The Alchemist's Apprentice

12

H aving attended to my penance and dressed in clean clothes and shoes, one of which was decidedly damp, I peglegged down the stairs with Giorgio hovering alongside. I was waylaid halfway by a mob of Marciana women and children and had to give an expurgated adumbration of my battle outside the church, which was the talk of the parish. I arrived at the watergate at the same time as a gondola glided in to the quay. The curtains on the felze were open and inside sat Filiberto Vasco in his red cloak.

I do not like Missier Grande Quazza, but I respect him; he is tough but honest. I cannot say as much for his vizio. Filiberto Vasco is about my age, which is too young for the high office he holds; his family has too much money and he has far too much ambition. Were I Missier Grande, I should wear plate mail on my back whenever Filiberto Vasco came within stabbing distance. He pays court to all the women, menaces all the men, fancies himself as a wit, and knows everything. His only admirable quality is that he dislikes me as much as I dislike him.

Giorgio’s services would obviously not be needed. The two men rowing Vasco’s boat wore ordinary gondolier clothes, but I should not have cared to wrestle with either of them. Nay, were I triplets, I should’st not. I limped down the steps and boarded, squirming into the felze with heartrending stoicism to seat myself alongside Vasco. We regarded each other with mutual distaste.

“Where do you want to go to, Zeno?”

I gave him Karagounis’s address in the Greek quarter just east of San Marco. He passed it on and we shot away from the quay. The gondoliers started to sing, because they are forbidden to listen to their superiors’ conversation, but they sang surprisingly well, one bass and one tenor. The vizio leaned back and smirked. I wondered if I could have learned to smirk like that if my great-great-grandfather had been a pirate like his. We cross swords almost every week at Captain Colleoni’s Monday fencing class. I am a better fencer than he is.

“I have orders to take you to the Leads, Alfeo, unless you tell me the truth and the whole truth.”

“I will gladly tell you as much as I am allowed by my oath, Filiberto.”

“What oath?”

“I am not allowed to say. But it was sworn to someone much higher than Missier Grande.”

The sneer waxed. If I could do no better than that, Vasco would hear the music of a cell door closing on me.

“The well-loved Procurator Orseolo died two days ago,” I said.

“What has that to do with you?” But a moment of hesitation had told me that the doge was not the only one concerned about that sudden death.

“He was taken ill the previous evening. Maestro Nostradamus was the first physician to attend him, you know, and he suspects poison.”

Vasco’s eyes narrowed to stiletto stabs as he calculated how to use this information for his own advancement. “Keep talking.”

I had my master’s leave to reveal all this. If the Greek’s servant, Pulaki, matched the assassin I had seen in the mirror, then he was a Turkish agent and the murderer we sought. I was sorry that Vizio Vasco would get the credit for arresting him, but the Maestro would be rescued from suspicion and the case closed.

“We have a theory that the procurator was an innocent victim of a plot to poison somebody more important. No, dear friend, I am forbidden to reveal more. But we believe that a man named Pulaki, one of the wine stewards, is actually an agent of the sultan. Remove his britches and all will be revealed.”

“You mean not enough will be revealed?” Vasco fancies himself as a wit.

“As the lustrissimo says. There is a slight chance that his master is the culprit. That is what I have to establish. If I identify either of them, I will happily accuse him and give you reason to look for the missing evidence.”

“Will you, indeed?” The vizio smiled. Heads he won, tails I lost. What more could his shriveled little heart desire? “And on what basis will you identify either of them?”

“Call it a hunch.”

He smiled. The Ten could make stones speak. “And who is his master?”

“A Greek bookseller, Alexius Karagounis.”

Vasco’s smile disappeared like an anvil in a canal.

I guessed why and felt a fact drop into place with the thump of a pile driver’s mallet-the Ten already suspected Karagounis! That was why the doge was so concerned; he had unwittingly gone to meet with a possible Turkish agent, and he was utterly forbidden to talk with foreigners except in the presence of his counselors.

Silence fell. Under the competing songs along the canal, I could hear Vasco’s brain creaking as he weighed his options. If Karagounis was under surveillance, then it would take a specific order from the Ten to arrest him and a premature move would bring the wrath of the mighty crashing down on the vizio. To let Alfeo Zeno interfere and then not arrest Karagounis would alert the suspect and cause him to flee. Vasco’s only safe course was to throw Alfeo Zeno back in jail and report to Quazza for fresh orders.

Then he reached a decision and smiled again. “It will be interesting. If your accusation is false, you will be in serious trouble, of course.”

“I am confident that my information is correct,” I said, trying to look as if that were true. Now it was my brain’s turn to creak. My warped imagination toyed with the possibility that Karagounis was a spy for the Ten and then discarded it. “He may have fled. I did try to call on the man yesterday, but there was no one home.”

“We have ways of opening doors,” the vizio said. He continued to smile, no doubt listening to the noises my brain was making as I tried to work out what he had worked out.

No more was said until we reached our destination. There is no way to climb out of a gondola while keeping one leg straight, and my scarlet hose was oozing blood by the time I was up on the quay. I looked skyward in dismay.

My companion leered. “Top floor, you said? You want to run up ahead?”

“If you were a gentleman you would carry me,” I said grumpily and headed for the stairs. Vasco and his two colossi followed. There had been women standing around the door as we approached. Now there were none, but almost every window held a face or two, as if we had sounded trumpets. The vizio ’s red cloak had worked this magic.

Somewhere around the second floor it occurred to me to wonder how long the Council had suspected Karagounis, assuming it did. Suppose the Ten had debated arresting Karagounis on the day of the Imer supper, and that very evening the doge himself had gone rushing off to a meeting with the suspect? If Karagounis had already fled the country, the doge could be accused of warning him.

