Raphaella was standing beside my chair now, and she laid her arm on my shoulder. “Garnet, calm down.”
“I don’t get it. How could a crowd of men who knew the woman tie her up, cover her face, and throw rocks at her head, hitting her again and again, until she was dead? What’s wrong with people like that?” I looked up at Raphaella and tried to smile. “I’m repeating myself aren’t I? I’m babbling.”
She smiled back at me and said nothing.
Another thought burst in my brain, like those little packets of gunpowder the crowd flung onto the fire in my vision.
“It’s religious law that allows-hell, demands-stoning as punishment. For adultery. The regulations even specify what size of stone to be used. And by the way, a male adulterer gets a lashing and goes home.
“It was the Church that helped execute Savonarola. The Church’s Inquisition burned Jews and heretics. Religious leaders burned the witches in Salem.”
“I’ve always wondered,” Raphaella mused, “is it the religion that’s evil, or the people practising it? Is the religious law an excuse for committing acts they would have carried out anyway? A way to dress up viciousness as holiness?”
I felt suddenly exhausted, as if my mainspring had wound down. “I’m sick of it,” I whispered. “All of it.”
Raphaella crouched in front of me and took one of my hands. “But we have to see it through. We have to make him go away.”
I kept silent.
“Which means finding out why he’s still haunting the Corbizzi place,” she added.
I drew in some of Raphaella’s energy, the way a sponge absorbs water.
“So we go back… when?” I asked her.
“Tomorrow. I believe the answer’s in the prof’s unpublished book.”
I completed her thought. “Which is why the spirit was messing with it yesterday while we were lounging around outside.”
“I think we’re close, Garnet. I really do.”
II
MY STEP WAS A LITTLE lighter as I strolled back up the hill under the canopy of old maple trees in full summer leaf, but I still had a lot of thinking to do. I was so deep in thought when I got home that as soon as Mom hinted it was time the lawn was mowed I said yes without argument and marched straight from her office to the garage to get the electric mower.
An hour and a half later, hot and sweaty, I took my second shower of the day, stuffed my clothes into the laundry hamper, and put on a clean T-shirt and jeans. As I was heading downstairs something caught my eye. The history book I had chucked onto the blankets that morning had fallen open to a page near the back. I picked up the book and was about to slap it shut when I noticed the words “Appendix: The Arrabbiati.” Strange phrase, I thought.
Curious, I took a closer look. The Arrabbiati, or “Angry Ones,” were Savonarola’s opponents, the offended citizens who saw him as an intolerant puritanical tyrant. They included people from all walks of life, many from well-known families. The author of the book had listed these families alphabetically.
I ran my finger down the column of names, suddenly knowing what I was about to find.
And there it was, in black and white.
Corbizzi.
PART FOUR
Cut off his head, although he may be head of his family, cut off his head!
– Girolamo Savonarola
One
I
I HAD A LOT to think about.
With the discovery that the Corbizzi family had been opponents of Savonarola in the fifteenth century I had found another link between the estate on the shore of Lake Couchiching and an Italian city thousands of kilometres away across the Atlantic Ocean. This was no coincidence. The professor was an expert on the Italian Renaissance, had lived and taught in Florence, and had made Savonarola the centre of his studies, especially the friar’s attempts to set up a government that would rule according to Christian morality, as interpreted by him. The prof had written a new book warning against theocracy, a book that devoted a whole chapter to Savonarola, using the friar’s career as an alarm bell-the chapter Raphaella would be reading next.
Savonarola had contacted me through my dreams, had shown me how much he had suffered. He had made me watch his inhumane execution. Was he trying to win my sympathy? Who wouldn’t have compassion for a man who had undergone imprisonment, torture, hanging, and burning? The trouble was, he had urged that others get the same cruel treatment. And yet he had genuinely wanted Florence to take better care of its poor and underprivileged.
He seemed a brilliant but complex man, one minute inspiring admiration and sympathy, the next contempt. I was no theologian like Savonarola, but I believed that you should treat other people the way you wanted them to behave toward you. I had sympathy for him, but I was revolted by his contradictions-the willingness to torture and burn others, the hatred that soaked his words when he talked about his opponents. It was all symbolized on the medal in the secret cupboard-the friar’s profile on one side, on the other the Lord’s sword jabbing from heaven, warning of swift, certain punishment. When it came right down to it, I saw the friar as a dangerous man who, if you crossed him, would toss you into the fire without blinking, then tell himself he was doing God’s will. For him, that was the ultimate excuse. That was what made him so lethal. And that was what Professor Corbizzi had understood.
Long ago the Corbizzi family had crossed Savonarola by standing against him. For his entire life Professor Corbizzi had opposed what the friar stood for. It seemed clear to me that this visitation by Savonarola’s spirit was revenge, pure and simple. The professor had died under mysterious circumstances that involved a fire. His new book was a focal point of the visitation. The medal was, I thought, just that-a “souvenir” of sorts. The cross? Maybe there was something there, something Raphaella and I had missed.
But with the professor dead, why did the spirit hang around? Why involve me? That was the part of the puzzle that just wouldn’t fit. That was why I needed to take a break from the estate and its library, so I could think things through.
II
MOM WAS SITTING on the sun-splashed steps of the verandah lacing up her trainers when I sauntered out the door next morning.
“You’re up early,” she said, turning and squinting up at me.
“Lots to do,” I replied vaguely. “See you later.”
In the kitchen I prepared ingredients for a Spanish omelette and set them aside to await Mom’s return, then poured a second coffee and carried it outside to the driveway. I collected my toolbox, an old Dutch oven, some rags, and a few litres of motor oil from the garage, then rolled out the Hawk and pulled it up onto the centre stand. I set a low stool beside the bike, took a sip of coffee, and set the mug on the bike’s saddle.
Working on the Hawk was a little like cabinetmaking. It took my mind away. It required some knowledge and skill, asking me to think and remember. I puttered away in the shade of the ancient maple that stood beside the driveway, entertained by rustling leaves and the conversations of robins and sparrows.
I drained and replaced the crankcase oil, then spent half an hour or so adjusting and lubricating the chain, the clutch, and the brake cables. I wiped the bike down from front to back, taking extra time to polish the aluminum frame and swing arm. A motorcycle was like any machine-it liked to be clean, lubricated, and properly adjusted-but more so, because it operated outdoors in all weather, under conditions like yesterday’s, with dirt and dust and a certain amount of abuse.