The Malice of Fortune (4 page)

My meditation on those fleet years that “carry us to death’s sharp spear,” as Petrarch would say, was at last interrupted by your grandfather. Beheim at his side, still in his sweaty shirt, His Holiness wore only sagging hose and scarlet slippers, the better to display his legs, which were still sturdy and well-shaped. He advanced to me with the graceful step of a much younger man, toes out as if his dance master were watching. Only when he was close enough to touch me could I see how much he had aged—the liver spots, the thin skin stretched taut over the great obstinate hump of his nose. But his lips were luxurious as ever, pursed delicately, as if he had just sipped a particularly fine wine and was trying to get the taste of it.

He nodded at Beheim, who removed a knife from the physician’s box. I prayed for a quick end. But Beheim simply cut the cord that held my gag. My mouth was so dry that I couldn’t spit out the wooden plug. Employing the point of his knife, Beheim gouged it loose.

Your grandfather leaned forward and stared at me with those
obsidian eyes. “Damiata. I always knew where you were.” His voice was deep but his words hissed a bit, a whisper of his Spanish ancestry, even though the Borgia family—your family,
carissimo
—has been in Italy for generations. The snake in the grass. Or the serpent in the tree.

His fingers flicked at my hair; this gesture was not a caress but that of a stableboy examining the mane of a sick horse. “Dyeing your hair, hiding in some Jew’s tavern …” He shook his head wearily. “I could have come for you at any time. Each breath you have taken in the last five years has been at my indulgence.”

“You are the prince of indulgences, are you not?” I said. Your grandfather sold forgiveness from the altars of his churches like a whore selling candles on the street corner; the only crimes he would not pardon for a price were those against his person, or in aid of the Turk. “Perhaps you can even afford to absolve yourself. You murdered a blameless, dear old man at my house tonight. And your grandson’s dear little pet.” I did not want to tempt Fortune by speculating on Camilla’s fate.

I thought he would strike me. Instead he turned his back and looked up at Juan, the
alla turca
Duke of Gandia, as if beseeching this most cherished son to restore the flesh to his own moldering bones. After a time your grandfather’s heavy shoulders sagged and he turned his attention to the prophetic image of the son who yet lived: the Cesare Borgia who is now, as I write this, captain general of the armies of the Holy Roman Church, famed throughout Christendom as Valentino, Duke of the Romagna, the prodigy who threw off his cardinal’s cap for a warrior’s helmet, the vanquisher of tyrants and the savior of all Italy. The son who will enable your grandfather, His Holiness Pope Alexander VI, to conquer the Kingdoms of the World without rising from the Heavenly Throne of Saint Peter. Perhaps by the time you read this, that papal empire will have grown far beyond its present boundaries, to spread from the heart of Italy across Europe.

Indeed, if all my present fears come to pass, perhaps Fortune has already made you heir to that empire. But if that is so, then the Borgia have told you nothing about me but lies, save where the truth is worse.

At last your grandfather interrupted his own meditation. “Juan was going to your house the night he was murdered. You alone were privy to that. You alone could have informed someone else.”

I had sat at this pope’s table often enough, and had observed his methods sufficiently, to know how well he crafted false accusations from undeniable fact. Having anticipated such an interrogation for more than five years, I replied, “If you are claiming that I betrayed Juan by revealing his route to my house that night, God and the Holy Mother know that it was far easier for his murderers to follow him from his mother’s house near the Esquiline, where he had dined, as half of Rome knew. And you know as well as any man that the Orsini and the Vitelli had their knives out for him. They are the very
condottieri
who would profit most if the Borgia were erased from the earth.”

Now, I should explain that we Italians have for several generations placed the very survival of our various states and principalities in the hands of these
condottieri
, a brotherhood of mercenary generals whose bands of thugs carry out, for a very dear price, the martial tasks the French king would assign to a vast army of men in permanent service, led by nobles who have sworn allegiance to him. Here in Italy, however, it is our fashion to hire the agents of our own destruction. These “soldiers of fortune” strut about like pimps in their suits of engraved armor, waging phony war among themselves only to pillage the livelihoods of helpless peasants, transferring their allegiances to whoever will offer the fattest contract. And the two families presently in command of this blood-sucking cabal are the Orsini and the Vitelli.

“You made Juan the captain general of the Holy Roman Church,” I accused my accuser. “An office for which he was entirely unsuited and which he in no way desired. And it was you who directed poor Juan to throw his soldiers into one hopeless assault after another on the Orsini fortresses around Rome, which were defended all the better by troops under the command of the Vitelli. Even a cloistered nun could have seen that Juan’s assassins were Orsini or Vitelli. Or both. But you did not pursue them, did you, Holiness?” If I expected an answer, it was not forthcoming. “You were too weak to reckon with your own son’s murderers. Instead you made use of them.”

My meaning was clear to him, though perhaps it will not be to
you. The popes who preceded your grandfather had surrendered much of the Church’s earthly domain, which at present occupies the entire middle of Italy and is known as the Papal States, to a host of tyrants large and small. Without the assistance of the Orsini and Vitelli, your grandfather and Duke Valentino could only dream of defeating this confederacy of despots. So they hired their former enemies, subordinating these
condottieri
to Valentino’s bold and clever command, and were thus able to reclaim the Papal States with a swiftness that inspired awe throughout Europe; we heard of these victories even in the half-buried alleys of the Trastevere. That is why your grandfather, having no wish to implicate his allies, found it far more convenient to accuse me. I had no soldiers for His Holiness to hire.

“You did not come to me when we found Juan”—your grandfather’s back heaved a bit—“when you might have offered us these theories. Instead you ran like a housebreaker.”

