The Malice of Fortune (29 page)

From among the clutter of his unfinished prodigies, Leonardo shortly produced one of the few items he had presumably completed:
his
mappa
of Imola, which Damiata had described to me in some detail. I assumed the duke had returned it, evidently to assist Leonardo’s investigation. And I must confess that when I saw this map for myself, the sense of looking down on the earth like a bird nearly made my jaw drop.

Leonardo at once covered the
mappa
with a sheet of tracing paper that just as quickly engaged my interest: the square, circle, and square he had already drawn upon it in red chalk were the same figures of geometry he had displayed to Damiata. This drawing perfectly matched the
mappa
beneath it, the circle on the tracing paper and the circle of the wind rose being exactly the same diameter, although the tracing tissue itself was larger than the
mappa
.

“Tommaso,” Leonardo bid his assistant, who had come upstairs on my heels. With Tommaso at his side, the maestro lifted the sheet of tracing paper, again exposing the map. “Indicate where they were found. As best you know.”

“This was the first.” Tommaso stuck his finger upon the empty little square at the center of the map. This was the Piazza Maggiore, Imola’s main square.

“Yes, the buttock and femur,” Leonardo said, certainly meaning the considerable haunch I had seen in his anatomist’s vat.

“The lower leg was here.” The alchemist pointed to the miniature street in front of what was recognizably, despite its tiny scale, the Dominican church; in the city of Imola as it existed in our world, this building was located several hundred
braccia
north and east of the Piazza Maggiore. “I am told the arm was here”—he pointed just outside the Appian Gate, several hundred
braccia
directly east of the Piazza Maggiore.

Each time Tommaso indicated a location, Leonardo placed the tracing tissue back over his map, marked this spot with a single point and wrote beside it the name of the body part that had been found there. This procedure went on, seven in all: The armless half-torso was found outside the Faenza Gate, just to its east, between the mill canal and the city wall. The second buttock and thigh were found on the other side of the Santerno River, south of the city, at the very edge
of the big circle, or wind rose, drawn upon Leonardo’s map; the lower leg outside this circle, in the hills southwest of the city.

Here I was prompted to ask, “Were these parts buried or found on the surface?” I presumed the latter.

“They were exposed.” Having finished marking the locations indicated by Tommaso, Leonardo had taken up a straightedge and was busily connecting various points. He did not actually inscribe chalk lines between them but one could see that he was drawing geometric figures in his head, composing triangles and various other polygons.

“Yet animals did not take these exposed body parts,” I remarked.

“We have sent word among the rustics that we will pay them if they discover such things and do not disturb them or allow animals to scavenge them. As it is, we have yet to collect them all.”

I calculated my own ghastly inventory: given the new division of the bodies into eighths, nine fragments were still missing. Not to mention the heads.

Leonardo had begun to converse with himself again, moving his measuring stick about almost as if it were the bow of a
lira da braccio
. Yet again and again he shook his head, as if he could not find the right notes.

At last I said, “Maestro, possibly in this instance there is no figure of geometry, in fact no
disegno
at all.”

“Having gone to such pains to create this device”—Leonardo gestured at his tracing paper—“why would he abandon his work?” Evidently the maestro who had left so many of his own works unfinished did not see the irony of his question.

“Perhaps this man intended the
disegno
to be absent,” I said, “because he is varying his methods.”

Still bowed over his tracing, Leonardo glanced back at me. “He has varied his methods only in the dismemberment and disposition of the bodies. He varies between inhuming the remains and leaving them exposed. And now he has divided the limbs in a fashion to provide a greater number of points for his constructions. But the
disegno
is here. We presently cannot see it.”

I noted to myself the similar natures of Leonardo and the murderer,
in that both could regard butchered limbs as “points” for some figure of geometry. “Certainly he intends that we expect some new
disegno
,” I said. “But perhaps in this instance his intention is to confound us by not meeting that expectation.”

“His intention is to create a riddle employing figures of geometry.”

“To what end, Maestro?”

“That would be speculation.”

“It is his intention to engage us. He does not want us to lose interest or to find his
disegno
predictable. Hence he has varied his methods by not creating a figure of geometry, where one is expected.” I put my finger to the tracing. “In truth, we do not need to understand these figures of geometry if we can instead discover the necessity that has led this man to create them. What is the necessity in all this?”

Leonardo shook his head so vehemently that his gray curls swept about. “Why must we have this endless orgy of speculation! Let us return to the terra firma of
esperienza
!”

Here the maestro again searched among his tables. Half the things strewn upon them were of no use to his art or science, but instead belonged in a dry goods
speziale
: napkins and bed linens; terra-cotta pots full of brazier charcoal; a box overflowing with nails. And glass jars containing all manner of things, from glistening mercury to pearls of rice; sorting among these, the maestro finally selected one and returned to my side. He began to pluck from the jar a succession of dried black beans, placing them one by one on his tracing, at the points indicating where body parts had been found.

Yet Leonardo’s beans only better illustrated the terrible perfection in the distribution of the first two bodies and the anarchy in the placement of the most recent remains. In his frustration he dumped the entire jar on his tracing paper, crying out, “There is more here! The
disegno
is in relation to that which has preceded it as the sphere within a cylinder is to the planar construction by which Archimedes … Where the base is the greatest circle in a sphere … the surface together with its base is three halves … But I cannot see it. The points are not complete.” He extended his great index finger and gently tapped the beans in a random sequence, as if he were a fool who intended to count each
one. “Archimedes. I must read my Archimedes.” Suddenly he swept the beans aside. “Tommaso! We have to prepare for our journey. We have much to do. Much, much to do …”

“Journey?” This word struck me like a great stone dropped from a mason’s crane; I was all the more stunned because I should have known at once, after witnessing the activity on the street. I could only croak, “Where is the duke now?”

