by Dave Duncan
Zancani pulled a face. “He doesn’t look it. But let us make sure we know where he is when Their Excellencies want him. Sergeant, arrest sier Alfeo.”
“Bah! That is absurd!” the Maestro said. “Missier Grande, you know what work I am engaged in, or at least for whom I am working. You know why your vizio was sent here last night—to protect Alfeo. Now you will let him be dragged off to share a lockup with drunks and thugs? Who defends him there?”
Missier Grande looked thoughtfully at Vasco, who flinched. Yes, truly, his happiness was quite cast down. If he were sent to the local dungeon with me in order to continue guarding me, he would be in considerable danger from the other inhabitants.
“I should welcome his company,” I said, “but Sergeant Torre may resent the damage to the reputation of his establishment.”
“I shall put Zeno under house arrest,” Missier Grande said, “and leave—”
“Absurd!” the Maestro repeated furiously. “Enough of this nonsense.” He grabbed his staff from me and elbowed me aside. “Come and sit down, clarissimo, and you also, Father. Alfeo, bring a chair for Missier Grande, and you, Sergeant, kindly send one of your men to fetch Giorgio, my gondolier.”
The invitation to be seated obviously excluded Vasco and Torre, so I brought one more chair to the fireplace and then stationed myself behind the Maestro. Zancani, Quazza, and the priest sat opposite us, seeming wary, inscrutable, and mildly amused respectively.
“Now, Alfeo,” the Maestro said without trying to look around at me. “Why were you talking such rubbish just now?”
“Rubbish, master?” Mainly I had been trying to muddy the waters and pin Vasco down so he could not change his evidence to suit the case he wanted to make.
“You know what I mean! What did you really learn from looking at the body?”
“I may have been a little hasty in jumping to conclusions,” I admitted. “Now I realize that I see no gory footsteps on our floor here, so the watergate loggia is not drenched in a mixture of rain and blood, as it would be if Danese bled to death there. So he could not have been murdered downstairs. He died somewhere else and was brought here later. In fact, he was almost certainly dead before the vizio claims he arrived at Ca’ Barbolano.”
“With your rapier in him?” Vasco demanded.
“That is a curious detail, isn’t it?” In fact that detail was almost driving me crazy. Fortunately I do know something about ghouls, so I could blame Algol, even if I had no hope of convincing a court. “Dolfin died facedown, but he could not have been run through from behind and fallen forward, as one would expect of a man stabbed in the upper back. Does the point of that sword show damage, Filiberto?”
Vasco looked and said, “It’s blunted,” with a poor grace.
“A good lunge with a rapier will go right through a skull,” I continued. “A lung would offer almost no resistance, nor would a rib, and yet the sword did not break, so Danese did not fall with it sticking out of his chest. Yet it must have protruded from his breast because that was where his ruptured aorta hemorrhaged most. The wound in his right leg also came from behind, and we must explain the separate bloodstains on the back of his neck, where the ruff has been crushed. There is no mud on his dorsal side, as there is on the ventral.”
“And your conclusion?” the Maestro asked impatiently.
My conclusion was what I had seen in the fire and had described to him at the time. “Danese was in a fight, master. The murderer wrestled his sword away from him and stabbed him with it.”
“You base that assumption on the fact that his right thumb is broken?”
I had missed that. “Of course, and his wrist shows damage also. These things may have happened when he fell, but more likely when the killer wrenched the sword out of his grip. The leg wound must have come next, when he was trying to run away. He would have fallen. Having disabled him, his assailant then callously stabbed him in the back as he was trying to rise. Danese probably still tried to get up, and the murderer put a bloody shoe on the back of his neck to hold him down while he bled to death.”
Even Missier Grande winced at that image. Father Farsetti covered his face with his hands. My sympathy was quite genuine. It had been a fairly quick death, but not a pleasant one, if there can ever be such a thing.
“After he died,” I said, “the rapier was pushed all the way through him, perhaps just to make him easier to move. The killer brought him here. Thanks to the vizio’s acute observation we know now that the point did hit something hard, so we must look for a place with hard footing—brick or stone—and extensive bloodstains.”
