"I am yours, Master." I hugged him close and tried to vanquish him with kisses. He endured them, and even smiled, but he didn't move.
But when I broke off, and made a fist of my right hand as if to hit him, which I could never have done, to my amazement he began to yield.
He turned and took me in his powerful and ever careful embrace.
"Amadeo, I can't go on without you," he said. His voice was desperate and small. "I meant to show you evil, not sport. I meant to show you the wicked price of my immortality. And that I did. But in so doing, I saw it myself, and my eyes are dazzled and I am hurt and tired."
He laid his head against my head, and he held tight to me.
"Do what you will to me, Sir," I said. "Make me suffer and long for it, if that's what you want. I am your fool. I am yours."
He released me and kissed me formally.
"Four nights, my child," he said. He moved away. He kissed his fingers and planted that last kiss on my lips, and then he was gone. "I go now to an ancient duty. Four nights. Till then."
I stood alone in the earliest chill of the morning. I stood alone beneath a paling sky. I knew better than to look for him.
In the greatest dejection, I walked back through the alleys, cutting across little bridges to wander into the depth of the waking city, for what I didn't know.
I was half-surprised when I realized I had returned to the house of the murdered men. I was surprised when I saw their doorway still open, as if a servant would at any moment appear.
No one appeared.
Slowly the sky above ripened to a pale white and then to a faint blue. Mist crawled along the top of the canal. I went over the small bridge to the doorway, and again went up the stairs.
A powdery light came in from the loosely slatted windows. I found the banquet room where the candles still burnt. The smell of tobacco and wax and of pungent food was close and hanging in the air.
I walked inside, and I inspected the dead men, who lay as we had left them, disheveled, and now slightly yellowed and waxen and a prey to the gnats and the flies.
There was no sound but the humming of the flies.
The spilt wine had dried on the table in pools. The corpses were clean of all the rampant marks of death.
I was sick again, sick to trembling, and I took a deep breath that I shouldn't retch. Then I realized why I had come.
Men in those days wore short cloaks on their jackets, sometimes affixed, as you probably know. I needed one of these, and took it, ripping it loose from the humpback man, who lay almost on his face. It was a flaring coat of canary yellow with white fox for its border and a lining of heavy silk. I tied knots in it and made a thick deep sack of it, and then I went up and down the table, gathering up the goblets, dashing out the contents first, and then putting them in my sack.
Soon my sack was red with drops of wine and grease from where I'd rested it on the board.
I stood when finished, making certain that no goblet had escaped. I had them all. I studied the dead men-my sleeping red-haired Martino, his face on the bare marble in a puddle of the slopped wine, and Francisco, from whose head did leak a small bit of darkened blood.
The flies buzzed and droned over this blood as they did over the grease pooled around the remnants of the roasted pig. A battalion of little black beetles had come, most common in Venice, for they are carried by the water, and it made its way over the table, towards Martino's face.
A quiet warming light came in through the open doorway. The morning had come.
With one sweeping glance that imprinted on my mind the details of this scene for all time, I went out and home.
The boys were awake and busy when I arrived. An old carpenter was already there, fixing the door which I had shattered with the ax.
I gave to the maid my bulky sack of clanking cups, and she, sleepy and having just arrived, took it without a remark.