The Alchemist's Apprentice (10 page)

Isaia is narrow-shouldered and stooped—almost hollow-chested—with a permanently worried look, which he claims increases the fees people are willing to pay him. He dyes his beard gray to look older, is armed with a sense of humor deadlier than a bravo's stiletto, and plays the deadliest chess west of Cathay.

“Alfeo! Your helpers assure me that your master is well.”

“Much better than he deserves. If he weren't, you are certainly the one he would send for.”

“Why not a restorer of antiquities?” He showed strong teeth in a smile. “So you must be the one with a problem. A case of the French disease, is it?” We were nose-to-nose in a dingy, dimly lit stairwell that bore a strong smell of old cooking. It was an odd place for a medical consultation.

“No. Chastity and frequent self-flagellation protect me. The Maestro wants your opinion on a case.”

Modestus rolled his eyes. “The Lord's wonders never cease. This is only the third time he has done that and I must have asked his advice two dozen times. I shall be happy to do what I can. Will you tell me here, or shall we go to my house?”

“Here will do well. The subject was an elderly male of choleric humor. He limped slightly on his right leg…”

Isaia listened without comment, but I could soon sense that he had guessed the name of the deceased. When I had finished, he said, “Those symptoms sound to me like poisoning with the herb digitalis.”

“Not oleander?”

“Possible. Digitalis more probable.”

“My master's opinion also. Treatment of choice?”

He sighed. “Very difficult in a man of his years. He was already trying to vomit, so perhaps water, as long as he was capable of swallowing. The point is moot, though, isn't it? His doctor bled him that night and again the following morning, then attributed the subsequent death to old age.”

“You are ahead of me,” I said. “I was going to ask you the doctor's name so I could find out what medicines he had prescribed, if any.”

“I am still ahead of you, but I feel unhappily close to betraying a colleague.” The gloom did not hide Isaia's discomfort. “He is a good man, although he was a better one twenty years ago. He, too, asked my opinion of the case this afternoon.”

“Why consult you if he believed the death was natural?”

“He was having second thoughts about it, although foxglove had not occurred to him. When I suggested it, he admitted he had never prescribed it in his life or seen its symptoms. I advised him to take his suspicions to the Ten.”

“Will he?”

Isaia laughed. “What do you think?”

But now that Isaia had confirmed that there had been murder done, I had no excuse not to do so. I could feel thin ice cracking under my feet.

“I am very grateful and will tell my master. Also, I ask a more personal favor. There is an attorney named Ottone Imer.”

Isaia is much too quick-witted ever to hesitate. His pause was deliberate.

“I have heard of him.” The near-darkness emphasized how resonant and compelling his voice is. Usually it is soft, a comforting bedside voice, but now I heard the steel in it, warning me off.

I said, “I heard rumors that he is heavily in debt.”

Even in the Republic, which tends to listen to its purse more than its Pope, officially only Jews lend money, and moneylenders are as secretive as doctors or courtesans.

“This is important, Alfeo, or you would not ask?”

“It may turn murder into treason. That could not make the crime more serious, but it might save some innocent people from suspicion.”

Isaia sighed. “Then I agree that it is important. I will ask around. They will tell me if I say it is important, and I will let you know very soon.”

I thanked him, aware that the Ten's spies might take many days to dig out what I was going to learn “very soon” and Isaia's information might be better than anything they would gather.

“And now you should go, gentile,” Isaia said, “or you will be locked in with us unbelievers all night and have to eat my wife's cooking and play chess with me and evict my children from their bed and worry your master.”

“You make it sound very tempting, doctor,” I said.

G
iorgio was still at the quay, standing within a group of gondoliers and listening more than talking, as always. He strolled over to meet me.

“No boys?” I asked.

He gave me a blood-chilling look. “You didn't give them money, did you?”

“You think I am an idiot? A half-witted softhearted troublemaker?”

“How much?”

I dodged the question. “Not enough to buy them any serious trouble. I expect they'll be here shortly, I just have to visit the Ca' della Naves and I can walk there from here. I won't be long.” I fled the field.

Like almost any father, when his sons are old enough to earn money at odd jobs, Giorgio insists they turn it in as part of the family income. Corrado and Christoforo, for instance, had been working on and off at the building project on the other side of Rio San Remo. I felt he should let them keep at least some of their wages, else why should they bother? But it was none of my business and I must not meddle in his affairs.

The mysterious foreigners who had gate-crashed the book showing lived a few minutes' walk away, so I might as well go and see them. Had I been offered my choice at that point, I would have spoken with the procurator's granddaughter, the mysterious Bianca, who had probably had more opportunity than anyone to tamper with his wine, but the Orseolo family was in mourning and I had no authority to intrude.

