Secrecy (29 page)

‘Is that silk?’ I asked.

He nodded, then glanced down. ‘It was white before I gutted her.’

‘Nothing like a bit of silk to keep you warm on a cold night,’ I said.

These were men for whom violence was as ordinary and natural as sleep.

He told me there was a fee for entering the city, which should be paid to him and his colleague directly. It wasn’t my intention to enter the city, I said. I wasn’t even passing through. I was bound for Torremagna, a village forty miles to the south-east.

‘There’s a fee for that as well,’ he said.

‘I thought you might say that.’ I reached into a pocket and took out Faustina’s hair, which I had tied with a piece of ribbon. ‘You’re not the only one who’s killed a whore.’

He came forwards on his horse and held out a hand.

‘No,’ I said. ‘This trophy’s mine. Kind of a coincidence, though, don’t you think?’

The two men stared at me, either curious or just plain foxed, and I realized I had to keep talking, otherwise the spell would break.

‘Are you on the road most days?’

They watched me with the appearance of shrewdness, as if they suspected there might be a right answer, but weren’t sure what it was.

‘There’s a man coming this way,’ I went on. ‘He’s a monk.’

The bearded man muttered something under his breath.

‘Have you seen anyone like that?’ I said.

He shook his head. A wind sprang up, and a few strands of his gruesome wig drifted across his face. He pushed them back behind his ear.

‘You couldn’t miss him. He’s a big man, dressed in black and white.’ I paused. ‘They call him “Flesh”.’

The man with the lazy eye wanted to know why. I mentioned a partiality for choirboys and suckling pig. In that order. The two men looked at each other, and I saw a thought pass between them, amorphous, yet coiled, feral.

‘And he’s a monk?’ the bearded man said.

‘A Dominican. Hence the black and white. You’re sure you haven’t seen him?’

They were sure.

‘He’ll be here soon,’ I said, ‘and he’ll have money on him.’ I paused again. ‘He wears an emerald. It was a gift from the Grand Duke’s mother. That’s got to be worth a bit.’

The bearded man picked at a tooth. ‘He’s hunting you, isn’t he?’

He wasn’t without a certain sly intelligence; I was almost proud of him.

‘If he asks about me,’ I said, ‘tell him I went to Torremagna.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘I want him to find me.’

I glanced over my shoulder. Night had come down while we had been talking, and the woods I had passed through earlier were already sunk deep in the murk. Ahead of me, the walls of Siena rose behind the two road agents, lights showing in windows that seemed randomly arranged. I remembered the striped churches, the curving streets, the penniless nobility.

I asked the bearded man how much he wanted. He
mentioned
an amount. I told him it was more than I could afford. He should remember that I was no different to him – a man trying to make his way in the darkness, a man with hair in his pocket and blood on his hands. I took out a drawstring purse where I kept such money as I was prepared to lose and tossed it to him, then watched as he loosened the string and poked at the coins that lay inside.

‘The monk will make up the difference,’ I said.

Tugging on the reins, I pressed my heels into my horse’s flanks, then rode past the two men. I was careful not to look back, not to hurry. I didn’t want to trigger a pursuit. I didn’t even want the idea to enter their heads.

Once I had gained the high ground to the south-east of Siena, I began to look for a place to sleep. By then, I was in the
crete
, as they were known, a series of chevron-shaped ridges and ravines that were often bare, revealing an unearthly, greyish clay-like soil. There was almost no vegetation. Sometimes a row of cypresses, sometimes an olive tree so gnarled that it looked biblical. The wind roamed the landscape unimpeded.

I came across an abandoned cart and tethered my horse to its one remaining wheel, then I walked a few yards off the track and lay down on a patch of couch grass, my sword beside me. He was good with a sword, Earhole had said. I wasn’t, though. I didn’t know why I had brought it. Pointless, really. The raw air skimmed across my upturned face.

I saw the road agents confronting Stufa, all three men on foot. The sun rinsed the countryside in stringent yellow light. Stufa produced a
roncolino
, a short, curved knife designed for cutting ripe grapes from the vine, and drove the rust-pocked blade into the bearded man’s abdomen, then jerked it upwards through the complex, tumbling parcel of guts. Nobody had even asked him for money. Nobody had had the chance. He was supernaturally fast and violent.

