Arianna welcomed me with an expression of faint surprise. The smile on her freckled face was cheerful. “I wasn’t expecting you. But your visit fills me with joy.” She surveyed me from head to toe. “You look glum. What’s up?”
“The whole of Venice knows what’s up. But I will tell you afterward.”
I wasn’t the best of lovers that day. Too hasty, too brutal. I drank from her lips like a man parched by the August sun. I pounced on her full, heavy breasts like a hungry man on loaves of bread. I agitated her hips like a drunk shaking a bottle to get at the last drop.
My courtesan, besides, wasn’t the best in the universe just then. Perhaps, I thought, she could sense my unease.
As God willed, the embrace came to an end.
“Now tell me what’s wrong.”
I looked at the woman. She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. Blonde, curly hair; dark, shining eyes. She had been one of the best-known courtesans in Venice before she became mine alone. For some years I had been the only one who paid for her services. My condition prevented me from visiting brothels, where rumors spread like wildfire. Arianna kept me out of trouble.
“I have to find a culprit for the fire at the Arsenal. Someone up to the job. It’s irrelevant whether he really organized or committed the crime.”
“A scapegoat,” she said.
“Exactly.”
“We’re often called to do things we don’t want to do,” she said, or at least I thought she did. I was barely listening to her, thinking out loud.
“I need a perfect culprit to feed to the people of Venice. Consigliere Nordio is thinking of a man with a double life, because he says the man has to be beyond suspicion.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I turned my boss’s words around in my head, trying to enter them from all sides, to grasp their every implication.
Beyond suspicion.
Someone with a sufficiently elevated position.
Someone with a secret, an impostor.
I felt the warmth of my lover close to me.
Beyond suspicion.
I looked at Arianna. She smiled, uncertainly. Furtively, swiftly, she checked the door. It just took a moment. I looked down.
A secret.
My flaccid penis dangling to one side.
An impostor.
A penis without a foreskin.
A Jew.
A wave of horror ran through me. I suddenly turned to Arianna: she had hidden her face with her arms. I leaped to my feet and ran to the window that faced the calle. I glanced through the crack between the shutters.
Five guards were waiting outside the front door. I recognized two of them. My most trusted men. Gualberto Rizzi and Marco Tavosanis.
They owed everything to me. So, they were the most likely to want to get me. Men hate their benefactors. Do somebody a favor and nine times out of ten you’ll make an implacable enemy.
My lover had withdrawn to the end of the bed and covered herself with the sheet. Fear assumed the garb of modesty. Her eyes were moist. “They forced me — they did, Emanuele. Against my very will.” My lover, the only person I trusted, had sold the secret of my origins. Strip down Emanuele and you will find Manuel, the Jewish boy from Ragusa across the Adriatic.
They needed a culprit for the storm et tulerunt me, the Jew, the impostor, the liar, et stabit Venetia a fervore suo.
Hurry downstairs, confront the bastards in plain view. Counting on surprise and on my dagger, I could overpower two or three men, but not all of them.
Flight isn’t running full tilt with other people after you. Flight is disappearance.
Arianna came a few feet toward me, letting the sheet fall. Her face was anxious, but resolute. “They won’t get you if you do as I say. There’s a passageway that leads to the house next door, which is uninhabited. From there you can escape through the back way.”
For a moment I stood firmly on the spot. Then I got moving.
6
God had shown me at least a hint of compassion, in that I escaped the hands of Rizzi and Tavosanis. Hands that had acted at my command and now wanted to take my freedom and my life. Hands that were the fist and the claws of the inquisitor, as I had been the eyes, ears, and tongue on the cobbles and the water of Venice.
The sky was dark, the wind was coming in from the northeast and the summer was being carried away. I walked along the calli that I would no longer call home. As a piece of gravel forms a cyst under your skin after a nasty fall, and can only be removed with an incision, and the stone comes out along with blood — so Venice spewed me out.
People were noticing me. I had to stop walking so quickly, stop looking over my shoulder. I was a fugitive, and my body announced as much. Someone pointed at me, but I had already turned the corner, I was running, another corner, yet another, and at last I started walking again, because no one was coming after me. I had to keep a clear head and think.
I couldn’t go back to my house. Without a doubt, they would be keeping an eye on it. No, I had to disappear very quickly. There wasn’t much money in my pocket, just enough to leave the city, but I had a substantial sum at the Braun Bank, at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. It was money set aside for a rainy day, and the rainy day had arrived. I had entrusted it to a German banker to keep it far from prying eyes.
I quickened my pace again and headed for the Rialto. The need to move toward the interior of the city did battle with my instinct to reach the sea, a boat, safety. I forced myself to stay calm, as cold as I was when I questioned suspects. I took a course through the less busy calli, and when I emerged near the Fondaco I waited for a few minutes before edging toward the front door of the building with my back to the wall. A few cautious steps and I froze again. Something was holding me back — a sensation, a premonition based on my years of experience in the field. How many times had I trailed a spy or a troublemaker? I flattened myself into a doorway, covered by the bustle of carts and porters. Amid the ceaseless movement of goods, the eye could spot immobility.
The first of them was standing in the corner of a calle, leaning against the wall. He was looking around very slowly, observing everyone who passed in front of him.
The second was right beside the entrance. A dark cape fell from his shoulders and covered him entirely, hiding possible weapons.
There was also a third. There’s always a third. I hadn’t noticed him immediately because he was just a few feet away from me. He was checking the length of street separating me from the front door.
I waited for him to turn his head in the other direction, then slipped from my hiding place and turned back, into the dark innards of Venice, away, far from the death that lay in wait for me, away, feet flying on the cobbles, free to obey my instinct to flee.
A gold chain with a medal hung on my chest. A gift from my father: on one side the Holy Cross, on the other the Lion of Saint Mark, with its book closed and sword unsheathed. The war banner of the fleet.
War. The Republic had declared war on Emanuele De Zante, its faithful servant.
Betrayed servant. Treacherous servant. Fugitive.
I could convert the medal into small change, wherever fate happened to take me.
The most important thing was to flee. I would think of everything else afterward.
I reached a jetty and bargained briefly, letting the gondolier have more money than he expected. The gondola moved, while music from strolling players drifted across from the land. We slipped around the long loop of the Grand Canal into a leaden afternoon, harbinger of autumn. The ceaseless activity that animated the city hadn’t yet subsided. Boats plowed the water; men busied themselves on the shore.