Page 383 - The Grotesque Children's Book

Chapter 70.
Yet another look at the Bread of Life

From his vantage in the octagonal room, peering over his small gold spectacles, the
Southern Italian man had been able to observe Aurelio DeSolo without detection, noting the
places in the hall where Aurelio had seemed most transfixed, returning to again and again. The
Southern Italian man’s name was Lorenzo Pulveri. He was a professional assassin: one of the
highest paid mercenaries in all of Florence. If you wanted absolute discretion and certain results,
you hired Lorenzo Pulveri, hypothetically, say, if you no longer wished to be married to a certain
daughter of an Austrian emperor, but needed her death to look like the work of an uneven
staircase, hypothetically. Just now, Lorenzo Pulveri was standing next to Chimento Zaccario, in
Aurelio’s very footprints, looking up at the very angle which Pulveri had observed Aurelio
craning his neck for so long.

To remind you, there had been two Southern Italian men who had followed Santi del
Meglio: A swarthy fellow with a thick forest of a beard and a trimmer, tidier one, with a pair of
tiny spectacles on his face. Pulveri was the tidy one with the spectacles. Pulveri stretched out
his short stubby finger, pointing upwards to the images which he felt now much have been
Aurelio’s focus from here.

Zaccario looked up. This was the thirty-third bay from the north. Pulveri was pointing at
a portrait of Joanna of Austria eating a meal consisting of wine and bread.

“He stood here longer than all the rest of his observation points,” said Pulveri, “but he
also spent a long time there, looking up at angle focused on that section.” Zaccario saw an
illustration of the famous myth of Citia who had rescued her brothers and sisters from Diavolo
d’Oro.

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