The Malice of Fortune

by Michael Ennis

  Vitellozzo nodded to Oliverotto, the latter drawing from his belt the same ivory-handled dagger with which he had hoped to gut Ramiro da Lorca. Oliverotto lunged at me theatrically, as if he were an actor miming that very attack. Seemingly satisfied with my instinctive cringe, he slipped his arm around my back and sliced the rope binding my hands, so quickly that he nicked my wrist.

  “Careful where you are bleeding,” Vitellozzo said, offering the Elements to me.

  I wiped the blood on my jacket and accepted the book. Vitellozzo had opened it to the preceding day’s question: Gevol int la carafa, tell us who kill Duca Ganda.

  Vitellozzo whispered, “Turn the page and you will find the answer.”

  My hands trembled, even though the seeress’s answer could scarcely be considered credible. The parchment crackled, almost as if my fingers had set it on fire.

  Zeja Caterina had misspelled the names, but they were clear enough: Sgnor Vitel. Sgnor Ferm. And the last: Madona Damata.

  I met Vitellozzo’s eyes and told him the truth as I saw it. “The duke got the answer he expected. As you said, Zeja Caterina was a shrewd fraud.” It occurred to me that the seeress had perhaps heard Damiata’s name, and her alleged crimes, babbled by one of the condottieri during their goat ride—or had “divined” it from others at Valentino’s court. Yet I observed to myself: Even a fraud can tell the truth once. Or perhaps in this case, two truths and one lie.

  Vitellozzo winced as his shoulders heaved. “Turn the page.”

  The only words in the margin of the next page had also been written in the witch’s scrawl: Traget di capra. Zeja Caterina. Duca Valentin.

  “Just the two of them,” Vitellozzo said. “On a goat ride together. I imagine that while they were greasing themselves our gallant Valentino showed his strega some things even the Devil—or even our dear ’Liverotto—hadn’t. But I see you’ve noticed the odd thing there.”

  The page that should have followed was missing. I could clearly see the line running along the stub of the parchment where it had been scored by a knife—recently, it seemed, because the cut edge was not soiled like the rest of the book.

  “Someone has cut out a page of this book, isn’t that so, Messer Monkey-Macchia? I imagine, as I am sure you do, that it was removed because Valentino said something of great import while he was taking his journey on the back of a goat—or on the backside of a strega.” Vitellozzo offered me his dolorous smile. “So my clever little Florentine pet, what do you think the duke discussed with his strega whore—or perhaps chattered to some party not present—while in this narcotic transport?”

  I looked at Oliverotto. His eyes, nearly the same hue as the bluish-gray light, appeared to hover before me. Only then did it occur to me that perhaps Valentino was protecting Oliverotto because the two of them had formed some conspiracy against Vitellozzo Vitelli—much as Oliverotto had already betrayed his uncle.

  But I answered Vitellozzo with a more likely possibility. “I believe the duke confessed to crimes at Capua.”

  “We were all at Capua,” Vitellozzo said flatly. Valentino had used these same words.

  “Then you understand the remorse he might feel.” I could not escape imparting a certain irony to my words.

  Vitellozzo merely heaved a bit, with what sentiment I could not say, but it seemed he regarded me as a fool. “I have a final question for you,” he said, the word “final” freezing me at once. “Who do you think murdered the Duke of Gandia?”

  I might never have another chance to reveal the truth. “He is the same man who cut a Romagnole strega into four pieces and scattered her to the corners of the winds, then proceeded to construct an Archimedes spiral with the flesh of her entire gioca, an endeavor in which he was assisted by a faceless priest.” I searched in vain for something within eyes open no wider than the edge of a coin. “At Cesenatico, he created a salt tomb for the heads of the streghe and a reliquary for the skulls and other mementos of the women he raped and butchered at Capua.” I still waited for some sign. “Signore, the man who murdered the Duke of Gandia is a rare and most exceptional individual. Only when he takes life, can he live. He must kill in the same fashion that the rest of us breathe.”

