‘I think it will be best,’ Paola continued, ‘for you to leave Florence with them at the earliest opportunity. But you must rest first. You must gather your strength, for you have a long and arduous road ahead of you. Perhaps you’d like –’
‘You are kind, Paola,’ he interrupted her gently, ‘and you are right in what you suggest. But just now, I cannot stay.’
‘Why? Where are you going?’
During their conversation Ezio had been growing ever calmer, as all his racing thoughts came crashing together. At last he found himself able to shrug off his shock and his fear, for he had come to a decision and found a purpose, both of which he knew were irrevocable. ‘I am going to kill Uberto Alberti,’ he said.
Paola looked worried. ‘I understand your desire for vengeance, but the Gonfaloniere is a powerful man, and you’re not a natural killer, Ezio –’
Fate is making me one, he thought, but he said, as politely as he could, ‘Spare me the lecture,’ for he was bent on his mission.
Paola ignored him and completed her sentence: ‘– but I can make you one.’
Ezio fought down suspicion. ‘And why would you want to teach me how to kill?’
She shook her head, ‘In order to teach you how to survive.’
‘I’m not sure that I need any training from you.’
She smiled. ‘I know how you feel, but please allow me to hone the skills I am sure you have naturally. Think of my teaching as an extra weapon in your armoury.’
She started his training that very day, recruiting those girls who were off-duty, and trusted house-servants, to help her. In the high-walled garden behind the house she organized twenty of her people into five groups of four. They then started to mill around the garden, crisscrossing each other, talking and laughing, some of the girls casting bold looks on Ezio, and smiling. Ezio, who still carried his precious pouch at his side, was immune to their charms.
‘Now,’ Paola told him, ‘discretion is paramount in my profession. We must be able to walk the streets freely – seen, but unseen. You too must learn properly how to blend in like us, and become one with the city’s crowds.’ Ezio was about to protest but she held up her hand. ‘I know! Annetta tells me you do not acquit yourself badly, but you have more to learn than you know. I want you to pick a group and try to blend in with them. I don’t want to be able to pick you out. Remember what almost happened to you at the execution.’
These harsh words stung Ezio, but the task didn’t appear to him that difficult, provided he used his discretion. Still, under her unforgiving eye he found it harder than he’d expected. He would jostle clumsily against someone, or trip up, sometimes causing the girls or the male servants in his selected group to scatter from him, leaving him exposed. The garden was a pleasant place, sunlit and lush, and birds chirruped in the ornamental trees, but in Ezio’s mind it became a labyrinth of unfriendly city streets, a potential enemy in every passerby. And always he was nettled by Paola’s unremitting criticism. ‘Careful!’ she would say. ‘You can’t go charging in like that!’ ‘Show my girls some respect! Tread carefully when you’re near them!’ ‘How do you plan to blend in with people if you’re busy knocking them around?’ ‘Oh, Ezio! I expected better from you!’
But at last, on the third day, the biting comments grew fewer, and on the morning of the fourth he was able to pass right under Paola’s nose without her batting an eyelid. Indeed, after fifteen minutes without saying a word, Paola called out: ‘All right, Ezio, I give up! Where are you?’
Pleased with himself, he emerged from a group of girls, himself the very model of one of the young male house-servants. Paola smiled and clapped her hands, and the others joined in the applause.
But the work didn’t end there.
‘Now that you have learned to blend into a crowd,’ Paola told him on the morning of the following day, ‘I am going to show you how to use your new-found skill – in order to steal.’
Ezio baulked at this but Paola explained, ‘It is an essential survival skill which you may need on your journey. A man is nothing without money, and you may not always be in a position to earn it honestly. I know you would never take anything from anyone who could not afford to lose it, or from a friend. Think of it as a blade in a penknife, which you seldom use, though it’s good to know it’s there.’
