The Malice of Fortune

by Michael Ennis

  “Then Fortune was her murderer,” I said, regaining my bearings. “Maestro, I am looking for—”

  I stopped, having noticed something that made the hair dance atop my head. “What do you have in that vat, Maestro?”

  Not waiting for an answer, I made my way to the rear of the cellar, finding my suspicions confirmed even before I reached the long metal tub, which in fact was a coffin of sorts. A lead pipe ran in one end and out the other, conveying the water that both filled this vessel and coursed through it like a gentle brook.

  Beneath the surface lay two alabaster objects. One was a single buttock cut just above the pelvis and through the crotch, with the thigh still attached, although I was able to orient myself to these anatomical features only by the remaining patch of pubic hair, which drifted in the current like moss at the bottom of a perfectly clear creek. The second object was the matching lower leg, severed at the knee.

  I could not even begin to accept the dreadful defeat that lay before me. “Damiata was abducted out on the pianura last night. Did they do this to her?”

  “We will see.”

  “See?”

  “If they are the same.” I had only a vague idea, if any, what he meant by “they,” or why they would not be the same. Leonardo collected a notebook from one of his tables. “You must demonstrate to me, as precisely as you can, her height.”

  I knew where Damiata’s eyes were, relative to mine, when we faced each other. With a trembling hand I showed the maestro. With a great long stick he measured to my mark, then made notations in his notebook. “She was wearing her half-boots?”

  I nodded stiffly. With his bare hands Leonardo hauled the remains out of his vat like a fisherman clearing his net, placing them both on the stained sheet that covered his third trestle table. When he placed a measuring stick alongside the glistening shank, I could no longer watch.

  From time to time, I heard the scratching of Leonardo’s chalk, after which he noisily turned the sheets of his notebook like a court musician looking for a song. Here and there he also said things like “g is to h as the value r is to s …” But mostly he mumbled in fits and starts.

  The maestro was still engaged in this nerve-scraping esperienza when footsteps shook the wooden stairs. Down came the alchemist Tommaso, although you could see nothing of him save his head—with all that black wool sticking out of his idiotic berretta—and his big black boots. He was otherwise obscured by one of those great wicker baskets used in the grape harvest, these being shaped like an urn so that they will stand up, but so wide at the mouth that even Tommaso, with a span like a pelican’s wings, could hardly get his arms around it. When he had conveyed his harvest basket to Leonardo’s table, he emptied the contents onto the sheet.

  The butchered parts tumbled out like the fragments of a shattered marble statue, yet the almost rose-hued edges where these pieces had been cleaved from the whole were perfectly straight and even. Half a torso, absent the arm, which had been severed at the shoulder joint, the glassy, pale blue breast having no nipple, only what appeared to be a blackened, crusted areola where it had been sliced away. The two parts of another leg, the upper portion also having a fine dark fringe of pubic hair alongside the cut that had divided the trunk. The arm and hand, half clenched, that had evidently been sliced from the partial torso.

  Nevertheless, it was not the sight of that flesh but rather its reek—the same bitter scent that still clung to me—that made my head light. The room around me began to wobble.

  Leonardo had already begun to move the ghastly pieces about on the table, as if trying to reassemble the corpse. Distantly I heard him say, “Did you precisely ascertain the locations?”

  “All excepting the arm,” Tommaso answered. “Some boys had passed it about.”

  Here Leonardo paused to study the remains as if he were painting a fresco, musing over his pots of colors. After a moment I thought he muttered, “Dimmi”—Tell me—as though imploring the body parts to speak. Whatever his inquiry, the lifeless flesh did not reply, because the maestro knitted his brow, then turned away and rushed up the stairs.

  I caught up with Leonardo in his studio. Here, too, several candle globes were lit, allowing me to see this immense disorder that Damiata has previously related. The maestro was already leafing through a bound manuscript—Latin, as I soon observed—that he had snatched up from among several other volumes on the tabletop, all piled together as carelessly as if he intended to make a bonfire of them.

