The Sign of the Weeping Virgin (Five Star Mystery Series) (3 page)

“Nothing, Maria?”

“You know what I mean.”

Yes, he did. Thirty-one-year-old Lorenzo de' Medici was not an
elected
official of the Florentine Republic but, following in his father and grandfather's footsteps, he was the head of the Medici family and its powerful inner circle, both social and political. Guid'Antonio's circle. Like Lorenzo de' Medici, whether in office or out, Guid'Antonio had everything to do with the Florentine State, and it with him.

An unpleasant vision of servants and family standing with ears pressed to the palace walls, listening, flashed before him. “Maria,” he said, “our hallway isn't the place for this.”

“Believe me, I know. All I want is for you stay with me a while.”

All he wanted was to brush by her and hurry down the narrow stone stairs to the garden gate. To manage important political concerns first, then come back home and—what? Butt heads with her again? No. To sort out everything. He reminded himself he was a doctor of law, a highly acclaimed doctor of law, in point of fact. He couldn't count the times he had stood before the magistrates in court, handling a difficult case. Retreat would have gained him nothing as Florence's special envoy to Rome, to France, or to any other place. Withdrawal would gain him nothing here.

Still. “Time and the Lord Priors wait for no man, Maria. Not even me.”

A look of extreme sorrow dawned on her face. “These last two years there have been times I desperately needed you. Instead, I had to turn to your kinsmen for everything. Even for permission to order new linens for our beds. You were never here. You still aren't. All that's left of you is a shell where once there stood a man.”

“What?” he said, staring, drawing back. “What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes, you did. A
shell?
I'm Florence's ambassador to France, for God's sake. I've worked hard for the Vespucci family—”

“For Lorenzo,” she said.

Tersely, he said, “They're one and the same. I'm leaving.”

“I didn't expect you to stay.”

Head held desperately erect, she walked past him into the bedchamber. He heard her footsteps approach the washstand, heard her hair crackle as she attacked it with a brush. He heard the sound of quiet weeping.

He descended the staircase quickly, the heels of his boots ringing solidly against stone, and walked out into the courtyard, where he found Amerigo waiting by the fountain with his worn leather satchel containing his writing pens and ink slung over his shoulder.

“
Andiamo
, Amerigo,” he said. “Let's go. It's not wise to keep the Republic of Florence waiting.”

“Praise God, it's good to be home,” Amerigo said, excitement rippling in his voice as he and Guid'Antonio quit the Vespucci Palace gate and walked south along Borg'Ognissanti, All Saints Street.

“Yes.”

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing.”

He felt Amerigo's skeptical glance. The shell of a man? Great God Almighty, what had just transpired between him and his wife? What did she mean? Playing Maria's words over in his mind made his cheeks sting with the fresh heat of anger. Why had he stood in their hallway and allowed her to speak to him thus? Not many men would do. But few men had wives like his beautiful, contentious and hardheaded Maria del Vigna. Hadn't his notary warned him against her when Guid'Antonio approached him ten years ago about arranging the marriage? “She's a virago! A sixteen-year-old girl with a mind of her own! No wonder she's not already betrothed. Messer Vespucci—she reads and writes!”

“So do my sisters. So did my first wife,” Guid'Antonio had said back to the little man.

All around him now, Borg'Ognissanti was stretching to life. Yawning merchants unlatched doors and raised squeaky wooden shutters. Awnings dripped, and sunshine warmed the vast piazza between Ognissanti Church and the River Arno. Guid'Antonio drew a deep breath, drawing in the familiar sights and sounds that offered a balm to his soul. “Amerigo—” he said, but broke off as a monk clad in black robes ran from the church garden and crashed headlong into them.

Amerigo slipped in a pile of steaming dung. “Christ!” he yelled, slapping at the glittering green flies buzzing up around his eyes and nose.

“I—oh!” The monk stopped and briefly locked eyes with Guid'Antonio. “Messer Vespucci!” he cried and dashed on down the Borgo.

“What the hell was that?” Amerigo fussed, brushing at his tunic.

“Not ‘what’ but ‘who,’ ” Guid'Antonio said. “One of our own, considering his black clothing, and—” Just then two other monks of the Benedictine Order of the Humiliati burst from the church gate and plowed into them. “For God's sake!” Guid'Antonio said, stepping quickly back into the street. “Watch where you're going!”

