The Alchemist's Apprentice

by Dave Duncan

  “You mean not enough will be revealed?” Vasco fancies himself as a wit.

  “As the lustrissimo says. There is a slight chance that his master is the culprit. That is what I have to establish. If I identify either of them, I will happily accuse him and give you reason to look for the missing evidence.”

  “Will you, indeed?” The vizio smiled. Heads he won, tails I lost. What more could his shriveled little heart desire? “And on what basis will you identify either of them?”

  “Call it a hunch.”

  He smiled. The Ten could make stones speak. “And who is his master?”

  “A Greek bookseller, Alexius Karagounis.”

  Vasco’s smile disappeared like an anvil in a canal.

  I guessed why and felt a fact drop into place with the thump of a pile driver’s mallet—the Ten already suspected Karagounis! That was why the doge was so concerned; he had unwittingly gone to meet with a possible Turkish agent, and he was utterly forbidden to talk with foreigners except in the presence of his counselors.

  Silence fell. Under the competing songs along the canal, I could hear Vasco’s brain creaking as he weighed his options. If Karagounis was under surveillance, then it would take a specific order from the Ten to arrest him and a premature move would bring the wrath of the mighty crashing down on the vizio. To let Alfeo Zeno interfere and then not arrest Karagounis would alert the suspect and cause him to flee. Vasco’s only safe course was to throw Alfeo Zeno back in jail and report to Quazza for fresh orders.

  Then he reached a decision and smiled again. “It will be interesting. If your accusation is false, you will be in serious trouble, of course.”

  “I am confident that my information is correct,” I said, trying to look as if that were true. Now it was my brain’s turn to creak. My warped imagination toyed with the possibility that Karagounis was a spy for the Ten and then discarded it. “He may have fled. I did try to call on the man yesterday, but there was no one home.”

  “We have ways of opening doors,” the vizio said. He continued to smile, no doubt listening to the noises my brain was making as I tried to work out what he had worked out.

  No more was said until we reached our destination. There is no way to climb out of a gondola while keeping one leg straight, and my scarlet hose was oozing blood by the time I was up on the quay. I looked skyward in dismay.

  My companion leered. “Top floor, you said? You want to run up ahead?”

  “If you were a gentleman you would carry me,” I said grumpily and headed for the stairs. Vasco and his two colossi followed. There had been women standing around the door as we approached. Now there were none, but almost every window held a face or two, as if we had sounded trumpets. The vizio’s red cloak had worked this magic.

  Somewhere around the second floor it occurred to me to wonder how long the Council had suspected Karagounis, assuming it did. Suppose the Ten had debated arresting Karagounis on the day of the Imer supper, and that very evening the doge himself had gone rushing off to a meeting with the suspect? If Karagounis had already fled the country, the doge could be accused of warning him.

  Around the third floor I found another possibility, a more plausible one. What if Vasco knew that Karagounis was under surveillance but was not supposed to know? He could have been snooping in documents or eavesdropping. So now he would get the credit for catching a spy but could not be blamed for spoiling a plan he had not been told about. He need no longer worry that I was leading him on a wild goose chase. This was going to be one of his good days.

  We reached the top and I pointed to the correct door. One of the apes pounded a fist on it: one, two, three…It opened.

  I did not know the man standing there, although he was dressed as a servant and fitted Violetta’s description of “middle twenties, slender, dusky, looked like a Moor.” He was a scared Moor when he saw Vasco’s sword and cloak.

  “Your name?”

  “Pulaki Guarana, clarissimo.” He sounded more like a mainlander than a Venetian, but certainly not a Greek.

  Vasco glanced at me; I shook my head.

  “Take me to your master.”

  Pulaki resisted a push. “What name shall—”

  “No announcement. Move!”

  I followed with the oversized gondoliers on my heels. We crossed a dingy, cramped hallway and entered a dingy, cramped room being used as a study. It was almost filled by the desk. The man on the far side rose to his feet.

