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Everyone had returned to their business. There was an old woman begging alms in a whiny voice, and I knew her from under the Ponte Vecchio, had even shared some scraps with her. Now she wouldn’t look at me. Massimo was gone, Paolo nowhere in sight. I thought bitterly that the old man from Piazza Santa Maria Novella was right, that God laughed. And His laughter was cruel and filled with the worst kind of mockery.
    Silvano lifted me by my wrists, compelling me forward. “It’s not a far walk,” he said. “Just by the city walls. I’m sure you know where my beautiful establishment is. Everyone does.”
    I thought of the discarded bodies, some cut up, always young, that drifted down the Arno from his establishment. “Beautiful isn’t what people call your establishment.”
    “What do people know? Beauty is everywhere, in all things, and comes in many forms,” he replied cheerfully. He took up whistling a hymn as we moved through the streets. Twice I wrenched violently to escape him, and twice he caught me by the ropes around my wrists and yanked my arms viciously until I thought they would come out of their sockets. Once I threw myself on the ground, and he boxed my hurt ear so that the blood ran onto my neck. I stumbled forward. The Ponte Vecchio, with its little houses clustered like so many nests, barred the evening sky like a black ribbon stretched across an expanse of yellow silk. The city spread around us in harmonies of gray and ocher, and the hills of Fiesole beyond were already shrouded in the indigo shades of night. Its beauty made exquisite agony of the fate I knew lay ahead. My stomach bucked and heaved with terror, and despite the pain, I stumbled and flopped as much as I dared, desperate to prolong the walk. Silvano was patient, expertly twisting the rope to torture my wrists and hands, and then pressing me forward when I cried out. After some short time we arrived at the city walls, at a palazzo whose immaculate plastered facade belied everything that happened within it. I didn’t know the details exactly, and had never wanted to. I had, of course, witnessed all manner of fornication on the streets, but this place represented a darker, deeper level of fleshly sin. I knew from whispered conversations with Paolo and Massimo that the door that was now opening to swallow me belonged to the most famously depraved brothel in all of Tuscany.

Chapter
2
    SILENCE GREETED US. It was thick and clotted and overwhelmed me. It scared me as much as Silvano did, made me want to shrink into myself and hide. I wasn’t used to silence. The streets of Florence were never quiet. There were always sounds: drunken laughter, whinnying horses, dogs baying, bells ringing in the tower of the Badia Fiorentina, whores calling out, carriage wheels rattling on cobblestone streets, hammers clanging on anvils, boats clanking on the Arno, garbage from windows slopping wetly onto the flagstone street, stone-workers buzzing as they labored on the huge new church of Santa Maria del Fiore that everyone said would one day crown the city…. Even at night the streets vibrated with noise. I expected it. More, the babel had become part of me, like threads woven into a cloak make up the pattern of the fabric. This silence that seeped around me when I entered Silvano’s brothel was unnatural, poisonous. It was alien to me, alien thing that I was, with no family or name.
    Silvano shoved me at two stout women who waited in the foyer. “Feed him and clean him, he smells like sewerage. Put him in Donato’s old room. He’ll work tonight.”
    The women nodded and one took my shoulder. She had a moonshaped face, dark brown hair, and slack eyes shot through with red veins. The other woman, younger and paler, with a strange red mark across her cheek, reached around my back, and my wrists popped free. I cradled them to my chest as I watched her pick up the cuttings. Through her filmy white shirt, I saw that her back was crisscrossed with red