His face was almost as pale as it had been that night. “Her head …”
“I know, Niccolò.” I had known when he insisted I could not see her. “Was it like that woman?” I meant the woman whose half torso we had found in the olive grove, her neck a neatly trimmed collar of flesh, the cut clean and careful. I wanted this same dreadful mercy for my beloved Camilla.
“He cut partly through her neck … with a knife. The rest … the flesh was torn away.”
I shuddered so violently that I thought I would fold up like a marionette. This creature had nearly ripped off her head. “He was a powerful man,” I said, thinking of Signor Oliverotto’s huge hands. “What … else?”
“He did not remove her clothing, much less apply the unguent to her. He … removed … her arm. Her right arm. Just as he did the head. First the partial cut … then …”
Perversely, my mind tried to picture it. “Is there more?”
“No. And he left no objects or messages with her.”
“But he took her head. And her arm. The same arm that held the other messages.” It astonished me that I could observe this.
Niccolò shook his head. His eyes roamed a bit.
I shouted at him, “What is it?”
He swallowed as if the words were stuck in his throat. “I believe you will mislead yourself if you see poor Camilla’s murder as of a piece with the first two.”
“Madness!” I shrieked. “Can you possibly believe this? They are not related?”
“I believe they are related. But they did not have the same necessity. I do not even believe that the same man did them.”
At the very least I owed Niccolò a hearing. Yet it occurred to me that having seen the horror in this room—and now forced to relive it—he was perhaps closer than I to the precipice of reason. “Why do you think this, Niccolò?”
“The meticulous nature of the first two murders. No physician could cut more precisely. The nipples carefully sliced away. The unguent applied to the skin. The riddling messages he left on the bollettini, the figures of geometry derived from Leonardo’s map—”
“You have already noted these things.”
“And they have led me to this man’s necessity.”
“It is necessary for him to torment and provoke the pope,” I said. “Or if you must believe your most recent theory, he merely needs to draw us into his cruel game.”
“I see now that he regards this as more than a game. Vanity is his necessity. He has created this disegno with human flesh, and he is no less vain of it than any maestro of painting, sculpture, or architecture. We are his audience, who must admire the cleverness and accomplishment of his creation.”
“The pope is his audience,” I said, returning to my first faith. “He does not care about the rest of us.”
“No. From the very first he was as much interested in Leonardo as he was in the pope. And now … As you observed, he was watching us the other day. Watching you, I fear.” The late-afternoon sun must have come from behind the clouds and reflected off the opposite roof, because a brilliant light haloed Niccolò’s head. “Once he knew you, he sent someone to your rooms, to search them, to learn something about you.”
“He ‘sent someone’?”
“He cannot do this on his own. Like any maestro of a painter’s bottega, he must employ assistants or an apprentice—in his case there are probably only one or two, because of the nature of his art. The man who impersonates the Devil is almost certainly one of them. I would guess they assist their master in measuring the countryside and placing body parts on the points of a wind rose. Little different than Leonardo and his people.” From his look, Niccolò might have tasted rotten meat. “But I believe that his apprentice also abducts these poor women beforehand.”
I clapped my hand to my eyes. “He intended to take my Camilla to that farmhouse. But she would not have let him take her across this threshold. The Devil himself could not have forced her. She would have fought … Did you find her knife?”
“No. He might have taken it with him. But you must understand this: The apprentice killed your dear friend in anger. Because he could not do what he wished with her. He could not do what I believe his maestro instructed him to do with her. The maestro of the shop would not have permitted him to …” Niccolò held up both hands like a priest giving the blessing. “This evil maestro does not kill in anger. He murders with calculation. With a remorseless disregard for his victims. I do not believe he kills with any sort of passion at all.”
I was suddenly so weary that I collapsed into the ancient chair beside the little table. Where my beautiful Camilla had sat, in her last moments among us poor and miserable sinners.
“Niccolò, I know who he is. I have looked into his face. His very eyes. And it does not matter to me why he kills if I cannot establish that he has done so.” I spoke to him as gently as I could. “All I require now is proof. Perhaps Maestro Leonardo will find something in these figures of geometry, some key that will lead us to the … heads.” Perhaps my lovely Camilla’s as well. “The cold will have preserved them. When we have the first woman’s head we will know. We will connect this evil man to his crimes.”
Niccolò blinked rapidly. “No. Leonardo’s measuring wheel, maps, and figures of geometry will lead you nowhere. The journey we must now take is inside him. Within his head. Whether this maestro of the shop is Oliverotto da Fermo or another man, we must first inhabit his mind.”
We live in an age of marvelous invenzioni, where even an obscure secretary might stand upon the shoulders of the ancients, aspiring to some sort of scienza of men. But having seen Leonardo’s anatomical drawings, I regarded the maestro as considerably more likely than Messer Niccolò to journey inside a man’s skull.
“Mille, mille grazie, my dearest Niccolò,” I said to him. “I can never begin to thank you enough for all you have done for me. And for my Camilla. I will always be grateful to you.” I got up to embrace him, although it seemed I carried the world upon my shoulders. “Now I must try to be alone with my grief.”
