The Malice of Fortune

by Michael Ennis

  “Excellency, I believe she loved your brother.” If Damiata had not loved Juan of Gandia, how little truth was there to this “connection” she had cited between us?

  “She loved him. Yes, I believe that.” Valentino acknowledged this as if love itself were a sad and tawdry crime. “But I must ask if she has betrayed not only Juan but both my father and me—and you as well.” He turned to me again. “Secretary, is it possible that Damiata escaped the divination with this book?”

  Hope pulsed through my veins at the mere conjecture that Damiata was alive. And fear followed: if Valentino’s speculation was correct, perhaps she had kept the book from him because she could not trust him.

  I tried to steady myself, reasoning that even if I could tell Valentino little he did not already know about the events on the pianura, the manner in which he received my information might reveal more of his own intentions. Hence I described for him in detail the Gevol int la carafa and the mastiff-keeper’s flight with the “book of spells,” as well as my own encounter with the masked Devil’s apprentice, withholding only those particulars of the goat ride that had occurred within my own mind.

  “I do not see how Damiata could have pursued the mastiff keeper with better result than the masked man who knocked me senseless,” I concluded. “And as I told you, I do not believe this apprentice obtained the book, because if he had, he certainly would have put an end to my involvement in the matter.”

  The duke’s eyes, though half shut, were so fixed on the embers before him that he might have been willing the genesis of some great conflagration.

  “You must think carefully on this, Secretary.” After Valentino’s long silence, this instruction was as sharp as a stiletto. “Did you see this mago, this ‘mastiff keeper,’ in possession of the book itself when he ran from the hut?”

  “I was knocked down. I …” I saw what Valentino was asking. I had simply assumed the truth of Damiata’s words: He has the book! “No. I never saw that he had it.”

  “Consider it, Secretary. Is it possible Damiata intended you to pursue this man, so that she would be at liberty to bargain with those people? I would guess she kept a considerable sum on her person. And as you know, she is both clever and persuasive.” And a confessed liar and thief. “You would not be the first man she has deceived.”

  And she would not have been the first woman to deceive me.

  “My father made a grave error in involving Damiata,” Valentino said, his tone mirroring my regret. “And all the more so in using the boy as he did. Her desire to retrieve Giovanni is entirely sincere. Never doubt that. His Holiness has only given her a grievance and a cause.”

  I nodded. If she must, Damiata would enlist Satan himself in that cause.

  “You say that if we are to defeat Fortune, Secretary, we must anticipate events. If Damiata had this book in her possession, what would she do with it? Would she go to my father and trust him to release her son? Or would she wager that the condottieri, offered the opportunity to destroy the evidence of their association with the murdered women, would secure the boy’s release in exchange for the book?”

  I presumed Valentino meant that the condottieri would “secure the boy’s release” with the sort of subtle coercion that had already compelled him to leave Imola—or perhaps they would overtly threaten to attack the pope’s fortresses or the Vatican itself. That Valentino had even raised the question evidenced his steadily weakening position.

  “Given Damiata’s difficulties with your father,” I said, “she might have reason to favor the condottieri.”

  “I agree. More so if they have had a previous connection.”

  This “connection” being a conspiracy to murder his brother. Yet the duke had also left the “if” hanging in the air.

  Valentino settled back into his chair with a weariness I had never observed in him, his shoulders slumped and his chin down. “Secretary, do you know this nun from Mantua?” Now it seemed he was, in fact, only talking in his sleep. “This seeress or prophetess they all chatter about? Osana, she is called. She prophesied that the reign of the Borgia would be like ‘a fire of straw.’ ”

  A faint moan came from the fireplace, the sound of vapors in the wood escaping.

