“Okay, just deflate my ego-and everything else. Look: we’re going to need to have the latest word on the street when we get to Rome. The lefferti were pretty much poor teenagers who wanted to be toughs, get a little respect, acquire that kind of rogue-do-gooder sexiness that you’ve always found so appealing in me-”
“Down, dog. You’re humping the wrong tree. For real now, Harry; you think the lefferti can help?”
Unfazed, Harry started scraping together the last of his polenta while eying the still-steaming pot. “Yeah, for real. The city is occupied right? It’s going to have Spanish patrols, command posts, strong points, weak spots, black-market connections with anyone handling provisioning for the invaders: the whole nine yards. We’re going to need all that information. And we might need the lefferti ’s hands and bodies, too.”
“What? Harry, the lefferti are really just kids-”
“Pretty old kids; some of them are in their twenties. And they’re not shrinking violets, either. But I’d only use a few of the older ones in any actual attack. I’m thinking most of the lefferti would be far more useful providing us with a diversion.” He stood up, stretched, scratched his back. “Well, it’s time to debrief the staff.”
“And to see if there are any comely wenches among them?”
Harry affected deep emotional injury. “If I do so, it is only because you reject me so continually and completely.”
Sherrilyn smiled. “Oh, get the hell out of here,” she said to his receding back.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As Larry Mazzare had suspected, once grace was said and dinner was served, things became much more informal. Urban waved a freshly cut, steaming piece of bread in the air, distributing the aroma. “There are advantages living out in the countryside. Like this bread. Wonderful. Not so carefully made as the loaves prepared for our discriminating palates in the Vatican. And because of that-wonderful.” His eyes seemed to lose a little focus, to veer into a reminiscent trance; it was sometimes easy to forget that popes had once been little boys, too, eagerly awaiting a fresh loaf from a country oven. Of course, for Urban-Maffeo Barberini-that country oven would have been located in a palatial family villa. But still, the pleasures and recollections of childhood had a distinctive sweetness, no matter the socioeconomic strata of the one who possessed them.
Urban’s voice brought Mazzare out of his reveries. “You have been very quiet, Lawrence, even for you. Tell me: what is on your mind?”
Mazzare smiled. “Farmhouses and villas, Your Eminence. Of which this is a most unusual specimen. How long since you relocated here from the taverna outside Padua?”
Sharon Nichols furnished the answer. “We got here almost two weeks ago. We didn’t dare spend much time at that taverna.” She speared a sliver of roast chicken. “Too much traffic, and we were way too large a party. As soon as we found this place, we paid our tab and hit the road.”
“And it looks like you kept almost all the staff with you.”
Ruy smoothed one wing of his mustache farther out of the way of his inbound fork of green beans. “Not ‘almost all’ the staff, Cardinal Mazzare: all the staff.”
Mazzare nodded. “Yes. Of course.”
Ruy matched the cardinal’s nod. “The stakes are simply too high. Which is why, of the various choices put before us by the Cavrianis’ agent-”
Ah, that’s their local contact, then. Of course.
“-this house seemed the best.”
“The best?” Mazzare looked uncertainly at the dingy walls and the smoke-darkened ceiling and rafters.
Miro set down his knife. “I believe Senor Casador y Ortiz is referring to its innocuousness, rather than its appeal.”
Ruy nodded. “Yes. This house was twice emptied by the plagues that swept through Venice late last century. It stood vacant for almost a decade. Then a family tried to ‘break the curse’-and all died from yet another malady. From what we heard, I suspect typhus, but the local peasants are now convinced that the hand of divine judgment lies heavy on this roof.”
Mazzare looked around. “You must have had a lot of cleaning up to do.”
Vitelleschi sounded as if he had bitten into a loaf and found half a wiggling worm in the part he still held. “In service to the pope, I have traveled and dwelt in many places that could not be accurately described as civilized. Amongst them, this house still proved to be the nadir.”
Antonio Barberini, the young and rather doughy cardinal who was Urban’s nephew, shuddered. “Borja came to Rome and successfully drove us out in a day; we came here and are still trying to evict the roaches and rats.”
Mazzare found that his appetite had waned. “So how long do you believe it is safe to stay in this villa? Or is it a farmhouse?”
“I guess we’d call it a hybrid property-and we stay no longer than we have to,” Sharon answered. “When you meet with Tom Stone in Venice, Don Estuban, he should have a more remote spot selected for us.”
Miro inclined his head. “It shall be my first item of business with him. But would he not already have sent word if he had found something?”
Sharon frowned. “Yes, which has me more than a little worried.”
Ruy slipped an arm around her shoulder. “Such matters take time, and cannot be rushed,” he soothed. “After all, what would one answer if asked, ‘why such a hurry to find a country villa?’ I think we cannot safely respond, ‘ah, well, you see, we must have a house in which to hide a pope.’”
She smiled. So did Urban. Mazzare suspected that the brief lip-crinkling of Vitelleschi was a sign of amusement, also. “At least,” Mazzare offered, “it is a little easier to hide in this day and age. The depictions of a person being sought aren’t even as good as the ‘wanted: dead or alive’ handbills that were used in my world in the American West.”
“Truly? Even with your wondrous photography?”
“Photographs-or rather printing them out-was too expensive in frontier areas. Besides, even if the likenesses I’ve seen resembled His Holiness-and they don’t-not many people are willing to post them. Italy’s ardent Roman Catholics have no desire to turn their pope over to anyone, let alone a brutal usurper like Borja.”
“They might, if he offers a reward that piques Italy’s equally ardent greed.” Vitelleschi’s rejoinder was the crisp, arid declamation of a dedicated moralist.
Mazzare shrugged. “Perhaps. Perhaps not.” He turned toward Urban. “Either way, Your Holiness, we must announce that you are alive, and we must do so as quickly as possible. Every day we are silent increases the likelihood that Borja can finally break the will of Rome’s people, and can bring more of the Consistory’s remaining fence-sitters aound to supporting him.”
Sharon pursed her lips. “I hate to ask this, but might it already be too late? I mean, has the belief in the rightful pope been so badly shaken that the people are already looking elsewhere?”
Vitelleschi’s voice was firm with professional conviction. “No, Ambassadora Nichols. For a while, the people will simply be shocked. And then they will be outraged. Only once that rage has passed could it be said that we have waited too long.”
“And not having my body to parade will cause a long delay indeed,” Urban observed. Then, with his small, trademark smile, he said, “One should not choose a new pope before the old one is dead. After all, two popes at once? If Mother Church is the bride of Christ, we would be inviting our Savior to become a bigamist.”
Cardinal Barberini guffawed so suddenly that he almost choked on his chicken; Ruy managed not to laugh, but his smile was almost as wide as his mustache. Miro politely looked elsewhere to conceal whatever expression passed over his face. Vitelleschi looked like an offended school marm determined not to acknowledge the witty quip of a prized, but occasionally mischievous, charge.
Mazzare managed to keep his smile wan. “And that observation also highlights something about Borja’s probable intents.”
Urban sobered immediately. “You mean, that as in your American West, I am wanted ‘dead or alive’?”