  Vitellozzo blinked at me like a lizard on a fence, his nostrils steaming the air. After a moment he lifted his swollen hand, then let it fall heavily into his lap.

  Several of Vitellozzo’s liveried attendants swarmed his chair, quickly turning it about and transporting it like a litter toward the waiting horses. The rest of Vitellozzo’s company followed with similar haste.

  Before she joined this parade, Damiata at last met my eyes. The poets write of a single glance that haunts a lifetime, casting a spell of desire and regret that can never be broken. But this liquid blue glance, so nakedly pained and remorseful, answered every question of a lifetime. I believed in my reborn soul that Damiata still loved me, even as she had to abandon me.

  Then she, too, turned away.

  Vitellozzo’s party quickly vanished over the nearest hill; by the time Damiata slipped from sight, sitting sidesaddle on a white mare, draped in her red cape, she might have been a duchess in a miniature painting. And then I could hear only the wind sifting the snow.

  I took stock of my situation. I had taken no sustenance for almost two days; nevertheless, I was adequately clothed. It seemed that once again I had been deliberately spared; perhaps my recitation of a murderer’s history had convinced Vitellozzo Vitelli that I was a keen-eyed and useful witness, if nothing more—much as I was regarded as nothing more than a reliable observer by my own government.

  But I was wrong. As I continued to stare out toward the hill that now obstructed my view of Vitellozzo’s party, a rider on a white warhorse silently emerged atop it. For a heartbeat, he perched at the summit. And then he galloped toward me, snow rising up from the rapid hoofbeats in large puffs, like the smoke from dozens of scoppietti, all firing in sequence.

  I wondered if Oliverotto da Fermo intended simply to trample me. Instead he powerfully reined the stallion to an abrupt, rearing stop, its forelegs flailing, then leapt from the saddle and quickly covered the several steps between us, his mail shirt chinging.

  He did not, however, lunge at me with his knife—either comically or tragically. Instead Signor Oliverotto planted his feet and combed his blond curls with his fingers, almost as if I were a manservant holding his looking glass. When he did focus his pale blue eyes on me, he tilted his head only slightly, as though he did not require some particularly altered perspective in order to find my weakness. “You spoke with Ramiro da Lorca that night, didn’t you? Regarding me.”

  Certainly he meant those moments before Ramiro’s arrest. I nodded.

  “What did he tell you?”

  As before, I believed that only the truth might save me. “He said that Valentino was protecting you. And he asked me to consider why.”

  “Do you know?”

  “I suspect because you were both at Capua, Signore. And you observed something there that His Excellency would not want the rest of Italy to witness.”

  He tilted his head more severely. “I learned something even before I could shave.” Oliverotto seemed to be citing the phrase Valentino had used on the rampart, even as common as it was, so that I would recall that conversation. “Papa Vitellozzo showed me.”

  He raised up his immense hands and held them open before me, all his digits spread wide, as if he believed the stigmata had appeared on his palms. Instead he quickly flipped his hands down and made a collar of sorts around my neck, though without touching me. Every muscle in my body clenched, preparing for death.

  “If you strangle a woman while you are fucking her, it heightens her ecstasy. She comes at the threshold of death and returns to you, deeply grateful. Almost always she will want it again. But if you do not stop in time …” Oliverotto shrugged his massive shoulders. “I can tell you, by Jesus, there is a strange thing about that, as well. She doesn’t know fear until the last flicker of her life
is about to go out. And that is a marvelous thing to see. At that moment, I don’t believe any man could keep from spewing his seed.”

  Oliverotto lowered his hands and looked down at his sheathed dagger. “Now this,” he mused. “If you quickly gut a man with this, at once you can see his astonishment. But then he lingers. He must say farewell to the faces in his mind.” He shook his head, as if this stubborn persistence of life had presented him some difficult philosophical conundrum. “I think it is better to observe a man as he watches his wife or child die. Or his lover. Everything leaves him then, except the fear and grief an infant knows when it first enters the world. When that man’s anger is spent, he only wants to crawl back into the womb. You will see for yourself. When we come to Florence. Or perhaps even if you are able to get to Sinigaglia quickly enough.”

