In that, he was mistaken.
But if Benvenuto had needed any further impetus to escape, this was it. His usefulness was at an end, and so long as it could be made to appear a natural death, his enemies were prepared to kill him now. He dug under his sodden mattress and removed the long ribbon of cloth strips, laboriously tied together, that he planned to use to lower himself over the walls. He had hoped to make it longer, just as he had hoped to wait for a night with no moon, but now that he knew his chances of a papal reprieve were null, it was time to put his scheme into action. When the midnight bell had tolled, he used his spoon to remove the artificial hinges he had placed in the door, crept past the jailer’s room, where he was snoring soundly, and out onto the parapet of the Castel St. Angelo.
All of Rome spread out below him, swaddled in night, and with the strength still left in his emaciated frame, he lowered the rope—still too short to reach the ground—and began his slow and perilous descent.
Chapter 14
Monday dawned cold and gray, but after a hot breakfast delivered to his room, David packed up his leather valise and set out on foot for the Biblioteca Laurenziana, still determined to be the first one through its doors.
Florence could be a forbidding city under the best of circumstances, with its ancient buildings glowering over its crowded streets and squares, but that morning, with a blustery wind keeping everyone’s heads down and dust and dirt flying up from the cobblestones, it was especially sinister. On the Via Proconsul, he passed by the Bargello, once the headquarters of the chief city magistrate. For centuries, criminals had been publicly hanged from its tower windows, and if they were foreigners, their bodies had been donated to medical students and “anatomists” such as Leonardo da Vinci for dissection and study.
A few shifty-looking men huddled in the Bargello’s doorway, throwing dice, and David instinctively hugged the valise more tightly to his side. Italy boasted some of the greatest artists and inventors of all time, but it was also the home to some of the world’s most skillful pickpockets and thieves.
The streets were congested with morning traffic, cars rumbling by and motor scooters whizzing past like hornets. Jumping out of the way of one, David thought he caught sight of a figure in a slouched hat, with a rolled-up newspaper under one arm, dodging into an alcove. But a break in the traffic opened up, and without looking back he darted across the street.
Ahead, Il Duomo, the mighty rose-colored cupola of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, rose above the surrounding rooftops. Ever since its construction in the 1420s, city law had dictated that no building should ever exceed it in height. Built by Brunelleschi, it was a miracle of both artistry and engineering, soaring over three hundred feet into the air and so all-encompassing that it was, in the words of the Renaissance architect Alberti, “large enough to shelter all the people of Tuscany in its shadow.” Mark Twain had said it looked like “a captive balloon,” floating over the town.
A bunch of tourists, climbing off their bus and hoisting their videocams, snagged him in their midst, and before he could extricate himself, he thought he glimpsed that same figure, hat pulled low, mingling with the mob; but he could have been mistaken.
He wondered if his near miss with that driver back at the skating rink in Evanston had left him a bit paranoid.
Heading across the piazza, he could see the smaller, but no less captivating, dome of the ancient Church of San Lorenzo; like every major construction project in Florence, the contract had called for the cathedral to be “piu bello che si puo,” or in English “as beautiful as can be.” It was a stipulation the city fathers had insisted upon throughout the Renaissance, and it had yielded an unparalleled crop of striking architecture. Over the centuries, San Lorenzo—which claimed to be the oldest church in Florence, its original cornerstone having been laid in 393—had been rebuilt and expanded until, gradually, it had become a sort of monastic complex, housing an old sacristy by Brunelleschi, a new sacristy by Michelangelo, the Medici burial chapels, and, in an adjoining cloister, David’s destination … the world-renowned Laurenziana library.
From the outside, the buildings presented a fairly austere appearance, their walls layered in the dark stone, or pietra serena, of their native Tuscany. And although in warmer weather its cloistered courtyard was filled with green leaves and banks of multicolored irises, today it was barren and sere.