The Alchemist's Code

34

F ood was eaten with enjoyment, wine drunk with happy results, gossip and small talk tossed to and fro. Eventually the doge brought it all to an end by dismissing the Barbolanos.

“We have serious business to discuss with Maestro Nostradamus,” he proclaimed. “Your tenant is an esteemed servant of the state, clarissimo. Sometimes I wonder what we should do without him.”

That wrung a return flow of compliments from old sier Alvise. Not only was our tenancy safe now, he had probably already forgotten threatening it. Fulgentio escorted the Barbolanos out. I should have been at the front door to bow them on their way, but I stayed where I was. Now the meeting would get down to business.

“Now, Doctor,” Moro said, leaning back. “Your message said you would introduce us to the man we have been seeking. I take this to mean that you have identified the notorious Algol?”

The Maestro beamed, bunching cheeks and very nearly showing his teeth. “Identified and delivered, Your Serenity. Inquisitor Gritti has him locked up already.”

Eyes turned to Inquisitor Gritti, who alone looked as if he had not enjoyed the meal. “We have detained a man named Francesco Guarini, sire. He is charged with using violence against the vizio, who very nearly bled to death. He-”

“-would have bled to death, had Alfeo not known what to do,” my master said.

The doge grunted annoyance at the interruption. “Sounds like Zeno. Continue, Inquisitor.”

“We still have no evidence,” Gritti said, “that Guarini and Algol are one and the same. Nostradamus refuses to justify his claims.”

“It is fairly obvious.” Taking silence as an invitation to lecture, the Maestro laid his forearms on the table and put his hands together, fingertip to fingertip. “Espionage, if I may be permitted to belabor the obvious, is a form of theft. It takes information belonging to A and transfers it to the buyer, whom we may call Z. Your Excellencies have not entrusted me with Z ’s identity, although you must know it because your own agents stole the information back again, albeit still in encoded form and therefore not identifiable with complete confidence until I broke its cipher for you. One report I saw was dated so recently that Z cannot be located far away, in say Paris or Constantinople. Most likely Z is an ambassador right here in Venice, and I shall assume for the sake of this discussion that he can be found in the Spanish Embassy. Which embassy does not matter, because my point is that espionage requires middlemen. It would be quite impossible for a senior magistrate to stroll along to any embassy without his own government knowing it.”

The audience shifted uneasily at this allegation that the Ten spied upon its own, but none of them wasted breath to deny it.

“The same would be true, messere, if he sent his gondolier with a letter-very soon the Three would invite him in for a chat. It would be true also of the illustrious citizens who serve the Republic in high office and are privy to its secrets. So we must postulate B, who steals or buys the information from A and then delivers it, most likely to another middleman, C, who in turn passes it to D, and so on until it reaches Z. Of course Z probably hides behind one of his own subordinates, whom we may call X. Communication is the weak point in any espionage system, as you well know. Even on Thursday, when you entrusted me with the task of unmasking Algol, I was sure that the person I would catch would turn out to be a middleman, not a traitor within the government. The next day I learned that he was an amateur, not-”

“How?” barked Gritti.

The Maestro turned to him with an expression of bland surprise. “From the cipher, Excellency. He was using a most sophisticated method of enciphering-more subtle, I am certain, than the system used by La Serenissima herself-and yet he was using it very stupidly. A key only five letters long is absurd! Instead of VIRTU, he should have used something much longer: LA SERENISSIMA, or the paternoster, or a verse from Dante. He should certainly have employed a different key for each dispatch. Beginning every dispatch with a date is another incredible incompetence, a gift to the code breaker, but all ciphers are eventually betrayed by human stupidity.

“So B had to be an amateur, a local whom X had enlisted and taught to encipher. Fortunately, in spite of B ’s hamfisted, incompetent enciphering, the product was good enough to baffle most people.” That was a nice dig at Circospetto and his minions. “As long as B continued to supply valuable information, X was content not to interrupt the flow. An alternative possibility was that B had taught himself the rudiments of enciphering by reading a book, and I admit that I found this theory attractive because Alfeo had located a great library associated with a certain distinguished magistrate, but I discarded that as improbable as soon as I identified B as Danese Dolfin.”

“What?” The wintery blast came from Zuanbattista Sanudo. “You dare suggest that I gave state secrets to that slimy little thief? Or that my son did?”

“No, messer, I certainly do not.” The Maestro shrugged. “It is a complex story, which will be best understood if told in a logical sequence. I may…?” He accepted Zuanbattista’s silent glare as assent. “The next link in the chain from B to X was Francesco Guarini, of course, but I do not know which of them masterminded their squalid conspiracy. I suspect Dolfin, but Guarini may enlighten you, messere, when he is motivated to explain.”