“He departed for Cesena this morning,” Leonardo said absently. “In company with the entire army. Owing to the urgency of this matter, the duke has instructed us to complete our
esperienza
. But we must leave here tomorrow.”

Like Job sitting in the ashes, I stared at Leonardo’s tracing paper, still dotted with a few remaining beans. The departure of Valentino and his army could only mean that the treaty negotiations had been all but concluded; the duke and his
condottieri
would meet at Cesena or somewhere to the south, to seal their accord and join their armies in a common purpose—which would almost certainly be the conquest of Florence. And I was bound by my government’s instructions, reiterated to me in my most recent dispatch from the Palazzo della Signoria: to follow Duke Valentino wherever he went, regardless of his fate, or mine. I, too, had much to do, if I hoped to catch up with the duke and his army.

I had but one remaining stone to hurl at malignant Fortune. “Maestro, when you see His Excellency the duke, you must tell him there is a book, presently possessed by the same
gioca
of witches whose bodies you have examined in your cellar, that will connect the
condottieri
to his brother’s murder. Damiata and I both saw it on the
pianura
, a moment before she disappeared and I was struck senseless by the same masked Devil’s apprentice your own Giacomo witnessed. I believe that this book and possibly Damiata herself are still out on the
pianura
. The duke could dispatch horsemen from Cesena to conduct a search.” In truth only a canvass of this sort, conducted by a great company of swift-moving cavalry, was likely to bear result.

Leonardo looked up at me and nodded. He began to pace among his tables like a gray lion, pressing his hands to his temples, pushing
back his mane as if he wanted to shear it off entirely.
“Dimmi!”
Leonardo spit out the
d
as if he were an angry cat, the rest of the word a strange whine. “
Dimmi
!
Dimmi
!” Tell me! Tell me!

I looked to Tommaso, who quickly shook his head. Having said all I could until I saw the duke myself in Cesena, I went to the door but paused at the threshold.

Glancing back at the disordered studio, I wondered if Leonardo’s panoply of unfinished marvels had also become a metaphor of a yet more ambitious undertaking, which would in similar fashion never see completion: Valentino’s new Italy, a vision the duke had evidently surrendered to the designs of the
condottieri
.

CHAPTER
5

W
hoever wishes to see what is to be, should consider what has been
.

Early the next morning I was able to find a courier who needed a horse delivered to Cesena, which lies thirty miles south of Imola on the Via Emilia. This animal was scarcely a blessing; it was poorly schooled, difficult to handle, and finding fodder for it slowed my progress considerably. A journey I would ordinarily have completed in half a day required three.

I shared my misery with the great army of priests, monks, prostitutes, thieves, peasants, peddlers, and opportunists of every stripe that had followed Valentino’s army throughout the Romagna campaign. Whether on foot or bowing the backs of pitiful starving mules and oxen, day and night all proceeded almost single file along the Via Emilia, for to go where the snow had not been trampled was to quickly come to a halt.

At Cesena, at last I received a grain of good news: Valentino and his army had stopped there, apparently for a stay of some length. Certainly Cesena was capable of sustaining the army for a little while, as well as being defensible; it is a walled city much like Imola and of similar size, but the principal fortress is a true citadel, perched atop a steeply sloped summit, with the city itself directly at its foot. If Valentino were to regret his accord with his brother’s murderers prior to the irrevocable union of their forces, he would find Cesena a suitable redoubt.

Like the surrounding countryside, the city had been taken over by Valentino’s soldiers, who were billeted everywhere. But by various devices I was able to find a room in a large palazzo near the central piazza. The narcotic unguent that had been smeared on my flesh had evidently leached into my blood, afflicting me with weakness and fevers; for the next few days, as I attempted to recover from these ills, I struggled to find food and charcoal and attend to my dispatches, this requiring that I begin to reliably ascertain the strength of Valentino’s forces. I gravely feared that the duke’s troops, a great multitude to the Cesenate who had to lodge them, were nevertheless considerably outnumbered by the combined forces of the
condottieri
. Hence I saw nothing to relieve my suspicion that Valentino was marching south to consummate a peace that more resembled a surrender. My appeals to Agapito for an audience with the duke, in which I might have raised the conjoined fates of both Damiata and Florence, had fallen on resolutely deaf ears, this all the more evidence that Valentino was no longer concerned for either.

As much as I was plagued by the demands of each day, each night found me host to yet more troubling desires. Like Petrarch’s Laura, whose distance—and death—only strengthened the poet’s attachment, my memories of Damiata bound me more desperately to her as the days passed without word. At night she came to me as a succubus, sometimes as feverish as I, her flesh like a bed warmer, at other times her eyelids rimmed with frost and her arms as cold as a corpse.

Each time, I awakened with an almost unbearable regret, believing I had abandoned Damiata out on the
pianura
. In truth, I mourned for her as if my soul knew she was dead. It was as though I were a Ginevra degli Amieri of a far less fortunate sort, waking to discover that I had escaped death, only to find myself in a darkened tomb that would remain forever sealed.