The Alchemist's Apprentice

by Dave Duncan

  “I don’t know.” He seemed to shrink slightly, unaccustomed to admitting ignorance. “Ottone Imer is an attorney of citizen class and a bibliophile with more taste than money. Alexius Karagounis is a book dealer from Athens. He had some rare volumes to offer—looted from some Macedonian monastery, no doubt. Imer invited a few of the city’s most prominent collectors to view them at his house.”

  In this case prominent meant wealthy. The Greek would face tax or licensing problems if he tried to sell the books openly in the Republic. Imer had acted as official host in return for a commission, and the learned Doctor Nostradamus had been hired as a consultant to testify to the works’ authenticity. He was a prominent collector too, but he could not compete with the truly rich. This all made sense.

  “Did he have anything worthwhile?”

  “Three or four minor pieces.” My master sighed piteously. “An almost complete Book Ten of the Aeneid written in an uncial hand that cannot possibly be later than Eighth Century. Incredible condition, but unmistakably genuine. Possibly the oldest copy known. Then there was something that might be one of the lost plays of Euripides.”

  I gulped down my cud to ask, “Worth killing for?”

  Another sigh. “If genuine it would fetch thousands of ducats.”

  “I would kill for that.”

  Nostradamus ignored my repartee. “I arrived early,” he continued, “so I could view the books. I met Imer and Karagounis, and they showed me the manuscripts, all laid out on one long table. I inspected them and agreed that they all appeared to be quite genuine. I remained in my chair—and the Greek stayed with me as if he thought I might grab his treasures and run away with them! I resented his supervision at the time, but now I welcome it, for I cannot be accused of tampering with the wine. I was never near the wine! When the guests arrived, most were shown into the salotto. The prospective buyers came into the dining room to inspect the books with their glasses already in their hands. Eventually our host realized that I had not been offered refreshment and ordered the footman to bring me the wine of my choice.”

  “Then the books were auctioned?”

  “Nothing so crass! Discreet negotiations were to be held later in the evening. When everyone had expressed admiration, we joined the ladies and other gentlemen in the salotto so the servants could lay out a supper in the dining room. Eventually we all went back there, but we had not even started on the antipasto when the procurator was stricken and we all went home.” Again he sighed and his eyes grew quite misty. “The Greek still owns his books. But he is a foreigner. They will suspect him first.” He was conveniently forgetting that he was foreign-born himself, although he had been granted full citizenship as a bribe to move to the city, many years ago. The Republic is notorious for luring all the best doctors in Italy to come and live in Venice.

  I said, “The Greek is not an alchemist, and you are. Sudden death always provokes rumors of poison and most people cannot distinguish between poisoning and witchcraft. That was why you were so crabby yesterday. Also why you sent me out to buy half the poisons in the pharmacopeia—nux vomica, hellebore…You are planning to test each one to find out which creates the same symptoms? Shall I ask Giorgio to bring in his children?”

  “Fool! I do not know why I put up with you. I knew at once.” The Maestro leaned on his elbows and put his fingertips together, a sure sign that I was about to be lectured. His hands are as delicate as a woman’s. “The patient was an elderly male of choleric temperament. He limped slightly on his right leg and had old trauma scars on his right hand, with some loss of mobility. These were likely related to his reputation as a former war hero. I detected minor flashes of irascibility and hints of dysphasia, which I posited as the onset of dementia senilis. They would not yet be obvious to the layman. His family probably just regarded him as testy. He began to show signs of distress at the supper table—profuse sweating and salivation. I was not at all surprised when he excused himself and got up from his chair.”

  “Nausea? Urination? The company would forgive an elderly man’s need to visit the closet, surely?”

  “But he stumbled as he turned. A footman caught him and of course I went to assist. I detected an extremely rapid and irregular heartbeat; also some vomiturition. The patient displayed confusion, not recognizing me although we had spoken only minutes earlier. He asked me several times why I was blue.” The Maestro’s little cat smile meant that it was time for me to interpret.

  “Oleander poisoning?”

