The Alchemist's Code

by Dave Duncan

  “To the sage!” The doge raised his glass in a toast and the entire Signoria copied him. After they had all drunk he said, “Lustrissimo dottore, your explanation is impressive. Your apprentice confirms that Guarini was the man who attacked him on the Riva del Vin?”

  The Maestro nodded. “He does, and so does my gondolier.”

  “Well, then, are our two inquisitors satisfied? Have you questions to ask him?”

  Gritti now looked less grandfatherly and more avuncular—the wicked uncle who stole the throne. “No and yes, sire. Not satisfied, several questions. I agree Doctor Nostradamus has made an excellent case against Francesco Guarini, and Guarini must be closely questioned. But, Doctor, you have still not told us how you identified which of our ten thousand gondoliers was the one you sought. Perhaps you will elucidate your procedures for us?”

  No, no! Don’t!

  The Maestro filled his glass and took a drink of wine.

  He wiped his lips and leaned back.

  “My apprentice had mentioned that Dolfin had several sisters. My first thought was that one of them might have married a gondolier, so that Dolfin, when he discovered his gold mine in the sky, took his proposal to a brother-in-law. I sent a boy, actually two boys, to ask Father Equiano in San Barnaba for the names and occupations of the Dolfin girls’ husbands. Unfortunately not all brilliant hunches work out, and that one did not.”

  At that point I might have dived out the atelier door and made a break for freedom down the stairs, except that the old mountebank treated himself to another sip of wine. I know him well enough to know when he is letting the suspense build.

  “My next idea worked better,” he continued. “Ten thousand gondoliers are a small city all to themselves, but they are a very close fraternity, or perhaps two fraternities—the public-hire men despise those who work for wages. No matter, my own gondolier had seen the fight and watched Guarini clambering out of the water, so yesterday I asked him if he knew the man. He did not, but he said the story had been the joke of the week among the city’s boatmen, because Guarini was not popular with those who did. I sent Giorgio out to ask some questions. He soon learned that the man we wanted belonged to the traghetto of the Ponte della Paglia, and then it was easy to learn his name and address.”

  Only fools tell outright lies, the Maestro says. The wise use truth selectively. An icy droplet ran down my ribs. I hoped the Maestro had primed Giorgio well in what to say when he was questioned.

  The nobles of the Signoria were frowning, puzzled by the sudden tension.

  “You swear by your immortal soul that this is the truth?” Gritti said, fondling the words like a silken cord.

  “Certainly I do! I am not in the—”

  “It is not what Vizio Vasco reports,”

  The Maestro sighed. “What does Vizio Vasco report, Your Excellency?”

  “Perhaps we should hear it from his own lips,” Gritti smiled. “If Their Excellencies permit?”

  “I can’t see how it matters if he led us to the right man,” the doge said impatiently. “But let’s get it over with.”

  The inquisitor rose and went to the door. He spoke for a few moments with persons outside, then moved aside to let the vizio enter. Vasco was still pale and probably felt very shaky, but a healthy man will recover quickly from loss of blood if he is going to recover at all. Gritti led him to the table and pulled out a chair for him. He blinked uncertainly, sat down unsteadily and peered around the company. Excess of wine was affecting him more than shortage of blood now.

  “Filiberto Vasco,” the inquisitor said as he returned to his own seat, “do you swear to tell the truth?”

  “I do, Your Excellency.”

  “Then tell us how Doctor Nostradamus learned the name of the man who murdered Danese Dolfin.”

  This was my cue to dive out the window and swim away along the canal.

  I didn’t.

  “Yesh, Your Shereenit’tee…” Vasco’s speech was slurred by the wine and tangled up by the packing in his grossly distended nose, but what he was trying to say was, “Yes. Your Serenity, Your Excellencies, last night I was present in this room. There’s a spyhole in that wall and I could watch what Doctor Nostradamus and Alfeo Zeno were doing; and hear them, too.”

