The maps lived in a chest under Leonardo’s bed in the house on the Via Ghibellina, and on the morning after Lisa’s first visit he brought them to the Sala del Papa in the leather roll, under his cloak, and spread them out on the trestle by the window.
“You should know what you broke a man’s nose for,” he said.
There were eleven sheets.
Each one showed a town from above, the way a bird would see it, drawn in brown ink and washed in thin colour: the walls in grey, the rivers in green-blue, the hills shaded with fine lines like the grain in wood.
Imola.
Cesena.
Faenza.
Forlì.
Pesaro.
Every gate was there, every tower, every place where the ditch was shallow or the wall was old.
Along the margins, in Leonardo’s mirror hand, were distances paced out on foot and the depth of water in the moats in March.
John had seen maps like this before.
The Royal Engineers had made them of the German lines at Messines from photographs taken by aeroplanes, and men had died because they were wrong and other men had lived because they were right.
“You made these for Cesare Borgia,” he said.
“For the Duke Valentino.
Yes.
I was his architect and engineer for most of last year.
I walked his towns with him.
He wanted to know how to hold them.” Leonardo laid a finger on Imola, a neat round town inside an eight-sided wall.
“Which is the same as knowing how to take them.
Whoever has these knows how every fortress in the Romagna is built and where it’s weak.”
“And the bull?”
Leonardo took the little disc of red wax from his purse and set it on the corner of the Imola map.
“The Borgia arms.
A red bull on gold.
His men carry it so that his captains will know who sent them.” He turned it with his fingertip.
“Cesare’s father was Pope Alexander.
Alexander died in August, of a fever, very suddenly.
Cesare was ill at the same time, nearly died, and while he lay in bed his whole state in the Romagna began to come apart.
Then the cardinals elected a new Pope, Julius, who hates every Borgia alive.
Cesare is in Rome now, more or less a prisoner.
His towns are going over to Venice one by one.
And his captains, the ones who aren’t in prison or in the river, are trying to save what they can.”
“With your maps.”
“With my maps.
If one of them can hold even two of those fortresses for a winter, he has something to sell to the Pope, or to Venice, or to us.
Or to the King of France.” Leonardo rolled the maps up again, carefully, from the left.
“The man you hit wasn’t a thief, Giovanni.
He was a soldier on an errand.
Errands don’t stop because a man’s nose is broken.”
* * *
That afternoon Leonardo took him to the Palazzo della Signoria.
It was the first time John had walked through Florence beside someone who belonged to it.
Men stepped out of Leonardo’s way in the street, or greeted him, or called out to ask about the battle on the wall and when it would be finished.
Two women at a fountain laughed at his rose-coloured tunic, and he bowed to them.
A boy ran alongside them for the length of a street asking whether it was true that the Maestro could fly.
“Not yet,” said Leonardo.
“Ask me in the spring.”
The Palazzo was a great block of brown stone with a tower on top and a row of shields painted under the battlements.
Inside, past the guards and up a stair worn hollow in the middle, there was a long room full of clerks at tables, with the sound of quills going like rain on a roof.
This was the Second Chancery, Leonardo said in a low voice, where the letters of the Republic were written and read.
The Republic had no prince.
It had a council, the Signoria, and a head of state, the Gonfaloniere, Piero Soderini, elected for life last year.
And it had a committee of ten men for war, the Ten, who needed to know everything.
“And who tells the Ten everything?” said John.
“Their secretary, when he’s here.
He’s in Rome, watching the Pope eat Cesare alive.
His name is Niccolò.
“And when Niccolò is away, his friend reads them out to anyone who’ll buy him a drink.”
The friend was a thin young clerk with ink up to his wrists, named Agostino Vespucci.
He knew Leonardo.
He listened to the story of the knife with his quill held in the air, and when Leonardo laid the bull seal on his table, he put the quill down.
“In Santa Maria Novella,” he said.
“In daylight.”
“In daylight.”
Vespucci looked round the room, then took a folded letter from under a pile of others and read from it in a low voice.
“From Rome, the eleventh.
The Duke is held in the Vatican under guard.
He says one thing in the morning and another at night.
His men are scattering.
Don Michele, called Michelotto, has left Rome with a column of horse and is thought to be making for the Romagna by way of our territory.
Let the Ten watch the roads.” He folded it again.
“Niccolò.
He writes like a man who’s enjoying himself.”
“Then Michelotto’s men are in Tuscany,” said Leonardo.
“Some of them are certainly in Florence.
We’ve had reports.
Spaniards in the inns by San Frediano, buying drinks with ducats.” Vespucci looked at John for the first time.
“And who is this?”
“My assistant.
From Lucca.”
“He’s got a Borgia man’s blood on his sleeve,” said Vespucci, “and he’s from Lucca.” He smiled thinly.
