The Rossetti Letter (v5) (9 page)

9 October 1617

I
N THE DUSKY,
intimate hush of Sant’ Alvise, a gnomelike figure, clad in a tattered wool robe and worn leather sandals, loitered near the altar and looked out at the empty church. Roast pheasant, perhaps, or duck stuffed with cherries and apples, Ippolito Moro thought wistfully. Apulian wine, crayfish, and quail, followed by sugared almonds and marchpane with cinnamon…oh, the feast he would enjoy tonight, just for being Batù’s eyes and ears.

Any moment now, the secret assignation would begin, as it had once a week for the past three weeks. The last Mass of the day was done, the priests had gone, and the nuns had disappeared from the choir balcony, the sequestered site of their devotions. All that remained were the lingering odors of smoky incense, sour unwashed bodies, sweet beeswax candles that flickered and hissed. And Ippolito, waiting, anticipating, his robe still dotted with bits of straw from his afternoon nap.

“Ippolito!” Priest Domenico, impatient and entirely lacking in the spirit of tolerance on which he had just pontificated, called from the vestry. “Ippolito! Hurry up, now!”

The dwarf snatched the Bible and the chalice from the pulpit, cradling the hallowed items in his arms as he hobbled over to the vestry door where Priest Domenico stood, looking disgruntled. The priest’s face grew fatter every day, Ippolito noticed with disgust; eventually his eyes would look like two tiny black olives surrounded by pink flesh, just like a suckling pig.
Hmmm. Roast pork might be tasty, too.

“Take care this time,” Domenico said as Ippolito pushed past him. “If I find that chalice on the floor again, you won’t be sacristan any longer.”

A pox on you, Ippolito thought as he watched the priest’s retreating figure. He wasn’t worried by Domenico’s threats. He’d been at Sant’ Alvise for more than twenty years, long enough to see many priests come and go, long enough to lose the esteem he’d once felt for them.
Parasites all, sucking up the bounty of the convent.
The sisters routinely used up their rations of flour and eggs to bake bisquits and cakes for the rapacious priests, while he, Ippolito their faithful servant, got nothing but scraps. But whose fault was that? The uppity nuns were hardly generous themselves. Only Sister Brodata—homely Sister Brodata, of the ample bottom and the unfortunate mustache—was friendly; but now, he reflected sorrowfully, even she was shunning him. But it was the priests’ fault, not his! Brodata herself had complained that they ate all the food, and Ippolito had sniggered, “Be careful or they’ll take your virginity, too…unless, of course, you’ve already given it away.”

Brodata knew at once he’d been talking about Priest Fabrizio, whom he’d seen fawning over her, even though the old goat already had a mistress over at San Sepolcro. Brodata refused to speak to him now, but Ippolito knew she was only pretending to be angry; in truth she was flattered and secretly pleased. She wanted people to believe that the priest was sweet on her, no matter what cost to her honor. But what did these nuns care about honor?

He shook his head vigorously, as if to clear it. If Brodata didn’t want to be friends anymore, he would simply stop thinking of her! He had more important things to attend to, certainly. He would be a rich man tonight, if all went well; rich enough, at least, to buy himself a decent meal; even, perhaps, Ippolito thought as he returned to the nave, rich enough to take a stroll over to the Bridge of Tits, where the gentle
meretrici
would consider his money as good as any man’s, regardless of his shrunken form and bandy legs.

He wondered what old Brodata would say about that. No doubt she’d deliver a sermon on the sins of the flesh, he thought darkly, along with dire threats of the
morbo gallico,
the French disease. He remembered a priest from long ago who’d tried to convince Ippolito to give up lusting after whores; why gamble on those pox-ridden prostitutes, he’d said, when love between men is as good or better? I’d rather take my chances with the
gallico
than with the gallows! Ippolito had cackled, pleased with his own wit. Everyone knew that sodomy was a hanging offense, and a sin against God, and that was why the wise men of the Republic encouraged the
meretrici
to expose their breasts in public: to remind men of the proper expression of their desires.

Ippolito waited near the altar once again. In the church’s echoing quiet he heard the sound of water slowly dripping, then a sudden trill of conversation from the courtyard. It occurred to him that if things did not happen as he’d said they would, that blue-eyed devil, Batù Vrats, would make his life a living hell. He’d heard that Batù was not forgiving of mistakes. Ippolito wondered if he were nearby, watching and waiting. The thought made him shiver.

