The Secret Supper Read Free Page B

fiend for the exact detail. He knows everything!”
    The friar was right. The Soothsayer’s fine, bone-colored sheets of parchment, written in perfect calligraphy and now piled up in a wooden box sealed with the word riservato, referred with obsessive insistence to a secret plan to turn Milan into a new Athens. I had been suspecting something like this for a long time. Ludovico il Moro, like the Medici before him, was among those superstitious leaders who believed that the ancients had a knowledge of the world far more advanced than ours. He believed in a timeworn story according to which, before God punished the world with the Flood, humanity had enjoyed a prosperous Golden Age that first the Florentines—and now the Duke of Milan—wished to bring back at all costs. And to achieve this, these people would not hesitate to cast aside the Bible and the Church’s tenets, since, they argued, in those past days of glory, God had not yet created an institution to represent Him.
    But there was more: the Soothsayer’s letters insisted that the cornerstone of the project was being laid down before our very noses. If what the Soothsayer had written was true, Ludovico il Moro’s cunning was beyond measure. His plan to convert his domain into the capital of this rebirth of the philosophy and science of the ancients was to rest on an astonishing foundation: on no less a place than our new monastery in Milan.
    The Soothsayer had managed to surprise me. Whoever the man hiding behind such revelations might be, he had delved much further into the matter than I would have ever dared. As the archivist now warned me, he seemed to have eyes everywhere, not only in Milan but also in Rome, since several of his latest missives carried the disconcerting heading Augur dixit—“the Soothsayer hath spoken.” What kind of informer were we dealing with? Who, except someone well placed within the Curia, would know what name had been given to him by the clerks of Bethany?
    Neither of us knew whom to accuse.
    In those days, the monastery referred to in his messages—Santa Maria delle Grazie—was in the process of being built. The Duke of Milan had appointed the best architects of the day to work on it: Bramante was in charge of the church’s gallery, Cristoforo Solari, of the interior, and not a single ducat was spared to pay the finest artists for the decoration of every one of its walls. Ludovico il Moro wished to turn our temple into a mausoleum for his family, a place of eternal repose that would render his memory immortal for centuries to come.
    And yet, what was for the Dominicans a privilege was for the author of these letters a terrible curse. He foresaw terrible calamities for the papacy if no one put a stop to the project, and he predicted a dark and fatal time for the whole of Italy. It was indeed in all fairness that the anonymous author of these messages had earned for himself the title of Soothsayer. His vision of Christendom could not have been bleaker.

4
    No one paid any heed to the poor anonymous devil until the morning on which his fifteenth letter arrived.
    On that day, Brother Giovanni Gozzoli, my assistant at Bethany, burst noisily into the scriptorium. He was waving in the air a new message from the Soothsayer, and oblivious to the reproachful glances of the studious monks, he walked straight up to my desk.
    “Father Agostino, you must see this! You must read it at once!”
    I had never seen Brother Giovanni so distraught. The young man waved the letter before my eyes and, in a strangled voice, whispered: “It’s incredible, Father. Incredible.”
    “What is so incredible, Giovanni?”
    Brother Giovanni took a deep breath.
    “The letter—this letter—the Soothsayer—Master Torriani asked that you read it at once.”
    “Master Torriani?”
    The pious Gioacchino Torriani, thirty-fifth successor of Saint Dominic de Guzmán on Earth and the highest authority of our order, had never before taken any of these anonymous