“
I
was there when they found Juan. I waited beside the river …” For a moment I walked into that memory and could hear the shouts of the fishermen. “As soon as I saw him, I knew you would demand my confession. Just as you expect it tonight.” I glanced at the instruments of interrogation in the box beside me. “And I knew even then I had a child in my womb. A child I would have spit in the face of Satan to protect.”

His Holiness turned, his words hissing more noticeably than before. “Henceforth the boy will enjoy my protection. Here, in the Vatican.”

I wailed and wailed, bereft of all reason, these words having gutted me more effectively than any instrument Beheim might have chosen.

Only when I had exhausted myself did merciful God grant me a certain calm—whereupon I found Satan’s eyes so close to my face that I could smell the wine on his breath. “Bene, bene,” your grandfather said. “I have opened a door and shown you my grief. A few moments of the pain that is for me unceasing. A shirt of fire I will never be able to tear from my breast.”

“I, too, grieve for Juan.”

He dismissed my grief with a blink. “You call the boy Giovanni.
Of course I have also known that, from the day of his birth. But I don’t believe you are certain that my Juan was your Giovanni’s father.”

“He is the child of my womb and my soul. The Holy Mother and I know the father who put his seed in me.”

“After the boy has been here awhile, I will know the father,” your grandfather said, with no uncertainty. He nodded at Beheim, who once again displayed his physician’s knife.

On such an occasion, you are only wondering where the first cut will be. When Beheim sliced through the rope that bound my right arm to the chair, I presumed he intended to extend my limb in such a fashion that my song would begin with sharp, clear notes. Instead he cut the rope that held my left arm.

“It is in the box, Lorenzo,” your grandfather said. “Give it to her.”

I closed my eyes and felt Beheim’s hand between my thighs, no doubt in anticipation of pulling up my skirts. Against my will I looked down.

He had placed in my lap a little pouch that could easily fit in the palm of my hand. Fashioned of soiled red wool, with a long red string, it was the sort of charm bag that half the whores and procuresses in Rome carry about, hoping to obtain good fortune or cast a love spell.

“Look inside,” His Holiness said.

My hands trembling, I got in a finger and drew out a dirty paper card no longer than my thumb, also with a red yarn attached. This was a
bollettino
, which you do not see much in Rome—country people wear these little prayers around their necks. I could still distinguish the inscription, despite the untutored hand and cheap ink, which was not much darker than the stained paper:
Sant Antoni mi benefator
. Scrawled in some peasant dialect, it was a prayer to Saint Anthony, who guards against demons.

But when I turned over the little card I found another inscription, this in a practiced hand, in correct Italian and black Chinese ink:
Gli angoli dei venti
. The corners of the winds.

I looked at the pope and shook my head.

“Empty it,” he said.

The rest of the contents tumbled into my lap. Two fava beans, a
little lump of gray chalk, a quattrino
della croce
—a coin melted into the shape of a cross; these were the sort of charms that might compel a man to fall in love with their bearer. There was one last item, however, that froze my hands.

I looked down at the miniature bronze head of a bull, no larger than a small bell, with big eyes, short horns, and a ring that seemed to grow from the top of the tiny skull, so that it could be worn as an amulet. It was an Etruscan antiquity, fashioned by the ancient race that preceded the Romans and lent its name to Tuscany. I turned it over, requiring only a moment’s scrutiny to find the tiny Latin inscription engraved on the back:
Alexander filius
. Son of Alexander. On the day Rodrigo Borgia had been crowned Pope Alexander VI, taking the name of a pagan conqueror instead of a saint, he had presented this token of love—and worldly ambition—to his cherished son.

“Juan …” The pope swallowed as if the wine on his breath had returned to his throat. “He was wearing it that night.”

“He was never without it.” In a strange fashion, I hoped this would comfort Juan’s father.

“It was found at Imola,” he said, referring to an inconsiderable city in the Romagna—the Romagna being the northernmost of the Papal States, occupying a vast plain between the Apennine mountains and the Adriatic Sea. Or I should say that Imola
had
been a city of little consequence, until Duke Valentino located his court there early this year. One heard that all the ambassadors, not only those from our many Italian states and the rest of Europe but the Turks as well, had gone there in supplication. Somehow Juan’s amulet had journeyed for five years, hundreds of miles across the length and breadth of Italy, to return to his father’s hands. In such fashion Fortune displays her love of cruel ironies.

“How—”

“How indeed.”

I looked up. “If you have been watching my every breath these five years, then you know I cannot have transported it to Imola, even if it had ever been in my possession. I last saw that amulet a week before Juan was murdered. The last time …” I had to turn away the images that waited for me, floating on a copper-colored river I never again
wanted to cross. “I did not see it in that boat, either. Although one of the fishermen might have taken it.”

The pope glanced at Beheim. “Those fishermen were examined with great care.” Perhaps there was a certain dreadful irony to this “care.” But if so, His Holiness’s face did not convey it. “My boy’s assassins ripped this from his neck.” His Holiness snatched the amulet from me as if I were its thief. “They took it as their trophy.”

“Surely the woman from whom you obtained this charm bag can tell you who gave it to her.” I was surprised at the desperate pitch of my own voice.

“She can tell us nothing. The charm bag belonged to a dead woman. It was found in her hand.”

“I presume someone recognized her … her body.”

His Holiness’s nostrils pinched, as if he had smelled the putrefying remains. “She inconvenienced us in that regard. Duke Valentino’s soldiers discovered her corpse in a field outside Imola.” I noted the formality with which he now referred to his son Cesare. “Absent her head, which has yet to be retrieved.”

I crossed myself. “Then the murderers presumed she would be recognized by someone in Duke Valentino’s household, if not by your own people. Did she have scars or birthmarks upon her body?” I wondered if I would be expected to know these, still being familiar with the distinguishing marks of a number of ladies in our business.