Learning how to pick pockets was a lot harder. He would sidle up to a girl successfully enough, but as soon as his hand closed on the purse at her girdle, she would scream ‘Al ladro!’ and flee from him. When he first managed to draw some coins out successfully, he stayed where he was for a moment, triumphant, then felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. ‘Ti arresto!’ said the manservant who was playing the role of a city watchman, grinning; but Paola did not smile. ‘Once you’ve stolen from someone, Ezio,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t linger.’
He was learning faster now, though, and was beginning to appreciate the need to acquire the skills he was being taught as necessary for the successful accomplishment of his mission. Once he had successfully fleeced ten girls, the last five without even Paola noticing, she announced that the tutorial was at an end.
‘Back to work, girls,’ she said. ‘Playtime’s over.’
‘Do we have to?’ the girls murmured reluctantly as they took their leave of Ezio. ‘He’s so cute, so innocent…’ But Paola was adamant.
She walked with him alone in the garden. As always, he kept one hand on his pouch. ‘Now that you’ve learned how to approach the enemy,’ she said, ‘we need to find you a suitable weapon – something far more subtle than a sword.’
‘Well, but what would you have me use?’
‘Why, you already have the answer!’ And she produced the broken blade and bracer which Ezio had taken from his father’s strongbox, and which even now he believed to be safely stowed in his pouch. Shocked, he opened it and rummaged. They were indeed gone.
‘Paola! How the devil – ?’
Paola laughed. ‘Did I get them? By using the same skills I’ve just taught you. But there’s another little lesson for you. Now you know how to pick a pocket successfully, you must also learn to be on guard against people with the same skill!’
Ezio looked gloomily at the broken blade, which she’d returned to him with the bracer. ‘There’s some kind of mechanism that goes with them. None of this is exactly in working condition,’ he said.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘True. But I think you already know Messer Leonardo?’
‘Da Vinci? Yes, I met him just before –’ He broke off, forcing himself not to dwell on the painful memory. ‘But how can a painter be of any help to me with this?’
‘He’s a lot more than just a painter. Take him the pieces. You’ll see.’
Ezio, seeing the sense of what she was telling him, nodded his agreement, then said, ‘Before I go, may I ask you one last question?’
‘Of course.’
‘Why have you given your aid so readily to me – a stranger?’
Paola gave him a sad smile. By way of an answer, she drew up one of the sleeves of her robe, revealing a pale, delicate forearm – whose beauty was marred by the ugly, long dark scars which criss-crossed it. Ezio looked and knew. At some time in her life this lady had been tortured.
‘I, too, have known betrayal,’ Paola said.
And Ezio recognized without hesitation that he had met a kindred spirit.
5
It was not far from Paola’s luxurious House of Pleasure to the busy back streets where Leonardo’s workshop was, but Ezio did have to cross the spacious and busy Piazza del Duomo, and here he found his newly acquired skills of merging into the crowd especially useful. It was a good ten days since the executions, and it was likely that Alberti would imagine that Ezio would have left Florence long since, but Ezio was taking no chances, and nor, by the look of the number of guards posted in and around the square, was Alberti. There would be plain-clothes agents in place as well. Ezio kept his head well down, especially when passing between the cathedral and t
he Baptistry, where the square was busiest. He passed by Giotto’s campanile, which had dominated the city for almost one hundred and fifty years, and the great red mass of Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome, completed only fifteen years earlier, without seeing them, though he was aware of groups of French and Spanish tourists gazing up in unfeigned amazement and admiration, and a little burst of pride in his city tugged at his heart. But was it his city, really, any more?
Suppressing any gloomy thoughts, he quickly made his way from the south side of the piazza to Leonardo’s workshop. The Master was at home, he was told, in the yard at the back. The studio was, if anything, in a greater state of chaos than ever, though there did seem to be some rough method in the madness. The artefacts Ezio had noticed on his earlier visit had been added to, and from the ceiling hung a strange contraption in wood, though it looked like a scaled-up skeleton of a bat. On one of the easels a large parchment pinned to a board carried a massive and impossibly intricate knot-design, and in a corner of it some indecipherable scribbling in Leonardo’s hand. Agniolo had been joined by another assistant, Innocento, and the two were trying to impose some order on the studio, cataloguing the stuff in order to keep track of it.
