The Secret Supper (32 page)

Anguish gripped my throat.

“Where…am I?” I repeated.

“In a safe place, a village called Concorezzo, Father Agostino. And I’m glad to see that you’ve recovered. We have much to talk about. Do you remember me?”

“Who…?” I hesitated.

I tried to turn toward my captor, but a new pounding forced me to stop.

“Come now, Father! Our oil put you to sleep but didn’t blot out your memory. I’m the man who always tells the truth, don’t you recall? The one who swore to solve the riddle that was troubling you.”

A memory flashed through my brain. It was true. Dear God! I had certainly heard that voice before. But where? I made a great effort to turn around and look at my captor. And I saw him at last, as red in the face as ever, his emerald eyes as clear and as intelligent. It was Mario Forzetta, the former apprentice who had fought a duel with Jacaranda.

“Remember me?”

I nodded.

“I’m sorry to have had to resort to these methods to bring you here, Father. But, believe me, it was our only chance. You would not have come with us willingly.”

He smiled.

The plural intrigued me.

“With us, Mario?”

Forzetta’s face lit up when he heard me say his name.

“The ‘pure men’ of Concorezzo, Father. Our faith forbids us from doing violence, but not from using cunning.”

“You are a…bonhomme?”

“You are horrified, I know. You freed a heretic from the prison he deserved. But before you judge me too harshly, I beg you to listen to me. I have much to tell you.”

“And my brothers?”

“We left them asleep in Santo Stefano. By this time, if they’re not frozen stiff, they’ll be back in Milan, suffering from your same headache.”

Mario was looking reasonably well. The wound that had cut his face several days ago was still noticeable, but he had let his beard grow and his skin was dark from the sun. He was no longer the pale specter who had spoken with me in the prison of Oliverio Jacaranda. He had gained weight and he looked happy. The knowledge that he was safe from Jacaranda’s clutches had no doubt agreed with him. What I could not understand was why he wished to detain me. Why precisely me, the man who had granted him his freedom?

“My brothers and I hesitated for a long time before taking this step,” Mario explained, sitting down on the floor, by my side. “I know that you, Father, are an inquisitor, and that your order has, for over two hundred years, persecuted families such as ours, simply because we have a different way of approaching God.”

“But—”

“But seeing you in Santo Stefano, I understood that you were a sign sent by Our Lord. You appeared just at the moment when I had found all the answers I promised to give you. Do you remember? Isn’t that a true miracle? I convinced our ‘perfect’ to bring you here, so that I might pay back my debt to you.”

“No such debt exists.”

“It does, Father. God has intertwined our paths for a reason He alone can fathom. Perhaps it is not so that I can solve your riddles, but to face an enemy we both have in common.”

His words took me aback.

“What enemy?”

“Do you recall the riddle you put in my hands the day you set me free?”

I nodded. This Oculos ejus dinumera kept outsmarting my wits. I had almost forgotten that I had entrusted Forzetta with a copy.

“After leaving you, Father, I sought refuge in Leonardo’s workshop. I knew that his house would be the only one in Milan that would shelter me. And obviously, I spoke with the Master. I told him of our meeting, and of your great generosity, and I asked him to help me. Not only did I want him to protect me from Signor Jacaranda’s temper but I wanted him to assist me in giving you thanks for having delivered me from jail.”

“But you were no longer Leonardo’s apprentice—”

“No. And yet, once you’ve been his apprentice, you never cease to be one. Leonardo treats his apprentices as if they were his children and, though many of us are not talented enough to become painters, he still shows us his affection. After all, his teachings go well beyond the mere business of being an artist.”

“I see. So you went to seek protection under Master Leonardo’s wing. And what did he say?”

“I gave him your riddle. I told him it concealed the name of a person you were looking for, and the Master solved it for me.”

This seemed to me a great irony. Leonardo had deciphered the name of the one who had written to Bethany seeking the Master’s ruin? Full of curiosity, I tried to overcome my dizziness and took Mario’s hands in mine to emphasize my question.

“He succeeded, then?”

“He did, Father. I can tell you the hidden name.”

Mario laid down the Priestess’s card on the floor, between our feet.

