The Malice of Fortune (44 page)

Suddenly Giacomo fled into the snow. But even before I could call out, I saw him silently pounding on the vaporous door of what appeared to be merely the ghost of a house. Almost at once, he vanished inside.

Arriving at the same threshold, I found another miracle. Before me was a farmer’s dining room, lit by a smoking fire, the table in front of the hearth spread with a Christmas offering: sausages, roasted thrushes, bread, beans, and polenta. The farmer and his family were nowhere to be seen—perhaps they did not want to be further importuned by the starving Imolese refugees—but the dead had most certainly come to feed. Leonardo knelt on the floor next to the table, the five heads scattered around him like a melon harvest, sticking his fingers into the gaping mouth of one of those terrible leather faces, as if he believed he would find something hidden there, perhaps a message from her murderer. Tommaso was also busy, prying the lid from the wooden box he had salvaged.

“I have the agent of their deaths,” I said as I dragged the Licorn across the threshold, the snow blowing in with me. “He would have taken another head if Giacomo had not saved me. I am indebted to him for my life.” (A debt which Messer Giacomo made certain I paid,
although that is altogether another story—that strange business with Leonardo’s portrait of Giocondo’s mistress.)

Leonardo knelt beside our captive and listened to another gargling Ave Maria. He put his fingers to the beast’s thick neck, endeavoring to find his heartbeat, only to discover a little string; pulling on this, the maestro produced a small, red leather pouch.

Quickly I stuck my fingers inside this charm bag and extracted the sole contents: three tarnished, battered, squarish little bells. They rang—or chimed—faintly as I examined them. “Witch bells,” I said. “My father’s tenant farmers wore them, believing that a
strega
would pause to count each chime and become distracted from her evil designs.” Recalling this sound from my night on the
pianura
, I shuddered so deeply that my teeth chattered. These bells had announced to us, and to this creature’s pitiful victims, that we were in the unwelcome company of the Devil’s apprentice. Or perhaps the Devil himself.

“We must remove his disguise before he suffocates,” Leonardo said, now examining the helmet mask, which appeared even more lifelike in the light: it had been assembled from the white hide of a stallion, the beard of a goat, and even the horn of an actual antelope. “It is sufficiently well-constructed that it might fool Nature,” the maestro added admiringly.

I asked Giacomo, “Could this be the mask you saw in the woods that day?”

Giacomo reluctantly nodded. “He looks enough like the Devil, doesn’t he?”

Leonardo glanced up at us before he deftly drew the mask over the dying man’s head.

All four of us gasped.

“No face at all.” Giacomo repeated his words of a few nights previously, when both he and I had encountered
this
man, as well.

And Giacomo’s description was no less apt than it had been that night. Nature herself seemed to have sent the Licorn to us with only the rudiments of a face, most of it a great pink-and-white scar, with
two round beads for eyes, two slits for the nose, and another for the mouth. This tormented flesh was less livid than it might have been, however, because it was dusted all over with the glittering residue of some chalky white powder.

“I believe this substance is powdered moonstone,” I said; there were great veins of this luminous chalk in the vicinity of Imola. “It would appear that the two masks were in fact only one. This man sometimes wore the mask of the
licorno
and at other times just the ruin of his face, concealed beneath this powder, like a whore hiding the pox with a layer of ceruse.”

I knelt beside him, anxious to extinguish the spark of pity I felt for his deformity. “What happened to you?”

His eyes swiveled to me, black as peppercorns, absent lids or brows. He answered in good enough Italian, though with a Romagnole inflection, blood frothing on his slit of a mouth. “I was … turned … over the fire.” Strangely, he seemed fiercely vain of this ordeal and its terrible result. “To save … my soul.”

“When a child is born feetfirst,” Tommaso said, “the midwives here tie him to a spit and turn him over the fire three times. Otherwise he will fall into the
stregoneria
.”

“The credulous idiots succeeded only in burning him like chaff,” Leonardo said, his mouth sagging with scorn.

Again I had to look at the unicorn’s gruesome harvest, if only to be certain of the count. “Did you bring another woman’s head to Cesenatico? Within the last two days?” Here I relied on Leonardo’s judgment that the hand had been severed within that time span.

His head rolled from side to side. “Three weeks … ago. Two
streghe …
from Imola.”

Hope lifted me a little; evidently
Zeja
Caterina and her colleague had been these last two. But then I had to ask, “The hand you left in my room. How did you obtain it?”

“Imola … the
strega …
we kept it … in snow.”

Leonardo’s lips quivered. Evidently he had neglected to observe that the hand might have been packed in snow for some time; perhaps he had also failed to consider that he had not collected all the parts from the last two
streghe
.

But a great wave of relief washed over me. Although Damiata’s fate remained a cipher, I could reasonably believe that this monster had not butchered her.

Nevertheless, there remained a hard truth I had yet to hear. I grasped the beast’s jaw so urgently that it seemed my fingers would puncture his scars, which were not thickened or callused after so many years, but felt as smooth and fragile as frogskin. “You said ‘we’ kept that hand in snow. You mean you and your master. Who is he?”

The creature cast his unblinking gaze at Leonardo. I don’t know how that bloody slit could have suggested a smile, but it did. Yet he did not even attempt to speak.

I asked, “Do you want a priest?” Of course we were not prepared to find one, but I hoped I would be able to offer this illusory salvation in exchange for a full confession.

A little blood spouted from his lips. “I am … a priest.”

We have become accustomed to the misbehavior and depravities of country priests—not to mention the Vatican Curia—but this man’s vocation startled even me.