  The scar-like creases that framed Oliverotto’s mouth twitched more visibly than his lips, as he enjoyed the futility he saw in my eyes. My distress, however, was a trifle he did not intend to savor. He turned and started back to his horse.

  “Is that why you spared me?” I called out, voice and limbs quaking. “So that I can witness another Capua?”

  Oliverotto tugged at his saddle. His horse issued a long snort. After a moment he looked back at me.

  I summoned all my will and took a step toward him. “I have a question to ask of you, if I might, Signore.” I knew I was risking even this reprieve. “It is the question the duke asked you that last time you saw him. At Cesena.” The question regarding the expression on his uncle’s face when he knew Oliverotto had betrayed him. “Have you had opportunity to consider your answer?”

  He gave me a smile a woman would have regarded as charming. “My dear uncle Giovan just looked at me,” he said blithely, as if this were supper-table patter. “No fear, no anger. Niente. He was not even surprised. He had known that day would come, almost since the day I came into his house. Since I was six years old.”

  My hair danced, given my previous deduction that this rare man would manifest his nature at a very young age. Carefully I asked, “Why do you suppose he knew this, even when you were a boy?”

  “Because I was six years old when my uncle sold me into slavery.” Unlike the previous, this smile, though nearly as subtle, was intended for an enemy. “That was when my uncle sent me off to the Vitelli brothers. Three of them. Paolo, Camillo, and Vitellozzo. They began my instruction in this empty old house in Città di Castello. The first morning they brought me a little dog as my companion. That evening they made me kill it. With my hands. The next day the Vitelli brought me another dog. That evening …” He shrugged slightly. “And the third day the same. On the fourth day I strangled the little dog as soon as they put it in my arms. That was when I was deemed ready to begin my lessons as a soldier.”

  This answer startled me as much as anything Signor Oliverotto had said. Leaving me to reflect on it, he swung himself back up on his horse, his cape flying and chain mail ringing. The stallion snorted out a cloud and Oliverotto leaned across the beast’s neck, his face emerging from the steam like some sharp-featured demon spawned in Hell.

  “It should also interest you to know that I saw the expression on the Duke of Gandia’s face when he recognized his killer.” He reined his horse to near-perfect stillness. “I was there that night. But I was not the murderer.”

  Here Oliverotto wheeled the stallion so violently that its rump knocked me into the snow. When I was able to look up again, I saw him at some improbable distance amid the seemingly vaporous landscape, as though his horse had flown him into the sky.

  CHAPTER 21

  He who deceives always finds those who let themselves be deceived.

  I considered following Oliverotto’s tracks, and those of Vitellozzo’s party, all the way to Sinigaglia. But thinking better of it, I turned in the opposite direction. At once I was presented a vision far less elegant than the splendid party that had abandoned me: the victim of the recent scoppietto demonstration remained tied to the stake. The fourth ball had carved away half his jaw.

  I freed his bloody corpse and laid him in the snow, prayed briefly for God’s mercy on his soul, then took off at a quick pace. Soon enough I encountered some farmers and determined that Pesaro was the nearest city on the Via Emilia—and also where I thought I might find Valentino’s army, if the duke was bound for Sinigaglia and his appointment with the condottieri.

  For much of the journey to Pesaro, I traveled across the snowy fields or along the mule paths and irrigation ditches, having observed too many companies of mercenaries on the roads; the allegiances and discipline of these soldiers were always suspect, regardless of who employed them. As I kept moving throughout most of a bitter night, I saw their campfires winking like the zodiac all across the countryside. I assumed the condottieri had cleverly divided their forces into many smaller units, so that their true numbers would not be apparent until they reached Sinigaglia. And I wondered if Valentino was walking into a more deadly snare than I had supposed.

