Poison: A Novel of the Renaissance (38 page)

What Cesare made of this matter of fathers and sons, and the sacrifices one did or did not make of the other remains a mystery to me. But I can say that he stared long and hard at the scene before returning his attention to the rest of the Chapel.

For my part, I seized hold of the thought that the scene might have some significance to Morozzi, that he might even have chosen it to frame his own sacrifice of a child. Admittedly, that was very slim, but it did give me enough hope to keep going.

The interior was empty except for Innocent’s remains, the handful of guards keeping watch over them, and ourselves. Of Morozzi, there was no sign at all.

“There are wardrooms above us,” I told Cesare. “We should look there.” I had in my mind the memory of how Morozzi had appeared to Vittoro and myself on the walkway above the chapel.

“If you think it would be worthwhile,” he replied but without enthusiasm. I could not blame him. Time was passing at a fearful clip and we were no closer to finding the mad monk than we had been hours before.

Even so, I was about to mount the staircase set into the wall at the north end of the chapel and leading upward to the wardroom when the sudden appearance of several men stopped me.

The guards Cesare had sent to the Dominican chapter house had returned. And they had brought Rocco with them.

I have walked with fear often enough to consider it an old companion, and I am no stranger to despair. But what I saw writ starkly on Rocco’s face as he hurried across the width of the chapel made me feel as though I had been swept up by a gale that threatened to hurtle us all into the abyss.

“Is it true?” he demanded. “What the guards said? Is it true that Morozzi has taken a child?”

So agitated was he that Cesare moved to put himself between us. I gripped my unlikely protector’s arm and dug in my heels to hold him in place.

“It may be true,” I said cautiously. “What has happened?”

He tried to tell me but his breath caught and he was unable to speak. Finally, he gasped out a single word.

“Nando.”

I will spare you the rest except to say that Rocco had received
word from his mother the previous day that his son had gone off to fish in a nearby stream and had not returned. Fearing that Nando had come to harm—accidentally, as he thought then—Rocco hurried to La Giustiana, the village a few hours north of Rome where he was born and where his mother still lived. When the search for Nando proved fruitless, he returned to the city to seek help from me, only to be turned away at the palazzo. He then sought out Friar Guillaume. The two were trying to decide what to do when the men-at-arms sent by Cesare arrived.

“Nando is missing?” Poor stumbling thing that my brain had become, that was the best I could do.

“He is a good boy,” Rocco said. His eyes glistened with tears only waiting to be shed upon confirmation of the tragedy that loomed before us all. “He would not go off without a word to anyone. Something has happened to him.”

Too late, I recalled that the village was along the same road going north out of Rome as was the Orsinis’ country estate. One as enterprising as Morozzi had shown himself to be could readily have intercepted the messenger carrying the latest missive to La Bella from her cuckolded husband and at the same time seized the child of the man he knew to be at the nexus of all those he despised and feared.

“I am so sorry.”

The words were pitifully inadequate but the pain resonating within me was a far better measure of my guilt.

“I will do everything I can to see him returned safely to you.”

Rather than being nailed to a cross, gasping out his life as he died in a horrible mockery of the death of our Lord.

God help me.

I mean that literally. I truly did beseech the Almighty’s help, but, as usual, He seemed to be occupied elsewhere.

“Who is Nando?” Cesare asked.

“Rocco’s son,” I replied. “A child.”

Make no mistake, Cesare was a selfish and ruthless man. The entire course of his life proves this. But for all that, he could on occasion actually be a man—and by that I do not mean that he possessed a scrotum and penis, as does the rudest hog rooting in a sty. He had an instinct to care for those weaker than himself, especially children, whom he liked and valued far more than he did most adults.

But just then he was very young and lacking the thin—in Cesare’s case, extremely thin—veneer of civilization that most men manage to acquire as they pass through life.

That being the case, he gave voice to what was, in all honesty, my own instinctive response to Rocco’s news.

“Merda.”

I could not have put it better.

