The Dante Game Read online

  Poor Sukey was in trouble again. There she was in the middle of the street, huddling and whimpering, caught in a stream of motor scooters. Honking derisively, they dodged around her. A boot grazed her leg, and she had to be rescued by Tommaso, who helped her back to the sidewalk.

  Then in single file they drifted past the bulging chapels at the east end of the cathedral, stepping carefully to avoid the tiny feces of little Florentine dogs, making their way to the Museo del Duomo, buying their tickets and crowding through the turnstile.

  The game was Zee’s impulsive idea. He was taking pity on some of the kids who had obviously seen enough for one day and were ready to go home.

  “Find the pope Dante hated,” he said. “The one he wanted to bury upside down in the Eighth Circle of Hell.”

  At once they perked up, and began moving around the big ground-floor gallery, staring at labels. But the pope was in plain sight. Ned Saltmarsh squealed and ran to the end of the room, where a marble Boniface the Eighth sat ponderously on his throne, gazing into space, mild and majestic, as if he had never grasped at worldly pomp and kingly power, never sold the offices of the church for gain, never conspired to condemn Dante to lifelong exile.

  “Bravo,” said Zee in congratulation. “Good kid,” and Ned beamed in triumph.

  Homer Kelly missed the beginning of the Dante Game. He was making expeditions of his own, every evening, exploring the city on foot after skimming back from the school on his newly rented motorbike. It was true that the monuments were best seen in the daytime, but the life of the street was more interesting at night.

  It was more Italian, for one thing, less American-English-German-Japanese. Local citizens poured into the city in the late afternoon, teenagers and young parents with small children from the suburbs and the outlying towns. He had seen them crowding the buses, clinging to the overhead railings, clutching babies and folded strollers, tumbling out on Piazza San Marco or Piazza del Duomo in couples, in families, in hilarious bunches of smartly dressed girls or clusters of grinning high-shouldered boys.

  At this hour they filled the streets, boisterous and cheerful, drinking wine and coffee in the brightly lit bars, ambling in shoals past the open shops, admiring the jewelry in the windows, the digital watches, the jaunty clothes, the belts and scarves spread out on the pavement by black men from Senegal.

  Even the fruit and vegetable sellers made a bid for attention. On the evening of the first day of the Dante Game, Homer stopped beside the loggia of the Mercato Nuovo to admire a display of fresh produce piled up on a cart by some descendant of Donatello or Ghiberti, a monument of pears and peaches, cherries and apples, broccoli and cauliflower, topped by a spray of leeks like an oriflamme.

  He was in no hurry to get back to his lonely room. On Via Calimala he stopped to watch the owner of an enormous Harley Davidson show off his machine in the middle of an admiring crowd.

  The skinny kid was completely hidden by a shining scarlet helmet and a tight-fitting racing outfit. He sat on his big glittering bike with his feet flat on the stone street, making the engine roar in menacing flatulent bursts. It was apparent that he was living in a dream, not yet tied down with a couple of kids and a pregnant wife. Varoom, varoom—majesty, manhood, power.

  Smiling, Homer turned away, but at once there was a shriek, and he looked back. The owner of the motorcycle had lost control. His idling machine had bucked up and knocked down one of the bystanders. The wounded kid lay on the street, rolling in pain.

  There was a sudden confusion, a babble of high-pitched voices. The boy on the motorcycle pulled off his helmet, revealing a stricken childish face. Leaping from his machine, he knelt beside his friend on the ground.

  Someone else took charge, a big man in a butcher’s apron. “Non lo toccare,” he said emphatically. Don’t touch him, translated Homer—good advice. He watched as the butcher snatched a tarpaulin from a cart and covered the boy and snapped an order to a woman who had popped out of a shop, “Telefona alla Misericordia, nutnero due-uno, due-due, due-due.”

  Misericordia? What was that? It sounded like mercy. Could you telephone for mercy in the city of Florence? Apparently you could. Hardly a moment had passed before people along the street were making way, moving aside for the approach of an ambulance from the direction of the cathedral square.

