The Malice of Fortune

by Michael Ennis

  Of course I presumed that Valentino’s condottieri had been privileged to see this map before they betrayed him.

  Valentino did not even nod. “But you have not finished,” he said flatly. “Show me the rest.”

  Leonardo’s map was so precise that I was able to trace our route that afternoon, from the pile of stones beside the river into the hills south of the city, running my finger directly along the compass line labeled for the south wind, Mezzodi. Yet as I attempted to judge the distance on the map in proportion to the distance we had traveled, I understood the flaw in my reasoning: I was forced to move my finger off the map entirely.

  “I presumed that he would make another figure of geometry,” I said, “following the points of this map. No doubt this is what Leonardo was measuring this afternoon.” I shook my head. “Unless the mappa itself is in error, what we found today”—I lifted my hand and crossed myself—“cannot be placed on this map.”

  “The maestro is continuing his measurements.” Here Valentino nodded slightly, as if satisfied that he had just measured the depth of my knowledge—and my ignorance.

  “In some fashion this murderer intends to create a circle within a square,” I said, presuming that Leonardo had already shared the bollettino with his employer. “So this figure is not finished. There will be more.” By this I meant parts of a woman’s body.

  But when Valentino did not offer a response, I said, “Have you instructed Ramiro da Lorca to look for the rest of that woman?” I assumed this would be the case, not only because I had just seen Ramiro come and go with some urgency; among all of Valentino’s people, he had the most familiarity with Juan’s murder, as I knew only too well.

  Valentino shook his head absently. “No. I have sent Ramiro to command the garrison at Rimini. His methods of investigation are old-fashioned. The rack, rope, and hot iron. Leonardo employs the methods of scienza.”

  No doubt I made some expression that betrayed my surprise—and dread. Ramiro had been one of the pope’s most trusted retainers before His Holiness had attached him to Valentino’s household, and it seemed likely that his loyalties remained with the father rather than the son. If Ramiro was to be excluded from this investigation, I could only wonder if Valentino wished to determine entirely what his father would be told. And if this second murder was intended to refrain the provocation of the first, perhaps Valentino saw it in his interest—the interest of his peace—to withhold from his father certain information.

  Valentino did not remark on Ramiro’s exile, instead returning to my prior speculation. “You presume there will be further discoveries. Provocations.” He paused at length, his nostrils dilating several times. “Yes. There will be more.”

  This conviction was not offered in a fashion that invited further questions but instead seemed to forbid them. I prepared to be dismissed, if not condemned.

  Here he glanced at me again, a slight thing. Yet I recalled this expression quite well; it prefaced a silence by which he demanded—or pleaded—that one address some longing hidden within his breast. That was the single key to his seduction: where all but a few men wish only to enter you and fill you up, with their cocks and thoughts and sentiments—in many instances all equally flaccid—he brought a woman inside him entirely. He could not exist until she poured her soul into his.

  So after a silence, I gave him something. “That woman who was here. She loves you with every fiber of her being. I hope you will be merciful.” Yet perhaps I was merely pleading for myself.

  He blinked. “She knows nothing of me. Nothing but flesh. The sentiments that reside on the tips of our fingers.”

  After a moment Valentino looked down and again took up Leonardo’s mappa. “We have been given the means to hold in our hands the entire orb of the Earth. We need only to measure it in order to possess it.” His next words, almost sotto voce, did not seem intended for me. “But we need not turn this new world of ours over to Fortune, chaos, and war.”

  The duke motioned his head toward the door. “The maestro will continue to examine this matter,” he said with less sentiment than one could find on a fingertip. “When he has completed his observations, we will talk again.”

  IX

  On this night I ran across the drawbridge, imagining that hands grasped at me from the dark moat. When I reached the street my breath made a cloud before me. In the time I had waited on Valentino, the snow had blown down from the mountains again, tiny, wind-driven grains that stung my face.