“Thank you,” the Maestro said. “Now you are making sense.” He looked around to where our gondolier was waiting. “Ah, Giorgio. Last night, what time was it when Alfeo told you that he and I were not to be disturbed?”
Giorgio looked thunderous at having been fetched by a sbirro—such a thing never happened to respectable citizens—but he took a moment to think, “It must have been a little after eight o’clock, Doctor. We were putting the children to bed.”
“And what happened then?”
“Sier Danese Dolfin came and asked to see sier Alfeo.”
For a moment we were all silent, as we digested this information. Vasco scowled.
The Maestro nodded, as if he had expected something like that. “When?”
“About half past eight, roughly.”
“Go on.”
“I explained that you and he were not to be disturbed. He said the matter was urgent and he would wait.”
“How did he seem?”
“He seemed distressed, Doctor, agitated.” Giorgio himself was starting to look distressed, and also apologetic. “He did not say why he was worried, or what he wanted. But he was very jumpy. He had stayed here as—”
“As a guest, yes. So you let him wait in the salone unattended?”
Giorgio nodded glumly. “I was helping Mama…I heard the front door close. He had gone. I ran to the stair and saw him going down. I did watch him leave the building.”
“Did you get a good look at him?” the Maestro persisted.
Giorgio shook his head. “Mostly just his shadow, lustrissimo.”
There are times when one has to throw in one’s cards and hope that the next deal will work better. “I apologize, Vizio. You were not the only one who could have stolen my sword last night.”
The Maestro was ahead of me, of course. “Where is it?” he asked.
Danese had come to reclaim his own sword, which I had forgotten to return to him with his portmanteau. Either he had snooped around Ca’ Barbolano at some time during his stay here or—more likely—he had taken the risk of searching my room for it while Giorgio was bedding his brood. The top of a wardrobe is not an unlikely place to keep weapons when there are small children around. He had found mine and taken it. Had he also taken the matching dagger? Probably not, because he had been disarmed in a hand-to-hand tussle; with a dagger he could have stabbed his opponent when they closed. Men who sport swords should know how to use them, and he had not. In a real fight, as opposed to a formal duel, a rapier needs a parrying partner, either a dagger or another rapier.
A sbirro moved out of my way. I walked around our seated audience and headed to the medicine supply cupboard, taking my time while I worked out the least incriminating way of explaining why we had what I was about to produce. To confess that I had crossed swords with Danese on the Riva del Vin less than a week ago would not clear me of suspicion—far from it.
Danese’s rapier had no fancy inscription on the guard, just his initials. I handed it to Signore di Notte Zancani.
“Yesterday my master instructed me to pack the clothes Dolfin had left here and deliver them to him at Ca’ Sanudo. In doing so, I forgot to include his sword.”
That was entirely true, but as an explanation it was lame, practically paraplegic. How had the aforementioned sword found its way into the medicine cupboard? NH Zancani’s eyes narrowed like air slits in a dungeon. He go
t as far as, “And just how did—” when we were interrupted and the case was removed from his jurisdiction.
18
Sier Ottone Gritti is a short and portly man who has seen many winters. The years have softened his features, weathered his face to a sienna red, faded his eyes to a milky blue, and frosted his close-trimmed beard; wisps of silver show under the edge of his flat bonnet. Stooped and flatfooted, he looks like an archetypical grandfather. Although he is rarely seen without a sleepy, benevolent smile, his nose is a bony hook that a raven might admire. That is a warning. He wore, of course, the black robes of the patriciate, marked in his case by the dangling sleeves of a member of the Council of Ten. A couple of fanti followed him in.
The sight of an inquisitor at the door would rank high in most people’s list of Ten Worst Nightmares, especially if the inquisitor in question happened to be Ottone Gritti.
