5 - Her Deadly Mischief (12 page)

I halted on the path. “Teatro San Marco was built to reflect the glory of the Doge and our Republic. Its operas draw visitors whose gold keeps half of Venice’s hostelries and taverns and wine shops open. And what about the thousands of miles I’ve covered to bring Italy’s unrivaled music to every dull-as-ditchwater town north of the Alps?” The ferocity of my response surprised even me. I realized I was grinding my teeth.

Messer Grande’s expression changed from abashed to wounded. “Tito—” he began.

But I forged on. “For all that and all the hours I practice to perfect my performance, you dare say I’m not useful? After all I’ve sacrificed? After my very manhood was sliced away without my knowledge or consent?”

“Oh, Signor Amato.” He looked stunned, as if someone had struck him in the head with a mallet. “I spoke without thinking. I could pull my tongue out by the roots.”

I stared him in the face, unmollified, rigid with anger.

He stammered on, “Though…though your voice was created under…shameful circumstances…it is truly magnificent. And you are right, you and everyone at the theater bring glory to Venice. Please—” He interrupted himself to seize me in a bearlike embrace. “I will be desolated if you won’t accept my apology. Tell me you will.”

“Well…yes…I suppose…” I answered through folds of red silk. “If you wish…”

He pulled back and clapped me on both shoulders. A broad smile split his face. “That’s the spirit. I would hate to sully our friendship when it is just beginning. I admire you for much more than your singing, you know. Here—” He removed the petal-scope from a jacket pocket. “I bought this for your boy. Let it serve as a token of my goodwill.”

“It’s for Titolino?”

“He’s of an age to use it, is he not?”

“Yes, he will enjoy it. Thank you. But don’t you have children of your own?”

Messer Grande shook his head solemnly. “My good wife and I have not been blessed, and aren’t likely to be, married these twelve years—” He shrugged as one of his men ran panting down the path. “Yes?”

The constable extended a paper folded into quarters and sealed with a blob of red wax. “Excellency, a message just rowed across from Venice.”

Messer Grande slipped his thumb under the seal and snapped the note open. As his gaze flicked back and forth over the lines, his expression made me feel cold and hollow inside. Something had happened.

Indeed. Messer Grande raised his eyes, but I don’t think he even saw me as he announced, “I must leave you, now.”

“What is it?”

“Alessio Pino has escaped my guardhouse.”

Chapter Ten

Several days after my visit to Murano, I awoke earlier than usual to the promise of another beautiful autumn day. The gulls agreed with me. When I opened our balcony doors, the birds’ raucous cries were positively joyful. Allowing the mild breeze and diffuse golden light to fill our chamber, I returned to bed and ran my fingers through Liya’s lustrous blue-black hair. She barely stirred before dragging a pillow over her head.

Liya had been keeping a series of late nights, but not in my company. I had seen my wife awake only a few times these past days. She had skipped my ongoing performance in
Armida
to closet herself away with her oracles. Removing her
tarocchi
from their ivory casket after Titolino went to bed, she laid down array after array. If not at her cards, she spent hours staring into a soup pot filled with oil and mysterious herbs.

Each morning, she’d left the house early to poke around the ghetto, following up on clues that her planetary spirits—or was that her elemental geniuses?—had communicated to her the night before. She was beginning to worry me. Her rosy cheeks had paled, and she no longer seemed to listen as I recounted the latest theater gossip. I had to remind myself that I had encouraged her to take an interest in the ghetto for a very good reason.

Last night, I had returned from the theater to find Liya in her nightdress, asleep at the table in front of the dying fire, head resting on her curled arm. A ring of candles surrounding her brightly painted cards had dripped wax all over the tabletop. I blew them out, gathered up her
tarocchi
, and summoned Angelina to help get her into bed, an innocent gesture that precipitated a heated argument.

“You’ve mixed up my cards,” Liya cried once she’d wakened. “I’d just constructed the pyramid of Aradia.”

“My love, you’re exhausted. Come to bed and let these foolish things be.”

“Foolish things? What are you saying?” Anger flashed from her dark eyes.

I should have stopped there, but my brain was also clouded by fatigue. I told Liya she was endowed with too high an intelligence to rely on pieces of pasteboard to guide her life, even if they did sometimes seem to hit the mark. She responded with a sputtering lecture on all her tools of divination and the immortal, feminine forces that lent them power.

I’d soon heard quite enough. “Ridiculous!” I countered. “They’re cards, nothing but cards. Not some miraculous oracle.”

Acting on the basest of impulses—rage—I seized the pack of
tarocchi
and threw them into the grate where the flimsy pasteboard immediately flared into orange and blue flames. Our words flared just as hotly. By the time we were through, Liya had attacked the Holy Eucharist as nothing but Christian hocus-pocus and Angelina had given her notice. The maid slammed through the front door, and we heard her howling about “the Devil’s playthings” all the way down the pavement.