“Master Leonardo was much surprised when I asked him about your riddle,” he continued. “In fact, he told me he knew it well. That a monk from Santa Maria had brought it to him some time earlier, and that he’d solved it for him.”

“Father Alessandro!”

The memory of the Oculos ejus dinumera written on the reverse of a card like the one found next to the librarian’s body came back to me. Suddenly everything made sense: the Soothsayer must have murdered Father Alessandro after having been unmasked and must have thought up a plan to discredit Leonardo. To kill an obscure Dominican must have been easy for him, but not to do away with the duke’s favorite court painter. So he decided to incriminate him in the heresy. By writing letters to Bethany.

Breaking into my wild thoughts, Mario continued.

“Yes. It was Father Alessandro. I remember the Master’s words perfectly: that both riddles, the verses and the card, were intimately linked. Your verses were incomprehensible without the card, and the card makes no sense without the verses. They are like both sides of the same coin.”

I begged Mario to make himself clearer. The young man took the Latin words written in the paper I’d given him in Milan, and placed it next to the Visconti-Sforza card. Once more, those cursed seven lines lay before me:

Oculos jus inumera,

ed noli voltum dspicere.

In latere nominis

mei notam rinvenies.

Contemplari et contemplata

aliis radere.

Veritas

“In fact, it’s a simple three-leveled riddle,” he said. “The first seeks to identify the card that will help you solve the problem. ‘Count its eyes but look not on its face.’ It has a very simple meaning. If you observe carefully, you’ll see there’s only one other kind of eye possible, other than those on the woman’s face.”

“Another eye? Where?”

Mario seemed amused.

“In the belt, Father. Don’t you see? It’s the eye of the knot through which passes the cord that binds the woman’s waist. It’s a metaphor, cleverly used by the man you seek.’

“But that’s not all,” he continued. “ ‘The number of my name, you shall find on its side’ is an open question. If you look closely, you see that you can’t tell on what side to look. Is it the right side or the left that holds ‘the number of my name’? I’ll tell you: it’s the woman’s right side.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Master Leonardo stumbled upon the solution thanks to a steganographic detail.”

“A what?”

“Steganographic. The Greeks, Father, were masters in the art of concealing secret messages in writings or in paintings visible to all. In their tongue, steganos means hidden or occult writing, as in the obvious case of your riddle. A spelling mistake gives us the clue: rinvenies should be spelled without an R. A man as meticulous as the sender of this message would not have overlooked such a detail. After finding this extra R, I examined all of your verses carefully and discovered that certain letters were marked with a dot. You might have overlooked them, but they’re there, in the words ejus, dinumera, sed, adspicere and tradere. I’m surprised that no one has noticed them.”

I leaned down to read the Soothsayer’s message to see what Mario was pointing at, and I discovered that, indeed, the letters E, D, S, A and T carried dots just above them.

“You see?” he insisted. “With these, plus the misplaced R, you can read the word destra, meaning ‘right.’ That is the clue we needed.”

It was impressive. Leonardo had done that which none of us had thought of doing: relating the Priestess’s card with the riddle of the Soothsayer’s letters. Intuition or genius, the truth is that I felt a sort of vertigo, knowing that we were so close to the solution of the enigma.

“The rest is quite easy, Father. According to the lessons of the Ars Memoriae, the hands are the parts of the body that always carry the number in any given composition. On this card, as you can see, there are two hands, each showing a different number of fingers. If your man tells us that we must choose the right, it’s because the number of his name is five.”

“So you know the Ars Memoriae as well?”

“It was one of Leonardo’s favorite assignments.”

“So now I suppose I should look for a monk whose name consists of letters that add up to five, isn’t that right?”

“Not necessarily,” said Mario more proudly than ever. “Master Leonardo found it. The name is Benedetto: his is the only name in Santa Maria with that numerical value.”

