Gone was the black four-story mansion with its iron fence, cobbled courtyard, and broad lawn. There were no signs of a foundation in the damp ground. No footpaths or gardens. All that remained from the night of my visit was the enormous oak tree, but without the crows. I walked around the perimeter of the lot, then crossed the street and closed my eyes and waited a long moment before opening them again. But Maximus’s house did not rematerialize, as Massimo’s villa had on the Ramo Regina—a “trick” Maximus himself had referred to. Surely this was more than a trick, I thought. Maximus and Lila, Ludwig and Soon-ji, suddenly felt like the figures I saw in that tureen; because they were capable of disappearing without a trace, all of them seemed, strangely enough, to be more vivid, and more real.
2
It took me ten days to reach Padua. Hoyer hired me a sleek coach, built more for speed than comfort, with two experienced coachmen and four strong horses. The coachmen were brothers, Luther and Fritz, a husky, rough-hewn pair from the farm country of Saxony. They had broad shoulders and large, callused hands. They always seemed at ease, no matter the circumstances, maybe because they knew horses so well. We traveled through driving rain that barely let up, on muddy roads, over steep mountains, stopping only to feed the horses and ourselves and to catch a few hours’ sleep. We were detained at numerous checkpoints controlled by Prussian or Bavarian militias. There were frequent skirmishes between these rival forces, the last active combatants in a war that had formally ended the previous year. From the violence I witnessed—captured soldiers summarily hanged, wounded men left to die in fields, villages burned to the ground in cavalry raids—I would never have guessed that a treaty had been signed with great fanfare by two generals who afterward toasted one another’s health and took Communion from the Archbishop of Pressburg. Twice I had to bribe the guards at checkpoints, and once I was detained for five hours outside a remote village while a corpulent sergeant checked and rechecked my papers and interrogated my coachmen.
When we crossed the border into Venetia, I wanted to kiss the ground. Even the weather cleared at that point, and the final leg of our journey into Padua, through sunlit cornfields, olive orchards, and hilltop villages, passed without incident.
Though it was less than forty miles west of Venice, I had never been to Padua. Of course, until I traveled to Vienna, I had never been outside of Venice at all. That seemed a long time ago now, after I had performed in so many foreign cities. But it had only been fourteen months.
With its red roofs and yellow buildings, marble churches and religious statuary, Padua looked nothing like Vienna. And though it was, in fact, a smaller city, it felt huge to me because my sole purpose in being there was to find Adriana, and I hadn’t a clue where to begin. For all I knew, she might have left already. All during my journey, I had fretted about this and tried to formulate a plan of action. Fortunately, a solution awaited me.
Hoyer had suggested a hotel where I ought to stay, where his performers usually went. In writing to Bartolomeo, thanking him for his letter and informing him that I would be traveling to Padua, I had mentioned the name of the hotel, the Ippolito, on the Via Mentana. I arrived at dusk, hungry and weary. At the front desk, the concierge handed me a letter that had arrived two days earlier. It was from Bartolomeo.
Dear Nicolò,
If you are reading this, it means you are in Padua. I am gratified you’ve returned to Venetia. I have made many inquiries, and I believe your friend Julietta might be found in the vicinity of the Piazza Castello. I regret to say I have no further information about Adriana. Watch out for yourself. I hope we will see you soon in Venice.
Your friend,
Bartolomeo Cattaglia
After depositing my luggage in my room, I went outside to pay Luther and Fritz for their services. It had occurred to me that I might want to leave Padua on short notice, so I invited them to stay on with me at double their usual pay until my business was done. They gladly accepted, and after I asked the concierge for directions, we set out for the Piazza Castello. Bartolomeo’s information had raised my spirits, but they were dampened by the concierge’s reaction to my query: the Piazza Castello was evidently the nexus of the city’s worst district.
