They were interrupted by the arrival of Remigio’s two servants who were carrying a pitcher of wine, tin cups and an olive-wood bowl filled with walnuts, plus two slabs of curved marble with which to break the shells. Their behaviour expressed amazement at, and mistrust of, the clients who had convinced their master to leave his own office. Perhaps it had never happened before.
When they had gone, Hugues went to check that the door was properly closed and then he asked Mondino a large number of questions about Wilhelm von Trier, in a brusque and practical tone. Mondino found himself replying to the questions without quite understanding how the Frenchman had assumed command. It was something that obviously came naturally to him. Hugues wanted to know exactly what wounds the body had sustained, in what state the room was, if there were the remains of a fire, if there was a smell of sulphur and above all, if the material into which the heart had been transformed were really iron or something else.
As a whole, his questions revealed that Hugues was something of an expert on the subject of murder. He admitted to having gained experience in such things during his sojourn at the templar House in the Kingdom of Aragon, but it did not extend to alchemy. His ideas on alchemical processes were outlandish and confused, and Mondino, who had in fact studied the texts of Arnaldo da Villanova, Raimondo Lullo and above all, those of Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon, explained to him that the alchemical transformation carried out in that sordid inn behind Santo Stefano had nothing canonical about it at all. There had simply not been enough time to go through the four operations and three phases of transmutation, which could take weeks or even months.
‘The alchemist is not a magician, as the common man would believe,’ he went on, taking a walnut and placing it on one of the little concave slabs of marble. ‘To obtain a result of this kind, you don’t just need to light a fire, recite some magic words and click your fingers.’
‘So how do you explain what you saw?’ asked Hugues de Narbonne.
Mondino cracked the nut with the second piece of marble, crushing the shell. ‘I don’t know how to explain it. I only know what cannot have happened.’
‘I too have thought long and hard about it,’ intervened Gerardo. ‘Could it be that the murderer made his victims drink a substance, something that set off the transformation from the inside, and only after that, opened the thorax and displayed his work of art to the world?’
The Frenchman’s eyes lit up at the question, revealing an interest that according to Mondino went well beyond the desire to obtain justice for his order and for the poor victims. ‘I have never heard mention of a poison of that sort,’ replied Mondino. ‘But perhaps it’s not a poison ...’
They both looked at him, waiting for him to continue. He took his time, separating the flesh of the nut from the pieces of shell and eating, before he replied. ‘If you believe that it’s a question of some other alchemical preparation,’ he said, finally, addressing the Frenchman, ‘I cannot prove you are wrong. But I’ve never heard of any preparation capable of such a thing. Besides there are other knotty points.’ ‘What are they?’
Mondino drank a gulp of wine and the others did the same. ‘How is it possible that a man drinks a poison and that the poison, instead of passing down the throat to end up in the stomach, goes straight to the heart? How did it get there?
How is it possible that it left no trace of its passage through the rest of the body? And most of all, if the victim was first stunned and then stabbed with an awl, as the bruising on the nape and the hole in the chest of both bodies would suggest, how did the liquid make its way around the body? When the vital processes cease, the whole pumping system that is triggered by the heart stops functioning.’
‘And what are the answers to those questions?’ asked Gerardo.
Mondino saw an expectant light in his eye and was sorry to have to disappoint him. ‘I have no answers,’ he admitted, morosely. ‘Only questions.’
‘You have spoken of both corpses,’ said Hugues de Narbonne, fixing him with penetrating grey eyes. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before that you had seen the other one too?’
Mondino realised that he had said too much, distracted by his scientific interest in the subject. But the threatening undercurrent of Hugues’ words induced him to defend himself by attacking.
‘Messer, I do not know you and I am under no obligation to tell you anything,’ he said. ‘Perhaps Gerardo owes you obedience, I do not.’
The Frenchman let fall any pretence of friendliness. He rose in a flash and took hold of Mondino round the neck, lifting him and pushing him against the wall.
‘Messer, perhaps resolving these cases of murder only represents an intellectual curiosity for you,’ Hugues said through clenched teeth. ‘For me it is very different.’
Mondino grabbed his wrists to free himself, but it was Gerardo’s intervention that brought the situation back to normal.
‘Commander, please,’ he said, in a decisive tone. ‘Let him go, or I will have to defend him.’
Hugues de Narbonne turned to stare at Gerardo, stunned by such insubordination. Then he changed tack. ‘Very well,’ he said, in his low and throaty voice, relaxing his grip around the physician’s neck. ‘Excuse my vehemence, Messer Mondino. The fact is that if the King of France succeeds in his intention of suppressing my order, a large part of the templars will be condemned to mere purgationes, or at the most a few years in prison. But those occupying positions of greater responsibility, like myself, will end up at the stake. Or if they do manage to escape, will spend the rest of their lives in hiding, living in poverty, without ever drawing attention to themselves. Surely you must understand why I will do everything in my power to avoid that happening.’
‘What I understand, Messer,’ replied Mondino, overheated and breathing heavily, ‘Is that I do not like you and that I disapprove of Gerardo’s decision to reveal what he knew about those deaths.’
