by Clio Gray
And they were too late, or almost, for the Guildsman’s gatekeeper already had his key in the lock when they reached him, Greta and Hendrik dripping with the rain, sweating from exertion, hardly able to draw a breath. But Hendrik was well known in Deventer, by name, if not by sight, more so because of the Singel fire and the funeral earlier that day, and once Hendrik told the man who he was the gatekeeper reopened the door and let them in.
‘An Italian, you say? Ducetti?’ the man asked, as Hendrik breathily laid out his request. ‘And how long has he been registered with us?’
Hendrik shook his head.
‘I don’t know that information,’ he said. ‘Try a few weeks back, maybe more. Last residence most likely listed as Amsterdam. Maybe Scotland.’
His desperation was so obvious that the gatekeeper did not demure. He opened the huge Registry of Guildsmen and ran his finger down the line of names.
‘Ducetti?’ he asked again..
‘Ducetti,’ Hendrik said, spelling it out for the man, wanting to wring his neck, take the register and do his own looking.
‘Ah,’ the man hesitated after turning a couple of pages. ‘I think I have it. Yes, it’s here. Registered himself six weeks back as a tradesman from Rome who also has premises in Amsterdam, and was looking to set up shop here in Deventer.’
Hendrik was impatient at the Guildsman’s slow hands and lurched forward, turned the register around, reading for himself the name and address given there in scratchy writing. He thanked the man briefly and was already heading away.
‘It’s only just down the road,’ Hendrik shouted to Greta as he scarpered back out onto the street, seeing Ruan standing there scowling, the rain falling hard and heavy, splashing about his head and shoulders.
‘Come on! Come on!’ he urged his companions, and they were off again, a few minutes later were at the Guildsman’s hostel, Hendrik going banging his fist on the reception desk because there was no one was behind it, the whole place seeming quiet and deserted, no sounds of men moving around in the upstairs rooms or milling about the common dining area. A few moments later a weary looking woman emerged from the small vestibule behind the desk.
‘Yes?’ she asked. ‘If you’ve forgotten your key then you’ll have to wait for the night manager. If I’ve told you all once, I’ve told you a thousand times.’
‘Ducetti,’ said Grimalkin. ‘We’re looking for Luigi Ducetti. Second floor, room 27.’
The woman regarded them without curiosity.
‘He isn’t in,’ she said shortly. ‘None of ‘em is. All took a kind of holiday on account of that big man’s wife’s funeral. All lording it up, they are, at the Golden Globe, at that poor man’s expense.’
Hendrik stopped moving and Greta saw his shoulders sagging. Unexpectedly it was Ruan, who had come in behind them, who took up the reins.
‘This is Mijnheer Grimalkin himself,’ Ruan said. ‘And we have need to see inside that man’s room. Could you possibly oblige us?’
The woman perked up at this nugget of news, studying Hendrik Grimalkin with great interest.
‘Not supposed to give out the gentlemen’s keys,’ she said, ‘not without the manager’s say so.’
‘For God’s sake, woman,’ Hendrik was so angry he was about to boil over and the woman harrumphed, but disappeared back into her little room and returned a moment later with the key.
‘Up the stairs, second floor, third on the right,’ she said. ‘But mind you don’t leave any mess while you’re up there. I’ve a job to keep,’ she added and, as an afterthought, ‘I’m very sorry about your wife, Mijnheer Grimalkin. Very sorry. A horrible way to go. Horrible.’
As if Hendrik needed reminding. But they were soon away from this dreary woman and her dreary life, off up the narrow wooden staircase, one floor, two floors, heading down the dank and low corridor with its many tiny rooms. It did not take long to find the one that had been painted with a large 27 upon its door.
Back at the Athenaeum, Isaac was sitting in his peep-hole room. Everything was calm, almost normal. The monk Joachim, who it turned out was also Grimalkin’s father, had not looked in good shape, very pale and started coughing up lacy splatters of blood. Never a good sign in Isaac’s view, so Isaac took him upstairs and made him comfortable.
