Poison: A Novel of the Renaissance (37 page)

Cesare’s disgust was palpable. He looked around at the holy men, armored in their self-righteousness, and for a moment I truly did fear for what he might do. Squeezing his arm even harder, I tugged him toward the door.

“We’re wasting time,” I whispered. “Morozzi must have taken another way out.”

Still, he hung back, staring at them all. None, not even the old priest, had asked about the child. None had expressed concern for anyone beyond themselves. Later, when Cesare was so criticized for his actions toward the Church, I remembered that moment and marveled that he did not act even more harshly.

We left the sacristy and found ourselves near the main altar. In the time that we had been below, the soft gray light of dawn had crept into the basilica. I could see that we were only a few dozen yards from where we had set out. As for Morozzi, he could be anywhere.

“How much time do we have left?” I asked.

Cesare sheathed his sword and looked around at the preparations going on around us. Already, servants were arranging benches in the vast nave to accommodate those of sufficient rank to merit seating. A bier on which Innocent’s remains would rest was being set in place before the main altar. In the loft above, the choir was preparing to rehearse. Papal banners and the banners of the college of cardinals hung between the pillars separating both sides of the nave from the side transepts. Vast candles, some the size around of a fit man’s waist, were being hoisted into place.

Amid all this, a few clerics already came and went, busy conferring with each other. Some of the lay guests had arrived early for the same purpose.

“A few hours,” Cesare said.

Despite our failure to find Morozzi, I was more convinced than ever that he would not waste the opportunity presented by such an occasion. Prelates and lay alike, those attending the funeral were certain to be outraged by a supposed atrocity committed by the Jews within the very heart of Holy Mother Church. They were also best able to turn rage into bloody action in the blink of an eye. Yet how could he possibly hope to evade the notice of the hundreds of guards drawn up in and around the Vatican? However well he knew the netherworld under the basilica, he would have to emerge from it eventually.

Cesare must have been thinking along similar lines, for he said,
“I will set men to watch on the door by Saint Catherine’s altar and outside the sacristy. If he comes from either direction, we will have him.”

“But there must be other ways in and out,” I said. Surely, the smugglers themselves could not be coming and going from within the basilica. Although given the ready complicity of so many priests, I could not rule that out entirely.

“We will do our best to find them,” he said. With a true smile, he added, “Do not despair, Francesca. I count on you to keep my reason clear.”

Which was as close as he would ever come to acknowledging the dark fears he had confronted before realizing that Morozzi was only a man.

My own spirits lifted with his words, but a few moments later, I had cause to feel less than cheered.

The men Borgia had sent at my request to inquire of Rocco if he knew of any place where the mad priest might be hiding had returned. They brought word that the glassmaker was not to be found. His neighbors on the Via dei Vertrarari reported that he had left suddenly the previous day and had not been heard from since.

I did not want to think about what could be behind Rocco’s sudden disappearance, but the possibility that he might have come to harm because of his help when David and I escaped from the
castel
loomed large in my mind. I was questioning the guards, trying to discover exactly what the neighbors had said, when Cesare finished deploying his men and came over to join us.

“Why are you scowling?” he asked. He looked in ill humor himself, but that had less to do with the present circumstances than with the fact that the future cardinal was never at ease in any church.

“I fear something has happened to a friend,” I replied. “He isn’t at his shop and no one seems to know where he has gone.”

The odds of Cesare having any interest, much less concern, for a shopkeeper were vanishingly small, such people barely existing within his notice. Yet he surprised me.

“Who is he?”

When I told him, he said, “You think Morozzi may have harmed him?”

I hesitated to say as much. Rocco was a strong and able man. Against a warrior such as Cesare, he might stand little chance, but against the priest—

“I don’t know . . . it doesn’t seem likely but—” But Rocco was not someone I would expect to go off without a word to anyone, especially not in such fraught circumstances.

Cesare looked at me closely. “You care for this man?”

The thought of him truly being in danger made it difficult for me to breathe. I could only nod and say, “He is a dear friend.”