As we crossed the city to the Piazza Castello, the bustling, well-dressed Paduans around my hotel gave way, first to a neighborhood of narrowing streets and thinning crowds, and then a succession of arcades lined with cheap shops and shuttered stalls, and finally a network of seedy alleys where pimps and prostitutes, drunks and vagrants, hawkers of stolen goods, and pickpockets setting out on their nocturnal rounds outnumbered working citizens. Realizing how much I stuck out now, riding around in a fancy coach, well dressed myself, I was so glad I’d had the sense to retain the services—and company—of Luther and Fritz. Angry, quizzical eyes peered into my coach from the shadows. The denizens of those alleys would have imagined that someone my age, with those trappings, must be the son of a wealthy businessman or nobleman. In other words, an easy target. I realized the comfort and luxury I had grown accustomed to in Vienna had dulled my street smarts; otherwise, I would have left the coach behind.
In fact, I knew I had no chance of finding Julietta unless I proceeded on foot. I told the brothers to stop, and explained to them in my fractured German why we were there. They exchanged glances. How on earth, they must have wondered, did I hope to find a single Venetian girl in one of Venetia’s larger cities? I described Julietta to them, and said I wanted to walk the perimeter of the Piazza Castello. Fritz would stay with the coach in an alley off the piazza, and Luther would accompany me. I removed my silk-lined jacket and borrowed Luther’s spare coat, its oilcloth worn and rain-spattered. To Fritz’s amusement, I mussed up my hair as well, and kicked dust onto my boots, and Luther and I set out from the south end of the piazza.
Up close, the dark doorways of the piazza revealed every manner of vice. The first two buildings we passed were obviously brothels, heavily made-up girls in gaudy dresses huddled in gloomy corridors, watched over by dour madams. Holding my breath, I stopped and studied the girls’ faces, but Julietta was not among them. Then there was a succession of booths manned by gamesters playing three-card monte and throwing dice. And a large gambling hall where men at circular tables played cavagnole, a game in which numbers are drawn from a spinning cage, and ombre, a fast-paced game I had witnessed in Vienna, in which cardsharpers are invariably mixed in among the players to gull the unsuspecting. Next came a dance club, dimly lit by red candles, where scantily dressed women performed on improvised stages, often nothing more than a sheet of wood laid on boxes. The music they danced to was out of tune, cacophonous, but none of the leering men crowded four deep was listening to it. I did not see Julietta there, either. Outside all of these establishments, tough-looking men and hardened women were loitering, soliciting for the brothels and the gambling hall. Some of the men exhibited daggers in their belts or leaned on canes that clearly were intended to be used, not for walking, but for clubbing an adversary. These men eyed Luther and me closely, I because of my clothes (despite my attempt at a disguise) and he because of his foreign dress and country gait. Luther eyed them right back with his easy smile, taking stock of their weapons, watching their hands, and following their movements until we had passed. There were wine cellars filled with raucous drinkers, whose brawls spilled into the piazza, and more gambling houses, and another set of booths where Gypsy fortune-tellers and palm readers plied their trades.
At that point, we were nearly three-quarters of the way around the piazza, and I was beginning to lose hope. After all, there were myriad alleys off the piazza; if Julietta was truly in the vicinity, she could be up any one of them. And perhaps, despite his good intentions, Bartolomeo had been misinformed. As we passed another wine cellar and a run-down café, I heard a strain of music wafting from an open door down the nearest alley. I stopped and cocked my ear, for this particular music was actually being played in key, and not badly. It was a lute and a violin. I tapped Luther’s arm and
led him up the alley. The open door was down three steps. There was a thin curtain immediately inside, and beyond it men’s voices, tinkling glasses, and the music. It was another wine cellar, but of a higher quality, apparently.
Pushing the curtain aside, I saw a dimly lit room with maybe four dozen men drinking wine at metal tables. Indeed, they were better dressed than other men I had seen in the piazza. And they were drinking bottled, not barrel, wine. Against the wall, a young man in a brown suit was playing the violin. At first, I could not see the lutist. Then the young man shifted slightly to his right, and there was a girl on a stool playing the lute. She was wearing a white shift. She had long brown hair and downcast eyes. It was Julietta.
