Dio. The same conversations, the same suspicions, the same insults; every time I won. How had I stood it in the old days, years on end of rickety trestle tables and half-drunken gamblers and cards sticky with sour ale? “Mathematical certainty,” I said, bored, and then followed the usual argument about what that was, and the Genoese sailor ended up storming off and taking his two friends with him. I was left with the cards and a few scudi.

“More wine,” I told the sour-faced crone who served the drinks here. She never failed to twitch the sign of the evil eye at me when she thumped down my cup. I missed the days when Anna had worked here and never had to be reminded to cut my wine with water.

I’d come here first upon leaving the Palazzo Santa Maria. “I know you,” the tavernkeeper squinted at me. “The dwarf, you used to come here years back. Leonato?”

“Close enough,” I’d returned. “I helped you bury a girl named Anna.”

“Don’t remember.”

I sighed. “The one who got staked and killed in your kitchens?”

“Oh, her.” Crossing himself. “I remember that.”

Anna had long been gone from here, but I’d had some thought of talking to someone who remembered her. Anyone—customers who had bedded her, the other maids who had worked by her side. But they either were gone on themselves to other things or had memories as vague as the tavernkeeper’s. There was no one at all to care if I had said, I avenged her death. More of a dwarf’s foolish, oversized dreams.

“A drink?” the tavernkeeper had asked me instead.

“Why not?” And I had stayed, plying my old trade at his wine-sticky tables day after day, too bored to move on.

I lost three hands to a groom with manure on his boots, and recouped it an hour later against a fishmonger too busy reminiscing about the hanging he’d seen to pay attention to his cards. “Horrible, it was,” he confided, slapping down a card without looking at it. “The fellow goes black in the face, see, and his tongue comes out all purple. I made a wager he’d keep kicking as long as it took to say a rosary.”

“Leave us,” a peremptory voice addressed the fishmonger, who gaped briefly at the forbidding figure that had appeared like a black bat at his side.

“See here,” the fishmonger began. But a gloved finger pointed at him in emphasis, and my fishy-smelling partner swept up his cards and stole away without another word.

“You could not have waited?” I asked as the man in the mask slid into the vacated seat across from me. “I was about to win my evening meal from that fool.”

“Then I shall buy you your evening meal.” A few coins landed on the table.