Pasquale's Angel Read online

  Rosso stopped, and made one of his grand gestures at the burning bridge a little way down-river. ‘Don’t you love this, Pasqualino? I’ll paint such a picture as has never been painted before! Fire and black water and men baying for the blood of men! They have talked about my handling of highlights and shadow—I’ll show them the true worth! If I find the right client it’ll fetch four hundred florins at least!’

  Pasquale had to smile. ‘Master, only you would think of a commission in the midst of this. Are we to go much further?’

  ‘What’s wrong? Hurt your leg? Quite a tumble you took, although you handled it like an acrobat. Ah, Pasqualino, I never understood why you thought it was so wrong to try and better yourself. A man must be on the lookout for any opportunity. The trouble with us Tuscans is that we’re too given over to frivolities of this sort, which is why we’re afflicted with wretchedness and poverty.’

  Pasquale began to laugh. It welled up from deep inside and would not stop. He laughed until he had to clutch the railing of the walkway to stay on his feet. The iron rail was hot under his hands.

  Rosso said, ‘Yes, I know how business amuses you. But a little more business and a little less dreaming, Pasqualino, and you would be a rich man. Look up-river! That will be the cloth manufactory of the merchant Taddei burning. See the colours that the dyes lend the flames!’

  Pasquale said, ‘I was with Signor Taddei not an hour ago.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You know? Master, how do you know?’

  Rosso said casually, ‘I saw the insignia on the side of the carriage, of course.’

  He called to the ape, Ferdinand, which was swinging idly on the rail. The creature swung down and ambled over, with a sailor’s careless rolling gait. It put a hand on its master’s thigh and looked up at him with beseeching eyes, and Rosso dropped a grape which it caught between its strong yellow teeth.

  ‘Damn you,’ Rosso told it affectionately, knuckling its bony brow, ‘I should feed you something other than grapes. Grapes are your Eve’s apples, and how you grin to show that you know it. Wicked wicked wicked fallen creature. You should not have taught him to steal, Pasquale. It was his undoing.’

  Pasquale said, ‘You are a part of it, master. Tell me it’s true or I will go mad!’

  Rosso was amused all over again. ‘Tell me what you think is true, Pasqualino.’

  ‘You knew Raphael’s assistants. I remember now that you told me so much about them at the feast-day mass, but until now I didn’t think about where you had learnt that gossip.’

  ‘But surely you know how much I love gossip? Ah, Pasqualino, you have spent so much time with the famous journalist Niccolò Machiavegli that you see conspiracies everywhere, and no doubt Spain at the bottom of all of them.’

  Pasquale shivered. He said, ‘Would you have a cigarette, master?’

  Rosso handed one over, stuck another in his own mouth, and lit both from his slow-match. Pasquale greedily drew cool smoke deep into his lungs. His hands were shaking so much he had trouble keeping the cigarette pinched between thumb and fingers. The cold night air stung his skinned knuckles. He said, ‘It was in Niccolò Machiavegli’s company that I saw you, although I did not recognize you at the time. It was in the gardens of the villa of the Venetian magician, Giustiniani. I think that you went there with your namesake, Giovanni Francesco. Something had gone wrong with your plans after the murder of Giulio Romano. Perhaps he was the leader? Or something was stolen from him, that you were going to trade with the Venetian for the promise of new positions.’

  ‘Something was stolen, perhaps. Or let us say taken by mistake.’

  It was an admission that set Pasquale’s heart racing. He said, ‘If you mean the box which captures and fixes light, I no longer have it.’

  ‘Ah, no. That was always ours. An experimental device, but one soon to become common knowledge. Raphael had been given one to try out—although he tired of it soon enough, and Giulio was able to put it to better use. More rewarding use, let us say for now. He wasn’t murdered, Pasqualino, except if you count a ridiculous accident murder. Let us say for now he didn’t die at another man’s hands.’

  Rosso’s face, lit from one side by the burning bridge, looked amused and cruel and remote. He blew out a riffle of smoke between pursed lips. So Lucifer might look, at a foolish sinner’s boasting, for Lucifer’s crime was so great that it was beyond the measure of human sin, no matter how black the heart of the sinner—unless the artificers could mount a challenge on Heaven.

