The Cannon Law—ARC(12)

"There is no way?" Borja asked, knowing the answer from other canon lawyers, consulted before this day.



Sinceri gave a small, dry chuckle like the rustling of old parchment. "Your Eminence will recall the jest that there is precedent for nothing until it is done for the first time, perhaps?"



Borja laughed politely. "Indeed," he said. "We must simply hope that His Holiness sees the error of his ways and abdicates, no?"



Suddenly, and to Borja's mixed delight and alarm, Sinceri was every inch the inquisitor, the dryness antarctic rather than scholarly. "I am sure the Holy Spirit will guide him to the right conclusion, Your Eminence."



A statement, Borja realized, which could be parsed in oh so many interesting ways. Sinceri would never conspire, never scheme. But if a scheme looked like succeeding, Sinceri and men like him would be there with the right formalities, the right words and above all the right documents to turn a coup into an orderly change of government.



Borja clasped his hands and raised his eyes piously to heaven. "It shall be a conclusion to this matter that will never be far from my prayers," he said. "In the meantime, Father Sinceri, may I ask you to do me the estimable service of having ready a briefing on every precedent for papal abdication, and on the current legislations on the conclave of election? I should be most interested to study at length the scholarly conclusions you have kindly sketched for me today."



"It is the least I can do for Your Eminence," said Sinceri with a small bow of his head. With that, and a few small pleasantries, he left.



Borja passed a few moments staring out at the garden, musing on the fact that he had now taken an irrevocable step that would end in either glory or disgrace. But the possibility of disgrace was so small as not to be worth thinking about. There was a calmness in him now that he took for a sign of divine favor. Once the Holy Spirit moved, hesitation or squeamishness surely took on the character of sin.



Audacity and ruthlessness would see the matter through. The only secret that truly needed to be kept would be Borja's own willingness to shape his means to fit his end, and do so without betraying his holy purpose with so much as a hint of scruple.



Ferrigno entered silently. "Signor Quevedo y Villega has arrived, Your Eminence."



"Send him in." Borja turned away from the window. "Have wine brought. The man is an incorrigible sot, and seems unable to speak without a cup in his hand." In any event, Borja felt that a small drink of wine would not be out of order, in toast to the enterprise he was beginning.



"As Your Eminence wishes." Ferrigno bowed himself out to attend to it.



There, Borja thought, was the secret to effective statecraft. A staff who got on with the matter at hand without undue frolics of their own. Francisco de Quevedo had been pressed on him by Osuna as a useful tool in the present business. He was not a tool that would have come naturally to Borja's hand. If nothing else, the dash the man had cut at court in Madrid these past few years had offended Borja's austere sensibilities. A satirist and a humorist and a man the Spanish Inquisition had had to censure for writings once already.



Quevedo's history of wild scheming—scheming that as often as not ended in disaster—suggested that he was a tool with a mind of his own. Such were dangerous. Had he not been in Italy raising Cain because he'd had to leave Spain for a while after killing a man in a duel? And, of course, the man's most prominent failure had been the Venetian plot, which was an additional risk in using him. There was another of the Venetian plotters in Rome, a man who knew Quevedo and might recognize him.



Against that risk there was the excellent record the man had of creating complete and imaginative chaos wherever he went. It was only to be expected that that was where the man's talents would lie, since his other claims to fame were as a soldier and a poet. At once a brute and an artist, a thought that forced another bark of laughter from Borja. Exactly what Rome needed right now.



If Quevedo's plotting erupted into a spectacular debacle, that was all to the good. A descent into anarchy was what Borja wanted for Rome. If the anarchy ran out of control, so much the better. There would be a very present remedy for that ailment on hand at just the right time, provided Osuna kept his part of his bargain. There would be troops and to spare in Naples for anything Borja saw fit to use them for.



There came a knock. "Enter," Borja said. A servant opened the door to usher the spy in while another brought the wine Borja had ordered.



Quevedo was all that his reputation said he would be. An older man in his fifties, he nevertheless carried himself with the arrogance of a man much younger. Tall, imposing, doubtless of the kind who in his younger days would have been a favorite with the less reputable sort of lady, he carried the marks of both dueling and drink on his face. His clothes were outlandish to Borja's eye, but then he had spent too little time in Rome to have paid notice to the fashions prevailing. Still, for a man who had made part of his career as a secret agent, he cut a remarkably striking figure.