I shivered. Gritti was showing his teeth, biding his time. The Maestro might talk all he wanted, but he was not going to escape the charge of necromancy.

“Dolfin’s murder,” Nostradamus said, “was in a sense a lucky break for me as investigator, and for the Republic itself, although the Algol espionage was already ended before that. The murder was bizarre. Why was the corpse brought to Ca’ Barbolano and left in the watergate with the impaling sword still in place? Why not just drop it in a canal? We have many murders in Venice, but few are deliberately advertised as this one was. Why was he murdered at all? One obvious motive, if sier Zuanbattista will forgive my even mentioning it to dismiss it, is that someone in his family resented the way Dolfin had inveigled himself in by seducing madonna Grazia. But the last thing Ca’ Sanudo would want would be publicity, so the grotesque spectacle made of the corpse was not the work of any family member.”

“I am so relieved to hear that!” Zuanbattista growled.

“Nor could his death be a random slaying during a robbery,” the Maestro continued unabashed, “because the killer would not have known to bring him here, to Ca’ Barbolano. It could not be an effort to distract me from investigating the espionage case by involving me in murder, as I speculated at first, because publicity is the last thing a spy ever wants. For the same reason I do not believe that Dolfin was slain to silence him. Besides, the espionage was ended. Dolfin not only would not continue his treason, he could not, as I shall demonstrate. So why did his killer make an exhibition of him, a public scandal, the talk of the town?”

“Enough of this!” snapped the doge. “You are supposed to be telling us how you identified Guarini as the spy. And Dolfin, for that matter. Give us the facts and stop boasting how clever you are.”

“Sire, forgive me!” the Maestro said, bowing in his seat. “The facts? The salient facts? The lightning flash that illuminates the truth? Yesterday Danese Dolfin’s body was found in our watergate. A week ago yesterday, sier Zuanbattista and his noble lady came to our house in search of their daughter. One of the Algol documents you let me examine was dated the eleventh of August and another the fifteenth of September!”

Silence.

He looked around with the maddening pretense of puzzled innocence he adopts sometimes.

“Fridays,” he explained patiently. “Last Friday night, Dolfin was murdered. The Friday before that he climbed over the wall of Ca’ Sanudo, from which he had been expelled a few days earlier. Every Friday B wrote his report and met with C, who was either his letter box or his handler, in the argot of the espionage world, depending on which of them was senior. To abduct Grazia, Dolfin used a ladder. A week later Dolfin’s corpse was brought to Ca’ Barbolano’s watergate, which has no true land access. Does this not scream at you that C must be a gondolier? In Venice, what else could he be? Only trained gondoliers can handle our narrow, unstable boats, and what gondolier would transport a ladder by night for a stranger? Or convey a corpse?

“Undoubtedly X would have ordered B and C to limit their meetings to their weekly rendezvous and avoid all other contact. They broke this rule once and thereby brought about their downfall, as I shall reveal. When Guarini arrived at the rendezvous near Ca’ Sanudo on Friday the fifteenth of September, Dolfin explained that the golden goose had turned broody-he had been evicted from Ca’ Sanudo and cut off from his source of information. He proposed a backup plan. He would carry off Grazia and marry her, gambling that her parents would eventually bow to the inevitable and accept the serpent back into their garden. Guarini agreed, took Dolfin to fetch his ladder, and then transported him and his victim to some nest where they spent the night. Possibly madonna Grazia will be able to identify the boatman, although she had other things on her mind and we tend not to notice gondoliers. The next day the lovers went to a priest and explained that they would be driven to sin unless he united them in holy matrimony.

“Compounding his error, Guarini had agreed to meet the couple again on Sunday morning and transport them over to the mainland, where they would hide out until her parents had no option but to accept Dolfin as the father of a future grandchild. Alfeo intervened to rescue Grazia. Guarini countered by trying to stun Alfeo-he is clearly prone to violence. My porter picked Guarini up by the scruff of the neck and threw him bodily into the Grand Canal. When Alfeo turned up on his doorstep this morning, it was not Alfeo who recognized Guarini, although he did so later, it was Guarini who recognized Alfeo. Realizing that the game was up, he reacted for a third time with excessive violence.”

The Maestro beamed around his audience, and there was no fidgeting now. He had them enthralled.

