The Alchemist's Pursuit

by Dave Duncan

  A woman screamed. The sound came from in front of me, but there were about a dozen people between me and its source.

  “No!” I yelled, and hurled myself forward. Had I been as big as Bruno I might have accomplished something conclusive, but I could make no speed as I clawed and ricocheted through the mob, most of whom were now heading in the opposite direction. I saw a friar’s hood, but as I went to tackle him, I realized that he held a knife, so I tried to dodge at the last minute. We toppled into others and went down in a heap. My actions had been monumentally idiotic and I paid for my folly with a searing pain in my ribs.

  But then the onlookers bellowed and responded, most taking flight with cries of shrill alarm, while the rest—mainly young men whose foreplay had been interrupted—sought redress. I was kicked, cursed, then kicked again. I was hauled up by the collar. I was bleeding, which probably saved me from worse injuries. Rage turned to shouts of alarm.

  “Stop him! Catch him! Stop him!” I realized that I had been bellowing this for what felt like quite a while. “Is anyone else hurt?”

  Yes there was, because another group had gathered around someone who was not standing. Women screamed in horror. My companions went to see and I fled.

  I was armed, soaked in blood, and—so the sbirri would claim—had created a disturbance to let my accomplice slit a purse or a throat. The least I could expect from them would be some ham-fisted barber sewing me up, a couple of nights in jail, and interrogation by the chiefs of the Ten on Monday. The fire in my ribs grew worse as I ran, but I must have taken a slash, not a stab, or I would be drowning in my own blood already. Superficial wounds can bleed more than punctures.

  I crossed the bridge over the Rio dei Mendicanti and was faced with a dozen or so raucous, largely drunk, merrymakers filling the street from side to side. Many of them carried torches, and when I dodged through between them, they saw red all down my left side. Oh, how I cursed Fulgentio and his white cloaks! Fortunately nobody reacted fast enough to grab me, so I got safely past them, but then the shouting started and rapidly became a hue and cry.

  Drunk or sober, they were fresh. I was winded and already feeling the loss of blood. I wasn’t going to win a race and their shouts would alert any other group ahead of me. I needed a place to hide. The best Samaritans Venice possessed would not rescue a blood-soaked fugitive from the night without asking a lot of questions first.

  “Arghrraw . . .”

  A cat standing on its hind legs, scratching at a door? Sooner done than said. Some reactions are instantaneous, no matter how many words are needed to describe them later. Cats rarely condescend to be taught tricks, but will sometimes teach themselves, and this one must have learned that such antics would sooner or later persuade some friendly passerby to let it in. Probably the whole parish knew it and was proud of its cleverness. If that was the situation, the door was not kept locked. I was more than happy to let the cat in, follow it inside, and slam the door behind me.

  I found a bolt and slid it. Then I slid myself—to the floor. For a while I just sat there, leaning back against the planks and gasping. The cat had vanished into the darkness. Judging by the smell, the cat often did not go outside.

  Evidently my pursuers had not been close enough to see how or where I managed my disappearing act, for no one hammered on the door. As soon as I had caught my breath, I stripped off my cloak, doublet, and shirt, all of them blood soaked. I wrapped the shirt tightly around myself to bandage the gash slanting across three ribs, and then dressed again, hoping I was putting the cloak dark side out. Maybe Fulgentio’s invention did have some uses, but dark red would be more appropriate than black.

  I stood up with care and the world did not spin or tilt at odd angles. There would be blood on the floor in the morning, but at least my exsanguinous corpse would not be there also. I whispered, “Thanks, cat,” to the darkness. Rabid or otherwise, cats could be surprisingly useful. I opened the door and stepped out into the night with my head high, being as unfurtive as possible.

  17

  Since I had the big courtyard key with me, I let myself in the back way and did not terrify Luigi with my blood-stains. The stairs were even steeper than usual that night. Needless to say, the Maestro was not pleased to be wakened, but he could not refuse to sew his apprentice together. I put my garments to soak in a bucket, all except the cloak, which I burned in the kitchen fire. Only then was I free to go to bed.