  “Aha,” murmured Homer, reading the name on the side of the ambulance, Misericordia di Firenze. He watched as two men in black robes jumped out of the front seat, looking more like monastic friars than medical technicians.

  In his best patchwork Italian, Homer asked the butcher about the Misericordia.

  “Ah!” The man swelled with civic pride, and explained. Homer caught enough to understand that it was an ancient organization of volunteers. In times past it had buried the victims of plague, now it transported sick people to hospitals. Florentines from all walks of life served in the Misericordia, working a few hours a week, faithful to the organization for their entire lives. The butcher gestured at the black-robed man who was rolling the victim of the accident onto a stretcher. “Ecco, il Sindaco!”

  “The mayor of Florence?” Homer stared at the mayor, impressed by his lifelong commitment to so ancient a public charity. And then he walked homeward, moving slowly in a thick press of people, hearing the din of voices and the rattle of metal shades being pulled down over shop windows.

  As the Baptistery blocked out the soft light of evening he came upon the central office of the Misericordia. Ambulances were parked in front of it, here in the Piazza del Duomo in the very heart of the city.

  Homer hurried back to his pensione, floated upstairs in the tiny elevator, entered his room, turned on his forty-watt bulb, and sat down to write all about it in a letter to his wife.

  CHAPTER 20

  Hoarding and squandering filched the bright world’s glee

  Away.…

  Inferno VII, 58, 59.

  Leonardo Bindo too was thinking about his wife, and also about another woman who was an intimate friend. At an expensive furrier on Via Ricasoli he bought a splendid mink coat and a cheaper but more glamorous jacket of butterscotch muskrat.

  Against his better judgment he showed them to Matteo Luzzi in the privacy of his office, turning back the tissue paper, lifting out the luxurious furs, lying, “They are both for my wife.”

  Matteo held the sleeve of the fluffy jacket against his cheek. “Business must be better than you say it is,” he said jealously, resenting his own poverty.

  “No, but it will improve. And of course I am buying these on time.” Hastily Bindo covered up the furs again, and closed the boxes.

  Then they began talking seriously about Roberto Mori.

  To Matteo, Roberto was still a backward student in the use of the simplest handguns and target pistols on the firing range at the farm. Matteo’s awe in the presence of the good-looking priest had waned. Although Father Roberto was unfailing in his courtesy, the lack of sympathy between them had become more and more manifest. In Matteo’s opinion Roberto’s lofty purpose was ridicolo, stupido. Porca l’oca! How could anyone think such things?

  “Ah, my friend, be patient. Remember that for us he is a precious jewel, a treasure beyond price. How he sparkles when we hold him to the light! We must guard him, protect him, flatter him, inspire him, stroke him and keep him safe, at least until he accomplishes his task.”

  “Oh, si, si, I know,” grumbled Matteo, and then they sat down to examine the tentative schedule of events for the celebration of the cathedral’s seven hundredth anniversary.

  “The Scoppio del Carro,” said Bindo, tapping his pencil on the schedule. “The old Easter tradition of the Explosion of the Cart. Such a lot of noise!”

  When Matteo returned to the Villa L’Ombrellino, Professor Zee called him into the office. “Would you be kind enough to type this up?” he said. “I want to post it on the bulletin board this afternoon.”

  Matteo had been heading for his room, meaning to lie down and leaf through his new copy
of Il Mercenario. He couldn’t help thinking that he himself would have made a better model for the cover picture than the punk kid in leather pants who was standing with his boots spread wide apart against the backdrop of a ruined street, clutching an assault rifle, holding it incorrectly.

  Hurriedly Matteo banged away at the typewriter, making a mess of Zee’s handwritten list. Slapping the result down on Zee’s desk, he galloped away upstairs.

  Zee glanced at the garbled page, sighed, and typed it over himself. Then he took it downstairs to the Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, where Mrs. Keppel’s daughter had once held intimate little dinner parties. Now the miniature domed chamber was a utilitarian room with a public telephone, a table for incoming and outgoing mail and a bulletin board for miscellaneous messages. Zee tacked up his list. It was a set of clues for the Dante Game.