  “And what were they doing?” Gritti was literally rubbing his hands, not a gesture one often sees outside the theater.

  The vizio smiled as well as he could with his face the way it was. He would have managed better had I been there for him to smile at. “They were performing a Satanic rite, worshiping a human head. They were summoning the soul of Danese Dolfin back from death to tell them the name of his murderer.”

  Several patricians gasped. Others crossed themselves. The doge and a couple of others rolled their eyes.

  “Tell us more,” the inquisitor said.

  “They had the thing on a table, Excellency. They were burning incense around it and they had laid out offerings to it. They put a lock of Dolfin’s hair on it—on the head. Nostradamus read a long speech in a foreign tongue to the skull and then Zeno questioned it in Veneziano and it spoke to him. It was Dolfin! He had a very memorable voice. I knew it at once. Zeno asked him, er, it who killed him and he…it…the voice named Guarini and where he lived.” Vasco smiled bravely. I would be toasted and he could dance around the pyre.

  The inquisitor was just as happy. His old eyes held a youthful sparkle. “Did they give this talking head a name?”

  “They called it Baphomet, Your Excellency.”

  The doge muttered something I was glad not to be able to hear, but he did not interrupt. The wily old man had learned half a century ago to judge the tone of a meeting, and the tide was running hard against Nostradamus now.

  “Well, Doctor?” Gritti demanded triumphantly.

  Nostradamus seemed to have shrunk. He shook his head sadly. “I confess,” he said.

  More gasps.

  “I confess that both Alfeo and I had become very tired of having Filiberto Vasco underfoot all the time, prying and spying. He was only doing his job, I know, but…Well, I admit that I let my apprentice talk me into a most undignified prank. Yes, there is a spyhole in that wall, through to my atelier, and Vasco had found it. We set up a masquerade, messere! It was most unprofessional.”

  “What sort of masquerade?” Gritti demanded angrily.

  Sometimes my master throws things at me without any warning whatsoever. One of these days he will outsmart himself by over-smarting me, but that morning I was able to rise to the occasion.

  He turned to face me, spread his arms and cried, “Danese Dolfin! I summon you!”

  I dropped my voice to the lowest register I could manage and moaned back through the spyhole in my best attempt at Danese Dolfin’s sepulchral bass. “Who are you that calls to me in the darkness?”

  The audience jumped. Sier Zuanbattista, who knew that voice, knocked over his wine glass with an oath. For a moment the world seemed to stop breathing. Then the doge leaned back and bellowed with laughter, so everyone did—even Gritti, coming in last. That was an admission of defeat. Ridicule is the deadliest weapon in the world, the Maestro says.

  Poor Vasco stared around in dismay, wondering why everyone was laughing. I did wish I could go and comfort him.

  35

  They could have arrested me for spying on their meeting, but I had taken the same oath of secrecy as the Maestro. What mattered more was that he had solved their espionage problem for them in record time. It would be more true to say that the weather had solved it for them by driving the Sanudos indoors, or Danese had, by getting himself transferred to a bedroom where he would not have had the option of sitting by the window and taking notes. No matter, the Maestro could take the credit and look forward to a handsome fee; the Signoria could go away happy and prepare for the Sunday afternoon meeting of the Great Council. It is to the Great Council that the Ten report their activities, but the Algol case would obviously not be reported to anyone.

  The Maestro’s
stellar performance had tired him, though. When I had bowed the last guest off along the canal, I went back upstairs and found him already planted in his favorite chair. He glowered at me, which I took to be a good sign.

  “Bring me the Dee papers.”

  That was an even better sign, because he has been running a savage argument with the heretic sage for years, and nothing would restore him like a good upsurge of choler. I could confidently expect to find several pages of venom and vilification lying on my side of the desk in the morning, waiting to be enciphered.

