The Malice of Fortune

by Michael Ennis

  I will only tell you that I did as instructed and afterward went into the latrine, where I began to wash myself with a towel I had wetted in the basin beside His Excellency’s bed. I stood in the dark scrubbing that vile secretion from my legs—I had never imagined that a man’s “seed” would be any different than the dry seed a farmer tosses upon a field. And at that moment I knew my mama was never coming back for me.

  I did not sob as you might think I would have. Instead I recalled the Inferno, the first book I had ever read, when the poet enters the gates of Dis and looks out over a vast graveyard of fiery tombs, spread in all directions as far as he can see. Still just a girl, I saw before me a life no less terrible and inescapable than the city of Dis, to which I believed my own mother had abandoned me. In this fashion I blamed my poor mama for the choice others made.

  Just then Gambiera burst into the latrine, her eyes dark and darting. “We’ll go now,” she said in a harsh whisper. She grabbed my hand before I could even drop my skirts, yet instead of taking me downstairs to the street she dragged me deeper into the house, where shortly we entered the most remarkable room. It was lit by only a single lamp, but I could see antiquities and books everywhere.

  Gambiera’s head swiveled like an owl’s as she appraised all these treasures. “Take something,” she whispered malevolently.

  A moment later, she lunged at one of the tables, her fingers like talons, and snatched her “gratuity,” as she always referred to these thefts. I could only see that she had pinched what looked like an immense coin, though no doubt it was an antique medallion of some sort. “If you don’t take something every time,” she said, drilling me with those raven eyes, “you will end your life in a whorehouse, with every malformed, half-witted gallows bait in Christendom shoving his donkey dick into your little perfume bottle.”

  Terrified even to imagine a fate worse than that to which I was already condemned, I grabbed a book, smaller than most of the others, the leather binding almost black from grease—and clutched it like my last hope as Gambiera dragged me out into the street.

  When I returned to my bedroom at Gambiera’s house, I read the title on the front page: Regulaes grammaticales. I did not know that this was a Latin grammar, or that it was the first book any child encounters when he ventures beyond the vernacular. But as I turned the pages, I gazed in wonder at those strange and beguiling Latin words. To me they seemed like the answers to all the mysteries of the universe.

  From this humble beginning, I accompanied my thieving “sister” to suppers, garden parties, concerts, theatricals, and balls for almost four more years, halfway through giving up the chastity Gambiera had so carefully husbanded to the highest bidder, a fat old German cardinal who grunted and groaned like a quarry worker throughout—after having paid four hundred ducats for a pleasure that did not seem worth a carlino to either of us.

  But I also advanced from my Regulaes grammaticales to Ovid and Horace, and then to Cicero and Tacitus. And soon I became wise enough to understand that I could pluck knowledge from a learned man’s brain as easily as I could steal a manuscript from his studiolo. In this fashion I earned a distinction that eventually brought me to the tables of the most distinguished men of letters, as well as the princes of the Church. When Rodrigo Borgia became pope, an office he could not have purchased without the singular aid of my great friend and patron, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, I was among those who dined with the new pontiff the next day, at twenty-four years old occupying a chair any man in Rome would have given his right hand—and his right testicle—to claim.

  I did not stop my climb up this Jacob’s ladder of learning and wealth until I met your father. After several years in Spain, Juan had returned to Rome to become captain general of the papal armies, a position coveted by everyone, it seemed, save him; your father was the only man I had ever met who valued love, however reckless and mad, over his own greed and ambition. They all laughed at Juan’s vanity, his silly alla turca costumes, but they could never see that he was mocking their vanity and self-importance, that he wished only to live every day as if the sun that set on it would never rise again. I adored his virtues and did not understand that he could not survive his faults. And I only pray that you will be heir to the former and possess few of the latter.

  So my darling, in such fashion I made the best of the choice that was made for me. Year after year I added to my treasury of knowledge and earned a liberty that few nuns or wives could ever imagine: I owned my own property and was free to converse with whom I chose about topics of interest to me. I found myself at the center of great events and knew well, often to my profit, not only the persons of great men but also their peculiarities.

