The Malice of Fortune (32 page)

Yet I found the greatest wonder of my
bella
Firenze in the austere Piazza della Signoria, bounded on the east by the rustic stone palazzo where, many years later, I would serve our republic, just as Mama had prophesied. The Piazza della Signoria was a vast marketplace of discourse, where ideas were exchanged like coins at the bankers’ counters that lined the streets feeding into it. Here gathered men of all stations, from smiths in thick leather aprons to lawyers and wool merchants in fur-lined capes. They discussed things I hardly understood, even when I could hear them amid the great din; nevertheless I was enchanted simply to watch them speak, to study the manner in which men gestured with their hands, nodded, grimaced, reflected, turned from one to another.

Perhaps some part of me still stood in a doorway in Cesena, but my mind was entirely absorbed in this vision of the past; I was nothing more or less than a boy seven years old, sweeping my eyes about the Piazza della Signoria, transfixed by the life ahead of me. And even when this living memory faded, it slipped away so slowly that for a time I was lost, neither in one place nor another, empty save for a deep longing to hear my mother’s voice and to walk the streets of our Firenze.

When I once again realized where I was, I had my answer. I had
not come all the way to Cesena because I trusted anyone—neither Valentino, nor Damiata, nor even the Ten of War.

“I belong only to the republic, our
libertas
, and our
bella
Firenze,” I whispered, watching my words in the still, cold air, rising like smoke from a priest’s censer. “Whatever is required to save the city I love, I will do.”

No sooner had I issued this oath, than I observed a witness to it, although he seemed as much a phantom as the faces I had left behind in Florence, and time. He was perhaps fifty
braccia
distant, standing in a street-front arcade. His cape appeared little more than a shadow against the shop-front shutters, his face so enveloped by the hood that it seemed merely a bone-white Carnival mask—in this instance, the skeletal face of Death, rather than the goat-bearded Devil’s mask I had so briefly glimpsed on the
pianura
. Yet at once I had the terrifying conviction that this man had been present that night.

I saw little security in taking another route. If he was in fact the murderer’s apprentice—or perhaps even the maestro of the shop—my escape would only postpone this reckoning to an occasion when I might have even less warning.

I started toward him, my breast like a drum. When I had halved the distance between us, I could still distinguish nothing more of his face—or mask—than a pale cipher.

I called out with the desperate bravado of an unrepentant heretic, standing before his stake: “You there! Have you a new mask?”

A peculiar metamorphosis flickered within his hood, as though a bleached skull had begun to clothe itself in pale flesh. I could see the dark sockets, if not yet his eyes.

His cloak fanned out as if he were an eagle about to take flight and I braced for his charge. Instead he turned, striding away so quickly that he had exited the far end of the arcade almost before I could take a breath. Only when he had vanished entirely did it occur to me that this route would take him directly to my lodging—about which he could find any number of places to conceal himself and wait.

My pursuit was so swift that the cold air blurred my vision, my feet nearly slipping from under me as I raced around the corner—

I slid to a stop no more than an arm’s length from the point of a stiletto.

“Did you see that?”

I looked up. The face was entirely human, though the mouth seemed frozen into an O. I recognized him in the same moment that I placed his voice. “Giacomo?”

“He ran right past me,” Maestro Leonardo’s assistant said with indignation. “He would’ve knocked me over if I hadn’t stepped aside.”

“Did you see his face?”

He shook his head. “That wasn’t a man.”

“But not the mask you saw in the woods that day.” The same mask I had seen on the
pianura
.

“No. The face in the moon. Or an owl.” Giacomo studied his stiletto, which he had yet to slip back in his belt. “Or no face at all.”

I nodded at this last description, finding it more apt than the “mask of Death” I had observed. My science, if I could call it that, had so far failed to provide the murderer a face. He had allowed me to see only masks. Or no face at all.

Only after musing on this did I think to ask, “Giacomo, why are you out here?”

“Waiting for you.” He offered this as if I were the cause of both his discomfort and his encounter with a faceless demon. “The maestro sent me to fetch you.”

Now I could answer at least one question: certainly Valentino had already reported our conversation to Leonardo, who had evidently summoned me at the duke’s request. “Will the maestro still want to see me at this hour?”

Giacomo nodded, his Milanese diction as languorous as ever. “The maestro never sleeps.”

CHAPTER
8

T
o many things that reason doesn’t persuade you, you are persuaded by necessity
.

Giacomo led me to the opposite side of the city, where we halted at what appeared to be the refectory of an abandoned church. Through the cracks in the shutters, I could see that this brick building, which was as plain as a warehouse, was lit up like day inside. We ascended the two steps, whereupon Giacomo barged through the door as if he were an officer of the jail making an arrest.

I girded myself for another visit to Hell.

The considerable space had in fact once been an austere dining hall; if ever the walls had been frescoed, they were now plastered over. The two big trestle tables in the center of the room might have been left behind by the monks, although their refectory had been put to a use the soup-slurpers never could have imagined. Nor could I.

Save for the two tables, the entire floor was occupied with devices the maestro had actually constructed: any number of machines with gears and cogs; small boats; peculiar ladders; an enormous crossbow; a great wheel that reached almost to the ceiling beams, with no less than two dozen buckets attached to it. These and a myriad other things I could not even describe.

Attired in his chamois cape and a red satin vest, Leonardo stared fixedly at a drawing of several toothlike, irregular shapes that appeared composed almost entirely of numbers. Believing that these calculations
had something to do with the murderer’s
disegno
—or with the stature of his victims—I went at once to his side.

