Suicide Kings (12 page)

“I understand,” Siobhan replied, although her brows were still knitted.

Diana took her hands. “If ever there was a time to consider giving up the chase, it has since passed.” She broke away, signaling the discussion had ended.

A moment later, while brushing Diana’s long hair, Siobhan inquired, “Are you angry with your father for asking you to attend the Tornabuoni dinner?”

Diana looked at Siobhan through the long mirror before them. It was a personal question, but she had allowed Siobhan such personal intimacy in the past. Indeed, she appreciated the feeling of having a friend. “It does not bother me to attend to the Tornabuoni’s invitation. Truth is my father could be right. It might be a welcome distraction.”

“I’m more than a bit envious. You’ll be spending your time in the company of handsome and wealthy Italian men. If that’s not to your liking, I’d be more than open to exchanging places. You can have all the scruffy Irish lads you can handle.”

Diana said nothing, but gave her friend a smile.

A moment later, Siobhan persisted, “If you were not mad about the dinner tonight, why would you seem so angry with your father?”

Diana’s smile vanished. She worked her jaw back and forth, considering the question. At last she answered, “I don’t know, to be honest. My father and I have never been entirely close. My mother acted as intermediary between us. With her gone, I don’t know what course our relationship might take.”

“That is certainly too bad,” Siobhan said with a nod. “Granted, my father ripped me from my homeland and marooned me in this land of olive-skinned strangers upon his death, but he will always be the closest person to my heart. I thought it was the same between all fathers and daughters.”

“Apparently it is not,” Diana murmured.

“I’m told there is a line in the Bible that goes something like ‘Pride goes before destruction, and arrogance before a fall’, of course I don’t read Latin, and so I’m taking others at their word on that. Still, it would seem to apply here.”

Diana gave Siobhan a steady gaze. “You think I should apologize to my father.”

Siobhan raised on eyebrow. “If you wish to improve your relations with him, it could scarcely harm affairs.”

“I’ll consider it,” Diana answered, although the very thought was anathema to her. Perhaps Siobhan was right though, the Irishwoman had proven herself wise if not book-read on more than one occasion. Perhaps tonight at the dinner with the Tornabuoni she would apologize to her father and give him some reason to feel some pride in her. Assuming of course, that she survived her meeting with Pietro Benedetto.

****

Huddled in the cold church, Diana wrapped her coat around her, holding in tattered ribbons of her own body heat. The building writhed in shadows. Flickering candles provided the only defense against a lifeless darkness that spread like plague. No priest attended. A few dozen penitents skulked in the corners, wallowing in their anonymous guilt. A small cluster hung close to the altar, chanting their novenas. Listening to them made Diana feel infinitely sad. Even the icons hovered like cold and lifeless demons rather than symbols of hope and devotion. Diana wondered why churches sometimes seemed to be amongst the most unholy of places.

Her back faced the door. Leaving herself exposed was a dangerous choice, as she knew very well. She was in God’s hands. If He wished her dead, then He could very well take her in His own house. If hands reached for her or a knife went across her neck, the last thing she would do would be to aim her pistol backwards and blow a hole through whoever assaulted her. Hopefully one of these lost souls present would tell Niccolo. She could be buried in the wall of a church just like her mother. Perhaps they could lie side by side for all eternity. ‘Here lies Isabella Savrano and her daughter Diana who was too stupid to discover how to avenge her.’

Underneath her coat, Diana wore an elaborate dress of maroon with gold threading embellishments. Small pearls adorned the material making it beautiful to behold and simultaneously uncomfortable. She meant it for the dinner, but it could just as easily serve as a death shroud.

She held her hands before her as she knelt on the cold stone. Rosaries entwined her fingers. She prayed to the Virgin. A shadow slipped into the bench next to her with a sign of the cross. Diana’s right hand left the rosary and slipped into her coat, running along the grip of her pistol.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” the shadow intoned beside her. Muffled and flawed, the words came like they were babbled forth by an inhuman mouth. The voice went silent. Without looking, Diana felt the shadow turn to regard her. She sucked in a tight breath between quivering lips. Her hand tightened on the pistol. The shadow whispered, “It is God’s grace that I find you well, Diana Savrano.”

