Pasquale's Angel Read online

  The Pope took in this spectacle with a bemused short-sighted gaze. The crowd cheered the cunning of the workshops of the Great Engineer.

  There was more. Lights blazed down from the Great Tower itself. Brighter than the setting sun, the shafts of light seemed solid as they slanted above the heads of the crowd. Images rose and melted on the white screen behind the cosmic egg, suddenly coalescing into an angel that suddenly moved in jerky steps. Half the crowd screamed, the rest gasped. The Pope, suddenly unnoticed in the midst of this miracle, touched his pectoral cross.

  The angel smiled and bowed and briefly closed its great white wings. When they opened again, a vision of a detailed landscape was revealed, an artificer’s Utopia in which every river was regulated and channelled, every city was symmetrical, and great machines rowed the air.

  And then the vision faded. A great murmur went up from the crowd, and fireworks shot up from all around the circumference of the cosmic egg, cascading tails of sparks like comets and bursting high above in showers of gold and silver. A thousand white doves were released to whirr high into the air above the heads of the cheering crowds, and from within the cosmic egg stellar divinities arrayed in silver, their faces and hands painted gold, rose up on pillars and stepped down on to the stage to greet the Pope.

  2

  Pasquale saw the fireworks from the tall double window of Niccolò Machiavegli’s room. He was sitting at the writing-table, sketching poses and attitudes of angels, particularly concentrating on the relationship between wings and arms and body. The window overlooked a narrow dark courtyard, and Pasquale could hardly see what he was doing. The sky, bruise-coloured above the clutter of terracotta roofs, seemed to soak up the last light, but he was reluctant to light the thick candle on the desk.

  He bent close over the sheet of heavy paper, the back of some official document from the last century, quickly and minutely hatching the folds of the sleeve of the gown of an angel that hung in mid-air with feet together, arms flung wide. Shadows and light in the folds of the gown blending without lines. Soft cloth contrasting with the long primary feathers of wings taller than the figure they framed. He saw the form of the angel clearly. A furious light was burning behind it, and behind the light was a great wild parkland threaded with white paths and populated by animals of every kind, including the great dragons which had not survived the Flood, all of them fleeing the light, the fire of God’s wrath.

  All this: but he still couldn’t see the angel’s face.

  Papers littered the writing-table, loosely stacked or bound with ribbons, along with a bundle of goose-feather pens, ink-pots, a tray of sand, a tilting writing-stand. Beside the desk was a rack of a hundred or more books, some calf-bound octavo volumes, the rest the cheap paper-covered editions from the new printing-houses. Works ancient and modern. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in three volumes, Terence’s Andria, Cicero’s The Republic, Dante, Livy, Plato, Plutarch, Tacitus. And Koppernigk’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium, Guicciardini’s On the Paths of Light and Micro-cosmonium, Leonardo’s Treatise on the Replication of Motion. And two by two, Niccolò’s own plays, Belfagor, The Ass, Mandragola, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, a thick sheaf of polemical brochures and pamphlets. More unchained books than Pasquale had ever seen in any one place.

  As for the rest of the room, there was a black patent stove with a pair of spoon-shaped chairs flanking it, pictures in gilt frames crowding the walls, prominent amongst them blotchy oil-portraits of Niccolò’s dead wife and children, a cassone with a cracked front panel, and a truckle bed on which Niccolò Machiavegli slept amongst dusty cushions, breathing through his open mouth. The bandage tied above the knee of his left leg was spotted with dried blood. An empty bottle of wine lay on its side on the carpet. Niccolò had deadened the pain of his wounded leg with wine and cloudy absinthe, drinking with an increasing desperation, until finally he had slept.

  Pasquale too had slept through most of the day, curled on one of the old Moorish carpets that lapped the splintered wooden floor. He’d not slept for almost two days, and was exhausted by the night’s escapades. By the time he had cleaned and bandaged Niccolò’s wound, a deep bloody groove in the flesh above the back of the knee, and examined the glass in its charred frame that he had saved from the fire, the sky had started to lighten and the automatic cannon had fired to announce the opening of the city gates, and the bells of the churches were ringing for the first mass.

