The Wolves of St. Peter's (26 page)

Francesco wiped the blood from the corner of Susanna's mouth with his cloak. Beads of sleet clung to her dark lashes like tears. He had to do something. He'd heard enough.

He started to rise, but Calendula put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. She dropped to her knees, her cloak a tent around the dead girl between them. Grasping his arms tightly, she looked into his eyes. “Come with me, Francesco,” she whispered urgently. Francesco could smell her perfume. “We'll tell them Pollo Grosso killed Guido when he tried to harm me. Or something else … You're smart, you'll think of something. We can live in Florence. You, me, Agnello … You can help me. I'll live as Guido's grieving widow, and you can be a very rich man. Far richer than Guido would ever have made you.”

She was animated now, inventing a fairy-tale ending to this gruesome story. It was as if she'd forgotten she was responsible for the death of the woman in his arms, forgotten she was Calendula, so ready was she to step into the role of Juliet, so deluded she thought he would do this for her.

She was still pleading with him, but now her voice had become seductive. “And you won't only be rich. I'll give you whatever you
want. Anything at all. I know I remind you of her. I can be her for you. I just want Agnello. Please, Francesco.” She started to cry. “You can get him for me. You know where he is.” And now she was leaning in to him, seeking out his mouth with hers.

Why now, you bitch?
he thought, reaching for his dagger. Supporting Susanna's body with one arm, he stuck the dagger in Calendula's face, pressing the point against her cheek, the skin denting beneath it. One sharp push and he could erase her beauty forever. She gasped, her blue eyes flickering with fear, but she held his gaze.
No,
he thought,
not just any whore to me.

And without relinquishing his hold on the dagger, he wrapped his arm around her neck, pulling her toward him, Susanna's body now pressed between them, the blade still against Calendula's face now grazing his own. He kissed her with all the strength it had taken not to push his dagger through her cheek. He kissed her for Susanna, for Juliet, for everything he wanted back. His youth, his mother, his certainty. She grabbed his hair and kissed him back with the same violence, her mouth urgent and hard against his. Whatever she kissed him for, he knew it had nothing to do with seducing him. And when he finally broke away, the kiss—if that was what it was—ended as brutally as it had begun.

The only sound was the whisper of sleet and his own breathing. The expression on Calendula's face was inscrutable.

“Go help Dante find a shovel and meet me by the grove of apple trees near the wall,” he said hoarsely.

Silently dropping the veil back over her face, Calendula obediently turned away and beckoned to Dante, who gave no sign he'd seen or comprehended what had just happened.

Francesco looked down at Susanna, as still in death as she'd been animated in life. It seemed impossible that she would no longer
smile for him, her face lit up with childlike joy. He had ridiculed that joy, had seen it as proof of a simple mind, a mind unable to grasp the inevitable stupidity of human existence. But now it was the thing he would miss most about her.

He sheathed his dagger, lifted Susanna, and started up the slope toward the apple trees. Averting his gaze from Juliet's shallow grave, he walked along the wall until he came to the grove. The tree branches were bare, coated in ice, but in spring they would be lush with fragrant white blossoms, floating down like perfumed snow. It was the only thing he could do for her.

Holding her, he looked down the slope to the garish villa, watching as Dante and Calendula made their way toward him. Dante carried not one but two shovels, an axe, and a rod, while Calendula held Susanna's treasured bolt of silk. “I don't know why she brought this,” Calendula said. She set it on the grass and started to unroll it.

“She brought this cloth because she thought you were Juliet and I was still in love with her,” Francesco said. “She thought she could trade it for me. Like a dowry. And I was too blind to understand just how important I was to her.” They spoke calmly to each other, now just two people with a task that needed to be done.

He laid Susanna gently on the blue silk, which was already dotted by sleet. Her dowry, now her shroud.

“There are sure to be rocks and tree roots,” said Dante. “That's why I brought the axe and rod.”