‘He’s in the back yard,’ Agniolo told Ezio. ‘Just go through. He won’t mind.’
Ezio found Leonardo engaged in a curious activity. Everywhere in Florence you could buy caged songbirds. People hung them in their windows for pleasure, and when they died, simply replaced them. Leonardo was surrounded by a dozen such cages and, as Ezio watched, he selected one, opened the little wicker door, held the cage up, and watched as the linnet (in this case) found the entrance, pushed its way through, and flew free. Leonardo watched its departure keenly, and was turning to pick up another cage when he noticed Ezio standing there.
He smiled winningly and warmly at the sight of him, and embraced him. Then his face grew grave. ‘Ezio! My friend. I hardly expected to see you here, after what you’ve been through. But welcome, welcome. Just bear with me one minute. This won’t take long.’
Ezio watched as he released one after another of the various thrushes, bullfinches, larks and far more expensive nightingales into the air, watching each one very carefully.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Ezio, wonderingly.
‘All life is precious,’ Leonardo replied simply. ‘I cannot bear to see my fellow creatures imprisoned like this, just because they have fine voices.’
‘Is that the only reason you release them?’ Ezio suspected an ulterior motive.
Leonardo grinned, but gave no direct answer. ‘I won’t eat meat any more either. Why should some poor animal die just because it tastes good to us?’
‘There’d be no work for farmers else.’
‘They could all grow corn.’
‘Imagine how boring that’d be. Anyway, there’d be a glut.’
‘Ah, I was forgetting that you’re a finanziatore. And I am forgetting my manners. What brings you here?’
‘I need a favour, Leonardo.’
‘How can I be of service?’
‘There’s something I… inherited from my father that I’d like you to repair, if you can.’
Leonardo’s eyes lit up. ‘Of course. Come this way. We’ll use my inner chamber – those boys are cluttering everything up in the studio as usual. I sometimes wonder why I bother to employ them at all!’
Ezio smiled. He was beginning to see why, but at the same time sensed that Leonardo’s first love was, and would always be, his work.
‘Come this way.’
Leonardo’s smaller, inner room was even more untidy than the studio, but among the masses of books and specimens, and papers covered with that indecipherable scrawl, the artist, as always (and incongruously) impeccably dressed and scented, carefully piled some stuff on other stuff until a space was cleared on a large drafting table.
‘Forgive the confusion,’ he said. ‘But at last we have an oasis! Let’s see what you’ve got for me. Unless you’d like a glass of wine first?’
‘No, no.’
‘Good,’ said Leonardo eagerly. ‘Let’s see it, then!’
Ezio carefully extracted the blade, bracer and mechanism, which he had previously wrapped in the mysterious vellum page that had accompanied them. Leonardo tried in vain to put the pieces of machinery back together but failed, and seemed for a moment to despair.
‘I don’t know, Ezio,’ he said. ‘This mechanism is old – very old – but it’s very sophisticated as well, and its construction is ahead I would say even of our time. Fascinating.’ He looked up. ‘I’ve certainly never seen anything like it. But I’m afraid there’s little I can do without the original plans.’
Then he turned his attention to the vellum page, which he had picked up in order to wrap Ezio’s pieces back up again. ‘Wait a second!’ he cried, poring over it. Then he placed the broken blade and bracer to one side, spread out the sheet, and, referring to it, began to rummage among a row of old books and manuscripts on a nearby shelf. Finding the two he wanted, he placed them on the table and began carefully to leaf through them.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Ezio, slightly impatiently.
‘This is very interesting,’ said Leonardo. ‘This looks very like a page from a Codex.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s a page from an ancient book. This isn’t printed, it’s in manuscript. It’s very old indeed. Have you any more of them?’
‘No.’
