Page 364 - The Grotesque Children's Book

Coughing and failing muscles, wasn’t it?) and the two had struck up several and then many a
conversation. It seemed that Santi had quite an appetite and curiosity for scientific discovery,
asking Valerius question after question during moments caught between comings and goings at
lunchtime, perhaps, with Santi eagerly listening to answer after answer, far more attentive than
even the doctor’s colleagues. The journeyman Santi, very much on the younger side of all the
painters at work on the ceiling of the new Uffizi, perhaps not twenty years yet, but with the mind
of a much older scholar (“You say the cause of my father’s troubles might be from influenza?”;
this is Santi speaking. “But how are his symptoms of yellowed skin connected to influenza? Is
it possible my father is suffering not from dysentery? Tell me how to distinguish between those
two diseases, and what I would do to treat my father had he dysentery instead of influenza.”]
But if this promising young lad were murdered three days ago, how would he have put this folio
on my doorstep, and if not Santi, then who?

The manuscript had appeared on a Friday. By the waning hours of the weekend, it had
made its way lower down in one of the Doctor’s many stacks of books and papers, and by
Monday morning, a sudden chaos in the palace completely overshadowed any other thoughts of
the folio, for over the weekend at I Magistrati there apparently had been a robbery and a second
murder. By Tuesday the manuscript became further buried, and by Friday, forgotten completely.
For Doctor Ludovico Valerius, this turned out to be a deadly mistake.

The robbery, as you know, was of Bianca’s jewels, including the Red Dragon. The
murder was of a second painter: Aurelio DeSolo. Each in turn. First the murder.

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