“Maestro, I’ll tell the Ten.
But the Ten are busy, the Pisans are fighting again, and a painter’s quarrel with a Spaniard is not a war.
If they come again, send for the Otto di Guardia, not for me.”
On the way out, crossing the square, John saw the man in the doorway for the first time.
He was standing under the arcade of the Loggia dei Lanzi, leaning on a column, a man in a dun cloak with a felt hat pulled down.
He was doing nothing.
That was what John noticed.
Everyone else in the square was going somewhere or selling something.
This man was only standing, and when Leonardo and John came out of the Palazzo gate, his head turned.
John looked at him the way he had looked at the faint Hartleys.
A second ahead, the ghost of the man pushed off from the column and began to walk.
A second later, the real man did the same, and went the same way they were going, thirty paces behind.
“We’re being followed,” said John quietly.
“I know,” said Leonardo, without turning his head.
“Since the convent.
He has a friend at the corner by the Badia.” He walked on at the same pace, his hands behind his back.
“Don’t look round.
Don’t do anything to them.
Today they want to know where we go.
If they find out that we go to the Palazzo, so much the better.
Let them tell their master that the old painter has friends in the Chancery.”
They walked the long way back, by the river.
Leonardo did not hurry.
At the Ponte alla Carraia he stopped at the parapet and looked down at the Arno, brown and full with the November rain, and pointed downstream, towards Pisa.
“Do you know why Vespucci won’t help us?” he said.
“Because Florence has been at war with Pisa for nine years and can’t win.
The Pisans sit behind their walls and the river feeds them.
Every summer we march out, and every autumn we march home.” He tapped the stone.
“I have an idea.
I’ve talked about it to Niccolò.
You dig a channel, a great one, from above Pisa to the sea, and you take the Arno away from them.
No river, no harbour. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
No harbour, no Pisa.”
John looked at the water.
He tried to remember anything at all about Florence digging a canal to Pisa, and couldn’t.
Which probably meant it had not worked.
“How long a channel?”
“Fifteen miles.
Perhaps twenty.” Leonardo smiled at his face.
“You think it can’t be done.”
“I think it can be done with steam shovels and ten thousand men.
With spades, it’ll take years, and the first flood will fill it in.”
Leonardo was quiet for a moment.
“What’s a steam shovel?”
John told him.
He drew it on the parapet with his finger in the wet, a boiler, a jib, a bucket with teeth.
Leonardo watched with his head on one side.
The man in the dun cloak, thirty paces behind them, stopped at a stall and pretended to look at onions.
“So in your time,” said Leonardo at last, “the idea is good and the tools are better.” He sighed.
“In mine, I have the idea and Niccolò has spades.
Well.
Ideas are patient.” He set off again.
“Come.
The Spaniard behind us is getting cold, and so am I.”
* * *
For three days after that, John saw them everywhere.
The man in the dun cloak.
A second man, younger, with a red scarf, who sat on the steps of Santa Maria Novella mending a net he never finished.
A third, who came to the convent gate twice asking the porter whether the Maestro needed a model for soldiers.
They never came up the stair.
They never spoke to him.
They watched, and changed places, and watched.
He could have dealt with any one of them.
On the second evening, coming back from the bakery alone in the dusk, he passed the man in the red scarf in a lane so narrow their shoulders nearly touched.
The man had his back to the wall and a knife on his belt.
Four counts would have been enough to put him on the ground.
John thought it through as he walked, the way he would have done in a trench.
One man on the ground meant two more who knew for certain what John could do, and a body in a lane that the Otto di Guardia would ask questions about, and the questions would lead up the stair to Leonardo.
He kept walking.
The man in the red scarf watched him go.
“They’re counting,” he told Leonardo that night.
“They want to know how often I’m alone.”
“Then don’t be alone.” Leonardo was on the scaffold, drawing by candlelight, and did not look down.
“And lock your things up.
Spaniards aren’t the only thieves in Florence.”
John slept badly that week.
He would wake in the night with his heart going hard and lie there, listening.
On the fourth night he got up and went to his coat on its nail behind the screen for the wallet, and Tom’s letter, the way he did on bad nights.
The wallet was there.
The letter was there.
His wristwatch was not.
He’d taken it off before sleeping and put it in the coat pocket, as he did every night, because the strap rubbed.
A Swiss watch, nickel case, white enamel face, a present from his mother on his twenty-first.
He felt in every pocket.
He felt in the lining.
He felt on the floor.
Across the hall, by the light of the banked brazier, Salai was asleep on his own pallet with his curls on his arm and his mouth open, looking like a painted angel.
Beside the pallet, neatly together, stood a pair of shoes John had never seen before.
Red leather, soft, with long pointed toes.
The kind young men bought in the Mercato Vecchio when they’d come into money.