The True Adventures of Nicolo Zen (23 page)

“This is what Lila sent me.”

“What?”

“This was in the box you brought. Don’t you understand? It’s so I would have it now, when I was attacked.”

“How—”

“Don’t ask how. Believe me, that’s what just happened.” She wiped the blood from her lip. “You were right: they made a mistake.”

After we returned to Massimo’s villa, and I told him what had happened, after he tended to Meta’s wounds and Adriana took her upstairs to bed, after he had Lodovico put a compress on my head, give me a vial of herbs, and draw me a bath, Massimo stood before me wearing a black greatcoat, hat, and boots. His collar was turned up and he was pulling on a pair of leather gloves. He had listened to me earlier without saying a word, his face set in a kind of grim fury, while Adriana wept at the sight of us. He still had few words for me, but if anything, his anger had intensified. I could feel it emanating from him, as I would feel a wave of heat or cold.

“How is your head?”

“I’m all right. And Meta?”

“I gave her something to sleep. You will sleep here tonight. Do not leave the house. Lodovico’s prepared a room.”

“I wish I could have done more out there.”

“Outnumbered as you were, it was enough that you brought her back. I’ll be out for a while. Get some rest.”

Without another word, he walked down the hall. I discovered that he had given me something to sleep as well, in the form of those herbs, and within a few minutes of Lodovico’s turning down my bed, I was fast asleep.

Just after dawn I came downstairs and found Massimo sitting
alone in the drawing room in a red robe, sipping burdock tea, an open book in his lap. It was a bright sunny morning. Light was streaming through the windows and birds were singing in the garden.

“Tea?” he said, pouring me a cup.

He looked as calm as could be as I sat down across from him. I strained to see what he was reading.

“The girls are still asleep,” he said. He indicated my head.

“It’s better,” I said.

“Are you well enough to complete your errand of last night?”

“To get Julietta?”

“Lodovico can accompany you, if you like.”

“No, I prefer to do it myself.”

“Good.” He picked up his book again. “We’ll have breakfast when you return.”

He was reading Petrarch’s
Sonnets
.

I followed the same route Meta and I had taken the previous night. When I came to the trees beside the wall where Aldo and his gang had been hiding, I examined the ground. There were signs of a scuffle, and several patches of blood dried a darker brown than the soil. Aldo’s companions had seen Adriana before. They expected her to be in my company, and so it was her visage they projected onto Meta as we approached. If it had really been Adriana, they would have killed her. Meta had honed many arcane skills while assisting Massimo: how to leverage her weight, escape restraints, suppress fear, operate in darkness, and luckily for me, how to wield a knife.

Most of that blood belonged to the boy the others called Marco, who had indeed succumbed to his wounds and been carted off by the constables. The other five boys had escaped into the night.

I wanted to clear my head, which was still throbbing from the blow Aldo had dealt me, and I decided to take a detour on the way to Signora Gramani’s house. I walked to the Grand Canal and stopped to drink in the wind off the water. Everything felt fresher there: the light was clearer, sounds were muffled. I followed the Fondamenta de l’Ogio past the fish market, where the fishmongers were donning their aprons; and the produce stalls, where the farmers from Chioggia were arriving on barges; and
the boathouses on the Calle della Pescheria, where the nocturnal fishermen were sorting their catches. All seemed orderly and pleasantly routine until I rounded the bend at the Mercato di Rialto and heard a great commotion at the foot of the Rialto Bridge. A small crowd had gathered, shouting and pointing upward. It took me a moment to focus, gazing up into the glare of the eastern sky, but when I did, I was reeling.

From the underside of the bridge, five bodies were hanging by their necks on long ropes, swaying slowly. Gulls were wheeling overhead, screaming, but it was a flock of crows that had alighted on the shoulders of the corpses, pecking at their faces, agitating the crowd all the more. Only when I reached the edge of this crowd could I could confirm what I had suspected: it was Aldo and the four members of his gang suspended over the canal, their necks broken and their faces reduced to bloody pulps. The crows had yet to pluck out Aldo’s blank, milky eyes, but I would be lying if I said I felt a shred of pity for him at that moment.

