The Malice of Fortune

by Michael Ennis

  “We are going to build an entire city, the duke and I. Here in Cesena.” Only then did I discern that he was examining a rough map, with detailed measurements of this city’s dimensions; his mappa of Imola had probably begun with similar studies. “A new city even the ancients would envy. With plumbing, sewers, canals, locks, hospitals, courtrooms, public edifices that celebrate reason and liberty. I have drawn them and together the duke and I will construct them. A world without squalor, hunger, or darkness. It will begin here.”

  I would have thought him mad, had I not believed with equal conviction that Valentino, of all living men, was most capable of building a new world. But certainly the duke had not instructed his engineer general to summon me for this demonstration. “What cannot wait, Maestro?” Again I steeled myself for an anatomy lecture.

  “This was brought to us two days ago. From Imola. It was retrieved by the soldiers His Excellency dispatched to search for Madonna Damiata.” Perhaps I, of all men, should not have been surprised at the reverence with which he invoked her name, almost as though she were the Holy Madonna.

  Leonardo stuck two fingers into a leather purse attached to his belt, first drawing out a length of red yarn; when he extracted the little card attached to this string, I had to close my eyes. “How was it found?”

  “Within a hand. From an arm we could not locate before we left Imola.”

  “You mean an arm belonging to one of the two streghe. It could not be Damiata?”

  “No. Not her.” He presented me the bollettino. “Does it signify anything to you?”

  The card might have been colored by body fluids or simply by slush and red earth. Despite these stains and the rough scrawl, I could still read the contradictory invocations: Sant Antoni mi benefator. Angelo bianc, per vostr santite.

  “The ink and hand are identical to the bollettino we found in the olive grove,” I told Leonardo. “I presume that Zeja Caterina wrote this.” For a moment the dead witch’s pale eyes haunted me. “I am reasonably certain that she alone of that gioca could read or write, if only in the vernacular.”

  I turned over the card, little surprised to find another inscription, this in tiny but elegant Tuscan script. “And this hand and Chinese ink,” I said, “are the same as the reverse side of the previous bollettino. Maestro, I assume you saw the first of these bollettini, before it was sent on to the Vatican.” Here I referred to the bollettino the pope had shown Damiata; Leonardo had recovered the butchered remains of the woman who had carried it in her charm bag, hence I had good reason to believe he had seen everything found on her person—including Juan of Gandia’s amulet. “And I presume ‘the corners of the winds,’ ” I continued, “was written in the same hand as this bollettino.”

  Leonardo looked at the card, which still rested on the tips of my fingers, as if he expected it to burst into flame. “You assume correctly. On both accounts. But you must read this one.”

  I had to squint a bit to decipher the tight, miniature script: Il quadrato è il primo cerchio.

  “ ‘The square is the first circle,’ ” I said. “Then this is a figure of geometry, in the same manner as the previous two. Likewise presented to us as a riddle or conundrum. But the first circle was your own wind rose, inscribed around your mappa. And the square, I would venture, was drawn between the corners of the winds. Is he recalling for us his first figures? Perhaps to direct our attention to something we have not yet seen?” No sooner had I said this, however, than I saw the game this man was playing.

  “This inscription describes the new disegno he has made.” I was not surprised that Leonardo clung to this notion. “Giacomo!” Giacomo appeared to be shuffling off to bed. “Has Tommaso found the Archimedes?”

  Giacomo shook his head as if infinitely weary of such requests. I sympathized with him; the chaos of Leonardo’s intellect, his disposition simply to toss his thoughts about in a manner little different than his belongings, was already wearying to me—though in this he matched my own practice more than I would have wished.

  “We will locate the Archimedes,” Leonardo said, although his affirming nod was less than firm. “And then we will have our solution. I have every conviction this ‘first circle’ can be found among Archimedes’s proofs.”

  Evidently unwilling to wait on Tommaso, Leonardo began to rifle through various manuscripts, some bound and some loose, already accumulated on the table before him. “Because we have moved, everything has become disordered,” he explained—again with no hint of irony.

