Even Missier Grande winced at that image. Father Farsetti covered his face with his hands. My sympathy was quite genuine. It had been a fairly quick death, but not a pleasant one, if there can ever be such a thing.
“After he died,” I said, “the rapier was pushed all the way through him, perhaps just to make him easier to move. The killer brought him here. Thanks to the vizio ’s acute observation we know now that the point did hit something hard, so we must look for a place with hard footing-brick or stone-and extensive bloodstains.”
“Thank you,” the Maestro said. “Now you are making sense.” He looked around to where our gondolier was waiting. “Ah, Giorgio. Last night, what time was it when Alfeo told you that he and I were not to be disturbed?”
Giorgio looked thunderous at having been fetched by a sbirro -such a thing never happened to respectable citizens-but he took a moment to think, “It must have been a little after eight o’clock, Doctor. We were putting the children to bed.”
“And what happened then?”
“ Sier Danese Dolfin came and asked to see sier Alfeo.”
For a moment we were all silent, as we digested this information. Vasco scowled.
The Maestro nodded, as if he had expected something like that. “When?”
“About half past eight, roughly.”
“Go on.”
“I explained that you and he were not to be disturbed. He said the matter was urgent and he would wait.”
“How did he seem?”
“He seemed distressed, Doctor, agitated.” Giorgio himself was starting to look distressed, and also apologetic. “He did not say why he was worried, or what he wanted. But he was very jumpy. He had stayed here as-”
“As a guest, yes. So you let him wait in the salone unattended?”
Giorgio nodded glumly. “I was helping Mama…I heard the front door close. He had gone. I ran to the stair and saw him going down. I did watch him leave the building.”
“Did you get a good look at him?” the Maestro persisted.
Giorgio shook his head. “Mostly just his shadow, lustrissimo.”
There are times when one has to throw in one’s cards and hope that the next deal will work better. “I apologize, Vizio. You were not the only one who could have stolen my sword last night.”
The Maestro was ahead of me, of course. “Where is it?” he asked.
Danese had come to reclaim his own sword, which I had forgotten to return to him with his portmanteau. Either he had snooped around Ca’ Barbolano at some time during his stay here or-more likely-he had taken the risk of searching my room for it while Giorgio was bedding his brood. The top of a wardrobe is not an unlikely place to keep weapons when there are small children around. He had found mine and taken it. Had he also taken the matching dagger? Probably not, because he had been disarmed in a hand-to-hand tussle; with a dagger he could have stabbed his opponent when they closed. Men who sport swords should know how to use them, and he had not. In a real fight, as opposed to a formal duel, a rapier needs a parrying partner, either a dagger or another rapier.
A sbirro moved out of my way. I walked around our seated audience and headed to the medicine supply cupboard, taking my time while I worked out the least incriminating way of explaining why we had what I was about to produce. To confess that I had crossed swords with Danese on the Riva del Vin less than a week ago would not clear me of suspicion-far from it.
Danese’s rapier had no fancy inscription on the guard, just his initials. I handed it to Signore di Notte Zancani.
“Yesterday my master instructed me to pack the clothes Dolfin had left here and deliver them to him at Ca’ Sanudo. In doing so, I forgot to include his sword.”
That was entirely true, but as an explanation it was lame, practically paraplegic. How had the aforementioned sword found its way into the medicine cupboard? NH Zancani’s eyes narrowed like air slits in a dungeon. He got as far as, “And just how did-” when we were interrupted and the case was removed from his jurisdiction.
18
S ier Ottone Gritti is a short and portly man who has seen many winters. The years have softened his features, weathered his face to a sienna red, faded his eyes to a milky blue, and frosted his close-trimmed beard; wisps of silver show under the edge of his flat bonnet. Stooped and flatfooted, he looks like an archetypical grandfather. Although he is rarely seen without a sleepy, benevolent smile, his nose is a bony hook that a raven might admire. That is a warning. He wore, of course, the black robes of the patriciate, marked in his case by the dangling sleeves of a member of the Council of Ten. A couple of fanti followed him in.
The sight of an inquisitor at the door would rank high in most people’s list of Ten Worst Nightmares, especially if the inquisitor in question happened to be Ottone Gritti.
The three state inquisitors are not the three chiefs of the Ten. They are a permanent sub-committee of the Ten, always two of the elected members and one ducal counselor, two black robes and one red. Both positions carry a contumacia, meaning that a man must sit out one full term before being re-elected, but an easy way around that restriction is to alternate the two posts. I remember few times when Gritti was not one of the Three. As soon as his term in one office lapses, Gritti is elected to the other. Even that wriggle should leave him off the Council of Ten for four months in every twenty-four, but at least once I recall the Great Council enlarging the Ten with a zonta of fifteen and including him in it. It is as if the nobility cannot sleep well unless Gritti is keeping an eye on things for them, probably because he is reputed to be the most skilled and merciless interrogator in the Republic. The Council of Ten never reveals secrets about its methods or its members, of course, but rumors persist that Gritti is quite happy to sit on the rostrum in the torture chamber and direct the torment, a task most sane men shun. They say that he can break a stubborn witness faster than anyone else can-which is a sort of mercy, I suppose.
So far so good. Gritti is staunch in the defense of the Republic against her enemies and we all support him in that.
He has a darker side. Where Doge Pietro Moro is a profound skeptic concerning the supernatural, Gritti is a fervent believer, which is much worse. If I pulled a silver ducat out of a child’s ear, the doge would not believe I had pulled a silver ducat out of a child’s ear and might have me charged with fraud. Gritti would believe. He would call it black magic and me a witch. He is reputed to be more assiduous at torturing confessions out of suspected witches than even the King of Scotland is. Sometimes his colleagues manage to restrain him, but sometimes they do not, and in the present instance we had hints of demonic forces involved with an issue of national security. No one would try to hold Gritti back in that. The Maestro has repeatedly warned me that he is the most dangerous man in Venice.
The room had fallen silent.
“Well, well!” the newcomer murmured, beaming around. “I hear we have a problem here.” He acknowledged those present with nods: “Clarissimo?” -to Zancani-“Father? Doctor? Missier Grande? Vizio? Sergeant Torre, I trust your wife is on the mend now? And Alfeo Zeno, of course! Are you in trouble again, Alfeo?”
I bowed low. “It seemed so for a few moments, Your Excellency, but I believe the crisis is over.”
Vasco’s face said it had barely begun. Vasco will die happy if he can just see me hauled off to the galleys, but burning at the stake would be much nicer.
Without going close, Gritti frowned at the corpse in the corner. “Nostradamus, is this misfortune connected with the matter you were asked to investigate two nights ago?”