  He had gone from heavyset to fat in the twenty or so years since I saw him perform his first murder. Then he had been bearded, now he just needed a shave. He was ugly, oily, and angry. Although I could see no demon on his shoulder, I would believe that it was still there until I had watched him being exorcized by a conclave of archbishops. He ignored me completely.

  “Your name and station?” Vasco demanded.

  Karagounis bowed a slight bow and smiled a slight smile. “Alexius Karagounis, at your service, messer. I have a permit of temporary residence, if you wish to see it.”

  “You sell books?”

  The Greek smiled again, a you-won’t-catch-me-that-way smile. “No, messer. I am not yet permitted to trade. But I do have some interesting manuscripts if Your Excellency would care to inspect them? Pulaki, bring goblets and wine for the noble lords.”

  “No wine. Apprentice?”

  I said, “If you are an honest Christian, let us see you cross yourself.”

  Karagounis turned his oily smirk on me. All his reactions seemed curiously wrong. He had not asked our names or questioned our right to burst in on his privacy; it was almost as if he knew both of us and had been expecting us. “As a child in Greece my mother taught me to cross myself like this. Here, after I have been inducted into the truer faith, I shall cross myself like this.”

  I had him. Now he could not try to claim that he was a Jew.

  I said, “In spite of your offer of wine, I say you are a Muslim. Show us that you are not.”

  “You are calling me a liar, young sir?”

  “No,” I said. “I believe that you had Christian parents, because I say that you are a kapikulu. You were born somewhere in the impoverished wilds of the Balkans. In your youth you were sold to the sultan’s slavers, forcibly converted to Islam, and reared to serve the sultan. Prove that you have not been circumcised and I will apologize.”

  Vasco ostentatiously laid a hand on his sword hilt.

  Karagounis ignored him and kept staring at me, but sudden hatred burned up in his eyes and some trick of the light made them seem to glint red. He said, “We could help you, Alfeo Zeno!”

  Then he turned and dived out the window.

  Which was closed. Don’t try it, just take my word for it, but it is almost impossible to jump through a well-made casement, because both glass and lead are resistant to blunt objects. Either Karagounis called on demonic strength or the wooden sash had rotted after a century or so in the damp Venetian climate. Either way, he and the window vanished together, noisily. Vasco cried out in dismay and rushed around the desk. In their dash to join him, his heroes threw me against it, making me bang my injured leg.

  By the time I stopped swearing I was alone, the others having raced downstairs to demonstrate their skills at first aid. I limped to the gap in the wall and peered out carefully. My companions had not arrived yet, but Karagounis certainly had, landing half in and half out of the gondola—smashing it and smashing himself and sinking it in two feet of seawater and sewage. Some spectators had been injured by falling debris and a crowd had gathered to shriek like seagulls.

  I was sorry about the bystanders, but everything else pleased me. Suicide would be construed as a confession. Neither the Ten nor the gossips of the Rialto would have reason to blame the Maestro for the death of Procurator Orseolo. The doge and his friends should be able to hush up the whole affair. Vasco would probably get half his hide talked off him. I started toward the door and was distracted by a swirl of motion as the wind fluttered the papers on the desk.
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  I gathered them up before they blew all over the room. When we intruded, Karagounis had been transcribing or translating something. I am no expert like the Maestro, but I could see at a glance that these white sheets were modern, while those yellowed pages were densely inscribed with Greek text in a faded and antique hand. The originals were unbound, but looked as if they had been razored out of a bound book. They might be worth nothing or a lot of something.

  Who owned those tatty scraps of manuscript?

  Originally they must have been pillaged from a private house or cobwebby monastery in some Christian territory overrun by the Turks, or sold by starving owners for coppers just to buy food. So the sultan probably considered that he owned them, but he had given them to Karagounis to use as bait so he could get within striking distance of the doge. Karagounis had no further use for them and all his goods would be confiscated by the Republic anyway. They would end up locked away as evidence in some musty archive.

