The Serpent and the Pearl

  He caught it with a start of surprise. A clean apron, exactly like those worn by the other apprentices. “Signorina?”

  “You’re years behind the other apprentices, and you’ll find it hard to catch up,” I warned. “They all started at nine or ten, as is proper.” And how I was going to square this with Marco, I really didn’t know. Much less Madonna Adriana, who would certainly want to see an apprentice fee . . . but my red-haired pot-boy had that great rarity, a cook’s nose. A better one even than mine, I would guess, and I wasn’t about to let it go to waste.

  “Signorina,” he stammered, still gazing in shock at the apron.

  “Don’t stand there gawking, boy! Put that apron on. Those spices you sniffed out for me; I’ll wager you don’t know their uses or their proportions.”

  His face glowed like a torch. “No, signorina.”

  “Then get over here and let me teach you. Four and a half parts cinnamon to one part each of ginger and nutmeg, two parts cloves, and just a pinch of grains of paradise . . .”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Either Caesar, or nothing.

  —PERSONAL MOTTO OF CESARE BORGIA

  Leonello

  I heard the sharp call from the courtyard clear up in the loggia. “Juan!” But I didn’t turn my head at the shout. I stood in my shirtsleeves, one hand poised at my side, eyes closed, breathing evenly. I could feel the tiles through my boots, baking reflected heat up at the top of the palazzo. The sun fell warm on my arm from the open arches of the loggia on my left, but the shade on the other arm was no cooler.

  “Juan!” The voice came again, closer, followed by a rattle of Catalan. I ignored it, taking a breath instead and then letting it out halfway. I opened my eyes, flicked a Toledo blade from my cuff, and sent it winging down to its target: a side of beef ribs hanging from the open arch at the other end of the loggia.

  I was smiling even before I’d trotted the length of the loggia to check my throw. The blade had sunk true, I could feel it—right between the third and fourth ribs, up to the hilt. On a man, it would have pierced something vital.

  I heard the doors yank open behind me, followed by a furious swish of robes. “Little man,” a clipped voice greeted me. “Have you seen my fool of a brother?”

  “I fear I have not, Your Excellency.” I turned to make a bow to Cesare Borgia, Archbishop of Valencia. “The Duke of Gandia travels in such a crowd, it is impossible to miss him.” A pack of swaggering young men like himself, gaudily dressed, forever shoving and laughing like a pack of high-spirited, high-bred colts overdue for gelding. “He was sniffing about yesterday,” I added. “There’s a maid of Madonna Adriana’s he fancies.”

  “He fancies anything female with a heart that beats,” Cesare said shortly. “And no doubt if pressed he’d compromise on the heart. Nor would I rule out sheep.”

  “Perhaps.” I studied the young Archbishop—still a few months from eighteen, but rumor around the wine shops and betting touts of Rome had it that he was poised for a cardinalate. Unlike his brother, Cesare Borgia did not surround himself with the retinue of servants, priests, hangers-on, and retainers normally due one of his rank. He was alone now save for his colorless and expressionless guardsman Michelotto, who had already faded back against the doors like a statue as his master came to my side in a restless movement. The young Archbishop’s dark narrow face was stone-set above his purple robes, and his hands had stilled in a way I’d come to recognize. In the year I’d watched the Pope’s children, I had come to observe that while they all might have the same charming smile in happiness, in anger they spanned all possible variations. Lucrezia never angered at anything, Juan raged and threw tantrums, Joffre wilted into sulkiness—and Cesare grew very, very still. “Some trouble, Your Excellency?” I said neutrally.

  He ignored my question, folding his arms across his chest. “What’s that?” He jerked his chin at the side of beef, swaying from side to side in the light summer breeze as it hung in the arch of the loggia.

  “Practice.” I stood on tiptoe to jerk out my knife from between the two ribs. “No killers have made any attempts on Madonna Giulia or Madonna Lucrezia as yet, but that doesn’t mean one won’t turn up tomorrow. I take an hour or two up here each day, practicing throws.” Besides the practice, it was an hour or two of silence—precious in the ever-busy seraglio with its chattering servants, fluttery women, and giggling children.