  “At our first breath, we begin to race Fortune.” Valentino spoke as if he had already surrendered his hope of defeating her. “She draws a map of each man’s life, marking the distance that bounds our mortality, requiring of us that we race against her, ever faster, toward the oblivion that lies beyond. Santa Maria, that distance is short, the contest brief.” I thought I saw a glimmer at the corner of his eye. “Perhaps the nun of Mantua simply saw Fortune’s map of my life. Because if I do not find this schoolboy’s geometry, then all this, all my hopes for a new Italy, will be consumed more quickly than straw in a fire.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Whatever is entirely clear, entirely without suspicion, is never found.

  Upon leaving the Governor’s Palace, I wandered the streets of Cesena for what seemed an age, trudging from one corner of the little city to the next, hopelessly perplexed. I believed with every fiber of my intellect that Valentino’s suspicions of Damiata were sincere and not without foundation; he knew her better than I could imagine. He had held her, breast to naked breast, inciting in my own a jealousy I had once thought alien to my nature; this alone should have warned me that I was not in my right mind. Yet my entire soul still believed in Damiata with a conviction my intellect was powerless to defeat. It was possible that Valentino, plagued by his own guilt, was simply mistaken; certainly someone other than the two of them had also been privy to the Duke of Gandia’s route the night he was murdered. Nevertheless, even my soul had to concede that Damiata had known full well what I had at stake in the investigation of Juan’s murder, yet she had maintained a silence that was no less than a lie about the manner in which she had betrayed the Duke of Gandia, when she had taken his brother as her lover.

  On the other hand, Valentino’s own intentions were scarcely clear; even his presentiment of doom had been ambiguous. Did he regard any evidence that would obstruct his accord with the condottieri as the foremost stumbling block to his new Italy—or did he regard the condottieri as the principal threat to his most immediate ambitions, or even his very life? If the latter, then his withdrawal from Imola, and for that matter his entire treaty with the condottieri, might well be a madness feigned to deceive the architects of this “very great intrigue” against him, until he could secure the Elements and produce the evidence that would damn them all. Yet if the former were true, he desired the book only to destroy it—or deliver it as an offering when he submitted to the condottieri.

  In this manner my arguments went in circles, like my own repeated circuits of Cesena.

  I must have walked until well past the seventh hour of the night before I finally stopped in the doorway of a palazzo not far from my own rooms, suddenly unbearably weary. My feet made a little screech on the icy pavement as I found my footing. Cesena had become as quiet as a graveyard around me.

  After a moment I heard a familiar, clamoring noise, although it was not of this place, or the present.

  This was the rising din of another city, as Florence awakened to another day: a vast crowing, barking, and braying of both men and animals; a rattling of carts, a carillon of smiths’ hammers and stonemasons’ chisels. In some netherworld between memory and a goat-ride vision, I was once again only a few months past seven years old, standing in the doorway of our little house on the Via di Piazza.

  It was my first day with my new Latin tutor, Ser Battista, whose studiolo was at the San Benedetto church, next to the Duomo. I had never crossed the Arno by myself, much less half the city, so at breakfast my chin quivered a little. Mama had certainly observed this, because she fried little flour cakes and filled them with a cherry paste, singing one of her own lauds all the while: “The Lord who brings justice to the oppressed, the Lord who feeds the hungry and frees our bonds …”

  Having wr
apped one of these confections in a napkin, she presented it to me at the door. “My darling Niccolò, my first son,” Mama said as I tucked away the treat in the bag with my slate. “Your life will be out there.” Mama nodded in the direction of the city. “You will become a learned man, a man of letters. Like your papa. But I have the deepest faith that you will also have an office. You will take your place in the government of our republic.”

  This prophecy seemed utterly fanciful to me. Papa had never held an office in our government and could never hope to do so; he was not one of the favored “Medici men” who alone were accorded wealth and influence. The republic itself was only the dream of little people like Mama and Papa, who closed their shutters whenever Lorenzo de’ Medici rode past at the head of yet another gaudy Carnival parade, his chorus of sycophants and retainers following behind him like an immense, multicolored snake.