‘Please control yourselves,’ Gerardo intervened, standing between them and opening wide his arms to separate them. Then, addressing Hugues, he said, ‘It’s my fault that the magister finds himself involved in all this. Please don’t ask more of us than we can give you, Commander, but know that we will not hide anything important from you.’
Hugues de Narbonne nodded and took a step back, as though nothing whatever had happened. Mondino felt his heart thumping hard, but did his best to appear impassive. He said that he would have to leave them, as it was time for him to go back to his family for dinner. In the end the Frenchman had given him the perfect pretext to extricate himself from the discussion.
Gerardo looked at him with a maddened expression. ‘I have just said that we will not hide anything important from the Commander,’ he said. ‘Please would you show him the map you were talking about, Master.’
Mondino gave him a harsh piercing look, but the damage had been done. Gerardo had obviously decided to share everything he knew with Hugues de Narbonne, and at that point to pull out the map would add nothing to the problems they already had. Perhaps the Frenchman could even tell them something useful about it.
Letting out a sigh of resignation, Mondino slipped his hand beneath his tunic. ‘I found a map in a secret pocket sewn into Wilhelm von Trier’s breeches,’ he explained, extracting the roll of parchment. ‘I do not know what it represents nor if it bears any connection to his death, although I am inclined to think so, given that this was in the same pocket.’
With a rapid gesture he opened his palm and showed them the fleshless finger that he had found with the map. The two templars looked at him in amazement and Mondino quickly put it away before Hugues could manage to take it from him.
‘You saw it quite well,’ he said. ‘The veins of the finger have been turned into iron, just like the hearts of the two dead men. The finger does not belong to Wilhelm von Trier, and I don’t know where it comes from.’
‘Mast
er, but this means ...’ said Gerardo, without finishing his sentence.
‘What?’ asked Mondino. ‘That our man was drawn into a trap? maybe. That was exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘Let’s look at the map,’ interrupted Hugues.
Mondino moved the pitcher of wine and the bowl of walnuts away and brought the light closer before he rolled out the parchment on the table. It was a small sheet of the best quality vellum, soft and devoid of stains, made from the inside of the animal’s skin. The drawings had been executed with great care, first with lead point and then shaded with pigments of three colours: white for the roads, red for the mountains and black for the fields and woods. In the two top corners were the sun and moon. In the bottom corners were a green and a red lion looking upwards. Between the two lions there was a red circle beneath which were the Arabic characters الحمراء written in copper salts ink that had taken on a greenish tone as it had faded. In the same ink other groups of words were written in smaller letters, filling up almost all the blank spaces on the map. At the top in the centre, between the pictures of the sun and moon, there was another little red circle, with no clarification. The route indicated by the map united the two points, crossing through the woods and over the mountains. Mondino had studied it in every particular, but not knowing what it referred to and not understanding Arabic, he had made no sense of it at all.
‘Does it mean anything to you?’ he asked Hugues. The Frenchman examined the map attentively. Then he said, ‘Nothing. Other than that it describes a place in spain.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Gerardo, surprised.
‘Under the circle at the bottom there’s the word al-hamrã, or Alhambra, as the spanish say. It means “the red one”, and indicates the fortress in the city of Gharnata, in the south of spain. It’s a moorish stronghold. It must be the starting point of the journey.’
‘Since you understand Arabic,’ said Mondino, ‘Can you tell us what the other words mean?’
‘They seem to be verses written for a marriage,’ replied Hugues de Narbonne, without looking at the map. ‘They praise the spouses, but they don’t make much sense and it looks as though there are some stanzas missing. Perhaps they were only written to fill the empty spaces.’
Mondino knew about the habit of the Bolognese notaries of copying down verses in the margins of acts and documents, to prevent unauthorised persons adding false riders. Perhaps the Arabs did the same thing.
‘It’s possible,’ he said, crisply, as he rolled up the parchment.
‘In any case, if the dead templar had taken such trouble to hide it and kept it with the finger that I showed you, knowing more about the map could prove useful to us.’
Hugues took a swig from his tin cup and dashed it on to the table with an abrupt gesture, making the lamp’s flame waver.
‘We’re wasting time,’ he said, his hand still on the cup. ‘We have got to get to the murderer before the Inquisition does. And we don’t need a map crammed with abstruse symbols to do that. We need to know whom the two men met when they arrived in Bologna. We must split up and discreetly interrogate anyone who saw them, beginning with the places where they lodged and working outwards from there. Obviously, first, Gerardo, you must tell us everything that Angelo da Piczano said and did while he was in your company.’
Hugues had again assumed the role of commander and was independently deciding their plan of action. With his coarse voice, grey eyes and imposing physique, he had a natural charisma that checked any desire to challenge him.
However, Mondino drew himself up and confronted de Narbonne.
‘I don’t agree, Messer. As I’ve already make quite clear, I do not owe obedience to you and I will follow my own trail, while you and Gerardo look into the meetings and movements of your two dead confrères.’