Right hand enamelled with the bearded man’s blood, shreds of red silk trailing from the blade, Stufa rounded on the man with the lazy eye. There was nothing laconic about him now. Stufa dropped his weapon in the grass and wrapped both hands around the man’s thin neck. That was the last place he ever stood. A brackish wind stole through a nearby stand of cane. The dry stalks clicked and rattled.

Later, I saw Stufa sitting with Faustina in a brown room filled with firelight and shadows. He was an old friend of mine, he said – we had known each other for years, since we were
theology
students – and because I was too busy to make the journey from Florence –
You know how it is with artists!
– he had been sent on ahead to watch over her. Judging by the indulgent, almost sleepy way she looked at him – exactly the way my mother used to look at Jacopo – she believed every word. She didn’t know his name was hidden inside hers. She didn’t know his name at all. I reached for the door handle that led to the room, intent on warning her, and woke up grasping at the
nothingness
in front of me.

I slept again, and woke to find Stufa’s knife lying near me, but the crust of dried blood on the blade was the night sky and the silk tatters clinging to the hilt were dawn’s red streaks
showing
in the east. I had visited the hospital before I left. Cuif would live, Pampolini said, though it seemed unlikely he would regain the full use of his arms. There had been too much internal
damage
. To my astonishment, Pampolini had saved Cuif’s leg. Not that the knee would ever function properly again. When I looked in on Cuif, he gave me a sickly smile.
Tell that German to watch out. He’s got some competition now.
I sat up, rubbed my face. The land unfolded to the south, its corrugations the colour of mould on cheese, no trees for miles. My dreams had felt so earthed in what was real that it was hard to believe in the world that lay before me, so unthreatening, so empty of people, and so quiet.

Perhaps that was why the events of that morning caught me unprepared. I had been riding for an hour or two when I passed a stone dwelling that crouched in the shadow of a crumbling tufa cliff. The ground all round looked worn and patchy. A man waved from the doorway. I waved back. A woman appeared. Then some children. In no time the whole family were swarming across the threadbare land towards me. At first I took this to be some kind of welcome – a traveller was a rare sight, maybe – but when I saw how starved they were, their eye-sockets hollow, almost bevelled, their skin moistureless and slack, I
realized
it was Borucher’s mare they were after. A horse was food – no, more than that: a feast – and they would kill me for it. I jabbed at her flanks with my heels. She reared, and then sprang forwards. The woman spun sideways with a shriek, her arms outstretched. I smelled her famine breath. The man lunged at me, and caught my thigh with the tip of a sickle. Then I was beyond them, wind roaring in my ears.

Two miles on, I reached a gully. Trees choked with ivy, a floor of leaf-mould. I swung down out of the saddle. My horse’s eyes were rolling like balls in a bucket. I ran my hand over her sweaty neck until she calmed down, then I tethered her and undid my breeches. The wound wasn’t deep, scarcely more than a scratch, but the stranger had marked me, and I was left with no choice but to believe in him when I would rather have pretended he was yet another demon served up by my fevered imagination. He had pierced my skin, and I was worried that some of his terrifying desperation might have entered me.

When I glanced up, the trees appeared to have edged closer, and though I was certain the starving family were too weak to have followed me into the woods, I mounted and rode on, eager to be done with the region once and for all.

Towards sunset on the fifth day, Torremagna appeared ahead of me, its mud-coloured houses huddled on a rocky outcrop. A bell-tower modelled on the one in Siena rose clear of the tiled rooftops and seemed to support the heavy sky. It was warmer, but not by much. I was travelling the white road Remo had
travelled
more than twenty years before, his baby daughter strapped against his chest. To my left, the land sloped down, then lifted into a long blunt ridge. To my right, the blue-grey cone of Monte Amiata showed above a skirt of mist.