  He nodded grudgingly. “A not unreasonable hypothesis. Many physicians would make the same mistake. But oleander induces retinal toxicity only in chronic cases.”

  So the blue illusion must be significant, but it was a new symptom to me. I thumped my brain to spill out whatever it knew about diuretics and expectorants. Nothing relevant appeared, but Gerolamo the herbalist had mentioned a laxative that might be appropriate. I made a guess.

  “Virgin’s glove?”

  The Maestro’s nod of approval was intended to mask annoyance. His hands withdrew into his lap. “Very good! Continue.”

  “Also known as fairy thimbles or witches’ gloves or foxglove. In his celebrated De Historia Stirpium Commentarii, the learned Leonard Fuchs named it digitalis.” Which was how it was labeled in the Maestro’s collection—so why had he sent me to buy more, and under another name? “As I recall the medical uses of foxglove, the fresh leaves, when bruised, are efficacious in the treatment of wounds and the juice is used to relieve scrofula. Internally it can be taken as a laxative, but is unpredictable and dangerously toxic. What treatment did you advocate?”

  He pouted. “I suggested that his own physician be summoned at once, as he would be more familiar with the procurator’s regimen.”

  The first treatment for suspected poisoning is to induce vomiting, but the patient had been retching spontaneously without ejecting any matter. A rapid pulse would suggest that the patient should be bled, but he was elderly and might have unknown ailments. Even sips of water might have been dangerous. The Maestro had diagnosed murder and seen his own danger; any advice he had given would have been suspect. I could not blame him for taking the path of caution in this instance.

  “Can you estimate when the patient ingested the poison?”

  He shrugged. “He had obviously not eaten recently.”

  “You imply that he must have been poisoned after he arrived?”

  “An obvious hypothesis. And whatever the toxin, it must be extremely potent to be concealed in a glass of wine. The learned Paracelsus wrote that anything is poisonous in sufficient dosage.”

  Worse and worse. “So there is no hope of laying the blame on tainted food in his own household?”

  “No, and he had certainly not been munching on a salad of oleander. The dried and powdered leaf of digitalis can be prescribed for internal use, as a laxative, and it is rumored to soothe a raging heart. Possibly he took an accidental overdose, in which case we need not fear a murder charge. The man’s doctor must be interrogated.”

  I said, “He’s probably a Jew, in which case he has likely been arrested already. If I were one of the state inquisitors, I should now be putting Imer’s servants to the question, especially the footmen who served the wine.”

  “But you are not!”

  “Then why don’t you offer one of the servants an enormous bribe to run away and take the suspicion with him?”

  He shook his head, still angry. “No, we can ignore the servants, so—”

  “Why?”

  The Maestro matched up his fingertips again for another lecture. “Why should an attorney’s footman want to murder a procurator? Only if bribed to do so by someone of high rank, and if he is fool enough to be still in the city, then the Ten can catch him and torture the truth out of him. The doge would not be warning me away if he expected that to happen. But even the Three will not question the gentry rigorously without good reason to do so, certainly not torture them. The courtesans may not fare quite as well as the nobility,
but even they—”

  “Courtesans?”

  He pouted. “There were several there. Your friend was one of them. Is she capable of poisoning a man, one who insulted her, say?”

  “Certainly. I’ll ask her if she remembers doing so.” Violetta is a neighbor and the most prized courtesan in the city. The lady and I are friends, but I do not employ her services. One night with Violetta costs more than I earn in a year.

  The Maestro pulled a sour smile. “Then you now have two reasons to help me find the murderer. If I had the birthday and time of birth of everyone who was present, their horoscopes…but the law will require palpable evidence, either eyewitnesses or a confession.”

  “Denizens of the infernal regions must know.”

  “Don’t be absurd!” He glared at me. “Beg my life from a fiend? Don’t you hear anything I teach you? I can’t do that.”

  He was hinting that I could. For me to try to save him would be altruistic and therefore less dangerous. Not safe, just less dangerous. Summoning is best done after dark, when demons are more active and there are fewer people around to catch you at it. I would decide then whether to take the risk.

