The Malice of Fortune (41 page)

Hence for several hours I walked the streets of Cesena, yet still I did not encounter Damiata; I also returned several times to her room to see if she had come back. By the third visit my anxiety was at a high pitch. Foremost among my fears, I had to wonder if Valentino himself had discovered Damiata’s presence in Cesena, despite her efforts to remain out of sight. He might well have located her hiding place and sent someone to arrest her, given that he now appeared as determined to protect the
condottieri
from the consequences of her inquiry as he was to deliver himself into their arms.

Nevertheless, I could find no one at Damiata’s palazzo who had seen her go out, much less anyone come in and drag her out. I contemplated breaking the lock to her door, but that would only put her belongings at risk during the coming chaos, while probably revealing nothing I had not previously observed in her room. Instead, I continued visiting her palazzo every hour throughout a night as miserable as the preceding had been miraculous, my fears taking entire dominion over both reason and sentiment.

I had returned from one of these futile journeys perhaps an hour before dawn, when I paused before my own door. Hearing the faintest little chinging, like coins in a purse, I quickly looked behind me.

The tiny courtyard was empty. Yet all at once a stronger intuition coursed through me in a great spasm, turning me back to my door.

For just a heartbeat, I was surprised that I did not see someone—or
some thing—standing on the threshold before me. The little chinging sound seemed to come from the sky. I looked up to the very crown of the roof, two floors above me.

The face of the moon, or perhaps a barn owl. Or no face at all. It appeared to hover above the eave for so fleeting an instant that I could not say what it was, other than a pale apparition. When it vanished, the chinging sound metamorphosed into a light clattering, as if a large rodent were scurrying across the roof tiles.

I raced out of the courtyard and into the street, attempting to observe this creature’s escape. Yet I neither saw nor heard anything clambering over the roof. I peered into the alley that separated my building from the next, recalling the night I had found poor Camilla’s corpse. I had caught only the most ephemeral glimpse of the “barn owl” that Damiata had noted atop our building, at almost the same moment that I had observed the footsteps leading up her stairs, which I had followed with far more urgency—and what I discovered in Damiata’s bedroom had washed away any memory of the phantom on the roof. Yet now I could only presume that this owl-man had also been present that night, an unspeakably brutal apprentice who continued to stalk us behind the mask of Death.

This led me to a more terrifying deduction: the Devil’s apprentice had watched me enter Damiata’s rooms and had probably observed me leave. Again I saw Camilla’s corpse, the fresh blood everywhere, as though we are nothing more than fonts of gore, the bones of her neck and shoulder jutting like pig joints.

I started to run as if I had been struck by lightning, thinking only that I would die myself before I allowed Damiata to suffer poor Camilla’s fate.

Yet just as quickly, I stopped. Damiata was not waiting in her room as Camilla had been that night; she had been gone for hours. I would have found her door open, as I had that night, if the murderer’s apprentice had savaged her in the same manner. Instead he was here, still watching me. More likely Damiata had been able to flee from him and was still hiding. And he hoped to find her here.

Determined to bait a trap for this creature, I withdrew from the alley and returned to my rooms.

In my haste to search for Damiata, I had left my door unlocked; now I barred it behind me, thinking that I might confound this creature by not returning to Damiata’s lodging, as he had certainly come to expect. Instead, I would remain inside until he was provoked to call on me.

I lit a candle and set about examining my room for something to use as a weapon. The search was not at once promising, because I had packed up everything in anticipation of a hasty departure. I might have swept the cold tile floor, it was so clean, save for the brazier and a useless rusted poker. I had even cleared most of the papers and manuscripts from my little table—

I dropped my candle at once. The wick flickered at my feet, still providing a small amount of light. That scant illumination allowed me a fleeting, inchoate fragment of a prayer, that what I saw on my tabletop would prove to be only the delusion of a weary and desperate mind.

The next thing I knew I was running down the street, my reason clinging to a single, slender thread.

CHAPTER
16

I
t has always been no less dangerous to discover new methods and principles than it has been to search for unknown seas and lands
.

Maestro Leonardo’s globe lamps glimmered through the cracks of the warehouse shutters, these slivers of light as brilliant as molten bronze in an armorer’s crucible. The door gave me no resistance and I burst directly into the abandoned refectory, to find Leonardo and his assistants staring at me as if I were a madman. They were engaged in bundling up many of the items that littered the floor; had I my wits about me, I might have observed that Valentino’s departure had taken his own engineer general by surprise.