  “Vitruvius determined that the members of the human body were in mathematical proportion,” Leonardo said, poking a great finger at a page in his book. “A man’s height is equal to twenty-four palms and the other members are multiples or fractions thereof—my dear friend Fra Luca Pacioli has an equation to represent this. Dottor Savonarola, the grandfather of the fanatic, made useful tables based on similar principles …” Trailing off, Leonardo wrinkled his brow and wrote a few more numbers in his notebook.

  I was suddenly as frozen as at any time during the previous two days. He had seen something. “What is it?”

  The maestro once again produced his chalk and notebook, making a final notation. He shook his head.

  I shouted, “In the name of God who was the woman Tommaso brought in the basket!”

  “Not her.”

  My heart filled my entire chest. Yet I was only able to say, like a slow pupil, “So you are saying that those pieces of the body would not match someone of Damiata’s height.”

  He looked at me as though I had just asked him how to empty piss out of a chamber pot. “Neither is proportionate. One of those unfortunate women was three-sixteenths of a braccia taller than Damiata. The other woman was one-eighth of a braccia shorter.”

  I returned only the blankest of stares.

  “They are not symmetrical,” Leonardo said. “The length of the lower leg is not proportionate with the section of the pelvis and femur.” He was referring to the two fragments I had seen in his tank, upon which he had evidently based his entire deduction. “When we measure the parts Tommaso has collected, we will find the same variation.”

  I closed my eyes. “You mean—”

  “They cannot have been obtained from the same body.”

  I stood there, insane with hope. Damiata might yet live.

  But in her place, two other women had been butchered: Zeja Caterina, I was all but certain, and the strega who had joined her; the latter had appeared to be taller than Damiata. The taste in my mouth was suddenly as vile as the stink on my skin.

  Having offered me this cold comfort, Leonardo began to sort through the vast accumulation on his tables, as if I were not present at all. If Damiata had been astonished to find amidst this chaos a clandestine order—those numbers and measurements that the maestro had imposed on all these models and devices—I had the fleeting but inescapable sense of something quite different: Nothing was ever completed. Every drawing had later notations or corrections in the margins. Every wooden model, be it of a fortress or a contraption of gears and wheels, sat among pieces that either had been taken away or were waiting to be added.

  Like Damiata, I had no personal acquaintance with Leonardo da Vinci before I came to Imola; once there, I had only observed him, on a few occasions, coming and going to the Rocca. My interest in Valentino’s engineer general began only after I heard reports that he had collected the pieces of a woman dismembered in a peculiar fashion—this followed by rumors connecting the crime to the condottieri as well as to the pope. Whereupon I employed the boy, Lucca, to watch the maestro’s palazzo and inform me as to who—and what—went in and out. But I had never traded words with Leonardo until that afternoon in the olive grove.

  Nevertheless, I was familiar enough with Leonardo’s particulars to regard his disordered studio as a metaphor of his life. Thirty years before, he had been exiled from Florence on charges of sodomy, from which the Medici who had sponsored him should have protected him. His subsequent labors came to naught when the Duke of Milan be
trayed him as well as all Italy, after which the esteemed maestro was run out of Mantua and Venice. It was our republic that had welcomed him back, two years previously, the brothers of Santissima Annunziata having provided him a commission. Yet when Valentino took him on, Leonardo left the friars with nothing but an immense drawing—which crowds came to gawk at nonetheless, as if Botticelli had taken up the brush again.

  From among the clutter of his unfinished prodigies, Leonardo shortly produced one of the few items he had presumably completed: his mappa of Imola, which Damiata had described to me in some detail. I assumed the duke had returned it, evidently to assist Leonardo’s investigation. And I must confess that when I saw this map for myself, the sense of looking down on the earth like a bird nearly made my jaw drop.

