The Alchemist's Pursuit (37 page)

Shivering as the cold sank through to my bones, I waited until Fedele had completed his prayer and was ready for more.

“Now it is obvious why your mother hired Nostradamus. The diary named the courtesans but not the ‘amateurs'—as your brother Domenico called them, the adulterous married women that Zorzi seduced. She hoped he would identify some of them for her to hunt down.

“Last Wednesday, you were summoned to the deathbed of Giovanni Gradenigo. He did not know that the friar who arrived at his bedside had once been Timoteo Michiel, any more than you had realized that your own father's death would play a part in his confession.

“Of course Gradenigo told you much the same story as Foscari had told his confessor, except that he went further, because one of Zorzi's women at that time was not a courtesan but a highborn lover, an adulteress by the name of Tonina. That is a rare name, and in this case it referred to donna Tonina Bembo Gradenigo, wife of Marino Gradenigo, Giovanni's son. After the Council of Ten proclaimed Zorzi Michiel's guilt and flight, she went to her father-in-law and admitted that Zorzi had been with her when Gentile was stabbed. Zorzi was innocent, she said, and must be pardoned and recalled. But Zorzi was beyond recall, alas.

“Gradenigo concluded that he had tortured an innocent man to death and blackened a noble family's name. Racked by guilt, he swore his daughter-in-law to secrecy. He abandoned politics and devoted the rest of his life to good works.”

Pause. Then Fedele said harshly, “This is unbelievable!”

“There is an alternative,” I admitted, “but it is even worse. Zorzi had truthfully said he could not produce an alibi without betraying a lady. Perhaps he was just posturing and believed that he could always tattle if he had to—until he learned, too late, that his lover was the daughter-in-law of one of the state inquisitors, one of the men interrogating him. Had he not known that? Did they break him on the cord so that he blurted out Tonina's name, but Gradenigo and his partners refused to accept the alibi and just kept on torturing him?”

After a moment Fedele mumbled, “Gradenigo was an honorable man.”

That was the only answer I would ever get. It seemed that Zorzi had withstood the torment and taken his secret to the grave. Despite his debauchery, he had been no weakling.

“But you have no proof of any of this flummery,” the friar said harshly.

“No, Brother? When Gradenigo was dying you blocked his dying wish to speak with Nostradamus. When you came calling on Sunday and the Maestro speculated that the murder weapon had been available in Palazzo Michiel, you encouraged him to think so. You did not actually tell a lie, although you knew very well that his guess was wrong. You did not want the case reopened, although by then you knew that Zorzi had been unjustly condemned. You were hiding something.”

“I did not wish my family to suffer more,” the friar muttered.

He was still twisting the truth.

“That too, no doubt,” I said. “But now I have seen the anonymous letter, and last Thursday you wrote a note to me, if you remember.” Of course one could not hang a man on a mere handwriting resemblance and I had compared them in memory only, but Fedele did not know this.

He sighed. “Many laws still define a cleric as a person who can read and write, Alfeo. Not a day passes but some illiterate person asks me to write a letter for him.”

“Brother, you are still doing it! Do you honestly expect me to believe that you wrote out a virtual death warrant for your own brother without insisting that the true author's name be included?”

Fedele was silent, staring blindly along the great nave toward the faint candles on the main altar beyond the choir and screen.

“You composed that note!” I insisted. “Why, why? What motive could you possibly have had to bring a false accusation against your own brother in full knowledge of the horrors that might result?”

How could a man of God have lived with that guilt all these years? And for the last week he had lived with the awful knowledge of
how
Zorzi had died, and the certainty that he had sent his brother to the most terrible of deaths.

“Motive?” He lowered his gaze to the cat, but I did not think he was seeing the cat. He was seeing the past. “Motive . . . ? The human soul is a noisome pit, Alfeo. Priests know that better than anyone. I have had to listen to confessions even worse than my own. In that note I lied about who I was and what evidence I had, but I honestly believed Zorzi to be guilty. He was a fiend from hell!