  Yet even the cortigiana onesta fortunate enough to have mastered her trade must fear the inevitable loss of her assets—beauty and youth. When Geras clasps us to his wizened breast, there are those few cortigiane who have husbanded their income well enough to retire in modest comfort. But there are a great many more who must continue to labor, even as they become husks, the sad remains of their youth rattling around inside them like seeds in a dry gourd. If a courtesan must take up residence in a brothel, she is not likely to go out again, except in her coffin. And every day she will pray that it is her last. It is the living truth upon the Body of Christ, that a cortigiana onesta would rather walk into a graveyard and throw herself into her own tomb, than walk through the door of a whorehouse.

  XVI

  Far more than the whorehouse, however, I feared leaving you in your grandfather’s house. So I waited until my heart had let go of my throat, forced myself to take a breath, and climbed the steps.

  The bravo met me at the front door, his drowsy eyes wandering all over me as he let me into a room of considerable size, lit by greasy tallow candles and a blazing fireplace with a terra-cotta hood as broad as the roof of a small farmhouse. The tables were bare planks littered with jugs, glasses, platters, and bones, with men of all sorts seated on the rude benches: secretaries, farmers, merchants in fur-trimmed caps, cavalry officers in gold-stitched jackets. The girls who paraded about for them were attired in wool dresses a servant wouldn’t wear on Sunday. Some showed the grinding years—as well as the pox scars and pustules—that even a jar of ceruse could not conceal. But a few still had the unadorned beauty that country girls so often possess. I prayed for a blessing on all these ladies, knowing full well that what little grace God had already shown them would be withdrawn bit by bit every day they were here.

  Despite the crowd, the pimp wasn’t difficult to find—no man with any other sort of livelihood would wear Spanish shoes so long and pointed that you could spit a capon on the toes. I raised a hand to obtain his notice.

  He came to me with hips forward, his four-color hose so tight that it was pink at the knees, his codpiece no doubt obtained from the other half of the bravo’s melon. The French pox had left his face as rough as a peach pit. Faster than a cardinal’s chamberlain can reach for a tip, he had his hand on my culo.

  “I’m not here to work for a poxy shit-rag like you,” I said, which made him so mad that he raised his hand as if to give me a knock on the ear, lowering it only because I had already drawn a few ducats from the lining of my cape. “I want some girls. I’ve got a Florentine wool peddler back at my palazzo who’s swallowed every piece of meat we’ve thrown at him and still won’t get up from the table. If you’ll move your runny ass, I’ll go up and give them a look.”

  The pimp followed me upstairs, where curtains had made many rooms of several. An unseen trombonist played with sufficient wind that only occasionally did I hear the grunts and cries of fleeting passion; I had to shout a bit to issue further instruction. “I must have a pretty girl and a Tuscan-speaker—he likes to tell them to do this and that and he’ll pay ten ducats if he doesn’t have to point. And I would like her to be familiar with the tastes of better men, if you understand my meaning.” Of course I meant gentlemen such as the condottieri.

  Grunting, the pimp moved past me, going
nearly to the end of the hall before he drew aside a curtain made from a bedsheet that had been much used and never laundered. The lady inside, still in her shift, knelt upon a straw pallet scarcely better than they sell to pilgrims during Jubilee, her head obscuring the works of her guest, who had raised his rough country tunic.

  I was about to protest that this girl did not seem much familiar with the better class of men. But at that moment her farmer smiled at me, as if I had been summoned to pull his rope as well.

  I recognized his black lamprey teeth, which quickly vanished when he similarly identified me; evidently he had seen me well enough out at that dreadful farmhouse. He pushed away the girl’s head and sprang toward me with such alacrity that I had time only to turn my back and cringe. I was waiting for the blow when he flew through the door, still pulling up his hose.

  “Stop him!” I shouted.