As I hurried through the darkening
calli
of San Marcuola parish, I worried how much things had changed the moment Isaia confirmed that the procurator's death was murder. I had a clear duty now to report that fact to the authorities. Of course an apprentice is bound to obey his master, so I might argue that I must report to the Maestro first, but I did not think that excuse would weigh very much with the Ten.

And what if the Maestro refused? If he still insisted on trying to find the killer by himself, he would be courting disaster. His efforts to unmask the murderer might well be seen as an attempt to bury evidence, not uncover it. Or we might scare the criminal into fleeing beyond the reach of justice. Then both of us would find ourselves where I had been that morning, in the Leads. If that shock didn't kill the old man outright, the disgrace would ruin him.
Sier
Alvise Barbolano would evict him, his clients desert him.

But I hate to start something and not finish it. So does he.
Half-done is do,
he tells me often enough. He had occult tools that the Ten did not, or at least would never admit to using. Even I could invoke a fiend, and that might be less dangerous than what I was doing now, meddling in the Ten's business.

And then there were the doge's parting words:
I will see his head roll across the Piazzetta
. The doge did not trust the Council of Ten to see justice done. The Ten are politicians, all seventeen of them, and the other sixteen are eagerly planning promotion to higher office. They lust after votes in the Great Council, and if the murderer turned out to be a patrician, then the nobles of the Ten would be wary of antagonizing his relatives and friends.

I peered into the parish tavern, partly to see if the twins were there, which they were not, and also to inquire which apartment in the Ca' della Naves was infested with heretics. The drinkers gave me the information I wanted plus some seriously disapproving looks.

As I started up the stairs in the big house, I began to have misgivings. The Republic's attitude to foreigners is complicated. For centuries, pilgrims have passed through Venice on their way to the Holy Land, and there are state officials,
tholomarii
, stationed at San Marco to take care of them, to see that they find proper housing and transportation. The inns they use are carefully regulated and, although they do have to pay more for goods and services than residents do, they must not be cheated any more than the law allows. On the other hand, the senate is very wary of foreign politics. Contact between Venetian nobles and foreigners is strongly discouraged, and is actually illegal in the case of foreign ambassadors. A nobleman can be put to death just for meeting with a foreign ambassador in private. Feather was not an ambassador, but a procurator had been murdered. What I was about to do began to seem foolhardy.

I was very close to talking myself out of my mission when I heard voices just above me, one more flight up. Not just voices, but a woman shouting a barbaric guttural rant that I could barely recognize as French. I swallowed the bait and took the rest of the stairs at a trot.

Thus do the stars dictate our lives.

She was just inside the door. He was just outside it. She was one of the largest women I had ever seen, so much taller than I that at first glance I thought she must be wearing the stilt shoes of a courtesan. She was blonde, not just Violetta's bleached reddish gold, but a Germanic ash-blonde displaying a complicated sculpture of silvery curls on which balanced a tiny bonnet. A high fan-shaped collar formed a backdrop, her neckline was surprisingly demure, yet her gown was a voluminous mass of purple brocade and gold lace that would have been denounced by the Venetian Senate as absurd extravagance. It was not, obviously, a local costume. Her eyes were the watery blue of sapphires and her cheeks were flushed with anger.

He was clutching a parcel with both arms and prepared to defend it to the death. She was speaking
loudly
and
clearly
, so his failure to understand her was pure perversity.

“Madame!” I proclaimed in French, offering a gymnastically low bow suitable for reverence to a goddess. “May I be of assistance?” I added in
Veneziano
, “Shut up and let me deal with her.”

She uttered a satisfied, “Ha! At last! You speak French, monsieur!”

Better French than she did. “A little,” I said. “Is this oaf causing you trouble?”

“He has brought our costumes for Carnival and refuses to give them up without payment, although we had made an agreement with the seamstress.”

I understood the problem already, but decided to spin it out.
“Talk back and threaten me,”
I shouted in
Veneziano
so broad that even a Paduan would not have understood.
“Slum-dwelling, dung-eating spawn of a canal rat, you insult the madonna?”

His response flaked plaster off the walls. He was either a lot more skilled at invective than I was, or just well worked up already. Fortunately he had his hands full and I had two to wave, which evened the odds a little. I responded and we screamed at each other for a few minutes. Then I turned to the lady.

“Madame,” I explained calmly. “The wretch expects to be paid for delivering the goods, as if one glimpse of your divine beauty should not be sufficient recompense in itself. Permit me to settle the matter.”

I palmed him half a lira, which was five times what he was demanding and ten times what he had expected.
“For the lesson in abuse,”
I bellowed, waving a fist.
“You have the foulest mouth it has ever been my privilege to meet.”

He thrust the package at me and slunk off as if I had whipped him, calling back curses over his shoulder. What he actually said was,
“Blessings on you,
lustrissimo,
and give the foreign mare the ride of her life.”

Hyacinth said, “Oh! What a disagreeable man! That was most kind of you, m'sieur. If you will wait a moment I will find my purse.”

