After Hannibal (6 page)

At ease in his small room, with the ancient radiator creaking and occasionally uttering soft hisses, and the smoke from his cigarettes rising up toward the ceiling, he was considering the murder of Biordo Michelotti by the Guidalotti family in March of 1398, an event which for complex reasons had started the Baglioni on their road to power. He was seeking to establish some degree of complicity in this murder, or at least prior knowledge of it, on the part of the pope of the time, Boniface IX.

An impressive figure, Michelotti, soldier and politician both.
One of the most gifted commanders in the history of Perugia. In effect he had been the first ruler of the city, though far too prudent to adopt official titles. Prudent he had been, yes, but not able—as no man of his time was able—to see any real distinction between the fortunes of the city and his own. He had dreamed of recovering for Perugia, and so for himself, those former territories which had ensured the Republic her wealth and power. And he had gone a long way toward succeeding: in a series of brilliant campaigns, he had taken Assisi, Castiglione del Lago, La Fratta and Montalto and subjected them to the Comune of Perugia.

Such a degree of success brought danger. These were territories that lay within the zone of papal expansion. There was evidence enough that Boniface had begun to find this gifted adventurer an obstacle to his plans.

The leader of the conspiracy, Francesco Guidalotti, was a churchman, Abbot of San Pietro. He had been in Rome in the December of the previous year, only some three months before the murder. Monti had not yet succeeded in unearthing any definite indications of a papal audience, but this must have presumably been the purpose of Guidalotti’s visit. The chronicles asserted that he had been promised a cardinal’s hat.

With an intensity that gathered and grew in that small room, amid the complaints of the antiquated plumbing, Monti began to run over again in his mind the events of that distant morning. Michelotti, only five months married, still in his bedchamber. The abbot arrives, accompanied by his two brothers Anibaldo and Giovanni. They ask to speak with Michelotti on a matter of great importance. He gets up from his bed, dresses, and without arming
himself, goes out to greet them in the room where they are waiting.
Why so trusting?
This was a tried and experienced soldier, a man accustomed from early youth to the practice of arms. Moreover, he was a man of shrewd judgment, passionate perhaps, but not rash—all his career went to show this. Was it that he trusted in the gratitude of the Guidalotti? They had been expelled once from the city for conspiring against him and in his generosity of spirit he had pardoned them, allowed them to return. Those we have pardoned do we always underrate? Did he not know, this man of affairs, that where there is hatred it can only be increased by favors?

He had walked into the room where they waited. He had embraced Francesco in greeting, and while the abbot held him in the embrace, the two others attacked him from behind, stabbing him repeatedly with their poisoned daggers, first in the back and then, when he fell, in the chest and throat.

Monti stirred and sighed. It had been a deed of appalling treachery and cowardice, and momentous in its results, bringing back the noble families Michelotti had exiled, the violent and ambitious clan of the Baglioni among them. But in its nature there was nothing particularly to distinguish it from a multitude of such incidents in the sanguinary history of the city. Why, then, did it exercise such a spell on his mind?

Perhaps Biordo had been bemused, softened by his youthful bride. Slackened all the sinews of war. So happy in abandonment that for those moments he saw the world as a field of love. Giovanna di Bertoldo Orsini, his wife of five months. He had risen from her side and walked out to his death. The Orsini were a Roman family, by turns allies and foes of the Pope …

Monti sat forward. Could the wife have somehow had a hand in it? She could hardly have kept his weapons from him, but a woman can do much in the way of persuasion. He would have been in haste to return to her. He would not have detected the taint of treachery in her kisses. Any more than I did after all the years. She was the same in appearance and manner as she had always been, no less loving, no less kind. The time-hallowed jokes of people who live together—his absentmindedness, her habit of making lists and drawing up programs. She had even seemed happy. On her face sometimes a look of remote inquiry, as if she were tracking some elusive thought. This wild thing she had done, where was it to be seen, what intimations had there been in twelve years of wifedom? He knew himself to be often preoccupied, unobservant of his surroundings, subject to habit in domestic matters. There might have been signs that another man would have seen, but he had seen none. She had reminded him to wear his scarf, she had continued to take an interest in his work. Things could have gone on like this for a long time if they had stayed in Turin—it was the move here that had done it. She had come in good faith, she had intended to stay, she had arranged for a leave of absence from her teaching job. But the voice of her need had been too strong.

This was his chief suffering now, not the technical act of infidelity but this urgency of her love for another. Following upon this, unavoidable, the anguish of imagining their bodies together. He could not feel anger, only the sickness of the blow. He knew himself to be mild, to be lacking in aggression. None of the Baglioni men would have borne it patiently. Can it be this, he wondered,
that draws me so to the story of blood that is Perugia’s history?

No one, as far as he knew, had followed up the Orsini connection. He felt a stirring of excitement. Such a line of investigation could lead far beyond that morning of the poisoned knives, perhaps shed new light on papal policy in the period, in all its ruthlessness and duplicity.