He double-checked all doors and windows were closed and locked before returning to his peep-hole room, where he saw to his great shock a man standing dithering on the library steps looking uncannily like the one Hendrik had gone haring off after. Very like him, Isaac squinted, but not quite. Something about him was different, his stance maybe, his height, his breadth. Whatever it was, it had Isaac unnerved. And the man was just standing there doing nothing, obviously hesitating about whether or not to ring the bell, and so Isaac went out of the peep-hole room and whispered down to Caro. He didn’t like to disturb the lad, for Caro was plainly in some deep pit of his own making, but Isaac needed verification.
‘Caro, get yourself here. There’s something I need you to see. Or rather, someone.’
Caro was slow to respond but got himself up and joined Isaac in the peep-hole room, Isaac pointing out the images on the wall of the man standing obligingly motionless on the Athenaeum’s steps just below the portico, to keep out of the rain.
‘Do you recognise him?’ Isaac asked Caro. ‘Is that the same man you took back to the Servants?’
Caro gazed at the walls of the round room, confused by the upside-down image, bending over and screwing his head around to get a better look,
‘Is that him?’ Isaac asked again, Caro nodding grimly, straightening up ramrod stiff, hand on the hilt of his knife.
‘It’s him,’ he said. ‘No doubting it.’
‘What should we do?’ Isaac asked sucking in his breath. ‘I could let you out the back, go and fetch Mijnheer and the others…’
‘No,’ Caro said, not about to let this opportunity slip, not after what this man had done, and before he knew it a plan was ready formed in his head. Nothing like vengeance to sharpen the mind. He might be young, but by Christ he had scores needed settling.
‘So here’s what we need to do,’ he said, spelling it out, Isaac dithering, but not for long, not at the sight of the knife Caro had unsheathed from his belt and the look in his eye. It was two against one after all, and so Isaac did as the boy bid and moments later brought out the large iron key from his belt and turned it in the lock, began to draw back the bolts.
Hendrik opened the door to room 27 and stepped inside. The place was spartan in the extreme. A thin bed took up most of the floor space, with a rickety set of drawers pushed into one corner, a small desk and chair fitted into the other below a dirty window maybe two foot square, looking out over the street leading up to the Brink, if anyone could see through the grime and the damp and splintered shutters that hung from their hinges. The place was altogether so depressing that Hendrik wondered how anyone could stay here more than a few days, yet the Guild Book made clear that this Luigi member of the Ducetti family had signed in six or so weeks before.
There was a niggle in his head – for if the man had been in Deventer all this time he couldn’t possibly have been at the Servants when Greta was there, and if he had been at the Servants then how could he have set the fire on the Singel? He needed to ask the old crone downstairs what tabs she kept on her lodgers, if any, find out his comings and goings, when he had been here and when he had not. Easy enough to appear to be in one place by paying the rent up front, but not so easy to be in two places at the same time.
He looked about him for help. There wasn’t much in the way of belongings: some clothes spilling from the chest of drawers, a haversack pushed clumsily below the tiny planked bed whose mattress was so dilapidated Hendrik could see the horsehair poking through the thin sheets. The bedding on top looked fresh enough, free of lice and fleas, and the water bowl and ewer on top of the chest of drawers newly filled, the floor swept clean of dust and detritus, the lamp newly filled: a brief surge of admiration for the
woman on the desk – if this was part of her job and not another’s – that she kept the rooms so well-turned for the young gentlemen she had spoken of earlier, who she so plainly rather despised.
Greta was running her hands through the clothes in the drawers, Ruan tugging the haversack out from underneath the bed, so Hendrik went to the desk. It was of the kind children had at school, with a lid and therefore a compartment hidden underneath it.
‘Nothing,’ Ruan said, riffling through the haversack which was entirely empty, save for a crumpled and torn piece of paper in one of the side pockets that he nevertheless took out and tried to uncrease.
‘Nothing here either,’ Greta added, her search of the drawers without discovery, except that this man was nowhere near as good at darning his socks as Shauna was of Donal’s.
