The Botticelli Secret

2
“Chi-chi?”
Madonna. I hated being woken up after a hard night’s work. “Yes?”
“Will you do a favor for me?”
Another one? After the night he’d just had, Bembo should’ve been doing me favors. Over and above our agreed rate, of course. But business is business. I smiled sleepily. “Of course.”
Bembo hauled his considerable weight to his elbow and I caught a whiff of his armpit. Madonna. I reached for the lavender pomade from the night table and pressed it to my nose. Smiling coquettishly to dissolve the insult, I waited for what came next. It was always hard to tell with Bembo; obscenely rich men reserve the right to be unpredictable.
Benvolio Malatesta.
Fact one, Fatto Uno: he was called Benvolio Malatesta, but everyone called him Bembo. Maybe because he had a carefully studied jocular air, like your favorite uncle; a quality totally belied by his utter ruthlessness in business. He smiled and joked a lot but;
Fact two, Fatto Due: Bembo was one of the richest men in Florence. He made all his money from importing pearls from the Orient. Lovely things they were: big and fat and as white as an olive is black. He sent little boys with oyster knives to dive for them. Sometimes they ran out of breath or got tangled in seaweed.
Once Bembo brought his finest pearl round for me to wear in my navel when we were f*cking (do you see what I mean about never knowing what to expect from him?) Afterward he wanted it back but I told him I couldn’t get it out. That was a lie. I tried later in my bath and it came out, just . . . but it hurt a lot. I put it back in there. It fit so well, and now I am known for it—I make it one of the things I am famous for. (Like my tits and my hair.) I always wear gowns with cropped bodices or cut-out holes to show off my pearl. Clients always love something unusual. Especially the rich ones.
Bembo didn’t seem to mind. His big pearls were used in jewelery, and the little ones ground down for toothpaste for rich gentlemen or face powder for rich ladies. The pearls made their teeth and skin glow, even when they were as spotted as liver or as raddled as hags. My navel pearl was all good advertising for Bembo. He said that the pearl would pop out one day when my belly grows big with child. (I didn’t tell him there’s no chance of that happening. Every middle of the month I stuff waxed cotton squares up my hole to stop men’s tallow getting through to my woman’s parts. It makes me tighter but no one has complained yet.) For one horrible moment I thought that Bembo was planning to get me pregnant. Was he so cock-dazzled that he wanted marriage? Madonna. Is that why he let me keep the pearl? But then I came to my senses. A man like Bembo would hardly want to father a brat on a whore like me, for all my beauty: he has a rich frigid wife at home to cool his bed and bear his sons. And he has never asked for the pearl since, though some clients would have cut a girl’s navel to prise it out, not caring if she lived or died. Bembo wouldn’t do that to me though. He likes me. He even paid me three dinari for the night when the pearl got stuck, despite the fact that he couldn’t get his gem back. Must have been a good f*ck.
Fact three, Fatto Tre: Bembo knows a lot of artists. I think it makes him feel a little bit cultured, like one of his pearls, even though he is actually more like the common little ugly oysters that crowd the seabed. He came from nothing, from a line of fishermen, so he is trying to drag himself up to the surface and the light. Like his oysters he is an ugly creature capable of creating beauty, and he does this by his patronage of painters. It’s this third fact that he hit me with. And it bought me a whole heap of trouble.
“Will you pose for a friend of mine?”
I was still half asleep. “Which friend?” My voice was a crow’s croak.
“Alessandro Botticelli. Sandro.”
I vaguely knew the name.
“He thinks you’d be perfect for the central figure for his new panel painting.”
I opened one eye. “The central figure?”
He smiled and his teeth flashed pearl. I swear Bembo wore his wealth in his mouth. “Yes, Chi-chi. Don’t worry. You will be center stage and all the other figures will pale before your beauty.” Poetry didn’t sit well on Bembo’s tongue.
“How many figures?”
“Seven others. Eight in total.”
Crowd work. “Doesn’t sound very central to me.”
His smile widened. “Oh, but you will be, Chi-chi. The whole panel is to be called La Primavera—Spring—and you will be the goddess Flora herself.”
Still I grumbled. “At least it could have been the Madonna.”
Then he laughed. “You, the virginal queen of heaven? The notorious Chi-chi untouched by a man’s hand? No and no and no.”
I sulked and turned my head. He tickled my nipples to placate me. “Listen, pigeon. Sandro wants you because you have known the heat of a bed. Flora is to be experienced, fruitful, with a knowing face—even a suggestion that she is with child. But more beautiful than the day.” He knew how to appeal to my vanity.
“And how does Sandro know of my charms?”
Bembo collapsed onto his back again and the mattress buckled. He waved his arm to the thin muslin panel stretched like a window next to the bed. I had seen such things before in pleasure palaces and private rooms—a finestra d’amore, love’s window. Sometimes the host’s friends would watch him in a sex act, if the client liked to feel he was being watched. Or another couple would . . . well . . . couple in a chamber on the other side, sharing the sounds of their union. I had no problem with the concept normally—in fact, Signor Botticelli must have had quite a show if I remember some of the positions of last night; but suddenly I felt nervous. Watched by clients pleasuring themselves, fine; watched by an artist who was all set to immortalize me, unsettling.
I sat bolt upright and pulled two ropes of wheat-blond hair over my breasts in an unaccustomed gesture of modesty. Actually, I should tell you my three facts since I’ve now mentioned two of them.
Fatto Uno: I was named Luciana Vetra because I came from Venice as a baby in a bottle. True story; I’ll tell you all about it sometime.
Fatto Due: I have lots of golden hair—natural color untouched by lemon juice, before you ask—waist length, with ringlets that have never seen a poker.
Fatto Tre: I have fantastic tette—round and firm and small like cantaloupes. And they taste just as sweet according to my clients. But can you really believe what a man says about your breasts just before he spills his cuckoo spit?
“What do you say?” Bembo interrupted my musings.
I crashed back onto the pillows. “I’ll think about it.” I knew what Bembo wanted. He wanted everyone to see the panel so he could tell them that he’d f*cked Flora.
“Perhaps this”—he tapped the pearl in my navel—“will help you think well of my request?” He was wheedling now.
I looked down at the glowing, milky gem and back at him. That f*cking pearl. I knew I’d have to pay for it one day. “All right,” I said. “Give me his address.”
And that’s how I found myself by the Arno that day, all dressed up on the way to Sandro Botticelli’s and badly needing a wee.