The Malice of Fortune Read online

  “You did not come to me when we found Juan”—your grandfather’s back heaved a bit—“when you might have offered us these theories. Instead you ran like a housebreaker.”

  “I was there when they found Juan. I waited beside the river …” For a moment I walked into that memory and could hear the shouts of the fishermen. “As soon as I saw him, I knew you would demand my confession. Just as you expect it tonight.” I glanced at the instruments of interrogation in the box beside me. “And I knew even then I had a child in my womb. A child I would have spit in the face of Satan to protect.”

  His Holiness turned, his words hissing more noticeably than before. “Henceforth the boy will enjoy my protection. Here, in the Vatican.”

  I wailed and wailed, bereft of all reason, these words having gutted me more effectively than any instrument Beheim might have chosen.

  Only when I had exhausted myself did merciful God grant me a certain calm—whereupon I found Satan’s eyes so close to my face that I could smell the wine on his breath. “Bene, bene,” your grandfather said. “I have opened a door and shown you my grief. A few moments of the pain that is for me unceasing. A shirt of fire I will never be able to tear from my breast.”

  “I, too, grieve for Juan.”

  He dismissed my grief with a blink. “You call the boy Giovanni. Of course I have also known that, from the day of his birth. But I don’t believe you are certain that my Juan was your Giovanni’s father.”

  “He is the child of my womb and my soul. The Holy Mother and I know the father who put his seed in me.”

  “After the boy has been here awhile, I will know the father,” your grandfather said, with no uncertainty. He nodded at Beheim, who once again displayed his physician’s knife.

  On such an occasion, you are only wondering where the first cut will be. When Beheim sliced through the rope that bound my right arm to the chair, I presumed he intended to extend my limb in such a fashion that my song would begin with sharp, clear notes. Instead he cut the rope that held my left arm.

  “It is in the box, Lorenzo,” your grandfather said. “Give it to her.”

  I closed my eyes and felt Beheim’s hand between my thighs, no doubt in anticipation of pulling up my skirts. Against my will I looked down.

  He had placed in my lap a little pouch that could easily fit in the palm of my hand. Fashioned of soiled red wool, with a long red string, it was the sort of charm bag that half the whores and procuresses in Rome carry about, hoping to obtain good fortune or cast a love spell.

  “Look inside,” His Holiness said.

  My hands trembling, I got in a finger and drew out a dirty paper card no longer than my thumb, also with a red yarn attached. This was a bollettino, which you do not see much in Rome—country people wear these little prayers around their necks. I could still distinguish the inscription, despite the untutored hand and cheap ink, which was not much darker than the stained paper: Sant Antoni mi benefator. Scrawled in some peasant dialect, it was a prayer to Saint Anthony, who guards against demons.

  But when I turned over the little card I found another inscription, this in a practiced hand, in correct Italian and black Chinese ink: Gli angoli dei venti. The corners of the winds.

  I looked at the pope and shook my head.

  “Empty it,” he said.

  The rest of the contents tumbled into my lap. Two fava beans, a little lump of gray chalk, a quattrino della croce—a coin melted into the shape of a cross; these were the sort of charms that might compel a man to fall in love with their bearer. There was one last item, however, that froze my hands.

  I looked down at the miniature bronze head of a bull, no larger than a small bell, with big eyes, short horns, and a ring that seemed to grow from the top of the tiny skull, so that it could be worn as an amulet. It was an Etruscan antiquity, fashioned by the ancient race that preceded the Romans and lent its name to Tuscany. I turned it over, requiring only a moment’s scrutiny to find the tiny Latin inscription engraved on the back: Alexander filius. Son of Alexander. On the day Rodrigo Borgia had been crowned Pope Alexander VI, taking the name of a pagan conqueror instead of a saint, he had presented this token of love—and worldly ambition—to his cherished son.

  “Juan …” The pope swallowed as if the wine on his breath had returned to his throat. “He was wearing it that night.”

  “He was never without it.” In a strange fashion, I hoped this would comfort Juan’s father.