Hugues turned puce in the face, as though he had been slapped. He obviously wasn’t used to hearing his decisions disputed. He looked at Mondino in silence, holding the empty cup firmly in his large hand covered with blond hair.
The physician met his gaze and, in the end, the Frenchman asked through gritted teeth, ‘What would your idea be?’
‘The secret of how to turn human blood into iron cannot be known to many. I myself, even though I studied alchemy during my medical training, have never heard of it. I am making inquiries among the city’s alchemists, asking them for information about who might know a secret of that sort. Finding that person would almost certainly mean finding the murderer.’
Hugues gratified him with a contemptuous smile. ‘Making inquiries among the alchemists is the first thing that the Inquisition would think of doing. To follow in their footsteps is a mistake. This is a race in which we cannot afford to arrive second.’
Gerardo, while not losing his adoring attitude towards the Frenchman, intervened in defence of Mondino. ‘Forgive me, Commander, but it’s likely that the alchemists said as little as possible to the Inquisitor friar. While it is possible that they would speak freely to a lay physician, who after all knows the subject as well as or better than they do.’
Hugues reflected a second before speaking and then he nodded his great curly head. ‘Very well, we’ll split up. We’ll talk to ordinary people, you to the alchemists. And we will keep each other informed of the results.’
Put in that way, Mondino’s role seemed once again to have been narbonne’s decision. But the physician decided to let it drop. After all, it was true that rooting out the murderer of the templars was in the interests of all three of them, and given that Hugues was now part of the group, to collaborate was the wisest thing he could do.
‘Very well. Now we’d better leave. I don’t want that poor banker to have an outflow of bile.’
All three of them rose. Hugues de Narbonne left the coins he had thrown on the table lying there and walked out of the office. Remigio did not turn up to say goodbye and they left without anyone seeing them out.
As soon as they were in the street, Mondino said, ‘Now I must leave you. I will expect news through Gerardo.’
Having made it clear that he would prefer not to see Hugues de Narbonne again unless it was absolutely necessary, he turned and walked briskly away beneath the arches.
VI
Remigio Sensi stepped back from the two small holes in the painting of St matthew that had allowed him to see and hear what had gone on in his office, and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his tunic.
He often made use of the hideaway to watch the behaviour of clients whom he did not trust. He would find an excuse to leave them alone for a moment and retire to the little hidden cubbyhole, cut into wall behind the painting. If his clients nosed around among his papers, appeared too happy or too afraid, went up to the safe or even (as sometimes happened when there were more than one of them) spoke in low voices of their fraudulent intentions, when Remigio returned to the studio he found an amiable but firm pretext not to conclude their business. In that way he avoided putting anyone’s honesty in doubt.
Now, however, it was not a question of a loan or a deed of sale, but of something much more serious. What he had overheard required immediate measures to be taken.
He left the hideaway, beckoned to one of the servants at the door and sent him to deliver a message. Not long afterwards, a gaudily dressed young man entered Remigio’s office. He wore a yellow surcoat and red breeches bordered in orange; his shoulder-length dark-brown hair was partially hidden beneath a brown cap embroidered in gold.
‘I was about to sit down to eat when I received your message,’ he said, by way of a greeting, taking a chair opposite Remigio without waiting to be asked. ‘I hope you called with such urgency because you have good news for me.’
‘Indeed I have,’ replied Remigio, looking him straight in the eye. ‘I want to propose the total cancellation of your debt. You will owe me noth
ing and your father will never know what trouble you have got yourself into through playing dice.’
The young man regarded the banker for a long time without showing any enthusiasm. Then he asked, ‘What do you want in return?’
Remigio explained. His guest listened intently and at the end he said, ‘Are you absolutely sure that it’s as simple as that?’
‘The place and time have to be chosen carefully, that’s all,’ replied Remigio. ‘I shall decide when the time’s right and send you word.’
‘And afterwards I won’t owe you anything.’
‘We’ll tear up the promissory note together, you have my word.’
‘It’s a done deal, then,’ said the young man, rising with an agile movement that revealed his familiarity with physical training. ‘I’ll await your instructions.’
He left the room with a jaunty step and when the servant had closed the door, Remigio smiled to himself. Soon he would have eliminated a potential problem in his life and at the same time he would finally have his revenge.
*
Mondino had taken a gig to Porta lame and then got out and continued on foot as far as Bova, where the Moline and Cavadizzo canals converged with that of navile. There he asked directions from some farm workers and left the main road heading towards the right, across two fields where the wheat was still short and green. The city was beginning to spread beyond its gates, but there were still only a few houses around there, separated by vines and cultivated land.
The little grain plants had a feeble air to them because the recent rains had drenched the earth so. Another long period of bad weather would seriously damage the crops. Mondino was tired and had sore feet. He had decided to leave the gig and continue on foot so as not to stand out too much, but he was beginning to regret it.
At last he saw a modest house, one storey high with a thatched roof. For the moment, the laws to prevent fires were only valid within the city walls; but soon, with the advance of the houses and the retreat of the fields, even the sorceress would have to put on a tiled roof.
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