  Thus blinded, I confronted the truth I had not wished to face in Valentino’s study. In the same blithe fashion that the duke would discard the poor woman who loved him so nakedly, he would discard me. I would not be strangled or “interrogated”—if he simply wished to have me out of the way, he might have done so tonight. Instead Valentino would leave me at liberty to nose around Imola; I might even learn something that would enable him to exact more favorable concessions from the condottieri. Indeed, I presumed this was why he had instructed a courtier as valuable as Leonardo to continue pursuing a truth he only intended to bury. But all too soon Signor Oliverotto would convey the documents to Vitellozzo Vitelli for his signature, at which time the treaty would bind all the parties.

  Whereupon I would return to Rome with life intact, but too late to ransom my little boy. The name of his father’s murderer would no longer have any value, except to poison the wound in his grandfather’s breast. With no other vengeance left to him, His Holiness would seek his solace in my lingering and painful death. And even if the Holy Madonna were to intercede for me in Heaven, I would suffer an eternal torment far greater than any punishment of Hell, knowing I had left my precious son behind to grow up in the Devil’s house.

  After I had entered our palazzo, I ventured the length of the courtyard, ascending the stairs to the piano nobile on the wing opposite ours. I pounded on Messer Niccolò’s door, only to be greeted by a ghost, or so it seemed: the boy in a nightshirt was so pale and slender that it was a miracle he had worked the latch, much less lifted the bar. He couldn’t have been seventeen, but he had the vitality of an old man—he fixed me with one rheumy eye, the other nearly crusted shut, and stumbled back inside.

  I followed this scarecrow into the bedroom, where he collapsed upon the mattress with a pitiful groan. Just in front of the shuttered window was a small table, lit by a tallow candle and piled with books and papers, with scant room cleared for an inkwell.

  Messer Niccolò had fallen asleep at this little desk; he remained sitting in an old chair, still dressed in his shirt and hose, his head at the angle of a hanged man. I spied a bit on his researches. In addition to the stacks of folded letters and diplomatic dispatches, I found a Latin text, the Decades of Titus Livy. A missive also appeared to be in progress, this beginning with the salutation “Magnifici Domini,” no doubt intended for the secretary’s lordships in Florence.

  I gave him an indelicate poke in the shoulder. “Messer Niccolò,” I said, “I hope you found your supper agreeable.”

  He sprang to his feet, blinked, and gave me a little hand roll that seemed to mock us both. “Antonio found it particularly agreeable—he was able to rise from the dead and eat. The miracle of Imola.” He glanced at the boy on the bed and whispered, “My manservant has made my mattress his sickbed, leaving me the choice of his cot or this chair. When he is not ill, Antonio must endeavor only to restore his health; when he is ill, I must endeavor to restore his health while providing for myself.” He added, “I have lost my enthusiasm for Terence,” referring to those comedies wherein the servants dictate their masters’ lives.

  “Is that why you find your amusement in the more serious Latins? Your copy of Livy is marked up well enough.”

  He ran his hand over the salad atop his head. “Titus Livy tells us that the study of history is the best medicine for present ills.”

  “Ah. So you are not merely your manservant’s physician but Italy’s as well.”

  He lifted an eyebrow a bit.

  “Well,
Dottore,” I went on, “I find myself in agreement with something you told me today. All this has to do with whatever Maestro Leonardo is measuring.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “It has to do with considerably more than that. But we must begin with whatever Leonardo is measuring, if only because it will lead us to this man’s necessity. And his nature.”

  “His necessity?” This seemed some philosophical invention. “I do not care about this vile murderer’s necessity or his nature. I want to learn his name.” But I did not think this was the time to reveal how strongly I suspected the name Oliverotto da Fermo.

  “Nevertheless, I do not believe we will know his name before we learn his necessity,” Niccolò replied. In the candlelight it was hard to say if he wore the expression of a mischievous boy or more resembled the Devil himself.

  Here I saw an opportunity to aid both of us. “I have now seen the corners of the winds.” Whereupon I proceeded to tell him about Leonardo’s mappa of Imola, describing how the quarters of the first woman had been placed precisely on four equally spaced points of the wind rose.