  Sunday, I decided, would be a day of rest.

  I woke at dawn, as I always do. I rolled over and went back to sleep, which I never do.

  When I did appear, the Maestro poked and prodded me and claimed that he detected no sign of the wound fever that kills more victims than wounds do. I knew that it was still too early to tell.

  We said nothing more. We did not make eye contact until well after noon. I had failed him. He had foreseen when and where the Strangler would strike again and I had failed to block the attack. That was failure, the bitterest of tastes. The Maestro, for his part, had almost had to sign a receipt for one dead apprentice, and that was not part of the agreement either. Small wonder we had little to say to each other.

  Most of the morning I spent reading and trying to memorize some of Ovid’s Metamorphoses so I could be more worthy of my lady. He sat in his red chair with a copy of Paracelsus’s Paragranum, but I noticed that he wasn’t turning pages. He appeared to be staring at the slate table, doing absolutely nothing, which was another end-of-an-epoch landmark.

  At one point I lowered my book because the print was a blur.

  “He wasn’t tall enough,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Bulky,” I said, “but not tall. Domenico said that Zorzi was tall. The Honeycat I caught wasn’t tall.”

  “Honeycat uses a rope, not a dagger.”

  “A cord isn’t fast enough in a crowd. He was forced back to using a knife because there were too many witnesses.”

  My master snorted. “Or because he wasn’t Honeycat.”

  “But then . . .” But then had the Maestro’s clairvoyance been distracted by a pending murder involving a different murderer?

  “But what?” he snarled.

  I thought it out as he has taught me. “He was Honeycat,” I said. “Don’t ask me why I think that, because I have no rational reason to, but I am positive that the man I grabbed as I fell was Honeycat. I know that isn’t logical.”

  “But it may still be correct,” he growled. “Stop thinking about it and eventually you will understand, even if you have to dream it.”

  The news had reached the parish and was distributed in the campo after Mass. There would have been no use my heading over to San Zanipolo to ask the residents what had happened there the previous night. I was an outsider and if the Virgin herself had returned to earth there to bless Carnival, even that would still be none of my business. The Council of Ten would have heard from its local spies, though, and I was half expecting Missier Grande to coming a-knocking at our door, or even send his vizio for me, which would be much more humiliating. Fortunately the Ten hesitate to invade the privacy of a noble’s house and sier Alvise Barbolano is as noble as they come.

  The Maestro lacks the Ten’s resources, but he does have Giorgio and Mama Angeli. Both belong to enormous families, and there is hardly a parish in Venice that does not include some relative of theirs. In this case, as Giorgio explained when they all returned from church, one of his cousins’ husband’s brother Andreo lived in San Zanipolo where another poor woman had been murdered.

  “I need to talk with him,” the Maestro said. “Fetch him. Bring an eyewitness, too, if he can find one for you. Bring his entire family and feed them here if you want.”

  “He is not married,” Giorgio replied without a flicker of a smile. “But he will eat enough to make up for that.”

  Finding a bachelor on a day of rest could have been tricky, but we were fortunate. Within twenty minutes a young man in his Sunday best was standing in front of the Maestro’s chair, answe
ring questions. Andreo was an apprentice carpenter and a juvenile version of Giorgio himself—short, heavy shouldered, and given to thinking before he spoke. He was as much of an eyewitness as we were likely to find, having been right there in the Campo San Zanipolo when the terrible thing happened. He had spoken with people who had seen the fight.

  “They say she was attacked by two men, one of them dressed as a friar and the other wearing a white cloak.”

  “Tell me about the woman,” Nostradamus said.

  Andreo made the sign of the cross. “Marina Bortholuzzi was her name, lustrissimo.”

  “Stabbed where?”

  “In the, um, chest, lustrissimo.”

  “What sort of woman?”