‘Pity. People shouldn’t tear the pages out of books like this.’ Leonardo paused. ‘Unless, perhaps, the whole thing together –’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Look, the contents of this page are encrypted; but if my theory is correct… based on these sketches it may very well be that…’
Ezio waited, but Leonardo was lost in a world of his own. He took a seat and waited patiently while Leonardo rummaged through and pored over a number of books and scrolls, making cross-references and notes, all in that curious left-handed mirror-writing he used. Ezio wasn’t the only one, he supposed, to live his life with one eye looking behind him. From the little he’d seen of what was going on in the studio, if the Church got wind of some of the things Leonardo was up to, he didn’t doubt that his friend would be for the high jump.
At last Leonardo looked up. But by that time Ezio was beginning to doze. ‘Remarkable,’ muttered Leonardo to himself, and then in a louder voice, ‘Remarkable! If we transpose the letters and then select every third…’
He set to work, drawing the blade, bracer and mechanism towards him. He dug out a toolbox from under the table, set up a vice, and quietly became absorbed in his work. An hour passed, two… Ezio by now was sleeping peacefully, lulled by the warm fug of the room and the gentle sounds of tapping and scraping as Leonardo worked on. And at last –
‘Ezio! Wake up!’
‘Eh?’
‘Look!’ And Leonardo pointed to the tabletop. The dagger blade, fully restored, had been fitted into the strange mechanism, which in turn was fixed to the bracer. Everything was polished and looked as if it had just been made, but nothing shone. ‘A matt finish, I decided,’ said Leonardo. ‘Like Roman armour. Anything which shines glints in the sun, and that’s a dead giveaway.’
Ezio picked up the weapon and hefted it in his hands. It was light, but the strong blade was perfectly balanced on it. Ezio had never seen anything like it. A spring-loaded dagger that he could conceal above his wrist. All he had to do was flex his hand and the blade would spring out, ready to slash or stab as its user desired.
‘I thought you were a man of peace,’ said Ezio, remembering the birds.
‘Ideas take precedence,’ said Leonardo with decision. ‘Whatever they are. Now,’ he added, producing a hammer and chisel from his toolbox. ‘You’re right-handed, aren’t you? Good. Then kindly place your right ring finger on this block.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m sorry, but this is how it must be done. The blade is designed to ensu
re the total commitment of whoever wields it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’ll only work if we have that finger off.’
Ezio blinked. His mind flashed on a number of images: he remembered Alberti’s supposed friendliness to his father, how Alberti had later reassured him after his father’s arrest, the executions, his own pursuit. He clamped his jaw. ‘Do it.’
‘Maybe I should use a cleaver. Cleaner cut that way.’ Leonardo produced one from a drawer in the table. ‘Now – just place your finger – così.’
Ezio steeled himself as Leonardo raised the cleaver. He closed his eyes as he heard it brought down – schunk! – into the wood of the block. But he’d felt no pain. He opened his eyes. The cleaver was stuck in the block, inches from his hand, which was intact.
‘You bastard!’ Ezio was shocked, and furious at this tasteless practical joke.
Leonardo raised his hands. ‘Calm yourself! It was just a bit of fun! Cruel, I admit, but I simply couldn’t resist. I wanted to see how determined you were. You see, the use of this machine originally did require such a sacrifice. Something to do with an ancient initiation ceremony, I think. But I’ve made one or two adjustments. So you can keep your finger. Look! The blade comes out well clear of them, and I’ve added a hilt that flips out when the blade’s extended. All you have to do is remember to keep them splayed as it’s coming out! So you can keep your finger. But you might like to wear gloves when you use it – the blade is keen.’
Ezio was too fascinated – and grateful – to be angry for long. ‘This is extraordinary,’ he said, opening and closing the dagger several times until he could time its use perfectly. ‘Incredible.’
‘Isn’t it?’ agreed Leonardo. ‘Are you sure you don’t have any more pages like this one?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Well, listen, if you do happen across any more, please bring them to me.’
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