Two days later, Adriana and I departed Venice for Modena, a journey of one hundred miles. In the meantime, a good deal had happened. Julietta agreed to serve as Massimo’s assistant. After her ordeal in Padua, and with slim prospects as a musician, she was thrilled to be asked. Meta would stay on at the villa until Julietta was sufficiently trained. After that, Meta planned to move to Vicenza, to begin a new life. Without hesitation during her convalescence, Massimo had granted her request to be reunited with Lila, whom he had sent for in Vienna.

“You have worked tirelessly for me, without complaint,” he said. “I promise that you and your sister will never want for anything.”

I knew he was disappointed about losing Adriana’s services—and company—but our enlisting Julietta, and her obvious enthusiasm, seemed to have mollified him.

The sensational deaths of Aldo and the members of his gang had become the talk of the city. When I arranged to meet Bartolomeo at his sister’s house, he greeted me with a bear hug and then looked over my well-tailored clothes.

“Quite an improvement since the last time I saw you,” he said dryly.

I thanked him for alerting me to the plight of Julietta and Adriana, and filled him in on what had transpired since I left
Vienna. Signora Botello again treated me like one of her long-lost sons, who were still on active duty in the Ionian Sea. When she said she didn’t approve of how thin I looked, I appreciated the irony: a diet of rich Viennese food and enjoyment of the finer creature comforts had left me less robust than when I was surviving on scraps. She insisted I share their supper of fish stew, grilled eel, and pickled radishes. “And plenty of bread basted with oil,” she added.

Bartolomeo told me Aldo had been suspected of numerous robberies and assaults, kidnappings, and at least one murder, but the constables had never been able to catch him red-handed or find witnesses who would talk. Interrogated by magistrates from Castello and the Dorsoduro, and once by a State Attorney who could have thrown him in prison on the spot, he fell back on his blindness to elicit sympathy. How could a blind orphan, he declared, who relied on charity and goodwill, be responsible for so much mayhem? “I can barely dress myself,” he would whine, “much less wield a knife or club.”

“For a time, it worked,” Bartolomeo said, slicing the bread. “But when Aldo learned that a captured member of his gang was willing to testify against him, as well as Marta and Luca, and that the police had secured warrants, he fled to Padua, and Marta and Luca disappeared—probably to a far more distant place. I am surprised Aldo returned here at all. He had made many enemies, honest and crooked.” Bartolomeo looked at me from under his thick eyebrows. “Someone he crossed caught up with him—with a vengeance. He wasn’t just killed: he was executed.”

Though those of us residing in Massimo’s villa felt sure we knew the identity of Aldo’s executioner, we did not dare broach
the subject with Massimo. What could we have said? Adriana, Julietta, and Meta evinced as little regret as I had over Aldo’s fate. They did not personally witness the gruesome spectacle at the Rialto Bridge, but knowing of his various crimes, and of the damage he had intended to inflict on them, I doubt even that would have softened their hearts.

As for Massimo the Magnificent, I would always feel conflicted about him—not surprising, since literally and figuratively, he was a man split in two. He could be a beneficent force, using his considerable powers and connections to help the likes of me, a poor boy who had come to him out of nowhere. I owed him a great deal, and perhaps for that reason trusted him more than he might have expected. He was also the most terrifying and enigmatic man I ever knew. Even those he cared about—perhaps us most of all—were frightened of him because we knew what he was capable of and sensed that he only revealed a fraction of those capabilities.

On that last day, after Lodovico had loaded our baggage onto a cart, and Adriana and I had said our goodbyes to Julietta and Meta, Massimo took me aside in the courtyard.

“You have not yet tried to play the clarinet again, have you?” he said.

“You know I haven’t.”