  Cesare Borgia assessed my hanging target, buzzing with flies in the heat and dripping old blood from a dozen previous hits. “You could not practice on a target board?”

  “Target boards don’t have ribs, Your Excellency. Blades glance off bone, so it’s good to practice on something with a skeleton.” Besides, I’d appropriated the side of beef from the kitchens behind that prickly cook’s back (or rather, I’d suborned a burly manservant to appropriate it for me), and later when returning it I’d have the pleasure of watching her fly into a rage. She looked almost pretty when she yelled.

  “Why such a short distance?” The Archbishop outpaced me as I turned for the other end of the loggia again—perhaps twenty steps. “Michelotto can put a knife through a man’s eye at twice this range. Can’t you, Michelotto?”

  A grunt from the doors. For Michelotto, that was lengthy conversation.

  “I don’t need to put a knife through a man’s eye at twice this range.” Such a distance was also near impossible for my shorter arms, but I was damned if I’d say so. “Any assassin who gets past all the guards on his way to Madonna Giulia will have gotten very close indeed. My kills are far more likely to be made up close.”

  “An hour’s practice every day for such a short distance?” Cesare Borgia sounded faintly scornful. “How hard could it be?”

  I offered him the longest of my Toledo blades.

  He hefted it a moment, giving an easy flip to test the balance, then squinted one eye shut as he measured the distance. He let fly, and swore as the knife glanced off at an angle and clattered to the tiles.

  I tilted a shoulder at him. “Try again.”

  He waved my second blade off. “I see what you mean about ribs, little man.” He watched instead with hands clasped behind him as I threw my remaining blades one by one, a rhythm I found as easy and soothing as my own heartbeat. “How much would I have to throw until I could match you?”

  “Every day.” The finger blade from my cuff went humming, then sank between the first and second ribs. “With large targets and small ones.” The blade from my other cuff hit the space between the second and third ribs. “In the day, and in the dark.” The blade from my boot top; third and fourth rib. “In quiet, and in noise.” My last blade glanced off, and I grimaced. “Like any skill, one has to work at it.”

  “Practice on my brother,” Cesare Borgia muttered. “I’ll hang him upside down for you and you can prickle him all you like.”

  Muttered asides of a personal nature, when spoken from a nobleman to a dwarf, do not count as conversation and are best treated as though unheard. “I’ve not seen the Duke of Gandia since yesterday,” I said instead. “I imagine you might find him in a brothel. Sowing his oats before the wedding.” The Pope had not been content with one child illustriously settled in matrimony—Juan Borgia had been found a match of his own, a Spanish princess who was cousin to King Ferdinand himself, and the only good thing I could see about the whole business was that the Duke of Gandia would sail to Spain to claim both his bride and his duchy, and thus spare us another gilded excrescence of a wedding here in Rome.

  “My brother had better stir himself from his whores, because I need the papal troops and my father will expect Juan to head them,” the Archbishop of Valencia said shortly, and turned to go in a flutter of purple.

  “Some trouble in the city, Your Excellency?”

  He hesitated, but answered me. “Tell Madonna Adriana to keep my sister close inside today. There’s a crowd of fools gathering in the Borgo—a girl staked out in a tavern like Christ on the cross, they say, and now everyone thinks
the Jews are making devil sacrifices.”

  The day was hot, but I felt a small chill trace the length of my crooked back. “Staked?” I said, and was surprised at my voice’s evenness.

  “A tavern maid raped on a table, with her throat slit. Hands staked out wide, a knife through each palm.” Cesare held his arms wide, a dark Christ in ecclesiastical robes. “It wouldn’t matter, normally. Whores and tavern maids die every day. But now we have the Spanish Jews to blame, so suddenly it must be a pagan sacrifice.”

  “Not to mention that little fruit seller who died in the market not long ago,” I added. “One hears she died the same way. Staked and throat-slit.”

  Cesare eyed me, dark eyes curious. “What’s it to you, Messer Leonello?”

  “Nothing at all.” I began lacing up the front of my doublet. “Though I doubt it was the Jews. They’re too grateful to be safe out of Spain to be stirring up trouble here.”

