“Luca, don’t be stupid.”
“I don’t know what happened,” he replied testily. “You tell me. I was in here.”
“When she left here, someone must have grabbed her, dragged her down an alley, and slit her throat. They are killing the Jews for it.”
“Maybe they did it, then.”
“Luca, when I came walking along the road I saw her husband coming out of the alleyway.”
“Oh, dear God.”
“You have to get up; we have to go to a magistrate and stop it.”
The full impact of the danger he was in suddenly swept over the Italian. If de Fréjus could calmly kill his own wife, what would he do to the man who cuckolded him?
“Oh, my God,” he repeated, sinking back onto his pillow. “Oh, my God.”
“Come on, then. Get up. Luca . . . ?”
“Do you think I’m mad?” he said, recovering himself enough to answer, then getting out of bed and fumbling for his clothes in the shuttered darkness.
He began walking around the room, collecting clothes and equipment and stuffing them into a large canvas bag as fast as he could, panic obvious in his every movement.
“What are you doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing? I’m getting out of here.”
“You can’t do that. You have to go to the magistrate, say what happened.”
“Are you mad now? Stand up and say, ‘Please, sir, that countess, that woman married to the Comte de Fréjus, wasn’t killed by the Jews. She was murdered by her husband because she was committing adultery with me just before?’ I wouldn’t even have time to sign a statement, he’d kill me so fast.”
“But unless you say what happened . . .”
Pisano shrugged. “What? De Fréjus goes free? He will anyway. All the Jews are killed? They will be anyway, the way things are going.”
“You can’t just run away.”
“Watch me.”
He was being coarse, brutal, unfeeling. Deliberately so, wanting to push aside all memory of what had occurred the previous night. In his mind he was halfway there. She had never come to the house; he had never given Olivier a beseeching look to go and spend a couple of hours walking the streets. She had never walked over, kissed him, given him no choice about what happened next. He had not fallen asleep, thinking that in all the time she’d been there, they had not exchanged more than six words. She had come, and gone, and now the whole encounter was merely a fantasy, a dream that had never taken place. As long as he was not confronted with the gossip and the details, that was how he could keep her. If he could leave immediately.
His bag was packed. All he had to do was walk out of the house, hire a donkey, and go.
“You’re really running away?”
He grunted, then turned around. “Olivier, my friend, believe me. I may have been wrong not to make sure she got home safely, I may have been wrong to let her stay here in the first place, but I’m not going to get killed for it. Promise me you will say nothing. Nothing will be gained by it.”
Olivier hesitated, then promised.
Pisano turned and ran down the stairs, the door crashing as it slammed shut. His world was collapsing all around him, and like many another, he felt the need to go home, to see the hills and fields and people who had given him life. He never reached them. The nausea began four days later, even before he reached the coast road that led down into Genoese territory; the sweating began an hour afterward and the black, stinking pustules erupted in his armpits and then all over his face that night. He was traveling alone, wanting no company out of fear, and would have been able to find none even had he so wished. The roads were empty, and those who were on the move were going in the opposite direction, away from the sickness and carrying it, all unknowingly, farther and farther into the heartland of Europe.
He died alone, without comfort or sacrament, with only his mule for company, it as indifferent to his suffering as he had been to its distress at the weight of baggage he had loaded onto its back. After he died his whole body erupted into a mass of black pus, creating such a stench that the mule slowly wandered off, into cleaner, fresher air. Even the rats refused to chew on his carcass. He did not win his place as one of the great founders of Italian painting, as he believed he deserved. The pages of Vasari do not mention him even as a pupil of anyone; he won no great commissions from church or town or noble patron; nor did he ever have the chance at fixing his immortality onto the walls of his beloved Siena.
THEY HAD lived in a dream of their own imagining, believing that they had barricaded themselves from reality, shut out the world, created a place of perfect safety by their own efforts and the strength of their emotions. It was the shock of realizing how much of an illusion that had been that so numbed him that he spoke automatically to Marcel’s questioning and probing.
But, crushed though he was, capable really of thinking only of her, he still responded with a flicker of calculation, enough to win himself time; and with time came hope, for the two are really aspects of the same thing.
No, he said, he did not know where Bernard was. He had been given a means of contacting him, that was all. A message to be relayed through who knew how many intermediaries. And only two messages to send; that was his entire purpose. He could say he had some of Julia’s pictures ready, or that Marcel wished to discuss matters with him. That was all; anything else would be ignored. He had to deliver the message on his own, with no supervision, otherwise Bernard would not come. He needed a car as well, for the message had to be delivered in a town some way from Avignon, and time was short.
He would, he said, tell Bernard that Marcel would meet him, at his house in Roaix. Tomorrow. At four o’clock. Marcel could make whatever arrangements he thought necessary.
“One condition, though. I deliver this message, Julia goes free. Once I’ve done it, I will go straight to the prison and collect her. I will telephone when I get there, and you will give the orders that she is to be released. I will take her away, and you will promise she will not be troubled in any way again. If you do not agree, I will not leave this office.”
Marcel agreed. He was glad to do so, genuinely glad. “Believe me, I wish her no harm, Julien,” he said. “Even you will scarcely be as happy as I when she walks through those gates.”
Julien did not answer. He walked out of the office, with the keys to Marcel’s car in his pocket.
WHEN THE POLICE came for Julia, driving out of Vaison in their car, they were angry at the assignment, not least because they had been told to take her into Avignon and they barely had enough fuel to get there. They had been husbanding their limited supplies for weeks now, and considered that to use it all up on such an errand was an absurd waste.
She answered the door on their knock, and looked more surprised than worried to see them there. “What’s up, gentlemen? Lost your way?”
She was still dressed in the dirty ink-stained shirt, the arms rolled up, her hair pinned back loosely, falling around her neck. Her hands were dirty; she had been working.