  I took his distraction as an opportunity to examine some of the loose leaves, which recalled to me all the unbound manuscripts in my father’s little library. Many of these papers, mostly copied in Latin but a few, quite old, written in Greek, did in fact concern mathematics, the dense script often accompanied by diagrams with lettered points or elaborate drawings of various polygons. I could get nothing from them.

  Shortly, however, I found a page written in Latin, and not in Leonardo’s hand; on closer scrutiny it turned out to be an account of a man who suffered a disease of the brain the Greeks knew as kephalgia, which “alienates the mind, induces loss of voice, and at last withdraws the vital power.” As Leonardo continued to sift through his volumes and pages, I found an entire stack of leaves by this same hand, evidently that of a physician, or his copyist, describing illnesses of all sorts as well as necropsies performed on persons who had expired. More than a few of these concerned maladies of the brain: delusions, memory loss, mute entrancement, and a violent madness the Greeks called phrenesis. One such case, which involved an executed criminal, interested me sufficiently that I dared to intrude on Leonardo’s fruitless exploration. “Maestro, these physician’s accounts. Where did you obtain them?”

  “Those are Benivieni’s cases,” he said, as if I were a farmer asking for the source of the dung on my boots. “Antonio Benivieni,” Leonardo snapped at my blank expression. “The Florentine physician.”

  I recovered my own lost memory. Benivieni was a dottore of considerable renown; like Leonardo, he was reputed to have undertaken many dissections of corpses.

  “You cannot come to any labor of anatomical science without good knowledge of mathematics,” Leonardo said. “As you can see, Benivieni’s work is entirely worthless. He has measured nothing.”

  I was hardly one to raise a defense of physicians. Nevertheless I said, “When you have measured and identified this new figure of geometry, my dear Maestro, what do you expect to discover regarding the nature of the murderer who has created it?”

  “We will see.”

  I believed it was time to take the maestro to school, let us say. “Your Giacomo and I saw this man or his apprentice on the street tonight, Maestro. Evidently there are no less than two different Carnival masks these men wear when they go about their evil labors—one the Devil and the other Death, as nearly as I have been able to observe. And I believe this maestro of death will continue with similar deceptions, displaying to us various other masks, riddles, and figures of geometry, by these means making his works known to us—even as he does not wish us to know him. That is why he is determined to obtain this Euclid’s Elements, in which I am certain his name has been recorded.”

  As Leonardo listened, his mouth worked, but he said nothing aloud.

  “Maestro, I believe this man ordinarily goes among us without any sort of mask, yet by some means he is able to conceal his true face. And as I have previously told you, it is my most firm conviction that we will not be able to identify him until we have entered his mind and understood his necessity—”

  “Necessity?” Leonardo’s voice was suddenly as shrill as the high notes of a piffero. “Do you understand at all this word of yours, this necessità you ceaselessly invoke? You—you are nothing more than a Latinist, your nose stuck in ancient texts!” Leonardo drew his head back as if recoiling from this horror. “Do you think that proofs of the sort I am seeking are established by the ornate words of orators like you? What have you measured? Where is your e
sperienza?”

  “You can place your measuring stick next to a man’s skull,” I answered, “but it will tell you nothing of the desires and necessities that reside within.”

  Leonardo wagged a great finger at me. “Tell me then, my esteemed man of letters, what instrument you have acquired to measure these desires that exist only in the minds of men—when I, who have dissected the very ventricles of the brain, have yet to discern this mechanism. Do you propose to extend your arms like some barefoot fool measuring his vegetable plot, and tell me that it is you alone who have calculated the length of a man’s desire? You are better off measuring his cazzo instead!”

  “My instrument, if you must have one, is the wisdom of those who have observed history and derived its lessons. Herodotus. Plutarch. Thucydides. Titus Livy! They have provided us with every measure of humankind’s desires and ambitions—as Livy says, ‘In history you can find human experience in all its infinite variations.’ That is my esperienza!”

