The Malice of Fortune (13 page)

A pale face floated above us. I let out a little cry and even Leonardo drew a sharp breath in the heartbeat before we recognized Messer Niccolò.

“Nothing,” he reported. “There is not a stick of furniture up here, not a piss pot or a grindstone. Nothing except this.” Messer Niccolò sat on the edge of the opening, his legs dangling, and reached down to us, holding in his hand a plain clay butter pot.

For some reason the maestro and his people were reluctant to accept this offering. I took it, wishing I hadn’t as soon as I smelled the contents. This little pot was half filled with the sort of unguent that ladies in Rome usually obtain from the old women of Israel, whose concoctions of myrrh, sulfur, and hog lard are intended to preserve the skin. But there were other scents in this particular recipe: the foul bitterness of belladonna when it is first crushed and also mandrake, perhaps with henbane and hellebore.

For a strange moment, every foreboding I have ever had in my life seemed to revisit me.

Messer Niccolò dropped almost silently to the ground. When he had straightened up and dusted the sleeves of his jacket, he said to me, “Allow the maestro to smell it. He will recognize the scent.”

The breath caught in my throat. Both Messer Niccolò and Maestro Leonardo had sniffed their fingertips after running them across the flesh of that poor, butchered woman. And now I understood Leonardo’s
apparent indifference to this discovery; he had already known what he would smell in that pot.

“This unguent was smeared over her body, wasn’t it?” I offered this more as a plaint than a question. “And it was found on the remains of the first woman as well.”

Leonardo nodded in a palsied fashion, his nostrils fairly twitching. “Yes.” His tenor was slightly hoarse. “Both of them.”

Messer Niccolò cast his eyes up at the darkness he had just explored. “Then I am certain,” he said, “this is where they were both butchered.”

VIII

All five of us arrived back in Imola at dusk, having returned briefly to the olive grove to replace the planks over the little crypt, to keep the wolves at bay until Leonardo could send soldiers to retrieve the human fragment. I could not make myself go close to the grave. But even as I stood some distance away, I felt a vague yet increasingly heavy presence, until all at once I shuddered.

I ran to Messer Niccolò. “He is watching us right now.”

Niccolò looked at me in a piercing fashion, as if I had claimed to see the Virgin.

I pressed my argument. “He was waiting for us at that farmhouse, wasn’t he? He had to have gone out a window just before you went up there. Do you think those men came to help him escape?”

“They were looking for him,” Niccolò answered. “For what purpose I am not certain. Neither am I certain he was up there. The latch was broken. Perhaps I jarred the trapdoor loose, only to have it fall when our backs were turned.” He elevated his gaze as if peering into the dark copse behind me. A moment later his eyes fell to me, almost reluctantly.

I know when a man is drawn to me, even if he hopes to conceal this attraction. That element was present in Messer Niccolò’s stare—as indeed in any number of glances throughout that day. Yet there was something else, to which he gave voice. “You should consider leaving Imola.”

I wondered if he hoped to cast himself as my protector; perhaps
he imagined I would offer him a grateful farewell before I returned to Rome. “Why do you say so?”

“Because I, too, am certain that the Devil has seen us.” Of course, I took this to mean a man disguised as the Devil. “And now he knows who we are.”

Niccolò and I parted with Leonardo and his people as we entered the Via Emilia. I continued my fraud, telling the maestro, “I will write His Holiness at once and inform him that there has been another murder.” Though Leonardo did not say so, I had little doubt he would quickly inform Duke Valentino that I had brazenly followed his engineer general into the countryside and insinuated myself into his inquiry.

The street was raucous with tradesmen and candle-shop girls, the latter calling out, “Take a bite of this chestnut!” “No French pox here!” This cacophony was the greatest in front of the Inn of the Cap, where so many of the streetwalkers had gathered in order to solicit the travelers and couriers going in and out of the stables. Once we had passed and could talk without shouting, Messer Niccolò looked sideways at me and said, “Leonardo is involved in this.”

“In what fashion?”

He shook his head. “Certainly he is no murderer. That is not his nature. But he is trying to conceal a great deal. With little success. You saw him. His paintings may fool us all with their semblance to life. But at the art of deception, he is hardly a maestro.”

I said into Niccolò’s ear, “As a military engineer, Leonardo had to have worked with the
condottieri
before their defection from Valentino. Perhaps they have duped him.”

Niccolò nodded. “There is something in all this that only the maestro and this murderer know. Something that makes the maestro behave as if
he
will be hanged for it.”

Messer Niccolò and I turned the corner. Not far down the street, the Rocca was an immense gray monolith against a sky as deeply purple as squid ink, the moat around it already black. We entered our Palazzo Machirelli through the stables gate we had both exited separately, hours before, when I had been innocent of a great many things—and
considerably less baffled by this whole matter. The animals in their stalls stamped at our presence, as if the very Devil had followed us.

“I have to look after my mule,” Niccolò said. I had become anxious even about going into the courtyard alone, so I trailed Niccolò to the stall.

“You are uncommonly devoted to this beast,” I said to him. There was just enough light remaining that I could see the animal blink gratefully, as Messer Niccolò stroked his muzzle.

“I acquired him from a charcoal burner who had driven him mad with work—the poor creature was burdened with grapevine bundles piled so high they could reach a balcony, while his belly sagged into the dirt. I persuaded the
cacapensieri
that his animal was worth more to me alive than to him dead. My intention is to restore his strength and ride him back to Florence.”

