The Wolves of St. Peter's Read online

  Francesco had been in Rome long enough to know that a life fit for a cardinal was scarcely less grand than a life fit for a king. It took a household of at least people to run and maintain a palace, and it was hard to know where to cut corners and still be able to live and entertain in a fitting manner. So while Asino resented the Pope’s projects and everyone associated with them for robbing him of his luxuries, Michelangelo felt more could be spared for him if these cardinals weren’t such expensive parasites on the Church.

  “What happened after they complained?” Francesco asked.

  “His Holiness came with that boy of his, and Michelangelo had to apologize in front of everyone. If I were di Grassi and Asino, I’d be checking my bed for water snakes.” The other assistants snickered as they cast guilty glances toward their master.

  “But what was wrong with the scene? It was almost finished.”

  The assistants all shrugged, clearly annoyed. “Who knows?” Bastiano whined, scratching furiously at his long, tangled hair. “All we do know is that he took one look at it this morning, declared it an abomination, and went berserk. No consideration at all for how long we’ve been slaving away at it.” Bastiano was the most experienced and talented of the lot, but also the most disgruntled. He made no effort to hide his dissatisfaction that, despite all his skill, he was still not only an assistant but a grossly underpaid one at that.

  “Stop gossiping like an old woman and bring me my food!” Michelangelo’s voice echoed around the cavernous chapel, and Francesco, rolling his eyes at the assistants, left them and crossed the spans with the two remaining loaves and the wine.

  “You’re late,” Michelangelo grumbled. “What took you so long?” Francesco decided the truth was as good an excuse as any. He didn’t give a name or say he knew her, only that a woman’s body had been found in the river and he’d stopped to watch.

  “Just another whore, I’m sure,” Michelangelo said, echoing Francesco’s own words. “If I had a ducat for every whore who found herself floating in the Tiber, I’d be a rich man. There are four thousand priests in this city and two whores for every one of them. Not that all their tastes run to women. Rome would be wise to remember the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  If Michelangelo had been a friend, Francesco might have warned him against expressing such an opinion of the clergy too loudly, even if it were true. But he wasn’t, so Francesco said nothing as he reopened his sack and pulled out the jug of wine. He might also say a few rumors were circulating around Michelangelo’s own tastes when it came to desires of the flesh. People had seen his sculptures of strong, virile men and drawn their own conclusions. While sodomy was a crime punishable by burning at the stake, Francesco was of the opinion that in Rome it was largely overlooked. Francesco had already made the acquaintance of the Vatican painter Il Sodoma, “The Sodomite,” a man who wore his nickname as openly as his collection of frocks, a collection that Imperia said was the envy of every courtesan in Rome. Still, Francesco doubted Michelangelo shared any of Sodoma’s tastes. A follower of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, Michelangelo was too prudish and afraid of eternal damnation to involve himself with women, let alone men. It’s a pity, Francesco thought, as he wrenched the cork from the bottle. It would almost make this misery worth it, to see Michelangelo wearing a fine gown!

  The wine had leaked around the cork and soaked into the remaining loaves of bread, but Michelangelo didn’t notice. He didn’t care what he ate and took no pleasure in food. However, probably out of spite for Francesco’s lateness, he declared himself hungry and took Francesco’s loaf too, all the time ranting on about di Grassi and Asino. Francesco only half-listened as Michelangelo chewed the bread, washing each bite down with wine he first swished around his mouth. He gestured like a peasant as he talked, his hair and beard were matted and dirty, and his squashed face was grimy with several days’ worth of plaster dust and smeared paint. His ill-fitting clothes were in no better condition, and Francesco thought a swim in the Tiber, as filthy as it was, might do him some good.

  “Did you send my letters?” Michelangelo asked, wiping his mouth with his dirty sleeve.

  “Letters?” Francesco repeated, momentarily confused. “There was only one on the table, and yes, I sent it.”

  “There were two letters. One to my father, another to my brother.” Having exhausted his venom for the papacy, Michelangelo was back to the one other earthly thing besides his art that consumed him: his family and how they misspent his money.

  “I sent the one to your father. I didn’t see one to your brother.”

