Pasquale's Angel

by Paul J McAuley

  Dr Pretorious said sweetly, ‘We are both seekers after power. That is why we are so alike, you and I.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Niccolò countered. ‘It is true that we both seek power, but by different roads, and for different ends. You wish only to serve yourself and none other, and so avoid falling into Hell—for beside such as you, the damned would seem pure.’

  ‘Spare me the analysis. You have asked two questions. Ask me the third and be done with it.’

  ‘No. No, I don’t believe I will. I have learned enough for now.’ Niccolò rose, and for a moment Dr Pretorious looked up at him with astonishment. ‘Come, Pasquale,’ Niccolò said. ‘We have much work to do, this night.’

  Dr Pretorious said, ‘No! Wait! You have one more question to ask me.’

  ‘Perhaps some other time.’

  Dr Pretorious swept the table clear of beakers and sprang to his feet. Behind him, the Savage also stood, his head brushing the ceiling. ‘No!’ Dr Pretorious shouted. ‘You will not keep any hold over me after this, I swear it! It is done!’

  ‘I have no more questions for now,’ Niccolò said mildly, and took up his stick. ‘Come, Pasquale.’

  Pasquale dared look back only after they had crossed the bridge over the little stream. No one seemed to be following.

  Niccolò said, ‘Don’t worry. In his own way, Dr Pretorious is a man of his word, and while he still owes me the favour of an answer he will not harm us.’

  ‘What favour could you possibly do a man like that?’

  ‘I once showed that he could not have done what he was accused of having done. I thought that I was acting on the side of justice, for if the wrong man had been hanged then the real criminal would have remained free to continue his dreadful work. Those were terrible times, and I had to act without foresight. If I had known that the real killer would have evaded justice after all, then perhaps I would not have helped Pretorious. There are many things he has done for which he deserves death. But in hindsight it is easy to judge your actions, less so in the heat of the moment. You still look troubled, Pasquale.’

  ‘I was wondering what new artificer’s device he was alluding to, that he said would greatly impoverish all artists.’

  ‘You must remember that Dr Pretorious seeks to gain power over everyone he meets, Pasquale. It was probably no more than a snare set to catch your attention. Dismiss it from your thoughts.’

  Niccolò seemed troubled and exhausted, and they walked on a way, through dark narrow courts and passages, with Niccolò’s stick tapping in the darkness, before Pasquale asked him what he had learned.

  ‘That this is not as great a matter as it might be. If Raphael is not involved, then in all likelihood Giulio Romano and Giovanni Francesco were not acting for him, or acting to protect him, but were acting for themselves. The little flying device you keep safe, and the picture you rescued from the fireplace, undoubtedly have something to do with the matter, but I do not think they are ends in themselves.’

  Pasquale remembered, with a guilty shock, that he had left both the picture and the device on Niccolò’s writing-table, but thought it best to keep quiet about this lapse. ‘Is Giustiniani really a magician? Dr Pretorious seems to believe no one is, save himself.’

  ‘It is true that men of that kind delude themselves into thinking only they have true powers, but that is precisely the point. Dr Pretorious is well placed to see through any trickery, none better, for he believes himself to be a true magus—the only true magus. In the end, men like him deceive no one but themselves.’

  ‘Artificers think they know everything, too.’

  ‘No, Pasquale. While they do believe that they have the means to unriddle locked mysteries of the universe, they share their knowledge because it is discovered by a common system. Men of Dr Pretorious’s kind hoard it, and each one believes that only he understands the operations crucial for the conjuration of power. There’s the difference.’

  Pasquale couldn’t help letting his disappointment show. Signora Giocondo’s florins lost so quickly. His best clothes ruined. He said, ‘Then this may not be important after all.’

  ‘We are starting from a lower rather than a higher place. We may yet climb far. Don’t worry, Pasquale. You’ll get your money.’

  So Niccolò saw through Pasquale, too. He saw through everyone it seemed, even (unlike Dr Pretorious) himself.

  They reached the main thoroughfare, and as they passed under the light of the first of the acetylene lamps Pasquale at last took his hand from his knife. Moments later, between the first lamp and the next, they were attacked.