In the morning light, at the threshold of a new day, the argument seemed thoroughly childish. Admittedly, I found my wife’s pagan ways strange at times, but I knew her for a loving, good-hearted woman, whatever her beliefs. I respected those beliefs because they were hers, just as she had never disparaged the mysteries of the religion I held dear.

Of her Hebrew girlhood, we’d rarely spoken. When she’d slipped out of Venice, Liya packed up her old ghetto life like out-of-season garments folded into a trunk. Now that Zulietta’s murder had led her to open that trunk and air its contents, our carefully maintained equilibrium had been thrown off balance. I couldn’t let that continue.

I lifted the pillow from Liya’s head and kissed her shoulder, the notch of her throat, between her breasts. She must have bathed before she’d consulted her cards last night; her flesh was still scented with lavender bath oil. Under my touch, her eyelids fluttered and she woke with a moan. She seemed as loathe to let the argument linger as I was. She kicked the bedcovers off and wrapped her legs around me. Then her arms. I reveled in the familiarity of her embrace. Here was one instance where I had to bow to the wise women of Monteborgo who had schooled Liya in the uses of herbs. Thanks to her invigorating balms and lotions, I suffered no lack of desire or potency despite the violence that had been done to my manhood.

Later, as we lay folded together, our warm bodies cooled by the breeze from the open doors, Liya reached for something on the bedside table. Drowsy, eyelids at half-mast, I felt her slip a cord over my head.

“What is this?” I fingered the red flannel bag that had come to rest on my bare chest.

She traced its outline with the feathery touch of her forefinger. “Something I made for you—protection.”

In a heartbeat, I came fully awake. “Why do I need protecting?”

Liya stared over my shoulder, as if a deep vista stretched beyond the very solid wall of masonry, a vista only she could see. Finally she blinked and focused on me. “Before my cards burned, they warned of danger.”

“Perhaps you’re the one in danger.”

She shook her head firmly and answered in a hushed tone. “It was you and no mistake. Swords hung over your head.”

Despite myself, an icy shiver raised the hairs on my forearms. “How can this protect me? It’s only a little bag of red flannel.”

“The
how
doesn’t matter. It’s enough that I made it for you and collected its contents with my own hands. You must promise to wear it always.”

“Never take it off? Not even to wash?”

“The time will come when it will be removed, but the moment is not for you to choose.” She waited solemnly, clearly expecting a promise.

Why not indulge her? What harm could a bag around my neck cause? “All right, I promise never to remove it—but now you must be as forthcoming in return. Tell me why you have been so consumed with finding Zulietta’s killer.”

She pulled the light coverlet around us and plumped up our pillows. Then she answered with a sigh, “Zulietta could have been me, Tito. I could have followed in her footsteps exactly.”

“I don’t know what you mean. You and Zulietta are hardly the same. You were forced out of the ghetto by your mother’s insistence that you give Titolino up to the Pieta. Zulietta was still Mina Grazziano when she let old Malpiero tempt her away. She left of her own free will.”

“Zulietta and I were both at a crossroads. Stepping this way or that would change our lives forever. And you forget that Mama had several plans. When she first discovered I was going to have Luca’s child, she wanted to marry me off to a ghetto boy, the son of a neighbor across the
campo
.”

“Yes, I do recall. You said he had a face like a shriveled melon and teased Fortunata behind your back. You refused him and that’s when your mother insisted you give the child of a Christian to the Christian orphanage.”

She nodded. “I don’t think I ever told you his name.”

“Is it important?”

“The boy was Aram Pardo.”

I pushed up on one hand. “Liya, my love. Why didn’t you tell me at once?”

She ran her tongue over her lips, staring at the sunlight creeping across our faded carpet. “I’d rather not think about those days,” she finally answered. “They were terrible. Mama and Papa locked me in my room and arranged the match without so much as a word to me. The one time I was allowed out, our parents toasted the engagement with a glass of Cyprus wine while Aram and I sat on the sofa. Right under their noses, he dug his fingers into my thigh so hard it left bruises. As our mothers talked of dishes and linens and our fathers slapped each other on the back, Aram had his mouth to my ear, whispering all the terrible things he was going to do to me and telling me how much I was going to like it.”

Liya wrapped her arms around her knees and folded herself into a little ball. I could barely hear her next words: “I couldn’t stand it, Tito. I threw my wine in Aram’s face and said I wouldn’t marry him if he were the only man in the ghetto. Mama locked me in my room for two more weeks, but I wouldn’t relent. By then, my belly was getting bigger and something had to be done. Mama started threatening to give my baby to the Pieta. She thought that would bring me to heel, but I’d remembered the old wise woman who had cured some ailments I’d had as a child. With my sisters’ help, I escaped my prison and found a man to row me to her island at the north end of the lagoon. It was she who arranged my journey to Monteborgo.” Liya raised her chin. Her eyes were wet with unshed tears. “If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t have returned to the ghetto. I would have simply lost myself in the city. I would have ended up lower than Zulietta. No luxurious pleasure casino for me. No fourth-tier opera box. No jewels. I would have been one of the slatterns you find waiting for men outside the Arsenale or haunting the docks.”

