I will say no more, except that our angel’s love is woven into the weft of your soul as well as mine, and nothing can ever draw it out.
X
When we reached the corner where Messer Niccolò had earlier kept watch on Leonardo’s palazzo, I said, “There is an alley alongside,” having studied the great house well enough myself. “Let us see what they have in back.” The towering façade offered only barred windows and the massive oaken door.
The unpaved alley led us to an ill-kept garden where flowerpots lay tumbled amid a small, overgrown orchard. Behind a low brick wall was cleared ground, mostly planted with squash, lying beneath a pale carpet of snow that extended to the city wall. For a moment I looked about in melancholy wonder, remembering our own little garden in the Trastevere. I saw you and dear little Ermes running about, Camilla chasing behind you both. Now all I wanted in this world was to hear your laugh again.
Messer Niccolò and I examined the back of the house. The smaller windows on the ground floor were covered with iron grates; the arched windows on the piano nobile were merely shuttered, though a good ten braccia above us. After thrashing about in the snow-sprinkled shrubs, we located a crude ladder, merely a long pole with scraps of lumber nailed to it every braccia or so.
When we had wrestled the ladder against the stone lip of one of the windows, I told Niccolò, “I will go in.”
He looked at me as if I were mad.
“Can you say that you have earned a living stealing from men’s houses?”
His smile was quick but sad. “As an honest servant of the Florentine republic, I earn no living at all. I am in debt for my expenses here and still waiting for my appropriation.”
I began to climb, the scrap steps creaking, my gloves shredded by splinters. Upon reaching the shutters I forced them open with my knife and sat on the broad windowsill, letting my legs hang into the house. I was able to make out quite a large room; probably it had once been a bishop’s sala grande. Indeed it appeared to have been set up for a banquet, the three large trestle tables already having a great many objects on them, though I could not say what they were.
It was not a long drop to the floor beneath me, but before I could leap my breath caught in my throat.
The blank, ghostly face hovered almost directly opposite me. I thought, I have found her head.
But this was something only a bit less ghastly. Evidently a whited human skull had been placed upon the broad cornice that ran around the walls, in the fashion that small antiquities are often displayed. Wondering if this room contained other items Maestro Leonardo had obtained from corpses, I decided to search it first.
I observed the faint glow of a brazier near the open doorway and padded over to light the candle stuck in my belt. When I turned around again I discovered, tumbled and strewn upon those banquet tables, a new world.
With each step, my flickering light illuminated one marvel and then the next: A bleached thighbone might sit next to a Herodotus bound in leather, atop of which rested something like a miniature millworks, with sequences of tiny wooden cogs and wheels. Drawings were scattered about like leaves in November, many portraying the human body from without, but others were similar to those Valentino had just shown me, whole lattices of bones, tendons, nerves, and veins, as though they had been stripped intact from the surrounding flesh, like the skeleton of a filleted fish. The light glimmered on mirrors, lenses, calipers, and scales. On myriad scraps of paper measurements had been noted, quantities added, geometry proofs recorded. Yet what most teased my eye were those forms repeated from one thing to the next: a petrified spiral seashell metamorphosed into the cog of some strange wooden machine, only to be found next in fantastic drawings of spinning whirlwinds and whirlpools.
I wandered for some time, so rapt I almost walked straight past the most important drawing in that room—at least with regard to my quest. Carelessly surrounded by several notebooks and wooden polygons, this diagram had been inscribed in red chalk upon a piece of thin, translucent paper, such as artists employ for tracing copies.
“God’s Cross,” I said aloud. “This is what you were measuring.”
XI
This tracing tissue was somewhat larger than the map Valentino had shown me only an hour or so before. Maestro Leonardo had drawn a circle divided into an octave identical to a wind rose; indeed it appeared that Leonardo had traced this figure from his own map of Imola. He had also made red dots at each of four equally spaced points on the rim of the wheel, so to speak, these no doubt corresponding to the corners of the wind, as Valentino had shown me. And Leonardo had drawn lines between these points, creating a square perfectly fitted within the circle, touching it at only the four corners.
This much I could have expected. But Leonardo had further drawn a larger square around the circle, which touched it at only four points, these tangents being the four corners of the winds; the larger square was in this fashion rotated at an angle to the smaller square, thus giving a sequence of square, circle, square, all fitted perfectly together.
“The circle within the square,” I said aloud, though at that moment I did not entirely understand it.
All at once, it appeared that my candle had waxed considerably brighter. I spun about.
Maestro Leonardo da Vinci stood in the doorway, attired in a farmer’s shirt and an apron, the latter covered with irregular dark spots, which I thought to be paint. With his right hand he held a candle lamp; the tarantula-leg fingers of his left hand appeared to claw at the apron where it covered his breast. Only when I recalled that Leonardo was said to dissect corpses in his basement did I understand that the apron was a butcher’s smock, the dark spots blood, which he was attempting to wipe from his fingers.
“What do you think you see?”
His sharp tenor now had an authority absent in the olive grove; he seemed to draw strength amid the dazzling disorder of his own intellect. He came to me with the padding gait of a great lion.