  Pasquale draped his best black serge jerkin, stained with sweat and smoke as it was, over a chair and slept, and was woken after a few hours by Niccolò’s housekeeper, Signora Ambrogini. This was a small fierce old woman, no more than four feet tall, her back bent by years of labour, still dressed in widow’s weeds, layer on layer of black, for a husband who had been dead ten years. She looked after all the rooms in the rambling building where Niccolò had his lodgings, off a court backing on to the Via del Corso, midway between the Piazza della Signoria and the Duomo. She was feared and loved by the bachelor scholars and itinerant writers and musicians and artificers who lodged there, chastened by her scorn at their lackadaisical absent-mindedness and cosseted by her fierce stern loyalty.

  She burst into Niccolò’s room in the early afternoon, gave a faint scream when she saw Pasquale sleeping curled up on the carpet by the writing-table, and then a louder scream on seeing Niccolò’s wounded leg, propped up on cushions on the truckle bed.

  Alarm gave way to a kind of angry mothering. Signora Ambrogini banged to and fro, ordered Pasquale to boil up some water on the stove, told Niccolò, who was still dazed with drink, to pull down his leggings. She bathed the wound and neatly bandaged it, looking sideways at Pasquale as if to blame him for the suffering of her tenant.

  Niccolò bore this stoically and with good humour; he was used to her ways. ‘We had a little adventure,’ he said, and smiled when she scolded him.

  Signora Ambrogini threw up her hands. ‘A man of your age! You shouldn’t take up with young ruffians like this,’ she added, darting a fierce black look at Pasquale. Her eyes were bright and black in a face folded with deep wrinkles. White hairs coarse as wire sprouted from her chin.

  ‘I know I’ve learnt my lesson,’ Niccolò said. He was eyeing a half-finished bottle of wine that stood on the writing-table, but did not dare ask for it. Signora Ambrogini disapproved of his drinking. He added, ‘But I think it was profitable, all the same.’

  ‘Gallivanting shamelessly!’ Signora Ambrogini cried, and rolled her eyes with dramatic pathos. ‘And now you will miss the arrival of the Pope, and so will I, by the time I have finished with you. Oh! What a time of it you give me, Signor Machiavegli.’

  ‘Now you know you would never go and see the procession,’ Niccolò told her with fond patience, ‘because of the crowds. And as for me, there will be plenty of journalists there. All of the journalists in Florence, I shouldn’t wonder. My contribution won’t be missed.’

  The old woman bent to tie the bandage around Niccolò’s leg. ‘And I suppose this young blade is another of your journalist friends. You, young man, you should be about your work, not lurking here bothering my tenants.’

  Pasquale protested that he was an artist, but the old woman refused to believe him. She tied the bandage tightly and neatly, and Niccolò leaned back when she had finished and sighed and told her she was a miracle-worker, and he would truly believe it if she could fetch them some broth.

  ‘That young fellow is strong enough to fetch his own broth,’ Signora Ambrogini said sharply.

  ‘He is helping me,’ Niccolò said. ‘Helping me on a truly important project. And he really is an artist, a good one too, an apprentice of Giovanni Rosso.’

  ‘Can’t say I know the name,’ the old woman said with a sniff, but went off to fetch some broth all the same.

  ‘She means well,’ Niccolò said, leaning back on his pillows. ‘For the sake of God, Pasquale, pass me the bottle, there on the table.’

  ‘How is your leg?’

  Niccolò drank s
traight from the bottle, and used his sleeve to mop spilled wine from his chin. ‘I’ll try it later, but now I feel like resting. Pasquale, you still have that glass?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Let me see it again.’

  Mounted in a wooden frame that was flaking with black char, the glass had been cracked by the heat of the fire, and the picture printed or drawn upon it was so browned by heat that only a segment was visible. In fact, the picture seemed altogether darker than it had when Pasquale had rescued it, as if the medium on which it had been made was undergoing a transformation. Still, it was possible to make out figures, muffled in robes and hoods, stiffly modelled yet depicted with exquisite meticulous care, that stood behind a kind of altar on which a naked woman lay, drawn in such a way that it was impossible to tell if she was supposed to be dead or alive. Giustiniani, his hood thrown back from his hawkish face, stood with a sword, its blade softly blurred, raised above his head.