  4

  Four men ran out of a passageway on the other side of the road, ran right at Pasquale and Niccolò before they realized that these were not revellers. In an instant, Pasquale was wrestled away from Niccolò. His assailant, breathing heavily and stinking of bad beer, locked an arm around his neck and Pasquale shoved backwards, unbalancing the man, and slamming him against a wall. Breath knocked out of him, the man loosened his grip for an instant, and Pasquale stamped on his instep and pulled free.

  Then it was knife against knife. The man, a burly bully-boy, grinned when Pasquale drew his blade. He tossed his own from one hand to the other with a streetfighter’s ease and taunted Pasquale in a slurred voice, telling him to come on, come and get it, come and get fucked good. They warily circled each other before the man suddenly leapt forward. Pasquale dodged a slashing blow which might otherwise have unseamed his guts, and caught the man’s knife arm with a lucky swipe. The man squealed like a stuck pig and dropped his weapon. Pasquale kicked it away and the drunken fool grinned and ran at him, and Pasquale sank his knife to the hilt in the other’s guts. The man gasped and sagged, clutching Pasquale’s shoulder with one hand and pawing at his wound with the other. The haft of the knife twisted from Pasquale’s grasp and the man fell to his knees, swearing that Pasquale had killed him.

  Niccolò had already disabled one ruffian with a blow of his stick; the man curled in the road, sobbing and holding his smashed knee. Niccolò threw the stick at the second and gained enough time to draw his pistol, but the third stepped up behind him and sapped his arm. The second man grabbed the pistol and turned towards Pasquale.

  For a moment it seemed that all was lost, but then someone growled and ran out of the darkness, brushing Pasquale aside. It was the giant Savage, Dr Pretorious’s servant. He smashed into the ruffian who brandished Niccolò’s pistol, swung him into the air by neck and hip, and threw him against his companion.

  For a moment everyone froze, like actors at the end of a tableau. Then the two fallen men picked themselves up and ran down the street, shouting. The man with the smashed knee looked whitely at Dr Pretorious’s servant and picked himself up and hobbled after his companions, gasping with pain.

  ‘My thanks,’ Niccolò said. He was out of breath. So was Pasquale, whose heart was banging against his ribs.

  The Savage fixed Niccolò with a stare and said in a low voice, ‘My master says that the debt must be discharged.’ And then he ran into the shadows and was gone, moving with incredible lightness for so big a man.

  Pasquale said admiringly, ‘He showed no fear at all.’

  ‘He believes himself dead,’ Niccolò said. ‘Dr Pretorious once told me that the magi of his godforsaken island, when they wish to enslave a man, make from the liver of a certain fish a potion which renders a man so insensible that he is taken for dead by his family, and is duly buried. The magus then digs up the supposed corpse and revives him, and so gains an obedient servant who is without fear. A potion sewn into a pouch is slung at the servant’s neck, to mark him as the property of the magus. Such a one is Pretorious’s servant, although how he came by him, Pretorious did not say.’

  The brute wounded by Pasquale’s knife started to whimper. He was curled up on the ground, both hands pressed to his belly. Niccolò grasped the man’s hair and wrenched his head up and asked him who had paid him, but the man only sobbed that he was killed.

  �
�What shall we do with this fool?’ Pasquale asked. He had wounded someone before, but that had only been a trifling scratch in a sudden quick drunken fight over something both he and his opponent had forgotten about in the instant of blood-letting. He knew now that he could, if he willed it, fight to the death. He had it in him. It was both exciting and disturbing. It made his blood sing.

  Niccolò said, ‘We’ll find the militia.’

  ‘We should leave him to die.’

  ‘That’s hardly Christian charity. Besides,’ Niccolò said with a smile, ‘he may then wish to tell us about himself. Such as who sent him—’

  Pasquale stooped and grasped the brute’s ears, shook his head from side to side. The man groaned.

  ‘Who sent you! Was it Giustiniani?’

  The brute said in a slurred voice, ‘You’ve killed me, you motherfucking bastard.’

  Pasquale tried the question again, but the man would only groan and cry. Niccolò said, ‘He will talk, if not now, then later.’ Then he lifted his head and said, ‘Hush. Someone comes.’