I turned around excitedly to Luther. “That’s her,” I whispered, and he looked even more surprised than me. “I’m sure of it.”
We went in and sat down at the nearest table. Luther kept his composure, signaling a barman for a bottle of wine. I saw there were two tall boys at the bar watching Julietta. I tried to catch her eye, but she never looked up. She was pale and thin, and her hair was wild. Her face was so taut, her expression so grim, that it was difficult to reconcile with the girl I remembered.
When they finished playing the song, no one clapped or even seemed to notice. Only then did Julietta look up slowly. For a moment, she glanced in my direction, but showed no sign of recognition. With my hair short, and wearing Luther’s coat, I didn’t expect her to. There were other boys my age present, but none was sitting with a man like Luther, who, dressed like a farmer, with his healthy tanned face, truly looked out of place. For whatever reason, she looked back at our table, and after a few seconds her eyes widened. I nodded vigorously, and hesitating briefly, she inclined her head toward the boys at the bar. I knew she must be there against her will, and that these boys were keeping a tight rein on her.
Luther picked up on all of this. “Go to her,” he muttered in German, “and take her outside. I’ll deal with those two. Go now.”
I stood up and wended my way among the tables. The two boys had picked up on things, too, and were watching me. I strode right up to Julietta.
“Julietta, come with me.”
“It’s really you?”
“Please, get up.”
“I can’t. You don’t know—”
I took her arm and pulled her off the stool. “Hurry!”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw those boys rushing toward us, and then Luther heading them off. I made for the door, squeezing Julietta’s hand tightly. She was still clutching her lute. Some of the customers cursed at us, but none tried to stop us. Those boys were shouting after us now, and as we pushed the curtain aside, I heard a crash and a loud cry. I turned just as Luther lifted the second boy in the air and threw him against the wall, where his partner was already sprawled out.
We ducked out the door and up the steps. “I have a coach nearby, Julietta. You’ll be all right.”
“Aldo is here,” she said breathlessly. “Those boys are in his gang.”
Luther emerged from the wine cellar, where pandemonium had broken out. “Come,” he said, and we ran down the alley to the piazza.
“Aldo?” I said to her, and at that moment he appeared before us, like a ghost, three other boys close behind him. He was wearing a long coat and carrying a cudgel. Two of the boys were clutching knives.
“Going somewhere, Julietta?” he said.
“Get out of our way,” I shouted.
He cocked his head, his blank eyes cast upward. “Am I hearing right? Can that be you, Nicolà?”
“Yes, and I could kill you for what you’ve done to her.”
“Kill me?” he laughed. “You have it backward. And this little whore will get what’s coming to her.” He turned toward his companions, who were describing to him what they saw.
Luther was having none of this. He stepped in front of me, put his fingers to his lips, and whistled so loudly that Aldo jumped back.
“What’s that?” he said.
I had never heard such a whistle, which carried clear across the piazza, though his brother was not nearly so far away.
“Stay back,” Luther commanded me in German.
“Who’s your Austrian friend?” Aldo said, advancing toward us, brandishing the cudgel.
“Come to me,” Luther said, standing his ground and beckoning to the three boys. “Come to me.”
They were obviously aware of how he had handled their comrades inside, and they hesitated—just long enough for me to hear a coach approaching on the cobblestones of the piazza.
“Now what?” Aldo said to the boys.
The horses’ hooves were echoing loudly. One of the boys turned toward the piazza, the others began circling toward Luther, brandishing their knives before them.
Fritz pulled up at the foot of the alley, leaped from the coach, and ran toward us. He decked the boy beside Aldo with a single punch that broke his jaw, and then pulled down one of the boys with a knife from behind and kicked him in the ribs. Luther made short work of the other one, grabbing his arm and twisting it so hard that, before his knife hit the ground, we heard his wristbone crack like a stick.
“What the hell is going on?” Aldo cried, hearing his companions howling in pain, spinning this way and that, flailing wildly with his cudgel.
