“In what fashion?”
He shook his head. “Certainly he is no murderer. That is not his nature. But he is trying to conceal a great deal. With little success. You saw him. His paintings may fool us all with their semblance to life. But at the art of deception, he is hardly a maestro.”
I said into Niccolò’s ear, “As a military engineer, Leonardo had to have worked with the condottieri before their defection from Valentino. Perhaps they have duped him.”
Niccolò nodded. “There is something in all this that only the maestro and this murderer know. Something that makes the maestro behave as if he will be hanged for it.”
Messer Niccolò and I turned the corner. Not far down the street, the Rocca was an immense gray monolith against a sky as deeply purple as squid ink, the moat around it already black. We entered our Palazzo Machirelli through the stables gate we had both exited separately, hours before, when I had been innocent of a great many things—and considerably less baffled by this whole matter. The animals in their stalls stamped at our presence, as if the very Devil had followed us.
“I have to look after my mule,” Niccolò said. I had become anxious even about going into the courtyard alone, so I trailed Niccolò to the stall.
“You are uncommonly devoted to this beast,” I said to him. There was just enough light remaining that I could see the animal blink gratefully, as Messer Niccolò stroked his muzzle.
“I acquired him from a charcoal burner who had driven him mad with work—the poor creature was burdened with grapevine bundles piled so high they could reach a balcony, while his belly sagged into the dirt. I persuaded the cacapensieri that his animal was worth more to me alive than to him dead. My intention is to restore his strength and ride him back to Florence.”
I now understood the nature of Messer Niccolò’s devotion: the mule was a promise he had made to himself, that he would return to his home. But even as I believed I had divined his sentiments, I saw that he was peering into me.
And judging from his expression, he had found something that required his sympathy. “I am no longer so certain,” he said almost sadly, “that these murders have anything to do with the treaty between Valentino and the condottieri.”
I could only assume that Niccolò indeed knew nothing about Juan’s amulet; otherwise he would surely believe, as I had, that the object of the first murder was to provoke the pope. Perhaps the second murder, seemingly in the same fashion, had only been a taunting reminder, a memento mori of the cruelest sort. As Messer Niccolò himself had said only hours before, it was in the interest of the Vitelli to keep the thorn in His Holiness’s side and prolong the negotiations.
But I did not know Messer Niccolò well enough to risk sharing this confidence. I could only ask him vaguely, “What brings you to this opinion?”
“The care taken to dismember the corpse. The nipple sliced away. The unguent, containing narcotic herbs, smeared upon the skin. This business with the corners of the winds.” Here he made a sharp little nod that stung more than an overt accusation, reminding me that I had previously withheld this confidence from him. “Leonardo’s measurements, the note regarding squares and circles. It is all of one piece. A great rebus or riddle, composed in human flesh. As if all of this were one man’s cruel amusement.”
“Yes,” I said. “There is no end to the riddles and mysteries that amuse men. The Key of Solomon, the Kabbalah and the Heptaplus, the mysteries of Hermes Trismegistus and the Pythagoreans—not to mention that I have known several men to find pleasure in cutting women with knives.”
Messer Niccolò offered me the rueful smile of a man who knows the world all too well.
“But,” I continued, “I believe that this amusement was conceived with a sole purpose: to provoke the pope. To cite your own theory of this very afternoon, perhaps the Vitelli are behind this because they do not see the treaty with Valentino as sufficiently advantageous to them. And if they delay the negotiations with these clever and cruel games, they can obtain these additional concessions you remarked upon.”
Here I took Messer Niccolò’s arm and led him into the courtyard; all at once it had come to me what I must do next. When we reached the foot of my stairs, I said to him, “I am going to send my girl to your rooms with some food and wine.” While I did not intend to serve as a pimp, I thought Camilla’s charming—if chaste—company might fire his eyes and would certainly fill his belly; he did not appear to eat well.