  “The women claim she was a prostitute,” Andreo said, carefully distancing himself from such knowledge—no man in the parish would now admit ever having heard of Marina Bortholuzzi. “They say she was past her best. Used to be very high and mighty and lately hasn’t been paying her rent on time. So the women were saying.”

  The man in the white cloak had shouted and run away, drawing the crowd off so his accomplice could escape in the darkness. So Andreo said, and no doubt that was the popular account. It did not worry me overmuch, because the gash on my ribs was evidence as to what had really happened.

  The Maestro sighed and thanked him. “Alfeo, a ducat for him.”

  He had done well. I had not. Lucia, Ruosa, Caterina, and now Marina.

  Failure.

  Soon after that we went into dinner, Nostradamus walking with the aid of his canes, although Bruno hovered anxiously in the salone, eager to assist.

  We ate without exchanging a single word, the Maestro and I. I did not speak because I had nothing useful to offer. Zorzi had been tall. The false friar I had assaulted on Campo San Zanipolo had not been tall. Zorzi was almost certainly dead, his brother had said, murdered by a bounty hunter. Our evidence for identifying the killer as Zorzi Michiel was looking flimsier by the hour, and yet something nibbled and nagged away at the back of my mind, some thought that I could not get hold of.

  The Maestro’s silence was ominous. I kept hoping he would decide to try another foreseeing, but he didn’t. Judging by past experience, I feared that he had dreamed up something else, some maneuver so exotic and dangerous that he was trying to find an alternative.

  After dinner, when we returned to the atelier, he was hardly into his chair before he said, “You must go and see Carlo Celsi again.”

  “Sunday afternoon. He’ll be attending the Great Council.” And Fulgentio Trau would be on duty, which explained why he had not come to see me.

  “This evening will suffice. Now a contract with donna Alina Orio. Better do a draft first.”

  “What terms?” I asked, reaching for a sheet of paper.

  “Three hundred ducats to prove that Gentile Michiel was stabbed by someone other than his son, Zorzi.”

  I selected a quill and inspected its tip carefully. “You believe that?”

  “Yes, but as yet the evidence is merely indicative, not indisputable.”

  Evidence? What evidence? He waited for a moment, no doubt hoping I would ask him so he could tell me to work it out for myself. When I didn’t, he continued.

  “The primary objective remains to track down this killer of courtesans, and I still believe that the two cases are connected. I want you to question every soul in that house who may, in your opinion, have any useful knowledge of either matter. The old lady can impose that on them, can’t she?”

  “Possibly not on Bernardo or Domenico, but I fancy everyone else is sufficiently terrified of her.”

  “Mm. Make that just two hundred ducats. I don’t want to frighten her into changing her mind. And I shall need a week. If I haven’t caught Honeycat by then, we shall have to try something else.”

  If he wanted me to go back to Carlo Celsi, he must already have something else in mind. He would have to tell me eventually, so I wasn’t about to ask. I set to work on a draft, trying out a Carolingian minuscule hand that I had been studying. I was close to finished when someone rapped on the front door.

  I rose eagerly, despite an angry reprimand from my stitches, because I hoped that the caller would be Violetta returned from her house party. As always, I left the atelier door ajar so that the Maestro could listen. I opened one flap of the big outer doors.

  Many odd people come calling on the Maestro, but probably no couple I have ever found waiting out there at the top of the stairs has surprised me more. The woman was swathed from the ground up in the habit of a Benedictine nun, with only her fingers visible to show that there was a woman inside that menacing pillar of black. The man at her side, gray robed and tonsured, was the third Michiel son, the former Timoteo. I bowed to his austere, Old Testament stare.

  “This is an unexpected honor, Brother.”

  “Unexpected no doubt, my son, but no honor.” This was an attempt at humility, but it needed work. “Tell your master I wish to see him.”

  When necessary I can obstruct and obfuscate with the best of them, giving the Maestro time to escape by the secret door, but I was confident that Nostradamus would want to see this pair. I swung the atelier door wide.

  “Brother Fedele and Sister Lucretzia, master.”