“And is his wife also a dear friend?”

“He is a widower with a young son—” Abruptly, I realized what was in his mind. So great was my surprise that I blurted out the first thought that occurred to me.

“For heaven’s sake, Cesare, you can’t possibly care that I—”

But apparently he did, at least enough to look like a sulky boy who thought that an amusement he assumed to be exclusively his own was, in fact, not.

“It doesn’t matter to me one way or another,” he claimed. “I just don’t want you distracted right now.”

“Then help me,” I pleaded, in the hope that he could be mollified, his incandescent temper deflected in a more productive direction.

Something in my manner must have touched him, for he softened slightly and after a moment, nodded.

“Where could this Rocco Moroni have gone?”

Quickly, I tried to think where he might be. If he truly was in trouble, I hoped he would have come to me, assuming that he was able. But the palazzo and the Vatican both were surrounded by guards. He might well have been turned away. That left one other possibility.

“He has a trusted friend at the Dominican chapter house,” I said. “Friar Guillaume. He might know Rocco’s whereabouts.”

“Is this the same friend you said would warn us if Morozzi tried to take shelter with Torquemada?”

When I nodded, Cesare turned to the guards who snapped to attention. Briefly, he told them about Rocco, then said, “Make inquiries at the chapter house but be discreet. Let no one other than the friar know why you have come.”

They bowed and took their leave. I watched them go down the long nave of the basilica and out into the brightening day before I turned back to Cesare.

“Thank you for doing this.”

He shrugged as though it was of no matter, but the look he gave me suggested that there would be a reckoning. Like his father, Cesare never did anything without a price.

“
If
you can concentrate now,” he said, “my men have found half a dozen more concealed doors. The basilica seems riddled with them. But there is still no sign of Morozzi.”

“Perhaps he is not here.” My greatest fear was that I was wrong about the mad priest’s intentions. He and Torquemada might have an entirely different plan that had eluded me.

My second greatest fear was that I was right.

If I were Morozzi . . .

Scarcely had the thought gone through my mind than I fought the impulse to dismiss it. The basilica was immense and the surrounding buildings even more so. If we were to have any hope of finding the mad priest before he struck, I had to steel myself to reason out his plan.

Assuming, of course, that reason can be applied to madness. That is a matter for the philosophers. For myself, I had more practical concerns.

“We must not make the mistake of underestimating him again,” I said. “He is daring and clever, and he strikes where we do not expect.”

“You are thinking of Giulia,” Cesare said, looking grim.

I nodded. “All Morozzi cares about is the destruction of the Jews. He is at least as fanatical in that regard as is Torquemada himself.

And he is unburdened by any sense of conscience or morality. We must assume that he is capable of doing absolutely anything in order to achieve his ends.”

“He had an ally in Innocent. My father believes that had the Pope lived much longer, he would have signed the edict. Morozzi’s failure to see that through must be as a fiery goad driving him onward.”

“No doubt that is so,” I said. “But when Innocent died with the edict still unsigned, Morozzi refused to take that as defeat. He came back immediately with a plan that, had it succeeded, would have assured that the one man he knows will not sign the edict could not become pope.”

“By causing a rupture between my father and the Orsinis, whose support he must have if he is to have any chance of winning?”

“Exactly. If Morozzi had managed to turn them against each other, in all likelihood he would have assured della Rovere’s election or, at the very least, that of someone else who would sign the edict.”

“But the plan failed,” Cesare pointed out.

“Yes, but it was that very failure that prevented me from realizing immediately that, in order to act as he did, Morozzi had to have knowledge that he could not possibly have acquired on the spur of the moment.”

I was thinking out loud but at least I finally was thinking, seeing at last what shock and fatigue had prevented me from grasping earlier.

“He knew about the letters between Giulia and her husband,” I said. “He even knew of her love for figs. I think he has been planning all along what he would do if Innocent died without signing the edict and it looked as though your father would become pope.”

