“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.