While I fetched a stool for me, Violetta sat down on the one opposite him. He raised his gaze from the wineglass to regard her with eyes like gory stab wounds.

"I'm Violetta. Caterina are I were friends in her great days. She was a wonderful person. I've seen the picture Titian painted with her as the Goddess Juno."

Those awful eyes turned to me.

"Alfeo Zeno. I held your shirt on the Ponte dei Pugni on All Saints' Day in 1582. Proudest day of my life."

He let the information soak in like the slow flow of a tide, but eventually he nodded slightly and reached for the wine flagon. The waiter rushed over with two more glasses, and I could almost hear the tension in the shop snap.

Matteo took a longer look at Violetta, then me again. "You her doorman?"

I grinned and nodded, which was a lie, but a lie in a good cause and one that might suddenly become an unwelcome truth if the unknown strangler continued his rampage. Yes, we're all pimps together.

"You done good. Lucky man."

"None luckier," I said. "Matteo, I also work for Doctor Nostradamus. You know of him?"

But Matteo was studying the empty glass in front of Violetta, over which the neck of the flagon wavered unsteadily in his grasp. I beckoned the waiter and told him to bring a bottle of his best. I would take the cost out of Violetta's hundred ducats.

Matteo set the empty flagon down heavily. "She can still stiffen a man right up with one glance," he mumbled. "Even now. Could, I mean… before."

The waiter brought a dusty bottle and poured three glasses. It wasn't bad. Even the drunken pimp looked pleased when he took a swallow.

"They threw me in jail," he said.

I said, "Nostradamus sent me. You've heard of him?"

"They thought I done it."

"You do want the murderer caught, don't you? You want to watch his head being chopped off?"

"What had she ever done to deserve that?"

"Did you see who-"

"I loved her! It was my house. She paid me rent, but that was all."

Trying to hold a conversation with him was like trying to catch fish in the middle of the Piazza. Violetta and I took turns casting nets, but always hauled them in empty. I was ready to give up when suddenly something silvery flapped in our web.

"He the wizard?" Matteo mumbled.

"Nostradamus is not a wizard," I protested quickly. "He's a wise man and a seer. He's very clever and he wants to catch the strangler. It would help if you could answer some questions."

He scowled at me. "The sbirri send you?"

"No."

He belched. "The Ten?"

"No." The buzz of talk had resumed in the magazzen now and I didn't think anyone could overhear our conversation, but I would have bet my liver that at least one person in that room would be reporting to the Ten before nightfall. "If you can tell us what you know about him, it would help Nostradamus to find the Strangler." Somehow the killer's description had become his name in my mind.

"Didn't get a good look at him." The giant pushed down on the table to straighten himself. Amazingly, he even seemed to sober up a little also. "He came early, 'bout sunset. Boy brought a note, see, and she sent back word that she would be ready then. And he came, but I didn't see his face much."

"What did you see of him? Was he big? Small?"

"All men are small," Matteo said deadpan. He had probably been making that same joke for forty years. It was a reflex. "Dressed like a friar. All I could see inside his hood was beard."

"Dressed like a friar?" Violetta said. "But you think he wasn't a friar?"

"Didn't smell like a friar."

That was not conclusive evidence. Vows of poverty do rule out spare linen and luxuries like soap, but many laymen in Venice cannot afford them either.

"Masked?" I asked.

"This's Carnival, isn' it?"

"But did you see anything of his face at all?"

"Beard. Gray beard."

"Did you see what he was wearing on his feet?" I asked, not expecting an answer.

"Bare feet. Saw them when he came down. Had bare feet."

I glanced at Violetta and saw my own doubts mirrored in her. It takes a lifetime to become accustomed to walking the streets with bare feet. Even genuine friars often wear sandals. Our murderer had taken his disguise very seriously.

It took a lot of questions and repetition, but gradually a picture emerged. The former hero had sunk to being a harlot's doorkeeper. He lived in a room at street level. Anyone entering from the calle faced a staircase going up, with Matteo's door at the bottom standing open during business hours. The big man let visitors in; more important, he would see them leave, so no one could get away without paying. There were two rooms upstairs. The other one was occupied by someone named Lena, who was out of town. He did not say that she had gone off to the mainland to have an abortion, because that would make him accessory to murder, but that was what I suspected.

Caterina's had been a grim life for a woman who was once the toast of the Republic and had sat for the great Titian. She had still been able to insist on appointments, apparently. Had she lived another five years or so she would have been sitting in the window, bare-breasted, trying to haul the drunks in off the street.

Matteo had seen the Strangler and told him to go up-"Door on the right."

Then he had heard some bumping-"Very fast worker, I thought."

After that nothing until the second customer of the evening had plied the door knocker.

Matteo had offered him a seat, planning to go up and tap on the bedroom door, but the friar was already coming down, silent on his bare feet. The friar had handed him the agreed fee of one lira and left. The second man had been directed to the door on the right, had gone up, and had run down again, screaming. By that time the friar had vanished into the dark and the fog.

Caterina had been lying on the floor, fully dressed, with a purple groove around her neck where the rope had dug into the flesh.

There had been no sex, no robbery, just death.

No, Caterina had not had an alarm bell like Violetta's. She had sometimes banged on the floor, and then Matteo would go up and thump the john a few times before throwing him out. Evidently the friar had overpowered her before she could signal properly and all Matteo had heard had been her death throes.

Violetta was Medea, eyes blazing green in the gloom, ready to go and inflict a few death throes herself the moment she knew the target.

"That leaves one big question," I said. "I'm sure the sbirri asked you already, but I must. Did you hear the man's name?" Matteo would not have read the note.

"No," the big man growled. "But I know the name he gave her. She laughed, see, and told me an old friend was coming to see her at sunset."

"Did you see the note?" I asked eagerly. "Did you give it to the sbirri?"

No, he mumbled. He'd looked but couldn't find it. The sbirri thought the friar must have found it and taken it.

"But she did tell you the name of this surprise caller?"

Matteo reached for the wine bottle, tilted it up, and drained it. If he had been drinking like this all week, it was amazing he hadn't killed himself yet.

"She did. Sbirri wouldn't believe me. You won't."

"Try me. Nostradamus has taught me to believe all kinds of unbelievable things."

"Gattamelata." Matteo's eyes burned with a challenge to call him a liar.

I would never be so stupid as to do that, but Gattamelata means "Honeycat." I looked at Violetta, whose mouth framed a perfect O of surprise.

So now we had a name for the Strangler, except that Gattamelata had been dead for a hundred and fifty years.