The Lion and the Rose (32 page)

“Shut him up, will you?”

Bartolomeo didn’t move. “What else did you lie about?”

“He’s getting more than a beating, I can tell you that. He’s going to answer some questions first.”

“Why?”

“You’re about to find out. Sorry to deceive you, but you wouldn’t have helped me otherwise.” I’d said very little of why I wanted revenge against the Duke of Gandia, only that I had my reasons, and Carmelina’s would-be lover had been too focused on his own reasons for revenge to give a thought for mine. Nor had he questioned my glib assertions that all I intended for Juan Borgia was to drag him off his horse to a prearranged room where we could give him a swift and anonymous beating, and then let him go. “You’re a good boy, but you still have things to learn,” I told my apprentice kindly. “The next time someone talks you into violence, check
all
the details first. Now, kindly gag that monster in the chair and let me get to work.”

I didn’t know if Bartolomeo would do it—he looked ready to bolt, away from me and my dark lies and my even darker intentions. But I looked at my apprentice, and he looked at me through his mask, and then he came forward silently and stuffed a rag into Juan Borgia’s mouth.

“Now, Gonfalonier,” I said, rising from my chair. “No screaming, please. Few people bother answering screams in this quarter of the city, but I’m not taking any chances. We’re going to have a long and uninterrupted chat, you and I. It’s not how you anticipated spending the evening, I know.” I shook my head at the stained walls, the warped boards of the floor, the sounds of barking dogs and muttering drunks coming through the bolted shutters. “And you thought Giulia la Bella would meet you in a place like this,” I couldn’t help saying. “Because you think she is just a whore, I suppose, and all whores of course like it dirty?
Dio
, it’s a good thing the killer I was hunting turned out to be you instead of your brother. Cesare would never have been stupid enough to fall into such a trap.”

“My brother—wait, what killer?” The young Duke’s eyes narrowed at me after Bartolomeo took the rag away on my nod. “If you release me now—”

“Seven.” I folded my arms again. Roped into his chair, Juan was shorter than I, and I took a perverse pleasure in the advantage of height.

“What?” He felt Bartolomeo pace behind his chair and twisted his head in a futile effort to see. “Seven what?”

“Seven girls, Juan Borgia. Seven at least here in Rome, and God only knows how many in Spain when you went to claim your bride. Seven girls staked to tables by knives through their palms. Raped. Their throats cut.”

I saw the flare in his dark Borgia eyes. A flare of fright, but behind it something else. A furtive kind of greed, and I felt the familiar savage thrill bloom in my chest.
Yes
, I thought,
yes, oh yes
. I had not thought Juan Borgia had wits enough to get away with so many killings, or tastes twisted enough to move from simple rape to this kind of dark and compulsive murder—but I had been wrong. That furtive gleam in his eye had the base cunning of a rat, and a lust black enough to see a thousand girls staked and screaming on their backs beneath him.

So many wrong turns, but not now. Not now.

“Leonello?” Bartolomeo whispered. “What
is
this? There were more of them? More girls besides Carmelina who he—” But I paid no attention.

“I will make you a bargain, Juan Borgia.” I rocked back on my heels, looking almost fondly at my precious, long-sought murderer. “I’ve no interest in the later girls; I didn’t know a one of them. But the first was someone rather special to me, and I believe you will remember her too, because she was your first. No, don’t argue. Not the first girl you ever bedded, I’ll wager, but your first kill. That’s why you botched it when you slashed her throat. Do you still think of her? Because she did take your virginity in another way, didn’t she? She made you realize just how much you like the occasional spill of blood to go with that piss-poor stuff you spill between women’s legs.” I met his eyes. “Tell me her name, Juan Borgia. Tell me her name, and I’ll let you go.”

Juan licked his lips.

“Seven girls?” Bartolomeo whispered.
“Seven?”