Hendrik lifted the lid of the desk, saw a couple of letters lying there and picked one up, reading it quickly. Only a brief missive giving directions to the hostel and the Guild, the other giving a list of the route of towns and rivers a man would have to take from Amsterdam to Middleburg on the Walcheren Peninsula. Middleburg was the place Caro had taken Signor Ducetti after the wrecking of the Collybuckie, from where Caro had brought back his kinsman who’d stayed on sweeping floors at the Servants for no apparent reason.
Hendrik spotted the corner of another piece of paper below this route-list and picked it up, the shock of its contents parting his lips though no words came out, for here was no letter; here instead was a complex table of calculations and experimental inputs and out-goings, with gunpowder on one axis, liquid turpentine on the other, and a single X where the two lines of the graph optimally met.
The bolts that had been drawn at the Athenaeum Library doors had been pulled back.
‘No deliveries, thank you,’ Isaac said, eying the hand-pulled drey that stood behind the stranger standing on the steps.
‘But it’s just beer,’ the man said, looking pathetic and sodden, making a show of shaking the wetness from his hair, squeezing some of the water from a corner of his jerkin.
‘All deliveries round the back,’ Isaac stated. ‘Always been so, always will.’
‘I’m new,’ tried the black haired, pock-marked stranger. ‘Just been told to dump it off and then I’m away. Got a wife expecting. Got to get back soon as I’m able.’
‘Round the back,’ Isaac said again.
‘Can’t you make an exception, just this one time?’
Isaac hadn’t been in any doubt but now he knew for certain. Good Dutch, but accented in the exact same way as the man who’d been here before, not the same man, but one very similar.
‘Wait,’ he said, closing the door in the supposed tradesman’s face.
‘Ready, Caro?’ he whispered.
‘Ready,’ came the reply.
Isaac opened the door again.
‘Just this once then,’ he said, beckoning Luigi Ducetti in.
‘Proof at last,’ Hendrik said softly, holding up the piece of paper he’d fished out of the desk, Greta and Ruan coming forward.
‘Um,’ Greta interrupted, ‘not to put a dampener on things, but what does this prove at all?’
‘That they know how to blow things up, Goddamit,’ Ruan said.
‘Well yes,’ Greta said, placing a small finger on the piece of paper. ‘But they sell armaments and presumably stuff that explodes, so all it really proves is that he knows his trade.’
Ruan watched Greta’s finger on the paper and heard the certainty in her words, and thought abstractly that she probably knew as much about blowing things up as this Luigi fellow. And then he had a brainwave.
‘But we know where he might be,’ he said quickly. ‘At the Golden Globe, like the concierge told us. Surely it’s worth a try?’
Luigi Ducetti was not at the Golden Globe. He was at that very moment bringing the first of his two barrels into the Athenaeum Library. He’d been seriously apprehensive about them trying the same trick twice and had told his brother as much, but as usual Ricardo overruled him.
‘It’ll be easy,’ Ricardo assured him. ‘Just make sure you get the first barrel in and I’ll do the rest.’
‘But what about the watch-man?’ Luigi remonstrated, his stomach flipping with fear. ‘They’re sure to have doubled up on security.’
‘Stop fussing, brother,’ Ricardo had said. ‘Just do as I say and it’ll be easy.’
But easy it had not been, not any of it, not for Luigi at any rate. His heart had almost stopped when he’d sent that boulder down the hill, very nearly crushing those people stone dead – horse, cart and all. He’d only meant to cause a landslide, block their path so they would have to turn back.
He’d been so terrified he’d had to lean against that second boulder before he could move, and when that had accidentally gone down too he’d trouble breathing, let alone running, his legs giving way several times. But the money Uncle Federigo had promised them was ridiculous.
‘And lots more like it, lads,’ Federigo had assured them, ‘and the second that old fool of a pope has gone to the blue beyond, cousin Cardinal is sure to be elected in his place. And nothing to stop us then, nephews, nothing.’