“A thousand pardons!” said the taller of the two young men. “Ohhh, Messer Vespucci! It's
you
.” Alarmed blue eyes shone from the narrow planes of the monk's alert features. His tonsure made a silvery fringe around his face.

Guid'Antonio growled, “Yes.” He had no time for this.

“That's
Ambassador
Vespucci to you,” Amerigo said. “Now get out of the way so we can go to City Hall and surrender our credentials.”

“What?” The tall monk fumbled for words. What did he know of credentials and the Palazzo della Signoria? “I mean to say you don't know me, Messer Vespucci, but I know All Saints is your family church.” He gestured toward Ognissanti. “We all know it very well.” Gathering his dignity, he drew himself up to his considerable height. “I'm Brother Paolo Dolci, and this is Ferdinando Bongiovi.”

Ferdinando poked his head around Guid'Antonio. “Brother Martino!” he yelled and bolted around them toward the Prato Gate with Brother Paolo giving chase, crying back, “May God have mercy on your souls!”

“
Our
souls? Yours first!” Amerigo said, swearing and wiping his boot with a handful of the straw littering the thoroughfare. “What did he mean by that? If I had my hands on the rascal leading that merry chase, he'd have good reason to run. I just cleaned three weeks' travel off these boots, and now they're covered with shit. Monks!”

Guid'Antonio turned over in his mind the glittering excitement and fear he had witnessed in the faces of the three young men. “Who knows? As for Brother Martino, a heavy burden fueled that high emotion, else, why flee his Benedictine brothers?”

They cut through a byway so narrow and lofty in places, its steep walls never felt the sun. “Ugh,” Amerigo said. “Here's an alley ripe with piss and last week's boiled pigeon livers.”

Guid'Antonio slowed, his body drawing back. At the far end of the alley, Giuliano de' Medici slumped to his knees, his cloak a black cloud billowing around him. Blood gushed from his head. Guid'Antonio gasped, staring as a scarlet lake spread outward from Giuliano's ruined corpse.

“Uncle! What is it?” Amerigo said.

Guid'Antonio snapped his head toward his nephew. When he looked back down the alley, Giuliano was gone. “Nothing,” he said, swallowing hard over the lump lodged deep in his throat. “I thought—” He pushed the image back into its dark hole. “I'm only worn out from the road.”

“Me, too,” Amerigo said. “Times there were the last three weeks I thought my rear end would wear through the saddle. Do you remember the night I spent talking with the old monk in Piacenza?”

“Absolutely. We were late getting started the next day.”

Guid'Antonio started walking again, profoundly shaken by Giuliano's ghostly image. In France, painful memories had gnawed at him, coming out at night like rats. But he had witnessed no visions of Giuliano de' Medici. Now he was home was he to be completely devoured by guilt and grief, when all he wanted was peace in his heart? Thinking of Maria, he choked back a laugh.

“The old fellow kept prattling about the coming of a new heaven and earth. What do you suppose he meant?”

“Annius of Viterbo has been predicting the defeat of the Turks,” Guid'Antonio said. “The building of holy cities and a new Jerusalem.”

“Praise God for a miracle! And for sunshine, too,” Amerigo said as they entered Piazza Trinita in a golden shaft of light.

“That's the prophet's prediction. The Ottoman Turks embarked on a career of conquest centuries ago in the name of religion. I doubt they'll abandon their mission anytime soon.”

“Islam,” Amerigo said.

“Yes. Few have managed to hold them back.”

“Vlad the Impaler did.” Vlad Dracula, the prince of Wallachia, near the kingdom of Hungary.

“How very true,” Guid'Antonio said.

A solitary man wearing a full leather apron hurried past them in the direction of Ponte Santa Trinita, off toward their right. Two women, their faces shining with a taut white candescence within their dark hoods, entered Trinita Church on the square. Did they mean to pray before Trinita's miraculous crucifix? Well, Guid'Antonio no longer believed in miracles. Certainly not when it came to the Turks. In 1453, Mehmed II's soldiers had conquered Constantinople and slaughtered King Constantine XI along with his army of Christian defenders. In the aftermath of that massive blow to the Christian world, on the blood-stained floor of Constantinople's Cathedral of Saint Sophia, the young sultan had offered up a prayer of thanksgiving:
There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet!
Mehmed had proclaimed the church a mosque and named the defeated city the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and so it had remained for the last thirty years.

