Catrina began to scream uncontrollably. She finally managed to articulate that if Tonio wasn’t found alive and well by noon tomorrow, Carlo was a dead man. She would see to that herself immediately.
“Signora,” her husband said again, “it is true that in all likelihood the boy is dead or gelded. But if you take it upon your head to relieve Carlo Treschi of his life for this, then you take upon yourself a responsibility for all eternity which no one among my fellow statesmen will share with you: the responsibility for the extinction of the House of Treschi.”
PART III
1
THEY REACHED FERRARA before nightfall, and Tonio had not regained consciousness. Jolted by the carriage as it sped over the fertile plain, he opened his eyes from time to time but they appeared to see nothing.
Guido carried him at once to a bed in a small inn on the outskirts of the city. He bound his hands. And felt of his forehead.
A stand of shivering green poplars screened the small, deep-cut windows of this place. And the rain commenced to fall before sunset.
Guido got a bottle of wine. He set one candle on the stand by Tonio’s head, and seating himself across from the foot of the bed, he waited.
Some time during the early evening, he dozed.
And when he opened his eyes, he did not know why he had awakened. For a moment, he thought he was in Venice. Then everything that had happened came back to him.
He squinted in the gloom at the tiny aureole of the candle. And then he let out a gasp.
Tonio Treschi was seated against the wall, his back to the corner, his eyes two glittering slits in the darkness. How long he had been awake, Guido couldn’t guess.
But he felt that he was in the presence of danger. He said in Italian, Drink some wine. But the boy did not answer him. Guido saw then that the boy’s hands were untied, and that the cloth sash he had used to tie them lay on the floor.
The boy’s eyes never moved from Guido for an instant. They were shot with red, narrow, a deep purple bruise distorting the expression into utter malevolence.
Guido drank a swallow from the pint cup at his side. Then he drew the documents out of his valise and laid them on the rough white blanket before Tonio.
The eyes moved slowly down to gaze at the Latin lettering, but the boy did not read the documents, he merely looked at them.
Then he looked up at Guido.
And he moved so fast in rising off the bed that he had thrown Guido back against the wall before Guido even realized what had happened. His hands were on Guido’s throat, and it took all of Guido’s strength to throw him backwards. He gave him a forceful blow to the head. And the boy, obviously groggy and unable to defend himself, collapsed, resting on his hands, his body trembling, his face flushed as he shut his eyes.
He did not resist when Guido slammed him back against the wall. His lips opened so slowly that it was as if he were again losing consciousness.
Guido gripped his shoulders with both hands. He was looking into the eyes of the devil; or into the eyes of madness.
“Listen to me,” he said under his breath. “I had nothing to do with what was done to you. The physician who cut you is most likely dead. Those who killed him would have killed me had I not agreed to take you out of the Veneto. They would have killed you also. They as much as said so.”
The boy’s mouth was working as though he were chewing the inside of it, gathering the saliva into it.
“I don’t know who these men were. Do you know?” Guido asked.
The boy shot such a spray of spit into his face that Guido let him go and stood with his hands over his eyes for an instant.
When he looked at his hands he saw they were stained with blood.
Guido stepped backwards. He settled into the flat wooden chair in which he’d been sitting before, and felt the back of his head rest against the plaster.
The boy’s eyes did not change, but his body which appeared almost luminous in the dark had commenced a violent trembling. Finally it was a shuddering.
When Guido rose to put the blanket up around him, Tonio drew back hissing something in the Venetian dialect which sounded like Do not touch me.