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the palace and marching in parades. He thought he was magnificent, but he looked silly to me. I knew most of the equerries by sight, but not this one.
    â€œThis is the right man, clarissimo ,” the guard said.
    The equerry shrugged. “Well, His Serenity did mention something about an astrologer. Obviously astrology doesn’t pay well.”
    He was sneering. After an unearned night in jail, I resented that. “And obviously you fought at Famagusta.”
    Bull’s-eye! The equerry started. “How do you know that?”
    â€œFrom the stars. Are we keeping the doge waiting?”
    He shot a worried glance at the guard and crossed himself. “If you would be so kind, sier Alfeo…” He gestured at the door, very nearly bowing.
    I did bow. “Do, please, lead the way, messer equerry.”
    A cheap trick, yes, but as my master says, Sometimes a cheap trick is all you can afford . Of course I had been lucky. I do not recall my grandparents, but I had met enough of their friends to hear a trace of Cyprus in the equerry’s Veneziano, and the way he had angled his head when he looked at me reminded me of one of the Maestro’s patients who had suffered an eye injury. The doge had distinguished himself at the disastrous siege of Famagosta, so it was reasonable that he would have given a sinecure job in the palace to a man who had served under him back then, and had since, likely, fallen on hard times.
    I followed my chastened guide through another grandiose meeting room and across the third-floor landing of the Golden Staircase. We were now in one of the areas designed to impress visitors and I felt a great deal more cheerful. My arrest had been absurdly unorthodox, I had not been properly charged or booked in as a prisoner, and now the doge had sent a senior equerry to fetch me at such a bleary hour that we were very unlikely to meet anyone on the way. Doge Pietro Moro has a reputation for being impatient with rules.
    The entrance to the doge’s personal apartments is through the equerries’ hall, which is large and imposing, furnished with benches and couches and a few tables. In the past I had spent many hours in it, waiting on His Serenity. The paintings had been changed since my last visit, but I could hardly demand time to inspect them. A couple of the inmates—both much younger than my keeper—were sitting by the fire, playing a game of tarot. They looked up and frowned at the squalid company their colleague was attending. I smiled politely as we passed through.
    â€œ Sier Alfeo Zeno, sire.” We had reached our destination. I walked around the equerry into a dressing room where the doge was having his hair cut by a valet. I doffed my bonnet and bowed low. We Republicans do not kneel to our head of state.
    â€œThank you, Aldo.”
    The door closed.
    Our most serene prince, Pietro Moro, is large and grizzled; he has a rheumatic back, is of the sanguine temperament as defined by the immortal Galen, and at that time was in his late seventies. It is rare for a man much younger than that to be elected doge—Venetians favor rapid turnover in the supreme office of the state. At the far end of the room stood a row of mannequins draped in different versions of the state robes, one of which was being vigorously brushed by a second valet. The doge goes garbed in white and ermine and cloth of gold; he wears a brocade cap called the corno because it rises at the back in a horn. This protuberance bears a marked resemblance to an oversized nose, so it is regrettable that the present incumbent has been known all his life as Nasone , Big Nose.
    Keeping his head still for the scissors, he squinted at me out of one eye. “You seem to be in trouble again, lad.”
    â€œI suspected so, Your Serenity. I don’t know why.”
    â€œAn old friend of mine died yesterday.”
    I could not see where that led. “I offer my humble condolences. I heard the bell