Niccolò looked guardedly at me. Perhaps he was as much concerned with the state of my reason as I was with his. He opened his mouth to speak but stopped himself, closed his eyes, and turned and left me.
When I sat again, I was no longer in that room. Like Simonides reconstructing the ruins of his memory palace, I went back to our little garden in the Trastevere, which my beloved Camilla had committed to her memory hardly a fortnight ago. She was already waiting for me, as she had on our first day there, eight months to the day after your father’s murder. In that time we had not spent more than three nights in a row under the same roof, staying with various ladies I had known in the business, sometimes hidden away in some guardaroba where a servant slept, sometimes in a latrine under the stairs, always making our farewells before our hostess could no longer resist the temptation to draw her thirty pieces of silver from your grandfather’s prodigious and ill-gotten treasury. It was Camilla who found us our sanctuary in the Trastevere on the first day of your life, bringing us there in a tanner’s cart, hidden beneath stiff, stinking cowhides, the afterbirth tied to my thigh with a string because the midwife, not having time to deliver it, did not want it to draw back in and poison me. On that day the little garden had seemed a Gethsemane to me, so certain was I that your grandfather’s people would track us there—a place as wicked as the world we had fled, dark and tangled, the pitiful trees strangled with vines, a nest for rats.
Yet Camilla and I transformed that Gethsemane into our Eden. That is the memory garden to which I returned, to those long spring days hoeing, pruning, planting herbs, flowers, and fruit trees, grading gravel paths, and hammering together our trellis. Watching you grow, as our little boy more resembled his father every day.
I remained in that garden until dusk, when the cold wind rustled across the pages open on the table beside me. I had given Camilla this little Petrarch years ago and she had inked tiny medallion shapes beside those lines she favor
ed. I saw that she had marked this: “And should time work against my sweet desires …”
I got up, closed the shutters, and stretched out on the barren mattress, covering myself with my fur-lined cioppa. I did not believe I would sleep, yet it seemed I drifted from one dream to the next, fitful images populated with the living, the dead, and the many faces of regret.
I remember only the last of these visions. I was in my lovely bedroom overlooking the Via dei Banchi. A man stood at the shutters. The sun had transformed him into a creature of light, no more material than a golden flame, glowing and shimmering. He turned to me, slowly; though I could not make out his face, I knew he was Juan, because his body was pierced all over with dark gashes, shadow instead of light pouring through these wounds, quickly congealing into black blood.
I tried to awaken but a pale face came over me, his hand on my mouth so that I could not breathe. I thought he whispered to me, “I would like to hear you sing.”
Then I heard myself scream, entirely within my own mind: This is not a dream!
XIV
The weight pressing upon my mouth and nose seemed little more than a down pillow but I could draw nothing into my lungs. Another voice whispered my name in a diminutive I have not been called for years. I thought it was Juan calling me back to my dream, and death.
“Dami, Dami. Don’t scream. It is Cesare. Don’t scream.” The man all Europe knows as Valentino lifted his hand from my mouth.
“Mother of God,” I gasped. I could vaguely see the features of his long, somber, beautiful face, as if Christ Himself had come to sit on my bed.
“I had to come in here like a housebreaker.” His whisper was harsh. Perhaps even fearful. “The watchman is sleeping. I couldn’t risk his attention.”
“Why? You are the duke.”
“I can trust no one. Not even my own father. The watchman here is in his employ. I could not even send Michelotto to you. Dami?” He removed a glove and gently placed the back of his hand to my face. “You are so cold, Dami. You have no heat in here.” Yet it was his hand that seemed cold.
“I remember her. Your Camilla. She was so lovely. So lively. If I could, I would offer you the comforts of the faith I long ago lost. If I ever had faith.” Even as little as I could see of his face, he suddenly appeared sadder. “My father should not have sent you here. He should have left Juan at peace. And left the boy with you. Now this …”
He sat up, his trunk as erect as if he were standing. “When the searchers came from the river to tell my father that Juan had been found, he would not even turn his head to me.” His voice was distant. “I thought it was merely that he could not bear to see that Fortune had spared me and had instead taken the icon of his heart. I remember the first occasion when he did look at me again. He had shut himself up in his bedroom for five days without food or water. I brought a candle into that tomb and could no longer recognize my father. His eyes were great bruises, everything except the pupils entirely purple and red, as if he had attempted to snatch them out of the sockets.” I could hear the sigh escape through his nose. “Yet when he stared at me through these wounds I thought for the first time in my life: My father sees me. And I knew at once that he believed I had been an accomplice and instigator, not only of Fortune but of the men who wielded the knives.” Valentino’s eyes had appeared shut during this remembrance, but now I could observe a faint glimmer. “Sometimes I think there is no one His Holiness does not suspect. To this day.”
“Then it is all the more urgent that the condottieri be held accountable.”
He shook his head, yet I could not be certain if he was signaling disagreement or had instead resigned himself to pursuing justice. “Dami. There is something else you need to know about Leonardo’s map. The maestro did not finish it until mid-October. By then my condottieri had already announced their defection and rebellion. None of them have been in Imola since early this summer.”
“What about Oliverotto da Fermo?”
