Courtesan's Lover (33 page)

Gianni stopped and looked about him. The alley he was in was narrow and cramped—it was strewn with rubbish and smelled of salt and dirt and stale fish. An old woman peered out at him from a shutterless window—a lightless opening like a crack in a rock; she glared suspiciously at him for a second, her knobbed fingers gripping the broken sill, and then she drew her head back inside, muttering to herself.

“Where the bloody hell are you, Carlo, you bastard?” Gianni muttered aloud, looking around him. “Where have you gone?” Ducking down into a gap between two buildings on his left, he headed toward the docks.

Sunlight was dancing in sparkling fragments on the wavelets out in the bay, but between the berthed ships, the water moved more sluggishly—it was a slow-swelling, brackish brown, and as it shifted and lifted, sodden flotsam pushed up almost silently against the bellies of the ships and moved away again. A greasy-looking rat walked gingerly along a taut rope down toward a bollard. Eyeing Gianni for a second, it jumped down onto the cobbles and skittered away beneath a pile of broken boxes.

The dockside was quiet, almost empty, apart from a couple of nut-brown sailors, an elderly man in a filthy, salt-encrusted doublet, and a scrawny, pigtailed boy about his own age; the boy was sitting on an upturned barrel, wiping his eyes and nose on his sleeve.

Gianni ran up to the sailors.

“I'm sorry,” he said, breathlessly, “but have you seen a man—a young man about that tall?” He held up a horizontal hand. “He has light-brown hair, he's wearing a doeskin doublet, and he's with two little girls?”

One of the sailors shook his head, raised his hands apologetically, and said something incomprehensible in a language Gianni had never heard before. Gianni forced a smile of thanks, then strode across to where the old man in the dirty doublet was splicing the end of a fraying rope without looking at it.

He repeated his question. “He's with two little girls. Have you seen them?”

The old man gazed up at Gianni with milky eyes and shook his head, frowning doubtfully. “I'm sorry, lad. He might have been here, but I've not been noticing.”

Gianni nodded, feeling sick, and ran down toward the boy on the barrel.

“Might have done,” the boy said in answer to Gianni's question, swallowing what sounded like the tailend of a sob.

Gianni's heart thudded. “Please—which way did they go?”

The boy wiped his nose again and stared down at his smeared hand. “Why do you want to know?” he said, looking back up at Gianni. His gaze raked Gianni from head to foot. “Interested in him, are you?”

Gianni frowned. “What? What do you mean? He's my brother.”

The boy's expression changed. “Your brother?” he said, now sounding surprised.

“Yes—does it matter? I just want to know where he is.”

“He told me he was going to the tavern round the corner,” the boy said, jerking his head in the direction of the entrance to another filthy little alley. “But from what he said, I don't think he was planning on staying long.”

“Thank you,” Gianni said over his shoulder as he began to run again. “I'll try there now. Thank you very much.”

***

Gianni grabbed the old tavern-keeper by the upper arms and shook him. “But don't you understand? It's urgent!” he said. “He's my brother, and…and he's…he's in danger. I have to catch up with him and warn him.”

The lie seemed plausible enough.

“Someone told me he had come in here,” Gianni said, still gripping the tavern-keeper's arms. “He was with…our two nieces. Have you seen them? They don't seem to be here. Could they have gone upstairs? Please—I have to find them! Do you know where they might have gone?”

The old man stood still, saying nothing but staring pointedly at Gianni's hands on his sleeves—first the right, then the left. Gianni let go, stood back a step, and held his hands up, palms forward, as though in apology. The tavern-keeper shrugged and jerked with his chin toward the far end of the room.

“They went down there,” he said.

Gianni pushed his way through the busy tavern and saw, almost hidden behind a table, a steeply descending set of ladder-like steps. He scrambled down and opened the tiny door that stood at the bottom. The narrow corridor that led away from the door was long enough to disappear out of sight, and was entirely lightless.