  “Find it and send it. It is hard to believe that a man of twenty cannot perform the tasks usually entrusted to a boy of ten.”

  Francesco would have liked to remind him that Ricardo paid Michelangelo well to put up with him, but he couldn’t risk Michelangelo sending him back to Florence out of spite. He was in exile and would remain so as long as it pleased his father, not to mention that Guido del Mare still wanted to kill him. So instead, Francesco looked up to where the scene of Noah and the Flood had been chipped away and asked in his most innocent voice, “What happened?”

  The response was every bit as apocalyptic as the assistants had warned.

  THE house Francesco shared with Michelangelo had once opened onto the Piazza Rusticucci, close to St. Peter’s. But long ago, someone had blocked the front door by building a lean-to, and now they were forced to navigate the narrow alley that ran behind the row of houses to the back door in order to get inside.

  These additions to buildings were common throughout Rome, a cheap way to add a room for housing animals or to earn some extra rent. Rumor had it Pope Julius would soon issue a decree to have them knocked down, since they made many of the streets impassable to carriage traffic. Francesco didn’t care about the carriages, but he did wish he could use their front door. He also wouldn’t mind getting rid of the lean-to’s current tenants, a soap-maker and his wife. With their hands and faces burned and scarred by lye, they were an evil-looking pair whose nightly arguments could be heard clearly around the edges of the door. Two or three times a week, they collected rancid fat from the butchers and boiled it over a fire in the square, sending up a stink that permeated the entire neighborhood. Today was one of those days, and as Francesco picked his way through the debris-choked back alley, he could still smell it over the vile stench of the outhouses. In Rome, even the soap is dirty, he thought, not for the first time.

  This row of outhouses, he’d already learned, was favored for the disposal of unwanted infants—those born to the too young, the unwed, slaves, servants, whores, the poor with too many mouths to feed already. His first week in Rome he’d found a newborn girl wrapped in rags, weakly whimpering outside one of the doors, the baby’s mother perhaps unable to bring herself to drop her into the filthy hole, where she would quickly, or not so quickly, drown.

  He couldn’t bear to pass the child by and so, taking her back to the house, laid her on the hearth. Would have been more merciful to leave it where it was, Michelangelo had said, looking up from his drawings. You’re only prolonging its misery. Francesco had known Michelangelo was right. Hell was full of good intentions. The girl was just hours old, already dying from starvation and exposure. There should be some other recourse … Francesco had said, but he knew not what that could be. They didn’t have milk, so he’d mixed some water with wine, but the child breathed her last before he could even get it to her lips.

  Today there were no other horrors in the alley but the smell itself, and he’d just about reached the house when he saw Susanna looking over the gate into Michelangelo’s yard. Her back was to him, but he knew it was her from the long dark plait and brown dress she held up to keep it from dragging in the filth. Sure she hadn’t seen him, he quickly stepped out of sight behind one of the neighboring sheds. Feeling a little foolish for hiding from a girl, he waited there for a moment, watching a lizard climb a sickly-looking lemon tree, before peering around the corner. She was still there.
He pulled his head back again and sat down on a stump to wait a few more minutes.

  He wasn’t in the habit of avoiding her. If it hadn’t been for the events of the morning, he would have been happy to see her. Susanna’s presence usually meant she had brought him something to eat or come to beat the fleas out of the bedding—and she might even be persuaded to slip into that same bedding with him for a while. But right now, he really just wanted to find that letter and get over to Raphael’s. Maybe once he’d passed along the news of Calendula’s death, he could shake the image of her mangled face from his mind.

  It started to rain again, and he shifted on his seat to avoid the drip from the shed roof while he waited for Susanna to go inside. Francesco had met Susanna on his third or fourth night in Rome after opening the wrong gate, surprising her as she picked her way across the yard from the outhouse. She was the maid to Benvenuto the Silversmith, whose house and workshop consisted of a jumble of sheds adjoining Michelangelo’s. Francesco had been out wandering the streets until night had fallen, hoping to avoid Michelangelo, who’d been in a particularly foul mood. When he told her this, she’d laughed. Then, taking him by the hand, she had led him inside the house, where a feeble fire with more smoke than flame burned inside the gargantuan fireplace.

