Of Love and Evil (7 page)

“We should go to Niccolò. We can talk of the ghost later.”

“Oh, but one thing first. I prayed with pride that first night. I know that I did.”

“We all do, my friend. It’s pride, is it not, to ask God for anything? And yet He tells us to ask. He tells us to ask as Solomon asked for wisdom.”

He drew back and that seemed to calm him. “As Solomon asked,” he whispered. “Yes. I did that. I told him I wanted to have all these many gifts, gifts of the spirit and the mind and the heart. But did I have the right to do it?”

“Come now,” I said. “Let’s go to your friend Niccolò.”

He paused as though listening for some distant sound. And we both realized the house was quiet, and had been for some time.

“Do you imagine the dybbuk has been listening?” he asked.

“Perhaps,” I said. “If he can make a sound, then he can hear a sound, isn’t that likely?”

“Oh, may the Lord bless you, I am so glad you came to me,” he said. “Let’s be going.”

He clutched my hand with both of his. He was a passionate man, a volatile man, and I realized how very different in spirit he was from those I’d visited on my last adventure, who for all their passion had not had his hot southern Mediterranean blood.

“You realize I don’t know your name?” he asked.

“Toby,” I said. “Now let’s go to see your patient. While I play the lute, I can listen and I can watch and I can see if in fact this man is being poisoned.”

“Oh, but that’s not possible.”

“I don’t mean by you, Vitale, I mean by someone else.”

“But I tell you, Toby, there is no one that does not love him,
no one that could bear to lose him. Therein lies the dreadful mystery.”

We found the same crowd in the street, but this time the Jews had been joined by some onlookers and some of the rougher sort and I didn’t like the look of it.

We pushed through without speaking a word, and as we made our way through the thick press of the alleyway, Vitale was whispering to me.

“Things are good here now for the Jews,” he said. “The Pope has a Jewish physician and he’s my friend, and there are Jewish scholars in demand everywhere. I think that every cardinal must have a Hebrew scholar on his staff. But that could change in an instant. If Niccolò dies, the Lord have mercy on me. With this dybbuk I will be accused not only of poison but of witchcraft.”

I nodded to this, but was mainly trying to make my way through the press of passersby, peddlers and beggars. The cookshops and taverns added their scents and swell to the narrow street.

But within minutes, we had arrived at the house of Signore Antonio, and were admitted at once through its huge iron gates.

I
MMEDIATELY WE ENTERED A HUGE COURTYARD, FILLED
with potted trees, arranged at random around a glittering fountain.

The bent and withered old man who opened the gate for us was shaking his head and very forlorn.

“He’s worse today, young Master,” he said, “and I fear for him, and his father has come downstairs, and will not leave the bedside. He waits for you now.”

“That’s good, Master Antonio is out of bed, that’s very good,” said Vitale immediately. He confided to me, “When Niccolò suffers, Antonio suffers. The man lives for his sons. He has his books, his papers, his work for me all the time, but without his sons, there’s nothing really for him.”

Together we went up a very broad and impressive stairway of shallow treads and polished stone. And then proceeded down a long gallery. There were spectacular wall hangings everywhere, tapestries of wandering princesses and gallant young men at the hunt, and great sections of the wall painted in brilliant pastoral frescoes. The work looked as fine to me as if it had been done by Michelangelo or Raphael, and for all I knew some of it had been done by their apprentices or students.

We passed now into a chain of antechambers, all with marble tiled floors and scatterings of Persian and Turkish carpets. Magnificent classical scenes of nymphs dancing in paradisal gardens adorned the bare walls. Only an occasional long table of polished wood stood in the center of a room. There were no other furnishings.

Finally the double doors were thrown open to a vast and ornate bedroom, darkened, except for the light that came in with us, and there lay Niccolò, obviously, pale and bright-eyed against a mound of linen pillows beneath a huge red-and-gold baldachin.

His hair was blond and full and matted to his damp forehead. In fact, he looked so feverish and so restless that I wanted to demand someone bathe his face immediately.

It was also plain to me that he was being poisoned. I could tell that his vision was blurred and his hands were trembling. For a moment he stared at us as if he couldn’t see us.

I had the sinking feeling that the poison had already reached the fatal level in his blood. I felt a slight panic.