Around the third floor I found another possibility, a more plausible one. What if Vasco knew that Karagounis was under surveillance but was not supposed to know? He could have been snooping in documents or eavesdropping. So now he would get the credit for catching a spy but could not be blamed for spoiling a plan he had not been told about. He need no longer worry that I was leading him on a wild goose chase. This was going to be one of his good days.

We reached the top and I pointed to the correct door. One of the apes pounded a fist on it: one, two, three…It opened.

I did not know the man standing there, although he was dressed as a servant and fitted Violetta’s description of “middle twenties, slender, dusky, looked like a Moor.” He was a scared Moor when he saw Vasco’s sword and cloak.

“Your name?”

“Pulaki Guarana, clarissimo.” He sounded more like a mainlander than a Venetian, but certainly not a Greek.

Vasco glanced at me; I shook my head.

“Take me to your master.”

Pulaki resisted a push. “What name shall-”

“No announcement. Move!”

I followed with the oversized gondoliers on my heels. We crossed a dingy, cramped hallway and entered a dingy, cramped room being used as a study. It was almost filled by the desk. The man on the far side rose to his feet.

He had gone from heavyset to fat in the twenty or so years since I saw him perform his first murder. Then he had been bearded, now he just needed a shave. He was ugly, oily, and angry. Although I could see no demon on his shoulder, I would believe that it was still there until I had watched him being exorcized by a conclave of archbishops. He ignored me completely.

“Your name and station?” Vasco demanded.

Karagounis bowed a slight bow and smiled a slight smile. “Alexius Karagounis, at your service, messer. I have a permit of temporary residence, if you wish to see it.”

“You sell books?”

The Greek smiled again, a you-won’t-catch-me-that-way smile. “No, messer. I am not yet permitted to trade. But I do have some interesting manuscripts if Your Excellency would care to inspect them? Pulaki, bring goblets and wine for the noble lords.”

“No wine. Apprentice?”

I said, “If you are an honest Christian, let us see you cross yourself.”

Karagounis turned his oily smirk on me. All his reactions seemed curiously wrong. He had not asked our names or questioned our right to burst in on his privacy; it was almost as if he knew both of us and had been expecting us. “As a child in Greece my mother taught me to cross myself like this. Here, after I have been inducted into the truer faith, I shall cross myself like this.”

I had him. Now he could not try to claim that he was a Jew.

I said, “In spite of your offer of wine, I say you are a Muslim. Show us that you are not.”

“You are calling me a liar, young sir?”

“No,” I said. “I believe that you had Christian parents, because I say that you are a kapikulu. You were born somewhere in the impoverished wilds of the Balkans. In your youth you were sold to the sultan’s slavers, forcibly converted to Islam, and reared to serve the sultan. Prove that you have not been circumcised and I will apologize.”

Vasco ostentatiously laid a hand on his sword hilt.

Karagounis ignored him and kept staring at me, but sudden hatred burned up in his eyes and some trick of the light made them seem to glint red. He said, “We could help you, Alfeo Zeno!”

Then he turned and dived out the window.

Which was closed. Don’t try it, just take my word for it, but it is almost impossible to jump through a well-made casement, because both glass and lead are resistant to blunt objects. Either Karagounis called on demonic strength or the wooden sash had rotted after a century or so in the damp Venetian climate. Either way, he and the window vanished together, noisily. Vasco cried out in dismay and rushed around the desk. In their dash to join him, his heroes threw me against it, making me bang my injured leg.

By the time I stopped swearing I was alone, the others having raced downstairs to demonstrate their skills at first aid. I limped to the gap in the wall and peered out carefully. My companions had not arrived yet, but Karagounis certainly had, landing half in and half out of the gondola-smashing it and smashing himself and sinking it in two feet of seawater and sewage. Some spectators had been injured by falling debris and a crowd had gathered to shriek like seagulls.

I was sorry about the bystanders, but everything else pleased me. Suicide would be construed as a confession. Neither the Ten nor the gossips of the Rialto would have reason to blame the Maestro for the death of Procurator Orseolo. The doge and his friends should be able to hush up the whole affair. Vasco would probably get half his hide talked off him. I started toward the door and was distracted by a swirl of motion as the wind fluttered the papers on the desk.

I gathered them up before they blew all over the room. When we intruded, Karagounis had been transcribing or translating something. I am no expert like the Maestro, but I could see at a glance that these white sheets were modern, while those yellowed pages were densely inscribed with Greek text in a faded and antique hand. The originals were unbound, but looked as if they had been razored out of a bound book. They might be worth nothing or a lot of something.

Who owned those tatty scraps of manuscript?

Originally they must have been pillaged from a private house or cobwebby monastery in some Christian territory overrun by the Turks, or sold by starving owners for coppers just to buy food. So the sultan probably considered that he owned them, but he had given them to Karagounis to use as bait so he could get within striking distance of the doge. Karagounis had no further use for them and all his goods would be confiscated by the Republic anyway. They would end up locked away as evidence in some musty archive.

Who had unmasked the Grand Turk’s agent at no small risk to himself? Who was going to reward me for this outstanding service to the state? Who had ruined a good pair of hose and very nearly been impaled in six directions that very morning? Was I to be compensated for loss and suffering?

The answers were: me, nobody, me, and not likely. Considering all the factors involved, it did seem that no one had any better right to those papers than I did. I slipped them into the pocket of my cloak and set off to limp down all those stairs, one step at a time.