The first person I came across as I rode into the village was somebody I recognized. He was hoisting himself along on three legs, two of which were artificial, made of wood. Only when I had passed him did he look up at me. The portrait Faustina had painted had been accurate enough. Mimmo Righetti was still in his early twenties, but he had lost all the shine and suppleness of youth. I was struck by his gaze, though, which was steady and slightly humorous, as if he thought I might be about to make a fool of myself. My eyes shifted to his crutches. The bottom of each crutch had been carved to resemble a wild boar’s trotter. Higher up, they were patterned with vine leaves and clusters of olives.

‘Beautiful craftsmanship,’ I said.

He thanked me quietly. His gaze didn’t waver.

‘Your father’s work, I take it.’

‘What do you know about my father?’

‘Only what Faustina told me.’

Looking at the ground, he nodded.

‘Is she here?’ I asked.

When he didn’t answer, a pit opened inside me, and I felt I might be sick. What if Stufa had deceived me, and Faustina was somewhere else entirely, in a place known only to him and his informers, and my long ride south had removed me from the scene, leaving him free to deal with her without any danger of me interfering?

‘Is she here in the village?’ I said again. ‘It’s important.’

Mimmo told me to follow him.

On reaching his house, I looped my horse’s reins through one of the iron bars on the window, then I stepped down, through a green door, into an L-shaped room. Though the air hoarded the sweet smell of sawdust, I could see no sign of the cabinet-maker’s tools. Mimmo’s father must have retired. Or died. Fixed to the walls were a number of wooden boxes, each of which contained a stuffed bird.

Mimmo saw where I was looking. ‘It’s a hobby.’

‘Only birds?’

‘Didn’t she tell you?’

‘Yes. She told me.’ I faced him across the room. ‘Where is she?’

‘Not far away.’ He removed the cork from a bottle and poured me a glass of wine, then poured one for himself. His hand was as steady as his gaze.

I told him what had happened since Faustina left the city. He listened carefully, and when I had finished he said that no one resembling Stufa had appeared, and that Faustina was safe. The only place to hide her, he added, was in his house.

‘But he’ll search your house,’ I said. ‘He’ll search every house in the village.’

‘He can search all he likes. He won’t find her.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

In the last decade of his life, Mimmo said, his father had become convinced that furniture should combine the functional with the clandestine, and he had begun to incorporate sliding panels and hidden compartments into almost everything he made.

Mimmo pointed to the bed at the far end of the room. ‘One of the better examples.’

I moved towards the bed. Its headboard offered a sea view, with a port on the horizon. A female figurehead leaned out from the foot of the bed, and its sides had been carved in such a way as to suggest a waterline. The frame above the drawers rippled like unfurling waves, like the beginning of a wake, while the drawers themselves, which were below the surface, were
decorated
with fish, shells, rocks and coral. I had no idea what I was looking for.

Mimmo told me to open a drawer.

‘Think about the depth of it,’ he said, ‘from front to back.’

Suddenly I saw what he meant. Given the width of the bed, the drawers on either side weren’t as deep as they should have been. Beneath the mattress, and running down the middle of the bed, would be a space about the size of a person.

‘You have to lie on your back,’ Mimmo said. ‘If you’re an adult, that is. It’s easier if you’re a child. I used to hide in there a lot. I used to call it “The Hold” –’

There was something of the schoolmaster about him,
something
self-regarding and pedantic, and I turned from the bed and put my glass down so abruptly that it nearly shattered. For all his absence of bitterness and resentment, for all his understated charm, I knew he must view me as a rival, and, odd though it might sound, and despite his obvious disability, I felt he had me at a disadvantage. He was distracting me, delaying me.

‘I’m wasting time,’ I said.

‘Then go.’

‘You haven’t told me where she is.’

He was by the window at the back of the room, staring out into the night. ‘Can’t you guess?’

I went over and stood next to him. Though it was my first time in the village, I thought it must feel like any other night at the end of winter – the faint, insistent barking of a dog, the air fragrant, almost nostalgic, with woodsmoke – but somewhere out there in the dark was a figure on horseback, a huge, hunched figure with a gash for a mouth, the black flames of his cloak flickering behind him, and I felt the urgency of the situation, and the hopelessness, and a panic twisted through me, fast and incomplete, like a lizard that has lost its tail.