The three state inquisitors are not the three chiefs of the Ten. They are a permanent sub-committee of the Ten, always two of the elected members and one ducal counselor, two black robes and one red. Both positions carry a contumacia, meaning that a man must sit out one full term before being re-elected, but an easy way around that restriction is to alternate the two posts. I remember few times when Gritti was not one of the Three. As soon as his term in one office lapses, Gritti is elected to the other. Even that wriggle should leave him off the Council of Ten for four months in every twenty-four, but at least once I recall the Great Council enlarging the Ten with a zonta of fifteen and including him in it. It is as if the nobility cannot sleep well unless Gritti is keeping an eye on things for them, probably because he is reputed to be the most skilled and merciless interrogator in the Republic. The Council of Ten never reveals secrets about its methods or its members, of course, but rumors persist that Gritti is quite happy to sit on the rostrum in the torture chamber and direct the torment, a task most sane men shun. They say that he can break a stubborn witness faster than anyone else can—which is a sort of mercy, I suppose.
So far so good. Gritti is staunch in the defense of the Republic against her enemies and we all support him in that.
He has a darker side. Where Doge Pietro Moro is a profound skeptic concerning the supernatural, Gritti is a fervent believer, which is much worse. If I pulled a silver ducat out of a child’s ear, the doge would not believe I had pulled a silver ducat out of a child’s ear and might have me charged with fraud. Gritti would believe. He would call it black magic and me a witch. He is reputed to be more assiduous at torturing confessions out of suspected witches than even the King of Scotland is. Sometimes his colleagues manage to restrain him, but sometimes they do not, and in the present instance we had hints of demonic forces involved with an issue of national security. No one would try to hold Gritti back in that. The Maestro has repeatedly warned me that he is the most dangerous man in Venice.
The room had fallen silent.
“Well, well!” the newcomer murmured, beaming around. “I hear we have a problem here.” He acknowledged those present with nods: “Clarissimo?”—to Zancani—“Father? Doctor? Missier Grande? Vizio? Sergeant Torre, I trust your wife is on the mend now? And Alfeo Zeno, of course! Are you in trouble again, Alfeo?”
I bowed low. “It seemed so for a few moments, Your Excellency, but I believe the crisis is over.”
Vasco’s face said it had barely begun. Vasco will die happy if he can just see me hauled off to the galleys, but burning at the stake would be much nicer.
Without going close, Gritti frowned at the corpse in the corner. “Nostradamus, is this misfortune connected with the matter you were asked to investigate two nights ago?”
The Maestro said, “I am certain it is, messer.”
That was enough. A state inquisitor outranks just about anybody. In seconds, Father Farsetti had gone, Zancani had gone, taking Sergeant Torre and his sbirri, and Giorgio had been sent off to attend to his duties. Missier Grande was dismissed with a terse, “I know you are urgently needed elsewhere, lustrissimo.” The two fanti were last to leave, ordered to guard the door.
Gritti settled himself on one of the green chairs, while Vasco and I took up positions behind out respective superiors to sneer at each other over their heads. The bizarrely contorted remains of Danese Dolfin remained under a sheet in the corner.
The inquisitor folded his hands over his round little paunch, and said, “Proceed, Doctor.” After that he almost seemed to doze, eyes half-shut, as he listened to the story. Once in a while he would nod thoughtfully, or even smile. I suspect that at the end he could have recited the entire report word for word.
The Maestro recounted the events of the last week. He left out the size of his fee for finding Grazia and did not mention pyromancy or the Aegia Salomonis, but he did admit he had used clairvoyance. His celebrated uncle, Michel de Nostredame, made clairvoyance as respectable as astrology. Even Gritti would have trouble declaring that to be black magic. Fortune telling with tarot, on the other hand, remains a criminal offense.
I listened with half an ear while I worked out the tide of events in the Doges’ Palace after we had left. The Maestro’s VIRTÙ bombshell would have launched a frantic hour of deciphering. At the end of it, the chiefs must have known a lot more about Algol’s activities than previously, but they had not uncovered his identity. If they had, then Gritti would never have bothered to come to Ca’ Barbolano; a mere murder would be beneath his notice. Contrariwise, if Algol’s dispatches had turned out to be gossip and fraud, the case would have been closed presto. Therefore, by elimination, the chiefs had concluded that Algol had knowledgeable sources high in the government, perhaps even in the Council of Ten itself. Rather than reveal this new development to the spy, they had turned the case over to the Three. Overruling the chiefs’ decision to withdraw Vasco, the Three had sent the vizio back to Ca’ Barbolano. The fact that he had arrived not long after ten o’clock showed that La Serenissima can move fast when she wants to.