  Benvenuto had been in Florence on business, and Francesco said he was from Florence too. She’d given him wine and sympathized with his forced exile. Michelangelo, she claimed, could scare away demons with his scowl. Francesco had drunk her wine and, deciding that even with a blackened front tooth she was not unattractive, had started to tease her, telling her she talked like the gypsy girl who collected rags with her mother near his home. She’d slapped him for the comparison, but he’d caught her hand and, kissing her fingers, explained that he’d always thought the gypsy girl very beautiful, with her dark eyes and hair like a raven. She forgave him, letting him kiss more than her fingers.

  He’d spent the night in her bed, waking in the morning with his cheek against her breast. It was infinitely better than the restless nights he spent next to Michelangelo, who snored and kicked him with the boots he often wore to bed. Francesco had made up the bit about the gypsy girl, but he did like Susanna’s dark eyes, as, unlike Calendula’s, they didn’t confuse him or remind him of what he’d lost. Maybe that was why he’d found her so easy to confide in.

  His story had made Susanna incredulous. You fell in love with your employer’s wife? And you’re still alive? You’re a very lucky man.

  As miserable as he was to be separated from the woman he loved, he knew he was indeed lucky to have escaped with his life. If Guido had taken one moment to think that afternoon in Florence, he wouldn’t have gone after Francesco himself. He would have sent his bodyguard—a brute of a man named Giovanni, although everyone had long forgotten that and called him Pollo Grosso, “Big Chicken,” for the bright red hair that stuck up like a comb from his big square head. If Guido had sicced Pollo Grosso on him, Francesco would have been dead for sure. Because despite his cowardly sounding name, Pollo Grosso was a vicious dog who did his master’s bidding without thought or remorse. He was as devoid of feeling as he was of articulate speech, and his only pleasure was to kill.

  When Francesco looked out again from his hiding place, Susanna was still peering over the gate. What’s so interesting, he wondered, that she’d stand outside in the rain? Deciding that he wasn’t going to wait her out, he walked up behind her.

  “What is it?”

  “There you are,” she said accusingly. “I’ve been waiting for you. There’s a chicken in the yard. I don’t know what to do.”

  “A chicken?” he echoed, looking around for the bird. How odd. He’d just been thinking of Pollo Grosso and now a real chicken appeared. “I would think it obvious. Kill it for my dinner. Where is it?”

  Most of the yard was filled with the giant blocks of marble Michelangelo had chosen for the Pope’s tomb, blocks he refused to sell just in case His Holiness changed his mind. Now stacked with firewood and covered with vines, they had taken on the quality of a ruined monument, and it was from out of this that a mottled brown-and-white chicken emerged.

  “Is a chicken with three legs a good or bad omen?” she asked as the bird blinked up at them.

  It was on the tip of Francesco’s tongue to tell her she was mad, but she was right. The chicken had three legs: one dead-center and one on either side. It stood on two of these legs, listing to the left while the third leg stuck out from the opposite side, looking like a useless appendage until suddenly it gave a funny little hop before coming to rest on the third and center legs, listing now to the right. Francesco laughed for the first time that day.

  He told her omens were superstitious nonsense, but Susanna was insistent, and as the bird did its little dance for them, tilting from one side to the other, she rhymed off a litany of strange sightings. “But what about the two-headed calf born in Tivoli only three days before an earthquake? There can be no other explanation. And last year, just before the Tiber flooded its banks, a dwarf was stillborn not far from here. And the day before that terrible storm swept through Ostia and knocked down my father’s house, a bat with red eyes flew down the chimney.” She grabbed his sleeve. “They say too the day before the Castel Sant’Angelo bridge collapsed and all those people died, a donkey—”

  “Enough,” he interrupted, wondering if gypsy blood actually did run in her veins. “Look at it. It’s too ridiculous to be anything bad.” Indeed, if there were any bad omen that day, it was the discovery of Calendula’s body.

  “Well, a good omen then,” she rebutted. “The day before you came, there was a giant blue moth on the window ledge. That’s how I knew when I met you that you were a good man.”

  “Is that why you slapped my face?”