“Staked down,” I said without shifting my eyes from Juan. “When I walked in to see him putting a knife through Carmelina’s palm, I knew.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying.” But Juan Borgia’s eyes flicked, and then he screamed again because a knife flashed out and tore a great slash through his cheek. Not my knife—this one was clutched in Bartolomeo’s fist, and it mirrored the triple slash of faint scabbed lines still visible on Juan’s cheek where Carmelina had raked him a little over a week ago.

“
Tell me!
” Bartolomeo roared, and tore off his mask.

“Yes, do tell.” I pulled up my chair and sat down as Juan shrieked again, from the pain of his cheek and his thigh and the agony of his hamstrung legs, which had already bled a pool around his feet. “Tell me why you feel the need to stake women through the hands before you kill them. Tell me how many you killed in Spain. Or just tell me the first one’s name, and I’ll let you go.”

It was a messy, bloody business. I asked questions and Juan answered them, and whenever he balked I calmly opened a slash in his arm or put a blade through his hand in imitation of the stakings he’d dealt out so many times. Bartolomeo threw up twice in the corner, but he stayed, stayed with horror in his eyes. I could see an even greater horror growing in Juan Borgia’s gaze, every time I cut him. The horror of knowing that his father could not save him, his position and birth could not save him, his money could not save him. That nothing could save his brash and privileged life from the implacable vengeance that was me.

He was screaming at the end, bleeding from four more wounds I’d dealt out in shallow and controlled fashion over his arms and legs and hands whenever the answers slowed. But for the most part, the answers came quickly. Yes, he liked killing girls. He killed the first because she fought too hard, because he was too drunk to finish the job between her legs and too humiliated to let her walk away knowing she’d unmanned him. He killed the others because—well, that part was less clear. He began to sob then, and his words came more and more indistinctly. He killed girls when drink made him incapable, when he was angry over some insult or failure, if the girl was ugly, or if he knew no one would miss her. One girl he had killed with his brother’s dagger, simply to spread ugly rumors about Cesare—a going-away present to his older brother, right before leaving for Spain. He thought he had killed three or four in Spain; he couldn’t remember. And no, he had no idea who had killed the girl who died when La Bella and I had been in the hands of the French, and Juan himself had been in Spain.

“Pity,” I said, and filed that mystery away for another day.

Bartolomeo stared at the Duke of Gandia in utter revulsion. Juan Borgia was still weeping, tears dripping down to mix with the blood on his face. He’d long since soiled himself; piss and shit mingled with blood on the floor. “Why?” Bartolomeo whispered, clutching at the crucifix about his neck as though fending off a devil.
“Why?”

But I didn’t care much
why
. Never had. Even when I hadn’t known the man I was hunting was Juan Borgia, I knew Anna’s murderer had killed her and all the others because he wanted to.

Because he liked it.

“Please, little man, please, I won’t do it anymore, I won’t do it, I swear, and I swear I won’t say a word about you, if you’ll just let me go—”

“Do you remember the first girl’s name?”

His head drooped. “No,” he whispered, and I still felt not one drop of pity.

Bartolomeo was white as a bowl of milk, and I rose from my chair on legs that had gone stiff, and drew him to one corner. “Wait outside, boy,” I said quietly.

“No.” Bartolomeo’s voice was just a thread, but a steady thread. “He wouldn’t just have raped my Carmelina—he’d have killed her. Like the others. I owe him for more than I thought.” A flick of a glance at me. “And you.”

I liked him for it, and I felt sorry because I could see the revulsion in his eyes when he looked at me, me and my bloody hands, and I could tell he wouldn’t forgive me at the end of this night’s grisly work. He might well hate me.

“So be it.”

I turned back to the sobbing, bleeding wreck that was the Duke of Gandia, the Gonfalonier of the papal forces, Pope Alexander VI’s most beloved son. “Juan Borgia,” I said quietly, “look at me.”

He lifted his head, sobbing. He had been handsome, but he was not handsome now, blood on his cheek mingling with sweat and tears, his auburn hair hanging in limp strings over his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he choked. “I’m
sorry
.”

“You’re sorry you were caught,” I said. “And her name was Anna.”

