6
Fifteen minutes later I was back in Number 96, finishing Violetta's breakfast while she scanned the contract. She wore another simple housemaid's dress, which I gathered Milana had sewn for her overnight. It was plain, but few senators' wives would boast of anything better made. I had come by the sea-level road because I was wearing my rapier; swords and acrobatics do not mix.
"Just what sort of expense is Nostradamus planning to spend my hundred ducats on?" my darling demanded.
"I have no idea," I admitted. "But I expect he does."
"I want him to catch the man who killed Lucia da Bergamo."
"He can't. No witnesses, no evidence-the strangler's scot-free on that one. But obviously the same man killed all three victims. And obviously he may kill again."
She nodded reluctantly, a tiny frown marring the perfection of her forehead. "You think I'm in danger?"
I brought out my tarot deck. "I can find out, if you wish."
"Will it really tell?" Minerva's big, luminous gray eyes studied me. "You believe in the cards that much?"
I nodded. "Tarot has limitations, but even the Maestro admits I am good with it. But I'm not a fairground fortune-teller, love. I won't babble pap about being lucky in love or old friends re-entering your life. If the news is bad, I'll tell you. I might desensitize my deck if I misquoted it."
"Let's do it, then." At once she began clearing a space on the table, which is very small, an intimate place to be shared by two.
I shuffled the deck and gave it to her. "Hold it for a moment in both hands. Now cut it and deal off the new top card. This will represent you or the question you want answered."
She turned over the queen of coins.
"Excellent!" I said. "The highest-paid courtesan in Venice, who else?"
She laughed. "How did you do that?"
"I didn't! I told you this is serious, not make-believe. This deck is almost two hundred years old. It's had many owners and enough time to absorb every dream and fear that mortals know." I took it back and dealt four more cards, facedown, forming a cross around the first one. "Now the one closest to you is the problem. Turn it over-sideways."
She did and then gave me a sharp look, for it was XIII of the major arcana-Death.
"But it's reversed!" I said quickly. "That's good! Lay it down that way."
"What does Death reversed mean?"
"That the problem is to avoid Death, I think. Now turn this one, the helper or path." This time she found trump X, which on my deck shows a lion. "This stands for Strength, although some decks call it Fortitude, and other artists may use other pictures."
"Should I perhaps hire Bruno to protect me?" she inquired teasingly.
"I wish you wouldn't joke about this!"
"Sorry. Now what?" She was amused, not sorry. Although Violetta has great esteem for the Maestro's clairvoyant abilities, familiarity breeds disrespect and she is too aware of my faults and weaknesses to hold me in similar reverence.
"The opposite one, the snare to be avoided."
She turned over II, the Popess, reversed, and looked inquiringly at me.
"That is the most cryptic card in the arcana," I admitted. There never was a Pope Joan. In my deck she is shown on a throne, wearing robes and a papal miter, holding a book on her lap. "I need to think about it. Let's see the last one, the goal or solution."
She turned the top card and it was the knight of cups reversed. Now I knew I must do some fast talking, because I could recall few layouts more perplexing. With three cards reversed and only two trumps, it was certain to be ambiguous. "The queen of coins means that it is your reading, and Death reversed means that the problem is to keep you alive. Strength or Fortitude may mean that you will have to be brave. The knight of cups baffles me, I admit. The jack of cups usually means me, the alchemist's apprentice, but I don't think I've ever appeared as a knight in any suit. Besides, I don't want to be reversed! And the Popess reversed has me totally befuddled."
"And here I thought I was consulting an expert!"
"It's a very unusual spread. I'll consult Nostradamus. I suspect it refers to some people we haven't met yet."
Violetta's eyes had darkened, but they were twinkling with amusement. "What use is a prediction that can't be understood until it has come to pass?"
"Ask Apollo. That was how he did it at Delphi. Trust me. All will be revealed in time."
"As long as Death stays reversed," she retorted.
"Let's get Giorgio to row us over to San Samuele so we can visit with my old hero, Matteo the Butcher."
The rest of the world admires and envies Venice for many things: our wealth, our republican form of government, our skilled and luscious courtesans, our glittering state processions, the beauty of our jeweled city on its hundred islands, smug and safe and well fed in its fish-rich lagoon. Another of our unique features that is almost as famous and perhaps not as envied-although travelers come from far and wide to view it-is the War of Fists.
Its needs are simple. We have more than four hundred stone bridges ready to hand in Venice, almost all of them narrow, humpbacked, and lacking parapets or railings of any kind. Moreover, they almost always mark the boundary between two parishes. Line up a few hundred enraged, combative young men on either side and you can resume the War of Fists. It happens spontaneously quite often in the fall, between summer and the start of Carnival, and the Council of Ten thunders against it. The greatest battles, though, are planned weeks in advance, enlisting the best fighters from all over the city, and there is not a great deal that the Ten can do to prevent those encounters. Indeed, the government has been known to organize them to entertain important visitors, such as one I remember about ten years ago for delegates from some place called Japan, which is said to be near Cathay, at the other end of the world, but I doubt that the visitors had come all that distance just to watch armies of carpenters and fishermen trying to pound their opponents into submission or submersion.
The contesting teams are always the Nicolotti and the Castellani. Whatever began the age-old dispute between the two factions is now lost in mists of myth, but the hatred between them is virulent, leading sometimes to outright murder. The dividing line between the factions winds across the city roughly southwest to northeast, and it makes a particularly large curve around my birth parish of San Barnaba, which lies on the eastern, Castellani, side of it. Being of patrician birth, I cannot participate in such plebeian pastimes except as a supporter, although I did once manage to steal a very minor role in one great battle, as I shall explain.
Now San Barnaba is fairly central in the city, flanking the outside of the more southerly of the two great bends of the Grand Canal. It is also frontier territory, abutting Nicolotti parishes on two sides, and it boasts a very visible and accessible bridge, so favored for battles that it is known as the Ponte dei Pugni, the Bridge of Fists. When a battle is scheduled, the inhabitants throw up rickety bleachers to rent to spectators, and those lucky enough to have windows or roofs overlooking the scene can charge enormous fees to the rich and great. You can understand, then, that I was always a staunch Castellani supporter because it would have been more than my juvenile life was worth to utter one good word about the despicable Nicolotti scum. San Remo parish fervently supports those glorious Nicolotti heroes, so I shall never be completely trusted there and must guard my tongue when anything concerning the War of Fists creeps into conversations.
The opposing forces are not mere rabble. Many parishes or other groups in the city pride themselves on sending semi-military companies of fifty or more young men, marching in step, wearing the same uniform. Both sides have their various leaders, known as padrini, who provide some sort of order and plan strategy, and of course every one of these is a great fighter who has earned respect and reputation in a hundred previous clashes. By the time the battle is due to begin, thousands of pugnacious young men have worked themselves up into fighting fury, every vantage point in sight is packed with spectators, and the canal is paved solid with boats. Abuse is hurled, blood froths, and skilled padrini have concealed reserve forces in nearby warehouses, so they can throw in fresh troops at a critical moment.