The inquisitor nodded. “And did he tell you anything before he left?”
That was a leading question, but Giro ignored the implications. “He repeated what he told us earlier, when we learned that Dolfin was missing. He brought my parents home, carried in his oar and the cushions from the gondola, bolted the front door, checked the rear door, went to bed. About two hours after curfew, roughly, I came home and he let me in. The men sleep at the front, so they can hear the knocker, and I have a special knock-I am often late.” He glanced at me and showed a rare trace of a smile. “I tip whoever comes, so they almost fight over the honor.”
By now Fabricio would be on the Mestre ferry, or even already on the mainland. As a suspect, he was too obvious. Whether or not the Sanudos had suggested it to him, his flight was a sign of prudence more than of guilt; better exile than interrogation. If the real culprit could not be found, Fabricio could be labeled a murderer and the case closed.
At that moment Vasco slipped in, nodded meaningfully to Gritti, and sat on the chair he had chosen earlier. The nod meant that he had found blood.
Gritti did not criticize Girolamo for letting the gondolier flee. “Before we meet with the ladies, sier Alfeo has a question to ask you.”
Giro turned an inquiring gaze on me. Again my hair follicles twitched in alarm. More and more the inquisitor was making me think of cats and mice, with me in the supporting role. I swallowed hard.
“ Clarissimo, since you mention that you were late coming home, may I inquire where you went last night?”
The navy minister stared at me in silence for a long moment, letting me stew in my impertinence, before saying, “It is no secret. I spend most afternoons and evenings helping out at the scuola. Last night I was cutting elderly toenails.”
Charity work. If true, that would be a better alibi than just about anything. I evicted Girolamo Sanudo from my mental parade of suspects.
“And who hired the servants here?”
“I did. While my father was closing the house at Celeseo, I was opening this one. You approve of my taste?” Giro’s cold stare said that he could guess what I was thinking and nothing in the world mattered less than my opinion.
“So none of them has been in your service more than a couple of months?”
“Fabricio. And Danese, but he was no longer a servant at the time of his death.” Giro did not express any hypocritical regrets. “I hired him about five years ago. Before my duties for the Republic interfered, I provided legal advice for the poor at nominal fees, and he came to me with a problem. I was able to help him with that and he revealed that he was in the service-unwillingly, he assured me-of a man of high standing who is also a notorious pervert. I offered the lad a job as a clerk, which he accepted eagerly, and eventually he graduated to being my mother’s companion.”
But he had not won his way back into his own mother’s favor. Had he even tried? Giro waited to see what else I wanted, but I understood that I had been thoroughly put down and just thanked him politely.
“If the ladies are ready for a few questions?” Gritti prompted. Girolamo nodded and went to see.
The inquisitor said, “Vizio?”
Vasco drew a deep breath. “Excellency, I have the honor to report that I found no bloodstains in the yard here, but a large amount of blood had been spilled in the calle three houses east of here, near the watersteps. Fante Bolognetti was there, calming a trio of sbirri, who were supervising a worker cleaning it up. Much of it had already been washed away by the rain, but traces ran all the way to the watersteps.” Vasco looked smug at having completed so difficult a mission successfully. “We informed the sbirri that Their Excellencies know who died there and I took their names in case they are needed as witnesses.”
So Danese had left Ca’ Sanudo, gone south to Ca’ Barbolano to get his sword, returned north to Ca’ Sanudo to die, and then been transported back to Ca’ Barbolano again. In the names of all the martyrs, why? He had probably never gone near his mother in San Barnaba.
Gritti nodded. “Very good.” The shrewd old eyes stabbed at me. “Why did you ask the page about Dolfin’s portmanteau, Alfeo?”
Prevarication time. I wanted to locate Danese’s gold and find out where it had come from, but if I mentioned the gold itself, I might have to reveal that he had been ferrying sequins from Ca’ Sanudo to Ca’ Barbolano, and out would come the Maestro’s extortionate fee. I must find an alternative explanation. The Maestro insists I cannot tell lies with a straight face, but I can. I did.
“I wondered after I brought it here whether I should have gone through it to check for migrating silverware. You noticed that sier Girolamo admitted Danese had been in some sort of trouble when-”
“Your master said he sent you to pack the portmanteau. Did you or didn’t you pack it yourself?”
“It had never been unpacked. I just threw in a few loose clothes he had left lying around. Hosts shouldn’t rummage through their guests’ luggage.”
Gritti gave me the sort of silent stare that is intended to make a witness keep babbling. I took the chance to change the subject.
“I admit I misjudged sier Girolamo. I am impressed by a member of the Collegio cutting old folks’ toenails.”
He shrugged and allowed the diversion, although he had noticed it. “Be more impressed by a man who does the Lord’s work being elected to office. That was mostly a compliment to his father and I am sure that sier Girolamo will be glad to see his term end. Young Sanudo took a vow of celibacy when he was sixteen, you see. His father talked him out of entering a monastery, but I think there is a time limit on that promise.” The old rascal was flaunting the Ten’s intimate knowledge of the nobility’s secrets. “A few years later Zuanbattista married again to try for an heir, but madonna Eva has given him only one daughter and a stillborn son.”
No doubt Girolamo’s religious zeal explained his drab clothes and frigid self-control. I had never known Violetta to be so wrong about a man before, but he was not a potential patron and had only just come into the public eye, so her error could be excused. “He likes to keep pretty boys and girls around just to torture himself?” I asked.
“Or to test his resolve. For all I know he wears a hair shirt, too.” The inquisitor rearranged his jowls in a pout to indicate that the subject was closed.
But for me a new door had opened. “So madonna Eva’s hopes of one day being dogaressa were not so unreasonable after all! If Girolamo takes holy orders and turns his back on the world, and Grazia is married off to a wealthy Contarini, then the family fortune need not be saved for the next generation. The mainland estates can be cashed in to finance sier Zuanbattista’s continuing career?”
Gritti’s answer was a stony stare. I ignored it as I recalculated motives. I had not given enough thought to the matter of dowry, which in Grazia’s case could be several tens of thousands of ducats, enough to make the lapdog Danese into a very rich man by normal standards. Surely the murder on top of the elopement scandal would destroy whatever was left of Zuanbattista’s reputation? Would he banish Grazia to a convent now, or find her another husband? How much dowry would she bring the second time around? For that matter, how much had Danese been promised? Now my personal list of suspects had acquired some new names-the rejected suitor, Zaccaria Contarini, who had been cheated out of a large fortune in dowry, and even Danese’s sisters, who had all married commoners. If Danese had left a will…
“What’s squirming around inside your agile young brain now?” the inquisitor demanded.
I jumped. “I hadn’t realized, Excellency, that if the marriage contract was signed before last night”-which might explain why Danese had been allowed to move back in as Grazia’s acknowledged husband-“then he may have died a comparatively rich man.”