  And there behind us I beheld a grim black fiend.

  Consider there how vast a world I have set under thee.

  The sixth planet, temperate, and of sheen pure white.

  He that with turning compass drew the world’s confines.

  The souls of the unbaptized.

  The Garden of Earthly Paradise.

  The tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

  Dante’s portrait.

  The Dante Game was an American plaything from the start. No self-respecting Italian, Zee knew, would condescend to such a childish form of instruction. The citizens of Florence needed no game to help them understand their ancient city. They had lived with its monuments all their lives. They didn’t walk around with cameras lifted to their faces, they didn’t stop to gawk at the Duomo, they didn’t line up at the Accademia to stare at Michelangelo’s David. These wonders were theirs by birthright.

  But for the American students the Dante Game was a handle by which they could grasp the city. Already they were familiar with the bus stops at Porta Romana and Via Cerretani and San Marco. Already they felt superior to the newcomers wandering lost on the stony byways, their noses in their maps.

  Joan Jakes and Dorothy Orme, leaning from a lofty Gothic window high up on Giotto’s campanile, could name the towers and steeples, they could point out to each other the bridges over the Arno. Under Zee’s guidance the entire class had been permitted to look at precious Dante editions in the Biblioteca Riccardiana. Venturing out by themselves they had become used to thousand-lire notes, they had bought souvenirs in the Mercato Centrale. The boldest had found a videodiscoteca, a club called Divina, a couple of piano bars. And now the studious ones were tracing Zee’s list of clues, searching out the answers by themselves.

  Homer Kelly was enchanted with the Dante Game. He was beginning to see the city of Florence as a picture book of Dante imagery, a compendium of all the vivid scenery in The Divine Comedy. Hell steamed from the manhole covers in its stony streets, Purgatory sprouted from the steep hillsides across the river, Paradise was manifest in the serene perfection of Brunelleschi’s lofty dome.

  His favorite clue was the devilish fiend from the twenty-first canto of the Inferno, because there were devils all over the city.

  On the corners of buildings they supported spiky iron lanterns and iron rings for torches. Grinning batlike creatures spread their wings under lofty pedimented windows. Why, he wondered, were angels noncommittal, while devils smiled from ear to ear?

  The devils were easy, because they were everywhere. Some of the other queries on Zee’s list were more difficult, but three of them were cleared up at once, on the second day of the Dante Game, by a field trip to the Museum of the History of Science.

  Homer found the first one. Staring into an exhibit case he shouted, “The compass that drew the world’s confines, here it is! And, good God, it belonged to Michelangelo.”

  Julia Smith discovered the next. There on a shelf was the diary of astronomical observations in which Galileo had recorded his observations of the moons of Jupiter. “Look at that,” she said. “Is Jupiter the sixth planet?”

  “In Dante’s heaven it was,” said Zee.

  Joan Jakes was not to be outdone. Rushing into another room she came upon a gigantic gold orrery displaying the entire medieval cosmos. Hurrying back to Zee she hauled him away to behold her booty. “How vast a world I have set under thee,” she cried, “okay?”

  It was time to go home. But when they gathered at the bus stop, someone was missing.

  “Where’s Throppie Snow?” said Tom.

  “Oh, don’t mind about Throppie,” said Kevin. “He’ll turn up sooner or later. He’s just sort of, you know, restless.”

  Throppie Snow was really Winthrop Pendleton Snow, scion of a wealthy Springfield family. His father was a wealthy manufacturer of elastic bandages and industrial webbing. For Throppie money unrolled like an endless bandage, wrapping him up so thickly he was incapable of self-generated endeavor.

  This was Throppie’s first trip abroad, his first taste of independence. He had expected a European orgy of wine, women and explosive music, but it hadn’t turned out that way at all. Throppie was disappointed to find himself so completely under the thumb of the faculty and so far from the center of action. Jesus, you had to walk a mile and take a bus, and when you got there everything was closed half the time and the churches were ugly and the museums were boring and the city was full of tourists who looked just like his parents and the Italian kids were really weird. And that Van Ott woman seemed to think she could boss him around. What the fuck business of hers was it if he never came to class? Throppie had paid plenty of money to come to this run-down villa, and he was doing them a favor by being here at all.