  Leonardo at once covered the mappa with a sheet of tracing paper that just as quickly engaged my interest: the square, circle, and square he had already drawn upon it in red chalk were the same figures of geometry he had displayed to Damiata. This drawing perfectly matched the mappa beneath it, the circle on the tracing paper and the circle of the wind rose being exactly the same diameter, although the tracing tissue itself was larger than the mappa.

  “Tommaso,” Leonardo bid his assistant, who had come upstairs on my heels. With Tommaso at his side, the maestro lifted the sheet of tracing paper, again exposing the map. “Indicate where they were found. As best you know.”

  “This was the first.” Tommaso stuck his finger upon the empty little square at the center of the map. This was the Piazza Maggiore, Imola’s main square.

  “Yes, the buttock and femur,” Leonardo said, certainly meaning the considerable haunch I had seen in his anatomist’s vat.

  “The lower leg was here.” The alchemist pointed to the miniature street in front of what was recognizably, despite its tiny scale, the Dominican church; in the city of Imola as it existed in our world, this building was located several hundred braccia north and east of the Piazza Maggiore. “I am told the arm was here”—he pointed just outside the Appian Gate, several hundred braccia directly east of the Piazza Maggiore.

  Each time Tommaso indicated a location, Leonardo placed the tracing tissue back over his map, marked this spot with a single point and wrote beside it the name of the body part that had been found there. This procedure went on, seven in all: The armless half-torso was found outside the Faenza Gate, just to its east, between the mill canal and the city wall. The second buttock and thigh were found on the other side of the Santerno River, south of the city, at the very edge of the big circle, or wind rose, drawn upon Leonardo’s map; the lower leg outside this circle, in the hills southwest of the city.

  Here I was prompted to ask, “Were these parts buried or found on the surface?” I presumed the latter.

  “They were exposed.” Having finished marking the locations indicated by Tommaso, Leonardo had taken up a straightedge and was busily connecting various points. He did not actually inscribe chalk lines between them but one could see that he was drawing geometric figures in his head, composing triangles and various other polygons.

  “Yet animals did not take these exposed body parts,” I remarked.

  “We have sent word among the rustics that we will pay them if they discover such things and do not disturb them or allow animals to scavenge them. As it is, we have yet to collect them all.”

  I calculated my own ghastly inventory: given the new division of the bodies into eighths, nine fragments were still missing. Not to mention the heads.

  Leonardo had begun to converse with himself again, moving his measuring stick about almost as if it were the bow of a lira da braccio. Yet again and again he shook his head, as if he could not find the right notes.

  At last I said, “Maestro, possibly in this instance there is no figure of geometry, in fact no disegno at all.”

  “Having gone to such pains to create this device”—Leonardo gestured at his tracing paper—“why would he abandon his work?” Evidently the maestro who had left so many of his own works unfinished did not see the irony of his question.

  “Perhaps this man intended the disegno to be absent,” I said, “because he is varying his methods.”

  Still bowed over his tracing, Leonardo glanced back at me. “He has varied his methods only in the dismemberment and disposition of the bodies. He varies between inhuming the remains and leaving them exposed. And now he has divided the limbs in a fashion to provide a greater number of points for his constructions. But the disegno is here. We presently cannot see it.”

  I noted to myself the similar natures of Leonardo and the murderer, in that both could regard butchered limbs as “points” for some figure of geometry. “Certainly he intends that we expect some new disegno,” I said. “But perhaps in this instance his intention is to confound us by not meeting that expectation.”

  “His intention is to create a riddle employing figures of geometry.”

  “To what end, Maestro?”

  “That would be speculation.”

  “It is his intention to engage us. He does not want us to lose interest or to find his disegno predictable. Hence he has varied his methods by not creating a figure of geometry, where one is expected.” I put my finger to the tracing. “In truth, we do not need to understand these figures of geometry if we can instead discover the necessity that has led this man to create them. What is the necessity in all this?”

  Leonardo shook his head so vehemently that his gray curls swept about. “Why must we have this endless orgy of speculation! Let us return to the terra firma of esperienza!”