But I did not have my wits about me. I ran directly to the maestro and shouted into his face, “You must come at once! Bring your
cazzo diavolo
measuring things!”

“You know what I am asking,” I grimly told Leonardo. Giacomo had placed a reflecting candle lantern on my tabletop, so that we could see quite well enough.

Leonardo crouched, bringing his face within a palm’s length of the severed hand. “It is a woman’s,” he said, his voice lacking its usual melody.

I could not recognize the hand as Damiata’s, any more than I could assure myself it was not. Slightly bloated, the fingers swollen most of
all, the entire appendage was blotched a ghastly claret and purple. It had been severed cleanly at the wrist.

I had to turn away before Leonardo could begin his measurements. I did not even hear his chalk dreadfully scratching away in one of his notebooks, divining fate with letters and numbers, before he said, “Did you observe this?”

The red string fell from Leonardo’s hand like a trail of blood. Yet the little card attached to it was not stained at all. Leonardo presented it to me as if he were a priest offering the wafer at Mass.

There was no prayer to the Devil on this
bollettino
; the facing side of the card was entirely blank. My fingers trembled as I turned it over. The script on the other side was in the familiar, polished Tuscan hand and black Chinese ink. But the words were like something heard in a dream.

Il sale più profondo a Cesenatico
.

“The deepest salt at Cesenatico,” I mumbled, Cesenatico being Cesena’s seaport, a town about ten miles east, on the Adriatic coast. “It doesn’t even mean anything.”

“There are salt basins at Cesenatico,” Leonardo said. Illuminated from below by the reflecting candle, his face appeared distorted, almost monstrous.

Yet it was his silence that alarmed me. “What is it, Maestro!” I knew I sounded as mad as he looked. “Do you already know? Is it Damiata’s hand!”

Leonardo shook his head as if entirely bewildered. “I cannot determine that with only … this,” he said in a croaking voice. “The hand varies too much from the
simmetria
of the limbs. I can only say that it was separated from the living body within the previous day. Or two. There are fluids—”

All at once Leonardo’s spidery fingers pounced on the
bollettino
, plucking it from my slack hand.

He examined the cryptic message, his head shaking in his palsied fashion. Finally the maestro found words. “Perhaps the hand was left for you,” he whispered, clutching the
bollettino
to his breast. “This is for me.”

It was a measure of the skill with which this unspeakably vile murderer had entered Leonardo’s mind that within moments of reading the butcher’s cryptic missive, Valentino’s engineer general had put aside his urgent pursuit of the duke’s army; with renewed authority in his voice, he instructed his assistants to prepare for a journey to Cesenatico. He then turned to me and said, “I will require several hours to prepare the apparatus necessary to examine the salt basins.” Recalling the great wheel of buckets I had seen in the maestro’s warehouse, I wondered if this “apparatus” would be employed for some sort of excavation or dredging. “You must be prepared to leave here later this day. Wear as much clothing as you have—I can tell you with good assurance there is going to be a storm.”

Before he departed, Leonardo carefully placed the severed hand in a canvas sack. As I closed the door behind him, I could think only:
Not two days ago I kissed that warm and tender hand, the hand that burned my flesh and healed my soul, the hand that led me to a new life. Now it is nothing but a butchered piece of meat
.

And in Cesenatico would I be condemned to find the rest of her, piece by pale, bloodless piece?

The maestro finally returned for me at midday, alone. He explained that he had already sent his assistants ahead and was now determined to proceed to Cesenatico on foot, as he was certain he could cover the distance more quickly than a mule.

I had no difficulty matching the maestro’s lunging strides; such was my urgency to determine Damiata’s fate, that I could have run the entire way, despite not sleeping at all since I had awakened early the previous morning. After passing through the unguarded city gate, we proceeded east on a road the Romans had certainly not built, as it lacked the perfect line only their surveyors have ever achieved—a symmetry that was otherwise evident in fields bounded by precise borders.

A mile or so past the city walls, we observed that we were not
alone. Traveling in companies of five or six to as many as twenty or thirty, they were not local country folk, although in their rough capes they scarcely appeared different, until one observed that many had only scraps of cloth tied about their feet and some were as barefoot as Saint Francis. These desperate mendicants were my fellow pilgrims, who had also followed Valentino’s army from Imola. And while the whores and priests who had journeyed south would always find means to keep from starving, these peasants could only hope to glean from a Cesenate countryside that was quickly being stripped as bare as the Imolese fields they had so recently fled.