Just as Ippolito was beginning to lose hope, the first man arrived. This was the one he thought of as the traitor, for the man was Venetian, Ippolito was sure of it. “Not noble, no, nothing like that,” Ippolito had said when he’d described him for Batù, “someone from the lower orders, a guildsman perhaps, a weaver or a glassblower.” Yes, that had intrigued Batù; more so than most, Batù knew that the secrets of Venetian glass were sought by foreign courts using the most devious means. And even though it was Venetian policy to hunt down and assassinate any glassblower who plied his trade outside the Republic, a breach of the Venetian monopoly still happened occasionally. Only last year the French king had wooed one of Venice’s premier mirror makers with promises of money and women, and the Council of Ten was still agonizing over its inability to get to the turncoat, who was happily sequestered at the French court.

Ippolito watched from the altar as the Venetian sat down in the same pew he’d sat in for the past three weeks, and he witnessed the traitor’s false ritual of piety. First he knelt and briefly prayed; then, almost imperceptibly, he placed a small, folded paper into a crack in the wooden pew in front of him. He stayed only a moment longer, then slipped out of the church.

This was the crucial moment. Batù had explained that they would let the first man go—for now—in order to capture the second. The Spanish spy, as Ippolito thought of him, for he dressed in the Spanish style of doublet and hose, and one day Ippolito had followed him all the way to the Lista di Spagna and the Spanish embassy. He desperately wanted to go to the pew and make certain that the paper was there—they must catch the Spanish spy with the note, Batù had said—but he knew he must stay where he was, remain silent and still. If it did not go as Batù said it must, well…Ippolito was afraid to think of what might happen. Going hungry would be the least of his troubles.

Ippolito felt his breath catch as the Spanish spy entered the church and proceeded to the same pew. Yes, he was certain it was him: the Spaniard sported a thin black mustache that did little to cover the scar that had split his lip and left his mouth with a permanent sneer. He wore the same dusty brown doublet he’d worn the week before. Like the first man, he briefly knelt, appeared to pray, then took the slip of paper from its hiding place in the pew. He’d walked only a few steps toward the door when four men, brandishing swords, blocked his exit. He whipped around toward the altar, his eyes wild, in a futile search for another way out. The Spanish spy looked right at him and Ippolito gasped, afraid for his own life, but the instant soon passed because the Spaniard drew his sword and turned back to fight his attackers.

Within seconds the church was filled with the sound of clashing steel. “Don’t kill him,” one of the four shouted to the others, and Ippolito saw the Spaniard fight with increased zeal, as if he would prefer death to the alternative they had planned for him. A better end than that which comes in the Court of the Room of the Cord, Ippolito agreed as he watched the battle from behind the pulpit. Soon enough the Spaniard was disarmed, his sword flying in a glittering arc across the nave and clattering along the floor. The four men pounced on the spy, pinioning his arms and legs and hustling him away. Ippolito watched them through the open door as they moved across the
fondamenta
to the tiny canal outside and a waiting gondola. The scuffle was over in minutes, and the church was deathly quiet once again.

What about me? Ippolito wanted to cry out. Where is the reward Batù has promised? He curled his tiny hands into fists and felt as though he might burst into tears. Without the money as proof, Brodata would never believe he was responsible for the capture of a spy, that he had risked his very life! For all his fantasies of sumptuous meals and courtesans, he’d done it only for Brodata, to win back her friendship. He’d never felt quite so bereft before. He was about to shuffle away from the altar when a shadow, as black and sinuous as a viper, filled the church doorway.

Throwing back the hood of his cloak, Batù Vratsa entered the church and walked down the aisle toward Ippolito. He was strong and graceful and, Ippolito knew from the stories he’d heard, as dangerous a man as ever lived. Friend to outcasts and orphans, Batù had said when they’d first met, but the blue-eyed devil was one of the few people in this world who terrified him. He came from far away, the land of the Rom. They must be a bizarre race, for certainly Ippolito had never seen anyone like Batù before: a face strangely flat, with cheekbones that jutted out like wings; skin the color of dried tobacco, and eyes so light they appeared as empty as the most distant, colorless part of the sky. A blue-eyed devil. When he asked you to be his eyes and ears, how could you refuse?

Batù Vratsa looked down on Ippolito and handed him a leather pouch filled with coins. “You did well, my little friend,” he said, smiling, causing a tremor along Ippolito’s spine. “And how are you going to spend it all?” he asked, still with that smile that made the dwarf feel cold inside. “Perhaps there’s a nun here who’s your particular friend?”

Ippolito gulped, speechless with fear. Had the blue-eyed devil been watching him, too? Luckily he didn’t have to answer, for Batù Vratsa had disappeared as mysteriously as he’d arrived.