Had Malchiah sent me here to know the bitterness of failure?

Beside the bed sat a venerable gentleman in a long burgundy velvet robe, with black stockings and slippers of jeweled leather. He had a full head of near-lustrous white hair, with a widow’s peak that gave him considerable distinction, and he brightened at the sight of Vitale. But he didn’t speak.

On the far side of the bed stood a man who seemed so deeply moved by all this that his eyes were wet with tears and his hands were shaking almost as badly as the patient’s hands were shaking.

I could see he bore some resemblance to the old man and to the young man in the bed, but something very different marked his appearance. He lacked the hairline for one thing,
and he also had larger and much darker blue eyes than either of the others, and whereas the old man expressed his concern in a devout manner, this young man seemed in the midst of breaking down.

Beautifully dressed in a gold-trimmed tunic with slashed sleeves and silk lining, he wore a sword at his hip, and he was clean shaven with short curly black hair.

All this I took in almost immediately. Vitale kissed the ring of the gentleman seated by the bed, and he said in a low voice,

“Signore Antonio, I am glad to see you downstairs, though sad that you must see your son like this.”

“Tell me, Vitale,” asked the old man. “What is the matter with him? How could a simple injury falling from a horse produce a condition so miserable as this?”

“This is what I mean to discover, Signore,” said Vitale. “I give you my heart as my pledge.”

“You once cured me when every Italian physician had given me up for dead,” said Signore Antonio. “I know that you can heal my son.”

The young man on the far side of the bed became all the more agitated. “Father, though it pains me to say it, we had best listen to the other doctors. I am in terrible fear. My brother lying here is not my brother.” The tears welled in his eyes.

“Yes, this diet of caviar I accept, Lodovico,” said the patient to the young man. “But Father, I have complete trust in Vitale just as you trusted in Vitale, and if I’m not to be cured, then it’s God’s Will.”

He narrowed his eyes as he looked at me. He was puzzled by me, and every word he spoke was an effort.

“A diet of caviar?” asked the father. “I don’t understand.”

“That my brother take caviar for the purity of it,” said the young man, Lodovico, “and that he take it three times a day and no other food. I went to the Pope’s physicians for their
advice on this. I am only doing what they have told me to do. He has taken this diet now since the fall.”

“Why was I not told this?” asked Vitale, glancing at me, as he spoke, then at Lodovico. “Caviar and nothing else? You are not satisfied with the food I recommended?”

I saw the anger flash in Lodovico’s eyes for an instant, then fade at once. He was too distraught apparently to be insulted.

“My brother was not doing well on such food,” he said with a half smile that quickly faded. “The Holy Father himself has sent the caviar,” he went on patiently to explain to the father, expressing an almost tender trust. “His predecessor swore by it. And he lived well and was hearty and it gave him strength.”

“No insult to His Holiness,” said Vitale quickly, “and it’s kind of him to send this caviar, of course. But I’ve never heard of anything so strange.”

He glanced meaningfully at me, but I doubt anyone else saw it.

Niccolò tried to sit up on his elbows and then sat back, too weak, but still determined to speak.

“I don’t mind it, Vitale. It has some taste to it and it seems I can taste nothing else.” He sighed rather than spoke, and then he murmured, “It burns my eyes, however. But then probably any other food would do as much.”

It burns my eyes.

My mind was mulling over this uneasily. No one had the slightest notion of course that I was a man who’d concocted poisons, disguised poisons and knew how to give them, and if ever there was a food that could mask a poison it was pure black caviar, because you could slip just about anything into it in this world.

“Vitale,” the patient asked. “Who is this man who’s come with you?” He looked up at me. “Why are you here?” It was a struggle for him to get these words out of his mouth.

And finally, much to my relief, a servant woman appeared with a basin of water, and applied a cold rag to his head. She wiped some of the sweat from his cheeks. He was annoyed by it and motioned for her to stop, but the old man directed her to go on.

“I’ve brought this man to play the lute for you,” explained Vitale. “You know how music has always soothed you. He’ll play softly, nothing that agitates you.”

“Oh, yes,” said Niccolò settling back on the pillow. “That is a kind thing indeed.”

