Salai lied beautifully for about a minute.
He’d bought the shoes with money from his mother.
His mother had died in 1497, Leonardo said, from the scaffold, without turning round.
With money from a card game, then.
Salai couldn’t play cards.
With money he’d found.
Where?
In the street.
Which street?
Salai looked at the ceiling, and at the cartoon, and at John, and then at his own feet in their red shoes, and something in his angel’s face gave up.
“Iacopo the Jew,” he said.
“By Orsanmichele.
He gave me four florins for it.
It’s only a little clock, Maestro, it doesn’t even strike.”
“It doesn’t need to,” said John.
Leonardo came down the ladder.
He took Salai by the ear, not hard, the way you’d take a cat by the scruff, and walked him to the door, and said a great many things in a low, pleasant voice that made Salai go white.
Then he let go, and Salai ran down the stairs in his red shoes, and Leonardo turned back with his hands spread.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I keep him because he’s beautiful and because he steals from other people more than from me.
Usually.” He picked up his cloak.
“Come.
Iacopo opens early.”
* * *
Iacopo opened early and was sorry he had.
He was a small, careful man in a black cap with a shop no wider than a cupboard, and he listened to Leonardo with his hands folded on the counter, and when Leonardo finished he unfolded them and laid them flat.
“Sold,” he said.
“Last night.
Before I’d even put it in the book.”
“To whom?”
“A man with a scar through his eyebrow.” Iacopo touched his own eyebrow.
“He paid in gold, Maestro.
Ducats.
He didn’t argue the price.
He asked whose it was.”
“And you told him.”
“I told him a boy brought it.” The pawnbroker looked at John, at the bandage under his sleeve, at his face.
“He didn’t need me to say which boy.
He knew the boy.
He asked where the boy’s master lived, and then he laughed, because he knew that too.” He spread his hands.
“I’m sorry.
I’m one man with a shop the size of a coffin, and he had two friends outside.”
Out in the street the cold came off the stone.
John stood with his hands in his pockets, where the watch should have been, and felt the empty space in the lining like a missing tooth.
“Vanni Lupo,” said Leonardo.
“With the bull in his purse.”
“It’s a watch,” said John.
“Springs, wheels.
If he opens it he’ll find a little machine.
Your notebooks are full of little machines.”
“Is there writing on it?”
John didn’t answer at once.
On the back of the case, in copperplate, his mother had had the jeweller in Kentish Town engrave J.A.
from Mum.
21.
1917.
He’d laughed at the Mum.
He’d worn it at Passchendaele with the glass cracked and had the glass replaced in Amiens for a week’s pay.
“A date,” he said.
“Four hundred years from now.”
“Then he has a clock that runs without water and says it was made in a year no one can read.” Leonardo pulled his cloak tighter.
“Cesare is finished, Giovanni.
The Pope his father is dead since August, the new Pope hates him, and Michelotto, his dog, is running round Tuscany looking for a door.
Men like that pay for anything that might open one.
My maps of the Romagna fortresses.
A man who knows things no one else knows.” He looked at John sideways.
“A wonder to sell to a prince.
Any prince.”
The boy came at noon.
Ten years old, barefoot, with a note folded small and a fist out for his penny.
The clock for the fortress drawings of Imola and Cesena.
Tonight, the third hour, the old salt store by the San Frediano gate.
Bring them yourself, northerner.
Come alone or I break it open and see what’s inside.
Leonardo read it twice and put it on the trestle and looked at the cartoon for a long time.
“I won’t give him those maps,” he said at last.
“If Cesare comes back to the Romagna, he comes back with fire.
I walked those towns with him.
I know what he does to towns.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“No.” Leonardo turned.
“You’re going to go and take it back.
With your four counts of Ave.”
“Four counts is a long time in a fight.”
“Against one man.
He’ll bring three, and lanterns, and they’ll have been told about your trick.
Lupo is a murderer, not a fool.
He’ll have counted, the same as I did, in Santa Maria Novella, while he bled.” Leonardo picked up a stick of charcoal and a fresh sheet and, without sitting down, began to draw a fortress.
Walls, a ravelin, a ditch, a gate tower.
It took him perhaps the length of a paternoster.
It was beautiful and convincing and, John realised after a moment, entirely wrong: the ditch was on the side where the hill came down, which no engineer on earth would do.
“Take these,” said Leonardo.
“He’ll look.
He’ll have to look properly, in the light, with the lantern close.
While he looks, he isn’t looking at you.” He started on a second sheet.
“And Giovanni.
Whatever happens, don’t kill him in Florence.
The Signoria hangs foreigners for that, and you are the most foreign man in Italy.”
* * *
He spent the rest of the day getting ready, the way he had got ready for a night repairing cable in no man’s land.
He ate.
He ate everything Salai would give him and then went out to the baker by the convent and bought more with the last silver Leonardo had pressed on him, and ate that too, sitting on the cloister wall, because the Hold burned food and he could not afford to start the night hungry.
He slept for two hours in the afternoon behind his screen, with the noise of Leonardo drawing above him.
When he woke, he did not test the Hold.
Every count he spent now was a count he would not have in the salt store.