  Here the maestro again searched among his tables. Half the things strewn upon them were of no use to his art or science, but instead belonged in a dry goods speziale: napkins and bed linens; terra-cotta pots full of brazier charcoal; a box overflowing with nails. And glass jars containing all manner of things, from glistening mercury to pearls of rice; sorting among these, the maestro finally selected one and returned to my side. He began to pluck from the jar a succession of dried black beans, placing them one by one on his tracing, at the points indicating where body parts had been found.

  Yet Leonardo’s beans only better illustrated the terrible perfection in the distribution of the first two bodies and the anarchy in the placement of the most recent remains. In his frustration he dumped the entire jar on his tracing paper, crying out, “There is more here! The disegno is in relation to that which has preceded it as the sphere within a cylinder is to the planar construction by which Archimedes … Where the base is the greatest circle in a sphere … the surface together with its base is three halves … But I cannot see it. The points are not complete.” He extended his great index finger and gently tapped the beans in a random sequence, as if he were a fool who intended to count each one. “Archimedes. I must read my Archimedes.” Suddenly he swept the beans aside. “Tommaso! We have to prepare for our journey. We have much to do. Much, much to do …”

  “Journey?” This word struck me like a great stone dropped from a mason’s crane; I was all the more stunned because I should have known at once, after witnessing the activity on the street. I could only croak, “Where is the duke now?”

  “He departed for Cesena this morning,” Leonardo said absently. “In company with the entire army. Owing to the urgency of this matter, the duke has instructed us to complete our esperienza. But we must leave here tomorrow.”

  Like Job sitting in the ashes, I stared at Leonardo’s tracing paper, still dotted with a few remaining beans. The departure of Valentino and his army could only mean that the treaty negotiations had been all but concluded; the duke and his condottieri would meet at Cesena or somewhere to the south, to seal their accord and join their armies in a common purpose—which would almost certainly be the conquest of Florence. And I was bound by my government’s instructions, reiterated to me in my most recent dispatch from the Palazzo della Signoria: to follow Duke Valentino wherever he went, regardless of his fate, or mine. I, too, had much to do, if I hoped to catch up with
the duke and his army.

  I had but one remaining stone to hurl at malignant Fortune. “Maestro, when you see His Excellency the duke, you must tell him there is a book, presently possessed by the same gioca of witches whose bodies you have examined in your cellar, that will connect the condottieri to his brother’s murder. Damiata and I both saw it on the pianura, a moment before she disappeared and I was struck senseless by the same masked Devil’s apprentice your own Giacomo witnessed. I believe that this book and possibly Damiata herself are still out on the pianura. The duke could dispatch horsemen from Cesena to conduct a search.” In truth only a canvass of this sort, conducted by a great company of swift-moving cavalry, was likely to bear result.

  Leonardo looked up at me and nodded. He began to pace among his tables like a gray lion, pressing his hands to his temples, pushing back his mane as if he wanted to shear it off entirely. “Dimmi!” Leonardo spit out the d as if he were an angry cat, the rest of the word a strange whine. “Dimmi! Dimmi!” Tell me! Tell me!

  I looked to Tommaso, who quickly shook his head. Having said all I could until I saw the duke myself in Cesena, I went to the door but paused at the threshold.

  Glancing back at the disordered studio, I wondered if Leonardo’s panoply of unfinished marvels had also become a metaphor of a yet more ambitious undertaking, which would in similar fashion never see completion: Valentino’s new Italy, a vision the duke had evidently surrendered to the designs of the condottieri.

  CHAPTER 5

  Whoever wishes to see what is to be, should consider what has been.

  Early the next morning I was able to find a courier who needed a horse delivered to Cesena, which lies thirty miles south of Imola on the Via Emilia. This animal was scarcely a blessing; it was poorly schooled, difficult to handle, and finding fodder for it slowed my progress considerably. A journey I would ordinarily have completed in half a day required three.