The Malice of Fortune (31 page)

He opened his eyes and sat forward. “Everyone knew that the
condottieri
had their knives out for Juan. First, because he had enraged the Orsini with his campaign against them, even if he achieved nothing. And second, because the Vitelli, who did most of the fighting for the Orsini, saw it to their profit to continue the hostilities with my father, even when the Orsini began to discuss peace. Yet Juan did nothing to secure his person. When he went out at night he took along a drunken groom or two and rarely wore his armor. His only defense was his wandering nature—no one could say when or where he would go.” Valentino now tapped his thighs so rapidly that his fingers might have been playing a
moresca
on a flute. “I have always wondered if Damiata told them where he was that night, and where he would go later. Told this to one of the Vitelli, I believe. Or perhaps Damiata simply told someone who told the Vitelli. She was furious about Juan’s dalliance with the contessa. Ordinarily she could conceal her anger. As she concealed so many things. But I was with her that day. I saw …” He blinked as if trying to see his former lover through the veil of years. “Damiata had ears and mouths all over the city. She had a thousand ways to accomplish her betrayal.”

His fingertips ceased their tattoo. He stared at his hands, as if wondering why they had stopped. “And I, in my own way, was her accomplice. I told her the fatal truth about Juan’s plans for that night, fully knowing that I would feed her anger over his new lover. Of course I was mad with desire for her. But I also believed she was another gift, much like the captain general’s office, that Juan had so carelessly squandered. So I, too, willfully betrayed my brother.” The words drew his lips tight, as if he had swallowed sour wine. “ ‘The Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him …’ ”

“Excellency, I believe she loved your brother.” If Damiata had not loved Juan of Gandia, how little truth was there to this “connection” she had cited between us?

“She loved him. Yes, I believe that.” Valentino acknowledged this as if love itself were a sad and tawdry crime. “But I must ask if she has
betrayed not only Juan but both my father and me—and you as well.” He turned to me again. “Secretary, is it possible that Damiata escaped the divination with this book?”

Hope pulsed through my veins at the mere conjecture that Damiata was alive. And fear followed: if Valentino’s speculation was correct, perhaps she had kept the book from him because she could not trust him.

I tried to steady myself, reasoning that even if I could tell Valentino little he did not already know about the events on the
pianura
, the manner in which he received my information might reveal more of his own intentions. Hence I described for him in detail the
Gevol int la carafa
and the mastiff-keeper’s flight with the “book of spells,” as well as my own encounter with the masked Devil’s apprentice, withholding only those particulars of the goat ride that had occurred within my own mind.

“I do not see how Damiata could have pursued the mastiff keeper with better result than the masked man who knocked me senseless,” I concluded. “And as I told you, I do not believe this apprentice obtained the book, because if he had, he certainly would have put an end to my involvement in the matter.”

The duke’s eyes, though half shut, were so fixed on the embers before him that he might have been willing the genesis of some great conflagration.

“You must think carefully on this, Secretary.” After Valentino’s long silence, this instruction was as sharp as a stiletto. “Did you see this
mago
, this ‘mastiff keeper,’ in possession of the book itself when he ran from the hut?”

“I was knocked down. I …” I saw what Valentino was asking. I had simply assumed the truth of Damiata’s words:
He has the book!
“No. I never saw that he had it.”

“Consider it, Secretary. Is it possible Damiata intended you to pursue this man, so that she would be at liberty to bargain with those people? I would guess she kept a considerable sum on her person. And as you know, she is both clever and persuasive.” And a confessed liar and thief. “You would not be the first man she has deceived.”

And she would not have been the first woman to deceive me.

“My father made a grave error in involving Damiata,” Valentino said, his tone mirroring my regret. “And all the more so in using the boy as he did. Her desire to retrieve Giovanni is entirely sincere. Never doubt that. His Holiness has only given her a grievance and a cause.”

I nodded. If she must, Damiata would enlist Satan himself in that cause.

“You say that if we are to defeat Fortune, Secretary, we must anticipate events. If Damiata had this book in her possession, what would she do with it? Would she go to my father and trust him to release her son? Or would she wager that the
condottieri
, offered the opportunity to destroy the evidence of their association with the murdered women, would secure the boy’s release in exchange for the book?”

I presumed Valentino meant that the
condottieri
would “secure the boy’s release” with the sort of subtle coercion that had already compelled him to leave Imola—or perhaps they would overtly threaten to attack the pope’s fortresses or the Vatican itself. That Valentino had even raised the question evidenced his steadily weakening position.

“Given Damiata’s difficulties with your father,” I said, “she might have reason to favor the
condottieri
.”

“I agree. More so if they have had a previous connection.”

This “connection” being a conspiracy to murder his brother. Yet the duke had also left the “if” hanging in the air.

Valentino settled back into his chair with a weariness I had never observed in him, his shoulders slumped and his chin down. “Secretary, do you know this nun from Mantua?” Now it seemed he was, in fact, only talking in his sleep. “This seeress or prophetess they all chatter about? Osana, she is called. She prophesied that the reign of the Borgia would be like ‘a fire of straw.’ ”

A faint moan came from the fireplace, the sound of vapors in the wood escaping.

“At our first breath, we begin to race Fortune.” Valentino spoke as if he had already surrendered his hope of defeating her. “She draws a map of each man’s life, marking the distance that bounds our mortality, requiring of us that we race against her, ever faster, toward the
oblivion that lies beyond. Santa Maria, that distance is short, the contest brief.” I thought I saw a glimmer at the corner of his eye. “Perhaps the nun of Mantua simply saw Fortune’s map of my life. Because if I do not find this schoolboy’s geometry, then all this, all my hopes for a new Italy, will be consumed more quickly than straw in a fire.”