Yet for some reason, I was not frightened. When he had come to my side, I said, “The duke has shown me your map. And the corners of the winds.”
“You make a false assumption.” His pitch was higher now, querulous. “These corners of the winds are not my construction.”
“No. But the murderer has imposed them on your wind rose.” I placed my finger on the tracing tissue, directly upon one of the corners of the larger square. “Let us presume that this point represents the location we visited today, in the olive grove. Where we found one quarter of the second woman’s body.” In quick sequence, I moved my finger to each remaining corner of this larger square. “The corners of this square are the locations where you have since found the remaining three quarters of her.” I reasoned that Leonardo and his assistants had gone back out that night, or perhaps Valentino’s people had visited the other three locations during the day. “Once you had measured to that olive grove, you understood how to draw the circle within the square, because the circle was your own wind rose, and you had the first point of the square.”
“Again you make an incorrect assumption. We have yet to recover anything from the other three locations. The duke’s soldiers are guarding them until we can conduct our esperienza in a suitable light.”
However hasty my assumption, I had little doubt that the remaining quarters of that poor woman would be found buried in crude crypts. “Maestro, this murderer is using your mappa,” I said sharply. “He has traced his own disegno from it, as your drawing here demonstrates. Who would have had an opportunity to examine your map at such length?”
His lips moved silently and I thought he would merely address the ether. “I am a military engineer,” he said at last. “The defense of this city requires an exacting set of measurements.”
“Then I presume that the duke’s officers and intimates were familiar with your map.” As I had observed to Messer Niccolò, the duke’s engineer general had no doubt worked with the duke’s condottieri before their recent defection. And as Leonardo had not contest
ed my previous assumption, I leapt at once to another, hoping to take him by surprise: “Maestro, did you have an association with Signor Oliverotto da Fermo?”
The tarantula legs returned to Leonardo’s apron, as if his hand wished to burrow into his breast. “Only inasmuch as he was attached to Vitellozzo Vitelli.”
So he knew both of them, evidently being more familiar with Vitellozzo Vitelli—who among all the condottieri had the most to gain by sending his emissary to Imola with instructions to secretly and most deviously impede the peace negotiations. But the maestro had confirmed my suspicion of Signor Oliverotto only because he had not expected such a direct inquiry; he would not answer me so readily again. Thus I simply said, “Mille grazie, Maestro. Now will you allow me to exit through your door?”
Leonardo silently led me down a creaking wooden staircase to the entrance vestibule. When he paused at the great oak portal, his eyes transited carefully over my features, as if examining the tissues beneath my skin. At last he stooped to unlock the smaller pedestrian door.
“Maestro,” I said, “someone has taken considerable care to cut two unfortunate women into pieces and place them in conformity with your mappa. Is it incorrect to assume that whoever has done this might take similar care to see that someone else is blamed for his crime?” By this I implied that Vitellozzo Vitelli, once he had succeeded in gaining the upper hand in the negotiations, might find it useful to provide a scapegoat for the very crimes that had postponed the agreement—a fate the duke’s engineer general and I might well share.
His eyes still on me, Leonardo pushed open the door. “Whenever good Fortune enters a house, Envy lays siege to the place.” He blinked, with that expression one has when remembering. “And Envy’s chief weapon is false accusation.”
As soon as the door closed behind me, I scurried through the alley to the back of that great house. Messer Niccolò remained faithfully beside the ladder, a dusting of snow on his head and shoulders. Startled to see me come around the corner, he began to push the ladder over before he recognized my face; in my costume I might well have been the maestro’s servant or bravo. I took his hand and led him at a trot into the street, not slowing until we were back on the Via Appia.
“What happened?” he said. “I saw the light. Did you rouse the entire house?”
I let go his hand and told him everything I had seen in Maestro Leonardo’s study. We were halfway down the Via Emilia before I concluded my recitation: “This butcher has made a square within the circle of Leonardo’s compass rose and another square outside it, all fitted as tightly as an egg in its shell. The maestro believes that whoever has done this will endeavor to accuse him, out of some envy or rivalry.” I recalled how Valentino had extolled Leonardo’s plans for the Romagna; perhaps the condottieri, men who had mastered only the arts of destruction, both feared and envied an engineer general who threatened to build new cities where all men could share peace and prosperity. “That would explain why this murderer has followed so faithfully the maestro’s mappa.”
I waited a dozen steps, the thick snow flying furiously into our faces, before Niccolò offered his commentary. “Yes. This man has a great deal of interest in Leonardo,” he said in his musing fashion. “Envy? Possibly. But I lean toward a different opinion. The murderer is most concerned with his own amusement—an amusement principally derived from confounding all of us. Each time we look at this disegno he has created, we find it more difficult to see what he is getting at.” He shook the snow from his salad-head. “No. He does not wish to bury the maestro with false indictments. He wishes to engage him in a dreadful game.”
I could hardly listen to this. “Now you imagine that”—my pitch rose sharply—“that this butcher and the maestro will sit together and play triche-tach?”
Niccolò gave me a cautious glance. “You recall Maestro Leonardo telling us he was informed by peasants as to the location of the remains we found today. Yet from what you just told me, Leonardo has deduced the whereabouts of the other three quarters solely from his measurements regarding the first.”
