Who would spontaneously admit to being the author of a crime that would take them straight to meet the executioner?

‘So you are Francesco Salimbene,’ said Uberto, in a placid tone. ‘The templar monk who lived in the lodgings in the parish of sant’Antonino that burned down two weeks ago. Do you admit that?’

‘I admit that I lived in those rooms, father, but I am a medical student, not a templar monk.’

‘And yet the person who was staying with you, Angelo da Piczano, was. To whom would a templar wanted by the Inquisition go for hospitality, if not his confrère?’

‘He would go to a friend. I knew Angelo and his predicament, and I did not think I was breaking the law by inviting him to stay with me for a few days. I committed no crime according to secular justice.’

‘The Knights templar have no friends among ordinary people.’

‘I don’t know about that, but if you say so, it must be true. I only know that he and I were friends and I had no reason to deny him help.’

Silence fell, broken only by the scratching of the notary’s pen. He was sitting to the left of Gerardo, transcribing the questions and answers on to a sheet of parchment laid out on the slanting surface of a writing bench and held down with two iron paperweights in the shape of cubes. Uberto reflected that if they carried on like that, they would never get anywhere. He had hoped to draw the young man into making a series of small admissions that could gradually be constructed to form a solid cage around him. This was why he hadn’t immediately charged him with using a false name. However, Francesco Salimbene was showing himself to be more astute than he’d thought, despite his youth. There was only one way to make the templar confess his crimes quickly, but at the
comune
Uberto’s hands were tied.

‘Could you tell us exactly what you think this young man is guilty of, father?’

This was said in the aspirate Luccan accents of Enrico standing at the door, elegant as ever, accompanied by the sinister-looking PantaLeone Buzacarini, Captain of the People.

Bernadazzi, the
Podestà
. Uberto spun round to find him ‘This was not part of our agreement, excellency,’ protested the Dominican. ‘I only agreed to come here to interrogate the prisoner because I was assured that I would have full liberty of movement.’

‘You agreed because you had no alternative,’ intervened the Captain of the People. ‘However, the conditions of our agreement have changed. Do you really believe that telling us what you think the prisoner to be guilty of is a limitation of your movements?’

PantaLeone Buzacarini was a noted Ghibelline who held that position due to the new Guelph policy to include their rivals in the government of the city, while nonetheless keeping them in a minority. Uberto would have to be doubly cautious with him.

‘It is not that,’ replied the Dominican, choosing the path of prudence. ‘It is only that I would prefer not to talk about it until I have something tangible in hand. I do not like accusing people without proof.’

‘I would have said the opposite,’ murmured PantaLeone, almost inaudibly, bringing a smile to the face of the
Podestà
, although he was a diehard Guelph.

‘What did you say?’ asked Uberto, who had heard PantaLeone perfectly.

‘Nothing of any importance. But if you don’t even tell the prisoner what crime you are accusing him of, how is he going to be able to confess that he’s guilty?’

Uberto would have happily subjected the Captain of the People to torture on the wheel. His disrespectful attitude was the direct result of the weakness of prelates such as the Archbishop of Ravenna.

Da Rimini crossed his arms over the white tunic he wore beneath his order’s black cloak and hood; a stance that usually struck terror into those subjected to his investigations. ‘How and when I decide to communicate it to him is my affair, Captain. Now, if you will allow me, I would like to go on with the interrogation.’

The notary had stopped writing and was watching the three of them from his bench, scratching his ear with the quill.

Francesco Salimbene, for his part, did not lose a word of what was being said and the look on his face alternated between hope and despair like a game of light and shade played by the sun filtering through the leaves of a tree.

‘Please go on,’ said the
Podestà
, going to sit down behind the notary, followed immediately by PantaLeone. ‘We won’t be any bother.’

The young man’s face grew definitively morose, but Uberto was too cross to derive any satisfaction from that. Alas, that insolent Captain of the People was right. To interrogate the prisoner on their conditions was the only alternative left to him, given the circumstances. And he needed to get a result pretty fast.

But perhaps there was a way of resolving the situation to his advantage.

‘As far as I know,’ he said to the
Podestà
, ignoring the Captain of the People, ‘Serious circumstantial evidence points to this man being an arsonist, and yet he maintains that he wasn’t there when the fire broke out.’

‘That is true, but this is a crime that must be assessed by the
comune
.’

‘And how will you assess it, given that the accused will not confess?’

The
Podestà
gave Uberto a perplexed look. ‘The evidence against him is serious enough to justify the use of torture. But you know that quite well.’ ‘So please go on.’

‘Do you mean to say that rather than reveal what you intend to accuse him of, you will relinquish interrogating him altogether?’

‘Not at all,’ replied Uberto. ‘I’ll be straight with you. The crime that I intend to accuse him of is the murder, with recourse to the dark arts, of a templar, whose name I do not yet know, who died after the fire in the parish of sant’Antonino ...’ He noticed that the Captain of the People was about to interrupt him and he silenced PantaLeone with a look. ‘I know that it was murder,’ he said, anticipating the man’s objection, ‘Because I’ve found the corpse. Now may I go on?’

‘Yes, you may,’ intervened the
Podestà
.

‘Furthermore, I mean to accuse this young man, who in all probability is not called Francesco Salimbene at all, of the murder of Wilhelm von Trier, the German templar found dead in an inn near the Basilica of Santo Stefano with his heart turned into a block of iron. But to be able to prove my accusations, I need the prisoner to declare that he was guilty of starting the fire. Now, if you consider it opportune, I will stand aside while you interrogate him on that subject and when he has confessed to the crime, I will proceed with the other accusations.’

