We made love silently, furtively, as though we, too, were thieves, and pleasure was something it took two people to steal.
Every now and then, we stopped to listen, thinking we had heard her uncle’s bedroom door or voices in the yard below.
When she came, I put my hand over her mouth.
Halfway across the Ponte Rubaconte, a cold wind gusted, and I was glad of the English coat the Grand Duke had given me earlier that year. I wore it buttoned to the neck and kept my head lowered. My third winter in Florence.
The day before, I had called on Pampolini and asked if I could have a word with Earhole. Pampolini said he hadn’t seen the boy all week. His mother had lost her job at the slaughterhouse, and she was drinking heavily. They lived on Via delle Poverine, near the Campo della Morte. He gave me directions and told me to watch out I wasn’t robbed.
Ever since the break-in, I had been trying to come up with strategies. I didn’t think I had much chance of talking Stufa round. He had told me I was a dead man, and I doubted he had it in him to relent; the best I could expect was to delay or deflect his animosity. That said, it didn’t seem a bad idea to acquire some ammunition of my own. As yet I had nothing except a few rumours spread by an out-of-work French jester. I was going to need more than that. In the meantime, I had to hope that Stufa’s life was going well. You should always wish success on your enemies. If they’re happy and fulfilled — if they feel blessed — they’ll be far less likely to turn on you.
Bassetti presented a different problem. On the face of it, he had always been agreeable. If I had twinges of uneasiness, it was because I suspected he had registered the fact that the Grand Duke and I had grown closer. Whenever he saw us together, he would assume an indulgent look, as if we were wayward but harmless children, but I knew he would not take kindly to being upstaged or excluded, and once or twice, while the Grand Duke and I were discussing some aspect of the secret commission, Bassetti had entered the room unexpectedly, and we had broken off in the middle of a sentence, an abrupt, artificial silence that a man of Bassetti’s social sophistication could hardly have failed to notice. He must have realized that something was being kept from him, and I was always bracing myself for a confrontation. It never came. Was I imagining tension where none existed? Was it possible that Bassetti actually approved of my role as the Grand Duke’s confidant? It was one of my strengths that I saw things other people didn’t see. Was I now seeing things that weren’t there at all? I had written Bassetti a note, asking for an appointment. I wanted to convince him of the fundamental innocence of my relationship with the Grand Duke. I had to be certain he was on my side.
Via delle Poverine was aptly named. There were no paving stones, only potholes. Palaces had given way to shacks and sheds, their walls patched with rotten wood, loose stones and handfuls of river clay. Looming above the rooftops, sheer and forbidding, was the tower of San Niccolò. Nearby, huddled on a mud embankment, were half a dozen grubby children. As I drew level, the sun broke through a veil of cloud and turned the puddles silver. The leader of the group was a boy of about thirteen. His hair hugged his skull like fur.
‘Nice coat.’
He bounced a pebble on his palm. In place of eyebrows he had two slightly swollen ridges of bone.
I said I was looking for Nuto.
‘Nuto?’
‘He’s about your age. He’s only got one ear.’
The boy tilted his head, playing deaf. ‘What’s that?’
His cronies sniggered.
They knew who I meant, but weren’t about to help.
I moved on. A pebble skipped over my boot.
‘I thought you were looking for Nuto,’ the boy called out.
A second pebble struck the back of my leg. I swivelled round. The children were already on their feet.
‘Any more of that,’ I said, ‘and someone else is going to lose an ear.’
The boy’s arm flashed in the dim air. A stone whirred past my head. I started towards the embankment. By the time I reached the place where the children had been standing, they were fifty yards away, on the far side of a gully filled with slimy, stagnant water. His face expressionless, the boy looked straight at me and drew his forefinger across his throat.
Earhole lived in the last shack in the row, part of it propped on wooden piles and leaning precariously over the Arno. When he answered the door, he didn’t seem surprised to see me. Had he, too, learned to mask his feelings?
There was only one room. A small child sat on the mud floor, gnawing on a twig. Probably its teeth were coming through.
‘My niece,’ he said. ‘I’m minding her.’
He handed me some wine in a clay cup. Through the cracks in the walls I could see the river sliding past, the colour of phlegm.
I told him I wanted him to follow someone. His brief would be to gather information. I drank from my cup and made a face.
‘This stuff is foul.’
He grinned. ‘It’s what my mother drinks.’
He was trustworthy, I said. He had good powers of observation, and he knew the streets. He would be perfect for the job.
He accepted the praise with a certain complacency, as if his qualities and talents were beyond dispute. ‘Who am I to follow?’
‘Stufa.’
He turned away, the ragged outline of his ear reddening. He clearly knew the name.
‘If it’s too much of a challenge,’ I said, ‘or you’re afraid to take it on, I’ll understand.’
‘I’m not afraid. I’m just not sure it’s politic.’
I smiled at his vocabulary. ‘Maybe not. But I don’t have any choice.’
‘What kind of information are you after?’
‘Something I can use against him.’
‘That won’t be easy. I imagine he’s pretty careful.’
‘He is, and he isn’t.’
Stufa was Vittoria’s protégé, I said — in her eyes he could do no wrong — and this, paradoxically, was where his weakness lay. Since he believed himself to be invulnerable, he took more risks than one might expect.
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I’ve been watching him. Besides, it’s how the powerful behave.’
Earhole looked through the gap in the wall that served as a window. Though he wasn’t entirely reassured by my answer, I thought he could see that it made sense. It’s the people who don’t have any power who have to watch their step.
The door banged open. A woman stumbled in and dropped heavily on to a stool. She laid her head on her arms, her white scalp showing through her hair. She smelled of urine and cheap wine.
‘My mother,’ Earhole said.
He gestured to me. I followed him outside. We stood near the mud embankment, and I mentioned the children I had seen earlier.
‘It’s not a very good area,’ he said.
I smiled again.
I told him what I knew about Stufa, then handed him some change as a retainer. He asked if I had cleared it with Pampolini. I said I had. I watched as he concealed the coins, one by one, about his person. He should come to my workshop, I told him, as soon as he had something to report.
He nodded. ‘All right.’
Before I left, I asked why he put the money in so many different pockets.
‘So it doesn’t jingle,’ he said. ‘So she can’t hear it.’
The day of my appointment with Bassetti arrived, and as I climbed the slope that led up to the palace its heavily barred windows and crude blocks of toasted stone seemed to bear down on me. As in a dream, I had the feeling that events were moving too fast, even though I was the one who had initiated them. I felt jumbled, scattered. Unprepared.
Located on the first floor, with windows that overlooked the gardens, Bassetti’s office was predictably lavish, one entire wall depicting the alignment of the stars at the moment when he first found favour with the Grand Duke’s family. Bassetti himself was seated, pen in hand, behind a desk inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. As amiable as ever, he told me that my request for an audience had surprised him. We knew each other too well, didn’t we, to have to resort to such formality?