The Alchemists pursuit aa-3

by Dave Duncan

  I turned south along the Calle Spadaria, walking slowly so I could scan the doorways. Celsi had not said right or left.

  "Arghrraw!"

  My rapier flashed into my hand, for the sound had been close and-yes!-two golden eyes shone in front of me, on the edge of my puddle of lamplight.

  "Arghrraw…" it said again, more softly.

  Find one rabid cat and of course you must expect many more, for they will bite one another. The city might be infested with them, although I had not heard anyone mention such a problem. I backed up a step.

  The eyes advanced. "Arghrraw!"

  "Now look here, Felix," I said sternly, having visions of needle teeth sunk in my ankle… But my mind must still have been grappling with the tarot and the quatrain because then I heard an inner voice that sounded much like the Maestro's: "Be not so proud as to spurn help at your feet."

  A cat had led me to Alessa when she was ready to talk. A cat had found me refuge when the mob was after me. I backed up three steps.

  "Arghrraw… Arghrraw…" The cat followed, softer still, but more urgent.

  A door opened not ten feet ahead of me. Although the light escaping from the entrance was in truth very faint, it seemed to flood the alley. It was not even bright enough to illuminate the man emerging, but I knew his voice.

  "I will tell them. Good night to you, lustrissimo."

  "And to you, capitano," Sciara replied.

  By that time I had closed my lantern and was backed into a doorway, trying to make myself as flat as paint. If the departing visitor turned in my direction he would be certain to see me, even in the dark calle, for it was so narrow I would be within arm's length of him. He would hear my heart thundering like a charge of heavy cavalry.

  No. Saints be praised, vizio Filiberto Vasco went the other way, toward the Piazza and the Doges' Palace. His boots tapped off into the night, the puddle of light from his lantern danced around his feet, and Raffaino Sciara closed his door.

  I stood where I was until I stopped shaking, which took several minutes. My tarot had warned me of the jack of swords, the quatrain had told me to accept help at my feet. Had the cat not delayed me, I would have rapped on that door while Vasco was standing on the other side of it, and I had no imaginable reason to be calling on Raffaino Sciara even in broad daylight, let alone at midnight. Had I been betrayed? Had Celsi reported what I planned? Or his servant? I assured myself that there were a dozen reasons why Missier Grande might have sent his lackey to ask Sciara something or tell Sciara something, and none of them need have anything to do with me.

  For a third time cats had helped me-except that it must obviously be the same cat and more than just a cat. It might be a demon from hell, but I was going to give it the benefit of the doubt from now on. I opened my lantern and saw the cat sitting in the middle of the calle, watching me and licking a paw.

  "Thanks, Felix."

  "Arghrraw…" It stood up and paraded southward, tail high, until it stood in front of the door with the grille, Circospetto 's door, the door that vizio Vasco had just left.

  A cat was telling me that it was safe to proceed and I was crazy.

  No, I must trust my new helper, and Felix was now standing waiting for me, staring inquiringly as if wondering why I was taking so long. I walked over to it and bunched my knuckles to make the signal I had been told.

  Knock! Knock! Rap-rap-rap.

  I turned the half-lantern so my face would be visible.

  I had to wait, but I had expected that little ploy.

  "What do you want?" asked a whisper.

  I could whisper too. "Information."

  "This is a new departure for you, sier Alfeo."

  It was Sciara. Even a whisper can be recognized. Any other time I would have given him a smart-alecky response but not tonight. Tonight I felt I had sunk too low to amuse anyone, even myself.

  "Desperate times require desperate measures, lustrissimo. Are you going to let me in?"

  The door opened a few inches in well-oiled silence. I pushed it wider and stepped into darkness beyond.

  "Lock it!"

  I turned the big key. Then I encountered a heavy curtain, and beyond that a very dimly lit corridor with another curtain, and finally a room. It was barely large enough to hold the table in the center, flanked by two chairs and bearing a lantern, but at last there was light enough for us to see each other. Another door at the far side presumably led to either Sciara's house or a back exit.