Of course I expected poor Messer Niccolò’s disappointment, to learn he could dine with me only by proxy. Thus I was surprised—and perhaps a bit disappointed myself, vain as I am—when he did not evidence any regret. Indeed, he appeared relieved that I would not be present. With nothing more than an ironic little bow, he started toward his rooms.
Regardless of his indifference, I did not want to risk that Messer Niccolò Machiavelli might post himself behind his shutters and observe me in the fashion I had so often spied on him. So I trudged wearily up my stairs, gratefully embraced Camilla, and sent her across the courtyard with some wine, cheese, bread, and boiled capon.
As soon as I was alone I summoned my courage, washed my face, and changed my clothes.
Not having a pass to the Rocca, I was fortunate to locate the same guard who had escorted me the previous evening; from long habit, I make it a point that men should remember me, even if there is only a small chance they will be useful later.
Although I had asked to see the duke’s secretary, Messer Agapito, my journey terminated at the same sala where I had supped the previous evening. Inside, I found the dining room transformed. The bare wooden table appeared almost tiny and the plastered walls were similarly undraped, the tapestries replaced by a single golden crucifix and an ancient icon.
Agapito, his uniformly black velvet unchanged, commanded an entire side of this smaller table, opposite several gentlemen and a copper-haired woman. He speared a chunk of meat with his knife before looking up from the platter. Just as quickly he looked down, wiry jaw pulsing.
I went around behind him and whispered close to his ear, “I have seen something today that will interest His Excellency. An observation his engineer general failed to remark upon.” In this fashion I hoped to anticipate Leonardo’s inevitable report—yet also tempt Valentino with the notion that the maestro had overlooked something. Of course this was a perilous game. But Valentino would be sufficiently infuriated regardless, when he discovered I had not waited on his determination of my “usefulness.”
Agapito merely chewed like an ox, obliging me to stand there as if I had been summoned to hold his napkin. I looked across the table. Two of the men were ambassadors, judging from their sable collars and pinched faces. Next to them, as if conjured by my invocation of Vitellozzo Vitelli not an hour before, sat his emissary, Oliverotto da Fermo. This signor was kept company by the copper-haired woman, a prime slice of Venetian prima donna, with glorious curls and breasts as round and firm as oranges, pushed up almost to her collarbones by a brocade bodice cut straight across in the Milanese fashion.
Without a word to me, Messer Agapito rose and proceeded to the brightly lit stairwell at the corner of the large room, before he vanished within it.
Signor Oliverotto watched Agapito’s departure, then gave me a nod.
I returned his greeting. “Buonasera, Signore.”
“I was all but certain we would meet again.” If Maestro Leonardo’s words were notes played on a pipe organ, Signor Oliverotto’s were plucked from the deepest range of a lute. “As I told you, I am here for a while.”
I could not help but wonder if he had been here long enough to murder one woman, wait for her charm bag to be delivered to the pope in Rome, and, shortly after the arrival of His Holiness’s emissary, murder another woman in the same brutal yet meticulous fashion.
His lady nodded at me. “That is such a lovely gown,” she said in a sweet, cither-like voice. “One does not see velluto allucciolati of that quality these days. You must have had it sewn some yea
rs ago.” I stifled a laugh; she already sounded like a jealous wife. Had I wished to set myself after her signore, I could have quickly turned her jealousy to envy, a far more sour vintage.
But I did not need to encourage Signor Oliverotto. He turned to his little cortigiana and said, “Play something. Without words.”
Silently the girl took up her lira da braccio from the chair next to her, backing away from the table like a waiting lady leaving a duchess. She began to play the Gelosia, holding the slender bow between two fingers and her thumb, drawing the taut horsehairs over the strings of her lira with the liquid grace of a dancer—although her notes were not so beguiling.
As she played on, her companion turned his attention to a silver plate crowded with miniature olives. Signor Oliverotto’s hands seemed twice as large as most men’s, yet delicately he began to arrange the tiny olives into some pattern, although it was not at once clear what he intended to make. He did not look up until he had finished his disegno, whereupon the ferocity of his stare so startled me that I could not observe what he had created. “She will learn,” he said to me, his tone far more gentle than his eyes. “The lira, like warfare, requires long practice, while one is still young. She can benefit from instruction.” Here he cocked his head, as he had the previous night on the drawbridge. “But I would have no need to teach you, would I?”