“I took my vows at fifteen. I thought I could resist the temptations of the flesh. Zorzi was two years younger than I, and even then he laughed at me and said I would regret my decision. He was right, so right! I was wrong. The fires burned up far hotter than I had dreamed they would.

“Zorzi mocked me for it. At sixteen he was promiscuous. At nineteen he was a rake, a compulsive fornicator, and proud of it. He would brag of his sins to me, tell me he was taking my share also. Our father was a moral, upright man. Yes, he strayed sometimes, but we all do that. He supported the church and gave alms generously. He had tried to bring up his children to be good Christians and he succeeded with all but one of them. I adored my father!”

His mother adored Zorzi.

Timoteo swore an oath of chastity; Zorzi was a lecher.

Timoteo swore a vow of poverty; Zorzi wallowed in his mother's wealth.

Fedele swore absolute obedience; Zorzi did anything he wanted.

“Why did you denounce him?” I demanded.

“Because he killed our father!”

“He told you that?”

The priest raised his pain-racked eyes to mine. “Yes. No. Not quite. He swore he had a very good alibi, because he had been in bed with two harlots at the time, one for him and one for me. He was
laughing
at me! Yes, he did tell me he was guilty, but not in words. With smiles, gestures, hints . . . I knew and he knew I knew. I thought the end justified the means and so I brought him to justice. He fled into exile, we thought, and that seemed an absurdly lenient sentence, far less than he deserved.
I did not know about Tonina Gradenigo!

“For eight years I felt no guilt. Then, not a week ago, I learned that I had been wrong! wrong! wrong! I betrayed my brother and I betrayed my mother, who had needed my help for so long. I had blamed her, not my father, for everything.” He shook his head and started to gather himself, as if to rise and stalk away, back into his lonely, private hell.

“Zorzi died proclaiming his innocence and protecting his mistress, you think?” I said.

“Isn't that what you have been telling me?”

“No. He may have been protecting your mother. Can you not see the pattern, Brother?”

Fedele slumped back on the stool and stared at me. “Pattern?”

“Alina has been murdering women with Jacopo's help. Jacopo did the dirty work beforehand, the legwork. He found the victims and made all the preparations, even writing the notes that would lure the fallen women to their deaths. But when the time came, he would always arrange a good alibi, and she wielded the knife or the silken cord. That was how she had worked with Zorzi, Brother. She was repeating the pattern. Who do you think gave her the dagger eight years ago? Who put her up to it? Who suggested she save her poor baby from his daddy's wrath?”

“Zorzi was guilty all along?” The friar's eyes widened in sudden hope.

“Oh, yes. They were
both
guilty. Your mother you can see tomorrow . . .” It was my turn to stare at the cat, which had barely moved a whisker through all this long conversation. “But Zorzi? Could you forgive him now, Brother? If your brother were truly repentant and trying to make amends and came to ask for your blessing, could you give it?”

Fedele shouted at me, raising echoes in the huge church. “If God gave you wings, would you fly, Alfeo? Do not ask such sacrilegious questions, such blasphemy! What happens now? You have called me Cain and I have not denied the charge. You will denounce me?”

“I could not. The only evidence that could be produced in court is the note and I ought never have been shown the note. In any case I would not, and neither would my master. In effect, although you lied, what you said was true. Zorzi was an accomplice in your father's death, as guilty as your mother and with far less excuse. But I would never denounce you, because of the cat.”

Friar looked down at cat as if he had forgotten it. The cat stared back.

“Oh yes, the cat. Your familiar, I suppose?”