  When I had finished, Niccolò looked down and placed the tips of his fingers on his Titus Livy. “Yes. A disegno, drawn with human flesh. But Leonardo already knew that. So now what is our maestro measuring?”

  I shook my head. “The point the maestro measured in that olive grove is not on his map. You said yourself this was all a riddle or a rebus. I think the location of the olive grove is some sort of key to that riddle. Perhaps Leonardo believes his measurements will direct him to the head of the first victim.”

  “I never took to geometry.” Messer Niccolò’s fingers remained on his Titus Livy. “The question I would first consider is this: Why the riddle?”

  “To taunt the pope,” I said impatiently, recalling all too well His Holiness’s fury in the Hall of Saints. “To confuse and enrage him with these games, so that the pope himself will remove the burden of delaying the negotiations from the Vitelli—whose fellow condottieri are far more eager for peace. I believe it was you who instructed me regarding these ‘additional concessions’ the Vitelli hope to coerce, when they are allowed time to hire more soldiers and achieve superiority in numbers.” I could not fathom why I had to continue reminding Messer Niccolò of his own words.

  “I don’t know. Perhaps that is in fact this murderer’s necessity—to torment the pope. Or perhaps it is merely his nature.”

  I had all too little time for more of this philosophical nonsense. “Let me make you a proposal, Messer Niccolò. I intend to examine Maestro Leonardo’s studio for whatever drawings and notes he has recorded with regard to this murderer’s figures of geometry. I invite you to come with me.”

  “You intend to call on him? Will you send Camilla over with supper before you pound on his door in the middle of the night?” He made no effort to disguise his amusement.

  “I intend to call on him,” I said, “this very night. But I do not intend to knock.”

  Once again I had erased his smile. Messer Niccolò drew his fingers over the page beneath him, as if caressing a child’s face. When he looked up at me, his black eyes were sparked by the candlelight and I could see the desire he had previously taken pains to hide. Yet I could also see that he did not trust me.

  At last he shook his head, evidently perplexed at his own decision, because he said, “If you mean to go at once, I have only to get my cape.”

  Messer Niccolò having obtained his wrap, I brought him across the courtyard to my rooms, so that I could quickly change my clothes yet again. While he waited outside my bedroom, I told Camilla where I intended to go and she dressed me accordingly, in hose and a boy’s short jacket, my hair pulled up under a berretta.

  When we had returned to Messer Niccolò, I instructed Camilla, “Bar the door, of course. But I am not even going to say farewell, because I will return so soon.”

  My darling smiled at me, in a fashion that struck through my heart like a stradiot’s spear.

  I suppose here I should tell you a few things about your zia Camilla, who could shame the Seraphs with her goodness. She came to me in anno Domini 1494, the year the French came to Rome. Charles VIII had arrived with his enormous army in the last days of December, driving Pope Alexander out of the Vatican and into the Castel Sant’Angelo. But His Holiness, though weak in arms and soldiers, was far too clever for the drooling, watery-eyed little king. With the aid of my dear old patron, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, a truce was negotiated that proved more profitable to the pope than to His Most Christian Majesty.

  The French soldiers were allowed into Rome like panthers on leashes. Most of them were held in check, but enough got loose to sack scores of houses, making bonfires of the tables and chairs while they drank our finest wines and sampled without recompense delicacies of various sorts—though King Charles himself had issued a decree that no cortigiane were to be harmed. Even the houses of the pope’s chamberlain and the mother of His Holiness’s children—your grandmother—were not spared. And unfortunate servants and Jews often fared little better than the furniture.

  I was twenty-six years old in that year, and there was not a man in Rome, from the fuller treading piss in his vats in the Trastevere to the pope on the throne of Saint Peter, who did not know my name; the wages of my notoriety had earned me the best house on the Via dei Banchi. Even now I can still smell those rooms, the orange water and lavender; the flowers I had every day in spring and summer: roses, carnations, jasmine, and hyacinth.