He thought it through on his back on the pallet, looking at the roof beams.
Four counts, if he was rested.
In four counts his body could take perhaps three steps, or reach out an arm and close a hand, or turn and duck.
Not more.
That was the whole of what he had.
It was not a weapon.
It was a head start.
A man with a head start could take something out of a hand that was not expecting it, if he was close enough and knew exactly when to move.
So everything depended on two things.
Being close.
And knowing when.
Leonardo’s false fortress would give him the second.
Lupo would bend over it, and his eyes and his mind would be on the ditch.
The first was harder.
Lupo would make him stand back.
Then I’ll have to make him want me close.
At dusk Salai came back up the stair without his red shoes.
He was barefoot, and his feet were blue with cold, and he put a small purse on the trestle in front of John without looking at him.
Four florins, less what he had spent.
“I sold them back,” he said.
“The shoes.
They were too tight anyway.”
It was the nearest thing to an apology John ever heard from him.
The salt store smelled of brine and rats.
It stood against the inside of the city wall by the San Frediano gate, a long low barn with a roof sagging between the beams, and one lantern burning on a barrel in the middle of the floor.
Lupo sat on a sack beside it, with his scarred eyebrow and a plaster of linen across his broken nose where John’s forehead had gone in.
Two men stood behind him.
A third, John guessed, was behind the door he’d just walked through, because he heard the bar drop into its brackets.
“Northerner,” said Lupo.
He held up the watch by its strap.
It turned slowly in the lantern light, the white face, the nickel case, ticking.
“It talks to itself all the time.
My friends think there’s a devil in it.”
“There’s a spring in it.”
“That’s what a man would say who had a devil.” Lupo held out his other hand.
“Drawings.”
John gave them to him.
He made it look reluctant.
Lupo unrolled them on the barrel, beside the lantern, and bent over them.
He was careful.
He weighed the corners down with a knife and a coin and his own fist.
He traced the walls with his finger.
The two men behind him leaned in to look too, because everyone wants to look at a drawing by Leonardo, even a murderer, even in a salt store at three in the morning.
John watched Lupo’s finger move along the ditch towards the side where the hill came down.
He didn’t wait for it to get there.
He pushed.
The lantern flame stood up stiff and yellow and still.
Lupo’s finger stopped.
The watch hung from his left hand on its strap, a quarter turned, the second hand caught between two marks.
One.
John stepped forward.
Two.
He took the watch out of Lupo’s fingers, strap and all, and they didn’t close on it, they couldn’t, they were in the other time.
Three.
He reached for the knife weighing the corner of the drawing, and his fingers were already cold, his lip already wet, and his body told him clearly that there would be no four tonight, not after the fortress and the cold walk and no supper.
It snapped back on three.
Lupo’s hand closed on nothing.
He looked at it.
Then he looked at John, standing two feet away with the watch in one hand and the knife in the other and blood running out of his nose into his mouth, and he smiled.
“Three,” he said.
“Last time it was four.
I counted.”
He was two feet away.
John had Lupo’s own knife in his hand, and Lupo’s throat was bare above the collar of his jerkin.
Even without the Hold, it was a short distance.
But the Hold was gone and would not come back tonight, and the two men behind the barrel were already moving.
If John put the knife in Lupo, he would still have two men on him in the next breath, and a third at the door, and nothing left to fight them with.
And if he somehow got out, there would be a dead Spaniard in a city salt store with a Florentine knife in him, and every clerk in the Second Chancery knew whose assistant had come in with Borgia blood on his sleeve.
Leonardo would be in the Bargello by noon.
Not here.
Not like this.
Get the watch out.
That’s the job.
The two men came round the barrel.
One had a sword, a short heavy falchion, the other a club.
John backed up against a stack of sacks.
The man with the sword came first, fast and low, and John got the knife in the way, and the falchion went down the blade with a scream of iron and stopped at the guard, and the man leaned on it, grinning, much stronger, pushing John’s own knife back towards his face.
John put his free hand on the sword.
Not to grab it.
The edge was turned the other way and the flat was cold and pitted under his palm.
He pushed into it the way he’d pushed into the clay horse, but forward only, all forward, a year, ten years, a hundred, the iron drinking heat out of his hand like a sponge drinks water.
The blade rusted under his fingers.
He felt it go: the shine dulling, the surface flaking orange, the core going brittle as biscuit.
The man’s grin went uncertain.
He leaned harder.
The falchion broke a hand’s breadth above the guard and fell on the floor in three pieces, and the man fell after it, off balance, into the sacks.
John couldn’t feel his arm below the elbow.
He went for the door.
The man with the club was in the way, and he hit him with his shoulder and they both went down, and John was up first, because he’d been taught to get up first by a corporal at Étaples who’d kicked men who didn’t.
The third man, by the door, had his hands on the bar.
John kicked him in the knee.
He let go of the bar.
John lifted it with one hand, his good one, and the cold night came in through the gap, and he went out into it, and ran.
Behind him, in the salt store, Lupo was laughing.
“I know your face, northerner!” he shouted, through the door.
“I know whose house you sleep in!
I know whose wife comes to sit in it!”