  Mama caressed my cheek with dry, rough fingers. She had been almost forty years old when I was born, and on this day she seemed an old woman to me, her forehead hatched with lines, her lips thin and almost without color. “Niccolò, long before you were born, I made the most solemn promise to our Lord. I vowed that I would give the first son I carried in my womb to our bella Firenze and her libertà.” Her wide-set, vaguely catlike eyes peered inside me. “Today you will begin to redeem that promise. You will come to love our Firenze, and then you will understand why you must save her. Why you must restore her libertà to all her people. Not just the few.”

  With these words my mother gave me to Florence. As I crossed the Ponte Vecchio, tears clouded my eyes, because I knew I would never again follow my beloved mama around our house like a little pet. And I did not fall in love with bella Firenze that first day; I was too frightened.

  Nevertheless, not a week had passed before I bounded out the door after breakfast and raced across the bridge, within a few hundred steps finding myself in the roaring heart of all Europe’s commerce. To my mind the buildings on either side of the street resembled great sailing ships, the towering façades of the silk shops always draped with enormous, shimmering damask banners, while from nearly every window of the wool factories, each the size of a palazzo, long bolts of newly washed fabric, nearly as fine as the silk, flapped in the wind. Swept along in a great tide of traffic, I crossed the city on the Via dei Calzaiuoli, named for the many hosiery shops that lined it, although most of the shop-front arcades displayed some other trade beneath their long tiled canopies: shoemakers, goldsmiths, illuminators, bookbinders, our first printer’s shop.

  But amidst all this commerce, which to my eyes resembled a great and fascinating battle, I found an even more astonishing beauty. On the Via dei Calzaiuoli, I could wander around the great gray block of the Orsanmichele church, looking up at the statues of the patron saints of all the guilds, like Donatello’s Saint Mark and Saint George, their lifelike appearance nearly miraculous compared to the stiff scarecrows carved in the centuries before our Rinascimento of ancient arts and letters. At the end of the street was the immense Duomo, clad in white-and-green marble, crowned with Brunelleschi’s prodigious brick dome; every time I passed, I craned my head back so far I thought I would fall over, and floated away with pride, to think that the men who had made these invenzioni were Florentines like me.

  Yet I found the greatest wonder of my bella Firenze in the austere Piazza della Signoria, bounded on the east by the rustic stone palazzo where, many years later, I would serve our republic, just as Mama had prophesied. The Piazza della Signoria was a vast marketplace of discourse, where ideas were exchanged like coins at the bankers’ counters that lined the streets feeding into it. Here gathered men of all stations, from smiths in thick leather aprons to lawyers and wool merchants in fur-lined capes. They discussed things I hardly understood, even when I could hear them amid the great din; nevertheless I was enchanted simply to watch them speak, to study the manner in which men gestured with their hands, nodded, grimaced, reflected, turned from one to another.

  Perhaps some part of me still stood in a doorway in Cesena, but my mind was entirely absorbed in this vision of the past; I was nothing more or less than a boy seven years old, sweeping my eyes about the Piazza della Signoria, transfixed by the life ahead of me. And even when this living memory faded, it slipped away so slowly that for a time I was lost, neither in one place nor another, empty save for a deep longing to hear my mother’s voice and to walk the streets of our Firenze.

  When I once again realized where I was, I had my answer. I had not come all the way to Cesena because I trusted anyone—neither Valentino, nor Damiata, nor even the Ten of War.

  “I belong only to the republic, our libertas, and our bella Firenze,” I whispered, watching my words in the still, cold air, rising like smoke from a priest’s censer. “Whatever is required to save the city I love, I will do.”

  No sooner had I issued this oath, than I observed a witness to it, although he seemed as much a phantom as the faces I had left behind in Florence, and time. He was perhaps fifty braccia distant, standing in a street-front arcade. His cape appeared little more than a shadow against the shop-front shutters, his face so enveloped by the hood that it seemed merely a bone-white Carnival mask—in this instance, the skeletal face of Death, rather than the goat-bearded Devil’s mask I had so briefly glimpsed on the pianura. Yet at once I had the terrifying conviction that this man had been present that night.