The policemen were uncomfortable; none truly believed they should do jobs like this; the government had set up a special department for rounding up Jews, and they disliked having to do the dirty work for others. One of them, indeed, was ready to tell her that they would come back, that she had half an hour to disappear into the hills. All would have been quite happy had she not been there. These were not cruel men; in a few months’ time one would abandon his uniform and join the Resistance himself; another would risk trouble for giving a young man and his family precisely the opportunity he was not quite ready to give to Julia. Only the third disliked troublemakers and communists more than he did the Germans, yet even he acted with no zeal when it came to rounding up people for deportations. He did his duty, as did the others, hoping that a higher authority—the préfet perhaps—would intervene and prevent this matter getting out of hand.
“Is your name Julia Bronsen?”
Her lips tightened as she realized that the moment she had feared then managed to put in the back of her mind had materialized so suddenly in the middle of a hot, quiet summer afternoon. The words changed everything; the heat became humid, the light sound of the wind through the trees around the little house faded into silence, and she knew she was very afraid. She said nothing; she could have said no, the lady of the house has just gone into Vaison, but did not know the police would have tried to believe her.
“And are you a Jew?”
Again, she could have denied it, produced all her identity cards, all the official bric-a-brac she had made for herself, but did not; she’d been busy that morning working on some new cards for Bernard and was more terrified of their coming in and seeing these than she was of being arrested. There was little she could do; they evidently knew she was not Juliette de Valois anyway. And if the police came in, dozens of Bernard’s associates would be vulnerable, and Julien would also be arrested.
Besides, she realized she did not wish to deny it anymore.
So she looked at them firmly and said, “Yes, I am.”
She begged a few minutes to prepare herself; checked there was nothing incriminating; packed a bag, asked to stop at the village, where she quickly asked the priest to get a message to Julien. The police did not come in the house; they should have done so, but they were hoping she would take the opportunity to run out the back door. She would have been pursued, of course, but they would not have done a very good job of it. It was too hot for running; only those in fear of their lives could run on a day like that.
But she didn’t. Instead she walked to the car and sat peaceably in the back as it drove over the bumpy tracks to the road, then turned onto the main road to Avignon. She felt very calm, if annoyed at her ill fortune. Julien, she knew, would intervene and get her released. Why had he worked for Marcel for all this time if not in anticipation of a moment like this?
OLIVIER WAS IN a state of shock as he walked through the streets, unnaturally quiet now that the fury had abated, with only the smell of burning wood from the Jewish quarter to give a hint of what had happened only an hour or so before. Dozens of people had died, many buildings razed, their possessions—few enough—not even looted. This was holy rage, not to be deameaned by theft. The storm had blown, then suddenly died away; men who were screaming, throwing stones, beating bodies with sticks, suddenly found their fury exhausted, and they stood there seeming not to know what they had been doing or why they had been doing it.
Calm, and the appearance of normality, returned, but as he crossed the town and made his way to the cardinal’s palace, Olivier could feel the chaos lapping at his heels. The feeling that all sense was turned upside down became stronger still when he arrived, made his way to his master’s private chamber, and begged for an audience.
“Not now, Olivier,” Ceccani said. He was staring out the window to where he could just see the papal palace, still covered in the impedimenta of building, though all work had now stopped.
“Forgive me, sir, but this is truly important,” Olivier began.
Ceccani said nothing, and Olivier used the brief moment to catch his attention.
“The wife of the Comte de Fréjus has been murdered, sir.”
Ceccani turned and arched an eyebrow. “So?”
It was gossip, pure and simple. Nothing to attract his attention as yet.
“She was murdered by her husband, I am sure. But the people are blaming the Jews, and there was a riot this morning. Many have been killed, and more will be soon unless something is done.”
Ceccani had not risen so far without being able to unravel implications, and the implications of implications, in an instant. His good fortune was so great that he knew that divine favor was responsible for it.
“Why did the count kill his wife?”
It never occurred to Olivier for a moment not to say; Ceccani was master of them both, nothing could be concealed from him, and in truth, Pisano never intended that it should be when he extracted his promise.
“Because the lady was with Luca Pisano shortly before her death.”
Ceccani said nothing.
“She came to him, sir,” Olivier went on. “He did not seduce her.”
“Spare me the details, Olivier,” Ceccani said with a wave of his hand. He sat down in his chair by the broad oak table covered with papers and parchments, and thought.
“So,” he said after a while. “The Jews are under suspicion of causing the plague by poisoning wells; we have solid evidence of it with Cardinal de Deaux’s creatures caught trying to murder His Holiness, and now they have murdered the innocent young wife of a nobleman. It is God-given, Olivier my boy. Just as the church could put itself at the head of Christendom by calling for a crusade, then again by wiping out the heretical Cathars, so it can do so again, now, by wiping out these people, once and for all.”
His eyes shone as he saw the possibilities. At last, people would have hope once more, convinced they were attacking the source of their troubles. The authority of the church would be restored as it placed itself at the head of the despair, and channeled it into purposeful action. And once Aigues-Mortes had fallen, and the papacy was forced out of Provence, then it would return to Rome as well, immeasurably strengthened and ready, once more, to impose itself on all of Christendom.
This was the first Olivier had heard of the arrest of Gersonides; he had not been to the palace for several days, and the arrests had not yet been broadcast abroad. Would not be, until the battle for power within the palace was decided. He turned pale at the words and gripped the back of the chair to balance himself.
“What? What did you say? Who did you say tried to murder His Holiness?”
He sounded so grieved, so incredulous, that Ceccani omitted to reprimand him for his interest in things that were none of his business. “Just as I say. Gersonides and his servant are both in the dungeons. One of them was caught emptying a phial of poison into the well.”