The Alchemist's Apprentice aa-1

by Dave Duncan

  “Can you estimate when the patient ingested the poison?”

  He shrugged. “He had obviously not eaten recently.”

  “You imply that he must have been poisoned after he arrived?”

  “An obvious hypothesis. And whatever the toxin, it must be extremely potent to be concealed in a glass of wine. The learned Paracelsus wrote that anything is poisonous in sufficient dosage.”

  Worse and worse. “So there is no hope of laying the blame on tainted food in his own household?”

  “No, and he had certainly not been munching on a salad of oleander. The dried and powdered leaf of digitalis can be prescribed for internal use, as a laxative, and it is rumored to soothe a raging heart. Possibly he took an accidental overdose, in which case we need not fear a murder charge. The man’s doctor must be interrogated.”

  I said, “He’s probably a Jew, in which case he has likely been arrested already. If I were one of the state inquisitors, I should now be putting Imer’s servants to the question, especially the footmen who served the wine.”

  “But you are not!”

  “Then why don’t you offer one of the servants an enormous bribe to run away and take the suspicion with him?”

  He shook his head, still angry. “No, we can ignore the servants, so-”

  “Why?”

  The Maestro matched up his fingertips again for another lecture. “Why should an attorney’s footman want to murder a procurator? Only if bribed to do so by someone of high rank, and if he is fool enough to be still in the city, then the Ten can catch him and torture the truth out of him. The doge would not be warning me away if he expected that to happen. But even the Three will not question the gentry rigorously without good reason to do so, certainly not torture them. The courtesans may not fare quite as well as the nobility, but even they-”

  “Courtesans?”

  He pouted. “There were several there. Your friend was one of them. Is she capable of poisoning a man, one who insulted her, say?”

  “Certainly. I’ll ask her if she remembers doing so.” Violetta is a neighbor and the most prized courtesan in the city. The lady and I are friends, but I do not employ her services. One night with Violetta costs more than I earn in a year.

  The Maestro pulled a sour smile. “Then you now have two reasons to help me find the murderer. If I had the birthday and time of birth of everyone who was present, their horoscopes…but the law will require palpable evidence, either eyewitnesses or a confession.”

  “Denizens of the infernal regions must know.”

  “Don’t be absurd!” He glared at me. “Beg my life from a fiend? Don’t you hear anything I teach you? I can’t do that.”

  He was hinting that I could. For me to try to save him would be altruistic and therefore less dangerous. Not safe, just less dangerous. Summoning is best done after dark, when demons are more active and there are fewer people around to catch you at it. I would decide then whether to take the risk.

  I thought of another problem. “How much foxglove would be needed? And what does it taste like?” I rose to reach for the De Historia Stirpium Commentarii that lay on his side of the desk. “Would wine disguise its taste?”

  “Sit down. You think I have not consulted the herbals? Most poisons are vile-tasting, as you know, because they are tainted by the Evil One. Foxglove is so bitter that livestock will not graze it, whereas they do die from eating oleander. The taste and dosage would depend on how the essence was extracted. Steeping in water may be enough, or spirituous extraction followed by reduction. I shall conduct some experiments.”

  “If you have any sense at all,” I said, “you will throw your entire supply in the canal and destroy the label on the bottle. Yesterday you sent me out to buy every nasty thing in the pharmacopeia. Was that a wise action?”

  He bunched his cheeks. “I wanted to discover if digitalis is presently available in the city. Since only the murderer and I knew the poison used, I preferred not to advertise its name.”

  “Even if Gerolamo and the rest do not stock it, surely foxglove can be grown in any little garden plot. It likes sandy soil, as I recall.”

  As a feat of memory that remark was pure show-off, and his wizened little eyes tightened to show that he knew it. “But that would still be evidence of premeditation.”

  And oleander was common enough. “So anyone could acquire the plant. But who,” I asked innocently, “could possibly have the arcane knowledge to extract and concentrate the venom? Or is this where we began this conversation?”

