My stomach complained bitterly that I should have gone to the kitchen and found food, but I told it that fasting was good for our soul. Instead of eating, I watched as the guests settled in at the long table. The doge invited madonna Barbolano to sit at his right, the place of honor, and she looked ready to swoon. Alvise went on his left, of course, and the Maestro opposite, flanked by Gritti and Sanudo. The rest of the counselors were left on the edges, but the table could have held another forty. The two equerries stood in the background, in attendance.
Giorgio and Christoforo in their Sunday best acted as footmen. I could not see what they were serving, but it smelled wonderful and I marveled that Mama had managed to assemble a worthy repast at such short notice. She and her brood had fled the house right after her scream, you will recall, and on Saturday afternoon there would have been little left to buy on the stalls. Likely she had borrowed supplies from her enormous family and from Giorgio’s, which is even larger. When the tale of the doge’s visit got out, they would all bask in reflected glory.
I settled down to starve. Nothing of importance would be discussed until the Barbolanos were dismissed and possibly not even then, because the purpose of the gathering was merely to demonstrate to Ottone Gritti that the Signoria was not in favor of combusting the doge’s personal physician.
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.”