“With your gracious permission, sire, I will speculate a little about what happened right after that scuffle on the Riva del Vin last Sunday. I think Guarini, anxious to know what had gone wrong and who Alfeo was or represented, followed him and his charges back here to Ca’ Barbolano. Speculating even further, he may have kept an eye on this house all week, wondering whether Dolfin had sold out to the Council of Ten. If so, he may have seen Dolfin freely coming and going, which would not have allayed his misgivings.

“They say that there is no honor among thieves, and there is certainly no trust among spies. When Friday came around again, it was two very nervous young men who went to their weekly rendezvous near Ca’ Sanudo, as they had done for the past two months. Dolfin had first come here to Ca’ Barbolano to retrieve his sword, so he foresaw trouble. Failing to find his own blade, he purloined Alfeo’s. He arrived armed at the rendezvous, alarming Guarini even more, when he was already seeing agents of the Ten in every shadow. Dolfin announced that the dance was ended; he would deliver no more reports. Now that he was one of the family, he was buttering his bread on the other side.

“There were words, a fight, Dolfin died. Then Guarini must have thought that there was no one to betray his espionage, all he had to worry about was a murder.”

The Maestro sighed. “Why did he not just rob the corpse, remove the sword, and go, leaving us to assume a random killing? I admit I do not know, and I should be very interested to hear what he says when you ask him. I have not met him, except for a few moments this morning. I posit that he is a stupid, violent man, given to rages, and craving revenge on the people in Ca’ Barbolano who ruined his profitable avocation. Or he may be sly enough to see what I said earlier, that publicity is the last thing a spy ever wants. A sword is the weapon of a gentleman or a professional bravo, not a simple gondolier, so perhaps he thought his treatment of the body would deflect attention away from him. Whatever the reason, he carried the corpse-it showed no signs of having been dragged-to his boat, laying it face up there because that way it would stain his boat less. On his way home from Cannaregio to Giudecca, he had to pass fairly close to San Remo anyway.

“If there is no rational explanation for an event, Your Excellencies, there must be an irrational one. In his fear and murderous rage, Guarini lifted the corpse ashore, and left it lying face up in our loggia. So perish all the enemies of Francesco Guarini! ”

“Ingenious as always,” the doge conceded. “But you have made grave accusations against a noble member of the Signoria. This is a serious offence.”

The rest of the faces around the table were as grim as his, but what had they expected? They had known from the beginning that the source of Algol’s information must stand close to La Serenissima ’s heart. Were they about to kill the messenger?

The Maestro spread his hands disarmingly. “Six years ago, sire, when I was not as halt as I have become since, I attended Nicolo Morosini in his last illness. I had never seen such a case, nor have I since. His entire hand was rotting. It had begun with an insignificant paper cut, he said, but those were almost his dying words. The poison spreading up his arm killed him before sunset.”

I held my breath, wondering if he would now dare mention the jinx, the cause of all the Sanudos’ miseries. The skeptics would not accept that argument and it would remind his audience of the strange events of the previous day’s inexplicable self-combustion. He did, but only obliquely.

“Disasters come in groups, it seems, sire. Since then, ill luck has continued to dog Nicolo’s family. Of course I know his widow, madonna Fortunata, sier Zuanbattista’s sister-in-law, although I have not met her since her husband’s death. Last week she was mentioned as a resident of Ca’ Sanudo, but later Alfeo spoke of her as if she were a very elderly woman and madonna Eva’s aunt, not Grazia’s. Alfeo is a sharp lad, who rarely makes such mistakes. He does tend to waste time staring at paintings, but when he described a portrait of her and her husband, I remembered it, and noted that he had recognized sier Nicolo’s likeness but not hers, although she had been present in the room.”

The doge was showing dangerous signs of impatience, and the Maestro abandoned his dissertation on the workings of curses.

“It has been a very hot summer, sire. Sier Zuanbattista was newly reunited with the family he had not seen in three years, including his son, and both of them were newly elected to very high office. What would be more natural than that they would sit out on their balcony on those sweltering evenings, overlooking their garden-”

“Gesu bambino!” Zuanbattista covered his face with his hands.

After a moment the Maestro completed his sentence, “-talking? Talking directly above the windows of the room assigned to Danese Dolfin, the lute-playing, poetry-reading, hair-brushing, light-fingered cavaliere servente?”

“Enough!” Zuanbattista rose from his chair. “It is true, sire! My son and I did sit and talk on that balcony in the evenings, after the ladies had retired. I see now that we were criminally careless not to realize that we could be overheard. We-Venetians! Natives of a city where hardly a door fits its frame. Now, will you let me resign?”