“This explains why he was entirely free to roam the countryside on his terrible errands,” I told Leonardo. “He enjoyed both the sanction of God and the license of the Devil. The master of the shop chose his apprentice well.” The peasants knew that even if they reported this priest’s crimes to the authorities, he was subject only to canon law. Though the Church was quick to punish clerics for heresy, priests who stole, raped, and even murdered were too often allowed to go about their business—and retaliate with impunity against any who accused them.

Leonardo shook his head in disgust. “That is the consequence when the Church will acknowledge no evil among its own.”

“Maestro.” Tommaso had finally prized the carefully nailed top from the little wooden casket. Although the room was already filled with the varied smells of the food and salted flesh, a scent of civet and stale roses suddenly came to my nose.

Tommaso removed the aromatic contents of the box: a jar the size of a wine bottle but of the clearest Venetian glass, the mouth plugged with wax. It was filled entirely with an amber liquid and a great number
of what appeared to be tiny shelled clams, each about the size of a thumbnail, mostly of a gray or reddish-gray hue.

Leonardo at once seized the peculiar vessel from his assistant, holding it to the nearest lantern and staring as if he had, in all truth, found the Devil in this jar.

“What is it, Maestro?”

“Paps. Human.” Leonardo turned to me. “Women’s paps. At least threescore.”

I had to put my hands on my knees. In every instance I had observed, both in the olive grove and in Leonardo’s basement, the nipple had been sliced from the otherwise intact breast. And knowing what I did of the murderer, this had almost certainly been done before death. “At least threescore,” Leonardo had uttered. No less than thirty women had suffered this outrage.

I leaned forward and whispered into the monster’s ear. “The boxes. Did you put things in them?”

He coughed blood and shook his head. “I only … buried … boxes.”

This I believed. I looked up at Leonardo and said, “Maestro, regarding those wizened heads. From your observation, as little opportunity as you had, is it possible that all of them were killed at nearly the same time?”

Seeing that I had evidently renewed my faith in
his
science, Leonardo appeared almost grateful. “It is not, on the face of it, false to assume that all those heads were severed from their bodies in proximate time.” Still chastened by his error, he offered this somewhat warily. “They all demonstrated a similar buoyancy. But we cannot be certain.”

“And how long ago would you presume that time to have been?”

“I would have to speculate.” Leonardo looked at me as if the very word “speculate” had soured on his tongue. “The medium of preservation is salt … postmortem … I would say many months.”

“As long as a year or two?”

“We would not err within that duration.”

“Were they mostly, if not entirely, women’s heads?” This had certainly been my observation, judging from the hair, the size of the skulls, and my perception of the distorted features. But they might also have been adolescent boys.

Leonardo only nodded, a grudging assent.

I had heard enough. “Maestro,” I said quickly, “the nipples in that cursed jar match the heads that erupted from the salt mound in such quantity. I further believe that the crimes consecrated by these obscene relics occurred before this creature here became an apprentice in the Devil’s workshop. Lastly, it is my conviction that these women were murdered at Capua some eighteen months ago.” Hence this much of Ramiro da Lorca’s last testament was true—as I had previously assumed. The murderer had been at Capua, perfecting his brutal craft.

I returned to the creature, requiring the answer to but one more question. “Who gave you the boxes to bury in that salt?”

He only rolled his head a little.

I approached the matter less directly. “How many did you help him kill?”

“Five,” he nearly sighed, as if they had been his lovers. I was certain he meant only the five most recent victims. “Whores!” He spit the word vehemently, spraying blood. “The Devil’s … whores. Streghe … all … of them.”

I could not help but recall the insane violence he had visited on poor Camilla. Perhaps the master of the shop had encouraged this madman to believe that the Devil’s mistresses deserved to suffer the torments of Hell—while they yet lived.

“So this was God’s labor.” I choked on the words, but I needed to enter his diseased mind.

Again the demonic smile.

“But I have seen your work when your master is not present. A poor imitation.”

Blood spewed from the gill-like stump of his nose. Before he died I wanted to exact a last measure of vengeance for our lovely Camilla, if nothing else.

“The woman you killed at the Palazzo Machirelli was not a witch, no matter what your master told you,” I said. “The Lord of Heaven knows that.” I could hear the bloody froth hissing on his lips. “But without your master present you could not stop yourself. You slaughtered an innocent. And for that good woman’s murder, you are about
to enter Hell, to suffer far worse than she did, each hour of every day, for all eternity.”

His eyes rolled wildly. Though it was little enough retribution, I was certain he would leave this life fearing the Devil.

“But why should the man who showed you the way to Hell live long and well, while you alone are thrown into the pit? Who was your master?”

His throat gurgled.

“I will help you. Was it Oliverotto da Fermo? Or Vitellozzo Vitelli? Or did the both of them put you to this? These great signori who will only mock your death and raise a cup to your everlasting torment.”

The wind shrieked against the door. Dante tells us that a man can speak only the truth in Satan’s kingdom; it seemed this fiend had heard his last living inquisitor in one ear, and the cries of the damned in the other. “
Speja
.”

I thought he had said
Zeja
. “A witch?”

“
Spia
,” he said in Italian, the word sputtering out with his lifeblood.

“A spy?”

I put my ear to his mouth. His last words were a hiss little different than his last breath, which at once followed. I could not be certain I had understood.

Leonardo observed me with a feverish expression and I thought he would surely scream “
Dimmi
!
Dimmi
!” Instead, in a dry, catching voice, as if he had witnessed the death of his own kin, he asked, “What was the name?”

“He did not give me a name,” I said. “His last words were, ‘He watches.’ ”

“He watches,” Leonardo repeated like a slow-witted child.

At that moment I saw Oliverotto da Fermo’s face as he stood on the rampart at Cesena, his head cocked slightly, his pale eyes seeming to reach into Valentino’s soul. Watching, I believed, for some sign of weakness.