Cesare nodded slowly. It was clear that what I was fumbling my way toward made sense to him.

“Now he is regrouping again,” he said. “This time with a scheme to rouse the mob against the Jews.”

“And we can be sure that once again, he has worked out exactly how he will do that well in advance,” I replied. “That is why Torquemada is here, to be present at the moment when the ‘crime’ is revealed so that he can announce to all that the Jews are to blame, thereby assuring that no cardinal seen as tolerant of them could possibly be elected.”

Cesare’s face had turned very dark. In sharp contrast, the knuckles of the hand gripping the pommel of his sword shone white.

“Della Rovere is putting it about already that my father is
marano
.”

“Likely he knows what Morozzi and Torquemada are planning, though he will try to keep his distance from them both. At any rate, della Rovere doesn’t matter; your father can deal with him. It is Morozzi we must stop at all costs.”

“How?” Cesare demanded. “I can bring in more men and scour the basilica from top to bottom but we have very little time—”

“The mere fact of your doing that will raise alarm that should your father become pope, he—and his family—would abuse his power.”

I did not say what I knew to be rumbling in the streets, that Borgia truly was the wolf come to devour the lamb. That no more rapacious or ambitious man had ever dared to seek the Throne of
Peter. Of course, all that was being put about on behalf of Borgia’s rivals. So far, the Romans themselves, who by the mere threat that they could erupt into violence had influence in the election, were making mock of it. I had to hope that nothing would happen to make them change their minds—or their allegiance.

Never had I seen Cesare look so bleak or, for that matter, so close to despair. “Then we are finished,” he said, “and Morozzi will have won.”

“No! There is still time, granted not much, but we must make good use of every moment.”

I looked around, driven by the sense that something eluded me, some fact I had not yet considered. In the years since, I have often found it useful when confronted with a perplexing problem to consider not only the evidence of what
is,
but also to look for what
is not
. Sometimes it is in the empty, blank places that we find truth staring back at us.

Amid all the preparations for the funeral, what was missing from the basilica?

“Innocent’s body still lies in the chapel,” I said slowly.

Cesare nodded. “It will be processed in after the mourners are assembled.”

In that procession, the late Pope would be escorted by the highest prelates of the Church and the most honored lay attendants. All of whom would be assembling first in the Sistine Chapel.

“We may be looking in the wrong place,” I said.

To reach the chapel, Cesare and I, along with several guards, had to leave the basilica and make our way through the Apostolic Palace. Our passage did not go unnoticed. Already word was spreading that Borgia’s son was on the premises and that he had not come in peace. We were greeted with glares by priests and clerks alike, more than a
few of whom made a show of pressing against the walls as we went by, as though to avoid being contaminated by contact with us.

Cesare did not so much ignore them as appear to be entirely oblivious to their existence. I envied that even as I struggled to keep up with him. Such was the forcefulness of his presence that when the captain of the guards in the chapel saw us coming and stepped forward to block our entry, a mere glance from Cesare froze him in place.

Looking back now, I think it is possible that Cesare had never been in the Sistine Chapel before. If that is true, it would be consistent with Borgia’s policy of discretion regarding his children until he became pope, when all that changed so spectacularly. At any rate, Cesare paused before turning around slowly in a circle, staring at the magnificent frescoes decorating the walls.

In particular, the work depicting the Temptation of Christ seemed to attract him.

“Who painted that?” he asked.

“Sandro Botticelli,” I replied.

What Cesare made of the Devil or the splendor of treasure the Fallen One offered to the Son of God escapes me. He seemed more curious about a small detail within the fresco, the appearance of a priest holding a bowl filled with blood.

“What’s going on there?” he asked.

I had asked the same question of my father years before, and gave Cesare the answer he had given to me.

“See those people,” I said, directing his attention to a small group of figures approaching the priest with animals. “They are Jews preparing to offer sacrifices. The scene reminds us that God allowed Abraham to spare his son, Isaac, by offering up a ram in his place.
But we are also to remember that God gave His own son to redeem us from sin.”