“Oh, God!” he said with a lurch of his stomach. “He's taken them into the
sottosuolo.”
His father's voice, sharp with anxiety, rang in his ears from years before as he stared now into the blackness. “
Don't you ever let me catch you going in there, do you hear, Gianni? People get lost in the
sottosuolo
. Lost for good. People go exploring and never find their way out again. And some people actually live down there—wicked people running from justice
.” People like Carlo, Gianni thought. Swallowing down a smothering feeling of panic, he hurried back up to the cramped back room of the tavern and squeezed his way through the crowded tables to where the old man was now standing with a pewter jug in his hand.

“Please,” Gianni said, trying to keep his voice calm. “Please—do you have any sort of lantern I could take?”

The old man put the jug on a nearby table, lifted down a thick torch from a wall-bracket, its end wrapped in flaming, pitch-soaked sacking, and handed it to Gianni. His face was quite expressionless as he said, “Mind you don't let it go out. I doubt you'd find your way back in the dark.”

Gianni nodded, and, holding the torch above the heads of the many drinkers, pushed his way back to the steps.

The corridor into which he stepped now had long ago been hacked out of the tufa stone on which the whole of the city was built; it was narrow—hardly wider than Gianni's shoulders—and he had only inches of headroom. The torchlight sent black, flickering shadows dancing across the walls. Gianni held his breath, straining his ears as he walked. He could hear nothing but his own hissing pulse-beat.

Creeping forward, moving sideways, holding the torch out behind him, he picked his way carefully as the ground began to slope more steeply downward. The stone was damp and slippery, and a sharp smell of mold hung in the air. The tunnel meandered down another few hundred yards, then bent sharply to the right, where a short flight of steps, carved as precisely as if they had been in a cathedral, dropped the level of the tunnel another dozen feet or more.

At the bottom of these steps, Gianni stopped. In front of him, a square of denser black a few feet ahead indicated that some bigger space lay before him. Holding the torch up high, he saw a vast cavern. Its walls soared up twenty, thirty feet, and the floor stretched away from him into blackness; the cave could have held a crowd of a thousand, with room to spare, Gianni thought, panic beginning to lump uncomfortably in his throat.

He pulled a linen kerchief from a pocket in his breeches and, crouching, tucked one corner under a stone. Having thus marked his way out, he walked into the emptiness, looking around him, searching for Carlo. His own shadow lay out to his right, long and black, rippling over the uneven floor as the torchlight bobbed and swagged.

The cavern was empty.

Carlo and the two little girls were nowhere to be seen and the cave was silent, but as Gianni stared around, now holding the torch above his head, he saw the mouths of another three tunnels, leading out of the cavern at the far end.

Which one had Carlo taken?

And where did it lead?

He walked across the cavern, glancing down over and over again at his feet, treading carefully over the rubble and rocks that made up the floor. All he could hear were his own tentative footsteps and the skittering clatter of small lumps of rock, dislodged as he walked.

And then a long, wailing moan sliced out into the air around him.

Gianni froze.

***

Every street Modesto saw teemed with children, and every child he saw was one of the twins; his heart jumped in his chest at each sighting, then plummeted with sickening disappointment. Every person he asked gave the same shrug, the same frowning, apologetic headshake.
“No, Signore, I'm so sorry—I've seen nothing.” “What do they look like, again, Signore?” “I hope you find them, Signore.”

He began to walk back toward the house in Santa Lucia.

Ilaria was sitting on a stool by the ashes of the untended kitchen fire when he arrived. Her swollen face and tear-blurred eyes gave him the answer to his unspoken question.

He said, “The Signora not back? Nor Signor della Rovere?”

“No one.” Her voice was thick and distorted.

“I'll go back up to San Tommaso.” Keeping still was unbearable. “See if she's still there.” He could not stay and wait. Banging back out through the front door, Modesto began to run.

It took him no more than a few thudding moments to reach the other house. The front door was unlocked.

Wheezing a little, he pushed it open. Stepped up into the entrance hall.

Silence.

“Signora?”

Nothing.

“Are you still here?”

Nothing.

He turned to leave.