“Having one point of the square,” I said impatiently, dodging a hole filled with slush, “he could easily measure the other three, knowing their position on the wind rose.”
“Yes. Just so. The remains of the first victim were placed on the corners of the winds. The murderer paid peasants to report their locations but not to disturb them, so that they would be found precisely in that pattern—and Maestro Leonardo would be certain to recognize it. Peasants likewise informed Valentino’s people regarding the crypt we opened today. But the murderer did not pay peasants to report scavengers at the locations where he buried the remaining three quarters. Instead he challenged Leonardo to discover his new figure of geometry.” Here we turned onto the street that ends at the Rocca, though the fortress itself was no longer visible through the veil of snow. “Do you see? With the first victim he established the rules of his game. With the second, he invited Leonardo to play against him. That is why he buried the quarters of the second victim—so that they would not be disturbed before Leonardo was able to make his measurements, discover this new square with his own circle or wind rose within it, and find his way to them.”
I had it at the tip of my tongue to tell him about the Duke of Gandia’s amulet, thus establishing beyond question that the object of this otherwise meaningless “game” was to provoke rage in the Vatican—and, it seemed, cast false suspicion on Valentino’s engineer general. But instead I merely remarked on Messer Niccolò’s dubious method, in the hope I would no longer have to hear his theories: “As Lucretius says, ‘We draw large deductions from small indications, and so bring ourselves to deception and delusion.’ ”
I was not entirely surprised that he laughed, even if he was the joke.
When we reached our building, we entered the stables through the pedestrian door, finding the animals inside huddled together against the cold. As we entered the courtyard, I looked up to our shutters. They were closed, but the light from Camilla’s lamp glimmered reassuringly through the cracks.
Almost directly above our shuttered windows, a motion caught my eye. Through the falling snow I saw what appeared to be the ghostly, pale face of a great barn owl, perched upon the spine of the roof. Almost at once this enormous bird vanished into the gray sky.
“Did you see it?” I said, turning to Niccolò.
Niccolò bolted into my stairwell and I could only watch in utter confusion as he leapt up the stairs and disappeared onto the landing.
For some reason I looked at my feet. Two sets of footprints led to my stairwell, the second having just been made by Niccolò himself.
I flew up after him, unable to feel my feet touch the steps. The door was wide open and I could see straight into the bedroom. The candle still burned on the little table beneath the window. All at once Niccolò appeared at the bedroom threshold, his face as white as the owl I had just seen.
I ran toward him. “Tell me she is still here!” I screamed.
Niccolò pushed me back as if I were an intruder, his hand at the back of my head, burying my face in his cape. I could see nothing but the abandoned farmhouse where two women had already been butchered.
“She is still here,” he said. In Rome, Camilla and I had once climbed the Esquiline hill to visit the ancient ruins of Nero’s Golden Palace and had called to each other from within those vast, echoing chambers; Niccolò’s voice was hollow and distant like that. “And you must not go in there.”
XII
I would not have survived that darkest of nights, or the next days, without Messer Niccolò. First he kept me from my bedroom, though he nearly had to suffocate me to do so; afterward, as I fell into a black stupor of grief, Niccolò also made those arrangements the living must make for the dead. I slept upon the servant’s cot in his rooms because I could not bear to cross my own threshold, relying instead on Niccolò to bring me my clothing and other necessities.
I began to climb from the abyss on the secon
d day, when Niccolò compelled me to bathe. He transported the copper bathtub from my rooms and had the hot water brought up by the watchman, then left me while he attended to his mule. I fitted myself into the little tub that Camilla had polished for me; as grateful as I was for this last token of her unceasing industry on my behalf, I became as angry as Electra that I had only this metal shell to wrap me, and not my angel’s loving arms. Even after the water had turned cold I continued to sit in the tub as if it were armor, guarding me from a grief I could not otherwise defeat.
I might have stayed there forever, if Niccolò had not discovered me, still curled up like a fetus in the womb. “Cacasangue,” he said. I had some vague notion of him bustling about, draping me with towels. “You must dress yourself.”
I rose, unconcerned to cover myself, but Niccolò had already withdrawn to the bedroom. I scarcely toweled at all and pulled my shift over wet skin. My feet were still in the tub when Niccolò looked in and came to me at once, snatching up several of the towels that had tumbled to the floor. He turned my back to him and began to dry my hair, much as Camilla had always done.
“You handle a woman well, Messer Niccolò.” It was as if someone else were saying this. Yet I knew it was true; most men wish to put their hands on a woman, but few know how to truly handle her, although all the men in your family are among the latter. No doubt this gift is also your patrimony.
“You know women, don’t you, Niccolò? And not just wives and sisters.” In my brief interludes of reason during our mourners’ vigil, I had learned a few things about him. He had a young bride, who had come to him from a wealthy family but with scant dowry; one could see why this spoiled girl and the secretary in threadbare clothes did not enjoy an epic love. Indeed his wife, Marietta, refused to write to him here in Imola, although they already shared a little daughter, who was not a year old.
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