“Any regrets?”

“None.”

“Fears?”

“Some.”

“And what is it you most want now?”

I indicated Adriana, awaiting me beside the cart.

He nodded approvingly. “You’re very lucky, Nicolò—maybe more than you know. Many of us don’t seize the moment when we meet the right partner. We assume there will be other such moments.” I was surprised, for however oblique, this was the most personal revelation I’d ever heard from him. “I will share with you something my old mentor, Hajik Nassim, once told me,” he went on. “Remember it well: ‘Those who truly guide you in life do not show you where happiness lies, but where it doesn’t.’ ”

We traveled for three days, mostly on the road south originally built by the Romans in the time of Augustus Caesar. Once we were past Padua, broad yellow fields opened up on either side of us. Farmers were cutting the tall hay, the sun reflecting off their scythes. Women with kerchiefs round their heads and baskets on their backs walked alongside the road. The baskets were filled with cucumbers, tomatoes, and ears of corn. The sky was a radiant blue, cloudless, almost painful to stare at.

With Adriana beside me, I felt at peace with myself for the first time in a while. Though she tried to remain cheerful, I could see she was preoccupied, anxious about the reception she would receive in Modena, wondering if she would be received at all. I really did have a plan. It was quite simple, really, and rather ingenious—or so I told myself. If her request to see the Duke was rebuffed by his retainers, I would, without mentioning Adriana, present myself at his palace alone and tell them that I would be pleased to give a recital, at the Duke’s pleasure, to honor his love of music. I had learned of the latter by making a few inquiries before we left Venice. Albinoni and the violinist Coletti had performed at his court, and the Duke himself played the clavichord and fancied himself to be rather proficient. I was not being immodest when I thought there was a good chance my reputation
might have preceded me as far south as Modena. I really had gained a good measure of fame in Vienna, and throughout Austria and Bavaria, and as Herr Hoyer often told me, I was not only the foremost clarinet soloist in Europe, and a prodigy, but was also a pioneer of sorts on the instrument. Should I require it, I also had a letter from Herr Hoyer to the musical director at San Angelo in Venice. I was supposed to deliver this letter in person, but I had held on to it in case I was asked for a formal reference. At any rate, if, as I expected, the Duke invited me to perform for him, I would take Adriana along and at the appropriate moment introduce her to him. It might be awkward at first, but I hoped that, seeing her face to face, he would be more receptive to her than his silence with regard to her letters might indicate. At any rate, she would be able to address him directly. I couldn’t extend my planning beyond that point.

Of course, all of this entailed my getting into the Duke’s good graces, and that meant entertaining him properly with my clarinet. When I told Massimo that I had no regrets about the clarinet’s having been restored to its original state, I was telling the truth, for all the reasons I had first given him. But on the day he acquiesced to my request, I had no idea I might be giving a recital on which Adriana’s happiness hinged. The timing was unfortunate. I knew the first performance I gave after the clarinet was altered was going to be a challenge. The closer we got to Modena, the more I asked myself why it had to be this one, putting that much more pressure on me. All my bravado to Adriana about making things right suddenly rang hollow to me.

As if reading my mind, she took hold of my arm at that moment
and rested her head on my shoulder. “Everything is going to be all right,” she said. “It’s not going to do any good for me to fret about it.”

Nor I, I thought, and a few minutes later she had drifted off to sleep.

That first night we put up at an inn in the town of Lendinara, beside the Adige River. A night I would never forget. Of course Massimo had given us separate bedrooms while we were his guests. This would be the first time we shared a room. At first, Adriana seemed to have no qualms about this. She acted as if it was perfectly natural. As for the innkeeper, he eyed us skeptically until I asked for his best room, and without hesitation paid him in advance the inflated amount that came off the top of his head. I signed the guestbook
Signor & Signora Nicolò Zen
. Then the innkeeper picked up our bags and led us upstairs and told us our supper would be ready whenever we were.