  Who had unmasked the Grand Turk’s agent at no small risk to himself? Who was going to reward me for this outstanding service to the state? Who had ruined a good pair of hose and very nearly been impaled in six directions that very morning? Was I to be compensated for loss and suffering?

  The answers were: me, nobody, me, and not likely. Considering all the factors involved, it did seem that no one had any better right to those papers than I did. I slipped them into the pocket of my cloak and set off to limp down all those stairs, one step at a time.

  13

  I had no sooner paid off the gondolier outside the Ca’ Barbolano than the Marciana horde swarmed around me to point out that I was bleeding. By the time I had finished explaining that I had just been oozing a little but had now stopped, two of the largest size had lifted me between them to chair me upstairs. Holding my leg straight out while they were doing this took enough effort to start it bleeding again. I thanked them and hobbled into the Maestro’s apartment. Corrado shouted that I was hurt. His mother came flustering out of the kitchen…You would think none of them had ever seen blood before, let alone mine.

  I went briefly to my room to shed my cloak. Then I went to report.

  When I limped into the atelier, the Maestro was seated by the fireplace. To my amazement, the visitor in the green chair opposite was a nun. I blinked twice before I recognized Violetta, alias Sister Chastity, and remembered that she and I had a date to call on Bianca Orseolo.

  The Maestro is enough of a prude to rank courtesans with prostitutes and despise men who pay women for sex when they could buy books instead, but he is not a misogynist—he finds almost everybody stupid and boring, regardless of gender. Violetta is well aware of all this and goes out of her way to charm him. Nobody is less boring or stupid than she when she wants to be. He eats out of her hand and would not notice if she fed him rocks.

  I detoured by the desk because there was a letter lying on my side of it. It had been opened, of course.

  Dear and honored friend,

  The man of whom you enquired was in serious financial straits until recently, having pawned his book collection and some of his furniture. About two months ago he came into better times and paid off all his debts.

  I have the honor to be

  Your humble servant

  Isaia

  That testimony would hang Ottone Imer now, if the Ten got hold of it.

  On the Maestro’s side, the Midrasch-Na-Zohar had been closed and pushed aside, but Nettesheim’s De Occulta Philosophia lay open beside it, so he had not given up on cabalism yet.

  I headed for the tête-à-tête, collecting a chair on the way. Somehow Violetta seemed much less outrageous in her nun’s costume than she had the previous day. Had I grown used to it, or had Milana altered it for her? Her sun-bleached hair was well tucked away and she wore no face paint, but it was equally possible that Violetta was merely acting nun so effectively that I failed to find her display of ankle and bosom as outrageous as I should.

  “Bishop takes pawn.” She lifted her lips to offer me a kiss, but she was Aspasia, so it was a Platonic, political kiss. Besides, bending was awkward for me at the moment. “You are bleeding, Alfeo.”

  “Just another jealous husband.” I sat down between them, facing the fire.

  “Rook to king’s bishop five,” the Maestro said.

  “Ah, disaster!” Violetta said. “I should have seen that! It will be mate in three, won’t it? I should know better than to try to match wits with one of the greatest minds in Europe, but I do thank you for the game, doctor. You look very pleased with yourself, apprentice. Shall I leave, so that you men can talk business?”

  “Maestro?”

  He said, “Not at all, madonna. I know Alfeo tells you everything anyway.”

  He does this just to rankle me, because he knows I will leap to her defense like a dog chasing a stick.

  “I do not tell her everything! I tell her nothing. In this case I questioned her because she was one of the witnesses, and a very observant one. She led me to valuable information about Enrico Orseolo, who had to be a prime suspect because he will be the old man’s heir. Other than that, she knows no more than the public at large.”

  He pulled a mawkish smile. I had brought back the stick. “Would you tell her what you did with that mirror last night?”

  “I haven’t done so, but if you give me permission I will.”