With that, I cut his throat.

CHAPTER TEN

The Pope is a carnal man

and very loving of his flesh and blood.

—CARDINAL ASCANIO SFORZA

Giulia

I
had never seen my Pope more frightened. In fact, I had never seen him frightened at all. I had seen him raging, passionate, frustrated, amused—but never one whit terrified by anything that God or Fortune had ever thrown into his path.

“Juan would have sent word by now.” Rodrigo could not keep still. He flung himself into his carved chair; he rose again to pace across the Sala dei Santi, he paused with a jerk to finger an exquisitely engraved astrolabe in brass and gold sitting on a small table, and then he was pacing again. But over and over his eyes went to Pinturicchio’s fresco on the wall overhead—the disputation of Santa Caterina, where a grandly turbaned figure on a horse oversaw the saint’s pleading with the fixed and arrogant face of Juan Borgia. “He would have returned by now, or he would have sent word! To have him disappear like this, and not
one
of his men knowing where—”

“It wouldn’t be the first time Juan lost himself sporting all night, and then slept all the next day.” I reached up from my chair to touch Rudrigo’s arm. “Cesare did say Juan was going to some woman after leaving Vannozza’s
cena
. Isn’t he very taken with that new Milanese girl, Damiata?” I tried to coax a smile. “You should be glad he’s developed enough sense not to be seen leaving a courtesan’s house in the middle of the afternoon! He was just waiting for night to fall, for discretion’s sake.”
As though Juan were ever discreet
, I thought, but did not say it. My Pope needed soothing, not more causes to worry. I couldn’t really manage to worry about Juan, but this absence was rather strange.

“But his horse—”

“Horses stray, everyone knows that.” Juan’s horse had been found by the papal soldiers Rodrigo had dispatched to search for the Duke of Gandia—just the horse, which would not have been so unsettling if the great stallion had not been found with one stirrup cut away and a splash of blood on its flank. Not horse blood, either, because the horse was uninjured. But I gave my Pope as reassuring a smile as I could muster. “Someone no doubt tried to steal the horse when Juan left it tied for the night, and it got loose. How many horses has Juan managed to lose this year, after all?” Usually by riding them until they dropped, and of course there was the one pretty little mare whose throat he’d cut with his own dagger because she had the temerity to throw him off in front of his soldiers . . . but Juan
did
have a fair number of horses stolen, since he could rarely be bothered to tie them properly, much less stable them.

“But we were supposed to meet today, to discuss the campaigns I’ve planned in Romagna!” Rodrigo burst out. “Even if he were dallying with some woman, even if he lost his horse and went looking for another, he would not have left me waiting with no explanation!”

Cesare looked up from the elaborate globe in the corner, where he had been fingering the etched coasts of the new land that Genoese sailor had discovered. Much of what we knew of Juan’s latest activities came from Cesare: his brother’s high spirits at Vannozza’s
cena
, the masked man who had come to deliver a message, the way he split from Cesare on the ride home and rode off toward the Piazza degli Ebrei, leaving his squire behind. “You have never worried overmuch when I kept you waiting, Holy Father,” Cesare murmured.

“Bah, you never forget yourself when dallying with women.” Rodrigo gave a distracted clap of the hand to his eldest son’s shoulder, and Cesare’s immobile face looked more masklike than ever. He had a hard tension running through him like a strand of fire, a tension that made me wonder if he just might have planned a beating or some other unpleasant surprise for his brother. But Cesare had been fully accounted for the rest of the night after Juan rode off, playing cards until dawn with Michelotto and some of his other soldiers. And if Cesare ever came to blows with his brother, I knew he’d do it himself and not hire bravos.

I wondered if my Pope would ever bring himself to think the same thing. If he did, he’d never speak the words aloud.
He’ll never admit the thought that
la familia
could ever turn on each other.