  The Maestro scowled, because Italians are notorious as the poison experts of Europe, the Venetian Council of Ten has the same reputation within Italy itself, and the Council of Ten has been known to consult Maestro Nostradamus on such matters. And that, I realized, might well be what it was up to in the present instance, except that it was putting the demand for assistance in the form of a personal warning from the doge. That would explain why Sciara had felt justified in dragging me off to jail.

  I opened my inkwell. “You will, of course, now write to the Lion’s Mouth to report your suspicions that Procurator Orseolo died of an overdose of medicinal digitalis. You will have to sign it.”

  The bocca di leone is any of several drop boxes available in the palace to accept accusations of treason or other major crimes. Anonymous tips are supposedly ignored, but no one believes that.

  The Maestro grimaced. “No. I despise men who work in silence and darkness. Very few people could have committed the crime. It must be possible to work out which one did. Then we can report to the Ten.”

  There is no use arguing with him when he sticks out his goatee like that. “We have two days.” The doge had given me three, but I was allowing one for travel. I opened a drawer and selected a quill and a sheet of our best rag paper. “The attorney, Imer, is the man to start with. He must be quaking in his dancing pumps.”

  Maestro Nostradamus said, “Faugh! You still don’t know how bad this is. Take a cheaper sheet.”

  I changed the paper.

  “There were about thirty guests in all,” he said, “but not all are suspect. Only the procurator was affected, so the poison was not in the bottle. It must have been put in his glass. It acts quickly but not instantaneously-I know that but the Ten do not. So the only persons who matter are those who came in to look at the manuscripts.”

  He leaned back wearing an expression of extreme smugness like a suit of plate mail. I plodded through his logic and decided it would have to do for now. I could not possibly question thirty people in two or three days.

  “Clear crystal glasses, or colored?”

  “Murano ruby glass. You could not tell what anyone else was drinking, and if the poison made the wine cloudy, that would not show either.”

  “And what sort of wine?”

  “We were offered a choice of three: refosco, malmsey, or retsina. I had the refosco. It was a good jar.”

  He fancies himself as a connoisseur of wines. I plan to study them when I am rich.

  “Refosco is red, malmsey a sweet white. The other one is Greek, yes?”

  He made a steeple of his fingers again for a sermon. “Yes. Retsina is most vile, flavored with resin. Served in honor of the Greek merchant, I suppose. It is pungent enough to hide the taste of lye or vitriol, but few Venetians would touch it. Malmsey is so sickly it might suffice. Refosco would not. Let us review the suspects. I proclaim my innocence, and in any case I was seated behind the table. I could not have put poison in anyone’s glass without standing up and stretching across, which would have been a very conspicuous action. Write my name in the first row.

  “The Greek was in the room all the time. Our host came and went. As organizers of the affair, they must be suspect. Imer and Karagounis in the second row.”

  He closed his eyes to think. “I was early, as I told you. Imer and his wife greeted the guests as they arrived and saw that they were given wine. Most went to the salotto, only the book collectors came into the dining room. The first b
uyer to enter was Senator Tirali. He wished me well and at once walked the length of the table, on the far side from me, inspecting the goods. I felt like a shopkeeper!”

  “I believe you, master.” I knew of another Tirali, the senator’s son. Neither was a patient of the Maestro’s.

  “Close behind him came Procurator Orseolo, leaning on a cane. He and Tirali greeted each other coolly. They were old rivals as collectors.”

  “Put Tirali in the second row?”

  “I suppose so, but I doubt if their rivalry ran to murder. Orseolo had a woman attending him. I didn’t hear her name and she stayed close to him. Next came a foreign couple, who did not introduce themselves to me. They spoke in French with barbarous accents, questioning me about the books. They knew nothing about books. All they were interested in was price.”

  I added them to the second row: two foreigners.

  “Two footmen poured the wine. We should include them in the second row, if the Three have not gotten to them first.” The Maestro opened his eyes. “Then sier Pasqual Tirali, Giovanni’s son. With your friend.”