  Courtesans have to be the most secretive of people, and he knows that.

  “Do so, then.” He leaned back to watch.

  “I invoked a fiend last night, love,” I said. “Dangerous but necessary. That’s why I went to the church this morning.” I knew she would have heard about the fight that was the talk of the parish. “The demon showed me the face of the poisoner, and today I went calling on him with Filiberto Vasco. The spy was Karagounis, not his servant. When we questioned him he saw the game was up and jumped out a window. About now the vizio must be trying to explain why he brought in a dead spy. I wish him luck, very bad luck. But the case is closed. The would-be assassin was a Turkish agent. The procurator’s death was an accident, when their glasses got switched. The real plot was to kill the doge, who had been cleverly lured to the meeting.”

  “Well, I’m sorry about the old man,” Violetta said softly. “I am glad we don’t have to suspect poor Bianca.” She was Niobe, an aspect of her I rarely see, the sorrowing mother. Bellini or del Piombo would have taken one look at her and painted her at the foot of the cross for all eternity to admire.

  “We need not bother Bianca,” I said happily. “The case is closed.”

  “Indeed?” the Maestro murmured.

  I almost fell off my chair in alarm. “Am I missing something?”

  “You missed something last night,” he said with quiet satisfaction. I detest that sleepy look he puts on. He was going to make me look stupid in front of Violetta.

  I spoke through clenched teeth. “Instruct me, master.”

  “You are looking for a simple solution after I warned you the matter was complex.” He bunched his cheeks into a mocking smirk. “Evil is rarely simple. Yes, I’ve told you that often enough, but you must also remember that, while fiends are not as clever as certain nuns, they do know their business. A fiend making a mistake would be very unlikely to commit a lesser evil instead of a greater, and yet you are telling me that the fiend-ridden Karagounis poisoned a harmless old man instead of the Republic’s head of state. How very curious! A demon would be much more inclined to err the other way, like a dog spurning fresh meat in favor of a stinking heap of carrion. If the fiend had the chance—by design or by accident—to poison Nasone and did not do so, then the fiend must have been on the track of some greater evil. We must hope that today’s incident has balked it.”

  Violetta was silent, watching us both without expression. She must see how the old scoundrel was baiting me.

  I said, “You are telling me that Alexius Karagounis did not murder Procurator Orseolo despite what the other demon showed me?”

&nbs
p; He nodded smugly. “The logic is inescapable. How exactly did you command the fiend?” He knew that. I had reported every word.

  “First, a negative—to go away ‘if there was no murderer present on San Valentine’s Eve last in the room in…’ Oh, confound it!” What I actually thought was Damn you! which is what Putrid had said to me.

  “You have it now?”

  “Well, I don’t!” Violetta said loyally, probably lying to make me feel better.

  “A murderer,” I said, “is a person who has murdered another. The old man did not die until the following day, so the poisoner was not a murderer until then—unless he had killed someone else previously, I mean. Until Orseolo actually died, the crime was merely attempted murder. I should have specified poisoner, not murderer.”

  The Maestro picked it up. “Alfeo’s tame fiend would normally have taken him exactly at his word and gone away, to mislead him into thinking that there had been no killer present. But there was a murderer present, one of the sultan’s assassins. The demon would undoubtedly have preferred not to betray that one, because the man had the potential to do much greater evil in the future, but it had to obey Alfeo’s command.”

  “What greater evil, Maestro?” Violetta asked anxiously.

  “Hell alone knows,” I said. “Karagounis was setting himself up in the city, planning to marry so he could stay here. He had Ottone Imer in his pocket. He organized the book sale so he could meet rich and important people. He must have had some long-range plan. In a few years he might have become truly dangerous.”

  He had already been dangerous enough to shed some of my blood that morning. He had known my name and face. Who else but his demon could have warned him about me and told him to send bravi after me? Or tracked me down in the church, a place I do not go as often as I should.