Very shortly thereafter, a frantic search of the wardrooms above the chapel produced no sign of Morozzi. We were back to where we had started, which is to say in the basilica.

“Why would he have taken Nando?” Rocco demanded as we stood before the main altar, near where the body of Innocent would be placed shortly at the start of the funeral rites. It was a reasonable question under the circumstances but not one I wanted to answer.

“He is mad,” I said, and hoped that would suffice.

But he was also a man, not a magus. In order to carry out what I believed to be his plan, Morozzi would have to make a crucified child appear before a large crowd. How could he do that and escape without being detected?

A child, a cross. A single man needing to maneuver both within a vast space and before the eyes of hundreds.

I had ventured into the netherworld below Saint Peter’s and discovered only that Morozzi had, in all likelihood, hidden Nando there briefly. I had found no sign of the child himself or of the cross upon which he would have to hang.

Where were they?

If not below then—

I looked up, into the deep shadows that hung beneath the roof of the basilica.

“What lies above?” I asked.

Cesare did not know, nor did any of us. But the same priest who had dared to challenge us in the sacristy was, when found at Cesare’s order and hustled before him, willing enough to provide an answer.

“A garret,” he gasped. “In poor repair. No one goes there.”

“How do we reach it?” I asked. So anxious was I that I only just managed to stop myself from grabbing hold of the old man in an effort to shake the information out of him.

Though he might have been more tolerant than most of his brethren, being addressed without deference by a woman of no particular lineage was more than the priest could bear. A nervous tic sprang to life in his right eye. Glaring, he turned away from me and addressed himself pointedly to Cesare.

“Signore, we are about to perform the final sacraments for our late Holy Father! Surely you can understand that your presence here and that of your—” He paused, no doubt considering what he would like to call me. Some sense of self-preservation must have won out as he said only, “—companion is not appropriate?”

Cesare had many skills—I have alluded to several of them—but he was utterly lacking in even the rudiments of tact. Indeed, his notion of diplomacy revolved around the conviction that the best route to peace lies in grinding one’s enemies into the ground so
thoroughly that the very fact of their ever having existed will be forgotten on the wind.

But he was in Saint Peter’s Basilica, next to Jerusalem the holiest place in all of Christendom. And if he caused any real problems, he would have no end of trouble from his father.

Accordingly, Cesare gritted his teeth and said, “Don’t fuck with me, priest. Just show us how to get into the garret.”

The old man turned white, then blazing red. Though he seemed to be having some difficulty breathing, he managed to point the way.

A short while later, I paused to reflect that the priest had told the truth about conditions in the upper reaches of Saint Peter’s. Dark, damp, musty, filled with air so thick that I struggled to breathe, the garret seemed to contain the combined effluvia of a thousand years of human sweat, toil, prayers, and suffering. It was a veritable midden of dust so heavy that I sank in it up to my ankles, spiderwebs of a thickness to mimic walls, and trash—the castoffs of generations who, by the look of it, had mostly found the garret a convenient place to disport themselves in all manner of illicit ways. Heaven only knows how much worse it would have smelled if not for the gaping holes that let in the sky.

We had reached the garret up a narrow staircase concealed behind a pillar in the southeast corner of the basilica. The priest showed us the location of the entrance but did not accompany us. He did not wish us well, either, but I suppose he could be pardoned for the lapse. Cesare went first with Rocco right behind him. I followed along with several men-at-arms.

As we straightened and looked around, Rocco asked, “Why would Morozzi come up here? There must be far better places to hide.”

I remained unwilling to tell him what we feared. Instead, I said
only, “We have already looked below. Besides, Morozzi likes to do the unexpected.”

Rocco nodded but he appeared unconvinced—and growing more desperate by the moment. His eyes were red-rimmed, he was unshaven, and his lips looked severely bitten, as though he had done so to keep from crying out.

As much to give him the relief of action as to hasten the search, I said, “We will make faster progress if we split up.”

“Fine,” Cesare said. “Glassmaker, two of my men will accompany you. Francesca, you come with me.”