  Pasquale said, ‘I suppose that you know how Giulio Romano died, then, but you will not tell me.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll work it out if you need to. But really it isn’t important. Not poor Giulio’s death, I mean, but the way he died.’ Rosso pushed away from the rail and put an arm around Pasquale, pushed him forward. ‘We have a little way still to go,’ he said. ‘Amuse me as we walk.’

  ‘Well then,’ Pasquale said doggedly. ‘After Giulio’s death you had to try a new tack, perhaps by threatening the Venetian magician. Instead, he murdered Francesco, and you fled with Ferdinand. I saw you both cross the lawn in moonlight. I thought that Ferdinand was a dwarf.’

  ‘You’re moving in strange circles, Pasqualino.’

  ‘Stranger than you think, perhaps.’

  ‘Taddei and his tame magician are hardly strange,’ Rosso said. ‘Staid, I would have said, but not strange. Even the Pope employs an astrologer: presumably the powers of the Holy See do not extend to prognostication. Talk on, Pasqualino, you haven’t the half of it yet, although I’m impressed that you know even that much.’

  Pasquale confessed that he knew only a little more, and that by guesswork. ‘I would suppose that the Venetian had Raphael murdered because he believed that Raphael was a part of your plot, although I must suppose that he was nothing of the kind. And now someone has the corpse of Raphael, and wants me, too. That’s why I had to escape, master. Taddei planned to ransom me for Raphael’s body.’

  ‘That’s beside the point. At one time Giustiniani was acting as broker for us, and after the stupid accident which killed Romano he began to pressure us for delivery of what we had promised. Francesco thought that he could return the pressure, and went to parley with Giustiniani. That was against my advice, I should say. I knew that snake Giustiniani would simply laugh at any attempt to blackmail him. He revels in degradation—after all, it is an advertisement of his power. So I earnestly treated with Francesco, and when the poor fool refused to listen I followed him. As did you, and so you know what fell out there, and that I could not save poor Francesco but had to flee for my own life. But now I need not treat with any agent, for I can deal directly with those who can give me what I want, and I them.’

  They turned off the promenade, and climbed the clanging iron stair, and started across the wide street. Pasquale said, ‘Where are we going, master?’

  ‘To see some friends of mine. You may be able to help them. And they in turn…we will see, eh Pasqualino?’

  Rosso led Pasquale along a narrow street that wound up the steep hillside, leaving behind the tall fine houses that looked out across the Arno. The shanty town of the ciompi spread across the hillside, a densely packed wave of dark shapes against the dark land. Few lights showed. The paving stones of the street gave way to mud. There was a sharp smell of burning in the cold night air, cutting through the ripe stench of the open sewer that ran gurgling down the middle of the street.

  Pasquale stopped and said, ‘Would your friends be Spanish, master? If so, I’d rather not go any further.’

  ‘Here’s fine gratitude, after all my help.’

  ‘A million thanks for your help, master, but I don’t want to be involved in this.’

  Rosso laughed. ‘But you are involved, Pasqualino. Besides, I know things you need to know. For instance, I know where your friend Niccolò Machiavegli is. Don’t you want to see him again?’

  When Pasquale tried to run, Rosso caught his arm and managed to throw him to
the muddy path. Pasquale sprawled in shock. He was stronger than his master, but the fight was gone from him. The ape chattered, plucking anxiously at Pasquale’s chest, his torn jerkin, touching his face with hard horny fingers. Pasquale calmed the animal and slowly got to his feet. ‘That wasn’t necessary,’ he said.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say, Pasqualino. That I am a traitor, consorting with enemies of the state. But it really isn’t so. Ever since we left the bridge we have been watched, by the way. I have saved your life, because if you had run away they surely would have killed you.’

  ‘If you’re caught, you’ll hang as a traitor. Master, you can’t think of this!’

  ‘These are hard days for artists, Pasqualino. We must find sponsors where we can. It doesn’t matter who the sponsors are—it is the art that we can make because of their support that matters. And I am tired, Pasqualino, tired of scraping a living painting pots and carnival masks, and dirty pictures for lecherous merchants and their vapid wives. I know that I have it in me to paint great pictures, and I need a comfortable position to do it. Many of our fraternity have fled to France for support, and even there the artificers are winning, driving out good art with bad reproductions. Spain, though, is still a friend to us. There are so many in its royal family, so many dukes and princes who wish to show themselves a better patron and connoisseur than their neighbour, who wish to glorify themselves through commissioning great paintings. Ah, but I forget that you think that you can work without any kind of sponsorship, and live on air, I suppose.’

