“Everyone loves you, Santi, but it’s Michelangelo’s commission.” To a girl tending her father’s booth, Soderini said, “A jug of garum, boy.” The girl scooped a serving of fermented fish sauce into a pouch. She wore a cap tipped like a boy’s, but one look at her features and you’d never doubt she was a girl. Sometimes it’s amazing what people refuse to see, isn’t it?

“You don’t truly believe that Michelangelo is coming back to Florence, do you?” I asked, painting my tone thick with skepticism. “As Plato said, ‘the worst deception is self-deception.’”

Soderini’s brow furrowed. “You don’t think Michelangelo will return? Ever?” He was only holding a paltry soldo, so I slipped two more coins onto the young lady’s table. She smiled and added an extra dab of garum.

I said, “From what I understand, that tomb will take a lifetime to carve.”

Soderini put his pinkie in the fish guts and licked it. “But I’ve been counting on travelers seeking those frescoes to fill the city’s coffers.”

I winked at the fishmonger girl and pursed my lips sadly at Soderini. “Mi dispiace, Gonfaloniere, I’m afraid you’re going to have to find another painter, unless you think a drawing will attract a crowd.”

I swear I didn’t mean for Soderini to take that comment as advice. I never thought he’d put that drawing on public display. But that’s what he did, exhibiting both large-scale cartoons on opposite walls of the Great Hall—Leonardo’s on the east, Michelangelo’s on the west, where the frescoes would eventually live. (If they’d ever been finished, sì certo. Just the other day, I overheard a Florentine banker, visiting Rome on business, remark about what a tragedy it was that those “dueling frescoes” were never finished. Leonardo and Michelangelo would’ve pushed each other to “even greater greatness”—his clumsy words, not mine—if they’d only been allowed to compete side by side in the same room. He said it as if either of them would’ve chosen Florence over working for the pope or the King of France, if only they’d been allowed. He blathered on for quite some time about how those frescoes would’ve no doubt been the greatest in history if only . . . Until he spotted me, sitting between inarguably the two handsomest women in the place and grinning. That shut him up.)