12 October 1617

“W
ELCOME TO THE
Court of the Room of the Cord,” Senator Girolamo Silvia said. He put his ax blade of a face close enough to the Spanish spy to see the dueling scar on his upper lip and the nervous sweat beading his brow. “No doubt you’ve heard of it: it’s the most feared place in all of Venice. The cord from which it takes its name is this one here.” Silvia reached up to touch the rope that hung from the ceiling and was tied to the prisoner’s wrists, bound behind his back. “We call it the strappado, and its purpose is to rip your shoulders from their sockets, something it does with remarkable efficiency. Of course we hope this will not be necessary. If you cooperate with us, you may still be able to lift a sword when you leave here. If you don’t cooperate, this may be the last place you’ll ever see.”

Buried deep within the Doge’s Palace, the Court’s thick, windowless stone walls admitted no light and deadened all sound: even the most horrifying scream could not be heard outside its solid fortifications. In the dim light cast by the wall-mounted torches, the bloodstained floors appeared black and the mice that scrabbled along the edges were little more than small, swift shadows. Silvia took a breath and the oppressive smell of the room filled his mouth and lungs. It was a smell you could taste, heavy and unpleasant on the tongue, a charnel odor of blood, vomit, piss, and fear so pervasive his clothes still reeked of it after he left. Because of that he never wore his scarlet togas in here, only the black. When prisoners were brought in, they often gagged and retched, but Silvia was inured to the smell; he had even begun to associate it with a sense of triumph.

In the Court of the Room of the Cord, Silvia had become privy to some of the most closely guarded secrets of Venice’s many enemies. Secrets that had often provided the Republic with an advantage in waging war, negotiating treaties, or outwitting their rivals in business and trade. One hundred hours of so-called diplomacy produced less good effect than what he and Batù could achieve in an hour in the Court. Here, Silvia discovered the hidden designs and true intentions of foreign kings and their dissembling minions, the shifting alliances and secret policies that determined the fate of nations. In a world of lies and deception, the Court of the Room of the Cord was a temple of truth.

He stepped away from the prisoner as Batù entered, slipping out of his cloak and turning to the plank table where various instruments of wood, leather, and metal were arranged in rows. His angular face and ice blue eyes appeared feral in the torchlight. He looked at the Spaniard with contempt and Silvia was reminded of the first time he’d seen him.

It had been more than twenty years ago now, belowdecks on a Turkish carrack docked in Constantinople. After four years on an official tour of the republic’s colonies, Silvia needed a servant to take back with him to Venice, one young enough to train properly. The slave auctions once held at the Rialto had been banned since 1366, but owning a slave or two was not uncommon among noble Venetians, nor was it illegal. The Turkish captain was a round little fellow with a gravelly voice. “I’ve got a boat full of pilgrims on their way to Mecca,” he said as he led Silvia down into the grubby hold where the slaves were kept. Most of them were Greek or from the lands surrounding the Black Sea. “The slaves not sold here will be unloaded at Alexandria. See anything you like?” The captain gestured at a group of boys huddled on the floor and Silvia’s gaze settled on a child of six or seven with golden skin and black hair. Even then his blue eyes were unsettling; they seemed to pierce right through the grimy darkness.

“What about him?” Silvia asked.

The captain guffawed and spit. “Not that one, sir, he’s wild and vicious as a cat.”

“Still, I’d like to get a better look at him. Could you ask him to stand up?”

The captain went over to the boy and kicked him, but he did nothing except glare at them with even greater ferocity. He grabbed the boy’s arm and dragged him to his feet, but as soon as he let go, the boy defiantly sat down again. The captain pulled him up once more, this time adding a hard smack across his face. “See what I mean? He’s incorrigible. An orphan, and a strange half-breed, too—Romanian by way of the Golden Horde. Named for the grandson of Ghengis Khan, Batù Khan, who laid waste to all the lands between Mongolia and Bohemia. He’s got the blood of demons in him.”

Red welts were rising on the boy’s cheek, but he hadn’t flinched when he was hit, hadn’t even uttered a sound, and his eyes were as dry as bone. Silvia looked for a tear without finding the least glimmer of one.

“I’ll take him,” he said.

