While I no longer suspected him of trying to tempt me into activities that were dubious or unlawful, I kept returning to the dream. What had the Grand Duke been holding in his hand? What could he have been holding? I simply could not see the whole of the picture. For that reason, perhaps, I still felt the commission was fraught with danger. If I made this woman for him — this Eve, as he had called her — would I not be putting myself in a vulnerable position? He had emphasized the need for absolute discretion, but what if the whole thing came to light? I knew what I would do if I were him: I’d act the innocent. It was Zummo’s idea. I’m not sure what he was playing at. Trying to corrupt me, I suppose. I should have known. Those Sicilians, they’re not like us. I would be held responsible, and in the current climate, which was so repressive, so quick to judge, I would be lucky to escape with my life.
At the same time, I couldn’t ignore the fizzle of excitement in my belly. The apparent simplicity of the commission was deceptive. To create something that was pure surface. To make it vivid. It was diametrically opposed to the work I usually produced. Not a trace of putrefaction or disease. Only youth and health. Only beauty. My skills would be tested as never before, just as the Grand Duke had suggested.
I kept veering — now this way, now that …
All thought of sleep blown from my head as if by some internal gale, I plunged down into the alleys on the south side of the river and stopped at the first tavern I saw, a dingy place with a boar’s hide nailed to the outside wall, the blunt, bristly head and oddly dainty trotters still attached. I pushed the door open. The place had brown walls and a floor of beaten earth. It was almost empty. I walked up to the bar and ordered wine. I still couldn’t get over the ease and deftness with which the Grand Duke had manipulated me. He was more of a politician than I had taken him for, and I doubted I was the first person to be wrong-footed by his vague, morose demeanour.
‘Zummo?’
I looked round. Sitting at a table in the corner was the Englishman I had met in the palace the previous November.
‘Towne,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I could ask the same of you.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting to see anyone I knew.’
‘Me neither.’
We both laughed.
He invited me to join him.
When I was seated, I asked him how he came to number Cosimo III among his clients. They had met many years ago, he told me, when His Highness was travelling in England. The occasion was a banquet in the Earl of Pembroke’s house in Wilton. Did I know Wilton?
‘I’ve never been to England,’ I said.
‘Well, it’s an exquisite house.’
‘You certainly seem to go to all the right banquets.’
‘One should embrace everything life has to offer,’ he said, ‘don’t you think?’
I smiled and drank.
The Grand Duke wasn’t a typical collector, he went on, but then again he — Jack Towne — wasn’t a typical dealer.
‘He’s a complex man,’ I said. ‘More complex than he appears to be.’
Towne looked straight at me. ‘He’s a fox.’
It suddenly occurred to me that the commission might have been in the Grand Duke’s mind for quite some time. Could that have been the real reason why he had invited me to Florence?
‘Is something wrong?’ Towne asked.
‘No, it’s nothing.’ I glanced over my shoulder. Apart from us, there was nobody in the tavern. ‘When we first met, in the palace, you said all sorts of people shared your taste. How would you define that taste exactly?’
Towne began to talk about the liminality of many of the works he bought and sold. Their meaning shifted, he said, depending on the nature of your passion and the angle of your approach. He offered an example. In a village east of Florence there was a man called Marvuglia, who modelled life-size animals out of clay. I should visit Marvuglia one day, he said, if I could spare the time. He spoke about my plague pieces too, heaping praise on them, but, in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on, he seemed to be including me in a club to which I wouldn’t have said I belonged, and this gave me an unnervingly removed feeling, as if, by virtue of talking to him, I had become somebody else, somebody I didn’t recognize. I didn’t argue the point, though, or even interrupt — not, that is, until he told me that he would very much appreciate the chance to watch me working.
‘No,’ I said.
The word came out louder than I had intended.
‘No?’ He leaned forwards, hands clasped on the table in front of him.
‘I’m sorry.’
I didn’t think I needed to explain that my working methods were a private matter. I was sure he understood the impulse towards secrecy — its attractions, its demands — and, judging by his easy, slightly knowing smile, I was also sure that my response had not surprised him.
Later, as I headed along Via de’ Bardi, my thoughts took an intriguing turn. What I would have to do, I realized, was to build an element of what Towne called ‘liminality’ into the commission. I had to make a piece of work that functioned on at least two levels. How, though?
I walked the streets for hours, nothing concrete in my head, just a possibility, a riddle — a dilemma. All the inns and taverns had long since closed. As I approached the Ponte Rubaconte, I met a man pushing a handcart heaped with ghostly, gleaming blocks. Part of the river had frozen, he told me. Higher up, beyond the Pescaia. He was hoping to sell his load to the ice house in San Frediano. Near the Duomo, I came across two police officers, recognizable by their swords and their grey jackets. They were rousing a man who was slumped against the gates of a palazzo. Sleeping on the street was illegal, they told him. He should go to the Albergo dei Poveri — the Paupers’ Hotel — where he would be given a bed. Not long afterwards, as I passed behind San Lorenzo, I saw a woman leaning against a wall, one hand propped on her hip, a jaunty yellow ribbon in her hair.
‘You look sweet,’ she said, her breath like smoke. ‘Not Jewish, are you?’
A whore could be flogged for sleeping with a Jew. This was one of the Grand Duke’s recent initiatives.
‘I’m Sicilian,’ I said.
‘Cristo santo, I’m not sure which is worse.’
I don’t know whether it was her smile, which was charmingly crooked, or the slight catch in her voice, a kind of huskiness, but I followed her across the street and up a creaky flight of stairs to a small back room with an unmade bed and a brazier of hot coals in the corner.
‘Nice and warm in here,’ she said.
She took off her clothes and lay on the bed, and I could see from the smooth, faintly concave stomach that she was young, no more than seventeen. I leaned down and kissed the mossy darkness of her armpits.
‘No one ever did that before,’ she said.
I drew back. With her arms flung behind her head and a sheet twisting down between her legs, she reminded me of Poussin’s ‘Sleeping Venus’ — she had the same boldness and sensuality — and I decided there and then to reacquaint myself with the Frenchman’s paintings before I started work on the commission.
The young woman asked me, lazily, what I was looking at.