The Malice of Fortune (46 page)

After Vitellozzo had lamented his late brother—and his cards—Oliverotto won the stakes with merely a
numero quaranta
. But before the deal could pass to the left, Vitellozzo produced a parcel from his lap. He placed it in the middle of the table, as if establishing the stakes for the new hand. At once, I recognized this slight volume, bound in greasy, soiled cowhide. And I was hardly surprised to see it there.

“It is not much, is it? But I wonder if any of you can afford to play for it.” Vitellozzo nodded at Paolo Orsini. “You, Paolo, perhaps. We Vitelli having secured your family’s wealth against those who would snatch it away.” Certainly he meant the pope.

The preening Orsini warlord could not keep Vitellozzo’s gaze, as though the guardian of his family’s wealth frightened him more than the prospect of its loss.

“And you, ’Liverotto, would have to kill some more of your uncles. Or sell your hair to a wigmaker.” Vitellozzo’s sausage fingers mimed
a caress of luxuriant imaginary tresses. He lifted a heavy eyebrow and smiled tightly at the man he had schooled since he was a boy—the expression of a harsh father accustomed to mocking his son.

“ ’Liverotto” acknowledged this expression with one even less genial, although it was little more than a slight adjustment of his head.

Vitellozzo began to turn the leaves of the geometry text, his eyes now awake, rapidly roaming the pages. “You might ask, ‘Why is this eminent artillerist, this maestro of warcraft, so interested in some schoolboy’s Euclid?’ ” He pushed the book, still open, across the table to me. “Perhaps you can tell me, Messer Macchia.”

I turned the
Elements
so that I could examine the pages, requiring considerable will not to tremble. The scraped-over parchment had been reused at least once and the Latin text was hurried and careless, the ink fading. The annotation in the broad margin was worse, a childish, scarcely readable scrawl, the ink a cheap oak-gall brown:
Gevol int la carafa
. The Devil in a jar. This was followed by an accounting of the
streghe
present:
Zeja
Virgi nia.
Zeja
Maddalena.
Zeja
Francesca. And finally
Zeja
Caterina, the white-eyed seeress who had conducted the divination Damiata and I had witnessed—and who was almost certainly the untutored author of this marginalia.

Beneath the list of doomed
streghe
was another brief litany, the script much more elegant than the witch’s scrawl, although here each name had been written in a distinct hand: Vitellozzo Vitelli. Paolo Orsini. Oliverotto da Fermo.

The catalog of participants was followed by a familiar invocation:
Angelo bianc, per vostr santite e mia purite
. And beneath this diabolical prayer,
Zeja
Caterina had recorded, in a mongrel of Romagnolo and Italian, a question only the Devil could answer:
Gevol int la carafa
, tell us who here dies before the new year.

I fingered the top of the page, intent on turning to the answer. All at once Vitellozzo shot his great, swollen paw across the table and struck down my frostbitten hand.

“Don’t be impatient, Messer Macchia. We will share it with you in a moment. My ’Liverotto tells me that you are familiar with this form of divination. You and the whore the pope sent.”

I could only presume that Oliverotto had, as I suspected, followed
us to the hut that night—and was in fact the horseman who had pursued the fleeing mastiff keeper and relieved him of this book. “Then certainly Signor Oliverotto also told you that our
Gevol int la carafa
was interrupted.”

“Tell us about it anyway. Otherwise we will presume you are a worthless, chittering monkey, whom we have gone to great effort to bring to our table, only to watch you toss your
cacca
on everything. And you should hear how a little monkey howls when you pull its arms off.”

I took this as an entirely credible threat. “The
zeja
represents this
Elements
as a ‘book of spells’ and enlists some young children, virgins, to implore Lucifer to appear in her jar of water,” I told him with a dry tongue. “At which point I imagine the demon presents the
zeja
the answers to our questions. But as I said, my divination was interrupted.”

Vitellozzo’s shoulders heaved with wincing mirth, as if to actually laugh would cause him unbearable suffering. “Turn the page now, Messer Macchia.”

The broad margin of the next page had been filled with simple geometric figures drawn with a straightedge and sepia ink, evidently by a student. But at the bottom
Zeja
Caterina had written, in Romagnolo, a curt answer to the question of who among them would perish before the coming New Year:
Tot mort
. All die.

“The white-eyed bitch was only half a fraud,” Vitellozzo said. “She and the rest of her
strega
whores have fulfilled their part of the prophecy. Now turn the page.”

This margin had been almost entirely covered with annotations. At the top was the familiar list of participants, a litany of the dead
streghe
and the three
condottieri
present at this table. But these names were followed by the words
traget di capra. Capra
, goat, was clear enough.
Traget
briefly confounded me. Was it the Tuscan
tragitto
, journey?

Goat ride.

What followed was more confusing. Scrawled over this margin and that of the following page, even written over the Latin text in places, was a hodgepodge of names and nonsensical words and phrases, most in the rough hand of the
zeja
but some in pure yet undisciplined Tuscan Italian. Misspelled names of those present
—Ursin, Vitel, Ferm
—and those evidently not
—il papa, Duca Valentin
. Places real and imagined:
Roma, Paradisio, Inferno
. Things sublime and profane:
tesoro di mi cuor, milli diamanti, potta, fotta
. My eyes could do little more than race over this marginalia before Vitellozzo’s hand shot out again and snatched away the
Elements
entirely. Just as he did so, I thought I saw
Ganda
—which I took as a misspelled reference to the late Duke of Gandia.

“You know what we were doing, Messer Macchia-Monkey. Tell me.”