  ‘Please, master, I’ll take no more of your mockery.’

  Rosso gave no sign of having heard Pasquale. He said mildly, ‘Look now, look down there on their work. What wonderful catastrophic light! I shall paint such a picture…’

  They were high above the Arno now. The huddled roofs of the rude dwellings of the ciompi spilled downhill towards the river. The Ponte Vecchio still burned, a small and intense line of fire. The river either side of it was a ribbon of molten copper, molten bronze, burning light alive on its sluggish surface. Beyond was the prickly city, the lighted dome of the Duomo, and the towers and spires of the palazzi and churches, and the tower of the Great Engineer with its scattering of lighted windows and crown of red and green signal-lamps. Sounds were small and faint, a distant roar punctuated by the sound of cannons.

  Pasquale said, ‘People are dying down there.’ But it was beautiful, in a powerful strange exhilarating way. He saw swarms of sparks flying up from the burning buildings on the bridge, dimming as they rose, like an inversion of the long fall of the rebellious host.

  Rosso recognized his pupil’s ambivalence and said, ‘Ah, but we are elevated above that. Catastrophe always compels from a distance, eh Pasqualino? Battles are the finest subjects of painting, when all conflict is resolved into one desperate hour. All life, and all death, in a tightly focused struggle.’

  ‘I’ll always remember the many fine discussions we had about the theory of art, master. How much further do we have to climb?’

  ‘Why, we’re here. That’s why we stopped,’ Rosso said. He stepped up to the plank door of a hovel, said, ‘I’m sorry, Pasqualino,’ and flung open the door and pushed Pasquale across the threshold.

  8

  A man sprang upon Pasquale as soon as he stumbled into the hovel. He was knocked bodily to the ground, and a sack stinking of mouldy earth was thrown over his head. He tried to struggle to his feet, but the man knelt on the small of his back and tied his hands together behind his back before lifting him up. Then the sack was jerked from his head, and he saw Niccolò Machiavegli.

  The journalist was twisting in the air, his feet a hand-span above the dirt floor, hanging by his arms from a rope which passed over the main roof-beam. It was a crude version of the torture employed by the secret police: the strappado, the rope. A brutish man hauled on the other end of the rope and lifted Niccolò a little higher.

  Niccolò gasped, and Pasquale cried out too. Then a hand was clamped around his mouth and he was shoved down the length of the room.

  The one room was all there was to the hovel, under a ceiling slung with bunches of gorse to catch any drips of rain that might seep through the loose slates of the roof. Two men sat on benches drawn up to a poor fire of dry turf and wood-chips that sent up a trickle of sweetish smoke. One wore the dark homespun robe, girdled with a rope, of a Dominican friar. He was young and plump and shaven-headed, with small features centred on a mild moon-shaped face. The other smiled at Pasquale, and Pasquale’s heart turned over with fear, for he knew the man. It was the Great Engineer’s one-time catamite, Salai.

  Turning on the rope, Niccolò called out, ‘Be careful, Pasquale!’

  Rosso ducked through the door of the hovel, dragging the ape with him. Pasquale twisted from the grip of the ruffian who had bound his hands, and called on his master to put an end to this at once. Rosso twisted the chain of the ape once more around his hand, fed the creature a grape and said without looking up, ‘I can do nothing for you, Pasquale.’

  Salai made soft ironic applause.

  Niccolò cried out again as he was jerked another hand’s breadth above the filthy floor. The brute who hauled him up was bigger than any man Pasquale had ever seen before, with a bristling beard and an eye-patch, and a knife with a curved, notched blade thrust through his belt.

  The friar said, ‘Oh, but you must not cry out yet, Signor Machiavegli. We have not begun.’

  Salai said, ‘The roof s not high enough for proper strappado, so count yourself lucky, journalist.’ He winked at Pasquale. ‘You know how it’s done?’

