day. She was Aspasia again, ready to share political gossip.
“And Giro, the son?”
Violetta, you will recall, had pointed out that gentleman to me at the theater for no apparent reason, so I expected her to clam up at that point, because she will never discuss her patrons. She didn’t.
“A lawyer.” She sounded oddly uninterested. “Attended university at Padua, served on the Quarantia, elected to some minor post on the mainland.” She paused, reflecting. “He never seemed to care much about politics and they stopped electing him, until last month when they suddenly made him a minister. There were rumors that he wanted to refuse.”
“He couldn’t!”
“Not without the Great Council slapping a huge fine on him. They were really honoring his daddy, I heard.”
It may seem odd that Venice would honor a man by electing his son to an office he did not want, but it does happen. The Great Council can be even more perverse than that, as for example, when it is angry at the doge and keeps on nominating his relatives to posts just for the satisfaction of voting them down.
“Giro himself ’s a nonentity,” Aspasia said dismissively. “I’ll ask around. Tell me why you need to know.”
Fair’s fair, although I knew that the reaction was bound to be stormy.
“Zuanbattista’s daughter may have been kidnapped.”
Violetta lurched upright, rocking the bed like a minor earthquake. “Or may have run away?” Claws flashed.
“That’s certainly possible.”
“You let her be, Alfeo Zeno, or I’ll never speak to you again!”
Medea was back and I was in imminent danger of losing my eyeballs or worse.
“Even if she’s been trapped by some predator?”
“And you will decide which, of course? You won’t let her opinion count at all! Just a stupid, lust-ridden flibbertigibbet, you think, whose life has to be organized by men?”
I had no answer to that, because an apprentice must obey his master and madonna Eva had bought mine for one thousand ducats.
3
D innertime was over and a dozen men and boys of the Marciana family were back at Ca’ Barbolano’s watergate, busily unloading the lighter, but not so busy that they failed to notice my emergence from 96. I worked my way along the ledge and fled upstairs pursued by much jealous ribaldry. A man cannot smile at a girl in San Remo without the entire parish discussing what he is up to-usually in intimate detail.
Armed with a glass of water from the kitchen, I returned to the atelier. The Maestro had made his way back to his favorite chair, but he was hunched over and shrunken, obviously in pain. Clairvoyance is an ordeal for him, leaving him drained and incapacitated, sometimes for days. He sipped the water, passed it back to me, then again bent over and held his throbbing head in both hands.
“What did I see?” he mumbled.
I went over to inspect the results, the scrawl chalked on the slate table. His writing is atrocious at the best of times; when he is foreseeing it can become totally illegible, even to me, and he never recalls what he has written.
“Impressive,” I said. “Almost legible and the words make so much sense I fear I must be missing something.” Clarity normally means short-range prophecy, as this one seemed to be.
Where the fish stands on a shore of wine and no flags fly,
Why does a black swan wear a white collar?
Amid a hundred bronze mouths the great one is silent.
Steel will ring louder and tears must flow.
He grunted. “Tomorrow.”
“That’s how I read it, master.”
The news would sound a bitter note in Ca’ Sanudo. Give the girl a night away from home with her accomplice and “unharmed” would mean less than her mother was hoping. For my part, I disliked the mention of steel ringing. At least the quatrain mentioned tears flowing, not blood, but drawn swords automatically increase uncertainty and thus blur foresight.
The Maestro was aware of that also, of course, since he had taught me. “You need not do this, Alfeo,” he mumbled. “Unless you want to.”
“Good! It sounds far too dangerous. I won’t.”
He looked up in dismay, visualizing a thousand ducats subliming away like his sulfur crystals.
I laughed to put him out of his misery. “If you had thought there was one chance in a million I was going to say that, you wouldn’t have made the offer, right? Of course I’ll go. I am the knave of swords who stands between the lovers and the world.”
“What?”
“Tarot.”
He grunted again and heaved himself upright. I handed him his staff. He seemed steady enough, so I left him to thump his way across to the door while I headed for the desk.
“We need a contract,” he said as he left. “And her father’s authority.”
“Italic, roman, or gothic?”
He slammed the door without answering, so I trimmed a quill to write italic.
Giorgio and I trotted downstairs to sea level and stepped out into the gondola. “That way,” I said, making myself comfortable on the cushions in the felze. “Ca’ Sanudo.”
“Which one?” Giorgio Angeli is a wiry little man with the strength of a horse. He adjusted his feathered gondolier’s cap and set his oar in the rowlock.
“Zuanbattista.”
“Don’t know it.”
I turned to peer up at him in amazement. “I thought you knew every building in the city.”
He shrugged, pleased but rueful. “Venice has more Sanudos than seagulls. I can ask.”
A stroke of his oar sent us off along the Rio San Remo. It is a quiet little backwater canal, but on a Saturday afternoon it had traffic enough, and it had the timeless beauty of Venice, where every building is different, shining in dancing, ethereal reflected light, never the same from one moment to the next. Voices shout greetings or ribaldry, others sing. People going by in boats call to people in windows or on bridges, but there is never the clatter of hooves or rattle of carts that mar other cities.
Giorgio pulled up close behind a gondola going in our direction and shouted, “Giro?”
The gondolier looked around and said, “Ey? Giorgio!”
Obviously this was not the same Giro-noblemen elected to the Collegio do not row gondolas on Saturday afternoons, nor any other time. This Girolamo did not know the Ca’ Zuanbattista Sanudo either, so he shouted to another boat going the other way. I hastily closed the curtains on the felze, but I could not disguise my gondolier and it would soon be all over the parish, if not the city, that Master Nostradamus’s henchman Alfeo was looking for Zuanbattista Sanudo.
The third man asked advised us that the palazzo we needed was the old Ca’ Alvise Donato in Santa Maria Maddalena parish, over in Cannaregio. There are even more Donatos than Sanudos in the Golden Book, but Giorgio knew the house and shouted thanks. If sier Zuanbattista had just bought himself a grand new mansion, he must have done well in Constantinople.
“I’ll need you tomorrow morning,” I said. “Early. Bruno, too.”
“Good cause?” Giorgio paused from eyeing the canal ahead to give me a shrewd, appraising look. He has seen the murky labyrinths into which my work for the Maestro can lead me.
“A very good cause,” I said firmly. But was it? I was going to make at least one person utterly miserable.