“No,” said the doge. “Sit down. We sympathize with your troubles, but there must be no gossip about dissension within the Signoria or rumors of espionage. Carry on, Doctor.”

The Maestro scowled and put his fingertips together again. “Let us consider for a moment, sire, the situation of this wretch, Danese Dolfin. Since boyhood he has lived by charm, good looks, and a total lack of morals. In the last three years in a palace at Celeseo, he acquired a taste for the good life-note that when he was evicted from Ca’ Sanudo, he promptly weaseled his way into Ca’ Barbolano. But now his mistress’s husband had returned, he was billeted in a much smaller house, where he might easily become a nuisance underfoot, and-worst of all!-the useful body was aging. He was no longer a beautiful boy. Knowing his hon-eyed days were numbered, he began building a reserve by stealing his employer’s jewelry, which is surely a sign of desperation.

“And then, a miracle! Gold rains down outside his window. Danese grabs a pen and takes notes. He gathers secrets, although in his haste and lack of education he makes mistakes. He gets some of his information wrong, as eavesdroppers will do. Then what? Run to the nearest embassy and open negotiations?”

The Maestro chuckled and answered his own question.

“Ah no! I surmise that such a course smelled too risky for sier Danese. He is still a nobile homo and he has returned to the city; the Ten’s eyes will be on him again. No, Dolfin enlists the help of a friend, a gondolier because gondoliers go everywhere and are part of the scenery of Venice, rarely noticed. And, because a fish schools with its own, Dolfin knows just the sort of ruffian he needs-Francesco Guarini. It would have been Guarini who took the notes to the embassy and met with a flunky, the one I have called X. But lowly X knew a chance when he saw it, and he was loyal to whichever monarch he serves. He suspected, quite rightly, that someone in the embassy was not, so he instructed Guarini in how to encipher his reports before delivering them. He taught him, too, the rudiments of espionage, such as keeping meetings to a minimum. He paid him and promised more if the information proved reliable and kept coming.

“I do not know if Guarini then taught ciphering to Dolfin; I suspect not. Dolfin had little privacy in that intimate family home, and the villains would feel safer if he just kept his plaintext notes in a safe place and handed them over to his weekly contact. Guarini enciphered them later, I think…but you can establish that.” The Maestro pulled a face. It is never pleasant to think that you have sent a man to his doom, however well deserved that doom may be.

“To the sage!” The doge raised his glass in a toast and the entire Signoria copied him. After they had all drunk he said, “ Lustrissimo dottore, your explanation is impressive. Your apprentice confirms that Guarini was the man who attacked him on the Riva del Vin?”

The Maestro nodded. “He does, and so does my gondolier.”

“Well, then, are our two inquisitors satisfied? Have you questions to ask him?”

Gritti now looked less grandfatherly and more avuncular-the wicked uncle who stole the throne. “No and yes, sire. Not satisfied, several questions. I agree Doctor Nostradamus has made an excellent case against Francesco Guarini, and Guarini must be closely questioned. But, Doctor, you have still not told us how you identified which of our ten thousand gondoliers was the one you sought. Perhaps you will elucidate your procedures for us?”

No, no! Don’t!

The Maestro filled his glass and took a drink of wine.

He wiped his lips and leaned back.

“My apprentice had mentioned that Dolfin had several sisters. My first thought was that one of them might have married a gondolier, so that Dolfin, when he discovered his gold mine in the sky, took his proposal to a brother-in-law. I sent a boy, actually two boys, to ask Father Equiano in San Barnaba for the names and occupations of the Dolfin girls’ husbands. Unfortunately not all brilliant hunches work out, and that one did not.”

At that point I might have dived out the atelier door and made a break for freedom down the stairs, except that the old mountebank treated himself to another sip of wine. I know him well enough to know when he is letting the suspense build.

“My next idea worked better,” he continued. “Ten thousand gondoliers are a small city all to themselves, but they are a very close fraternity, or perhaps two fraternities-the public-hire men despise those who work for wages. No matter, my own gondolier had seen the fight and watched Guarini clambering out of the water, so yesterday I asked him if he knew the man. He did not, but he said the story had been the joke of the week among the city’s boatmen, because Guarini was not popular with those who did. I sent Giorgio out to ask some questions. He soon learned that the man we wanted belonged to the traghetto of the Ponte della Paglia, and then it was easy to learn his name and address.”

Only fools tell outright lies, the Maestro says. The wise use truth selectively. An icy droplet ran down my ribs. I hoped the Maestro had primed Giorgio well in what to say when he was questioned.

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.