  I headed over to the wall of books. John Dee, of course, is not merely a heretic and a skilled practitioner of the occult, but also a close confidant of the English queen, so his correspondence must be kept in one of the secret compartments. I knelt and began to empty a shelf of its books, stacking them on the floor beside me. “Thank you very much, master.”

  “For what?”

  “For setting Vasco up by opening the spyhole so he could watch the séance. I wish you’d warned me, though.”

  “If I’d warned you beforehand, you might have started to giggle in the middle. And I had no chance to warn you afterward with the bat-eared vizio skulking around.”

  “But you took a terrible risk,” I said, “letting him watch us practice necromancy.”

  “Bah! We didn’t! That was the whole point. What I did was mere mummery. You saw how easy it was to burst that bubble. You, though, used the Word, which is authentic thaumaturgy. They might have let Gritti have you for that, but the doge’s physician is too valuable to burn.”

  And I wasn’t. He had saved me at no small risk to himself, so I must not sound ungrateful. “Yes, master. Thanks anyway.”

  I slid aside the panel at the back of the shelf and retrieved the Dee bundles, which occupy three pigeon holes. Having delivered them, I went back to replace the panel and the screen of books.

  “If you don’t need me this fine Sunday, I think I’ll go and have a chat with Father Farsetti.”

  “Why? Is something troubling you?” Danese Dolfin demanded behind me.

  I was squatting. In trying to spin around, I lost my balance, dropped a pile of books in my lap, and sat down heavily. “That’s a much better imitation than I did,” I said, glowering.

  The Maestro smirked. “Keep practicing! Oh, leave that. Go see the priest if you want, but I’d say you’d do better to visit that woman of yours and collect a few sins worth confessing.”

  I was supposed to look stunned, which wasn’t difficult. “You really did get Guarini’s name from Giorgio?”

  “I said so, didn’t I? You think I would lie under oath?”

  “Then where did Mirphak come from?”

  “Ah, yes. Mirphak? Ahem! Well, as you told Gritti, it was a shot in the dark. I invented it to use up one of your three questions. I wanted you to ask for Algol’s name and address. I didn’t want you asking something else that Dolfin would have known and I did not. As a matter of principle, apprentice: A deception should be demarcated in advance so that it does not wander out of control.”

  “Thank you for that apophthegm, master. And no Baphomet?”

  “None. The book’s a total fake. It doesn’t work. I’ve tried it before. Either it was put together by the Inquisition to scare some of the other Templars into confessing, or Raymbaud held back some of the spell. Now get out of here! Go!”

  “Yes, master.” I went.

  A week or so later, Marco Martini dropped by again, this time to deliver a draft on the Banco della Piazza, whose size made my eyes pop, and for which I wrote him a most beautiful receipt in black letter gothic. Surprisingly, Zuanbattista Sanudo eventually paid the rest of the fee the Maestro had charged him for almost getting me murdered on the Riva del Vin.

  And Francesco Guarini? Francesco Guarini was tried in secret and sentenced to five years in the galleys. Francesco Guarini escaped from his cell in the palace and fled to Egypt. Francesco Guarini was tried in secret, strangled, and his body dumped in the Orfano Canal, where the tide could take it away. Believe whichever you like, because Francesco Guarini was never heard from again, at least not by me. I’d bet on the third ending, were I a gambling lad.

  Close to Christmas, I saw the Sanudo gondola going by with Fabricio wielding the oar, so his exile had not lasted long. Just after Christmas, Girolamo Sanudo resigned from the Collegio and took the Franciscan habit and the name of Brother Pio. Zuanbattista served out his term as ducal counselor and thereafter declined office, indicating that if the Great Council elected him, he would refuse and pay whatever fine it levied. It did not nominate him after that, and he has reputedly been concentrating on his business interests ever since.

  The following summer, Grazia sent me a polite note asking if I, as Danese’s best friend, would stand as godfather for their son. I had never been a friend of his, best or worst, but I accepted. In my old age, I may have need of a very rich godson, which Alfeo Dolfin will certainly be. His great-aunt Fortunata came to the ceremony, looking twenty years younger. She stayed well away from me, though.