“Liya, Liya.” I stroked her hair, then her small white hands, for by this time she was sobbing in earnest. “What can I do?”

She wiped her cheeks with a corner of the sheet. Her voice grew hoarse. “You can help me prove that Aram murdered Zulietta. Then I’ll have the pleasure of watching him dance at the end of the hangman’s noose, a fate I’m certain he deserves over and over.”

“Liya—” I dropped my hands, shocked at the violence of her words, unsure what to say.

“Oh, Tito, you don’t know him. It wasn’t just Fortunata he teased. There were rumors of much worse. All the children on our square were afraid of Aram, and the dogs ran whenever they caught sight of him. He’s cruel and evil. He thinks the world owes him a living, and he’ll take that living any way he can get it. When Zulietta made her will, she signed her death warrant.”

“But, Liya, there’s no way to prove a man guilty of something he didn’t do. At least, no way I’d ever stoop to.”

“How do you know Aram didn’t kill Zulietta? Thanks to the construction he’s done at the back of his shop, he can launch a boat and leave the ghetto under cover of darkness. Yesterday, I questioned people who live in the buildings on either side. They’ve seen Aram and his henchmen avoid the patrol boat a number of times. Throughout the ghetto, he has earned the reputation of a master of all trades except that of an honest man.

“No.” She placed her palm over my open mouth. “Let me finish. There’s more. I’ve also been back to see Signora Grazziano. She admitted that Zulietta had announced something momentous would occur on the opera’s opening night. She told her mother to expect a windfall that would allow her to move to a larger apartment. If Signora Grazziano knew Zulietta would be attending the opera that night, she could have easily mentioned it to Reyna—who of course would have told Aram.”

I took both her hands in mine. They were ice cold. “Here, get into your dressing gown, and I’ll close that door. The sun may look like July, but it’s still October.” I rang for Angelina, actually forgetting for the moment that our maid had fled the house.

It was Benito who answered, white cloth over his arm, bearing a tray complete with chocolate pot and dome-covered dish. He arranged the table with a minimum of fuss and bowed himself out after sending me only a surreptitious wink to serve as a comment on the tumbled bedclothes.

Once we’d both had a few sips of chocolate and Liya was nibbling at a warm roll studded with pistachios, I observed, “You’ve been very busy these past few days.”

“When you devote yourself to some injustice that no one else cares to right, you’re like a bloodhound on the scent. I’ve watched you for years. You stop for nothing. Would you expect less of me?”

I released a sigh of mingled exasperation and admiration. “No, I wouldn’t. It’s just that several things bear against Aram as the culprit. For one…” I held up a forefinger. “I saw the man, remember. Aram is far too slight and I doubt if he’d have the strength to overpower Zulietta. And two…” I raised another finger. “The murderer had a key—not the official theater key that Alessio had given Zulietta, but his own. How would Reyna or Aram have come by a key?”

“Keys can be copied.”

“True, but you must have an original to take to the smithy.”

“Zulietta had access to Alessio’s key. She may have had a duplicate made for reasons of her own.”

“And one of the Jews got hold of that key? Highly unlikely, I think.” I reached for a pastry, picked off a few nuts, and crunched them between my front teeth. “Putting the matter of the key aside for now, we must admit that Alessio’s escape has convinced a good many people of his guilt.”

Liya raised an eyebrow. “There may be some other explanation for his flight. My cards foretold a sea journey…before they were destroyed.”

I hung my head and once again apologized for my rash action. “I’ll buy you another set of
tarocchi
,” I continued. “The best that Venice has to offer.”

When I raised my gaze, Liya was regarding me with a shrewd, unflappable expression. She pushed back a strand of hair that had fallen over her cheek, then replied, “As well you should. But your offer flies in the face of our tradition. A wise woman must search out her own tools, and only she can decide which cards are meant for her use.”

“Then I suppose you must start searching.”

“I will,” she answered with a grave smile. “But in the meantime, we have a murder to solve. How did Alessio manage to escape?”

“The bars of Alessio’s cell window were tampered with. The window was much too high for him to reach. Someone must have worked on them from outside and thrown a rope through.”

“Alessio has some daring friends, then.”

“Not as daring as it might appear on first blush. The work was accomplished during the darkest hours of the night, and while the guardhouse’s side walls are only a few feet from its neighbors, those buildings contain state offices that would have been empty of prying eyes. Two men could have done it, one from the top of a ladder, the other keeping watch. Once through that window, Alessio could have thrown on cloak and mask and gone…anywhere.”

Liya nodded judiciously. “If he’s still in Venice, Messer Grande will find him. Your new friend seems quite clever—and persistent.”

“I fear the search for Alessio ended before it began. Messer Grande came backstage last night and told me the Council of Ten has ordered him to shift his resources to another matter. There has been a rash of robberies in the San Polo district, and the neighbors are calling for the thieves to be apprehended. The Ten have judged Alessio guilty of Zulietta’s murder but believe he’s well out of Venetian territory, so…” I spread my hands.