  He looked even more like the Grim Reaper than usual, for I had never seen him except in his secretary's blue robe, whereas tonight he wore a black hat and cloak and his skull-like face seemed almost to float in the air. He did not sit or invite me to.

  "Who taught you that knock, Alfeo?"

  "No names, lustrissimo. You can help the one who sent me and no one else can."

  The death's-head showed its teeth. "He is too mean to pay for what he wants you to buy."

  "Not this time. Women are dying."

  "He cares?"

  "We both care and so should you."

  Sciara was enjoying baiting me too much to stop yet. "If I knew anything that would help Their Excellencies catch the killer, clarissimo, do you think I would not have shared it with them?"

  "Information can mean different things to different people. Are these word games part of the process or are you keeping me here until Vasco can return with the sbirri? You will have to explain my presence in your house, you know."

  Sciara drummed thin fingers on the table. "Tell me what you want."

  "To see the evidence that the Three used to find Zorzi Michiel guilty of patricide eight years ago."

  His total lack of reaction was admirable. I might as well have asked if it was raining. Venetian magistrates, several hundred of them, are noblemen elected by the Grand Council and their terms of office are limited, all except the doge's. The clerks, guards, secretaries, ducal equerries, and all the rest who make the government work, are drawn from the citizen-by-birth class, and are employed for life, or in some cases until they reach sixty. Sciara has been Circospetto for as long as I can remember and knows everything. He could probably recite by rote the records I wanted to see, although I should not have believed him.

  He pouted. "That file may be eight years old, but it has been attracting much attention of late. For me to remove it even briefly would be extremely dangerous."

  "So now we're bargaining. Name your price." Yes, I was an impudent young puppy, but I was a clarissimo and he was only a lustrissimo. We nobles have our rights and arrogance is one of them. Humility would shell no cockles with Raffaino Sciara. His eyes shrank as if they were withdrawing into his head.

  "You come here tomorrow night, a half hour later. If I do not answer, you go away and try again the next night. It may be several days before I manage to obtain the material you want to see, understand?"

  I nodded, my mouth dry.

  "When I do," he said, "you will look at the papers while I watch. You write nothing and take away nothing."

  "Agreed."

  "Five hundred ducats."

  "Absurd! Two hundred."

  He smiled. "Five hundred and not a soldo less. Fifty of that now."

  He had me by the throat and we both knew it. He did not trust me any more than I trusted him and he must be enjoying watching me squirm.

  I reached inside my doublet. "You'll have to settle for eighteen sequins now, it's all I brought." I was four lire short.

  The tip of his tongue showed for a moment, snakelike. He had not expected me to have such lucre on me and had been looking forward to kicking my young butt out into the alley. He probably wished he had asked for more.

  "Nonrefundable," he said.

  "No."

  "Then we have no agreement. Just looking for those files will be dangerous for me."

  Job himself could not have bettered my sigh. "Nonrefundable, then," I agreed. I spread eighteen little disks on the table.

  "Tomorrow at half an hour past
midnight. Four knocks."

  I nodded and turned on my heel without a word. I had made my debut in major corruption. I might make a politician yet.

  There was no sign of my supernatural feline helper out in the calle. Feeling soiled and with a sour taste in my mouth, I hurried back through the dark to the watersteps where Giorgio was waiting. If I had just thrown away fifty ducats, Nostradamus would skin me.

  20

  Nostradamus can always surprise me. Next morning he hobbled into the atelier on his canes, obviously still in pain, and by the time he had settled into his chair, I was there with his willow bark potion. I should properly have slunk quietly away and given him an hour to sheath his fangs, but I was anxious to head off to Palazzo Michiel. Besides, I wanted to get the ordeal over with.

  "Good morning, master."

  He grunted, which was better than snarling.

  "Concerning my visit to Circospetto…" I broke the news about the five hundred ducats and the forty-nine already gone. Since the wages due to me for the entire seven years of my apprenticeship will only be seventeen ducats, I expected to be torn into little pieces and fed to the fish of the canal.