  But there was little such bellezza on the day I met your zia Camilla. I was out in the cold rain, seeing after the bravi who always guarded my house—in those difficult days they also informed me as to the whereabouts of the French looters, in the event we should have to flee. I watched the evacuation of the neighborhoods just above the Ponte Sant’Angelo, where hazy plumes of smoke rose into the leaden sky. These refugees had loaded their mules with whatever they hoped to save: money chests, dresses, silver plate, what have you. I took in several of these distraught souls, who had credulously believed the French pledges, and was about to shut my door when I observed a couple mounted on a mule, trotting right down the Via dei Banchi, but in the direction of all the trouble. He had two good lumps on his nose and white scars on his stubbled cheeks. She was half his age, not more than fourteen, with a child’s slender face and charcoal eyes that had already seen everything.

  Surmising that both the mule and the girl had been stolen, I waved the thief to a stop. “Messer,” I said, “where are you going with my friend’s mule?”

  He threw back his cape and reached for the sword at his belt—until he saw my bravi step out from my doorway. “Who did you say your friend is?” he asked, his eyes slits.

  “Donna Vanozza Catanei,” I said, this being your aforementioned grandmother, although her ownership of the mule was entirely my invention. I wanted this thief to think he had just met a better thief.

  He gave me a scoundrel’s toothy smile. “That is so. Madonna Vanozza gave me this mule with orders to sell it to the oltramontani before they could steal it.” He nodded toward the smoke plumes.

  I knew what he intended to sell to the French. “Who is the girl?”

  “My sister. When I heard what the monks were doing to her at Santa Cecilia, I took my own flesh out of there, may a better God now protect her.”

  “Truly? And here I am looking for someone to recite the Litany of Saints.” I could see from the girl’s bare, purple feet that she had come from the dye vats instead of the convent, but you couldn’t say which was worse. “For which do you think the French are likely to pay more, your little sister-sister or the mule?”

  He pumped his heels at the mule’s ribs but I nodded to my boys to grab the halter. I told the rascal, “I think it will matter less to the oltramontani that the mule has already been ridden.” Then I looked carefully at the girl. “Do you want to go with him?”

  I knew what her eyes said. After a moment she shook her head.

  “Messer,” I s
aid, holding out my arms to the girl, “I leave you the mule.”

  So that was how my Camilla came into my house.

  She did not trust me for two weeks, although she ate my soup and roasts and took in everything with those agile, all-consuming eyes. Of course she believed that I would use her as I had been used when I was her age—like the girl of Andros. But one day she followed me into my bedroom and stood looking about at all my Greek vases and Roman medallions—with those eyes I didn’t know if she intended to snatch something and run off. Instead this tiny voice emerged: “Madonna, can I live here until Easter?”

  I took Camilla in my arms for the first time since I had lifted her from that mule. And I gave her at least a dozen kisses before I said, “You can live here forever.”

  That was when she began to tell me her story. Like me, she was born in the dirt, in her instance the red dust of the Neapolitan Campania. The rest was a tangled tale, much of which even she couldn’t unravel, but it is sufficient to say that she was sold like a basket of fat Spanish olives to another family, to serve as a companion to their daughter, only to be put on the street when the little girl died of plague. After that she suffered in as many guises as Ovid’s Mestra, until at last she found herself treading cloth in a dye vat near Monte Mario, from which she was soon enough chased by the French soldiers pillaging there. Having no place to go, she had been offered the poisonous charity of the lout from whom I had retrieved her.

  I taught my darling Camilla to read, as my mother had taught me, and that was the beginning of our love. In the end she did not profit, because she spent more years with me in the Trastevere than in our palazzo on the Via dei Banchi. But without Camilla I would not have survived the day you came into this world, and when she might have made her own life, she stayed with you, my precious son, as if you were her own. She was my first baby, you were my second. I was your first mother, and she was your second.