“Perhaps an accident in the slums . . . I swear, I’ll have that rat’s nest by the Piazza degli Ebrei swept clean after this!” Rodrigo swept a hand back through his graying hair, and I found myself wondering if it was grayer than it had been. I was so used to seeing my Pope as invincible, confident as Alexander the Great, from whom he had taken his papal name. Perhaps only when he was worrying so visibly could I see any signs that he was old.

He looked older still when nervous little Burchard burst in. “Your Holiness, something has been found—”

“Juan is hurt?” Rodrigo’s face drained.

“No, he is still—unaccounted for. But his squire has been found. Or to be precise, the man who was acting as his squire.” Burchard addressed his words to the woven carpet. “That man was found stabbed last night.”

“Last night?” Cesare’s voice lashed like a whip crack. “And only now are we hearing of this?”

“He was found stabbed, unconscious but still alive . . . he had been dragged to the nearest house, but the household was too frightened to make any report to the constables until day had risen. By then, the man was dead.” Burchard cleared his throat; the sound fell like a stone into the room. “It appears he died without saying a word—about the Duke of Gandia, or who attacked him. Them, I mean. Attacked them.” A sigh.
“Gott im Himmel.”

Rodrigo went so gray that I ran to his side, but Cesare got there first. “We will keep searching, Father,” he said, gripping his father’s arm in steel fingers. “I’ll have my own men out, down to the last page boy. We will find my brother, but you should rest.”

My Pope hardly seemed to hear him. Cesare looked over at me, command in his eyes as though he addressed one of the papal guards. “Take my father to bed and keep him there,” he ordered me. “Allow no one to disturb him, for any reason—not until I send word, and I won’t unless we find my brother.”

I found myself nodding tersely.

“Sweet Christ—” Cesare made the same gesture his father had, rubbing a hand over his hair, only his hair was still auburn and vigorous. “My idiot brother. As many enemies as he’s made, and he goes haring off alone into the night with a man in a
mask
? What possible temptation could have made him act such a fool?”

A cool little voice suddenly echoed through my head.
I am looking for a man
, it said.
I have found him, and now I am baiting a trap for him.

My palms began to sweat. But I pushed the voice away, leading my stunned and frantic Pope back to his private chamber, where I disrobed him, soothed him, whispered hopeful nothings, listened to him fret, and finally coaxed him off to sleep with his head on my breast. Where I lay all through the night, as Cesare’s men and the papal guards tore the city apart looking for Juan, and I stared into the dark thinking unimaginable things.

It was afternoon the following day before we heard more.

“Your Holiness,” the man whispered, crashing to his knees the moment he laid eyes on my Pope. A common man in a dirty linen shirt and sturdy breeches, deeply tanned from a life spent under the sun, rough-voiced and rough-handed and plainly terrified. His wide eyes darted from the rich mosaics to the Moorish designs about the frescoes, the exquisite ornaments of silver and gilt and fragile glass to the papal guards standing huge and immobile at the doors. Cesare stood just as silent in his cardinal’s robes, impassive of face, glittering of eye, one long finger tapping his own elbow. Joffre and Sancha had arrived and stood pressed together in unaccustomed accord, Joffre frightened and trying not to show it, the Tart of Aragon looking almost tearful for her brother-in-law and sometime lover. I stood by my Pope, his hand closed in both of mine—and to a common man like the one staring up at us, the Pope with his magnificent robes and sunken-eyed fear would have been most terrifying of all.

Rodrigo’s voice was only a whisper. “Rise.”

The man rose, visibly trembling. “I’m Giorgio Schiavi, I am—I didn’t do no wrong—”

“Occupation?” Burchard interrupted, pen poised. Johann Burchard always looked relieved when the world slowed enough so he could take proper notes. I was glad to see someone here was soothed.

Giorgio Schiavi twisted his cloth cap between his hands. “Timber merchant.”

Wood seller, in other words. “You are safe here,
poveruomo
,” I said softly, and he threw me a startled grateful glance as he spoke again.