  I reached Pesaro at daybreak on 30 December, although I had to inquire at a tailor’s bottega to be sure of the date; I was also told that Valentino and his army had stayed in and around Pesaro the previous night and had left early that morning, bound for Fano. Here Fortune favored me once again, because I went to the stufa, both for news and to bathe and wash my clothes, and there I ran into a courier who was known to be reliable. For several of my few remaining ducats, he agreed to ride to Cesena, retrieve my writing things and papers, along with a few items of clothing, and return as quickly as possible.

  I found a cot in a tiny room next to the stufa and was so weary that I slept at once, although feverishly. I dreamed I was back in our house on the Via di Piazza, where we had a workroom on the first floor, this opening onto the street on one side, the courtyard we shared with several other families on the other. At the end of the summer the flax was delivered from the fields, already braked and combed, so that it resembled great hanks of grayish-brown hair, as if some giantess had been shorn—or so it seemed to five-year-old Niccolò. Mama always brought in several women to spin these flax fibers into thread, although often she spun as well, as did my two sisters, who were years older than I. On this day a half-dozen distaffs stood in the workroom, reminding me of the scarecrows I saw in the country, because each was just a stick on a tripod, with a bundle of the hair-fine flax stuck at the top, about the size and shape of a woman’s head. With the peculiar self-awareness one sometimes has in dreams, I knew that these flax bundles were intended to represent the heads I would see many years later at Cesenatico, so that it seemed little Niccolò was receiving some dreadful prophetic vision.

  Yet I also observed that someone was standing on the threshold that led out onto the street. The flax workroom was flooded with light, but it seemed as dark as a moonless night outside, so that our visitor was nothing but a shadow, as faceless as the creature whose death I had so recently attended. And I knew at once that this visitor was the master of another sort of workshop, where living flesh was rendered into a perverse disegno.

  His voice slithered like a serpent across the floor. Every hair on my body stood up and I felt myself drawn into the air, entirely off my feet. You are almost here, Niccolò. In the center of my Labyrinth. But you will not see my face until I turn away.

  I awakened covered with sweat as if I were at the bath, my forehead nevertheless like ice, the words this maestro of Death’s workshop had whispered into my dream still echoing in my head. As much as my intellect told me this could only have been the voice of either Vitellozzo Vitelli or Oliverotto da Fermo, some baffling intuition stood between me and the certainty that either was a monster in the guise of a man. Vitellozzo remained a cipher, even face-to-face. And as closely as Oliverotto’s dreadful words matched the murderer’s deeds, a nagging voice of my own told me that Oliverotto was not a rare man; his casual brutality and naked ambition had become all too common among the condottieri. He had been bred to violence and murder, not born to i
t. And I believed that some vestige of his tormented soul regretted the evil tutelage that had begun when he was forced to strangle a little dog.

  In truth, I could only see that whatever the differences between Vitellozzo and Oliverotto—those of a stern, cruel father and his rebellious son—they were both conspiring to cast suspicion on Valentino himself. Of course, they were too clever to baldly accuse the duke of his brother’s murder; instead I had been led to the missing page of Euclid’s Elements, which Vitellozzo might well have removed himself, in order to fraudulently represent it as some sort of confession Valentino had made during his goat ride. And with equal subtlety, Oliverotto had implied that he had witnessed the Duke of Gandia’s murder yet had not wielded the knife, which certainly left Valentino suspect, given that the duke already appeared to be protecting some secret he and Oliverotto shared.

  Hence it occurred to me that this was the witness for which I had been summoned: to cast doubt on Valentino, so that the guilty could continue to elude justice. And in this they had to some extent succeeded, because those doubts had a hard kernel of credence that would not go away, like a seed in one’s shoe.

  It had been dark for several hours when a knock came at my door, whereupon my courier entered like the deus ex machina in a Greek drama. All of the clothing and papers he brought in a single leather sack were items I had left behind in Cesena, save one large packet, wrapped in fish paper, that had just been delivered from Florence.

  Almost since I had arrived in Imola three months previously, I had been begging my correspondents in Florence to send me a copy of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. No work of the ancients—much less us moderns—so carefully illuminates the character and natures of various eminent men, and I had been desperate for some insight into the unfathomable Valentino. But I had long abandoned all hope that it would ever arrive.