  I wrote Violetta’s name in the first row and started a third for Pasqual Tirali, vowing to send him to the torturers for prolonged interrogation. I get twinges of jealousy sometimes, when I think of her evenings.

  “They were the last to arrive. There was one other before them, Pietro Moro. First row.”

  I stood my quill in the inkwell, laid my forearms flat on the desk and glared belligerently across at my master. “You are hallucinating!” The nightmare had just turned into sheer terror, as nightmares do.

  He shook his head smugly. “I warned you that you were being naive.”

  “Master, before a doge is crowned he has to swear an oath known as the promissione. It is no trivial matter. He swears to shun each and every mistake and crime of all his predecessors in the last thousand years. The promissione is read to him every two months during his reign to remind him. He can barely blow his nose without his counselors’ consent. He must not leave the ducal palace without their permission. He must not meet with foreigners! He…I cannot imagine all the promises the doge would have broken if he went to that supper party!”

  “He wasn’t wearing his ducal robes and corno. I expect that’s another. But Moro is a fanatical collector of books.”

  “Then why did the sellers not offer him a private viewing in the palace?”

  The Maestro scowled horribly. “I do not know the answer to that. But I don’t suppose for a moment that Moro is the first doge to slip out for an evening incognito, playing Haroun al-Raschid.”

  “And somebody tried to assassinate him? Is that what you mean? The poison went to the wrong man?”

  The Maestro pursed his lips. “I wondered how long it would take you.”

  Even more aghast now, I said, “The Serene One moves and is unmoved ? The procurator got the wrong glass and the poison meant for the doge? Is that what it means?”

  “Possibly. A hypothesis to keep in mind. Even if not, do you see why I cannot write to the Lion’s Mouth? The Council of Ten must not have cause to investigate the procurator’s death, not officially. A suspicious death involving illicit acts by the doge may bring on a constitutional crisis, just when relations between the Republic and the Turks may be boiling up to another war. What you got this morning was not a warning, it was a cry for help!”

  I stared down at my list, although I was seeing nothing. I did not want to see old Nasone either murdered or deposed, but all doges have political enemies. “Did everyone see him there?”

  “Probably not,” the Maestro conceded. “He came in, looked at the books quite briefly, and spoke with Orseolo. Then an argument broke out with the foreigners. I think he left then. He was not at the supper table later.”

  “What sort of argument?”

  “The foreigners had not been invited. Imer told them to leave. Probably the doge had not been invited either. Faugh! Moro has always been impulsive. He champs under all the restraints of his office, the eternal committee meetings. Read me the list.”

  Present and not suspected:

  Dr. Nostradamus; Procurator Orseolo; madonna Violetta; Nasone

  Possible suspects:

  Attorney Imer; Karagounis; Senator Tirali; two foreigners; a woman; two footmen;

  Pasqual Tirali

  “You assume too much. Move your friend to the list of suspects.”

  I protested, “Did you see her tipping poison into the victim’s wine glass?”

  “Bah! Of course I didn’t. I didn’t see anyone doing that. I very much doubt if anyone did. It would be too obvious.”

  That had already occurred to me. “You said Orseolo had a crippled hand and used a cane. He must have laid his glass down when he wanted to handle one of the books? The others would too, perhaps, but he must have done so more often?”

  My master nodded. I could see that he had been hoping to point that out himself.

  “So,” I said, “the murderer unobtrusively poisoned his own drink and then switched it for the victim’s. Did you see that happen?”

  “No,” he admitted sourly, “but I was constantly being distracted by stupid questions. It is likely that somebody did. Tell Angeli you need him shortly.”

  I went over to the door and stuck my head out to tell one of Giorgio’s brood to warn him. When I returned, the Maestro was staring fixedly at the window and tugging his beard. I know better than to interrupt him when he is thinking on that scale. I took up my knife to sharpen my pen.

  Eventually he sighed and looked at me as if wondering where I had been. “A letter.”

  I took a sheet of rag from the drawer and dipped the quill.

  “About ten lines,” he said, so I would know how to place it on the sheet.