  “Of course it wasn’t the Jews,” Cesare snorted. “But you’ll tell my sister and that golden-haired giggler of my father’s to stay close to home. I won’t have them running afoul of any uneasy crowds.” He ran a hand over the dent in his auburn hair that was the faintest possible nod to a clerical tonsure. “If Juan can’t be roused from his brothels, I’ll take the papal troops, see the girl disposed of, and send any grumblers home with cracked skulls.”

  “That’s what you intended to do all along, Your Excellency,” I told him. “You’d rather disperse an incipient mob yourself and get the credit with His Holiness. You’re only here looking for the Duke of Gandia so you can tell the Pope you did your best to find him.”

  Cesare Borgia gave a wintry half smile. “Clever little lion man,” he said. “What other clever thoughts do you have in that oversized head of yours?”

  I’m thinking your brother Juan might have murdered that girl in the Borgo, I almost said. And before her a fruit-seller named Eleonora, and a girl named Anna. Juan Borgia’s name had come easily to mind once I began contemplating my masked murderer again, after Carmelina told me of her fruit-seller friend’s death. After all, what did I know about the man I sought? I knew he was a young man from within the Borgia household, gone slumming in the common quarters and splashing money about, trailing a guardsman and a steward appointed to keep him out of trouble. That certainly fit the arrogant young Duke of Gandia. But as neatly as it fit, I had my doubts. Whoever had staked those girls down was exercising a lust far darker and stranger than mere commonplace rape, and Juan Borgia’s lusts were of the extremely ordinary variety. I didn’t think he had the imagination for dark ritual murder. Or the patience, or the brains . . .

  “You’ve gone a long way away, little lion man,” Cesare Borgia observed.

  If not Juan, who? One of his swaggering, violent young friends, perhaps—

  A yell from the door interrupted my thoughts. “Leonello!” A furious female voice shattered the heat. “What in the name of Santa Marta are you doing to my side of beef!”

  “Signorina Cuoca,” I greeted the tall figure with the wrathful black-browed face. “How untimely.”

  “That was for tonight’s cena!” Carmelina shouted, pointing at my large and fly-specked target. “It’s supposed to be going on a spit!”

  “Think of it as pre-spitted, for your convenience.” I held up my hands, modest. “No need to thank me.”

  She muttered some Venetian curse and began to storm past, then noticed the lounging figure of Cesare Borgia and his guardsman. “Your Excellency,” she muttered, and dropped a belated curtsy.

  “Not at all.” He waved her up with a rare grin. “Better than a play. Do you require rescuing, Messer Leonello?”

  “I do apologize,” she began, eyes lowered, but Cesare shrugged her apologies aside as well. One last lazy salute to me, and he was gone as though whisked from a stage by pulleys, Michelotto ghosting behind him.

  Carmelina had already hastened to look at my makeshift target. “Mucked and torn to pieces, look at that hide! Pierced through a hundred times at least, it will never hold its juices now—” But I stood quite still now that Cesare was gone, tapping the toe of my boot against a crack in the tile. Tap tap tap.

  Another woman found staked to a table, with two knives through her palms. Anna first. Then the fruit seller in the market, though I had been able to discover very little about her. And now this one.

  One, I remembered thinking before, might be an accident. Two was a coincidence. But three?

  Anna’s masked killer flickered again before my eyes. Whoever he was.

  I turned and made for the hanging carcass where Carmelina was fussing. The trips back and forth along the length of the loggia over my hour of practicing had made my cramped muscles ache. I longed to lapse into the rapid spraddle that saved my bones their pains, but not when there were any other eyes to see me. Besides, Carmelina Mangano had a tart prettiness when she was shouting at me like this, so for her I would walk tall.

  Not to mention that I had one or two questions I wished to ask her. Better to sweeten her for once, rather than ruffle her feathers.

  “I do apologize for spoiling your spit-roasted beef, Signorina Cuoca.” Surveying the side of ox ribs. “But don’t you have a word of praise for my skill? Eight of ten in a line up the ladder of ribs! You won’t see that every day.”

  “And you won’t see another day at all if you keep raiding my kitchens for targets.” She began yanking the blades out from between the ox ribs and tossing them at me.

  “So, another girl dead.” I swiped the blades clean one at a time as she shoved them at me. “Like that fruit seller friend of yours. What was her name?” I knew her name perfectly well.