Signor Oliverotto smiled thinly and edged his platter of olives toward me. Having made this offering, he rose and left me with a short salute, touching his fingers to his velvet cap. When he collected his girl, he took her arm so quickly that her delicate bow screeched against the strings.
Only when they had gone did I look down at the platter of olives. Signor Oliverotto had made a perfect spiral.
I waited an hour for Messer Agapito to return, whereupon he instructed me I would have to wait some more, before he disappeared again. As the night wore on, the ambassadors were summoned, separately, each to a lengthy audience. Ramiro da Lorca also came and went, in a fury of clicking boots, his dark complexion nearly brick-colored; he was not required to wait at all and his meeting with the duke was similarly brief. He passed me with hardly a glance, though surely he knew I was the same notorious woman whose house he had so thoroughly searched the day after Juan’s murder.
At last Agapito came back down the stairs, for a moment standing silently over me like a priest at Mass, as if offering me the absolution of a prudent exit. “His Excellency is ready for you.”
The light in the stairway was provided by a large candelabrum; I found this peculiar, since a little oil lamp would have sufficiently illuminated the steps. Agapito knocked on the lone door in the landing, then opened it quickly himself. A woman slipped out like a wraith. She wore a snow-white chemise, her nipples making dark points beneath the thin fabric—I thought due to the cold, until I saw her eyes.
I knew the expression there, though it is a rare thing in my experience, because most ladies in my former business guard themselves well; if not, they are soon lost. And this lady was lost, as if upon a vast sea, entirely without stars or instruments to guide her, searching only for the touch of the man she had just left. There is a terrible bondage in such eyes, and always fear.
Even so, in such a state there is also a profound abandonment to one’s senses, and this I saw in her mouth, the subtle yet swollen pendant of her lower lip, the flesh above her thinner upper lip still moist with sweat.
Only when I observed that her hair was as blond as mine had been five years previously did I draw away from her with a start, for a moment imagining I had just encountered the duke’s sister, Lucrezia, now the Duchess of Ferrara. I was all the more startled because I so firmly believed that despite all the scurrilous gossip that Valentino was Lucrezia’s lover—the same had been said of Juan and the pope himself—there was no truth to these rumors.
But I could not see the rest of the lady’s face, which was concealed by a birdlike Carnival mask. She kept her eyes on me, turning her head even as she passed, though not as if I were a rival. Instead she seemed to acknowledge some kinship of our souls.
When I entered the dim room, however, it was as if she had been a phantom. Duke Valentino sat behind a single table in a large study that was otherwise unfurnished, poring over some document by the light of a single reflecting lamp, his jacket laced nearly to his chin. The tabletop was covered with stacks of papers.
Valentino pushed away the bronze lamp and sat back, clasping his gloved hands over his breast. He was attired entirely in black, his long, grave face appearing almost to float. He examined me, a silent attention I found considerably unsettling; at best, I expected a grim warning to remain in my rooms until I was sent back to Rome. And I did not want to consider the worst.
“Let me show you something that Maestro Leonardo has drawn.”
I knew at once that Leonardo had been to see him while I waited in “Paradise”; no doubt there were several passages to this room. Even as I considered this, I observed a small door in the wall behind him.
Valentino sprang from his chair like a hunting panther, yet he came around his table with the same languid grace those animals display when they have been fed and leashed. He looked down and began to thumb through one of the stacks. After a moment he extracted several drawings, which he placed near the lamp. “Come here,” he said. “Look at this.”
It was a study of a man’s arm, in reddish chalk, the contours of the muscles elegantly drawn in a perfect mimicry of life, save that the skin was absent. The myriad veins thus exposed resembled naked trees, the thicker limbs separating into smaller branches and twigs, so to speak.