The Captain of the People began to clap slowly, a vulgar habit that the populace usually used to show its appreciation of spectacles such as acrobats and ballad singers. Uberto, the
Podestà
, the notary and even the prisoner all turned to stare at him.

‘My compliments, Inquisitor,’ said PantaLeone. ‘I didn’t think you were so astute.’

‘What do you mean by that? explain yourself,’ intervened the
Podestà
, assuming a severe tone.

‘Everyone knows that Archbishop Rinaldo da Concorezzo abhors the use of torture,’ the Captain went on. ‘And as you know, an Inquisitor needs permission from the Archbishop to torture an accused man. Now, since the prisoner has not confessed
cospectu tormentorum
, the Inquisitor, seeing the instruments of torture, thought he could leave us the job of torturing him and take advantage of the results.’

‘So?’ replied Uberto, forcefully. ‘It was you who invited me to conduct my interrogation here instead of handing over the prisoner. Now I am proposing a collaboration that could turn out to the benefit of both Church and
comune
. What reason could you have to refuse?’

The Captain of the People was about to say something, but the
Podestà
stopped him with a wave of his hand. ‘That’s enough, PantaLeone. Don’t let your Ghibelline spirit get in the way of reason. If this young man is really guilty of crimes against the city and the Church, the best thing, in everybody’s interests, is to forget our differences and combine forces. Call the executioner, please.’

This time it was Uberto who had to stop himself applauding. ‘Well said!’ he exclaimed, while the Captain walked out of the room.

His words were followed by a fraught silence that continued until PantaLeone Buzacarini returned with the executioner. Uberto went to stand next to the
Podestà
and left the Captain the job of interrogating the prisoner. Gerardo merely repeated his version of events and so was immediately subjected to the pendulum. The executioner bound his hands behind his back with a rope attached to the wooden frame fixed to the ceiling. Then, rotating the other end of the rope round a spool, he slowly began to lift the templar off the ground by his arms. They left him the time to feel the intense pain of his shoulders being stretched in that unnatural manner. Then, at a sign from the Captain, the executioner let go of the rope so that the prisoner dropped and then the executioner immediately grabbed it again, stopping Gerardo fall with a jolt. Gerardo let out a yell of pain as his arms jerked upwards behind his back, almost coming out of their sockets.

‘This is only the first stage,’ explained PantaLeone Buzacarini.

‘If you confess immediately, you will be spared the second. At the third almost everyone confesses.’

‘No ... I didn’t start the fire, believe me,’ replied Gerardo, in a strangled voice. ‘When I got back to the house it was in flames. I was afraid they would blame me for it so I ran away.’ the notary took down the question and answer. The Captain turned to look at the
Podestà
and receiving a nod of the head, he ordered the executioner to winch the prisoner up again. This time when the ropes lifted Gerardo off the floor, the pain brought a few tears and a forlorn groan.

‘You’ve still got time to save yourself from agony,’ admonished the Captain. ‘Will you confess?’

‘It wasn’t me,’ the young man managed to say, through his teeth. ‘I beg of you, I’m innocent.’

The executioner let the rope go again. This time the prisoner’s cry finished in a sob.

‘Did you start the fire in that house in the parish of sant’Antonino two weeks ago?’ asked the Captain in a monotonous voice.

Uberto, standing at the
Podestà’s
side, didn’t take his eyes off the young man’s face, even for a second. He was noting the signs of surrender that were beginning to appear. The youth would soon confess. Then, weakened by the pulling of the ropes, he wouldn’t have the strength to oppose the interrogation about the double killing. And even if he did, he would only be tortured again until he confessed. After that it wouldn’t be difficult to convince him to repeat his admissions
sponte non vi
, that is, without the use of torture. Uberto knew from experience that when a prisoner yielded once, he never recovered strength enough to resist after that and ended up doing everything they asked of him.

‘I am innocent,’ insisted Gerardo, showing uncommon obstinacy. ‘Of this accusation and of the others that the Inquisitor wants to charge me with.’

The Captain nodded in the direction of the executioner, who began to pull on the ropes again. At that moment voices were heard coming from along the corridor. A guard entered the room and said that two people were demanding to see the Captain of the People and the Inquisitor. ‘Who are they?’ asked Uberto.

‘A Dominican friar and a paper-maker. The Dominican says that he has a message from the Archbishop and the artisan wants to speak to Messer PantaLeone to report a monstrous crime.’

Exchanging hostile glances, Uberto and PantaLeone Buzacarini left the room and followed the guard. The two men waiting for them were showing signs of great anxiety. The first to speak was the paper-maker. When they were still a few yards away, he couldn’t stop himself shouting, ‘Captain, in the paper-maker’s borough a man has been found tied to his bed with his head full of worms and a piece of iron where his heart should be!’ Hearing those words, Uberto stopped in his tracks. Another person killed in that extraordinary way! this automatically cleared Mondino’s student, who couldn’t be the perpetrator given that he’d been in jail at the time. The whole edifice of accusations that he had prepared was in danger of collapsing miserably.

But he didn’t have time to think about that before his assistant, friar Antonio, came up. The young priest, who was even shorter than him, must have been running because he was out of breath and red in the face. But he bowed with the usual propriety. ‘Forgive my disturbing you, father,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘The Archbishop has arrived and is asking for you urgently.’