CHAPTER
7

W
hatever is entirely clear, entirely without suspicion, is never found
.

Upon leaving the Governor’s Palace, I wandered the streets of Cesena for what seemed an age, trudging from one corner of the little city to the next, hopelessly perplexed. I believed with every fiber of my intellect that Valentino’s suspicions of Damiata were sincere and not without foundation; he knew her better than I could imagine. He had held her, breast to naked breast, inciting in my own a jealousy I had once thought alien to my nature; this alone should have warned me that I was not in my right mind. Yet my entire soul still believed in Damiata with a conviction my intellect was powerless to defeat. It was possible that Valentino, plagued by his own guilt, was simply mistaken; certainly someone other than the two of them had also been privy to the Duke of Gandia’s route the night he was murdered. Nevertheless, even my soul had to concede that Damiata had known full well what I had at stake in the investigation of Juan’s murder, yet she had maintained a silence that was no less than a lie about the manner in which she
had
betrayed the Duke of Gandia, when she had taken his brother as her lover.

On the other hand, Valentino’s own intentions were scarcely clear; even his presentiment of doom had been ambiguous. Did he regard any evidence that would obstruct his accord with the
condottieri
as the foremost stumbling block to his new Italy—or did he regard the
condottieri
as the principal threat to his most immediate ambitions, or even
his very life? If the latter, then his withdrawal from Imola, and for that matter his entire treaty with the
condottieri
, might well be a madness feigned to deceive the architects of this “very great intrigue” against him, until he could secure the
Elements
and produce the evidence that would damn them all. Yet if the former were true, he desired the book only to destroy it—or deliver it as an offering when he submitted to the
condottieri
.

In this manner my arguments went in circles, like my own repeated circuits of Cesena.

I must have walked until well past the seventh hour of the night before I finally stopped in the doorway of a palazzo not far from my own rooms, suddenly unbearably weary. My feet made a little screech on the icy pavement as I found my footing. Cesena had become as quiet as a graveyard around me.

After a moment I heard a familiar, clamoring noise, although it was not of this place, or the present.

This was the rising din of another city, as Florence awakened to another day: a vast crowing, barking, and braying of both men and animals; a rattling of carts, a carillon of smiths’ hammers and stonemasons’ chisels. In some netherworld between memory and a goat-ride vision, I was once again only a few months past seven years old, standing in the doorway of our little house on the Via di Piazza.

It was my first day with my new Latin tutor, Ser Battista, whose
studiolo
was at the San Benedetto church, next to the Duomo. I had never crossed the Arno by myself, much less half the city, so at breakfast my chin quivered a little. Mama had certainly observed this, because she fried little flour cakes and filled them with a cherry paste, singing one of her own lauds all the while: “The Lord who brings justice to the oppressed, the Lord who feeds the hungry and frees our bonds …”

Having wrapped one of these confections in a napkin, she presented it to me at the door. “My darling Niccolò, my first son,” Mama said as I tucked away the treat in the bag with my slate. “Your life will be out there.” Mama nodded in the direction of the city. “You will become a learned man, a man of letters. Like your papa. But I have the
deepest faith that you will also have an office. You will take your place in the government of our republic.”

This prophecy seemed utterly fanciful to me. Papa had never held an office in our government and could never hope to do so; he was not one of the favored “Medici men” who alone were accorded wealth and influence. The republic itself was only the dream of little people like Mama and Papa, who closed their shutters whenever Lorenzo de’ Medici rode past at the head of yet another gaudy Carnival parade, his chorus of sycophants and retainers following behind him like an immense, multicolored snake.

Mama caressed my cheek with dry, rough fingers. She had been almost forty years old when I was born, and on this day she seemed an old woman to me, her forehead hatched with lines, her lips thin and almost without color. “Niccolò, long before you were born, I made the most solemn promise to our Lord. I vowed that I would give the first son I carried in my womb to our
bella
Firenze and her
libertà
.” Her wide-set, vaguely catlike eyes peered inside me. “Today you will begin to redeem that promise. You will come to love our Firenze, and then you will understand why you must save her. Why you must restore her
libertà
to all her people. Not just the few.”

With these words my mother gave me to Florence. As I crossed the Ponte Vecchio, tears clouded my eyes, because I knew I would never again follow my beloved mama around our house like a little pet. And I did not fall in love with
bella
Firenze that first day; I was too frightened.

Nevertheless, not a week had passed before I bounded out the door after breakfast and raced across the bridge, within a few hundred steps finding myself in the roaring heart of all Europe’s commerce. To my mind the buildings on either side of the street resembled great sailing ships, the towering façades of the silk shops always draped with enormous, shimmering damask banners, while from nearly every window of the wool factories, each the size of a palazzo, long bolts of newly washed fabric, nearly as fine as the silk, flapped in the wind. Swept along in a great tide of traffic, I crossed the city on the Via dei Calzaiuoli, named for the many hosiery shops that lined it, although most of the shop-front arcades displayed some other trade beneath their long
tiled canopies: shoemakers, goldsmiths, illuminators, bookbinders, our first printer’s shop.

But amidst all this commerce, which to my eyes resembled a great and fascinating battle, I found an even more astonishing beauty. On the Via dei Calzaiuoli, I could wander around the great gray block of the Orsanmichele church, looking up at the statues of the patron saints of all the guilds, like Donatello’s Saint Mark and Saint George, their lifelike appearance nearly miraculous compared to the stiff scarecrows carved in the centuries before our
Rinascimento
of ancient arts and letters. At the end of the street was the immense Duomo, clad in white-and-green marble, crowned with Brunelleschi’s prodigious brick dome; every time I passed, I craned my head back so far I thought I would fall over, and floated away with pride, to think that the men who had made these
invenzioni
were Florentines like me.