  They came from the direction in which the other assailants had fled, half a dozen men in carnival motley, masked as griffins and dragons and unicorns. They were led by a giant—no, it was a man on stilts, stamping along with quick adroitness. He wore a white mask which covered his entire face, with triangular eyeholes rimmed in black. He pointed at Pasquale and Niccolò, and began to whirl a slingshot around his head. His troops surged forward with a yell. Pasquale and Niccolò fled just as the first slingshot load whistled past their heads.

  It was a glass globe which shattered on the paving-stones, spraying liquid. A fog whirled up, thick and orange. Pasquale and Niccolò plunged through the vapour, choking on a vile thick scent like rotting geraniums. The ruffians gave chase, yelling loudly. One blew a tinny toy trumpet. Niccolò was labouring, leaning heavily on his stick, and Pasquale dragged him along by main force.

  Then they reached the Piazza del Duomo and were suddenly amongst crowds. The congregation of the mass celebrated by the Pope, and supporters of the Medici, and revellers who had joined the party for the fun of it. Pasquale pulled Niccolò through the noisy people, glancing back and seeing the stilt-man looming above the crowd’s swirling heads, his white masked face looking this way and that. For the moment they were safe, but Pasquale felt suddenly more exposed than he had when being chased, and imagined a masked assassin whirling towards them out of the festive crowd at every turn.

  The cathedral reared above the heads of the crowd, its great gold-skinned cupola shining in focused lamplight, its marble walls shrouded by cloths on which, by artificer sleight of hand, transparent scenes trembled and shook. The tower of the campanile was lit too, and its Apostolica bell solemnly tolled the hour of ten.

  Pasquale supported Niccolò, and they made slow progress through the noisy crowd. ‘Who are they?’ Pasquale said, and realized that he was almost as breathless as Niccolò.

  ‘I would guess that they are Giustiniani’s. If Dr Pretorious knew of our involvement, then so surely must Giustiniani. The devil is after us for what we know, or what he thinks we know.’

  ‘We have that picture.’

  ‘Which he thinks he destroyed. More likely he knows us as witnesses to the murder of Giovanni Francesco.’

  ‘Or as his accomplices.’

  ‘Very good, Pasquale!’

  ‘Well, they will know us for certain now, because I left my knife behind, and it has my name on its blade. At least I have lost sight of the stilt-man.’

  ‘We have a long way to go this night,’ Niccolò said. ‘Confound this crowd. The fools should all be abed.’

  ‘A poor thing to say for those who have unwittingly hid us. I would have all the citizens of Florence awake all night, until we are saved.’

  ‘It will take more than one night,’ Niccolò said grimly.

  ‘Then I’ll stay with you. I’m marked now anyway. Though I would like to know where we are going.’

  ‘Whatever the reason, I am glad of your support, Pasquale. The devil take this crowd! Where we are going, if it is at all possible, is to the Palazzo della Signoria, because that is where Raphael will be dining this night, with the Pope and the first citizens of Florence. We must warn him of what has happened.’

  The Piazza della Signoria was scarcely less crowded. The people had taken the long platform in front of the Palazzo on which the Pope had been received, and were carousing like Moorish pirates celebrating the capture of a fat merchant vessel. Bands of university students roamed to and fro, roaring the songs of their nations. There was a clash between the Prussian and French nations around the Great Engineer’s cosmic engine. The latter seemed to want to tear at the engine which commemorated the great truth discovered by Canon Koppernigk, while the Prussians were defending the honour of their national hero. ‘Still it moves,’ they shouted, taunting the French. Beyond this, dancers danced in a circle around Michelangelo’s statue of David. The statue’s gilded hair flickered with reflections of the torches they juggled.

  Artificers were celebrating, too. Figures of light rotated over the wall that Pasquale and Rosso had so carefully prepared—was it only yesterday? The artificer, Benozzo Berni, was tending his light-cannon, and greeted Pasquale cheerfully. The big acetylene lamps of his device hissed and roared, their light concentrated through slits on to revolving wheels of painted horn, and big lenses of thick bubbled glass threw the changing patterns vastly magnified on to the painted wall. Light splinteringly refracted from the edges of the lenses threw Berni’s shadow a long way across the paving-stones as he came over to Pasquale and Niccolò. The artificer had taken off his many-pocketed tunic and was sweating into his hemp undershirt from the heat of his great lamps. Grinning like a madman, he clapped Pasquale on the back and whirled him around to face the show of lights with a grand expansive gesture.

