The Malice of Fortune (11 page)

“Vitruvius described this sort of wheel,” I said during one such pause. “I recall reading—”

“
De architectura
,” Niccolò said impatiently. “The wheel has a circumference of regular measure, I believe—”

“And the rim is marked,” I hastened to add, “so each revolution can be counted, the distance calculated by multiplication.”

“Yes. They want to know precisely how far they are from the previous marker.” Yet Niccolò offered this without the conviction of his previous observations.

I remained silent regarding “the corners of the winds.” Information, much like the courses of a supper or even a lover’s favors, is best served in small parcels.

Leonardo and his people finally reached a roughly square-shaped grove of olive trees, bordered by a parapet of neatly stacked stones. Quickly hoisting their Vitruvian wheel over the low wall, they continued on.

Messer Niccolò and I crept up to the parapet and hid behind it. We looked down at the city, having climbed as high as the tops of Imola’s slender towers; the brick shafts glowed nearly pink on the sides struck by the sun. In the opposite direction, to the south and west, the mountains were vast, white waves.

“
Dieci
,” someone called out, his voice as deep as Pluto in a theatrical. As if joining him in a motet, a high tenor responded: “Six hundred and twenty
braccia
.” Observing each set of ten revolutions in this fashion, the two men continued their duet until they were nearly to the parapet at the far end of the olive grove. But they did not climb over this wall, instead dropping their canvas sacks just beneath it. Leonardo and the astrologer quickly took up their spades.

Hurriedly I made my own calculation, as if I were sitting at a
primero
table, obliged to raise my bid or throw down my cards.

I stood up, drew my skirts between my legs, and scrambled over that wall.

VI

“
Cacasangue che pazzarone
.” This curse came from behind me. Messer Niccolò had followed me over the wall, though it seemed he had not been prepared to reveal himself so soon.

“Let me speak for us,” I said, not pausing in my climb.

We had gotten only a short distance up the hill when they saw us. All three of them started down the slope, Leonardo’s astrologer still brandishing his spade. Their long afternoon shadows accompanied them upon the snow like phantom janissaries.

“Maestro Leonardo!” I hoped the strength of my voice would conceal my fear. “I am Madonna Damiata. By His Supreme Apostolic authority, His Holiness, Pope Alexander, has sent me from Rome to inquire into this matter!”

As if I had commanded it, Leonardo halted. He stood no more than a half-dozen
braccia
from me, his wooden farmer’s clogs half buried in the snow. His face was nearly as unlined as a youth’s.

The maestro’s lips moved, though no sound was forthcoming. He did not look at me but instead directed his malachite-tinted eyes at Messer Niccolò, to whom he finally spoke: “I know you. You are that Latinist the Ten of War have sent.” His voice, a high tenor, more resembled a boy’s whine. “Why are you here?”

“A woman has been murdered. If it can be ascertained that she was a citizen of Florence, my government must be informed.” Messer Niccolò offered this in his rat-tat-tat fashion, as though he had prepared his answer—no doubt intended to disguise his government’s
true interest—well before setting out on this chase. “And I believe that this wheel of yours will soon arrive at the fifth part of her.”

“You make a false assumption. We are engaged in an
esperienza
.” Now Leonardo’s alto tenor had a musical authority, like notes played on a cathedral organ.

Messer Niccolò cocked his head. “
Esperienza
?” I presume he took the word as I had, not as “experience” in the familiar sense but as referring to an observation undertaken for purposes of
scienza
.

“Measurement!” Leonardo’s exclamation hung in the air like the peal of a bell. “Measurement and experiment are the pillars of all knowledge. There is nothing that cannot be known if it can be measured, and nothing that can be known if it cannot be measured. But I do not expect you to understand—imagine you read it in some ancient text and assume it on your faith in antiquity, as you men of letters do so many things.”

“So we can assume this measuring wheel of yours is a new
invenzione
,” Niccolò said, sharing a faint smile with me. “What remains uncertain is by what authority, ancient or modern, you determined to survey this plumb line across the countryside.”

Leonardo folded his hands over his groin, as if guarding his manhood. The astrologer descended several additional paces, his spade before him like a Swiss pike. The sun glittered on the brooch pinned to his
berretta
, yet rather than the zodiac badge I had expected, this was a silver alchemist’s symbol, the circle and cross that represent Mercury. He growled, “Maestro Leonardo is the duke’s architect and engineer general. We are surveying this vicinity under the authority of Duke Valentino.”

“And did the duke himself tell you what you can expect to find at the top of this hill?” Niccolò raised his chin as if pointing the way. Indeed for the first time I observed that the snow had been disturbed up there, exposing the sandy soil.

Here Leonardo glanced quickly to his pretty boy, whose sullen mouth—his lips were almost purple—more resembled that of a fallen angel, one of Lucifer’s brood. This youth drew a nasty stiletto from his belt, examining the blade before he languidly remarked, “I’ll put this between his teeth.”

“Maestro!” I called out. “In the privacy of his own Vatican apartments, His Holiness has shown me the
bollettino
retrieved from this unfortunate woman’s body.” Here I bet it all, declaring most stridently, “If you are able to explain to me ‘the corners of the winds,’ His Holiness will expect you to provide the particulars. Now show us what you have found up there.”

Leonardo stared at me as if pondering how a chittering monkey had acquired the ability of speech; “the corners of the winds” was a phrase no doubt familiar only to the Borgia inner circle, within which Leonardo was clearly included—thus I had established, to his considerable surprise and apparent distress, my own bona fides. For a longer moment, he silently addressed the ether. Evidently failing to receive a satisfactory response, he fixed his mouth in a sour expression, turned about, and began to lead us all toward the high end of the olive grove, his shoulders hunched and his hands, now at his sides, flopping like fish on a rock.