  The pimp turned to the girl, who had risen from the altar, so to speak. “Did he pay?”

  I could see she had bleached her long tresses during the summer, because a palm’s width of dark hair, like a helmet of sorts, had grown out since then. Her face was a mask of ceruse, her mouth a pink scar far less brilliant than the spots of rouge, as big and round as French tennis balls, on her cheeks. Her dark eyes darted from side to side. She nodded at the pimp.

  The pimp cocked his head in a shrugging gesture. With this, the girl flew past both of us. I had not seen a woman in her underclothes move so swiftly since Gambiera, my mentor in theft, ran across the Ponte Sant’Angelo with the Venetian ambassador two steps behind. And you have not seen a woman in mourning clothes run as fast as I did in pursuit.

  The front door was absent its guardian and I entertained the hope that the bravo had chased after the runaway whore. But it seemed he had instead gone to break up a fight or some such thing, because when I reached the steps I saw Niccolò at the bottom, the girl clawing at his face like a virago and the lamprey making his way up behind him. But as the lamprey had no visible weapon and I had my knife out of my sleeve, I held it over my head and called out to him, “You! When I tell my bravo to release your girl and turn his attention to you, we will both hold you down and make certain that you savor the same meat she was trying to swallow! Will that be to your pleasure?”

  Men always fear a lady with a knife more than a similarly equipped man, because they do not believe we are subject to reason. Whatever interest the lamprey had in securing his lady’s freedom vanished as quickly as he disappeared into the crowd. And no doubt we already had in our net a bird more inclined to sing.

  I yanked this screeching songbird’s two-color hair so vigorously that she stopped screaming at Niccolò and threw up her talons in hopes of keeping her scalp in place. Having gotten her attention, I showed her the knife that had so effectively routed her companion. “Now, if you shut up and talk to us,” I said through clenched teeth, “this night will end for you much more profitably than it began. If not”—I held the knife to her cheek—“there will be less of you than there is now.”

  The fight went out of her, if only to await a better opportunity to escape.

  On our way out of that street, I made several purchases: some rope and a torch from the sundries peddler, a cloak from the secondhand dealer, and a nice roast pheasant from one of the charcoal grills. Having no intention of parading this poor girl through the city, where she might draw unwanted attention to all of us, I determined we should do our business in a nearby alley. This we found behind an enormous palazzo just across the street, a modern building that had recently been the home of one of the local despots whom Valentino had banished. Because there were no staircases or balconies for loiterers, we were quite alone.

  Niccolò held our captive while I tied her ankles together and bound her hands behind her. Once she had been secured I thrust the sputtering torch close enough to her face that I could see her clearly. Beneath the mask of ceruse was a girl not even twenty; her narrow eyes glittered with frightening malice. I asked her, “Who was the man with his works down your throat? He thought you were worth rescuing, until he was asked to risk his own cock.”

  “Carogna,” she spat back.

  “She’s calling you a carcass,” Niccolò said to me, having been in the Romagna sufficiently long to know such things. Then he stated flatly to the girl, “Your friend is a meg.” He looked at me and translated: “Mago.” Meaning a wizard, a man who would most likely come to the gioca to provide protection for the streghe—and if he was fortunate, to play the Devil to the Devil’s whores when their rituals became a bacchanal. “I think the men who came to the farmhouse that day were all magi,” Niccolò added.

  The girl began to murmur “Sant Antoni mi benefator,” at the same time struggling to get her arms loose. It seemed she wanted to cross herself, or perhaps make the corne—the sign of the horns—against the evil eye.

  I said to her, “If you speak Tuscan, we can help you. I know why your friend ran. He knew I had seen him before. But you could have been any whore to me. Why did you run?”

  Her entire jaw quivered. “We all going to die.” Her Tuscan was good enough, though with the buzzing local inflection. “Who is going to die?”

  “Me. Them. You.”

  “How will we die?”

  “Goat ride.”