“This is for you,” I said, grabbing Julietta’s lute and swinging it as hard as I could at Aldo’s knees. The wood cracked, his legs buckled, and he fell to the street.
“You bastard, I’ll kill you!” he shouted as the four of us ran to the coach.
Fritz took the reins with Luther beside him, and Julietta and I jumped inside. As we sped away from the Piazza Castello, I wrapped my jacket around her shoulders. She was shaking. She looked into my face in bewilderment.
“My real name is Nicolò,” I said.
She burst into tears. “How did you find me?”
“I’ll tell you everything. But, first, I need to know if Adriana is here, too.”
“In Padua—no.”
“She set out to find you here.”
“She’s in Venice.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I overheard Aldo say so. His gang has been looking for her. Those other boys are just a part of his gang. They all come out of San Benedicto, the orphanage where he was sent. He enlisted a gang of the worst, most violent boys—so bad they either escaped or were expelled from the orphanage. They steal, they kidnap, they blackmail people. Aldo kidnapped the other girls from the Ospedale, Lutece dal Cornetto and Silvana dal Basso. It sickens me to think where they must have ended up. They kidnapped me the same way.”
“From the wine cellar.”
“Yes. I’ll tell you what happened to me in the last year. I only pray it never happens to Adriana.”
3
“Bellona and Genevieve tricked me,” Julietta said. “They took me to the wine cellar, saying one of the other girls was in trouble. I should never have believed them. The moment I entered, Aldo and a man in a greatcoat threw a blanket over me, and then tied a rope around the blanket, and carried me out. I put up a fight, but then I felt other hands on me, and suddenly I was in the bottom of a boat. I heard oars dipping into the water. It seemed I was in that boat forever. Then we stopped and they carried me again, and laid me down, and undid the rope. When I threw the blanket off, I found myself in a small, windowless room. It was filthy. Just some straw on the floor where I could sleep, though I barely slept. I was there for several days. Every night someone opened the door and slid through a plate of food with a fork and a pitcher of water, picked up the plate and pitcher from the previous night, and shut the door again quickly. All I saw was his hand. One night I kept the fork. I waited all day, sharpening the prongs of the fork on the stone wall. I stood close by the door, and when it opened and the hand came through, I brought the fork down on it as hard as I could. There was a terrible scream, for the fork went clear through the hand. I yanked the door open, and there was a boy Aldo’s
age, skinny but tough-looking, clutching his hand. I pushed past him, and for an instant he grabbed hold of my hair, but I pulled free and ran down a corridor, hearing his screams as he pursued me. I heard other voices responding from within the house, and then footfalls as they ran to join him. Suddenly there were two doors before me, on the left and right. I opened the left-hand door and felt a cold wind in my face and saw that I was in an alley. At the near end, I saw people passing on a busy street. I ran there as fast as I could, turned the corner, and was in the Campo Santa Marina, in the Castello. I kept going, in and out of alleys, into the Cannaregio, until I reached the Rio della Sensa. It was the supper hour, there were many people about, but still, I stuck out, wearing only my nightdress from the Ospedale. I followed the canal westward and never stopped. You see, I knew where I was going, Nicolò. Prudenza once told me that the convent at the Church of San Girolamo offered shelter to homeless girls. The nuns there are truly pious and will protect any girl who is honest with them about her circumstances. They listened to my story and gave me a bed to sleep in. Their dormitory is not luxurious like the Ospedale’s, but it is clean and safe. I was given certain duties, in the kitchen and the laundry, to earn my way. And then, knowing of my musical abilities, they gave me that lute with which you struck Aldo—and I’m glad you did!—so that I could play for them, in the church and in their own dining room. I so feared Aldo and the criminals who employed him that I did not leave the grounds of San Girolamo. Never. But after a year, my fear ebbed somewhat, and I grew restless. I thought I would lose my mind if I didn’t go out once in a while. I started by taking short walks. Then I ventured out to the food markets on the Fondamenta San Girolamo with some of the other girls.