But there’d been so much to stop them ever since, Luigi thought bitterly. Federigo killing the old man on the boat wasn’t the half of it, though Ricardo had been mighty impressed. And by God, but the stories Federigo had told them about that night – about the way the boat had dipped and swung in the waves, the boards groaning and screeching, the wind tearing the sails from their runners and masts with no more trouble than plucking seed from ripe sedge.
‘It was howling like the biggest pack of wolves you’ve ever heard,’ Federigo told them, ‘and when I rolled Golo Eck into the waves I near went in after him. It was only by good fortune that the pipsqueak came yelling for the old man right at that moment and some sailor heard him, turned around just in time to grab me before I went over too, the wind slapping us down so’s we were crawling like slugs on our bellies; and when I saw the last lifeboat go over the side, swinging like a hammock, crashing down into the waves, there was nothing left to do but to fling myself in after it and hope for the best. But if I’d died, boys, I’d’ve died knowing I’d seen you right, with Golo gone, and everything with him.’
But everything hadn’t gone with Golo Eck, Luigi knew, though he was always the slow one: good with his hands, good with all the metal-working and making replicas of the ancient armaments that brought in so much trade to uncle’s shops, but not so good at thinking. Never so good at that, and he tried not to think now, tried not to think on what Ricardo and Federigo were going to do once he’d got his barrels safely stowed side by side in this huge library. His back was aching with the effort of carrying the first one down the hallway. The place was so much bigger than it looked from the outside and was dark, like crawling into a conch shell, except for a small circle of lamps and candles somewhere further on down.
‘This way,’ said the old man who’d finally let Luigi in. And this way Luigi went, until about halfway to his goal when he felt a terrible pain in his buttock, enough to have him screaming, the barrel clattering to the boards, rolling a few yards down before slamming into a table and coming to a stop.
And there Luigi was, down on the floor, trying to figure out what the hell had happened, trying to curl up about himself to get his hands to where the pain was so bad he knew he wouldn’t be able to get up again, warm blood oozing down his legs like it would never stop. He looked up, and saw the shadowed face of a young boy and the glint of the knife he was brandishing, the blade whistling through the air as he swished it from side to side, the boy moving as if to straddle him, stab at him again with the knife that Luigi recognised, because he’d made it himself.
‘Steady lad,’ came a voice. ‘Killing folk ain’t our business, not at all. No matter what a man’s done.’
The lad cast Luigi one more murderous glance before desisting, and down instead came Isaac’s mottled hands, pulling Luigi up to sitting �
�� which was excruciating – forcing the wound to open and stretch and bleed, making him cry out in pain.
‘It’s nought more’n’a scratch,’ said Isaac, ‘just a bum-cut that’ll bleed like buggery, but you’ll live.’ He hauled Luigi to his feet, dragging him the ten yards to the leather sofa and depositing him there. ‘One more move, one more squeak out of you,’ said the old man, ‘and I swear I’ll not stop the lad the next time.’
Luigi didn’t move, didn’t squeak, but lay his head down upon the cool green leather, oddly glad that everything was over and no more would be asked of him.
‘Oh my Christ, forgive me,’ he whimpered, realising it was the end of the line for Luigi Ducetti, completely unaware that his brother had taken advantage of the commotion to dodge himself inside the library, bringing with him the second, lighter barrel – held against his chest with his smithy-strong arms – depositing it quietly on the floor as he slowly, silently, pulled the bolts to, closing them all in.
39
BROTHERS BETRAYED
They got to the Golden Globe in the plaza to find the place heaving, Hendrik having previously organised for food and drink to be available to his wife’s mourners, both the Athenaeum Board and the Civic Council adding their own contributions; the outcome being that the great and good of Deventer had had a bit of a party, particularly once they’d understood that Hendrik himself was not going to join them, for no party can really go with a swing if the grieving widower is in attendance.
They’d gone on late into the afternoon before returning home, and now the place was filled to bursting with apprentices and guildsmen – whose watering hole the Golden Globe was by default – hoping to take advantage of any tab that was left, of which there was plenty.
