The Malice of Fortune (20 page)

When I sat again, I was no longer in that room. Like Simonides reconstructing the ruins of his memory palace, I went back to our little garden in the Trastevere, which my beloved Camilla had committed to her memory hardly a fortnight ago. She was already waiting for me, as she had on our first day there, eight months to the day after your father’s murder. In that time we had not spent more than three nights in a row under the same roof, staying with various ladies I had known in the business, sometimes hidden away in some
guardaroba
where a servant slept, sometimes in a latrine under the stairs, always making our farewells before our hostess could no longer resist the temptation to draw her thirty pieces of silver from your grandfather’s prodigious and ill-gotten treasury. It was Camilla who found us our sanctuary in the Trastevere on the first day of your life, bringing us there in a tanner’s cart, hidden beneath stiff, stinking cowhides, the afterbirth tied to my thigh with a string because the midwife, not having time to deliver it, did not want it to draw back in and poison me. On that day the little garden had seemed a Gethsemane to me, so certain was I that your grandfather’s people would track us there—a place as wicked as the world we had fled, dark and tangled, the pitiful trees strangled with vines, a nest for rats.

Yet Camilla and I transformed that Gethsemane into our Eden. That is the memory garden to which I returned, to those long spring days hoeing, pruning, planting herbs, flowers, and fruit trees, grading gravel paths, and hammering together our trellis. Watching you grow, as our little boy more resembled his father every day.

I remained in that garden until dusk, when the cold wind rustled across the pages open on the table beside me. I had given Camilla this little Petrarch years ago and she had inked tiny medallion shapes beside those lines she favored. I saw that she had marked this: “And should time work against my sweet desires …”

I got up, closed the shutters, and stretched out on the barren mattress, covering myself with my fur-lined
cioppa
. I did not believe I would sleep, yet it seemed I drifted from one dream to the next, fitful images populated with the living, the dead, and the many faces of regret.

I remember only the last of these visions. I was in my lovely bedroom overlooking the Via dei Banchi. A man stood at the shutters. The sun had transformed him into a creature of light, no more material than a golden flame, glowing and shimmering. He turned to me, slowly; though I could not make out his face, I knew he was Juan, because his body was pierced all over with dark gashes, shadow instead of light pouring through these wounds, quickly congealing into black blood.

I tried to awaken but a pale face came over me, his hand on my mouth so that I could not breathe. I thought he whispered to me, “I would like to hear you sing.”

Then I heard myself scream, entirely within my own mind:
This is not a dream!

XIV

The weight pressing upon my mouth and nose seemed little more than a down pillow but I could draw nothing into my lungs. Another voice whispered my name in a diminutive I have not been called for years. I thought it was Juan calling me back to my dream, and death.

“Dami, Dami. Don’t scream. It is Cesare. Don’t scream.” The man all Europe knows as Valentino lifted his hand from my mouth.

“Mother of God,” I gasped. I could vaguely see the features of his long, somber, beautiful face, as if Christ Himself had come to sit on my bed.

“I had to come in here like a housebreaker.” His whisper was harsh. Perhaps even fearful. “The watchman is sleeping. I couldn’t risk his attention.”

“Why? You are the duke.”

“I can trust no one. Not even my own father. The watchman here is in his employ. I could not even send Michelotto to you. Dami?” He removed a glove and gently placed the back of his hand to my face. “You are so cold, Dami. You have no heat in here.” Yet it was his hand that seemed cold.

“I remember her. Your Camilla. She was so lovely. So lively. If I could, I would offer you the comforts of the faith I long ago lost. If I ever had faith.” Even as little as I could see of his face, he suddenly appeared sadder. “My father should not have sent you here. He should have left Juan at peace. And left the boy with you. Now this …”

He sat up, his trunk as erect as if he were standing. “When the
searchers came from the river to tell my father that Juan had been found, he would not even turn his head to me.” His voice was distant. “I thought it was merely that he could not bear to see that Fortune had spared me and had instead taken the icon of his heart. I remember the first occasion when he did look at me again. He had shut himself up in his bedroom for five days without food or water. I brought a candle into that tomb and could no longer recognize my father. His eyes were great bruises, everything except the pupils entirely purple and red, as if he had attempted to snatch them out of the sockets.” I could hear the sigh escape through his nose. “Yet when he stared at me through these wounds I thought for the first time in my life:
My father sees me
. And I knew at once that he believed I had been an accomplice and instigator, not only of Fortune but of the men who wielded the knives.” Valentino’s eyes had appeared shut during this remembrance, but now I could observe a faint glimmer. “Sometimes I think there is no one His Holiness does not suspect. To this day.”

“Then it is all the more urgent that the
condottieri
be held accountable.”

He shook his head, yet I could not be certain if he was signaling disagreement or had instead resigned himself to pursuing justice. “Dami. There is something else you need to know about Leonardo’s map. The maestro did not finish it until mid-October. By then my
condottieri
had already announced their defection and rebellion. None of them have been in Imola since early this summer.”

“What about Oliverotto da Fermo?”

“He arrived here a week ago. With Paolo Orsini.”

I couldn’t accept this; the first woman had been butchered at least three weeks ago.

“Dami. Do you understand what I am saying? I have a traitor in my house. Likely more than one. Not all of the conspirators declared themselves in October.”

So Niccolò had indeed been correct: the murderer—the maestro of the shop—had received assistance of some sort. And it would be all the more difficult to connect these crimes to the
condottieri
if they had employed proxies—presumably Valentino’s own people—to commit them.