  “That was just to get you to kiss me.”

  He kissed her now—even considered more, as it would be hours before Michelangelo returned—but all he could think of was Calendula’s bludgeoned face and missing finger, and he changed his mind again.

  He needed to find Raphael.

  “Well, don’t kill it then,” he said, backing away while trying to maintain the glib tone. “Maybe this will bring you another man. A rich one this time. But you better put the chicken in your yard, because Michelangelo will see it only as an omen he is about to have dinner.”

  He tried to make his escape, but Susanna insisted on his help in catching it. In any other case, she would have swept the chicken up by the legs and carried it upside down. The third leg made this awkward, however, and Susanna was afraid of hurting it, for fear it could turn against her, changing it from the good omen she was now convinced it was into a bad one. In the end, Francesco opened the gate and propped it open with a rock while Susanna attempted to herd it out with her shawl. Only the bird refused to leave. Instead, it stopped short at the gate and, evading the shawl, flew to the top of the stone wall, where it recommenced its dance, its head bobbing from side to side in time.

  “Forget it,” Francesco said after two more failed attempts. “I don’t have time for this right now. It’ll just have to take its chances with Michelangelo. I must find Raphael.”

  “Now?” Susanna asked, her disappointment palpable. “Come inside with me instead. It’s raining, and I have a fire.”

  He still didn’t want to tell her about Calendula. And he wasn’t sure why. Maybe because he liked the simple companionship he had with her, the distraction from the dark regrets that found him even in his dreams. But he couldn’t avoid the subject forever. She was going to find out, if not from him then from someone else. News traveled fast in Rome. “It’s one of the girls from Imperia’s, Calendula,” he said a little more matter-of-factly than he felt. “She’s dead, I’m afraid. I just saw her body pulled from the Tiber.”

  Susanna looked unfazed, and just another whore echoed in his brain. “Was she murdered?” she asked.

  “It appears she was.”

  “I thought so,” she said with a certain amoun
t of satisfaction as she attempted to steer him toward the silversmith’s yard. “The way she went around flaunting herself and that new ring. It was bound to happen.”

  He was annoyed with her. He didn’t expect grief—he wasn’t even sure he felt that himself—but this bordered on glee, the kind reserved for watching your enemies humbled. He had to wonder why. Because she was jealous? “Aren’t we the lady then,” he said mockingly as he pried her hand from his sleeve.

  “More than her,” she responded haughtily.

  “And I suppose all you do for the wages Benvenuto pays you is mend his clothes and cook his breakfast?”

  She aimed a blow at his head, but he was ready for it and dodged it easily, telling her to piss off, which made her even angrier. “Well, at least I know now the chicken is a good omen,” she yelled as he kicked open his back door.

  “Of what?”

  “Of one less whore in this city!”

  He tried to slam the door, but, because everything in the house leaned, it jammed against the floor instead, leaving a gap just wide enough for a three-legged chicken to slip through. Francesco swore and attempted to shoo it back out again, but it flew onto the shelf over the room’s one window and gazed down at him, unperturbed.

  Francesco gave up and hunted for Michelangelo’s letter. Impatiently, he sifted through sheets of paper filled with sinewy, muscular males he hoped Michelangelo wasn’t thinking of painting on the Pope’s ceiling. But the letter wasn’t there, nor was it on their only chair. The room was dark, which made the hunt even more difficult, but there really weren’t too many places to leave a letter other than the table and chair. He looked in the fireplace, wondering if Michelangelo, in a bad moment, had thrown it in there and forgotten about it. Not that it would have burned. The grate hadn’t seen a fire for several days, because Michelangelo was engaged in a feud over prices with the man who delivered the wood.

  Feeling more irritable with every passing minute, he searched the bed, tearing off the coarse woolen blanket and the tanned hides that covered the straw mattress. He opened the small trunk that held Michelangelo’s extra clothes: a pair of breeches, two stained shirts, and a jacket of unusually fine brocade Francesco had never seen him wear. There was nothing among the bottles of tonics and cures for Michelangelo’s many ailments, ailments Francesco was sure were all either imagined or feigned, no doubt to add to his image as a long-suffering martyr.