  ‘Now you see!’ he shouted exultantly. ‘Moving light making its own picture. What do you think of that, painter?’

  ‘Perhaps I am not sophisticated enough, signor, but I see no pictures, only the kinds of patterns a candle-flame may make against a wall.’

  ‘That’s the point! The light patterns act on the eye itself, and deceive it into making pictures. This is a new way of thinking, you see! The marvel of it is that the machine operates upon you.’

  ‘It is certainly a marvel, but perhaps machine thoughts are too difficult for me to understand.’ Perhaps Piero di Cosimo might appreciate this light-show, Pasquale thought, but it seemed a costly way of reproducing the random patterns found everywhere in nature.

  Berni laughed. ‘Have it your own way for now, but you’ll come around. We stand at the threshold of a new age. The curtain is hardly raised, and we glimpse only the first flickers of what is beyond, and these are so bright that we can scarcely believe our eyes. But soon we will have to deal with these visions. Machines force new ways of making things, of doing things, and now seeing things. The progression is inevitable.’

  ‘It seems there is no room for the artist,’ Pasquale said. To his tired mind, Berni seemed a kind of devil, full of restless energy, celebrating change for change’s sake.

  Berni dashed sweat from his brow with a scorched red rag. ‘The age of representative art is past. There will be new kinds of artists, painting directly with light, producing fleeting images that linger in the screen of the eye. My kinetoscope draws patterns which the eye seeks to interpret, and then there is the marvel of the Great Engineer’s moving pictures as produced by his ipseorama! And tonight he will capture the true likeness of the Pope in light itself. Surely you must agree that the age of interpretation and laborious symbolism is past!’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Pasquale began, ‘I know nothing of these moving pictures—’

  Niccolò had sat on an upturned crate to rest. Now he struggled to his feet and said, ‘I don’t know you, signor, but I hope you will not mind if I ask a question.’

  ‘But I know Niccolò Machiavegli!’ Berni sketched a bow. ‘Pe
rhaps your broadsheet might wish to report the new miracles first demonstrated here.’

  ‘Perhaps. That isn’t for me to say. What I would ask, Signor…’

  ‘Benozzo Berni, at your service!’

  ‘Signor Berni, I would ask you if any soldiers have lately entered the Palazzo.’

  ‘Why, no. None, since the great procession made its way from the Duomo to the Palazzo for the feast. That’s still going on, and I will run my engine until it is over—which means until well past midnight, for I hear more than twenty courses are to be served.’

  ‘Then we may not be too late, Pasquale.’ Niccolò smiled vaguely at Berni. ‘I’m sorry, signor. Perhaps we will discuss your marvel another time.’

  ‘You are witnessing the dawn of a new age, Signor Machiavegli! Just remember that!’

  As they crossed the square, taking a long route to avoid the rowdy students, Pasquale said, ‘What are you expecting to happen?’

  ‘I’m not sure, only that something will. Wait, look! Perhaps we are too late!’

  Niccolò pointed up at the Palazzo. It loomed at the eastern corner of the square like a ship. Every window in its bulk was ablaze, even in its square high tower, and flags bearing the Medici emblem of twelve gold balls flew amongst Republican banners showing the Florentine lily. Someone had flung wide a window under the overhang of the castellated top floor and was shouting to a group of soldiers below.

  More figures appeared at the window. Two men struggling with a third, who suddenly tipped over the sill. People shouted in the square below. The man plummeted, jerked, swung, kicking and kicking at the end of a cord.

  Soldiers were jogging smartly around the corner of the Palazzo towards the main entrance. A bell rang out with a quick urgent jangle. Pasquale and Niccolò chased after the soldiers as best they could. City militia in red and white hose, polished breastplates over white tunics, steel caps on their heads, were trying to block the high narrow door of the Palazzo with their pikes, but with little success; Pasquale and Niccolò were not the only ones who wanted to know what was happening. They pushed in with dozens of others, into the cold echoing cortile.