  “Eleonora.” Carmelina crossed herself. “She wasn’t really a friend. We just traded the odd word or two at market. But she knew I’d toss out any peach that was even a little bruised, so she always saved the pick of the fruit for me . . .”

  “And now another girl.” I leaned against the balustrade. “Do you think the Jews are to blame?”

  “More likely she took the wrong man home, whoever she was. That’s why women die. Drunken men, not Jews.” Carmelina yanked the last of my little knives free. “And I’ll wager most of those Spanish Jews are too tired and dusty to spend much time on satanic sacrifices.”

  “You seem sympathetic to our newest batch of exiles, my dear lady.” A great many exiles; Jews fleeing Spain from the attentions of Torquemada. What Signorina Cuoca was fleeing, I had no idea. Though I found that almost as interesting as the pattern I was starting to see around Anna and Eleonora and now this new girl. This dead girl.

  “I had a friend who died last year much like your friend Eleonora.” I laid all ten of my knives out on the stone balustrade, precisely arrayed from biggest to smallest. “I doubt anyone bothered to blame the Jews on her account. She was simply carted off and forgotten. Most whores like her and your Eleonora are.”

  “Who says she was a whore?” Carmelina waved flies away from the carcass with her apron. “Men are quick to throw that word about. A girl takes a man home now and then, and if he leaves her a coin or two . . .”

  “Any family to mourn her?” I polished a speck of ox blood off my biggest knife. “A husband?”

  “No.”

  Not for Anna either.

  Patterns. Had Cesare Borgia brought this latest murder up to me deliberately, knowing as he did that Anna’s murder had been the event that brought me into his orbit? But I’d never told him how Anna died, or even her name—not even in our first probing interview.

  I hitched myself up to sit on the stone balustrade beside my knives, and Carmelina put an automatic hand to my arm. “Careful, Messer Leonello—that’s a long drop.” Casting her eyes the long five stories down behind me.

  “Worrying for me?” I was nearly on an eye level with her now, which was precisely why I’d done it. “How kind.”

  “I could toss you off a loggia myself for what you did to my nice rack of beef,” she retorted. “Now, if you will excu
se me—”

  I captured her fingers before she could take them from my arm. “It’s you who should be careful, Signorina Cuoca. That’s three women I know of now who died the same way. I would be wary of strange men, if I were a woman like you.”

  “What do you mean, a woman like me?” She cocked her head, not pulling her hand away from mine quite yet. She had a scatter of new summer freckles, and her wiry arms below their rolled-up sleeves were scarred and practical. Her fingers were callused in mine, and a black curl had worked itself determinedly out of her scarf to lie against her brown neck.

  “A woman like you,” I repeated, holding her in my eyes. “More precisely, you are a woman like them. Low women, if you will forgive me. Two tavern maidservants and one fruit seller—working women. None of them whores, precisely—”

  “I am not a whore!” Tugging against my hand. “No woman in my position could afford to be. Do you know how kitchens talk when a woman gets a reputation for spreading her knees?”

  “Calm your feathers, Carmelina, I’ve no intention of insulting you—or the women who died. As you say, whore is a word that comes quick to men’s lips.” I gave a squeeze of her hand in apology. “These are women, rather, who met a great many men in the course of their work. Women who would not be missed once they were dead. Women without families of note. Women like you.”

  Were there other women, dead the same way in the year between Anna and Eleonora the fruit seller? I had not heard of any such thing, but I had not been looking. Were there more than three?

  Carmelina shivered a little, crossing herself. “God rest their souls,” she said soberly, and seemed to have forgotten her other hand still lay in mine. Her wariness of me had abated—a trick I knew well how to play. Everyone finds it easy to forget that a dwarf can be a threat. Her fingers were warm and rough in mine; she smelled of the fresh bread they must have been baking in the kitchens this afternoon, and I thought of tugging her to sit beside me on the balustrade. I could make her forget her shivers for the dead fruit-seller, make her laugh, flatter her and flirt with her until the moment came when I could lean in and snatch a kiss. I did like tall women. They even liked me, when I made an effort. Carmelina might come to like me, too.