“No, Brother. Please understand that my master's first objective always was to prevent any more murders. He is an avaricious man, but a good Christian in spite of it. I happily do his bidding. Throughout this case, that cat has been
helping
me. I first saw it last Friday, when it blocked my way. I thought it must be rabid, so I went by another road, and that turned out to be a very fortunate decision. On Saturday I tried to stop your mother from killing Marina Bortholuzzi and was chased by a mob that thought I was the killer. The cat showed me a refuge. On Sunday it saved me from arrest. Tonight it intervened to save a woman's life. This is no ordinary cat, Brother.”

Fedele crossed himself. “It is possessed by a demon!”

“A strangely cooperative, right-thinking demon. A honey-colored cat?”

It was, of course, the last of the tarot predictions. The card showing the helper had been Trump XX, Judgment, the dead rising from their graves. I said, “Do you believe in ghosts, Brother?”

The staring match continued.

“Well? Do you, Brother?”

Fedele whispered, “I suppose . . . Yes.”

The cat shot into his lap. He almost fell off the stool, hands raised so as not to touch the animal. He must be even less of a cat person than I had been.

The cat cuddled itself in tidily, curled its tail around, and began to purr, staring up at the friar's anguished face.

I rose. “You can try an exorcism if you want, Brother, but perhaps you should just offer your blessing. He died unconfessed, remember. By the look of him, I think he is ready to give you his forgiveness and accept yours. Then he can be on his way.”

At the door I looked back. The friar was embracing the cat and it seemed to be licking his tears.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the course of writing these stories about a parallel historical Venice, I have collected a personal library of over forty books, and borrowed many others from libraries. To acknowledge all of them would be tiresome and also unfair, because I have improved certain facts and made some accidental mistakes also.

For this story, though, I should acknowledge my debt to three books in particular. First,
The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice
, by Robert C. Davis, Oxford University Press, 1994. Matteo the Butcher is my invention, and I have changed the dates slightly, but otherwise I have followed Davis's account of a unique and astonishing custom in a city that has always been unique and astonishing. The Ponte dei Pugni is still there in San Barnaba parish, although nowadays it has parapets to keep people from falling off.

A book I have borrowed much from is
Coryat's Crudities (1611)
. (I have the Scolar Press facsimile edition of 1905.) Thomas Coryat journeyed from London to Venice and back in 1605, mostly on foot, and thus invented the “Grand Tour.” On his return he wrote what may fairly be called the first travel book since Pausanias's
Description of Greece
in the second century AD. Coryat includes vivid descriptions of much of the Venice of his day—although some of his observations are clearly wrong (he describes the nude statue of Mars in the Doges' Palace as representing the goddess Minerva). It is thanks to him that I know that the Campo San Zanipolo was not yet paved.

Another valuable eyewitness, an exact contemporary of my imaginary events, was Fynes Moryson, another English-man. Moryson visited Venice in 1593, 1596, and 1597. I have a collection of extracts from his records published as
Shakespeare's Europe: A survey of the condition of Europe at the end of the 16
^th
century
, edited by Charles Hughes, published 1903, reissued 1967 by Benjamin Blom, Inc., New York. I used Moryson's eyewitness description of the doge's procession to San Maria Formosa and the Christmas Mass in the Basilica. I have had a private tour of that church, which included sitting in darkness until those glorious, incredible golden mosaics appeared, gradually being illuminated. It is an experience one could never forget. Nowadays the trick is done with electric lights, of course, so I was fascinated to discover that it was done with candles back in Alfeo's day. But the Venetians have been managing the tourist trade since before the Crusades.

GLOSSARY

altana
a rooftop platform

androne
a ground-floor hall used for business in a merchant's palace

atelier
a studio or workshop

barnabotti
(sing:
barnabotto
)
impoverished nobles, named for the parish of San Barnaba

Basilica of San Marco
the great church alongside the Doges' Palace; burial place of St. Mark and center of the city

broglio
the area of the Piazzetta just outside the palace where the nobles meet and intrigue; by extension the political intrigue itself

ca'
(short for
casa
) a palace

calle
an alley

campo
an open space in front of a parish church

casa
a noble house, meaning either the palace or the family itself