I began to play one of the very oldest melodies that I knew, a little dance based on a few basic chord variations, and I made the music as gentle as I could.
The thought struck me, as was inevitable, that I was actually playing a fine lute in the very period in which it had become wildly popular. I was in the very age in which it had attained perhaps its greatest music and strength. But there was no time for indulging myself in this, any more than there was time for making for St. Peter’s Basilica to see the construction for myself.
I was thinking about the poisoner and how fortunate we were that he had chosen to take his time.
As for the mystery of the dybbuk, it had to wait on the mystery of the poisoner because clearly the poisoner, though patient, did not need very much more time to accomplish what he’d set out to do.
I was strumming slowly when Vitale gently gestured for me to be quiet.
He was holding his patient’s hand, listening to his pulse, and now very gracefully he bent down and put his ear to Niccolò’s chest.
He placed both his hands on Niccolò’s head and looked into his eyes. I could see Niccolò shuddering. The man couldn’t control it.
“Vitale,” he whispered, thinking perhaps I couldn’t hear him. “I don’t want to die.”
“I won’t let you die, my friend,” said Vitale desperately. He laid back the bedclothes now and examined his patient’s ankles and feet. True, there was an old discolored patch on the ankle but it was no cause for alarm. The patient could move his limbs well enough but they shuddered. That could mean any number of poisons attacking the nervous system. But which one, and how would I prove who was doing it and how?
I heard a sound in the passage. It was the sound of a man crying. I knew by the very sound of it that it was Lodovico.
I got up. “I’ll talk to your brother, if I might,” I said softly to Niccolò.
“Console him,” said Niccolò. “Let him know that none of this is his doing. The caviar has helped me. He puts such store by it. Don’t let him feel that he’s at fault.”
I found him stranded in the antechamber, looking lost and confused.
“May I talk with you?” I asked gently. “While he’s resting, or being examined? May I be of some comfort to you?”
I felt the strong urge to do this, when in fact, in the usual course of things, it was something I wouldn’t have done at all.
However, he looked to me at that moment like one of the loneliest beings I’d ever beheld. He seemed to exist in a pure isolation as he wept, staring at the door of his brother’s room.
“He is the reason my father has accepted me,” he said under his breath. “Why do I tell you this? Because I must tell someone. I must tell someone how troubled I am.”
“Come, is there someplace where we might talk in quiet? It is so difficult when those we love are suffering.”
I followed him down the broad stairway of the palazzo and into the large courtyard, and into yet another gated courtyard which was wholly unlike the first, in that it was crowded with tropical blooms.
I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.
A good deal of light spilled down into the area though the palazzo must have been four stories high, and the area was naturally sheltered due to its smaller size. It was extremely warm.
I could see orange trees and lemon trees, and purple flowers and waxen white blooms. Some of these I knew and some I didn’t. But if there were no poisonous plants in this room, then my mother had raised a fool.
In the center of the courtyard, where the shafts of sunlight made a sweet and beautiful light, stood a makeshift cross-legged writing table and two simple chairs beside it. There was a decanter of wine and two goblets.
And the dejected man, moving almost as if in a dream, took the decanter, filled a goblet and drank the contents down.
Only then did he think to offer me a drink, and I declined.
He seemed exhausted and emptied from his weeping. That he was genuinely miserable was beyond doubt. Indeed he was grieving, and I wondered if he was grieving because in his mind and heart his brother was already dead.
“Sit down there, please,” he said to me, and then he collapsed at his writing table, allowing a whole sheaf of papers to fall to the floor.
Behind him, from a large pot, grew a rangy and waxen-leafed tree, and one that was not at all unfamiliar to me. Again the hair rose on the back of my neck and my arms. I knew the purple flowers that covered this tree. And I knew the tiny black seeds that were left when the flowers dropped, as some of them had already done into the moist earth of the pot.
I picked up the mess of papers and put them back on the desk. I set my lute beside the chair.
The man appeared dazed as he watched this, and then he leant on his elbows and he wept very genuine tears.
“I have no great gift for poetry, and yet I am a poet for want of being anything else,” he said to me. “I’ve traveled the world, and have had the joy of it—no, maybe all the joy of it was writing to Niccolò and meeting him if and when he’d come to me. And now I have to think of the vast wide world, the world I traveled, without him. And when I think of this, there is no world.”
I stared past him at the earth in the pot. It was covered with black seeds. Any one of these would have been deadly to a child. Several, carefully chopped, would be deadly to a man. A small portion given regularly in caviar, of all perfect things, would have sickened the man slowly and pushed him closer with every dose towards death.
The taste of the seeds was ghastly, as is the case with many a poison. But if anything would hide it, it would be caviar.
“I don’t know why I tell you these things,” said Lodovico, “except that you look kind, you look like a man who peers inside another man’s soul.” He sighed. “You grasp how a man might love his brother unbearably. How a man might think himself a coward when faced with his brother’s weakness and death.”
“I want to understand,” I said. “How many sons does your father have?”
“We are his only sons, and don’t you know how much he will despise me if Niccolò is gone? Oh, he loves me now, but how he will despise me if I am the survivor. It was only on account of Niccolò that he brought me from my mother’s house. We don’t have to talk of my mother. I never talk of her. You can well understand. My father need have acknowledged no claim against him. But Niccolò loved me, loved me from the first moment we played as children, and one day, I, and all I possessed, were bundled up and taken from the brothel in which we lived, and brought here, to this very house. My mother took a fistful of gems and gold for me. She cried. I will say that much for her. She wept. ‘But this is for you,’ she said. ‘You, my little prince, are now to be taken to the castle of your dreams.’ ”