“But this girl has been murdered! He may not have got far — someone might have seen something-”
“That is not our concern, Brother.” The sharpness in histone took me by surprise. He sighed. “In the medical schools of Europe,professors of anatomy are allocated the bodies of felons for public dissectionunder the law — as many as four a year in some places.” His jaw tightened. “Iwill never be a professor of anatomy now. God in His wisdom saw fit to call meto His service in another way. But that does not mean my desire to learn is anythe less.” His tone suggested a degree of skepticism about the divine wisdom inthis instance. He planted both hands flat on the table and leaned across thegirl to nail me with a fierce stare. “Listen to me, Fra Giordano. I see in youthe makings of a man of science. I mean it. For such as us, pushing the boundariesof what is known, shining the light of true learning into the dark corners ofCreation — there can be no higher good. I know you agree.” He jabbed aforefinger into the air between us. “And do not let anyone make you afraid ofGod’s judgment. All of Nature is a great book in which the Creator has writtenthe secrets of the universe. Would He have given us the gifts of reason andenquiry if He did not wish us to read that book?”
In the soft light, his face was avid as a boy’s. Ihesitated. Fra Eugenio, my novice master, had taken great pains to impress uponhis flock of intellectually ambitious youths that the first and greatest sin ofour forefather Adam was the desire for forbidden knowledge. He held firmly tothe view that the Almighty intended much of His creation to remain beyond our meagerhuman understanding. I was of Fra Gennaro’s mind, but I was still afraid.
“You mean to anatomize her.” My voice emerged as a croak.This time I did not frame it as a question.
He picked up a long knife and studied the tip of its blade.“You know as well as I that this city is overrun with indigents.” He gesturedwith the knife toward the figure on the table. “She was a street girl, a whore.No one will mourn her, poor creature. If she were not lying here now, she wouldbe on a cart full of corpses heading for Fontanelle. At least this way somegood will come of her sad existence before she ends up there. In life, she gaveher body up to rogues and lechers. In death, she will give it up to the serviceof anatomy.” He fixed me with a long look, tilting his head to one side as hepressed the knife’s point into the pad of his finger. “You are not obliged to stay,if your conscience advises you otherwise. But think of the opportunity. You arethe only one here I would trust to assist me.”
I looked at him. How could I resist such flattery? Even so,in my gut I was deeply troubled by his proposition. In the first place, I didnot believe his story about how he had come by the body. There could be nodoubt that the girl had been murdered, barely an hour ago, and I feared that indisposing of her corpse — to say nothing of illegally dissecting it — we would beimplicated in her death. More than this, though, it was the brutality of whathe was proposing that disturbed me. I had read Vesalius’s work on anatomy andunderstood the value of practical experimentation. But this girl had alreadysuffered violence at the hands of a man; whatever she may have been in life,our cutting and probing in the name of scientific enquiry seemed like a furtherviolation. I did not voice any of this. Instead, I said:
“Does the prior know?”
He allowed a long pause. His gaze slid back to the girl onthe table.
“The prior has, on occasion, given me permission to examinecorpses where it is clear that there would be some greater benefit in doing so.When old Fra Teofilo died last year in Holy Week — you recall? — I waspermitted to cut him open in order to study the tumor in his gut. And whatcould be more beneficial than furthering our knowledge of the female form? Youcannot know how rare it is to find such an ideal specimen.”
The gleam in his eyes as he said this verged on lascivious,though not for the girl, or at least, not in the usual way. His desire was allfor her interior, for the secrets she might yield up to his knife. From hisstudied evasion of my question, I took it that the answer was no. He tapped thehourglass with a fingernail. The sand was already piling into a small hill inthe lower half.
“Time will not wait for us, Bruno. Go or stay, but makeyour mind up now.”
“I will stay,” I said, sounding steadier than I felt.
“Good.” Relief rippled over his face. “And if you think youare going to faint or vomit, give me plenty of warning. We will have enough to cleanup without that.”
He dipped a cloth in the hot water and wiped it almosttenderly around the girl’s chest, along the declivities of her clavicle, thesharp ridges of her collarbones and into the valley between her breasts. “Notethe fullness of the breasts,” he observed, as if he were addressing students inan anatomy theater, as he marked the place of the first incision in a Y-shapeacross each side of her breastbone, “and the enlargement of the areola. If I amright in my speculation, we may find something of unparalleled interest here.”
I concentrated on holding the lantern steady over the table.As if I could have failed to notice the girl’s full breasts or large, darknipples. Perhaps he had forgotten what it was to be eighteen. In his eyes, shewas simply a specimen, material for experimentation. To me she was too recentlyliving, breathing, warm, with a head full of thoughts and dreams, for me to regardher as anything other than a young woman. I did not dare touch her skin; Ialmost believed it would still hold some pulse of life. Nor could I look at herface; the terror in those wild, staring eyes was too vivid. I had heard it saidthat when a person was murdered, the image of the killer was fixed in theirdeath stare. I did not mention this to Fra Gennaro; I did not want him to laughat me or take me for a village simpleton.
Any unbidden lustful thoughts shriveled in an instant as hepushed the blade into her flesh. He made two careful incisions along thebreastbone and joined them in a vertical cut that ran the length of her torsoto her pubis. The sound of the knife tearing through meat was unspeakable, thesmell more so. I recoiled, shocked, at the amount of blood that pooled out.Gennaro calmly placed containers under the table at strategic points, and I sawthat, like a butcher’s block, the surface had channels cut into it thatdiverted the blood into tidy streams of runoff that could be collectedunderneath. He folded back the skin on each side of the chest cavity, exposingthe white bones of the ribcage. I clamped my teeth together, fighting therising tide of bile churning in my stomach, reminding myself that I was a manof science. A wave of cold washed over my head and a sudden sunburst explodedin my vision; the cone of light from the lantern slid queasily up and down thewall. Gennaro stopped to look at me.
“You’ve gone green.” He didn’t sound greatly sympathetic. “Hangthe lantern on that hook above me and sit down with your head between yourknees. We can do without you passing out on her.”
I did as I was told. I sank to the cold floor at the farend of the room with my back pressed against the wall, clasped my hands behindmy head, and buried my face in shame. The terrible slicing noises continued,the determined sawing through resistant muscle and tendon, the sucking sound oforgans being displaced. I closed my eyes and bent the whole force of my willtoward maintaining consciousness and keeping my supper down. I could not tellhow much sand had slipped through the glass by the time I felt able to standagain, but when I opened my eyes and levered myself to my feet, Fra Gennaro wasbending over the girl’s exposed abdomen with an ardent expression. His eyesflickered upward to me.
“You’re back with us, are you? Come and look at this.” Heprodded with the tip of his knife. He was indicating a swollen organ about thesize of a small grapefruit, mottled crimson. “The greatest anatomy theaters inEurope would pay dearly to get their hands on this. It is an opportunitygranted to very few anatomists. Providence has smiled on us tonight. Do youknow what it is?”