  ‘A black mass,’ Pasquale said.

  ‘Blackmail,’ Niccolò said.

  ‘What did you hear, at the window?’

  ‘I heard the name of Salai, and I heard Francesco threatening Giustiniani in a feeble but quite desperate manner. It occurs to me that Francesco has evidence that Giustiniani is performing rites such as that shown here, and is blackmailing him to provide a service.’

  ‘What service would that be?’

  Niccolò became animated. ‘What indeed, Pasquale! And why blackmail? Magicians like Giustiniani are always in need of money, and someone like Francesco would have money enough, I should think.’

  ‘Unless it is some task so terrible even someone like Giustiniani would hesitate to perform it.’

  ‘That’s the obvious explanation, although—forgive me, Pasquale—it smacks of the plot of some cheap melodrama. Perhaps Giustiniani has already performed the task, and Francesco was trying to threaten him to keep quiet. There may be a connection with Salai, and with Romano’s murder. I must think hard about this,’ Niccolò said, and drained the rest of the wine. ‘Fetch my little flask, and pour a tumbler of water from the pitcher there.’

  ‘That stuff will send you crazy, and then kill you, Niccolò. I know what it is. It has wormwood in it.’

  ‘Seven parts to a hundred parts water is the correct measure. Please, Pasquale, I do not need to be lectured about this! I need to think!’

  ‘You shouldn’t excite yourself. You’re wounded.’

  Niccolò shook his head. ‘There’s still much to discover. This is deeper and trickier than I first thought. Perhaps the scandal of the age lies around us!’

  ‘I’ll do it just the once,’ Pasquale said reluctantly.

  ‘Seven parts to a hundred,’ Niccolò said, watching closely as Pasquale poured the yellow-green liquid dropwise. He took the glass from Pasquale and drank the cloudy stuff straight down, then lay back, his eyes closed, his thumb and forefinger pinching the bridge of his nose.

  Pasquale sat and watched Niccolò. Presently he heard footsteps on the stair outside the door, and set the picture of the black mass face down on the writing-table just as Signora Ambrogini returned. She carried a tray bearing two bowls of soup and a hunk of dry bread. Niccolò said to the housekeeper, without opening his eyes, ‘Why, what would I do without you, Signora Ambrogini?’

  ‘Drink yourself into the gutter, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Signora Ambrogini said, departing after another fierce look at Pasquale.

  Niccolò said that reminded him, and burrowed under his bed, coming up with a bottle of wine. He drew the cork with his teeth, drank off a good draught. He met Pasquale’s look, and said, ‘For medicinal purposes only. Besides, it’s the last.’

  Pasquale drank a glass with the soup, but it was thin and bitter stuff, and he was happy enough to let Niccolò drink the rest, Niccolò hardly touched his soup and later slept again, and Pasquale sat at the table in the fading light and studied first the darkened picture, and then the little flying device. Try as he might, he could make no connection between the two, and set them aside and sketched first the sleeping journalist and then Signora Ambrogini, calling up her likeness by remembering her characteristic glare at him, half turned away, quick and cross. That was how he had taught himself to remember faces, not by individual details, but by an attitude or expression which called up the whole memory. He sketched the scene moments after the vaporetto had crashed, mostly from imagination, and finally turned to drawing angels, losing himself in the work until fireworks burst in the darkening sky and Niccolò woke.

  The journalist’s wounded leg had stiffened. He hobbled around the room, cursing under his breath, then collapsed on the bed. Pasquale said that he should rest, but Niccolò was determined to get out. There were questions to be asked, he said. There had been two murders, and it would not stop there.

  ‘You don’t have to come with me, Pasquale. You have done enough, risked enough. These are deep dangerous waters in which we have dipped, and I must needs go deeper. Now, I have some idea of what might lurk there, for I have charted these waters before, but you’re an artist. Your world is light, the surface of things. Go home.’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Pasquale said, with passion. ‘I’m no innocent.’

  He had surprised Niccolò at least as much as he had surprised himself. The journalist rasped the black stubble on his chin with his thumb. Eventually he said, ‘I’m tired, it is true. I would not object to help, if such help was offered for a good reason.’