  AFTERWORD

  A book can have too much reality. I used modern time-keeping because the Venetian day began half an hour after sunset, which meant that noon varied from about fifteen o’clock to about eighteen. Yes, they used a twenty-four hour day, but clocks never struck more than twelve. Clocks were rare. The pendulum clock was not invented until sixty years later.

  Polyalphabetic ciphers were known in the sixteenth century, but governments continued to use their cumbersome nomenclators. The reason may be that spelling and alphabets were not yet standardized. (The present English alphabet was introduced by Noah Webster in 1826 but was not universally adopted for another fifty years.) Thus it is anachronistic to describe Alfeo or Vasco writing out their alphabet—they might have come to blows over what the correct Venetian alphabet was. Without such agreement, substitution ciphers would easily have degenerated into nonsense. Codebooks, in contrast, did not rely on spelling. Veneziano, by the way, was a language in its own right in which the laws of a sovereign state were recorded. Its modern equivalent is still spoken today, although commonly regarded as a dialect of Italian.

  The traditional date for the election of the first doge of Venice was 697 A.D. In 1297, the aristocracy “closed” the Golden Book, restricting the vote and public office to men recorded there and their legitimate sons after them. Venice was not a democracy as we understand the word, but it kept its independence for eleven hundred years, the longest-surviving Republic in history. Hostile armies could not cross the lagoon, and navies could not sail it when the Venetians removed the markers showing navigable channels, as they did in time of war. By Alfeo’s time, La Serenissima’s great days were over and it had entered into its long decay, but it was not until 1797, two centuries later, that a French army under Napoleon Bonaparte arrived on the shore with artillery that could reach across the lagoon to bombard the city. Rather than see Venice destroyed, the Great Council voted itself out of existence and Lodovico Manin, the only mainlander ever elected doge, removed the corno as a sign of his abdication. Napoleon was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, which explains the Maestro’s quatrain on Chapter 28. Bonaparte gave the city to Austria, and it did not become part of a united Italy for another seventy years.

  GLOSSARY

  altana a roof-top platform

  androne a ground-floor hall used for business in a merchant’s palace

  atelier a studio or workshop

  barnabotti impoverished nobles, named for the parish of San Barnaba

  Basilica of San Marco the great church alongside the Doges’ Palace; burial place of St. Mark and center of the city

  broglio the area of the Piazzetta just outside the palace where the nobles meet and intrigue; by extension the political intrigue itself

  ca’ (short for casa) a house

  calle an alley

  campo an open space in front of a parish church

  casa a noble house, meaning either the palace or the family itself


  cavaliere servente a married woman’s male attendant (and frequently gigolo)

  Circospetto popular nickname for the chief secretary to the Council of Ten

  clarissimo “most illustrious,” form of address for a nobleman

  Collegio the executive, roughly equivalent to a modern cabinet—the doge, his six counselors, and the sixteen ministers

  Constantinople the capital of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, now Istanbul

  corno the distinctive cap worn by the doge

  Council of Ten the intelligence and security arm of the government, made up of the doge, his six counselors, and ten elected noblemen

  dogaressa the doge’s wife

  doge (“duke” in Venetian dialect) the head of state, elected for life

  ducat a silver coin, equal to 8 lira or 160 soldi, and roughly a week’s wages for a married journeyman laborer with children (unmarried men were paid less)

  fante (pl: fanti ) a minion of the Ten

  felze a canopy on a gondola (no longer used)

  fondamenta a footpath alongside a canal

  Great Council the noblemen of Venice in assembly, the ultimate authority in the state

  lira (pl: lire) a coin equal to 20 soldi

  lustrissimo “most illustrious,” honorific given to wealthy or notable citizens

  magazzen a tavern that does not sell food and stays open around the clock