Fanatics

them broken, like a cracked microchip or a stripped gear? I mean, just seeing it scared the hell out of me.

“I used to think atrocities were a thing of the past. They happened way back in the fog of history. And I thought that the past was like another country, far away, and that things are different now. After I saw Savonarola being tortured I read up on the strappado and found out it’s still being used, but the information didn’t sink in. I guess I tried to deny it. But that vision last night-the fire, the way the crowd joined in, enjoying the hanging and burning-”

“You’ve been thinking about Hannah,” Raphaella said quietly.

I nodded.

“And what those men did to her.”

Mention of Hannah’s name took me back to a windy starless night more than a year ago, when I had been dragged from sleep long after midnight by the mournful cries of a woman walking in the forest behind the mobile home park where I was living during my stint as caretaker there. I followed Hannah Duvalier along a path to a grave at the edge of the African Methodist Church burial ground, and later to the ruins of a log cabin where a terrible killing had taken place. Hannah made that same walk every night. She had been dead for 150 years.

“That was in the past, too. But do you know what Mom told me? A few months ago she was researching an execution in Afghanistan in 2005. A woman was stoned to death in front of dozens of witnesses. Legally. According to Islamic law. This was after the Taliban were kicked out. And Mom said stoning is still part of the penal code in Iran. It’s promoted by Islamist militants in other countries. Execution by stoning takes half an hour. It’s like being clubbed to death, slowly.”

Raphaella was standing beside my chair now, and she laid her arm on my shoulder. “Garnet, calm down.”

“I don’t get it. How could a crowd of men who knew the woman tie her up, cover her face, and throw rocks at her head, hitting her again and again, until she was dead? What’s wrong with people like that?” I looked up at Raphaella and tried to smile. “I’m repeating myself aren’t I? I’m babbling.”

She smiled back at me and said nothing.

Another thought burst in my brain, like those little packets of gunpowder the crowd flung onto the fire in my vision.

“It’s religious law that allows-hell, demands-stoning as punishment. For adultery. The regulations even specify what size of stone to be used. And by the way, a male adulterer gets a lashing and goes home.

“It was the Church that helped execute Savonarola. The Church’s Inquisition burned Jews and heretics. Religious leaders burned the witches in Salem.”

“I’ve always wondered,” Raphaella mused, “is it the religion that’s evil, or the people practising it? Is the religious law an excuse for committing acts they would have carried out anyway? A way to dress up viciousness as holiness?”

I felt suddenly exhausted, as if my mainspring had wound down. “I’m sick of it,” I whispered. “All of it.”

Raphaella crouched in front of me and took one of my hands. “But we have to see it through. We have to make him go away.”

I kept silent.

“Which means finding out why he’s still haunting the Corbizzi place,” she added.

I drew in some of Raphaella’s energy, the way a sponge absorbs water.

“So we go back… when?” I asked her.

“Tomorrow. I believe the answer’s in the prof’s unpublished book.”

I completed her thought. “Which is why the spirit was messing with it yesterday while we were lounging around outside.”

“I think we’re close, Garnet. I really do.”

II

MY STEP WAS A LITTLE lighter as I strolled back up the hill under the canopy of old maple trees in full summer leaf, but I still had a lot of thinking to do. I was so deep in thought when I got home that as soon as Mom hinted it was time the lawn was mowed I said yes without argument and marched straight from her office to the garage to get the electric mower.

An hour and a half later, hot and sweaty, I took my second shower of the day, stuffed my clothes into the laundry hamper, and put on a clean T-shirt and jeans. As I was heading downstairs something caught my eye. The history book I had chucked onto the blankets that morning had fallen open to a page near the back. I picked up the book and was about to slap it shut when I noticed the words “Appendix: The Arrabbiati.” Strange phrase, I thought.

Curious, I took a closer look. The Arrabbiati, or “Angry Ones,” were Savonarola’s opponents, the offended citizens who saw him as an intolerant puritanical tyrant. They included people from all walks of life, many from well-known families. The author of the book had listed these families alphabetically.

I ran my finger down the column of names, suddenly knowing what I was about to find.

And there it was, in black and white.

Corbizzi.

PART FOUR

Cut off his head, although he may be head of his family, cut off his head!

– Girolamo Savonarola

One

I

I HAD A LOT to think about.

With the discovery that the Corbizzi family had been opponents of Savonarola in the fifteenth century I had found another link between the estate on the shore of Lake Couchiching and an Italian city thousands of kilometres away across the Atlantic Ocean. This was no coincidence. The professor was an expert on the Italian Renaissance, had lived and taught in Florence, and had made Savonarola the centre of his studies, especially the friar’s attempts to set up a government that would rule according to Christian morality, as interpreted by him. The prof had written a new book warning against theocracy, a book that devoted a whole chapter to Savonarola, using the friar’s career as an alarm bell-the chapter Raphaella would be reading next.

Savonarola had contacted me through my dreams, had shown me how much he had suffered. He had made me watch his inhumane execution. Was he trying to win my sympathy? Who wouldn’t have compassion for a man who had undergone imprisonment, torture, hanging, and burning? The trouble was, he had urged that others get the same cruel treatment. And yet he had genuinely wanted Florence to take better care of its poor and