The Dark Heart of Florence Tasha Alexander (novels for beginners .TXT) 📖

share it. I do hope you will trust me when I say I am confident in my assessment of the situation. They pose no danger whatsoever.”

Colin had—more often than I would like—exhibited a tendency to overreact at the slightest suggestion I might be in danger, taking what I felt to be excessive protective measures. I had no reason to believe he wouldn’t do the same now. I trusted him, but I didn’t believe that the servants were being entirely candid. Something about the robberies could have proved to them the treasure did exist and could be found. If that were the case, they hadn’t told us everything they knew, and I did not share my husband’s confidence that they would alert us should they locate it. If the treasure was, in fact, what he’d discussed with them. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they knew far more about Colin’s work than I did, or that they were more like colleagues than servants. To me, that seemed a more reasonable explanation than any other for the uneasiness I felt around them.

The following morning, Colin and Darius breakfasted more quickly than usual, leaving me alone in the dining room, where, while Cécile finished her repast, I studied the map of Florence in my Baedeker’s.

“Can I help you find something, signora?” Tessa asked as she came in to clear the gentlemen’s plates.

“I’m looking for a small, dead-end street,” I said.

She peered over my shoulder at the map. “A specific street?”

“Yes, but I don’t know its name only that it’s near Santa Maria Novella.”

“Is it the street you seek or a specific building on it?”

“A house, but I don’t know…” I hesitated. She knew I was investigating Marzo’s death, but did I want to tell her that I was also interested in another murder? Did it matter? “Have you have heard about a murder that occurred in Florence not long before Marzo died?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “A Signore di Taro, killed in his home. Shot twice in the head.”

“Mon dieu, Tessa, how do you come to know such brutal details?” Cécile asked.

“It was in the newspaper. Everyone knows. A boy heard the shots and tried to report them, but no one believed him. The body was not discovered for two days. It was a hideous scene.”

“Two days? Why so long?” Cécile asked.

“The signore’s wife died some years back,” Tessa said. “They had no children and he lived alone.”

“It is his house that I’m looking for,” I said.

“Why? Is his murder connected to Marzo’s?” Tessa asked.

“I suspect they were both killed by the same man,” I said. This was a lie. Although Colin had not shared with me any details about the cause of Marzo’s death, I had seen the body. He had not been shot. More likely, his killer had bashed in the back of his head, as that sort of injury would fit better with him being flung off the roof. Nothing in the methods of the two crimes suggested a single killer; and, if Vittoria was correct, it was possible Marzo had murdered di Taro. “Do you know where Signore di Taro lived?”

“I do.” Referring to my map, she showed me how to get there. I thanked her and Cécile and I set off, heading north to the Piazza Santa Maria Novella and then along the Via della Scala, pausing briefly to look in the windows of the Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella. The Dominican friars of Santa Maria Novella cultivated a garden in the nearby monastery to provide raw materials—generally herbal—for a variety of medicinal cures. The friars founded the Profumo-Farmaceutica in 1212, but didn’t sell their wares to the public until 1381, when they offered their rose water as a means of warding off the Black Death that devastated Florence in waves throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They still sell their rose water, and I had every intention of popping in to buy some after we’d finished our work for the day. One can never be too careful about keeping the plague at bay.

From there, the walk to Signore di Taro’s street was short, and within a few minutes we’d arrived in front of the nondescript edifice in which he had lived. I couldn’t imagine why Marzo would have brought Vittoria here again and again. The street was wholly unremarkable.

“What now, Kallista?” Cécile asked. “We’re not going to be able to get into his apartment.”

“No,” I said, “but we can talk to his neighbors. If we’re fortunate, we may even be able to locate the boy who heard the gunshots.”

I never much enjoyed this part of my work: knocking on the doors of strangers. Generally, once I apologized for disturbing them and explained my purpose, things became easier. Many people who find themselves within touching distance of a horrible crime welcome the opportunity to discuss it, enjoying their proximity to notoriety, but that was not the case today. No one among the four other families who lived in Signore di Taro’s building would speak to us. They all claimed not to have known the dead man. We tried the residents of the other apartments in the street, but met the same resistance, so turned our attention instead to the shopkeepers on the main road.

We started at a small greengrocer, then a butcher, places I thought it likely Signore di Taro would have regularly patronized. He did shop in both, but neither the owners nor the clerks knew him in the slightest. They claimed he never bothered to make conversation. We’d made our way nearly a quarter of a mile down the street before we finally found a clockmaker who admitted to having known him.

“He was not from Florence,” he said. “He came in here with an old Viennese clock that needed repair. Seemed a pleasant enough fellow and he appreciated the work I did for him. He stopped in once in a while to chat and to see what I was making, but I can’t claim