  “Did your friends take the goat ride?” She knew what I meant, but she blinked defiantly. So I added, “The two girls in your gioca, who are now dead. They took the goat ride. You know someone is looking for you, don’t you? Do you think I came to that whorehouse to take you on the goat ride?”

  Here she spit at her feet and began to chant again and again: “Sant Antoni mi benefator.”

  It was only then that I observed the red string around her neck. I pulled the bollettino from beneath her shift. Her refrain had been written on the little card: Sant Antoni mi benefator. The appeal to Saint Anthony. I turned it over, to find another such invocation: Angelo bianc, per vostr santite. This was close enough to Tuscan: White Angel, by Your holiness. The White Angel was another name for Lucifer.

  But beneath the invocation of Hell’s angel another name had been scrawled: Zeja Caterina. I looked up at the girl. “Zeja?”

  “Zia,” she said, eager to make a fool of me.

  “Ah, an aunt,” I said to Niccolò, who was nearly squinting at the girl. “No doubt the sort of auntie who will tie a man’s handkerchief into knots to make him fall in love with you—or dig up a mandrake root watered with a hanged man’s piss to forever protect you from curses. Every whore in Rome has a zia like this. And everybody else calls this zia a strega.” I returned to the girl. “Are you this Auntie Caterina?”

  She curled her lip and snorted with contempt. “You won’t find her. Not here. Not there.”

  “Truly?” But rather than ask her directly why Auntie Caterina was so concerned to make herself scarce, I approached the matter by way of Calabria, so to speak. “How long have you worked in that whorehouse?”

  “Ten mes.”

  Ten months; she had been in that whorehouse while the conspiracy of the condottieri was still incubating. “Do you know a girl who did business with a soldier? A very important soldier. A condottiero.”

  Her eyes became slits, like Judas in a painting.

  “Was his name Vitellozzo Vitelli?”

  “Vitello,” she said, using the Tuscan word for “calf,” from which the name was indeed derived. But then she shook her head as if I had described someone half beast, half man, like a Minotaur. “No Vitello.”

  “Oliverotto da Fermo?”

  Now she shook her head rapidly yet wearily, as if she were listening to some pazzarone recite nonsense names.

  I took her chin in my hand. “Have you ever seen an amulet no bigger than the end of your thumb, shaped like a bull’s head? A very ancient amulet.”

  She almost sneered at this, as if I had invented it entirely. Niccolò put his hand on my arm, cautioning me that I was going nowhere.

  I might have been entirely frustrate
d had Valentino not confided to me his belief that the murders involved more than Juan’s amulet. “Your friends who took the goat ride and did not return,” I said. “They knew something, didn’t they? A secret this soldier told them.”

  “Secrét,” she said in a hissing fashion; this was the Romagnolo word, rather than the Tuscan segreto. She frowned as if I had made some sense, but not entirely.

  “What is the secret?” I said gently. “Does it regard a man who was murdered?”

  The Judas eyes widened and she drew back her head, as if it were I who had revealed this secret to her.

  All at once Niccolò reached out as if he were about to grab the girl by her throat, but he only put his fingers on her bollettino. She did not regard this interest as benign, however. The serpent’s malice in her eyes came spitting back.

  “Zeja Caterina knows this secret,” Niccolò said, having no doubt deduced for himself that Zeja Caterina had good reason to hide. “How do we find Zeja Caterina?”

  “Caz,” she barked. Prick.

  Niccolò glanced at me. “Zeja Caterina is at the center of this.” When I had nodded my agreement, he added, “If we hope to find her, we are going to require sterner measures.”

  Indeed, I had prepared for such measures, with the hope they would not be needed. I snatched up the secondhand cloak I had laid on the ground and the roast pheasant I had placed on top of it, ostentatiously taking a bite of the latter. “No doubt this tastes better than that sausage you had earlier,” I said. “I can wrap you in this cloak and send you off with the rest of the bird. Or I can keep my cloak, eat my pheasant, and send you off in your shift. And to remember you fondly, I’ll keep your nose.”