  I thought of another problem. “How much foxglove would be needed? And what does it taste like?” I rose to reach for the De Historia Stirpium Commentarii that lay on his side of the desk. “Would wine disguise its taste?”

  “Sit down. You think I have not consulted the herbals? Most poisons are vile-tasting, as you know, because they are tainted by the Evil One. Foxglove is so bitter that livestock will not graze it, whereas they do die from eating oleander. The taste and dosage would depend on how the essence was extracted. Steeping in water may be enough, or spirituous extraction followed by reduction. I shall conduct some experiments.”

  “If you have any sense at all,” I said, “you will throw your entire supply in the canal and destroy the label on the bottle. Yesterday you sent me out to buy every nasty thing in the pharmacopeia. Was that a wise action?”

  He bunched his cheeks. “I wanted to discover if digitalis is presently available in the city. Since only the murderer and I knew the poison used, I preferred not to advertise its name.”

  “Even if Gerolamo and the rest do not stock it, surely foxglove can be grown in any little garden plot. It likes sandy soil, as I recall.”

  As a feat of memory that remark was pure show-off, and his wizened little eyes tightened to show that he knew it. “But that would still be evidence of premeditation.”

  And oleander was common enough. “So anyone could acquire the plant. But who,” I asked innocently, “could possibly have the arcane knowledge to extract and concentrate the venom? Or is this where we began this conversation?”

  The Maestro scowled, because Italians are notorious as the poison experts of Europe, the Venetian Council of Ten has the same reputation within Italy itself, and the Council of Ten has been known to consult Maestro Nostradamus on such matters. And that, I realized, might well be what it was up to in the present instance, except that it was putting the demand for assistance in the form of a personal warning from the doge. That would explain why Sciara had felt justified in dragging me off to jail.

  I opened my inkwell. “You will, of course, now write to the Lion’s Mouth to report your suspicions that Procurator Orseolo died of an overdose of medicinal digitalis. You will have to sign it.”

  The bocca di leone is any of several drop boxes available in the palace to accept accusations of treason or other major crimes. Anonymous tips are supposedly ignored, but no one believes that.

  The Maestro grimaced. “No. I despise men who work in silence and darkness. Very few people could have committed the crime. It must be possible to work out which one did. Then we can report to the Ten.”

  There is no use arguing with him when he sticks out his goatee like that. “We have two days.” The doge had given me three, but I was allowing one for travel. I opened a drawer and selected a quill and a sheet of our best rag paper. “The attorney, Imer, is the man to start with. He must be quaking in his dancing pumps.”

  Maestro Nostradamus said, “Faugh! You still don’t know how bad this is. Take a cheaper sheet.”

  I changed the paper.

  “There were about thirty guests in all,” he said, “but not all are suspect. Only the procurator was affected, so the poison was not in the bottle. It must have been put in his glass. It acts quickly but not instantaneously—I know that but the Ten do not. So the only persons who matter are those who came in to look at the manuscripts.”

  He leaned back wearing an expression of extreme smugness like a suit of plate mail. I plodded through his logic and decided it would have to do for now. I could not possibly question thirty people in two or three days.

  “Clear crystal glasses, or colored?”

  “Murano ruby glass. You could not tell what anyone else was drinking, and if the poison made the wine cloudy, that would not show either.”

  “And what sort of wine?”

  “We were offered a choice of three: refosco, malmsey, or retsina. I had the refosco. It was a good jar.”

  He fancies himself as a connoisseur of wines. I plan to study them when I am rich.

  “Refosco is red, malmsey a sweet white. The other one is Greek, yes?”

  He made a steeple of his fingers again for a sermon. “Yes. Retsina is most vile, flavored with resin. Served in honor of the Greek merchant, I suppose. It is pungent enough to hide the taste of lye or vitriol, but few Venetians would touch it. Malmsey is so sickly it might suffice. Refosco would not. Let us review the suspects. I proclaim my innocence, and in any case I was seated behind the table. I could not have put poison in anyone’s glass without standing up and stretching across, which would have been a very conspicuous action. Write my name in the first row.