We went, picking our way down the long axis of the basilica. Perhaps inevitably in a building of such age, there was not a single open space but rather a vast maze of cubbyholes and cubicles alternating with long aisles. I suppose that at some time in the distant past, the garret had been used for storage. But as the building deteriorated and weather did its work, the floor became too weak and unstable to hold anything heavy.

Even, quite possibly, the weight of a single person.

“Careful,” Cesare said, reaching out to steady me. The wood directly under my feet felt alarmingly soft.

“I had no idea it was this bad,” I said.

While it was true that I had seen chunks of stone and brick fall from the basilica on occasion, and had heard even more stories about hapless visitors being struck by them, I hadn’t really understood how dilapidated the immense building had become. For whatever reasons—repeated barbarian invasions, the shifting eastward of imperial authority into Byzantium, the abandonment of Rome during the Great Schism—the notion that a structure had to be maintained apparently had not occurred to the successors of Peter, who by all evidence had left it to rot. Rather than belabor the obvious metaphor for the
condition of Holy Mother Church herself, I will say only that the place was a death trap.

Torches were out of the question in the garret, which, where it was not rotting, was tinder dry. We had to make our way as best we could by the shafts of sunlight penetrating through the holes in the roof. Some of these were little more than the size of pinpricks but others were as wide as a well-fed priest. Not unexpectedly, pigeons had taken up their roosts within the garret. It being daylight, most of the birds were below in the square or elsewhere looking for food, but the few that had remained took off in a great flutter of wings, leaving us to make our way through and around their copious droppings.

The basilica was more than three hundred and fifty feet in length—I knew this because my father had been interested enough in the ancient building to measure it with the help of a mathematician friend. The garret ran almost that entire distance. We had entered at the far side from the main altar. As we made our way slowly and laboriously, by necessity given the conditions we faced, I could hear the choir beginning to rehearse below.

“There can’t be much time left,” I said. My eyes smarted from the dust and grime. I blinked hard to clear them and saw, in the flicker of an instant, what I took to be movement about two-thirds of the way toward the far end of the garret. Either that or merely the fulfillment of my most fervent wish.

“What is that?” I asked.

Cesare looked in the same direction. The obscurity was very great. What I had seen might have been no more than the flutter of yet more pigeons or the stirring of dust.

“Shadows, nothing more?” he said.

In my desperation, I seized on his uncertainty as confirmation
that whatever I had seen might be at least worth investigating. Tugging impatiently at the skirts that weighed me down, I pressed ahead.

And got no more than a half dozen yards or so before Cesare yanked me back. At the same time, he raised a hand, bringing his men to a halt.

Very softly, he said, “Don’t make a sound. You’re right, someone is there.”

“Where?” I whispered, straining my eyes to see.

“Two hundred feet ahead of us, maybe less. If I’m right, that would put him directly above the main altar.”

“It has to be Morozzi!”

Cesare nodded. He looked grimly satisfied. “Leave him to me.”

I shook my head vehemently. “The moment he sees you, he will know himself to be in grave danger. There is no telling what he will do then. But he will not believe that he has anything to fear from a woman.”

All that was true enough, but I will confess that I wanted to confront Morozzi myself. Call it hubris, vanity, or what you will, I could not be content to hide behind Cesare.

“Just give me a moment,” I pleaded. “I can take him by surprise. Then you can overcome him.”

“I can overcome him readily enough without you,” Cesare protested.

“This isn’t about your prowess! He has a child, for God’s sake! We can’t take the chance of Nando being hurt.”

Assuming, of course, that he had not been already, but of that I could not think. Indeed, it was all I could do to wrench my arm free of Cesare’s hold and plunge forward into the shadows.

My way was obstructed by a thick mass of webs that had blurred my vision of what lay beyond. To my horror, they clogged my nose
and mouth, tangled in my hair, and seemed to grasp at every part of me like a thousand spectral fingers. So much for my overwrought imagination. A spider is only a spider, to be stepped on if dangerous and otherwise left alone. I struggled to remember that and kept going until finally, gasping and filthy, I was free.