  I saw little security in taking another route. If he was in fact the murderer’s apprentice—or perhaps even the maestro of the shop—my escape would only postpone this reckoning to an occasion when I might have even less warning.

  I started toward him, my breast like a drum. When I had halved the distance between us, I could still distinguish nothing more of his face—or mask—than a pale cipher.

  I called out with the desperate bravado of an unrepentant heretic, standing before his stake: “You there! Have you a new mask?”

  A peculiar metamorphosis flickered within his hood, as though a bleached skull had begun to clothe itself in pale flesh. I could see the dark sockets, if not yet his eyes.

  His cloak fanned out as if he were an eagle about to take flight and I braced for his charge. Instead he turned, striding away so quickly that he had exited the far end of the arcade almost before I could take a breath. Only when he had vanished entirely did it occur to me that this route would take him directly to my lodging—about which he could find any number of places to conceal himself and wait.

  My pursuit was so swift that the cold air blurred my vision, my feet nearly slipping from under me as I raced around the corner—

  I slid to a stop no more than an arm’s length from the point of a stiletto.

  “Did you see that?”

  I looked up. The face was entirely human, though the mouth seemed frozen into an O. I recognized him in the same moment that I placed his voice. “Giacomo?”

  “He ran right past me,” Maestro Leonardo’s assistant said with indignation. “He would’ve knocked me over if I hadn’t stepped aside.”

  “Did you see his face?”

  He shook his head. “That wasn’t a man.”

  “But not the mask you saw in the woods that day.” The same mask I had seen on the pianura.

  “No. The face in the moon. Or an owl.” Giacomo studied his stiletto, which he had yet to slip back in his belt. “Or no face at all.”

  I nodded at this last description, finding it more apt than the “mask of Death” I had observed. My science, if I could call it that, had so far failed to provide the murderer a face. He had allowed me to see only masks. Or no face at all.

  Only after musing on this did I think to ask, “Giacomo, why are you out here?”

  “Waiting for you.” He offered this as if I were the cause of both his discomfort and his encounter with a faceless demon. “The maestro sent me to fetch you.”

  Now I could answer at least one question: certainly Valentino had already reported our conversation to Leonardo, who had evidently
summoned me at the duke’s request. “Will the maestro still want to see me at this hour?”

  Giacomo nodded, his Milanese diction as languorous as ever. “The maestro never sleeps.”

  CHAPTER 8

  To many things that reason doesn’t persuade you, you are persuaded by necessity.

  Giacomo led me to the opposite side of the city, where we halted at what appeared to be the refectory of an abandoned church. Through the cracks in the shutters, I could see that this brick building, which was as plain as a warehouse, was lit up like day inside. We ascended the two steps, whereupon Giacomo barged through the door as if he were an officer of the jail making an arrest.

  I girded myself for another visit to Hell.

  The considerable space had in fact once been an austere dining hall; if ever the walls had been frescoed, they were now plastered over. The two big trestle tables in the center of the room might have been left behind by the monks, although their refectory had been put to a use the soup-slurpers never could have imagined. Nor could I.

  Save for the two tables, the entire floor was occupied with devices the maestro had actually constructed: any number of machines with gears and cogs; small boats; peculiar ladders; an enormous crossbow; a great wheel that reached almost to the ceiling beams, with no less than two dozen buckets attached to it. These and a myriad other things I could not even describe.

  Attired in his chamois cape and a red satin vest, Leonardo stared fixedly at a drawing of several toothlike, irregular shapes that appeared composed almost entirely of numbers. Believing that these calculations had something to do with the murderer’s disegno—or with the stature of his victims—I went at once to his side.