Francesco stared at him blankly, not sure at first what was wrong with him. But it wasn't what was
wrong
with Dante, Francesco suddenly realized, but what was
right
with him. The shock of what had just transpired must have shaken him out of his delusion. For Dante was no longer a bat man, but a wood-carver who made fine moldings, helping a friend dig a grave.

“Go home, Dante,” Francesco said. “I can do this.”

Ignoring him, Dante put the tip of a shovel to the ground and stepped down on it hard. “It should be deep enough so the wolves can't find her.”

Knowing Dante had his own ghosts to bury, Francesco murmured his agreement as he, too, set his shovel against the hard ground.

They dug together in silence, down through the layers of Rome, piling the soil to one side while on the other side Susanna's body rested on the shimmering blue silk. Time and again, they dropped their shovels and picked up the rod to pry up a rock or the axe to chop through a tree root.

Deeper, deeper. He and Dante reached their knees, their waists. They were not deep enough yet when night settled around them. Calendula left and returned with two torches, planting them at either end of the grave.

He had never worked like this. Francesco Angeli did not labor; he carried the purses of important men, watched over their fortunes, their land, and their wives, and woe to him and everyone he loved if he should covet said wives. His arms ached, his back ached, but still he dug and chopped and pried, his tears and sweat mixing with the sleet that ran down his cheeks.

Some children came to investigate the torchlight and ran back down the hill to spread the news from farmhouse to hovel:
Susanna—you remember her—the silversmith's girl from the market.

Soon, over the edge of the grave, Francesco could see lights making their way up the hill toward them. He was momentarily confused. Fireflies. Fireflies on a summer night in Florence. Chasing them with his sisters. No, not fireflies. Torches. Not many at first, a few lone torches from beyond the villa. No, from all directions. Men
and women bearing torches, converging on the grave, lighting up the night. He put his shovel into the ground and lifted more wet earth.

They gathered around the grave.
Two, three, four, five, six, seven
… An English rhyme his mother knew …
All good children go to Heaven …
Another spade of earth, another torch at the graveside.

Someone passed a torch down to Dante, and he planted it in the ground between them. They were up to their shoulders now, every shovelful of dirt needing to be lifted higher. Francesco's arms screamed for mercy.

Above them in the torchlight, the ice on the tree branches glowed like fine crystal. And still they kept coming. He recognized some of them as the men and women who had danced and laughed in the Colosseum.
A time to be born. A time to die. A time to dance. A time to mourn.

Beyond the walls the wolves howled, but no one flinched. The crowd stood silently, holding their torches high.

When it seemed he would dig ever deeper until it was his own grave, Calendula broke the silence. “It's deep enough.”

“No,” he said, speaking for the first time since his shovel had bit into the earth. “The wolves …”

“She's right, man,” Dante said. “It's deep enough.”

Francesco allowed Dante to take the shovel from his blistered hands. He ran his sleeve over his forehead and felt the grit and dirt, his hair slick with sleet and mud and sweat. Francesco reached up and an unknown hand took his arm and pulled him out of the grave and back to earth.

Around him, the crowd parted. Calendula was not among them. How many people were there? Twenty? No, thirty. Forty. Fifty. Simple folk, their clothes wet, but they didn't shiver. They
didn't speak, either, only looked at him with the knowledge that one day this was their destiny too.

Susanna's hair and clothes were soaked through from the sleet, but it had washed the blood from her face. He folded the cloth over her body, her skin cold to his touch. After holding her close one last time, he carried her over to the grave and, kneeling on the ground, handed her down to Dante, careful not to snag the cloth on the rough sides of the hole.

Someone had gone for a priest, who now said the Mass for the Dead:
“Grant her eternal rest, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her.”
People silently crossed themselves. Francesco had not prayed for a long time, but he knew they did it out of respect and was grateful to them.

Dante set her down gently, taking a moment to smooth the blue silk. He removed the torch and handed it up to Francesco, who, with his muscles close to failing, pulled Dante back above ground.