  ‘Well, if it is reason that you need, you still owe me the money I flung at the driver last night.’

  Niccolò laughed. ‘And in the end that fare was hardly enough for the man’s trouble, eh?’

  ‘I want to know what this is about. I’ve never before been involved in plots. It’s more exciting than etching portraits of the Pope, which is what we’ll be doing next week to earn our bread.’ He was thinking of the bare cold rooms he shared with Rosso, the grind of poverty. If he could regain the florins paid to him he could at least afford most of the materials for his painting. And when that was done he would not need to search for money. He scolded himself for believing this so fervently and foolishly, for hope is foolish, given the hard ways of the world, yet he could not help his hope.

  ‘I forget how young you are,’ Niccolò said, looking shrewdly at Pasquale. ‘Help me around the room a few times to loosen this stiffness in my leg. There will be a good deal of walking to be done before this is finished.’

  But before Pasquale could help Niccolò to his feet, there was a knock at the door and Signora Ambrogini burst in, saying that there was a lady who wished to see him.

  Niccolò sat up, suddenly alert. ‘A woman? Who is it?’

  ‘Not a woman, but a lady,’ Signora Ambrogini said firmly. ‘She would not give her name.’

  ‘Well, send her up, send her up. If she wishes to speak to me I can hardly refuse.’

  ‘With your room in the state it is! Really, Signor Machiavegli, you can hardly receive a lady here. It isn’t proper.’

  ‘If she is desperate enough to wish to see me, she will not be concerned with my circumstances. Please, Signora Ambrogini, do not keep her waiting.’

  ‘I am thinking,’ Signora Ambrogini said with great dignity, ‘of my reputation.’

  ‘Your reputation will shine forth, signora. Now please, my guest if you will.’

  She was indeed a lady. Pasquale recognized her at once, for she was Lisa Giocondo, the wife of the Secretary of the Ten of War. He would have whistled with pleasure, if Niccolò had not shot him a sharp look.

  Niccolò settled his guest in the best chair in the room, taking her heavy velvet cloak and handing it to Pasquale. In the last light that fell through the window, her indigo gown, of the finest silk trimmed with Flemish lace, set off her white shoulders and black hair, which was thickened with swatches of black silk. She wore a net veil held by a circlet of gold, which softened the contours of her face. As Pasquale lit candles, he glanced sidelong at this face: Signora Giocondo d
id not have the beauty of an angel—her nose was perhaps a little too long, and one of her dark eyes was slightly higher than the other, and besides, she was a mature woman with fine lines at the corners of her eyes, while the beauty of angels was the beauty of youth—but she had a solemn radiant grace that seemed to light her oval, pale-skinned face from within. Her perfume, a sweetened musk, filled the room.

  She was as direct about her business as her gaze. She folded her hands and said that she would not be here except for a certain unfortunate event at the Palazzo Taddei, and could not stay long for her husband would soon expect her at his side at the service which the Pope would hold in the Duomo. She hoped that Signor Machiavegli would forgive her candour, but she must speak to clear her husband’s name.

  ‘I hope that you will forgive my candour in turn,’ Niccolò said, clearly enjoying himself, ‘but while I have yet to form an opinion of your husband one way or the other, it is certain that it is in his power to commission a death should he have need of it.’

  ‘My husband is indeed a very powerful man.’

  ‘I’m not likely to forget that,’ Niccolò said.

  Lisa Giocondo said with resolve, ‘Signor Machiavegli, I know that we can never be friends, for my husband has the office which you once enjoyed, but perhaps we can at least not be enemies. I would help you in your investigations, and hope that in your heart there is a measure of Christian charity that will respond to my plight.’

  ‘Let me assure you, signora, that I am pursuing not a vendetta, but the truth. It’s truth that interests me.’

  ‘In that we can agree.’

  ‘Then if I may ask a few questions.’

  Lisa Giocondo looked up at Pasquale, who at that moment, with a piercing thrill, understood that she was the lover of Raphael. She was here to assure Niccolò that her husband had not had Romano killed for revenge, or as a warning.

  Niccolò, who was leaning forward at the edge of his bed with a hungry look, said, ‘He will be as discreet as I, signora.’