Diana’s eyes flicked to the side, trying to see him without turning her head. “You are the one they call Pietro Benedetto?”

“I am the one they call the Boar,” he answered, his breath icy against her throat. “Will you not look upon me? Will you not look upon me like your mother would?”

Mention of her mother stabbed deep in her chest. “And how did my mother look upon you?”

“With kindness,” he replied, his voice soft. “As a friend.”

She turned then and looked at him, with just the slightest hesitation. She met his eyes first, dark and sad, endless pools of misery. Long dark curls framed his face. He might have been handsome if not for his mouth. Up close she could see the texture of those teeth, the surface smooth and slightly pitted like driftwood. Irregular hunks of flesh flicked against his gums, giving him a horrible inhuman rictus. She felt her brows furrow at the sight of him, her mouth opened, but she said nothing. She did not look away.

“You see a monster,” he said.

“I don’t know what I see,” she replied, her eyes taking in everything. “Your eyes are too sad to be those of a monster. Yet I think God must have loathed you to make you as he did.”

His eyes slid over her. His jaws opened once then closed, the teeth audibly clicking together. “I appreciate your honesty. You are nearly as lovely as your mother.”

“You were in love with her.” She stated this as a fact.

“Wasn’t everyone?”

“Not everyone,” she observed.

His eyes dropped to the floor. After a moment he asked, “Do you fear me?”

“You did try to kill me.”

“You were waving a pistol at me. I left you alive.”

He was right; she had chased him with the pistol. After the run in with Mancini, she reached for that pistol too readily. “I don’t fear you any more than anyone else. I don’t know who to trust right now.”

“Believe in God alone and distrust His children on Earth.” Pietro made a sign of the cross. “For we are all deceitful creatures.”

“I guess you’re going to ask me to trust you all the same.”

He looked askance at her. It was difficult to read his expression, distorted as his face was. “I was your mother’s friend. I was unable to help her in life. Doing what I can for you is all that I can do to make amends for failing her.”

“You can start by giving me the key to the Savrano palazzo.”

Pietro’s forehead creased with lines. Long fingers reached into a coat pocket and pulled forth an iron key, which he deposited in Diana’s outstretched hand.

“My mother gave you the key?”

“She did.”

She paused for a moment. The question on her mind was a difficult one in multiple ways. Physically, she couldn’t imagine her mother and Pietro together, but she had obviously seen something in the man that bonded her to him. It was even more difficult for her to accept the possibility her mother had deceived her father. Then again, her mother had clearly hid much from her family. There was no point in letting the question fester in her mind as it surely would over time. “Were you and my mother lovers?”

His eyes went wide and after a deep breath he began to chuckle. The sound was harsh, rasping, naked of true joy. After a moment he caught himself. “Even your mother was not devoid of sight. I will not deny that my own thoughts of her went beyond those of spiritual and personal communion. I saw no indication that she returned such thoughts.”

Diana felt mildly humiliated, being laughed at. Still, the answer was a relief.

Pietro kept his voice down as he spoke, “Let me tell you some things, Diana Savrano, and hopefully you will understand. When I was but a little boy, I suppose I was as perfect an image of God’s own form as any child may expect to be. I was perhaps four or five when I first caught the malady that has so chastened me. How it came to be, I don’t know, whether a malady of the air, or an imbalance in the humors, the disease caused horrible sores of the mouth with agonizing pain and festering of the tissue. While the affliction eventually went away, it left me a fiend. When my teeth later came in, they were those of a beast. As you yourself said, it felt as if God himself had shown me great disfavor, a thought I have lived with each day of my life. With my disfigurement there was no question of camaraderie with other children or, as I grew, marriage. I became a prisoner of my parents’ home, my shame keeping me shut away from the city.

“At nights I would hear my mother and father speaking. My mother would ask what she had done wrong to have seen me transfigured into such a horrid ogre. My father consoled her as best he could, although I believe her death was, as much as anything, the result of a broken heart. My very existence was a burden for them both, and I continue to be a burden for my poor father. Naturally I understood that if my deformity was not punishment for my mother’s sins, than it must be punishment for my own. I could never understand what such a young child might have done to deserve such divine disregard.