“I get my wood unloaded from boats in the Tiber,” he began, eyes flicking about the
sala
again. “By the hospital of San Girolamo degli Schiavoni. I keep watch over my wood at night—terrible rough it can be down there, thieves everywhere looking to rob an honest man. At midnight two nights back, I see two men come to the riverbank—checking to see that everything was clear, that nobody was watching. They didn’t see me, did they? I know how to get out of the way . . .”

My Pope looked on steadily, but his profile looked somehow shrunken to me. Gaunt.

“Two more men, they do another sweep—and then a man on a horse comes along. Big white horse, it was, and it’s got a body draped across the saddle. Feet on one side, the head dragging along the other.”

Rodrigo’s hand jerked in mine.

“They pull the horse up, right near where I’m hiding, and I’m hiding by now, Your Holiness. Hiding and praying. There’s a spot where the sewers come into the water, it’s full of rubbish . . . they drag the body off the horse, and they give a great heave and into the river it goes.” Giorgio Schiavi licked his dry lips. “The man in the saddle, he asks if the body’s been sunk. They all say ‘Yes, my lord’—he sounds like a lord, you know. I didn’t get a look at his face, but he speaks good. Even though he’s a small man in that saddle compared to them, they look at him like he’s the one giving the orders.”

I was the one to start trembling then.
Oh, sweet Holy Virgin
—but I firmly shut away all thoughts of the utterly impossible.

“The body’s gone down,” the wretched wood seller yammered on, “but his cloak’s still floating. So they throw stones at it till it’s gone too, and then they leave.” Sancha of Aragon gave a great sob, clutching Joffre’s arm, and our witness came to a halt. “That’s all,” he mumbled. “Your Holiness.”

“Why did you not report this?” Cesare said in his velvety voice.

For the first time, Giorgio Schiavi looked too startled to be afraid. “I’ve seen a hundred bodies dumped there,” he said. “Until today, when guards came about asking for any information on murders done that night—that’s the first time anyone’s made inquiries about any of them.”

“Dumped,” Rodrigo echoed. His eyes stared at the carpet, seeing nothing. “They
dumped
him there, with the rest of the sewage. Like my son was trash—”

“We don’t know that.” I folded my poor Pope in my arms, not caring when I heard Burchard’s click of the tongue for Rodrigo’s papal dignity. “We don’t know it was Juan, you heard Messer Schiavi, a hundred bodies have been put into that river—”

“We’ll have the Tiber dragged at once.” Cesare was snapping orders to the guards. “Summon every fisherman and boatman who can be found. Ten ducats to the man who brings up the body—you’ll see, Father, surely it won’t be Juan—”

Sancha was crying noisily now. Joffre tried to comfort her and she struck at him. My Pope was shaking in my arms, shoulders heaving under his cope, and silly Burchard was still taking notes as though that would put everything right. Poor Giorgio Schiavi looked about him with open mouth. When a wood seller imagines the glories of the Vatican, the illustrious dignity of God’s Vicar on earth, I doubt he imagines anything like this. “Thank you, Messer Schiavi,” I said, disentangling myself from Rodrigo for a moment and ushering the poor wood seller out through the chaos. “Your loyalty and honesty will not be forgotten.” I pressed all the coins I had into his hands and flew back into the
sala
. “We will all pray,” I said, and no one could hear me over Sancha’s wailing so I gave her a good slap. Why not, she’d already hit Joffre and he wasn’t making any noise to speak of. That shut her up, and I clapped my hands.

“We shall all pray,” I repeated, taking out the rosary beads in black amber and gold that my Pope had given me at Easter, and slowly other voices joined mine in saying the Rosary.
“Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipoténtem, factorem cæli et terræ—”
I gulped out the words, suppressing the tears that wanted to follow them, because I loathed Juan Borgia but I wanted him to live. I could not bear the terrible, frozen grief on his father’s face, so I bowed my head over my rosary and prayed to the Mother of Mercy that my Pope’s most beloved son was alive.

But the Mother of Mercy was not merciful that day. Because as the bells for Vespers were ringing over the city a few hours later, tolling so sweetly they caught at the heart, the Tiber gave up her dead and Juan Borgia was dragged from the water.