Page 419 - The Grotesque Children's Book

Chapter 80.

And the rest of them?

Carola was not so fortunate as to be released from prison. The Cardinal hadn’t the same
use for the tavern girl as had had his deceased sister-in-law, and saw no need to keep her alive.
On the night before her execution, however, one of her guards accepted a nice bribe from Tozzo
Scatenarsi to allow her to escape with him.

What?, you ask. Tozzo? Surely he hadn’t found Carola’s box under the bed. Or if he
had understood that she wasn’t whispering about “two hundred seven compliments” but florins
instead, surely he had been unable to protect that money until Carola’s release from prison.
Surely he drank away that two hundred seven florins, in a delicious irony of returning that
money to his fellow drunkards who had wagered and lost it in the first place?

In fact, surely he hadn’t. Tozzo had quite unwittingly been duped into protecting
Carola’s money inadvertently. One of the drunkards at the Wheat and Chaff was a dubious
financier and had tricked Tozzo into “trusting” him with the money, and he would put it into the
very safest of financial instruments in all of Italy. Tozzo had taken that to mean one of the
banking families in Venice, perhaps, and would have been shocked and betrayed to learn that his
drunken friend had invested in a high speculative maritime adventure involving spices, African
capes and London England. But! Against all odds, the financier’s ship returned from England
whole, and at a mighty profit. Tozzo’s drunken financier friend, now flush with the sudden
respectability which comes with a two hundred percent profit, returned Tozzo’s cash (with a fifty
percent profit), coincidentally the very week Tozzo needed the money back in order to bribe the
guard and free Carola. Carola then took control of the money, and paid their quick passage
across the channel to Dublin, where she and Tozzo founded a successful chain of taverns and
lived happily ever after.

*

Allesandro Allori had used the cash he’d borrowed at such a price from Zaccario to hire
four painters to finish the ceilings. You can see the inferiority of their hasty work in the higher
numbered bays (Bay 29 in particular; where the plaster had fallen and had to be re-done at the
last minute) before Allori’s final stretch at the end of the hallway (Bays 40 through 44): the
work of the newly-hired painters were less inventive, with fewer characters and more expanses
of color, and in the case of the final bay to be finished (Bay 39), big enormous figures taking up
the span of a dozen (“Why hadn’t I thought of that sooner!” asked Allori. “Stupid, stupid,
stupid!”) He finished Bianca’s portrait, just barely in time for the opening of October 1st, but
finished.

*

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