“The Church speaks much about suffering on Earth as cleansing for the afterlife. It is, in a sense, a message I am prepared to accept. But if it is true, then I don’t understand how God’s agents in this world can surround themselves so with servants, and fine clothes and pampered lives. If suffering is the key to holiness, should not God’s ministers ravage their own flesh, and tear at their own lives? Instead the Bishop of Roma, who some call the Borgia Pope, presides over unholy orgies, sanctions murder, and is rumored to lie with his own daughter. The prelates of the church are carried forth by slaves in litters, dressed in fine silks and perfumed like Persians.”

Diana kept her voice low, “You come close to speaking heresy.” It was not a new complaint though. Indeed the Mad Friar Savonarola himself had raised such accusations. His bombast increasingly put him at odds with the Pope, a dangerous situation for him and all of Firenze.

“Let them burn me,” he whispered. “Your mother, though perfect in form, and privileged in origin, had come to a similar place in her life. She needed a deeper understanding of the mysteries of life.”

“Was she so unhappy?”

“I think her spirit was in need of nurturance.”

Diana felt a tug in her chest. “Was it me? Was she disappointed in me? Did I not do enough to please her?”

Pietro put one hand up. “No, that is not what I meant to imply. She spoke of nothing but love for you.”

Diana looked down, unconvinced. “What of my father?”

Pietro looked away. “In truth, we did not speak often of him. In my own conceit, I preferred to think of Isabella as my own in whatever limited ways that she would allow. I did not like to think upon how she belonged to another.”

Diana stared at her hands, remaining silent.

“We met here one day, your mother and I. In the cold weather I can use a scarf to mask my features. She left the church as I came in. When I slid on a patch of ice, she reached out to help me, and did not pull away even when the scarf came loose and revealed my features. She showed me great kindness. This was a year ago, perhaps. A year as her friend has brought some meaning to my barren existence. Even then she was with the Council. The Council’s views on the Church and how far it has strayed from the light of goodness were much like my own, and had influenced Isabella’s thoughts greatly. After we spoke on such matters, Isabella invited me to join the Council as my beliefs were already in line with their own.”

“You’re anti-papists, then?” Diana realized with disbelief. “You want to assassinate the Pope and overthrow the Holy See?” There were many who found the Pope in Roma to be distasteful. Many of these groups of anti-papists were radical and brutal, however, given to the same violent excesses as the Pope or worse. Religion in Italia had become a confusing and disagreeable thing.

Pietro nodded. “There was talk along such lines.”

Diana put a hand to her forehead. One of her headaches threatened. Dear God, what had her mother gotten herself involved in? She had been courting death as a heretic with such a group. Criticisms of the Church were certainly not unknown and at times, Diana quietly agreed with many of them. Yet vocal opposition to the Papacy was often a sure invitation to finding oneself tied to the stake with flames licking at one’s heels.

“We met in secret,” Pietro told her, “in the room you saw downstairs. The priests here are lazy and unwatchful and do not disturb us. It proved a reliable meeting ground and one tinged with an element of irony. When we would meet, we wore masks. Given the delicacy of our mission, it seemed imperative to function in secrecy from even each other, lest anyone of us have the power to destroy the rest.”

Diana rolled her eyes. “Sounds lovely. Doesn’t anyone meet for dice games anymore?” She shook her head. “In my mother’s note to you, she mentioned that something happened to change her mind about the Council. Can you tell me what happened?”

Pietro coughed and looked away for a moment. “Despite our use of masks, our system of anonymity remained imperfect. I knew your mother, of course, and she knew the person who recruited her. A determined effort could conceivably lead quickly up the chain. Rumors began to spread between us that the Republic had a spy amongst us.”

“I don’t understand. Savonarola is a fervent anti-papist. Why would he work against other anti-papists?” Since taking control of the Republic of Firenze Savonarola, despite being a Catholic friar, more and more criticized the Pope in Roma. Increasingly this seemed to put Firenze on a collision course with the Holy See.