  He grunted again. "Good. You made the correct decision."

  Rejecting the temptation to sink to the floor in a dramatic swoon, I said, "Thank you, master."

  "Had he asked for only the two hundred you mentioned, I would have forbidden you to go back there. We have done Sciara down so often that he might have forgone that much just for the spite of seeing me exiled and you sent to the galleys. But I doubt if even he will pass up five hundred."

  "Um…" I said, baffled by this backward thinking. "Yes, master."

  Of course Nostradamus would collect from Violetta, but that would mean that his final reward for catching Honeycat would shrink by the same amount. This could be ominous. Had he given up hope of earning his fee?

  "And I need counseling on a matter of cats, master."

  He looked up at me with an expression that would flake paint off a Tintoretto. "Cats?"

  I explained about cats: cats that force me to detour and so lead me to find Alessa in a weak moment, cats that direct me to a refuge when the mob is after me, and cats that delay me so that vizio Filiberto Vasco doesn't catch me red-handed trying to bribe Circospetto. One cat, or three? Not a cat in the normal sense at all, of course, so what? As I spoke he frowned and tugged at his goatee. Afterward he stared across at the wall of books for a while, scanning it as if he were mentally scanning through their contents, book by book. Perhaps he was.

  "You been summoning without telling me?"

  "No, master."

  "Curious," he murmured. "I had not thought of… Well, I advise you to be very careful. I have exposed you to much strange lore in a very short time. It may not have seemed short to you, but when you compress the wisdom of centuries into just a few years, it can take on a life of its own. I may have been reckless. You may have opened channels to unexpected realms. Three times but never four?"

  I scrabbled hastily in the back rooms of my memory. "In the Iliad, Patroclus tried three times to scale the walls of Troy and fell back, but when he tried again, Apollo struck him down. Diomedes, too. He attacked the god three times, and each time Apollo brushed him aside, but on his fourth attempt the god roared at him to warn him off. And Achilles-"

  Violetta would have been proud of my classical scholarship. Even the Maestro grudgingly nodded approval.

  "Yes, yes, Homer knew it, but it is older than that. I was thinking of the Hebrew tradition, to forgive a sinner three times but never four. Three times this apparition has helped you, you think. Now it has gained your confidence so that next time it may entrap you."

  "Or it may be truly benevolent?"

  "It may be," he said sourly, "but be careful! If there is a fourth time-Heaven forbid!-the stakes will be very high. Let me see that wound of yours."

  I suspected when Giorgio delivered me to the Riva degli Schiavoni that I would be too early for donna Alina Orio, so on reaching Palazzo Michiel, I asked for Jacopo. Admitted, I sat on the same bench as I had two days before and studied the same pictures. The solution to Gentile Michiel's death hid somewhere in this building certainly, and I was more convinced than ever that the courtesans' deaths were related also; I just did not know why I thought that.

  I was not alone in that belief, obviously, else why did so many people want the Maestro to investigate an eight-year-old murder that the Council of Ten had declared solved? Donna Alina Orio Michiel did. Violetta did, if indirectly. It seemed highly likely that Giovanni Gradenigo had, just before he died. And the Council of Ten did not.

  No long wait this time-Jacopo appeared in short order, trotting down the great staircase and striding forward to meet me with a smile of greeting. He was even more magnificently garbed than before, his britches and doublet a concerto of cream and purple brocade, and he had somehow contrived to have his silken hose and his ruff both in the same shade of cream, instead of white. Moreover the ruff was huge, with innumerable points around the edge like a sunburst, but that helped to disguise the top-heavy effect of his overlarge chest and shoulders. His bonnet matched his waist-length cape of silver and blue, and the buttons on his doublet were chunks of amethyst. He was an eye-popping vision of excess and I was tormented by jealousy.