“I should not dream of accepting one
soldo
, madame. The honor of being of assistance is recompense enough. You are the Contessa Hyacinth of Feather, are you not, the celebrated English beauty I came to meet? Permit me.” I offered another bow. “Alfeo Zeno, assistant to the celebrated Maestro Nostradamus, clairvoyant, physician, astrologer, philosopher, and sage, honored to be at your service, madame.”

Even in distant England, they knew that name. A tiny frown ruffled her eyebrows. “Nostradamus died years ago.”

“Not Michel Nostradamus, but his even greater nephew, Filippo. You met him two nights ago. And he has talked of little else since.”

“He has?” She peered down at me suspiciously.

My hopes of being invited inside were fading. “He was at the book viewing. You spoke with him.”

“Oh, that shriveled little gnome behind the table? I asked him if he was the clerk. He didn't speak like a Frenchman.”

She was not the first person I had heard say so. Loyalty has always forbidden me to ask. “He is an expert on old manuscripts.”

“You are selling manuscripts? Why didn't you say so sooner? Come in, monsieur, er…”

“Zeno.”

She let me enter and locked the door, then marched me through to a roomy, but rather cluttered
salotto
, whose furniture looked as if it had been rented in the Ghetto, although I could make out little by the light of a single oil lamp. She bade me sit and brought me a glass of malmsey with her own soft, white, shovel-sized hands. She strode around like a musketeer and declaimed louder than a sergeant drilling a platoon. Statuesque, she was. She would have been right at home embracing Mars on the giants' staircase.

“Sir Bellamy went out to call on some dealers, monsieur. We had promised the servants a night off to enjoy Carnival and Sir Bellamy always keeps his word, although without Domenico it is difficult for us to manage by ourselves.”

Her clothes and hair styling were wrong and I could not read her signals. It was unheard of for a lady of the Republic to entertain a man in her husband's absence and the absence of servants made the unspeakable unthinkable. Romantic near-darkness would normally turn hint into blatant invitation. Perhaps this was normal social behavior in cold, foggy England, or perhaps she was confident she could knock me senseless with a single blow if I tried anything. Who was Domenico? She was still proclaiming.

“That disgusting exhibition the other night was quite typical. If any Englishman spoke to us the way that vulgar Imer man did, Sir Bellamy would have given him a thorough thrashing. And if he didn't I would. But it is a joy to meet a man who understands French.”

I suspected that many others did but were unwilling to swim against her accent. “Is it that you have traveled widely, madame?”

“Just France and Rome and Savoy and Tuscany. We brought letters of introduction from many respectable people, including several members of the English and French nobility, you understand, but the recipients have not responded warmly.” She pouted. Her lips looked like ripe plums in the dusk.

“You find our city appealing?”

“Most beautiful!” she said. “But the canals do smell and the people are not friendly. Not like Padua or Verona, even. We have not been invited to a single ball or banquet since we arrived.”

“I am sure this is only a language difficulty, madame.
Veneziano
is not Roman or Tuscan.”

“Absolutely unintelligible! Nothing like proper Latin. But even when we had Domenico, the nobles never invited us into their palaces. It is most unfriendly. And I know that some of them are very pressed for cash just now. A lot of fine art has been coming on the market, and Sir Bellamy represents several important collectors. He is willing to pay in gold if the price is reasonable.”

She paused to draw breath and I whispered, “Domenico?”

“Domenico Chiari. Sir Bellamy hired him to be our guide and interpreter. He ran out on us three days ago. It makes things very difficult.”

Rich foreigners are always suspect. Either Domenico had been spying for the Ten, or he had been taken in for questioning. “Did he take his belongings with him?”

“Well, yes, he did. Why do you ask?” Sudden suspicion pulled rolls of flesh in around her eyes.

“People can meet with accidents and I could have advised you on how to report the matter.”

I could see no way to bring the conversation around to wineglasses and poison. I wondered how I could lure this bell tower of a woman and her so-trusting husband to Ca' Barbolano so that the Maestro could interrogate them for himself. She was still galloping ahead of me—

“He walked out on us without asking for his pay. It makes our task here almost impossible. Like two nights ago, when we met your master. The book dealer had told us about the sale at Master Imer's residence. He assured us that it was open to the public, and of course Sir Bellamy was not going to disgorge the sort of money he wanted without seeing how much other people were willing to pay. The host told us to leave and was very rude about it. Sir Bellamy apologized for the misunderstanding—extremely politely for him—and offered to show the color of his money, but then he became even more offensive and ordered us out of the house at once. He asked your master to translate for him. Sir Bellamy was much offended. He is talking seriously of breaking our lease on these premises and leaving the Republic as soon as possible. The weather is appalling. Worse than England. We can make better purchases in Florence.”

“Karagounis himself had invited you to the supper party?”