“We are going to build an entire city, the duke and I. Here in Cesena.” Only then did I discern that he was examining a rough map, with detailed measurements of this city’s dimensions; his
mappa
of Imola had probably begun with similar studies. “A new city even the ancients would envy. With plumbing, sewers, canals, locks, hospitals, courtrooms, public edifices that celebrate reason and liberty. I have drawn them and together the duke and I will construct them. A world without squalor, hunger, or darkness. It will begin here.”

I would have thought him mad, had I not believed with equal conviction that Valentino, of all living men, was most capable of building a new world. But certainly the duke had not instructed his engineer general to summon me for this demonstration. “What cannot wait, Maestro?” Again I steeled myself for an anatomy lecture.

“This was brought to us two days ago. From Imola. It was retrieved by the soldiers His Excellency dispatched to search for Madonna Damiata.” Perhaps I, of all men, should not have been surprised at the reverence with which he invoked her name, almost as though she were the Holy Madonna.

Leonardo stuck two fingers into a leather purse attached to his belt, first drawing out a length of red yarn; when he extracted the little card attached to this string, I had to close my eyes. “How was it found?”

“Within a hand. From an arm we could not locate before we left Imola.”

“You mean an arm belonging to one of the two
streghe
. It could not be Damiata?”

“No. Not her.” He presented me the
bollettino
. “Does it signify anything to you?”

The card might have been colored by body fluids or simply by slush and red earth. Despite these stains and the rough scrawl, I could still read the contradictory invocations:
Sant Antoni mi benefator. Angelo bianc, per vostr santite
.

“The ink and hand are identical to the
bollettino
we found in the olive grove,” I told Leonardo. “I presume that
Zeja
Caterina wrote this.” For a moment the dead witch’s pale eyes haunted me. “I am reasonably
certain that she alone of that
gioca
could read or write, if only in the vernacular.”

I turned over the card, little surprised to find another inscription, this in tiny but elegant Tuscan script. “And this hand and Chinese ink,” I said, “are the same as the reverse side of the previous
bollettino
. Maestro, I assume you saw the first of these
bollettini
, before it was sent on to the Vatican.” Here I referred to the
bollettino
the pope had shown Damiata; Leonardo had recovered the butchered remains of the woman who had carried it in her charm bag, hence I had good reason to believe he had seen everything found on her person—including Juan of Gandia’s amulet. “And I presume ‘the corners of the winds,’ ” I continued, “was written in the same hand as this
bollettino
.”

Leonardo looked at the card, which still rested on the tips of my fingers, as if he expected it to burst into flame. “You assume correctly. On both accounts. But you must read this one.”

I had to squint a bit to decipher the tight, miniature script:
Il quadrato è il primo cerchio
.

“ ‘The square is the first circle,’ ” I said. “Then this is a figure of geometry, in the same manner as the previous two. Likewise presented to us as a riddle or conundrum. But the first circle was your own wind rose, inscribed around your
mappa
. And the square, I would venture, was drawn between the corners of the winds. Is he recalling for us his first figures? Perhaps to direct our attention to something we have not yet seen?” No sooner had I said this, however, than I saw the game this man was playing.

“This inscription describes the new
disegno
he has made.” I was not surprised that Leonardo clung to this notion. “Giacomo!” Giacomo appeared to be shuffling off to bed. “Has Tommaso found the Archimedes?”

Giacomo shook his head as if infinitely weary of such requests. I sympathized with him; the chaos of Leonardo’s intellect, his disposition simply to toss his thoughts about in a manner little different than his belongings, was already wearying to me—though in this he matched my own practice more than I would have wished.

“We will locate the Archimedes,” Leonardo said, although his affirming nod was less than firm. “And then we will have our solution.
I have every conviction this ‘first circle’ can be found among Archimedes’s proofs.”

Evidently unwilling to wait on Tommaso, Leonardo began to rifle through various manuscripts, some bound and some loose, already accumulated on the table before him. “Because we have moved, everything has become disordered,” he explained—again with no hint of irony.

I took his distraction as an opportunity to examine some of the loose leaves, which recalled to me all the unbound manuscripts in my father’s little library. Many of these papers, mostly copied in Latin but a few, quite old, written in Greek, did in fact concern mathematics, the dense script often accompanied by diagrams with lettered points or elaborate drawings of various polygons. I could get nothing from them.

Shortly, however, I found a page written in Latin, and not in Leonardo’s hand; on closer scrutiny it turned out to be an account of a man who suffered a disease of the brain the Greeks knew as
kephalgia
, which “alienates the mind, induces loss of voice, and at last withdraws the vital power.” As Leonardo continued to sift through his volumes and pages, I found an entire stack of leaves by this same hand, evidently that of a physician, or his copyist, describing illnesses of all sorts as well as necropsies performed on persons who had expired. More than a few of these concerned maladies of the brain: delusions, memory loss, mute entrancement, and a violent madness the Greeks called
phrenesis
. One such case, which involved an executed criminal, interested me sufficiently that I dared to intrude on Leonardo’s fruitless exploration. “Maestro, these physician’s accounts. Where did you obtain them?”

“Those are Benivieni’s cases,” he said, as if I were a farmer asking for the source of the dung on my boots. “Antonio Benivieni,” Leonardo snapped at my blank expression. “The Florentine physician.”

I recovered my own lost memory. Benivieni was a dottore of considerable renown; like Leonardo, he was reputed to have undertaken many dissections of corpses.