The door to the tavern opened and a young, slightly drunken man looked about searchingly. When he saw John with Greta, he grinned.
“Ah, that’s what’s been keeping you,” he said with a laugh. “We thought you must have fallen down the outhouse hole.” He winked at the two of them. “You two going to be much longer? Then I’ll just roll the dice for you, John.”
“No, the two of us are quite done,” said John brusquely, giving Greta a nod. “See you in the morning, princess. Better put that letter opener away before you hurt yourself.” Then he followed the other man back into the tavern.
Greta stood as if rooted to the spot. She felt terribly stupid. She’d immediately assumed that it had been John Reed hiding by the river, when all this time he had been playing dice at the tavern. Or had he gone outside a while ago and followed her? But then his friends would have come looking for him sooner. Greta sighed. She no longer knew what to believe.
As she slowly walked back to the inn where her father and Karl waited, she continuously had the feeling that she was being followed. But every time she spun around there was nothing. No man, nothing red.
Red.
Greta held her breath and stopped.
Just as she arrived at the inn and saw the outlines of Karl and her father sitting at a table behind the windows, she realized who else the red head might have belonged to.
Kiss my scaly hand . . . farewell, Greta.
And then she remembered how she knew the melody that she’d heard by the reeds.
“It was Tonio! I saw Tonio!”
Greta stared at the two men, her eyes flickering. Johann hadn’t seen his daughter this terrified in a long time—not since she’d been locked up in a jail below Nuremberg as a fourteen-year-old girl. With trembling hands she clutched a cup of wine.
Greta had stormed into the taproom moments after knocking on the window. Now she was sitting at their table, white-faced, her dress drenched in sweat despite the cold night. Johann gathered from her hasty words that someone had followed her. It seemed that his worst fears were coming true.
Tonio was reaching out for his daughter! The shock was so profound that it suppressed another fit.
“I told you it was too dangerous to walk about by yourself,” groused Johann, trying not to show how afraid he was. “And no one said you could hang about the harbor. Why didn’t you at least take the dog?”
“Don’t talk to me as if I’m a child,” she retorted. “You can’t order me around.”
Johann was about to reply but stopped himself. At least Greta was still defiant, despite the bad fright.
“I know it was a mistake to go into the wetlands,” she admitted. “But I couldn’t know—”
“What makes you think it was Tonio?” asked Karl.
“It was his red cap. The same cap he wore as a French delegate and later in Metz. Remember, Karl? At first I thought it was that John Reed following me, but then . . .” She shuddered.
“What is it?” asked Johann.
“I heard a song in the rushes, very softly,” she whispered. “Someone played it on a flute. It was a children’s song, and suddenly I remembered.”
“Remembered what?” asked Karl with growing frustration.
Greta just clutched the cup with the steaming spiced wine.
Johann thumped his fist on the table impatiently, causing a few people at the other tables to turn their heads. “Speak up! What did you remember?”
“Back in Nuremberg,” Greta said. “You know how someone lured me underneath the bridge near the Hospital of the Holy Ghost, to the dead child? Where the guards found me with the talisman in my pocket and arrested me. There was a man by the river . . . and he played a flute. He played the same song.” Greta looked up and locked eyes with Johann. “It was Tonio, both times. I had forgotten the encounter at Nuremberg. I wanted to forget. But I recognized him by the song. And he hummed it later, too, in the prison cell, when he made me drink the potion. He said that if Faust didn’t come, then . . .”
“Then he’d take you in my stead,” muttered Johann. “That goddamn pied piper.”
“And you’re completely certain that you didn’t imagine it all?” asked Karl. “I mean, the rushing in the reeds, whispering and whistling. It could have been the wind. The howling of the wind sometimes sounds just like a willow whistle. And our own fears do the rest.”
Johann shook his head. “No, I believe it truly was Tonio. That evil creature followed us. For some reason he wants to prevent us from visiting Leonardo da Vinci. But he won’t stop us. Not if we—” He went to squeeze Greta’s hand, when he realized that he couldn’t move his arm.
“What is it?” asked Greta, worried.
“The paralysis,” whispered Karl. “It’s progressing.”
Johann said nothing. He had sworn to Greta that he wouldn’t lie to her again—and yet he had done it. He had told her that sometimes a person whose death he’d foreseen didn’t end up dying. He had said it to lend courage to his daughter, to leave her with some hope. But it wasn’t the truth.
The lines of the palm always showed the future.
He would die.
The only glimmer of hope he had left was Leonardo da Vinci. If Agrippa was right and the great artist was grappling with the same disease, he might be able to help.
Maybe Leonardo also entered a pact with Tonio. Maybe he knows how we might beat the devil.
“We don’t have much time left,” said Johann with a glance at his left arm, hanging limply at his side like a dead