“Maestro Leonardo has made a number of these studies,” Valentino said. My stomach soured; I wondered if the maestro intended to make similar drawings from the limbs of the butchered women. “Our modern painters have given us a convincing representation of the human form as they believe God created it. But only this maestro shows us the world hidden beneath our flesh. Only in these drawings can we envision man as Nature perfected him, an intricate invenzione of tubes and mechanisms.” He circled his finger over the drawing, almost as if he were tracing Signor Oliverotto’s spiral. “Maestro Leonardo already has plans for machines that can mimic Nature in various ways—devices that can walk like a man, or even fly like a bird.”
I had not even begun to digest this ambition, which seemed a challenge to both God and Nature, when Valentino removed this sketch, revealing beneath it a larger drawing, vividly decorated with paint washes upon paper; to my eyes it was some sort of architectural fantasia, a plan for a villa or palazzo of fantastical complexity, the bright brick hue contrasted to a thick blue serpentine painted a thumb’s span beneath the fantasy palace, like some immense banner curling in the wind.
All at once I imagined myself a thousand feet in the air, my shoulders gripped by an eagle’s talons, looking down on the earth, gazing into a walled city—indeed, the very city of Imola I had viewed from the surrounding hills just that day. However, this was Imola as seen by someone with the wings and eyes of a bird, every fortification, residence, and courtyard, each canal and river—for the blue serpent was the Santerno River—in its exact place, but observed from a great height directly above. Now, in my life I have sat upon a cloth-of-gold cushion in a Vatican apartment and held the maps that guided our mariners to the new lands. But I had never seen anything like this.
“Do you see what the maestro has done?” Valentino’s whisper was so faint that I strained to hear him, even in the hush of that room. “Just as he can see within our bodies, so he can also portray the world from a perspective we have never before seen. If we measure this distance on his map”—he stuck the tip of his finger on the Rocca at the corner of the city, which one could easily distinguish by its circular towers, then pointed to the Piazza Maggiore in the center of the city—“and this distance”—he now moved his finger to the Santerno River, outside the walls—“we will obtain precisely the same proportion that results if we pace the ground itself or mea
sure the actual distance with mechanical devices. Leonardo’s mappa is an image of the world identical in all its features, reduced to a scale that we can hold in our hands.”
Yet even as Valentino extolled this extraordinary mappa, I could see all too clearly that the novel perspective and uncanny fidelity were not the only remarkable features. The center of the map was also the center of the city, where two ancient Roman roads, the Via Emilia and Via Appia, cross each other. On the map, this intersection was also the hub of a circle, drawn in ink, that surrounded the entire city and the fields outside its walls. Like all geographers, Leonardo had indicated the points of the compass in the form of a wind rose, employing eight lines that proceeded carefully from the center to the perimeter of this circle, dividing it into an octave of evenly spaced slices. Where each line of the wind rose met the rim of the circle, in the fashion of a wheel’s spoke, it was labeled in a small, fine hand: Septantrione, this being the north wind; Greco, the northeast wind; Levante, east wind; Scirocho, the southeast wind—and so on around the compass, comprising the eight principal winds.
“This is it, isn’t it?” I said. I put my fingertip on the map, precisely where the compass line labeled Scirocho met the circle scribed around the city, just outside a bend in the Santerno River. “I believe this is where one quarter of the first victim was found. Today I saw the cairn of stones the maestro left beside the river.”
Skipping a line each time, in quick sequence I pointed where three other lines of the wind rose also met the circle, as I read the names written alongside them: “Libecco, Maestro, Greco.” Southwest, northwest (this being the strongest, or “master” wind), northeast. “Each point establishes the corner of an imaginary square, which we are able to see through the agency of Maestro Leonardo’s remarkable map. Thus the murderer was able to boast that he had left one quarter of a woman’s body at each corner of the winds. God’s Cross. Whoever has done this had to have seen this mappa.”
The Malice of Fortune Page 9
