The Wolves of St. Peter's (2 page)

When Francesco finally reached the Sistine Chapel, he climbed the forty-foot ladder to the scaffolding that spanned the width of the ceiling, where the assistants were waiting for him. Michelangelo was far down at the other end, engrossed in studying the expanse of white ceiling. The scaffold had been Michelangelo's own design, and after six months of work, it was virtually his only accomplishment. It was by anyone's reckoning a brilliant piece of engineering. Michelangelo had built a series of bridges anchored into the walls, the design allowing equal access to all parts of the arched ceiling. The bridges, stepped on either side and flat at the top, reminded Francesco of the bridges he'd seen in Venice when he was seventeen, having just finished his law studies in nearby Padua.

But the Venetian bridges weren't suspended at such terrible heights. Looking down through the cracks between the spans of Michelangelo's scaffold would have been dizzying save for the canvas that had been hung from the underside to catch falling paint and plaster. As Masses were still performed in the chapel, it served to protect the worshippers below, but the canvas also worked as a screen, hiding progress—or lack thereof—from curious onlookers. While he had nothing much yet to show, Michelangelo guarded the ceiling closely, convinced that at any time his enemies would steal
his ideas and replicate them elsewhere before he'd completed his project. Little did he know that Francesco amused Raphael and the other artists who gathered at Imperia's brothel with regular reports of his failures.

Today it was obvious that another failure was in the making. Yesterday Michelangelo's first fresco, depicting Noah and the Flood, was finally nearing completion after a month of agonizing work, but today all that remained of the scene were buckets full of colored chunks of plaster.

“Don't ask him what went wrong,” whispered Bastiano, one of the assistants, as Francesco handed around the loaves of black bread from his sack and poured cups of wine. “Be glad you weren't here when he arrived this morning. It's a wonder he didn't murder us and tear the entire chapel down. A new priest was saying Mass, and Michelangelo was smashing out the plaster and screaming damnation on the whole of Christendom. I could just picture the faces down below. I'm sure for a moment they thought they were about to suffer every terrible punishment God has ever doled out.”

“Did the priest complain to His Holiness?”

“No, but Cardinal Asino and Paride di Grassi did.”

Paride di Grassi was the papal master of ceremonies. He looked after the running of the chapel, checking the quality of the incense and candles and the cleanliness of the priests. He enforced silence during services and kept his ears peeled for anything in the priests' sermons that could be construed as heresy. He and Michelangelo had hated each other from the beginning, and while the master of ceremonies made little headway with his objections to the noise and dust, he still complained every chance he got.

Cardinal Asino and Michelangelo's mutual dislike was more material in nature. Asino, like all the cardinals, felt himself a victim
of Pope Julius's giddy overspending. Rebuilding the Vatican, his plans for St. Peter's, the construction of new roads, and his military campaigns throughout Italy to expand the Papal States were depleting the Church's resources, and the twenty-five or so cardinals in Rome had seen their allowances sharply reduced.

Francesco had been in Rome long enough to know that a life fit for a cardinal was scarcely less grand than a life fit for a king. It took a household of at least people to run and maintain a palace, and it was hard to know where to cut corners and still be able to live and entertain in a fitting manner. So while Asino resented the Pope's projects and everyone associated with them for robbing him of his luxuries, Michelangelo felt more could be spared for him if these cardinals weren't such expensive parasites on the Church.

“What happened after they complained?” Francesco asked.

“His Holiness came with that boy of his, and Michelangelo had to apologize in front of everyone. If I were di Grassi and Asino, I'd be checking my bed for water snakes.” The other assistants snickered as they cast guilty glances toward their master.

“But what was wrong with the scene? It was almost finished.”

The assistants all shrugged, clearly annoyed. “Who knows?” Bastiano whined, scratching furiously at his long, tangled hair. “All we do know is that he took one look at it this morning, declared it an abomination, and went berserk. No consideration at all for how long we've been slaving away at it.” Bastiano was the most experienced and talented of the lot, but also the most disgruntled. He made no effort to hide his dissatisfaction that, despite all his skill, he was still not only an assistant but a grossly underpaid one at that.