“The
streghe
employ an ointment into which they grind hellebore, henbane, and belladonna, before smearing it entirely over their naked bodies—this recipe induces a state known as the ‘goat ride,’ wherein the witches and wizards imagine themselves transported to distant places. As I am certain you gentlemen demonstrated to your own satisfaction, ordinarily this goat ride is a suitable prelude to the
gioce di Diana
. Witch games, which more resemble a bacchanal. An orgy.”

“That is true, monkey. My ’Liverotto had his
strega
whore babbling before he had even finished greasing her snatch. After that … you cannot believe what he got up there. But go on. You know there is more.”

“This concoction also induces a paralytic state,” I said. “The limbs are frozen, so much so that they might be hacked from the body, yet one is unable to scream.” I forced myself to look into Vitellozzo’s slitted eyes, wondering if he had witnessed this. “Even as one remains entirely sensible of pain.”

Vitellozzo lifted his bloated hand and rolled it limply, in a “go on” gesture.

“As the limbs regain movement,” I said, “the narcotics encourage one to converse. Quite liberally, with persons who need not be present.”

Here Vitellozzo feigned a little clap. “I adore clever pets. Don’t you, Paolo? I found this part of the journey by goat to be most interesting. But our darling ’Liverotto was not at all pleased to see his dearest uncle Giovanni again.”

Cold fingers traced up my back. I had the sense that Vitellozzo himself had simply observed, while his associates took the goat ride. The faceless apprentice’s last words—“He watches”—took on a new inflection.

Sparks might have flashed inside Vitellozzo’s animal slits. He had recognized my fear. “But you know you have not reached the end, don’t you,
Macchia
-Monkey. Finish your recitation.”

“I can only judge from what you have permitted me to see. But I presume that when their limbs were unfrozen, the
zeja
and these gentlemen were able to record their musings. It is possible they even confessed to certain sins. Or conversed about an object removed from a corpse.” Of course, I meant the amulet I presumed someone at that table had plucked from the Duke of Gandia’s bleeding throat, five years later slipping it into the charm bag of a
strega
he had so carefully cut into pieces.

Again Vitellozzo’s great bulk shuddered, the pained smile fleeing quickly from his bloated face. “So you think you see what I have here, don’t you, Messer Macchia?”

I nodded warily, wondering if I had already stepped into his snare.

“Then you are not such a clever little Florentine monkey.” Vitellozzo snapped his bloated fingers at Oliverotto, miraculously making a sharp pop, as if he were summoning a serving boy.

As though long accustomed to such servitude, Oliverotto at once got up and went out the black oak door. Quickly he reappeared in company with two soldiers, both in mail shirts like his. Only when Oliverotto declined his own seat and started toward me did I observe the noose he had obtained.

Vitellozzo waited until Oliverotto stood directly behind me. After glancing up at his ward, he began to turn through dozens of pages of the geometry text; I could see that most of the margins were marked up in a witch’s scrawl. Evidently finding something of interest to both of us, Vitellozzo stopped and pushed the book back to me.

In this margin was the record of a
Gevol int la carafa
almost identical to the preceding, with the same list of four
streghe
as before. But only one petitioner had signed, offering not his name but his title, in Latin:
Dux Romandiole Valentieque
. Hence I could be entirely certain that Damiata had not lied about Valentino’s presence in the book. Beneath the latter’s formal signature,
Zeja
Caterina had recorded a new question:
Gevol int la carafa
, tell us who kill Duca Ganda.

“We discovered this
Zeja
Caterina and her
gioca
of whores and
witches when we were in Imola almost two years ago,” Vitellozzo said. “At that time, our Duke Valentino was only beginning his conquest of the Romagna. He was most intrigued when I told him about our entertainment, but I don’t think he amused himself in similar fashion until the end of this summer, after these gentlemen and I had already determined to leave his employ. Well, you can see the question on his mind.”

Reaching his hand out as carefully as on the previous occasion he had been impulsive, Vitellozzo again took the
Elements
back. “This will make it more interesting for you, if you can’t peek. How do you think this ‘Devil in a jar’ answered the duke’s question?”

I presumed the answer was on the next page. “I would imagine that the
zeja
gave Valentino the answer he expected to hear.”

“And what do you think the duke expected to hear?”

It seemed Vitellozzo had simply cast out this net to see if he could discover whom I suspected, given my considerable inquiry into the matter. “The Duke of Gandia had acquired a number of enemies at the time he was murdered. Names familiar throughout Italy. The
zeja
might have told Valentino any one of them. Or even all of them.”

“ ‘Names familiar throughout Italy.’ You diplomats have cunts where your mouths should be.”

I was jerked to my feet, just as the hood went back over my head. In my renewed blindness, I waited for Oliverotto’s noose around my neck. Instead the rope went around my hands, binding them behind my back. As I was rushed to the door, stumbling over my own feet, Vitellozzo called after me.

“Messer Macchia! You should know a thing before we hang you.” He waited until his thugs had briefly halted my journey to the nearest window. “Your friend, the great whore of the Vatican, has already come to see me.”

CHAPTER
20

W
hen evil comes, you must take it down like medicine, for he is crazy who keeps it on his tongue, and savors its taste
.

Still bound and hooded, I was dragged down some stairs, heard a lock clank, and was thrown onto a stone floor. The door rattled behind me. I quickly discovered that this cell could be measured by my head at one end and my feet at the other. It stank like a rotting carcass.

These discomforts were nothing next to the horrors in my mind. I did not believe that Damiata had “come to see” Vitellozzo Vitelli any more than I had; if she had journeyed here of her own volition, she would not have left her room in Cesena without a word to me. Hence I shared that cell with images far worse than any punishment of Hell, condemned to helplessly envision the things that had already been done to the woman I loved.