  “I do not deny that the study of history is a nutriment to the intellect,” Leonardo said less vehemently. “But you—you offer no direct observation of the artifacts of the crime itself.”

  “ ‘Artifacts,’ Maestro? Do you mean the mortal remains of these unfortunate women? I have already taken into account the manner of their dismemberment, how we were expected to discover them, and how their arrangement—or lack of it—has sent you wandering in a dark woods, searching for some disegno that can be found only in the ventricles of your brain!”

  I paused and studied Leonardo carefully. All at once my skin crawled. “There is something else, isn’t there, Maestro? Something you have withheld.”

  His prodigious fingers plucked at his cape as if trying to remove burrs, each hand working independently of the other. “The heart is a muscle … of exceptional strength and vitality,” he said at last. “So ingeniously has Nature designed the valves … to permit a constant flow in but one direction, that our blood courses through our arteries with such turbulence … much as a river rushes through a narrow channel.” The maestro described this vigorous action in little more than a halting whisper, as though delivering aloud one of his silent addresses. “When we study the course of rivers, we observe that water is capable, over time, of carving passages in solid stone … In the body this flow attains such force that it can burst a vein in the head … Among older men it will eventually cause a callousing and thickening of the walls of the veins, until the blood no longer circulates in sufficient volume … to …”

  My own blood felt cold in my veins. “Finish your thought, Maestro. I know that these women did not perish due to a thickening of their arteries.”

  “Blood will pool in the inferior portions of the limbs … after circulation has ceased. But that … that settling was not observed in the remains that were brought to me.” Leonardo’s trembling face was gray. “Exsanguination had to have occurred during the dismemberment.”

  I recalled all too well my own goat ride. The concoction had paralyzed my body but had not rendered me insensible to pain; as my limbs struggled to regain movement, I had imagined awls were piercing my muscles and joints. Those poor women had been butchered while they were immobilized by the narcotic agents; probably they could not even scream. But they had remained entirely sensible of fear, pain—and the dreadful sundering of their flesh.

  I looked down at the pages I had previously examined. “Maestro,” I murmured, “if you regard Dottor Benivieni’s papers as worthless, might I have a few of them?”

  Leonardo gestured like an old woman shooing a fly. “Take whatever you wish,” he whispered. “As I told you, Benivieni has measured nothing.”

  As soon as I had barred my door I lit a candle and sat at the little table I had obtained for my writing. Clearing away my own manuscripts, I replaced them with Benivieni’s papers. The case that had so interested me in Leonardo’s refectory concerned a certain worthless miscreant named Jacopo, a habitual thief who had been hanged for his manifold crimes. Yet upon being removed from the gallows, Jacopo had turned out to be alive, and upon treatment he had recovered. Nevertheless, because of his wicked nature, Jacopo had disregarded the miracle of his resurrection and had returned at once to the same crimes—for which he was once again hanged, this time to the intended effect.

  Having conducted a great number of necropsies to ascertain the anatomical causes of various diseases and deaths, Dottor Benivieni was similarly determined to find the cause of Jacopo’s incorrigible behavior. After opening the man up entirely, the physician had fixed his interest on the back of Jacopo’s head, where one finds the ventricle of the brain known as the memoriae sedes—the “seat of memory,” or more nobly, the “throne of memory.” Benivieni observed that this region of the brain contained far less matter than was typical. On account of this deficiency, the physician wrote, Jacopo “scarcely remembered his prior crimes and the punishments he received, and so returned many times without shame, like a dog to its vomit, to his crimes, so that at last he put his own head in the noose and ended his life.”