“Stop gossiping like an old woman and bring me my food!” Michelangelo's voice echoed around the cavernous chapel, and
Francesco, rolling his eyes at the assistants, left them and crossed the spans with the two remaining loaves and the wine.

“You're late,” Michelangelo grumbled. “What took you so long?” Francesco decided the truth was as good an excuse as any. He didn't give a name or say he knew her, only that a woman's body had been found in the river and he'd stopped to watch.

“Just another whore, I'm sure,” Michelangelo said, echoing Francesco's own words. “If I had a ducat for every whore who found herself floating in the Tiber, I'd be a rich man. There are four thousand priests in this city and two whores for every one of them. Not that all their tastes run to women. Rome would be wise to remember the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

If Michelangelo had been a friend, Francesco might have warned him against expressing such an opinion of the clergy too loudly, even if it were true. But he wasn't, so Francesco said nothing as he reopened his sack and pulled out the jug of wine. He might also say a few rumors were circulating around Michelangelo's own tastes when it came to desires of the flesh. People had seen his sculptures of strong, virile men and drawn their own conclusions. While sodomy was a crime punishable by burning at the stake, Francesco was of the opinion that in Rome it was largely overlooked. Francesco had already made the acquaintance of the Vatican painter Il Sodoma, “The Sodomite,” a man who wore his nickname as openly as his collection of frocks, a collection that Imperia said was the envy of every courtesan in Rome. Still, Francesco doubted Michelangelo shared any of Sodoma's tastes. A follower of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, Michelangelo was too prudish and afraid of eternal damnation to involve himself with women, let alone men.
It's a pity,
Francesco thought, as he wrenched the cork from the bottle.
It would almost make this misery worth it, to see Michelangelo wearing a fine gown!

The wine had leaked around the cork and soaked into the remaining loaves of bread, but Michelangelo didn't notice. He didn't care what he ate and took no pleasure in food. However, probably out of spite for Francesco's lateness, he declared himself hungry and took Francesco's loaf too, all the time ranting on about di Grassi and Asino. Francesco only half-listened as Michelangelo chewed the bread, washing each bite down with wine he first swished around his mouth. He gestured like a peasant as he talked, his hair and beard were matted and dirty, and his squashed face was grimy with several days' worth of plaster dust and smeared paint. His ill-fitting clothes were in no better condition, and Francesco thought a swim in the Tiber, as filthy as it was, might do him some good.

“Did you send my letters?” Michelangelo asked, wiping his mouth with his dirty sleeve.

“Letters?” Francesco repeated, momentarily confused. “There was only one on the table, and yes, I sent it.”

“There were two letters. One to my father, another to my brother.” Having exhausted his venom for the papacy, Michelangelo was back to the one other earthly thing besides his art that consumed him: his family and how they misspent his money.

“I sent the one to your father. I didn't see one to your brother.”

“Find it and send it. It is hard to believe that a man of twenty cannot perform the tasks usually entrusted to a boy of ten.”

Francesco would have liked to remind him that Ricardo paid Michelangelo well to put up with him, but he couldn't risk Michelangelo sending him back to Florence out of spite. He was in exile and would remain so as long as it pleased his father, not to mention that Guido del Mare still wanted to kill him. So instead, Francesco looked up to where the scene of Noah and the Flood
had been chipped away and asked in his most innocent voice, “What happened?”

The response was every bit as apocalyptic as the assistants had warned.

THE
house Francesco shared with Michelangelo had once opened onto the Piazza Rusticucci, close to St. Peter's. But long ago, someone had blocked the front door by building a lean-to, and now they were forced to navigate the narrow alley that ran behind the row of houses to the back door in order to get inside.