  “It was found at Imola,” he said, referring to an inconsiderable city in the Romagna—the Romagna being the northernmost of the Papal States, occupying a vast plain between the Apennine mountains and the Adriatic Sea. Or I should say that Imola had been a city of little consequence, until Duke Valentino located his court there early this year. One heard that all the ambassadors, not only those from our many Italian states and the rest of Europe but the Turks as well, had gone there in supplication. Somehow Juan’s amulet had journeyed for five years, hundreds of miles across the length and breadth of Italy, to return to his father’s hands. In such fashion Fortune displays her love of cruel ironies.

  “How—”

  “How indeed.”

  I looked up. “If you have been watching my every breath these five years, then you know I cannot have transported it to Imola, even if it had ever been in my possession. I last saw that amulet a week before Juan was murdered. The last time …” I had to turn away the images that waited for me, floating on a copper-colored river I never again wanted to cross. “I did not see it in that boat, either. Although one of the fishermen might have taken it.”

  The pope glanced at Beheim. “Those fishermen were examined with great care.” Perhaps there was a certain dreadful irony to this “care.” But if so, His Holiness’s face did not convey it. “My boy’s assassins ripped this from his neck.” His Holiness snatched the amulet from me as if I were its thief. “They took it as their trophy.”

  “Surely the woman from whom you obtained this charm bag can tell you who gave it to her.” I was surprised at the desperate pitch of my own voice.

  “She can tell us nothing. The charm bag belonged to a dead woman. It was found in her hand.”

  “I presume someone recognized her … her body.”

  His Holiness’s nostrils pinched, as if he had smelled the putrefying remains. “She inconvenienced us in that regard. Duke Valentino’s soldiers discovered her corpse in a field outside Imola.” I noted the formality with which he now referred to his son Cesare. “Absent her head, which has yet to be retrieved.”

  I crossed myself. “Then the murderers presumed she would be recognized by someone in Duke Valentino’s household, if not by your own people. Did she have scars or birthmarks upon her body?” I wondered if I would be expected to know these, still being familiar with the distinguishing marks of a number of ladies in our business.

  The pope studied me for several heartbeats. “I am sending you to Imola.”

  “To examine what is left of her?”

  His hand flew at me and struck the top of my skull so hard that the stars winked at me; he clutched my hair as though he wanted to rip my scalp away with it, forcing back my head. “You will go to Imola and wait in lodging provided you by the Holy See.” The words seethed through his teeth. “You will wait there until you receive instruction from me.”

  I looked into a satyr’s leering face, so close that our noses briefly touched. I could no longer smell the wine on his breath. Instead this was the foul, earthy stench of a long-buried corpse.

  I thought: Hell smells like this.

  After a moment the pope released me, nodded again at Beheim, then left the room.

  In the arch above the door where you entered a moment later, Pinturicchio had painted the Holy Madonna displaying her Child to the adoring saints. Your grandfather’s people had already dressed you in a little hunting costume, with a padded jerkin and red morocco boots that reached to your knees. In your arms squirmed a dear Tenerife almost identical to our precious
Ermes, licking at your face.

  “Mama! Mama! Look!” you cried out like a carillon of tiny bells. An angel’s voice. “I have met my nonno at last and he has given me Ermes’s brother! In the morning we shall go back to our house and get Ermes and mend the cut those evil men gave him! I’m going to stay here with the dogs while you are away and receive instruction in fencing and riding!” You bounded into my lap and the fluffy Tenerife now licked madly at my face, eager for the salt in my tears. “Mama, nonno says we are all going to live here when you get back!”

  I had hardly composed my sobs when I observed that your nonno had returned to stand behind you. His Holiness’s fleshy lips trembled as they drew a tauter line. “Now you understand why I have every conviction you will go to Imola and do as I say.”

  “I understand,” I whispered, “that you have made your own grandson hostage to my obedience in this errand.”

  Your grandfather nodded at Beheim, who gently tugged you from my embrace. At once I felt the pain of birth, when a mother first parts with the child of her womb. Yet I knew that if I clung to you, I would only frighten you.