  I sat there in my creaking chair, tapping a finger on this last sentence. Certainly Benivieni’s conclusion was nonsense. It was entirely beyond reason that Jacopo, regardless of his anatomical defect, had forgotten his crimes; instead he had remembered all too well how to commit them. Nevertheless, I was not able to dismiss the physician’s observations entirely. It seemed to me that this Jacopo, a very common man, had been stamped from a similar mold to those rare men I had plucked from my recollection of history: Alexander of Pherae, the Roman dictator Sulla, or the emperors Caligula and Nero. All of them, regardless of circumstances, had habitually repeated their crimes without shame, guilt, or regard for punishment (yet history shows us that tyrants, no less than criminals like Jacopo, rarely die a peaceful death). The insignificant Jacopo had lacked the license of power to fully indulge his evil nature, yet he had pursued his trade to the end. Nero had enjoyed absolute power, but I believe that even as a shepherd or a cobbler he would have found an inexplicable delight in cruel acts. Benivieni’s description was in fact apt: “like a dog returning to its vomit,” these men were driven by some animal instinct to return again and again to the crimes that had already stained their souls.

  As I had told the duke, just as the nature of men does not change from age to age, so each man is born with an unchanging nature. Hence I could not help but lean to Dottor Benivieni’s opinion: this defect, whether it was Plato’s “disease of the soul” or some deficiency of the brain itself, had always been present in the men afflicted with it. Nature had made them thus, and neither man nor Fortune could ever alter them.

  A cold wind rattled the shutters. Clutching my jacket around me, I imagined myself on the threshold of this rare man’s mind, much as I had entered the intellect of Hannibal or Caesar, and had queried them there. Although instinct told me to run, instead I stared into his dreadful Labyrinth and silently addressed him.

  Your necessity is simply to destroy life, to feast without compassion or conscience upon the suffering of your innocent victims. This has been your nature since your life began to quicken in your mother’s womb. Yet in some manner, you have always been able to conceal your monstrous face behind the mask of a man.

  The wind whistled through the cracks around my poorly fitted door.

  But now I know you, if not yet your face or name. Because I alone know the secret that from your first breath has set you apart from all of us. It is not a secret you keep hidden in a diseased soul. It is a far more dreadful deception.

  You were born without a soul.

  CHAPTER 9

  The best remedy against an enemy’s plan is to do voluntarily what he expected you to do by force.

  Two days later—the day following the winter solstice—there was still no word of Damiata nor any sign of Valentino’s intentions. Instead the city of Cesena witnessed the most notable entertainment it had evidently ever seen.

  The ballo took place in the Civic Palace, which b
ounds the city’s principal piazza on the north, lying at the foot of the brooding citadel. Its façade composed of two tiers of arched windows, the Civic Palace is attached to a fortress of the same nearly featureless architecture as the one high on the hill—although it is much smaller, a rochetta rather than a rocca, with only a single great tower. Joined end to end, the Civic Palace and the rochetta present an immense massif of stone. On this particular evening the rochetta half of this enormous wall was as dark as the bottom of a well, while the Civic Palace was lighted like an armorer’s factory.

  The Cesenati had admirably transformed the palace’s great hall, hanging the walls with every tapestry the town could provide, along with a forest-full of boughs and pine wreaths studded with pomegranates. The adjoining rooms were furnished with sideboards that could only have been gathered from a dozen other palazzi, provisioned with a vast variety of hot spiced wines, meat pastries, spun-sugar confections, and candied fruits.

  The festive music was provided by no less than five tromboni, about twice as many shawms and flutes, and an equal number of lire da braccio, along with a portable theater organ. Most of the diplomats—and cortigiane—who had spent the autumn in Imola had remained to welcome the winter in Cesena. Even the famous hermaphrodite known as Il Portuguese had come this far; she might have been a sad, pudgy adolescent boy, a satin bodice pushing up breasts like a fat man’s.

  As to the other ladies, the matrons of Cesena were content to leave their husbands standing at the sideboards while they received the attentions of worldly men, a company in which I was grudgingly welcomed, this because the ambassadors had come to value my keen ear for useful information. Surrounded as I was by all these eager ladies, I found myself nearly trampled when a fanfare occasioned a great rush of the good wives into the entrance hall, pealing away: “The duke has come! Our duke is here!”