Dave Duncan - The Alchemists pursuit

"You will understand," he remarked as he began weighing the coins, "that I cannot furnish you with a receipt?"

I pulled out the chair on my side of the table. "Of course we must trust each other. Let there be honor among thieves."

He showed his teeth in a satisfied leer at the balance. "Excellent, one grain over. You are generous." He dropped the coins in a bag and hung it on his belt. He returned my money pouch.

Only then did he pull out his chair and sit down. Reaching under the table, he produced a document folder, a large sheet of heavy paper with its corners folded over to make an envelope, tied up with ribbon. I could see right away from the older creases and dust marks that the package had been originally folded around much thicker contents. It had been plundered, perhaps quite recently.

Sciara held it close to one of the lamps and scanned the writing on the outside. "Sier Giovanni… That's odd. These usually begin with the original report to the chiefs of the Ten… The chiefs' decision… a special meeting of the Three… Bless my soul, Their Excellencies met on the morning of Christmas Day! I don't recall that ever happening."

"Why don't we just see what's in there?" I demanded, for the contents clearly could not match the length of the index.

"Oh, the impetuosity of youth!" Sciara murmured, but he set to work on the binding.

"Do documents often go missing from such files?"

"Not since Domine Spataforta became grand chancellor." He opened and spread out the cover, exposing about a dozen or so sheets of paper held together by ribbon. I could almost believe he was too embarrassed to meet my eye as he passed them across to me.

I moaned. "Sixty ducats a page? I hardly dare touch such valuable material." Few things taste more bitter than the knowledge that one has been played for a dupe. Sciara must be enjoying himself enormously, remembering past slights. I began at the back, where the earliest documents should be.

The first was a report: Testimony of His Excellency, NH Giovanni Gradenigo, member of the Council of Three. Clearly he had made a formal report to his brother inquisitors, and the secretary had written it as if he were any ordinary witness. The man who had summoned me to his deathbed was about to speak to me from the grave.

Gradenigo had been present in the dark and crowded atrium and was apparently quite close when Gentile Michiel was stabbed. His first warning had been a woman's screams, followed by clamor from many throats. He had fought his way through the fleeing, panic-stricken mob, and it sounded as if he had been a large, or at least powerful, man. He found Gentile Michiel writhing on the floor, with donna Alina down there beside him, desperately trying to staunch the flow of blood. Counselor Foscari, the "red" among the Three, arrived moments later. Normally an investigation would work its way up through the chiefs of the Ten to the full Council, and only then to the Three. In this case the state inquisitors had been right on the spot. They had seen the blood first-hand. But its setting within the holy precincts of the Basilica had made this a highly unusual case from the beginning.

Either Pesaro or Foscari asked a question and the clerk had followed normal interrogation style:

Question: The witness was asked if he recognized anyone who was close when the murder was committed.

Answer: "No, there was complete confusion. People had fled in all directions. Donna Orio Michiel may be able to testify to that when she recovers, by God's grace. We must pray that others will come forward."

Then Agostino Foscari took up the story, backing up Gradenigo's version and going on to describe Michiel's death, still down on the floor, waiting for medical help to arrive; not that doctors could have done anything for such a wound.

Then came an exchange that hit me like a bolt of lightning.

Question: The witness was asked if he observed the murder weapon.

Answer: "I did. When we were certain that the victim had been gathered to the Father, and when poor donna Alina Orio had been escorted away, I watched Missier Grande remove the dagger from the corpse. He showed it to me and sier Giovanni."

Question: The witness was asked to describe the weapon.

Answer: "It's an ordinary straight dagger of landsknecht type, made in Germany. You could find a dozen of them for sale in the city. It's probably a century or so old and has recently been sharpened."

For a moment I sat amid the thunder of our case against donna Alina crashing to the ground in ruins. Jacopo Fauro's tale of the sack of Constantinople might be based on truth, but the khanjar dagger had absolutely nothing to do with his father's murder. Why had I trusted him to tell the truth even sometimes?

Without looking at Sciara, I forced my mind back to the work. The rest of that document told me nothing new. It ended at the bottom of the next page, in midsentence.

The next sheet was an account of the Michiel family as it had been at the time. Bernardo was married then, which I had not known, and Domenico had one child by his morganatic spouse, Isabetta Scorozini. Lucretzia and Fedele had already entered the cloister. Zorzi was dismissed with the single word giovane.

Then came a brief statement signed by Bernardo Michiel, written in the third person but almost certainly based on interrogation. As a bereaved patrician, he would have been treated with silk gloves. He described his illness on the crucial night, confirming everything he had told me and adding nothing new. The same went for statements by Domenico and donna Alina. Friar Fedele and Sister Lucretzia testified that they had been engaged in worship that Christmas Eve in the company of members of their respective orders. No doubt the inquisitors would have examined witnesses who could support the family members' alibis, but those records were missing, perhaps thrown away as unnecessary once the official verdict was reached.

They all, even Fedele, loyally supported Zorzi, dismissing the recent quarrel with his father as nothing new. Gentile had been threatening to disinherit the boy for years and had never carried through. The men all pointed out that his own record was far from perfect, despite the lofty standards he so hypocritically proclaimed.

There was nothing at all by Zorzi Michiel, the convicted murderer, and that silence screamed of wrongness.

I held out a hand. "May I look at that list of contents, please?"

The death's head smiled. "No. I promised only what was in the folder."

I silently consigned Sciara to Tartarus.

I was left with one last piece of paper. The note on the back explained that it had been deposited in the bocca di leone in the church of San Geminiano on December 27. It was brief:

To the noble Council of Ten-

I am a fallen woman, a sinner, but I will not defend a murderer. The man who stabbed Senator Michiel in the Basilica talks in his sleep and last night I heard him say he killed his father. He said so several times quite clearly, weeping. His name is Zorzi Michiel. He has a birthmark in the shape of a cat near his private parts, which is why he is called Honeycat. So may you know him.

I felt cold fingertips run down my back. I looked up quickly and caught the tail end of a smirk. Despite his denials, Sciara had known what I would find in the file. I held the paper up to the lamp, but it was cheap stuff with no watermark.

"The Republic maintains that its tribunals pay no heed to anonymous letters," I said.

He nodded. "That is correct."

"Correct that they say that is what they do, or correct that they do what they say?"

He favored me with one of his rotting-corpse smiles. "In practice, Their Excellencies do have certain stringent procedures for evaluating unsigned submittals. In the case of the Ten, an anonymous letter is examined by the three chiefs and the six ducal counselors sitting together, and only if those nine are unanimous is it brought before the full council, and the council must vote five-sixths in favor of considering it. Even after that, a four-fifths majority is needed before action can be taken."