“The rumor is in the street that you hired this man to play for the demon in your house,” said Lodovico suddenly. Again he looked to be on the verge of tears. “Is that what you did? And you lie about it now, you say this as a ruse?”

Vitale was shocked.

“Lodovico, stop,” said the father. “There is no demon in that house. And never have I heard you speak to Vitale like this. This is the man who nursed me back to health when every doctor in Padua, where there are indeed more doctors than anywhere else in Italy, had given me up for dead.”

“Oh, but Father, there is an evil spirit in that house,” said Lodovico. “All the Jews know it. They have a name for it.”

“Dybbuk,” said Vitale wearily, and a bit fearlessly for a man who had a ghost in his house.

“This man’s been plagued by this dybbuk since you gave him the keys,” Lodovico went on. “And it was only after this dybbuk took up residence and started breaking windows in the dead of night that Vitale’s skills as a physician have disintegrated before our very eyes.”

“Disintegrated?” Vitale was stunned. “Who says my skills are disintegrated? Lodovico, this is a lie!” He was hurt, confused.

“But the Jewish patients won’t come to you, will they?”
asked Lodovico. Suddenly, he changed his tone. “Vitale, my friend, for the love of my brother, tell the truth.”

Vitale was stymied. But Niccolò only looked at him trustingly and lovingly, and the old man was thoughtful and not quick to say anything at all.

“The Jews have told us this themselves,” said Lodovico. “Three times they’ve tried to drive this dybbuk from your house. This dybbuk is in your study, in the room where you keep your medicines, this dybbuk is in every corner of your house and in every corner perhaps of your mind!”

The young man was working himself into a frenzy.

“No, you must not say those things,” said Niccolò in a loud voice. Vainly he tried again to raise himself on his elbows. “It’s not his doing that I’m ill. Do you think every man who takes a fever and dies of it does so because there’s a demon in a house in the same street? Stop saying such things.”

“Quiet, my son, quiet,” said the old man. He laid his hands on his son and tried to force him back against the pillow. “And remember, my sons, the house in question is mine. Therefore the demon, or the dybbuk as the Jews call it, must certainly belong to me. I must go to the house and confront this awesome spirit who routs exorcists both Jewish and Roman. I must see this spirit with my own eyes.”

“Father, I beg you, don’t do that!” said Lodovico. “Vitale isn’t telling you of the violence of this spirit. Every Jewish doctor who’s come here has told us. It hurls things and breaks things. It stomps its feet.”

“Oh, nonsense,” said the father. “I believe in illness and I believe in cures for it. But in spirits? Spirits who hurl things? This I’ll have to see with my own eyes. It’s enough for me that Vitale is here with Niccolò.”

“Yes, Father,” said Niccolò, “and this is enough for me.
Lodovico, you’ve always loved Vitale,” he said to his brother, “the same as I have. The three of us, we’ve been friends since Montpellier. Father, don’t listen to these things.”

“I’m not listening, my son,” said the father, but the father was now carefully observing his son, because the more the son protested, the sicker he looked.

Lodovico knelt down beside the bed and wept with his forehead on his arm. “Niccolò, I would do anything in my power to see you cured of this,” he said, though it was difficult to understand him through his tears. “I love Vitale. I always have. But the other doctors, they say he’s bewitched.”

“Stop, Lodovico,” said the father. “You alarm your brother. Vitale, look at my son. Examine him again. That’s why you’ve come.”

Vitale was watching all of this keenly, and so was I. I couldn’t detect the poison by any scent in the room, but that meant nothing. I knew any number of poisons, which slipped into caviar would do the trick. One thing was clear, however. The patient still had considerable strength.

“Vitale, sit with me,” said the patient. “Stay with me today. The worst thoughts have been coming to me. I see myself dead and buried.”

“Don’t say this, my son,” said the father.

Lodovico was past all comfort.

“Brother, I don’t know what life means without you,” he said tenderly. “Don’t make me contemplate it. The first thing I remember is your standing at the foot of my cradle. For me, as well as for Father, you must get well.”

“All of you, leave us, please,” said Vitale. “Signore, you trust me here as you always have. I want to examine the patient, and you, Toby, take a place there”—he pointed to the far corner—“and play softly to still Niccolò’s nerves.”