  It was soon apparent to Lucretia that she had no choice. After talking it over with Zee, she called Throppie into the office and told him he had to go. Throppie shrugged his shoulders and grinned and went off to call his mother. Lucretia called her too, and explained the situation, and offered to return forty percent of his tuition.

  “Oh, I understand perfectly,” Throppie’s mother said. “But don’t send the money to us. Give it to Winthrop. He’s going to bum around the continent on his own. I think the experience will be so good for him, don’t you?”

  Lucretia was outraged. “Independent study, she called it,” she told Homer. “They just don’t want him in their hair, that’s all.”

  “Well, would you, if you were his parents?” Homer had begun to see everything in terms of the Dante Game. Throppie Snow was a living example of slothfulness, and by rights he should be expiating his sin by galloping at full tilt around and around the mountain of Purgatory.

  So Throppie went away, but his absence didn’t fix everything. There were other irritations. Isabella was listening at the door again. Joan Jakes had been deep in a personal history of her life, confessing everything to Dorothy Orme in Dorothy’s room, dwelling on the torrid love affair of her last Caribbean cruise, and she had suddenly thrown open the door to find Isabella on her knees with a scrubbing brush.

  “You were listening,” cried Joan.

  “No, no, Signorina,” said Isabella innocently, grinning at her.

  But of course she had been listening. Isabella was an insatiable eavesdropper. She loved carrying stories back to the kitchen. Her English was patchy, but she was a clever girl with an instinct for scandal. The idea that the ugly Signorina Joan should have had a lover was hilarious and the others all laughed hysterically, even the melancholy Alberto.

  CHAPTER 21

  New sport, good Reader! hear this merry prank!

  Inferno XXII, 118.

  The archbishop was worried about the committee in charge of security. In his opinion it was moving too slowly.

  Its members had begun by taking junkets out of town, consulting with police departments in Pistoia, Arezzo, Siena, Forli and Pisa, in order to assemble large numbers of reinforcements, enough to satisfy the Vatican Prefect, who—the archbishop was beginning to think—was deliberately making excessive demands. But until recently the committee had made no move to consult the local police department at the Questura.<
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  Thank heaven for the assistance of the remarkable Leonardo Bindo! Signor Bindo had shown a genius for cutting red tape, for sorting the important from the unimportant, for taking on his own shoulders many duties requiring tact and discretion. The man was a wonder, a kind of ballet master controlling the circling dance of the archbishop’s too many committees. When Signor Bindo took over the committee on security, contact with the local police began at once.

  What a relief, to hand over the job to someone so capable! Of course it was a heavy responsibility, but Bindo’s shoulders were broad, and the archbishop was gratified by his willingness to volunteer for other tasks as well.

  “What about the Misericordia?” Signor Bindo inquired at the next meeting of the supervisory committee. “Suppose someone in the crowd faints or has a heart attack? The ambulances of the Misericordia are right there in the square anyway. Shouldn’t we involve them in the plan from the beginning? Would you like me to speak to them? The Governor of the Misericordia is a friend of mine, the Provveditore.”

  There were murmurs of agreement around the table. “How sensible,” said the archbishop. “I would be extremely grateful if you would do so, Signor Bindo.”

  “Prego. It is my pleasure.”

  And of course Leonardo Bindo was a man of his word. Next morning he went to work at once, immediately after attending mass in Santissima Annunziata. Walking around to the Piazza del Duomo, he called on the governor in his study in the central office of the Misericordia.

  The governor was cooperative. “Of course you can have as many members as you like. There are more than sixteen hundred active brothers and sisters, but surely you couldn’t use more than, say, one hundred of them?”

  “One hundred would be more than adequate. We will ensure that they will have free access everywhere, past all the check points, without question.”