The faintest sound from upstairs. The softest murmur and a shifting of something along the floor. Hardly more than the rustle of fabric. Modesto ran up the stairs two at a time. The door to the Signora's former bedchamber was wide open. Holding the door handle, he leaned in—and froze.

She was crumpled on the floor at the side of her bed, her head leaning up against the mattress, and, around where her face was pressed against the brocade covering, a dark stain had soaked out like a poorly executed map. A thin trickle of darkening red ran down her neck, and the top edges of her shift and bodice were discolored. Her eyes were closed.

“
Porca
Madonna!”
he said under his breath. Then, running to her and crouching beside her, pulling her up into his arms, he said, “Signora? Francesca! Francesca—open your eyes! Oh, Christ! Look at me!”

Her head hung back over his arm.

Under her chin was an untidy, ragged-edged wound about the size of his thumbnail; a long cut sliced upward from this, running in front of her ear and up into her hair, which was stiff with dried blood.

“Oh, God—please, no!” Modesto muttered. “Francesca!”

He touched near the edge of the cut with a tentative fingertip. Her skin was warm. Looking down at the red-stained dress, he saw, with a vertiginous swoop of relief in his belly, that her chest was rising and falling. He shook her gently.

“Come on,
cara
, open your eyes!”

Her mouth opened a little. A soft, wordless noise sounded somewhere in her nose. Her eyes opened. And closed.

Modesto pushed one arm farther around behind Francesca's shoulders and tucked the other in underneath her knees. Pulling in a breath and holding it, he lifted her, staggering a step backward as he shifted her weight up into his arms. He put her down gently onto her bed.

“What's happened to you? Who did this?” he muttered, unsure what to do first. “Water,” he said then. “I need water. That cut needs cleaning.”

He ran back down the stairs and into the kitchen. Everything crated and packed in straw. Nothing useful, though—no water, no cloth. Nothing.

“
Merda
!”

For a moment, he stood irresolute, then ran back upstairs.

“
Cara
, can you hear me?” he said, softly, crouching down once again at the side of the bed.

Francesca made another soft noise in her nose, and then he saw her run her tongue along her lower lip, which was split and swollen. She opened her eyes.

“Have you found them?” she said in an almost soundless whisper.

“Who did this?” Modesto said, deliberately ignoring the question.

“Have you found them?”

He did not know what to say. “We…we're still searching. I've not seen Signor della Rovere—he might have them.”

She turned her head away from him.

“Who did this to you? What happened?”

There was a long pause. Then she said, so quietly that he had to lean close to her face to hear her, “Michele.”

“Oh, no…no…no. The bloody bastard!”

“Please,” she said then, reaching for his hand.

“What? What is it, cara?”

“Get Luca. I want Luca. Michele said Carlo's taken them.”

“I don't know where he is…Signora.” He paused. “Who's Carlo?”

She ignored his question. “Please, find Luca for me.”

“I don't want to leave you on your own…”

“Just find him.”

She curled on her side and closed her eyes again. With another nauseous lurch, Modesto looked at the gaping cut around the edge of her face and at her ashen coloring. He took off his doublet and laid it over her shoulders. “I'll find him, Signora—I'll be quick.”

He ran down the stairs and left the house, taking care this time to lock the front door.

***

The voice that cried out into the silence of the cave was high pitched—clearly that of a child. Swearing softly to himself, Gianni began to run, stumbling and tripping on the uneven ground, but the noise stopped before he reached the far side. Facing the three tunnel mouths, he stood, irresolute, looking from one entrance to another.

“Oh, God—which one?” he said aloud, his voice sounding flat and deadened in the vastness of the cavern. Holding his breath as he tried to decide, he heard a cough coming from the central tunnel. He started to run, but the flames from his torch streamed out backward and he slowed, holding the light out as far to the side as he could to keep it from catching his hair. The tunnel was narrow and dank, and the knuckles on his outstretched hand caught against projecting lumps of rock as he walked.

Some hundred yards farther on, the tunnel suddenly widened. As Gianni slowed his pace and lowered the torch, there was another cough, and a voice called out, “Who's there!”