These additions to buildings were common throughout Rome, a cheap way to add a room for housing animals or to earn some extra rent. Rumor had it Pope Julius would soon issue a decree to have them knocked down, since they made many of the streets impassable to carriage traffic. Francesco didn't care about the carriages, but he did wish he could use their front door. He also wouldn't mind getting rid of the lean-to's current tenants, a soap-maker and his wife. With their hands and faces burned and scarred by lye, they were an evil-looking pair whose nightly arguments could be heard clearly around the edges of the door. Two or three times a week, they collected rancid fat from the butchers and boiled it over a fire in the square, sending up a stink that permeated the entire neighborhood. Today was one of those days, and as Francesco picked his way through the debris-choked back alley, he could still smell it over the vile stench of the outhouses.
In Rome, even the soap is dirty,
he thought, not for the first time.

This row of outhouses, he'd already learned, was favored for the disposal of unwanted infants—those born to the too young, the unwed, slaves, servants, whores, the poor with too many mouths to feed already. His first week in Rome he'd found a newborn girl wrapped in rags, weakly whimpering outside one of the doors, the baby's mother perhaps unable to bring herself to drop her into the filthy hole, where she would quickly, or not so quickly, drown.

He couldn't bear to pass the child by and so, taking her back to the house, laid her on the hearth.
Would have been more merciful to leave it where it was,
Michelangelo had said, looking up from his drawings.
You're only prolonging its misery.
Francesco had known Michelangelo was right. Hell was full of good intentions. The girl was just hours old, already dying from starvation and exposure.
There should be some other recourse …
Francesco had said, but he knew not what that could be. They didn't have milk, so he'd mixed some water with wine, but the child breathed her last before he could even get it to her lips.

Today there were no other horrors in the alley but the smell itself, and he'd just about reached the house when he saw Susanna looking over the gate into Michelangelo's yard. Her back was to him, but he knew it was her from the long dark plait and brown dress she held up to keep it from dragging in the filth. Sure she hadn't seen him, he quickly stepped out of sight behind one of the neighboring sheds. Feeling a little foolish for hiding from a girl, he waited there for a moment, watching a lizard climb a sickly-looking lemon tree, before peering around the corner. She was still there. He pulled his head back again and sat down on a stump to wait a few more minutes.

He wasn't in the habit of avoiding her. If it hadn't been for the events of the morning, he would have been happy to see her. Susanna's presence usually meant she had brought him something to
eat or come to beat the fleas out of the bedding—and she might even be persuaded to slip into that same bedding with him for a while. But right now, he really just wanted to find that letter and get over to Raphael's. Maybe once he'd passed along the news of Calendula's death, he could shake the image of her mangled face from his mind.

It started to rain again, and he shifted on his seat to avoid the drip from the shed roof while he waited for Susanna to go inside. Francesco had met Susanna on his third or fourth night in Rome after opening the wrong gate, surprising her as she picked her way across the yard from the outhouse. She was the maid to Benvenuto the Silversmith, whose house and workshop consisted of a jumble of sheds adjoining Michelangelo's. Francesco had been out wandering the streets until night had fallen, hoping to avoid Michelangelo, who'd been in a particularly foul mood. When he told her this, she'd laughed. Then, taking him by the hand, she had led him inside the house, where a feeble fire with more smoke than flame burned inside the gargantuan fireplace.

Benvenuto had been in Florence on business, and Francesco said he was from Florence too. She'd given him wine and sympathized with his forced exile. Michelangelo, she claimed, could scare away demons with his scowl. Francesco had drunk her wine and, deciding that even with a blackened front tooth she was not unattractive, had started to tease her, telling her she talked like the gypsy girl who collected rags with her mother near his home. She'd slapped him for the comparison, but he'd caught her hand and, kissing her fingers, explained that he'd always thought the gypsy girl very beautiful, with her dark eyes and hair like a raven. She forgave him, letting him kiss more than her fingers.

He'd spent the night in her bed, waking in the morning with his cheek against her breast. It was infinitely better than the restless
nights he spent next to Michelangelo, who snored and kicked him with the boots he often wore to bed. Francesco had made up the bit about the gypsy girl, but he did like Susanna's dark eyes, as, unlike Calendula's, they didn't confuse him or remind him of what he'd lost. Maybe that was why he'd found her so easy to confide in.