  “The Greek was in the room all the time. Our host came and went. As organizers of the affair, they must be suspect. Imer and Karagounis in the second row.”

  He closed his eyes to think. “I was early, as I told you. Imer and his wife greeted the guests as they arrived and saw that they were given wine. Most went to the salotto, only the book collectors came into the dining room. The first buyer to enter was Senator Tirali. He wished me well and at once walked the length of the table, on the far side from me, inspecting the goods. I felt like a shopkeeper!”

  “I believe you, master.” I knew of another Tirali, the senator’s son. Neither was a patient of the Maestro’s.

  “Close behind him came Procurator Orseolo, leaning on a cane. He and Tirali greeted each other coolly. They were old rivals as collectors.”

  “Put Tirali in the second row?”

  “I suppose so, but I doubt if their rivalry ran to murder. Orseolo had a woman attending him. I didn’t hear her name and she stayed close to him. Next came a foreign couple, who did not introduce themselves to me. They spoke in French with barbarous accents, questioning me about the books. They knew nothing about books. All they were interested in was price.”

  I added them to the second row: two foreigners.

  “Two footmen poured the wine. We should include them in the second row, if the Three have not gotten to them first.” The Maestro opened his eyes. “Then sier Pasqual Tirali, Giovanni’s son. With your friend.”

  I wrote Violetta’s name in the first row and started a third for Pasqual Tirali, vowing to send him to the torturers for prolonged interrogation. I get twinges of jealousy sometimes, when I think of her evenings.

  “They were the last to arrive. There was one other before them, Pietro Moro. First row.”

  I stood my quill in the inkwell, laid my forearms flat on the desk and glared belligerently across at my master. “You are hallucinating!” The nightmare had just turned into sheer terror, as nightmares do.

  He shook his head smugly. “I warned you that you were being naive.”

  “Master, before a doge is crowned he has to swear an oath known as the promissione. It is no trivial matter. He swears to shun each
and every mistake and crime of all his predecessors in the last thousand years. The promissione is read to him every two months during his reign to remind him. He can barely blow his nose without his counselors’ consent. He must not leave the ducal palace without their permission. He must not meet with foreigners! He…I cannot imagine all the promises the doge would have broken if he went to that supper party!”

  “He wasn’t wearing his ducal robes and corno. I expect that’s another. But Moro is a fanatical collector of books.”

  “Then why did the sellers not offer him a private viewing in the palace?”

  The Maestro scowled horribly. “I do not know the answer to that. But I don’t suppose for a moment that Moro is the first doge to slip out for an evening incognito, playing Haroun al-Raschid.”

  “And somebody tried to assassinate him? Is that what you mean? The poison went to the wrong man?”

  The Maestro pursed his lips. “I wondered how long it would take you.”

  Even more aghast now, I said, “The Serene One moves and is unmoved? The procurator got the wrong glass and the poison meant for the doge? Is that what it means?”

  “Possibly. A hypothesis to keep in mind. Even if not, do you see why I cannot write to the Lion’s Mouth? The Council of Ten must not have cause to investigate the procurator’s death, not officially. A suspicious death involving illicit acts by the doge may bring on a constitutional crisis, just when relations between the Republic and the Turks may be boiling up to another war. What you got this morning was not a warning, it was a cry for help!”

  I stared down at my list, although I was seeing nothing. I did not want to see old Nasone either murdered or deposed, but all doges have political enemies. “Did everyone see him there?”

  “Probably not,” the Maestro conceded. “He came in, looked at the books quite briefly, and spoke with Orseolo. Then an argument broke out with the foreigners. I think he left then. He was not at the supper table later.”

  “What sort of argument?”

  “The foreigners had not been invited. Imer told them to leave. Probably the doge had not been invited either. Faugh! Moro has always been impulsive. He champs under all the restraints of his office, the eternal committee meetings. Read me the list.”