The Guidalotti, at any rate, had not profited from their crime. Monti thought about the extraordinary error of judgment that the family had made, more extraordinary in some ways than their victim’s reckless trust. They had apparently thought that by killing Biordo they would raise the city in their favor and be brought to power on a popular movement; not seeing, in their arrogance and stupidity, that the murdered man had been regarded by the common people with veneration, as restoring through his conquests the ancient grandeur of the Perugian state.

It was a mistake that cost them dear. A manhunt for members of the Guidalotti family was immediately instituted throughout the city. Perugian manhunts always took the same form: the incensed mob slaughtered anyone they could lay their hands on who was in any way connected with the Guidalotti, including any persons unfortunate enough to be encountered in the vicinity of their houses. The houses themselves were given over to pillage and fire.

Valuable houses on prime sites. Among those who had set on the mob, some would have been interested in political advantage, others would have had an eye on the real estate. Irrespective of right
or wrong, causes just or unjust, there were always people in the wings, with their eye on the main chance. And they were always the same people …

Blemish had things to attend to in Perugia and it was after midday when he headed back home. He was pleased with his morning’s business and especially with the way he had handled the Greens. They were a promising couple; he had thought so from the start. He saw them now in his mind’s eye, standing side by side at the top of the steps, gray-haired, blue-eyed and guileless, smiling in welcome. Once again it came to him that they were like the deserving couple in a folktale, the ones who treat the mysterious guest kindly and get the magic goose. Only the simple-hearted could convey an impression like that. Fools, in other words. He felt renewed ill will toward them. He had gone there on business and they had tried to make him share in their life. Well, this time it would be the mysterious guest who got the golden eggs. They were like Darby and Joan, he thought. The tune of the song came into his mind and he hummed it for a while then sang the few words he remembered in a cracked baritone:

While still a mile away he saw the sight that always filled him with pleasure and pride: there it stood, huge, square-fronted, imposing, set on rising ground with low wooded hills behind and the
campanile
of the little town rising beyond it. His house, his and Milly’s, someone’s nineteenth-century extravagance, now their proud possession, vast, in style ecclesiastic-Gothic, with its narrow pointed windows, dilapidated balustrades, brick-built portico and crumbling terra-cotta moldings. There was an arcade of columns running down one side, like a cloister—it was this that had given them their idea for the medieval restaurant. Much of the roof of this had fallen in and the pavement of the walk was cracked and broken. There was a lot that needed doing; they were only at the beginning. But the Greens would make their contribution and with any luck it would be a substantial one.

He found Mildred, the companion of his life, in the kitchen preparing lunch. “What is it to be today, my love?” he said.

Mildred looked up from her pan. She made a strong contrast in physical type to Blemish, being thick-necked, sturdy and slow-moving, with a habit of lowering her head as if about to charge. She smiled at him now and the light of love was in her smile. “Green-pea pottage,” she said in her deep, reluctant voice. “I have used dried winter peas, as they used to do, and colored it with saffron. It was a favorite dish of Richard the Second.”

“Wonderful.” Blemish gave Mildred two approving pats, one on each of her broad buttocks. “I think we are in prospect of more
cotto
,” he said. This was a familiar code word between them. Large areas of their flooring needed to be redone; they had decided on
traditional terra-cotta tiles throughout and so had fallen into the habit of measuring their gains in terms of these.

“New clients?” Mildred said, stirring slowly at the brew.

“I think so. An American couple. I have the strongest of feelings that they will want to enlist my services.”

Mildred smiled placidly. She left business to him. In spite of her bulk and gruffness she was wedded to the notion of female fragility. Men were the practical ones, the relevant lobes were more highly developed. Women were more creative. She herself, for example, was planning to write a medieval cookbook couched in medieval prose—the sort of enterprise that would never remotely have occurred to Stan.

“Ninety percent certain in my judgment,” Blemish said. “You get to know the look on people’s faces. Project management is as much a matter of psychology as anything.” He had a way, when pleased, of stretching his neck and raising his chin, and he did it now. “They are in difficulties with their house. I’ll get Esposito for the building. We understand each other—we have worked together before. If all goes well, we’ll be able to have the brickwork vaulting in the dining room restored.”

“That would be marvelous.” Mildred raised a thick-wristed reddish hand to her hair, dampened by steam from the pottage, which she was trying to bring to the right consistency. “You are so clever, Stan,” she said. “I know you will do it. That dining room will be the nucleus of our medieval restaurant.”

Blemish regarded her for some moments. He was touched, as always, by her loyalty, her unswerving confidence in his abilities. “We will have a fine house someday,” he said. “I promise you that, Milly.
We will have our medieval restaurant. It will be famous throughout Umbria. What am I saying? It will be famous throughout Italy. People will flock to come here, it will be
the
place. They will sit under our magnificent brickwork vaulting, at oaken tables, waited on by jolly serving men in doublet and hose, eating cabbage chowder and fried fig pastries, and quaffing ale. The floors will be covered with handmade
cotto
. The whole thing will be a vision of the High Middle Ages. We will make a fortune.”