Free The Alchemist's Pursuit by Dave Duncan

think anyone could overhear our conversation, but I would have bet my liver that at least one person in that room would be reporting to the Ten before nightfall. “If you can tell us what you know about him, it would help Nostradamus to find the Strangler.” Somehow the killer’s description had become his name in my mind.
    â€œDidn’t get a good look at him.” The giant pushed down on the table to straighten himself. Amazingly, he even seemed to sober up a little also. “He came early, ’bout sunset. Boy brought a note, see, and she sent back word that she would be ready then. And he came, but I didn’t see his face much.”
    â€œWhat did you see of him? Was he big? Small?”
    â€œAll men are small,” Matteo said deadpan. He had probably been making that same joke for forty years. It was a reflex. “Dressed like a friar. All I could see inside his hood was beard.”
    â€œDressed like a friar?” Violetta said. “But you think he wasn’t a friar?”
    â€œDidn’t smell like a friar.”
    That was not conclusive evidence. Vows of poverty do rule out spare linen and luxuries like soap, but many laymen in Venice cannot afford them either.
    â€œMasked?” I asked.
    â€œThis’s Carnival, isn’ it?”
    â€œBut did you see anything of his face at all?”
    â€œBeard. Gray beard.”
    â€œDid you see what he was wearing on his feet?” I asked, not expecting an answer.
    â€œBare feet. Saw them when he came down. Had bare feet.”
    I glanced at Violetta and saw my own doubts mirrored in her. It takes a lifetime to become accustomed to walking the streets with bare feet. Even genuine friars often wear sandals. Our murderer had taken his disguise very seriously.
    It took a lot of questions and repetition, but gradually a picture emerged. The former hero had sunk to being a harlot’s doorkeeper. He lived in a room at street level. Anyone entering from the calle faced a staircase going up, with Matteo’s door at the bottom standing open during business hours. The big man let visitors in; more important, he would see them leave, so no one could get away without paying. There were two rooms upstairs. The other one was occupied by someone named Lena, who was out of town. He did not say that she had gone off to the mainland to have an abortion, because that would make him accessory to murder, but that was what I suspected.
    Caterina’s had been a grim life for a woman who was once the toast of the Republic and had sat for the great Titian. She had still been able to insist on appointments, apparently. Had she lived another five years or so she would have been sitting in the window, bare-breasted, trying to haul the drunks in off the street.
    Matteo had seen the Strangler and told him to go up—“Door on the right.”
    Then he had heard some bumping—“Very fast worker, I thought.”
    After that nothing until the second customer of the evening had plied the door knocker.
    Matteo had offered him a seat, planning to go up and tap on the bedroom door, but the friar was already coming down, silent on his bare feet. The friar had handed him the agreed fee of one lira and left. The second man had been directed to the door on the right, had gone up, and had run down again, screaming. By that time the friar had vanished into the dark and the fog.
    Caterina had been lying on the floor, fully dressed, with a purple groove around her neck where the rope had dug into the flesh.
    There had been no sex, no robbery, just death.
    No, Caterina had not had an alarm bell like Violetta’s. She had sometimes banged on the floor, and then Matteo would go up and thump the john a few times before throwing him out. Evidently the friar had overpowered her before she could signal properly and all Matteo had heard had been her death throes.
    Violetta was Medea, eyes blazing green in the gloom, ready to go and inflict a few