Valentino leaned over me and placed his hands beside my head, almost as if he were preparing to mount me. “Juan demanded nothing of himself,” he whispered. “Yet he was a magnet to others, demanding—taking—everything from whomever he touched. It is still so. Even in death. At times I believe that it is not the New Jerusalem His Holiness sees descending from Heaven. It is the resurrected Juan.”

I whispered back to him, “You, too, demand everything.”

He lifted his right hand, remaining braced by the other, and brushed the back of his fingers across my cheek; now his touch was like a hot brand. A touch that returned me to my bedroom overlooking the Via dei Banchi. Late on a summer afternoon, the sun turning everything to pale stone, as if the entire room and all its furnishing had been carved in white sardonyx. Even my sheets and naked flesh had that hard luster.

His fingers trembled. His face was so close to mine that I could smell the rosemary on his breath. “I know some things that you do not. Matters not even my father has been told. And I did not think I should tell you …” He sat up again. “About the woman. The woman who had Juan’s amulet.”

My heart seemed to kick at my ribs. “You know who she was?”

“Not her name. Not the farmhouse—or hut—in which she lived. But you can see why I kept the secret. She was Vitellozzo Vitelli’s whore.”

“God’s Cross.” I presumed that they had already found her head, evidently even before I had last spoken with him. “Have you seen her face?”

“No. No one has found the head.” He paused, as if he regretted disclosing this. “But I knew that when he was here in Imola, Vitellozzo had a woman in the brothel next to the Franciscan establishment. A country girl. He likes to see the dirt on the soles when he turns their feet up. This woman was in a
gioca
with some other whores.”

“You mean they played the
gioce di Diana
?” Witch games. Everyone in the Trastevere and the little towns where I grew up knew about the
stregoneria
—the religion of witches—and the
gioce di Diana
. The
streghe
—witches—call their covens
gioce
, for those games.

“Their games are principally dancing naked about the wheat fields
at night and rutting like dogs with plowboys who call themselves wizards,” Valentino said. “I don’t condemn them, much less believe we should burn them. But I am told that these witches’
gioce
also include divinations.”

“
Gevol int la carafa
,” I said. According to Leonardo’s assistant Tommaso, this was some sort of augury, employing a jar of water. “The Devil in the jar.”

Valentino nodded. “That is one of their games. There is also the goat ride. A state of entrancement induced by a narcotic ointment.”

My memory flooded with the reek of the pot we had found in that cursed farmhouse.

“The
streghe
believe it enables them to fly to distant places, on the back of the Devil, who takes the form of a goat,” Valentino said. “Leonardo found this ointment on all the bodies. On all the parts. They were covered entirely with it.”

“So the murderer uses the witches’ magic against them. Like a thief who robs the butcher with his own knife.”

He nodded. “It assists in the abduction.”

“But why? Why not a buffet to the back of the head?” Or a hand over the mouth. “Why all the rest of this? The
mappa
, the games, the riddles …” All the things Niccolò had observed. “And my darling Camilla … Why?”

“I can’t say regarding Camilla … I don’t know.” He shook his head with some animation. Or frustration. “But I think the butchered
streghe
were more than conveniences for this riddle you and Maestro Leonardo have described to me.” He paused as if the next words would be a binding oath. “I believe the two
streghe
knew something.”

“Something about the
condottieri
.”

I heard another sigh. “Something that goes back to Juan’s murder. In a way that even Juan’s amulet does not.”

“Something that Vitellozzo Vitelli’s whore overheard? And then told to her
amica
in this
gioca
? Something that required them both to be silenced.”

Valentino got up, for a moment staring down into the brazier beside the bed. “You must burn some charcoal.” He turned and faced the shutters. “This is no longer about war or peace. It has to do with
the honor of our house. My father has waited more than five years for his vengeance. Nothing else lives in his breast …” He was entirely still. “I could have dealt with the
condottieri
in my own time. But Juan must have his way. Always. We must open his grave and parade his corpse up the Via Alessandrina.” He did not try to disguise his bitterness. “I can no longer contain this. We must discover what these women knew. Until Juan knows the peace of the dead, Italy will not have peace.”

“Do you want me to see what I can find at that brothel?”

“I don’t know. I must consider the next …”

All at once he started to the door, leaving his answer hanging in the air. I called to him when I heard the latch.

“Cesare. Your father suspects that Giovanni may be your son. He said as much to me. He said he would soon enough know his father.”

I heard only the door closing.

Shortly after dawn I crossed the courtyard. The spectral
garzone
answered my knock, but on this occasion Niccolò himself was sleeping beneath his cape on the boy’s cot, and indeed, with his unkempt hair and youthful face he looked like a poorly kept manservant.

Out of habit I slipped into the bedroom, cracked the shutters a bit, and again examined the books and papers on the table. No dispatches to Niccolò’s lordships in Florence remained in plain sight, but his Livy’s
Decades
was open as before. Atop the printed pages was a little scrap no doubt torn from some missive, upon which Niccolò had made two lists. The first was composed of names:

Alexander of Pherae
Perseus
Demetrius
Sulla
Caligula
Nero

I believe the first three are mentioned in Plutarch’s
Parallel Lives
. Of the others, Sulla was, of course, the cruel Roman dictator, while
Caligula and Nero earned their infamy as depraved emperors. Beneath this evil litany, Niccolò had written:

Amusement
Arrogance
Vanity
Ambition
Remorselessness
Reverence