I now understood the nature of Messer Niccolò’s devotion: the mule was a promise he had made to himself, that he would return to his home. But even as I believed I had divined his sentiments, I saw that he was peering into me.

And judging from his expression, he had found something that required his sympathy. “I am no longer so certain,” he said almost sadly, “that these murders have anything to do with the treaty between Valentino and the
condottieri
.”

I could only assume that Niccolò indeed knew nothing about Juan’s amulet; otherwise he would surely believe, as I had, that the object of the first murder was to provoke the pope. Perhaps the second murder, seemingly in the same fashion, had only been a taunting reminder, a memento mori of the cruelest sort. As Messer Niccolò himself had said only hours before, it was in the interest of the Vitelli to keep the thorn in His Holiness’s side and prolong the negotiations.

But I did not know Messer Niccolò well enough to risk sharing this confidence. I could only ask him vaguely, “What brings you to this opinion?”

“The care taken to dismember the corpse. The nipple sliced away. The unguent, containing narcotic herbs, smeared upon the skin. This business with the corners of the winds.” Here he made a sharp little nod that stung more than an overt accusation, reminding me that I
had previously withheld this confidence from him. “Leonardo’s measurements, the note regarding squares and circles. It is all of one piece. A great rebus or riddle, composed in human flesh. As if all of this were one man’s cruel amusement.”

“Yes,” I said. “There is no end to the riddles and mysteries that amuse men. The Key of Solomon, the Kabbalah and the
Heptaplus
, the mysteries of Hermes Trismegistus and the Pythagoreans—not to mention that I have known several men to find pleasure in cutting women with knives.”

Messer Niccolò offered me the rueful smile of a man who knows the world all too well.

“But,” I continued, “I believe that this amusement was conceived with a sole purpose: to provoke the pope. To cite your own theory of this very afternoon, perhaps the Vitelli are behind this because they do not see the treaty with Valentino as sufficiently advantageous to them. And if they delay the negotiations with these clever and cruel games, they can obtain these additional concessions you remarked upon.”

Here I took Messer Niccolò’s arm and led him into the courtyard; all at once it had come to me what I must do next. When we reached the foot of my stairs, I said to him, “I am going to send my girl to your rooms with some food and wine.” While I did not intend to serve as a pimp, I thought Camilla’s charming—if chaste—company might fire his eyes and would certainly fill his belly; he did not appear to eat well.

Of course I expected poor Messer Niccolò’s disappointment, to learn he could dine with me only by proxy. Thus I was surprised—and perhaps a bit disappointed myself, vain as I am—when he did not evidence any regret. Indeed, he appeared relieved that I would not be present. With nothing more than an ironic little bow, he started toward his rooms.

Regardless of his indifference, I did not want to risk that Messer Niccolò Machiavelli might post himself behind his shutters and observe me in the fashion I had so often spied on him. So I trudged wearily up my stairs, gratefully embraced Camilla, and sent her across the courtyard with some wine, cheese, bread, and boiled capon.

As soon as I was alone I summoned my courage, washed my face, and changed my clothes.

Not having a pass to the Rocca, I was fortunate to locate the same guard who had escorted me the previous evening; from long habit, I make it a point that men should remember me, even if there is only a small chance they will be useful later.

Although I had asked to see the duke’s secretary, Messer Agapito, my journey terminated at the same
sala
where I had supped the previous evening. Inside, I found the dining room transformed. The bare wooden table appeared almost tiny and the plastered walls were similarly undraped, the tapestries replaced by a single golden crucifix and an ancient icon.

Agapito, his uniformly black velvet unchanged, commanded an entire side of this smaller table, opposite several gentlemen and a copper-haired woman. He speared a chunk of meat with his knife before looking up from the platter. Just as quickly he looked down, wiry jaw pulsing.

I went around behind him and whispered close to his ear, “I have seen something today that will interest His Excellency. An observation his engineer general failed to remark upon.” In this fashion I hoped to anticipate Leonardo’s inevitable report—yet also tempt Valentino with the notion that the maestro had overlooked something. Of course this was a perilous game. But Valentino would be sufficiently infuriated regardless, when he discovered I had not waited on his determination of my “usefulness.”

Agapito merely chewed like an ox, obliging me to stand there as if I had been summoned to hold his napkin. I looked across the table. Two of the men were ambassadors, judging from their sable collars and pinched faces. Next to them, as if conjured by my invocation of Vitellozzo Vitelli not an hour before, sat his emissary, Oliverotto da Fermo. This signor was kept company by the copper-haired woman, a prime slice of Venetian prima donna, with glorious curls and breasts as round and firm as oranges, pushed up almost to her collarbones by a brocade bodice cut straight across in the Milanese fashion.

Without a word to me, Messer Agapito rose and proceeded to the
brightly lit stairwell at the corner of the large room, before he vanished within it.

Signor Oliverotto watched Agapito’s departure, then gave me a nod.

I returned his greeting. “
Buonasera
, Signore.”

“I was all but certain we would meet again.” If Maestro Leonardo’s words were notes played on a pipe organ, Signor Oliverotto’s were plucked from the deepest range of a lute. “As I told you, I am here for a while.”