Again they took up their shovels. Francesco tried to drop the first shovelful softly, but winced as the dirt hit the silk shroud. He had no sense of how long it took them to finish, only that it was so deep into the night that dawn could only be an hour or two away. They smoothed the last of the soil. Slowly, one by one, the men and women passed by the grave before making their way back down the hill, a fading trail of light like the tail of a passing comet.

There's nothing left now,
he thought,
but to return to the house in the square.
Susanna's house or Michelangelo's—whichever he could face. He could feel exhaustion weighing him down, and he wondered for a moment if he would lie there on the mound of freshly turned earth, never to wake again. Where was that fever that had haunted him these past days? If only it would come back now and take him away.

“Come on, man,” Dante said. “It's time for you to go home.”

Dante handed him one of the remaining torches, and they walked together down the hill. He could just make out the hulk of the villa in the darkness when he heard Calendula calling from a window.

“Francesco, you will bring me Agnello?”

Dante came to a halt beside him, but Francesco gave him a push and kept walking.

“I know you'll bring him,” continued the disembodied voice. “I'll wait here. And when I have my son, I will leave.”

“I haven't been well,” Dante said as if he'd heard nothing. “I don't know why. I remember so little. It's all so confused.”

Francesco didn't know how to answer, and he lacked the strength to do so. But Dante didn't seem to need an answer, and as they walked toward the bridge, Francesco wondered if he should tell Dante to keep what he'd seen quiet.

“I loved her, but what would she want with a poor wood-carver?” Dante said, shaking his head. “I think I'll leave Rome and go back to my father's in Urbino. Will you go back to your father now?”

“No,” Francesco said, telling the truth, although it had nothing to do with confronting his father and ending his exile. To return to Florence now was to follow Calendula. With Pollo Grosso's help, she might succeed in impersonating Juliet for a while, maybe a long while, but sooner or later she'd be found out, and he didn't want to be there when it happened.

They parted at the other side of the bridge just as the first light of dawn was forcing its way through the clouds. The sleet had stopped. Knowing this to be the last time they'd meet, they embraced each other. “Wash your face before you go,” Francesco said, managing a faint smile. In the cold dawn air, his breath was like puffs of white smoke. “It's so dirty your mother won't recognize you.”

“Nor yours you.”

“Sadly, I have no mother to return to. You're fortunate, Dante.”

Dante nodded, then asked, “Will you go to the authorities?”

“No. It won't change anything.”

“But you'll take her the boy?” he asked quietly.

About that Francesco didn't know, but he gave Dante the answer he knew Dante wanted to hear, and after a final embrace they parted.

Francesco turned toward the Piazza Rusticucci, imagining Dante in his shop, gathering his few tools before finding his way back to Urbino, where rest and the good air would make him feel like a man again. He had less hope for himself.

He took the alley to the back gates. He knew it was irrational, but somehow he thought he might see Susanna waiting for him there, as she'd waited the morning Calendula—no, Juliet—had died. She'd been watching the three-legged chicken and wondering if it was there to bring them bad luck or good. But of course she wasn't there. Deciding that opening her gate was more than he could bear, he opened Michelangelo's instead. He stumbled around the blocks of marble and puddles before finally pushing open the door.

Michelangelo was already awake, rolling up one of the drawings on the table while the three-legged chicken watched from the back of the chair. The only light in the room was the weak dawn seeping through the dirty window, but even that was enough to reveal Francesco's face and hair caked with mud from Susanna's grave, his clothes soaked with her blood.
If Michelangelo makes some remark about her being just another whore,
Francesco thought,
I'll kill him.

But that wasn't what happened. Michelangelo let go of the paper, and it slowly uncurled. “My God,” he exclaimed, his voice filled with genuine concern. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Susanna is dead,” Francesco said, choking on the words.

“Oh no,” Michelangelo said gently. “I am so sorry. How?”

Francesco opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. He stammered for a moment longer, and then he couldn't help it. He went to Michelangelo, laid his head on the man's shoulder, and started to cry. Cried like he hadn't cried since his mother had died and his father had held him in his arms and made all the pointless reassurances a father makes when comforting his son.