  “Italic, roman, or gothic?”

  “Italic, of course. ‘To the exalted chiefs of the noble Council of Ten. Usual bootlicking…It is with deep sorrow that I most humbly bring to Your Excellencies’ attention certain evidence pertaining to the despicable murder of…’”

  4

  G iorgio was ready in his standard gondolier costume of red and black, so we trotted downstairs and embarked. He is a wiry man and not tall. Standing in the stern of the gondola he looks far too slight to move a thirty-foot boat at all, but he is as proficient with his oar as he is at making babies. We skimmed off along the Rio San Remo, sliding between the traffic. The sun was shining with as much enthusiasm as it ever musters in February; bridges and buildings had a well-washed look. Women on balconies were hanging out washing, peeling vegetables, shouting conversations across and along the canal, lowering baskets to vendors in boats or on footpaths below them. Often they were singing. So were the cage birds, which had been brought out to enjoy the morning and tantalize the cats. Seagulls flapped clumsily or just stared. Almost all the boatmen were singing, too, when not fluting the odd cries they use to warn on which side they intend to pass. They say we have ten thousand gondolas in Venice.

  “Is it true the Maestro was at the supper where the procurator died, Alfeo?”

  Mama does the talking in the Angeli family. Most of the time Giorgio says little, although his silences have an uncanny knack of prompting other people to tell him secrets. He would not question me unless he were seriously worried.

  I said, “He was taken ill at the supper. The Maestro went to help, as you would expect. The procurator died yesterday, at home, tended by his own doctor.”

  “Oh.” Apart from returning hails from other gondoliers going by, Giorgio wielded his oar in silence for a while.

  “The Maestro didn’t poison him.”

  “Alfeo! I never said that he did! That’s a terrible-”

  “That’s the rumor. It’s a lie. Last night I was called in to the palace for a consultation. I was not arrested, not questioned. My arms are no longer now than they were before. Don’t worry about it.”

  A man who has to support a two-digit family must worry about his employer’s fate. Giorgio slid the gondo
la through a minuscule gap beside a farmer’s boat already on its way home for the day. He ducked as we shot under a bridge. Then he had time to speak again.

  “You are not nearly as good a liar as the master, Alfeo. You are worried, so I am.”

  “Then I confess! I’m on my way to tell the Council of Ten I did it.”

  The whole boat shuddered. “Don’t make jokes like that, Alfeo!”

  It was less of a joke than he thought, although I had no intention of posting the incriminating letter I carried. “How was the wedding?”

  Family is one topic on which Giorgio will talk, and talk at length. His children are outnumbered only by his brothers and sisters; Mama has even more; add in aunts, uncles, nephews, and nieces and the wedding party must have outnumbered the Turkish army on campaign. Giovanni from Padua and Aldo from Vicenza and Jacopo and Giovanni from Murano…He was still reciting the guest list when we arrived at our destination.

  Ottone Imer shared chambers with several other attorneys in the maze of alleys in San Zulian, just north of the Basilica of San Marco. That the house included living quarters and premises grand enough to entertain thirty guests I took on trust from the Maestro’s account. It is an expensive part of town, so either Imer had family money behind him or he was successful professionally. So why was he dabbling in the used book trade?

  The black-clad clerk who peered disapprovingly at me over his glasses looked somewhat dusty and dog-eared himself, as if he needed to be taken down off his shelf more often. He conceded that the learned attorney was in, but that was all he would concede. If I wanted to get any closer to his employer, he suggested, I must state my business in some detail. The learned attorney was not, he implied, about to stop doing whatever he was doing to oblige a mere apprentice, even if, he hinted, the apprentice’s master was a well-known charlatan dabbling in shady arts. I could make an appointment for next week, or Lent, or next summer, he intimated.

  Attorneys do not usually turn down business sight unseen, but attorneys rarely have important nobles collapse at their supper tables in a hiss of dangerous whispers. Was Imer hiding from everyone or just from anyone connected with that unfortunate event?