  If I could trust anyone in the Michiel household, it should be Jacopo. He could have been no more than eleven or twelve when his father died and he was also in the clear for the courtesan murders, because if I tried to tackle him the way I had tackled the fake friar at San Zanipolo, I would bounce right off.

  We bowed and greeted.

  He made no move to lead me anywhere. "You bring a contract? The old witch will be delighted. She has been on pins and needles since you left, worried that Nostradamus will turn her down."

  "The price may startle her."

  "Bah!" he said in exactly the tone the Maestro uses. "She has more money than she can count, nothing to spend it on, and not much time left to try. You'll have to be patient, though. The daily reconstruction is still underway. Skilled craftsmen are at work. Is there anything I can tell you or any way I can entertain you until she considers herself presentable?"

  I had very few questions to ask Jacopo, but I might as well put them now. I doubted that his half-brothers would let me within hailing distance of themselves or their staff until the matriarch had blessed my quest, perhaps not even then.

  "What do you know about the knife that was used to kill your father?"

  He eyed me warily. "How much do you know about it already?"

  "I heard that it was a family possession."

  He grinned, which seemed an odd reaction. "True. It had been a prized family treasure for centuries and then became an infamous one. Come along and I'll show you."

  He went upstairs at a fast trot, which I had to match, but fortunately there were only a few servants around to frown at such impropriety. We crossed the wide salone to a glass case standing against the opposite wall. Amid a collection of ancient books, Roman lamps, Greek jars, some antique coins, and a few Turkish curiosities, there was only one weapon, a dagger. It had an S curve to it, with an animal head for a pommel. The grip was made of bone and the scabbard of silver. The blade was not visible, but would be very little longer than my hand, while the hilt would fit comfortably in a man's fist.

  "It's called a khanjar," my guide said cheerfully. "Syrian. Made of damascene steel. It was collected in 1204 at the sack of Constantinople by one of their"-his smile faltered-"my ancestors. Unfortunately he collected it between his ribs. Fortunately his son was there also and was able to salvage the dagger, if not save the situation."

  "He saved the family honor, though. He must have killed the killer or he couldn't have brought back the sheath."

  Jacopo nodded. "Never thought of that."

  Or perhaps the dagger had been routinely looted from a corpse and its story had been embellished over four centuries. I could not but admire the deadly little
horror-an assassin's dream, small enough to be easily concealed and quite long enough to kill a man. "This cabinet is kept locked?"

  "It is now. It wasn't back then, when our father was stabbed. I used to play with the khanjar when I was small and it was still just as sharp as it must have been in Constantinople. In fact…" Jacopo hesitated. "I was the one who noticed that it was missing after the murder and opened my big mouth in front of witnesses. Apparently the sbirri had not thought to ask anyone if we could identify the weapon."

  "And how did the scabbard find its way back this time?"

  He stared at me blankly. "I don't know. I suppose it was left behind in the Basilica. The killer wouldn't want to be caught wearing it, now would he? Not with blood on it."

  I wondered who had been crass enough to put the dagger back on display, but I wasn't crass enough to ask.

  Jacopo started to stroll. "Let's go and see if the painters and decorators have completed today's masterpiece."

  I went with him. "If Zorzi has come back to Venice, he must have found somewhere safe to hide. Who would help him? Who would give him shelter?"

  "One of his harlots, I suppose. You'll be an old man before you finish questioning all of those maenads."

  "He had quite a reputation, but I was thinking of family. Bernardo?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "Good riddance, in his view. Why start the tongues wagging all over again? Why queer the Council of Ten? I know the Ten now are not the same men as eight years ago, but they're all part of the inner circle. You go nowhere in politics in Venice if the First Ones don't like you."

  "Domenico?"

  "Never!" he said, even more firmly. "He has the means, I agree. He comes and goes a lot, to and from the mainland. He has a lot of contacts there. Even the Ten may not be able to keep track of Domenico, not completely. And Dom sometimes took Zorzi's side in the quarrels, but that was years ago, when Gentile was alive. He's the last one to want him back now."