The nobles of the Signoria were frowning, puzzled by the sudden tension.
“You swear by your immortal soul that this is the truth?” Gritti said, fondling the words like a silken cord.
“Certainly I do! I am not in the-”
“It is not what Vizio Vasco reports,”
The Maestro sighed. “What does Vizio Vasco report, Your Excellency?”
“Perhaps we should hear it from his own lips,” Gritti smiled. “If Their Excellencies permit?”
“I can’t see how it matters if he led us to the right man,” the doge said impatiently. “But let’s get it over with.”
The inquisitor rose and went to the door. He spoke for a few moments with persons outside, then moved aside to let the vizio enter. Vasco was still pale and probably felt very shaky, but a healthy man will recover quickly from loss of blood if he is going to recover at all. Gritti led him to the table and pulled out a chair for him. He blinked uncertainly, sat down unsteadily and peered around the company. Excess of wine was affecting him more than shortage of blood now.
“Filiberto Vasco,” the inquisitor said as he returned to his own seat, “do you swear to tell the truth?”
“I do, Your Excellency.”
“Then tell us how Doctor Nostradamus learned the name of the man who murdered Danese Dolfin.”
This was my cue to dive out the window and swim away along the canal.
I didn’t.
“Yesh, Your Shereenit’tee…” Vasco’s speech was slurred by the wine and tangled up by the packing in his grossly distended nose, but what he was trying to say was, “Yes. Your Serenity, Your Excellencies, last night I was present in this room. There’s a spyhole in that wall and I could watch what Doctor Nostradamus and Alfeo Zeno were doing; and hear them, too.”
“And what were they doing?” Gritti was literally rubbing his hands, not a gesture one often sees outside the theater.
The vizio smiled as well as he could with his face the way it was. He would have managed better had I been there for him to smile at. “They were performing a Satanic rite, worshiping a human head. They were summoning the soul of Danese Dolfin back from death to tell them the name of his murderer.”
Several patricians gasped. Others crossed themselves. The doge and a couple of others rolled their eyes.
“Tell us more,” the inquisitor said.
“They had the thing on a table, Excellency. They were burning incense around it and they had laid out offerings to it. They put a lock of Dolfin’s hair on it-on the head. Nostradamus read a long speech in a foreign tongue to the skull and then Zeno questioned it in Veneziano and it spoke to him. It was Dolfin! He had a very memorable voice. I knew it at once. Zeno asked him, er, it who killed him and he…it…the voice named Guarini and where he lived.” Vasco smiled bravely. I would be toasted and he could dance around the pyre.
The inquisitor was just as happy. His old eyes held a youthful sparkle. “Did they give this talking head a name?”
“They called it Baphomet, Your Excellency.”
The doge muttered something I was glad not to be able to hear, but he did not interrupt. The wily old man had learned half a century ago to judge the tone of a meeting, and the tide was running hard against Nostradamus now.
“Well, Doctor?” Gritti demanded triumphantly.
Nostradamus seemed to have shrunk. He shook his head sadly. “I confess,” he said.
More gasps.
“I confess that both Alfeo and I had become very tired of having Filiberto Vasco underfoot all the time, prying and spying. He was only doing his job, I know, but…Well, I admit that I let my apprentice talk me into a most undignified prank. Yes, there is a spyhole in that wall, through to my atelier, and Vasco had found it. We set up a masquerade, messere! It was most unprofessional.”
“What sort of masquerade?” Gritti demanded angrily.
Sometimes my master throws things at me without any warning whatsoever. One of these days he will outsmart himself by over-smarting me, but that morning I was able to rise to the occasion.
He turned to face me, spread his arms and cried, “Danese Dolfin! I summon you!”
I dropped my voice to the lowest register I could manage and moaned back through the spyhole in my best attempt at Danese Dolfin’s sepulchral bass. “Who are you that calls to me in the darkness?”
The audience jumped. Sier Zuanbattista, who knew that voice, knocked over his wine glass with an oath. For a moment the world seemed to stop breathing. Then the doge leaned back and bellowed with laughter, so everyone did-even Gritti, coming in last. That was an admission of defeat. Ridicule is the deadliest weapon in the world, the Maestro says.
Poor Vasco stared around in dismay, wondering why everyone was laughing. I did wish I could go and comfort him.
35
T hey could have arrested me for spying on their meeting, but I had taken the same oath of secrecy as the Maestro. What mattered more was that he had solved their espionage problem for them in record time. It would be more true to say that the weather had solved it for them by driving the Sanudos indoors, or Danese had, by getting himself transferred to a bedroom where he would not have had the option of sitting by the window and taking notes. No matter, the Maestro could take the credit and look forward to a handsome fee; the Signoria could go away happy and prepare for the Sunday afternoon meeting of the Great Council. It is to the Great Council that the Ten report their activities, but the Algol case would obviously not be reported to anyone.
The Maestro’s stellar performance had tired him, though. When I had bowed the last guest off along the canal, I went back upstairs and found him already planted in his favorite chair. He glowered at me, which I took to be a good sign.
“Bring me the Dee papers.”
That was an even better sign, because he has been running a savage argument with the heretic sage for years, and nothing would restore him like a good upsurge of choler. I could confidently expect to find several pages of venom and vilification lying on my side of the desk in the morning, waiting to be enciphered.
I headed over to the wall of books. John Dee, of course, is not merely a heretic and a skilled practitioner of the occult, but also a close confidant of the English queen, so his correspondence must be kept in one of the secret compartments. I knelt and began to empty a shelf of its books, stacking them on the floor beside me. “Thank you very much, master.”
“For what?”
“For setting Vasco up by opening the spyhole so he could watch the seance. I wish you’d warned me, though.”
“If I’d warned you beforehand, you might have started to giggle in the middle. And I had no chance to warn you afterward with the bat-eared vizio skulking around.”
“But you took a terrible risk,” I said, “letting him watch us practice necromancy.”
“Bah! We didn’t! That was the whole point. What I did was mere mummery. You saw how easy it was to burst that bubble. You, though, used the Word, which is authentic thaumaturgy. They might have let Gritti have you for that, but the doge’s physician is too valuable to burn.”
And I wasn’t. He had saved me at no small risk to himself, so I must not sound ungrateful. “Yes, master. Thanks anyway.”
I slid aside the panel at the back of the shelf and retrieved the Dee bundles, which occupy three pigeon holes. Having delivered them, I went back to replace the panel and the screen of books.
“If you don’t need me this fine Sunday, I think I’ll go and have a chat with Father Farsetti.”
“Why? Is something troubling you?” Danese Dolfin demanded behind me.
I was squatting. In trying to spin around, I lost my balance, dropped a pile of books in my lap, and sat down heavily. “That’s a much better imitation than I did,” I said, glowering.