“Fascinating,” Gritti murmured at the end. He sat in silence for a while.
I realized I had stopped breathing, and started again.
“The doctor failed to mention,” Vasco said, “that his apprentice left the building clandestinely during the night.”
“He climbed out the window and jumped across the calle?” Gritti said. “He does that all the time. Whose lust is aroused by the danger, Zeno? Yours or the harlot’s?”
“Hers, Excellency,” I said. “Just the thought of her is all I need.”
He chuckled. “I don’t blame you. I’m jealous.”
Of course the Ten keep a dossier on me and Gritti knew my mistress’s name. My midnight excursion was no longer relevant as long as Gritti accepted that Danese had stolen my sword.
“Fascinating,” the inquisitor repeated. “I am familiar with the Sanudo story, of course. The tale has been the talk of the broglio for days—the Contarini betrothed who ran off with barnabotto trash.”
Vasco shook his head pityingly at the other barnabotto trash. I ignored him.
“Zuanbattista’s political career may never recover,” the inquisitor mused. “He is due to chair the Great Council tomorrow and so far he has not backed out. This murder may finish him, though. Now you say that Dolfin’s death is ‘certainly’ connected to the Algol espionage case. I do not see that as self-evident. Justify your allegation, Doctor.”
The Maestro put on his bewildered senility expression. “I am certain that it is correct, Your Excellency, but I am not yet in a position to back it up with evidence.”
Gritti smiled fondly, as at a stubborn child. “I do understand the difference between a proof and a working hypothesis.”
“Yet I must decline to reveal conjectures I cannot yet substantiate.”
Vasco raised two eyebrows; nobody defies the Three and gets away with it.
Gritti settled back in his chair and dropped the comedy mask in favor of the tragic. “Your work in breaking the Algol cipher was brilliant, Doctor, and the Republic will reward you
handsomely for it, but now you are implying that one of the most senior men in the government is a traitor and I demand to hear your reasons. I will not rush out and arrest people on mere suspicion. Let us hear it, Nostradamus.”
A grunt from the Maestro made my heart plunge. His stubbornness approaches suicidal insanity.
“I cannot accept these conditions,” he said. “I regretfully decline to work further on this case.”
“You think you can withhold evidence vital to the security of the state?”
“I specified that it is mere opinion, not evidence.”
I could not see the Maestro’s face, but his voice seemed amazingly calm. Gritti, opposite, was starting to show signs of annoyance. His already ruddy face was redder than ever.
“Alfeo, will you answer my question?”
I hope that my start of alarm concealed my simultaneous cold shiver. “I cannot, Your Excellency! I have no idea why my master believes the two crimes are connected. On the face of it, that would be a very strange coincidence.”
“No it wouldn’t,” Gritti said impatiently. “Dolfin is…was, I mean—a notorious lecher. The Ten opened a file on him when he was fifteen. Yesterday, you tell me, he was restored to the delights of his new bride’s bed after a week’s enforced celibacy. Yet instead he leaves Ca’ Sanudo and rushes back here to Ca’ Barbolano to consult the Maestro in an ‘agitated’ condition. Did he know of the Algol case?”
“I do not believe…” I said. “No, he couldn’t possibly. The Angelis never gossip about the Maestro’s affairs and even they know only that he went twice to the palace. The Marcianas downstairs jabber like starlings, but they knew nothing of importance. Danese…he saw the vizio here that morning and would have guessed that he had come on state business. Danese was clever.”
“Sly, you mean,” the inquisitor said with distaste. “So he went looking for his sword and found yours instead? That was enough, apparently. That was what he had come for. Any sword would do. So he ran off. Does it not make sense that he had stumbled on evidence of treason at Ca’ Sanudo and that was why he wanted his sword? Do you swear that this idea has not even occurred to you, Zeno?”