  Fedele shot me an angry glance, perhaps annoyed that I had been meddling enough in his family’s affairs to know his sister’s name, but he did not deny it. He strode in, gown swirling above bare feet, and paused to look around disapprovingly at the wall of books, the alchemy bench, the examination couch, and other curiosities. The nun followed him in and he pointed at one of the spare chairs we keep on hand for larger groups, one of two behind the door, near the great armillary sphere. She went to it without a word. Then the friar marched over to the Maestro, who smiled up at him.

  “I am suffering from reminders of mortality today, Brother. Pray excuse my failure to rise, and do be seated.”

  Fedele perched straight-backed on the edge of one of the green chairs. “I am sorry to hear of your infirmity, Filippo. I shall keep my visit brief.”

  I crept back to the desk, turning my chair slightly so I could also keep a corner of an eye on the nun, sitting off to my right, but she was motionless as a statue. I wondered how much her eyes wandered behind her veil.

  The Maestro was on his best behavior. “Your visit is welcome. May I offer you refreshment?”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “Won’t you present me to your honored sister?”

  “No. I am escorting her back to Santa Giustina and dropped in here on the way. You sent your apprentice to see my mother yesterday.”

  “I sent him to see your brother Bernardo.”

  “Why?” No, Fedele was not Old Testament. He was a martyr, and his emaciated, anguished features belonged on a crucifix or a triptych from some gloomy, sin-obsessed medieval monastery. He looked as if he had been fasting since midsummer on an exercise regime of three flagellations a day.

  “To give him a message.”

  “Why?”

  The normal response would have been, What message? The Maestro hesitated a moment before speaking.

  “Because I considered it my duty.”

  “Or to extract money from my family by preying on their sorrow?”

  “No.”

  “But you will accept money if it is offered?”

  The Maestro gingerly eased himself back in his chair and then put his fingertips together, five on five, which normally indicates the start of a lecture.

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  That was almost a demand for a sermon, and the friar rose to the bait.

  “You would be well advised to, Filippo. I look around at all this unseemly display and remember the words of our Lord about the camel failing to pass through the eye of a needle.”

  “Ah, an interesting metaphor. According to the revered Bishop Theophylact of Bulgaria, there was a gate in the wall of Jerusalem so narrow that in order to take a camel through, you would have to unload
all its burdens and—”

  “Let us talk about your burdens, my son.”

  The Maestro cackled one of his irritating cackles. “Brother, I believe we are talking at cross-purposes. You have asked five questions. Now let me have a turn, and then we may understand each other better. You were sixteen or seventeen when your father was murdered, may Our Lord rest his soul. You would not have been present in the Basilica, but you were old enough to comprehend. Describe the wound that killed him.”

  The green chairs face the window so that the Maestro has a better view of visitors than they do of him. So do I if I am at the desk. The priest must have found the question outrageous, but he hid his revulsion well.

  “He was stabbed in the back with a dagger. The wound penetrated his tippet and his kidney. He lost consciousness almost at once and died before he could be moved out of the church.”

  “The dagger belonged to your family?”

  The response was quiet but intense. “Who told you that?”

  The Maestro chuckled again, evidently intending to enrage the priest even further—angry men make mistakes. “The Ten did. Not in so many words, you understand, but they must have had reasons to conclude that your brother was guilty and if the weapon had been readily available to members of the family, that would be a compelling one. Right from the start I noted that as a plausible theory and your presence here reinforces my suspicion.”

  “What are you implying?” Fedele had lost color, which is more often a sign of anger than fear. Oh, what would San Francesco have said? And what was Sister Lucretzia thinking under her dreary draperies?

  “I can understand,” the Maestro said calmly, “that your family is reluctant to have old sorrows reawakened; I mean having your father’s murder reexamined. Even so, I find your respective reactions excessive. Sier Domenico, a rich and no doubt busy nobleman, contrived to have a private discussion with my apprentice. Sier Bernardo, on the other hand, snubbed him in a way I would not treat a beggar. Today they send you and your sister to call on me. Very curious behavior!”