Guid'Antonio's gaze strayed toward the wide side street bearing off to his left. A turn in that direction would lead him to Florence Cathedral. His stomach shrank into a hard ball. He had not stepped inside that holy place since spring 1478. Giuliano's broken body was the stuff of his dreams; how could he face the haunting images within those walls again? He could not. A ghost inhabited that enormous, twilight space. A soul lost and wandering, waiting to be saved. More than one, perhaps.

A red gateway opened off Piazza Trinita onto Via Porta Rossa. He unlatched the gate, let the wooden arm fall back into place with a thud and set a quick pace beneath Palazzo Davizzi's limp crimson banners. “Sometimes, Amerigo, whether or not you believe God has granted a miracle depends on whose side you're on,” he said.

“Soap scraps! Used hose!”

“Squirrel pies, pigeon pies, buy my day-old pies!”

“What's this?” Amerigo said as they strode into the market, where vendors in makeshift stalls pitched their wares. “Bargain day in Mercato Nuovo?”

“It appears so.” All around the square, rain-soaked silk streamers and ribbons dripped from balcony railings. Banners drooped, mounted on poles. Prominent among the banners was Lorenzo de' Medici's personal standard displaying a golden falcon caught in a net. An odd image for Lorenzo to embrace, or so it had always seemed to Guid'Antonio.

“Thank God our Lorenzo still flies with the Soderini and the Rucellai families and all the others,” Amerigo said, his voice grave. “The Pazzi dolphins would be sailing over us now, if Francesco de' Pazzi had his way. Damn his soul to hell for plotting Giuliano's murder.”

A muscle jumped in Guid'Antonio's jaw. “Francesco didn't plot it alone, as you well know.”

The facts behind Giuliano de' Medici's assassination had been slow in coming—a hard questioning here, sizzling pincers applied to private parts there—and they had led to a startling discovery, since they implicated Florence's powerful neighbors to the south, Rome and Naples. With Francesco de' Pazzi as his pawn, the fall of the house of Medici had been masterminded by Pope Sixtus IV's nephew, Count Girolamo Riario, with the full blessing of the Pope. Fear. Jealousy. Greed. Lorenzo's place as the unofficial ruler of Florence rankled the Pazzi family, particularly Francesco. Francesco's enormously wealthy family of international bankers was equal to the Medicis on Via Larga, or so Francesco believed. Wasn't
he
the head of the Pazzi holdings? Hadn't
he
snaked the all-important Papal account from Lorenzo and put it in his own hands in Rome?
And in retaliation for the loss of that hugely lucrative account—which Lorenzo's family had held for years—had not Lorenzo then tricked the Pazzi family out of a bountiful inheritance it had expected to collect?

This was personal: an outrage not to be borne. Girolamo Riario understood this. And he understood Francesco, too. Acting from the Vatican, Girolamo had appealed to Francesco's overblown sense of self-importance, his anger, his envy and frustration. Succeed in killing Lorenzo and his only brother, and the Pazzi family would no longer live under the thumb of the Medici brats. Succeed, and Sixtus IV and Girolamo Riario's mercenary troops could creep closer to Florence's frontiers as part of their private scheme to increase their own family's standing in central Italy. In this, they had enlisted the help of the king of Naples, who had his own personal vision of his place in Italy dancing in his head.

“Girolamo Riario was damned two years ago, along with his uncle, the Pope,” Guid'Antonio said. “And Francesco is dead.” Pulled naked and bleeding from his hiding place at home in the Santa Croce quarter and shoved from a window of City Hall with his hands bound behind his back and a noose around his neck before Giuliano was cold in Via Larga. As news of Giuliano's assassination and the aborted attack on Lorenzo swept through the streets, the Florentine population had not risen up against Lorenzo and welcomed the Pazzi family as its liberators, as pudding-headed Francesco had hoped. No: instead, they had branded Francesco a traitor scheming to hand them over to their enemies and had thrown their support behind Lorenzo, who had stood before them on the balcony of the Medici Palace, his neck wrapped with a bandage whose fabric was stained with blood: the wounded, singular head of his grieving family.

Guid'Antonio smiled to himself.
Unofficial
, indeed.

“Squirrel pies! Crow pies, cheap!”

Amerigo said, “Those pies smell like they've been here forever. I wanted a bite to eat, but now my appetite's flown.”

“In writing, please?”

“Nonna!”
Amerigo called to the old grandmother hawking the tragic little tarts. “You call that dried-up parchment a pie?”