  Pasquale did know how it was done. He had once made sketches of the questioning of a Savonarolista, for the newsletter that peddled the Signoria’s line. He remembered too the game he had so often played as a child, hanging from a branch of a tree in his father’s olive-grove, waiting and waiting as sharp needles dug into his arms and shoulders, and his wrists ached and his fingers burned, until the burden of his body could be borne no more, and then the airy rush of release when he let go, the wonderful feeling of rolling over and over, free, in the fragrant summer-dried grass. And he thought of how it would be with no release, and turned from the sight of Niccolò’s torture, ashamed and angry.

  Salai said, ‘I’ll tell you how it was once done to me. They haul you up and then the rope is abruptly released. You fall but you do not fall all the way, and the halt almost tears your arms from your sockets. Then they haul you up again. They do it four times before they put you to the question, and by then you’re ready to say anything.’

  Rosso dared take two steps into the room, hauling the ape with him. He said, ‘And did you talk?’

  Niccolò lifted his head and said, ‘Of course he talked.’ There was a sheen of sweat over his white face.

  Salai laughed. He was quite at ease in the hovel, with its damp smoky air and its dirt floor strewn with filthy rushes, in which black beetles as big as mice rustled. He was as elegantly dressed as always, in a cloak of black Dutch cloth fastened with scarlet cord over a red silk tunic that must have been worth the annual wage of any ten ciompi, and which almost but not quite concealed his paunch, and red breeches with a padded codpiece in the Flemish manner, and black hose on his fleshy legs.

  He said, ‘Of course I talked. I squealed like a happy pig. Why not? I told them something like the truth, and even if the names were wrong, they arrested the right number of men. Who because they were innocent protested their innocence even under question, which made their guilt all the more convincing.’ A silver box was open beside him, from which he took a square of Moorish jelly, dusted with fine sugar. He popped the confection in his mouth and smacked his rosebud lips together. ‘It is time this farce was put to rest, Perlata,’ he said to the friar. ‘The sooner I am out of this flea-ridden pit the better.’

  Niccolò said, ‘I agree. For the love of God, let me down. Why do you do this?’

  The young friar, Fra Perlata, said, ‘For the love of God, of cou
rse. These matters can’t be rushed.’

  Rosso laughed. ‘For the love of God!’

  Fra Perlata said quietly, ‘Look in your pupil’s purse. See if he has it.’

  ‘I’ve done all you asked me to,’ Rosso protested. ‘That and more.’

  ‘And you will do this,’ Fra Perlata said.

  Rosso said, ‘I’m sorry for this, Pasquale,’ and unbuckled the flap of Pasquale’s scrip and poked through its contents. He said, ‘It isn’t here.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Salai said. ‘You think he’d carry it with him as a keepsake?’

  Pasquale told Rosso, ‘Master, I hardly believe you can watch this. Your need for patronage is truly great. It astounds me.’ He knew now why Rosso had been so frivolous all the way up the hill; it was how Rosso, who was fundamentally honest, always hid a lie, a misdeed, a betrayal.

  Rosso said, ‘You got mixed up in this of your own free will, Pasqualino. Tell them what they want, and they’ll let you and Machiavegli go. I swear it.’

  ‘Be careful what you say,’ Niccolò called, and groaned as the brute jerked him up by another notch.

  Salai made an impatient farting noise with his lips. ‘Enough sentiment. Let’s find out what these fools have done with it and we can get on with our business. I’ll heat my knife in the fire here and test him myself rather than watch him twist like a spider. It’s making me dizzy!’

  Fra Perlata said, ‘Please, Signor Caprotti, have patience. When we have the proof you will have your reward.’

  He was the centre of power in the room, this plump young friar, his fanaticism scarcely disguised by a superficial mildness, like a sword sheathed in kid leather. It was quite clear what he was, for Savonarola himself was a Dominican, dying even now by slow degrees, it was reported, in a Dominican monastery in Seville. It was said that a cancer had taken away Savonarola’s voice, that instrument which had once shivered all of Florence to its collective soul, yet even on his deathbed he wrote an endless stream of tracts and letters and sermons and pamphlets about the great time to come, when the pure in heart would be bodily raised up to Heaven, and the sinners would be left to face the war of the Antichrist. Fra Perlata was one of the foot-soldiers in this holy cause.