“He arrived here a week ago. With Paolo Orsini.”
I couldn’t accept this; the first woman had been butchered at least three weeks ago.
“Dami. Do you understand what I am saying? I have a traitor in my house. Likely more than one. Not all of the conspirators declared themselves in October.”
So Niccolò had indeed been correct: the murderer—the maestro of the shop—had received assistance of some sort. And it would be all the more difficult to connect these crimes to the condottieri if they had employed proxies—presumably Valentino’s own people—to commit them.
Valentino leaned over me and placed his hands beside my head, almost as if he were preparing to mount me. “Juan demanded nothing of himself,” he whispered. “Yet he was a magnet to others, demanding—taking—everything from whomever he touched. It is still so. Even in death. At times I believe that it is not the New Jerusalem His Holiness sees descending from Heaven. It is the resurrected Juan.”
I whispered back to him, “You, too, demand everything.”
He lifted his right hand, remaining braced by the other, and brushed the back of his fingers across my cheek; now his touch was like a hot brand. A touch that returned me to my bedroom overlooking the Via dei Banchi. Late on a summer afternoon, the sun turning everything to pale stone, as if the entire room and all its furnishing had been carved in white sardonyx. Even my sheets and naked flesh had that hard luster.
His fingers trembled. His face was so close to mine that I could smell the rosemary on his breath. “I know some things that you do not. Matters not even my father has been told. And I did not think I should tell you …” He sat up again. “About the woman. The woman who had Juan’s amulet.”
My heart seemed to kick at my ribs. “You know who she was?”
“Not her name. Not the farmhouse—or hut—in which she lived. But you can see why I kept the secret. She was Vitellozzo Vitelli’s whore.”
“God’s Cross.” I presumed that they had already found her head, evidently even before I had last spoken with him. “Have you seen her face?”
“No. No one has found the head.” He paused, as if he regretted disclosing this. “But I knew that when he was here in Imola, Vitellozzo had a woman in the brothel next to the Franciscan establishment. A country girl. He likes to see the dirt on the soles when he turns their feet up. This woman was in a gioca with some other whores.”
“You mean they played the gioce di Diana?” Witch games. Everyone in the Trastevere and the little towns where I grew up knew about the stregoneria—the religion of witches—and the gioce di Diana. The streghe—witches—call their covens gioce, for those games.
“Their games are principally dancing naked about the wheat fields at night and rutting like dogs with plowboys who call themselves wizards,” Valentino said. “I don’t condemn them, much less believe we should burn them. But I am told that these witches’ gioce also include divinations.”
“Gevol int la carafa,” I said. According to Leonardo’s assistant Tommaso, this was some sort of augury, employing a jar of water. “The Devil in the jar.”
Valentino nodded. “That is one of their games. There is also the goat ride. A state of entrancement induced by a narcotic ointment.”
My memory flooded with the reek of the pot we had found in that cursed farmhouse.
“The streghe believe it enables them to fly to distant places, on the back of the Devil, who takes the form of a goat,” Valentino said. “Leonardo found this ointment on all the bodies. On all the parts. They were covered entirely with it.”
“So the murderer uses the witches’ magic against them. Like a thief who robs the butcher with his own knife.”
He nodded. “It assists in the abduction.”
“But why? Why not a buffet to the back of the head?” Or a hand over the mouth. “Why all the rest of this? The mappa, the games, the riddles …” All the things Niccolò had observed. “And my darling Camilla … Why?”
“I can’t say regarding Camilla … I don’t know.�
� He shook his head with some animation. Or frustration. “But I think the butchered streghe were more than conveniences for this riddle you and Maestro Leonardo have described to me.” He paused as if the next words would be a binding oath. “I believe the two streghe knew something.”
“Something about the condottieri.”
I heard another sigh. “Something that goes back to Juan’s murder. In a way that even Juan’s amulet does not.”
“Something that Vitellozzo Vitelli’s whore overheard? And then told to her amica in this gioca? Something that required them both to be silenced.”
Valentino got up, for a moment staring down into the brazier beside the bed. “You must burn some charcoal.” He turned and faced the shutters. “This is no longer about war or peace. It has to do with the honor of our house. My father has waited more than five years for his vengeance. Nothing else lives in his breast …” He was entirely still. “I could have dealt with the condottieri in my own time. But Juan must have his way. Always. We must open his grave and parade his corpse up the Via Alessandrina.” He did not try to disguise his bitterness. “I can no longer contain this. We must discover what these women knew. Until Juan knows the peace of the dead, Italy will not have peace.”
“Do you want me to see what I can find at that brothel?”
“I don’t know. I must consider the next …”
All at once he started to the door, leaving his answer hanging in the air. I called to him when I heard the latch.
“Cesare. Your father suspects that Giovanni may be your son. He said as much to me. He said he would soon enough know his father.”
I heard only the door closing.
Shortly after dawn I crossed the courtyard. The spectral garzone answered my knock, but on this occasion Niccolò himself was sleeping beneath his cape on the boy’s cot, and indeed, with his unkempt hair and youthful face he looked like a poorly kept manservant.
The Malice of Fortune Page 13