  It is through love, Plato said, that all conversation between God and man is conducted. Thus the vow I whispered to you was for God’s ears as well as your own. “I will come back and hold you again, my most precious darling. Soon. As soon as I am able. Until then you will be brave and do what you are told. And whenever you think of me, you will know that I am thinking of you and how I adore you more than the love that turns the stars, and that is when you must smile for me. Even if it is a hundred times every day. Even if it is only once. Each time you smile, my heart will know it.”

  You had no sooner left my arms than you offered me the first of those winsome smiles, sly and a bit sad at once, reminding me of your father. You turned and offered the second as you passed beneath the immense gilded arch that framed the Madonna and Child, the little dog in your arms peering back at me as well, his wide eyes lingering longer than yours.

  Your grandfather did not witness our farewell. Instead, again he stared up at his own lost son. For the first time that night, I was alone with him. And I cannot say why, but I felt between us a communion so powerful that I sobbed, as though we were the last two mourners standing at Juan’s bier.

  “The Orsini and the Vitelli are no longer in my employ.” The pope’s voice was hollow. “Last month the condottieri met in a secret conclave at the fortress of La Magione and declared an armed rebellion against Duke Valentino, the Holy See, and our entire enterprise in the Romagna. Vitellozzo Vitelli has already attacked our garrisons in the same fortresses and towns I paid him so liberally to secure for me only months ago. Impicatti. The Orsini and Vitelli have betrayed their Heavenly Father no less than their duke, their pontiff, and the pledges they gave us.”

  “So the condottieri are no longer useful to you,” I replied. “And now I am.”

  The pope remained fixed on Juan’s image.

  “Five years, Your Holiness. That is how long you have husbanded your hatred, every day putting away a bit more, like wine in your cellar. But it will be a sour vintage if you believe I had anything to do with those men. Perhaps this unfortunate woman had a connection with the condottieri. Most likely she did.” My sigh was weary. “But if I ever knew her, it was not because of some mutual association with the Orsini or the Vitelli.”

  The pope spun about, his eyes as glaring as black glass in the sun. Yet knowing your grandfather as well as I did, I observed a certain subtlety of his expression, from which I drew the faintest cause for hope. I had seen this same doubt twitch across his face when he raised the golden chalice full of Christ’s blood on Easter morning in San Pietro; as often as he had sold God’s forgiveness, His Holiness could not be certain he would ever receive it, at any price. He could taste the stink of Hell on his own tongue.

  And in the same fashion, he was not entirely certain of my guilt. If I could connect the condottieri to a faceless woman who was murdered while carrying Juan’s amulet in her charm bag, I might yet prove to him my innocence.

  “Very well, Your Holiness,” I whispered. “We have an understanding. I will establish myself in Imola and wait there for your instruction.”

  There is one final thing you should know about that night: Everything your grandfather told you was a lie, except for the Tenerife being our precious Ermes’s brother. I am all but certain that Ermes and the little dog His Holiness gave you came from the same litter, born two months before your father was murdered.

  II

  Fortune is fickle by her very nature. As a dear friend once observed, that malignant bitch knows that she cannot drop us to our ruin unless she first lifts us up. So it was that I returned to my violated house in Trastevere that very night to prepare for my journey to Imola, only to find Camilla there, quite alive. She had already delivered the body of dear, brave Obadiah to our little community of Jews and paid for his services and burial; she had given Ermes his rest in the herb garden behind our house. I found her with a bucket of water and lye, preparing to clean a great patch of blood from the mattress upon which I had last seen her. Before we could even embrace and keen like Trojan women for our lost little boy, our sad eyes met and she told me, “It is not my blood, Madonna.” I did not inquire further. Like your mama, our beloved Camilla came from nothing, and that has made her a most resourceful woman.