He’d brought him to Venice ostensibly as a houseboy, but Batù’s intelligence and extraordinary physical agility were soon apparent. His unruliness had subsided once he realized that he wouldn’t be abused; in Silvia’s household the servants were treated well. Observant, silent, and unafraid, Batù became Silvia’s favorite. The unspoken affinity between them grew and Silvia began to think of him as the son he’d never had—the son he couldn’t have. He saw to it that Batù was schooled in the things he was best suited to, and by the time he was twenty, there was no better sword fighter in the city. Even in cosmopolitan Venice, his exotic appearance drew notice; he was often challenged, but never bested. Batù was lightning fast and fearless—because, like Silvia, he was oblivious to pain. Which also made him the ideal partner for Silvia’s work in the Court of the Room of the Cord. Like his mentor, he had a particular skill for extracting the truth.

“The prisoner’s name is Luis Salazar,” Batù said in a low voice. “That much at least we learned from the traitorous
arsenalotto
before he died.”

“Anything else?”

“Very little. He was injured during the arrest. He didn’t last long.”

The note they’d found on the Spanish spy had nothing to do with glassmaking, as Batù had first thought, but was in fact detailed information about the Arsenale, Venice’s shipbuilding factory, passed to him by a Venetian Arsenale worker.

Silvia went back to the prisoner. “Luis Salazar, state secrets regarding the defense of the Arsenale were discovered upon your person. Being in possession of this information is punishable by death. However, I’m offering you a chance to save your neck—all you have to do is tell me who you are working for.”

Silvia spoke in Italian, and he saw comprehension in the prisoner’s eyes, but less trepidation than he would have imagined. Usually three days in the Doge’s Prison was enough to make men prey to their own fears; by the time they got to the Court of the Room of the Cord, they were half finished already. This one apparently had more mettle. Silvia could see the pulse in Salazar’s throat as his heart quickened its rhythm, and the increased sheen of anxiety on his face, but he did not move a muscle or utter a sound.

“Is it the governor of Milan? The viceroy of Naples? Or are you working for the Spanish ambassador and King Philip III himself?”

The prisoner held his silence. Silvia repeated himself in Spanish, just in case, but saw no difference in the spy’s countenance. He doesn’t look sufficiently afraid, Silvia thought. His eyes shone with a dull, heavy-lidded defiance, as if he’d just been awakened by the guards before being brought here. But who slept in the Doge’s Prison, knowing what terrors were in store for them? In a flash, Silvia realized the source of the Spaniard’s bravado.

“If you thought that taking opium would see you through this, you were laboring under a serious misapprehension.” Salazar must have hidden the palliative in his clothes; perhaps he should insist on having prisoners stripped down in the future. “Batù?”

At the mention of his name, Batù turned the crank that hoisted the strappado. The Spaniard groaned as his arms were pulled up behind his back and his feet left the floor. The weight of his body put excruciating stress on his shoulders. Sweat began to stream down his face. Batù raised him a few meters from the floor, then let him drop suddenly and quickly snapped the rope taut. The spy’s wrists were jerked high above his head. Silvia heard the familiar crack as his shoulder joints split apart, and Salazar’s piteous scream.

The senator approached the spy once more. “I will ask you again. Who are you working for?”

Salazar was sweating profusely. Tears ran from his eyes and his breath came in shuddering, heaving gasps. But still he did not speak.

“If you do not talk to me, I will get very angry,” Silvia said. “You don’t want to make me angry. I’m all there is between you and Batù. There are many ingenious devices here in the Court and Batù is familiar with them all. I can tell him to start and I can tell him to stop. The only way to convince me to make him stop is to tell me the truth. You will discover that nothing else—not your tears, or your screams—will have any effect on me.” Silvia paused for a moment, then turned away. “Batù? What think you next?” He looked back at the prisoner as he listed the possibilities. “There is the garroting chair, in which a steel point at the back of the chair is slowly driven into your neck. There is the rack, for the systematic dislocation of every joint in your body. There are a few other, how shall I say, more prosaic devices, such as the thumbscrew, the head crusher, or hot pincers, which can tear off nipples, ears, noses, tongues, and genitals.

“If you think we will simply kill you, you are wrong. You will wish for death, but we will not give it to you. Men can withstand a great deal more pain than you have and continue living. I know this from personal experience. When I was fifteen, I was trampled by a bull. My legs were broken, my pelvis shattered. No one expected me to live, but I did, although I suffered more pain than most men could endure. You might think I boast of my strength, but in truth I confess a personal failing: since that time I have had little sympathy for the pain of others. You might say that I am a connoisseur of pain, and that Batù is a connoisseur of inflicting pain. Between the two of us, you will have no mercy. Now, I ask you once more: who are you working for?”

The Spanish prisoner looked him in the eye, then spat in his face.

“You will regret that,” Silvia said.