The Dark Heart of Florence by Tasha Alexander (ebook reader screen TXT) 📕

For a moment, I worried that I was treading on dangerous ground. He was taking a great risk being so open with me. I could denounce him to Savonarola. Unless his openness was a feint, designed to trick me into condemning myself.

“Our meeting is no coincidence, Signora Portinari,” he said. “I knew your grandfather. He spoke of you often. I met you once, at a hunting party. You were thrown from your horse. I was one of the friends with whom he was sitting in the loggia when you returned. I recognized your face in the fresco Botticelli painted there. He modeled one of the Three Graces on you. I have hesitated to seek you out, but things are so bad now I had no choice. I didn’t come to your palazzo or write to you because I did not want to risk anyone else in your household learning of a connection between us. I’ve watched you for weeks, hoping for an opportunity to talk. That you came here, to the Duomo, today, seemed prescient. Savonarola is not doing God’s work. We are.”

“I want to trust you,” I said.

He pulled something out of his robe and passed it to me. “Your grandfather gave me this before he died.”

I recognized the object. It was the sardonyx cameo showing the goddess Minerva in profile that Lorenzo il Magnifico had given to my grandfather the evening we dined with him in his palazzo. The evening I had first seen Agnolo and thought he despised me. The evening that left me feeling so vulnerable I had welcomed Giacomo’s advances when I should have resisted them.

I’d seen the cameo only once since then, when Nonno showed it to me the night he asked me to keep his books safe. He’d told me he planned to give it to someone more trustworthy than any man he had met, someone who could help me if I ever found myself in trouble. And he’d promised that I would never have to seek him out; he would find me if I was in need.

“I will do anything you want,” I said. “Where do we start?”

 Florence,

190339

Signore Bastieri blossomed with renewed purpose when I told him what Colin and Darius wanted us to do. We waited until Signore Tazzera arrived, bringing with him a large box of documents. Once he and Cécile were settled at a table and starting to go through them, we left and went to each of the houses he’d identified on the map. I noticed nothing unusual about them.

When we reached the final one, in the Oltrarno, I leaned against the wall of the palazzo across the street from it. “The pattern of their locations is the same as that of the graffiti in our house, but what does it mean? Obviously, the arms couldn’t have been carved on the houses without the owners noticing. They don’t represent a family, and we know they date from the time of Savonarola. I think they were put on these buildings to signal membership in a group opposed to him.”

“But would their presence on the houses not have been noticed by his supporters?”

“They are much smaller than most others,” I said, “and etched into single stones. It’s easy to miss them. They’re far more discreet than, say, the emblems on the Palazzo Medici, which protrude from the façade. Or like that one, there.” I pointed to a house across the street upon which an enormous coat of arms was displayed.

“Yes, these arms are more subtle,” he said. “I think you are right, signora, that they were meant to send a message to the members of a secret organization. This is very good.”

I was less enthusiastic, for while the revelation might have proved helpful if it were the fifteenth century and we were looking for a haven from Savonarola’s henchmen, it did not bring us closer to finding either the treasure or the murderer. Or did it?

Many people had searched for the treasure in the Palazzo di Vieri over the centuries, yet no one had found it. What if it had never been there? The house could have been the center of an anti-Savonarola group, but its members may have chosen somewhere else to hold whatever precious items they wanted to hide from him. The letter that Signore Tazzera had found mentioned a passage, but we’d located no such thing. Maybe it was a tunnel that led away from the house. I needed to clear my mind. Too many thoughts were racing in too many directions.

“Signore Bastieri, tell me again about the man who lent you his carriage after Marzo’s funeral. Do you remember him wearing a scarf?” Tessa had mentioned a scarf.

“Yes, it was green. A paisley pattern. I noticed the design because the color scheme was similar to something I use in my own work.”

“Did he say anything at all that gave you an idea as to where his house was?”

“No, he did not, but as he walked home from the church, it couldn’t have been too far away.”

Florence was small enough that the distance being walkable told me very little. Why had he bothered with a carriage if the walk was so easy? “Was it raining the day of the funeral?” I asked.

“No, it was sunny and bright.”

I was convinced he had brought the carriage because he wanted to be able to get Lena into it, so he could eliminate her, just as he had Marzo. Perhaps he hadn’t expected her father to be with her, and had to adapt his plan, finding another opportunity to kill her.

Colin had not balked when I suggested the man might be Russian, and he had readily agreed that Cécile and I should be the ones to go to the consulate in an attempt to identify him. What did he and Darius know about this man? They would never tell me, not even now; and although it was disgracefully underhanded, an