At the top of the grove, the olive trees were far apart and the snow glistened in the sun, all save the partial excavation where we halted. Here the sandy, ocher earth had evidently been churned up by the same animals that had left countless pockmarks in the surrounding snow.

“Wolves,” Leonardo said, taking up his spade again.

“Then they have carried it away,” I said.

“You make an incorrect assumption.” All at once Leonardo struck down on the exposed earth with his spade. The tip hardly penetrated at all, yet the earth did not appear frozen. Instead the dull thud might well have been metal against bone.

“Tommaso!” At this command the astrologer—or more correctly, now that I had observed his badge, the alchemist—joined Leonardo in scraping away the top layer of sandy earth. Shortly they revealed several wooden planks, much like the lid of a coffin. Leonardo prized up one, which was probably a handspan in width. “This is a barrier against animals.”

Indeed these boards had not been nailed to a coffin but were merely loose planks weighted at the ends with large stones. When Leonardo and Tommaso had removed the latter, they were able to pull up the first plank entirely, revealing a sort of crypt, lined with smaller rocks.

Something pale glimmered inside. I crossed myself. Leonardo and his assistants pulled aside two more planks. Sunlight flooded in.

What I saw resembled a fragment of an antique statue after it has been unearthed and scrubbed, the white marble almost like chalk. But this was the right half of a woman’s torso, truncated at the neck and cleaved from there directly down the middle, the cut precise, as if made by a physician’s knife. The lone breast was entirely intact, although the nipple was not visible at all. The arm rested peacefully at her side, bent so that the hand lay just beneath the ribs, the white fingers gracefully curved. This strangely lovely artifact ended where I would have expected to find the navel, had the upper body not been cleaved from the absent lower, just above the pelvis.

As you know, I have seen death before. Yet just as Juan’s wounds were all the more terrible to me after I had witnessed the peacefulness of his cherished face, I found this fragment of a woman, presented like an antiquity in a cardinal’s
studiolo
, more horrifying than a hanged man with piss dripping from his toes. I thought I would swoon.

“The imbeciles have dusted it with quicklime.” Having offered us this observation, Leonardo knelt atop the remaining plank. “They believe this procedure will hasten decomposition. Were they to conduct an actual
esperienza
rather than rely on the wisdom of washerwomen and grave robbers, they would know that quicklime retards putrefaction.” Here the maestro reached down, his hand now entirely steady, and drew his finger across the whited torso just beneath the breast, removing the quicklime dust and exposing a finger-width swath of claret-hued skin. He put his finger beneath his nostrils and sniffed audibly.

Without remark Messer Niccolò knelt beside the maestro and similarly ran his finger over the belly of the corpse, leaving another claret streak, whereupon he also put his finger to his nose—and quickly turned his head, as if he had found the odor most disagreeable.

I was occupied with my own observation. “The quicklime is crusted,” I said, “where I presume her nipple to be.” My stomach turned over as I said this.

Leonardo stared into the stone sepulcher. “It has been sliced off.” He shook his head tremulously. “We observed this with regard to the previous remains.”

Messer Niccolò’s mouth was as tight as a vise. No doubt we shared the same question: Were these the remains of a second woman?

I addressed the maestro, trying to speak against the heartbeat rising into my throat: “Both halves of the previous victim’s torso were absent the nipples?”

Leonardo nodded.

“So the quarters of one victim were discovered almost at once,” Messer Niccolò said in his musing tone, “because they were left out in the fields.” I presumed Niccolò’s little informant had told him this. “Yet the quarters of the second victim have been carefully buried in this manner.”

“You make an incorrect assumption,” the maestro refrained. “We have not located the remaining three quarters. If they are to be found.”

So this was the first of four pieces of her. Or five. And now I understood why Messer Niccolò had previously inquired as to the “authority” that had directed Leonardo to this place. “Maestro,” I said, “we must know who informed you of this location.”

Leonardo silently mouthed something.

“Peasants,” offered Tommaso. “Some of them observed a pack of wolves pawing the earth. We did not place these remains here.”

Messer Niccolò looked up at me. He wore the expression of a boy who has brought a bullfrog to Mass, under his coat, so that it can croak during the homily. “It was not suggested that you had,” he said to Tommaso. “Only that you seemed to know your way here. And took great care to chart and measure your path.”

Silence followed, save for the cawing birds. At last Tommaso spoke, but not to the question Niccolò had raised. “What is in her hand?”

Leonardo again reached into the crypt. His long, elegant fingers appeared to crawl about like the legs of a pale tarantula, unwrapping a red string from a chalky hand that was not as stiff as I expected. The
maestro was able to gently open her fingers, almost as if she were sleeping, to reveal the little card resting in her palm. After he had delicately removed this
bollettino
, he brought it quite close to his eyes.

Almost as if the words he read had disgusted him, Leonardo quickly presented the prayer card to me.

This
bollettino
was no different than the one the pope had shown me, the cheap, rough paper inscribed in a crude yet legible hand. “
Gevol int la carafa
,” I recited for all present. This audience did not include the pretty boy, who had suddenly vanished, as if snatched away by wolves. I added, “I presume this is the Romagnolo dialect.”

“ ‘Devil in a jar.’ ” It did not surprise me that the alchemist, Tommaso, knew this phrase. “The Devil appears in the flask of water and conjures images of lost—”

“An imbecilic superstition,” Leonardo blurted out. “Of all the foolish beliefs waved as proud banners by the ignorant herd, the existence of spirits is the most asinine, no less offensive to Nature than it is to science. By the very powers imputed to them, these spirits are incorporeal quantities, which Nature defines as a vacuum—”