  Before Camilla and I took our leave of Rome, I was able to sell most of my medallions and cameos, thus obtaining the means to purchase those necessities the Holy See would not provide, as well as redeeming some of my best dresses from the pawnbrokers. Within three days of my forced visit to the Vatican, Camilla and I stood in the little garden behind our run-down house, preparing to mount the mules that waited out front, laden with our traveling chests. In our five years in that little house, the two of us had labored so much to make this garden as lovely as it was useful, planting our cabbages, garlic, lettuces, and all our herbs and flowers; grooming the fig, pear, and lemon trees; building paths and a pergola.

  A gentle rain provided almost a lens, through which our foliage glowed beryl and emerald. Yet this shower occasioned a foreboding—if we did not have reason enough to fear our journey—because even as we watched, snowflakes began to flutter down within it.

  “This will be the coldest winter,” Camilla said mournfully, having warm Neapolitan blood. “All the birds have gone already.”

  I knew how much she and our Giovanni loved to go out into the garden with Ermes, to watch the antics of the swifts and wrens, and sometimes chase them. I folded her in my arms. “I have a little hope,” I said. “The pope has left me that thread, and I will cling to it. I believe if I can discover the truth about Juan’s murder, I can bring our precious little boy home. That is my faith, my darling. We will come back here. All of us. The sun will shine again.”

  “I am remembering it,” Camilla said, looking around with wonder, as if seeing our garden for the first time. And then she smiled at me, with the remarkable innocence she has kept throughout the most dreadful times. “If you remember something well enough, you are sure to come back and see it again.”

  I will not waste words on the details of our transit, except to say that we spent a week on the backs of those mules—and the snow on the mountain passes was so thick that where it had been piled beside the road, it reached above our heads.

  Imola lies at the very foot of the Apennines, upon that great carpet of rust-colored soil, known as the pianura, that stretches to the Adriatic Sea, one of those cities the Romans strung along the Via Emilia like beads on the reed of an abacus. You could fit all of Imola into Rome’s Campo Marzio, but the city itself is not a great pasture like so much of Rome. There is a thick stone wall all around it, with everything packed tightly inside, and there are fewer tottering old brick towers than we have in Rome and just as many modern palazzi. With all the soldiers there and the army of opportunists that has followed them, you could count just as many souls in Imola on the day I arrived
as you could count in Rome on the day I left.

  We entered the city through the gate that faces the Apennines, thus called the Mountain Gate, passing through a wall thick enough to build a house within. Just inside we found a crowd flailing about like crabs in a sieve: candle-shop streetwalkers painted so heavily their faces looked like Carnival masks; porters with bundles balanced on their heads and peasants with baskets of eggs or sausages atop theirs; merchants in fur-trimmed capes, monks in coarse brown cowls, and cardsharps wearing velvet jackets short enough to display codpieces that might have been stuffed with cabbages. Order was kept by the local militia, rosy-faced mountain boys in jackets and puffy breeches, all striped with Borgia vermilion and yellow.

  The pope had secured our lodgings at the Palazzo Machirelli. This was a new building, only a few streets up from the Rocca, the immense stone fortress that anchors the southwest corner of the city. My two small rooms were upstairs, barren save for a big walnut chair and a bed with feather-stuffed covers. Camilla threw open the shutters, allowing us to look out over a lovely courtyard of the most modern all’antica design, with slender columns and graceful arches.

  We spent the next few days unpacking our chests, determining what to buy, and with great effort securing charcoal, wine, bread, and cheese, as everything is scarce here. With the days too cold to open the shutters more than a crack, we saw little of our neighbors. Even so, Camilla and I made a game of spying on them, just as we had when our windows overlooked the Via dei Banchi, in those years before Juan was murdered. Whenever we heard steps crunching in the frozen sand, we peeked out and gossiped about men we did not know.

  “Merchant. Venetian,” Camilla said of a graying gentleman wearing a sable cap, with sable lapels on his cioppa.

  “You are correct about the attire,” I said, “but a Venetian of his years would dye his hair, and this man has a little stoop from sitting too much—a scholar’s stoop. Ambassador. Ferrara or Mantua.”