Mario explained. According to the Ars Memoriae, the number of any given name is obtained by summing up the value attributed to each of its letters. Taking into account that the Latin alphabet lacked the letters J, U, W, Y and Z, the table of correspondences read as follows:

“Benedetto” adds up to 86, a number which is then reduced to 14 by adding up 8 plus 6, and further to 5 by adding 1 plus 4. As Mario pointed out to me, there is also a second 14 (therefore a second 5) in the Priestess’s card: the 14 coils of the woman’s belt. Mario added that Leonardo had thought this an unexpected number, since the logical one would have been 13, corresponding to the 13 wounds Christ received on the Cross.

But I was only half listening.

Benedetto?

I suppose that I blanched, because Mario stopped talking and looked at me closely.

Benedetto? The monk with a single eye, like the knot in the priestess’s belt?

The irony of the situation struck me in full.

How had I not seen it earlier? How had I not realized that the one-eyed monk, the Father Prior’s confidant, had been granted access to all the monastery’s secrets and was the only one sufficiently wrathful to attack Leonardo da Vinci? The revelation fitted like a glove the profile I had already drawn of the Soothsayer who, I had guessed, was a renegade disciple of the Master. Was not his face depicted in the Cenacolo under the guise of the Apostle Thomas, an irrefutable proof of his old allegiance to Leonardo’s organization?

As I embraced Mario I wondered whom I would pursue first: Father Alessandro’s murderer, or the members of this lost community of heretical Christians.

44

Brother Benedetto spat another gob of blood into the basin.

He looked terribly ill.

Ever since he had lain for hours under the open sky in the clearing of Santo Stefano, unconscious and barefooted, the one-eyed monk had not regained his normal breathing. He coughed painfully, and his clogged lungs made it difficult for him even to move.

The Father Prior ordered that he be taken to the hospital. There he was put to bed, isolated from the other patients and treated with aromatic vapors, daily bleedings and prayers for his speedy recovery. But Brother Benedetto was unable to sleep. His temperature rose inexorably and everyone feared for his life.

The last day of the month of January, as he lay there exhausted, the most wrathful of the monks of Santa Maria begged to be given Extreme Unction. He had spent the afternoon delirious, muttering unintelligible phrases in foreign tongues and haranguing his brethren to set fire to the refectory if they wanted to save their souls.

Father Nicola Zessati, a dean with half a century of service to the community and an old friend of Benedetto’s, anointed him with the holy oil. First, he asked the dying man for his confession, but Brother Benedetto refused to say a single word about the events at Santo Stefano. All efforts to dissuade him failed. Neither Father Zessati nor the Father Prior succeeded in convincing him to reveal my whereabouts or the names of the men who had assaulted us.

Those were days of deep confusion. As strange as it might seem, neither was Brother Giorgio of much use. The old man, his hands bitten by the cold and suffering from congestion, barely remembered the mysterious black monks that had come out to meet us. He was nearsighted and his age betrayed him, so that when he told the Father Prior that Benedetto had attacked someone with a knife, he was deemed to be suffering from delusions and was put to bed in the same wing of the hospital as the one-eyed brother, where he quickly recovered.

My third companion, Brother Mauro, was left speechless for several days. His youth had protected him from the cold, but since his return to Santa Maria no one had seen him leave his cell. Those who paid him a visit were horrified by his demented look. Mauro barely ate anything and seemed unable to follow a conversation. He appeared to have simply lost his mind.

It was Brother Giorgio who warned the Father Prior that Brother Benedetto was quickly fading. This was on Tuesday, January thirty-first. The old man found the Father Prior in the refectory with Master Leonardo, going over the latest progress in the Cenacolo.

After the burial of Donna Beatrice and my own disappearance, Leonardo had gone back to his work with renewed energy. Suddenly, it was as if he felt a pressing urge to finish his work. That very day he had given the last touches to the youthful face of Saint John, and was proudly showing it off to the Father Prior, who was scrutinizing it warily.

The apostle looked magnificent. A long blond mane fell over his shoulders, his half-closed eyes had a languid look, and his head was leaning to his right in an attitude of submission. Light poured from his face: a supernatural, magical radiance that suggested to the viewer a state of contemplation and a mystical life.

“I’ve been told that you used a young girl as your model.”

The Father Prior’s reproach was the first thing Brother Giorgio heard upon entering. He did not, however, see the Master smile.