"Well, maybe," she said, as they came level with the grand entrance of the palazzo. "For the moment, I don't really have any reason to be urgent about cultivating any contacts there, so it can wait a while. Maybe we can invite this Antonio—he's a cardinal, isn't he?—to some function or other just to test the waters. Meantime, I've got other chickens to pluck. This stuff about Cardinal Borja, for one. And getting married to a disreputable old Catalan, for another."
"Ah, wounded to the quick," Ruy groaned.
The Piazza Barberini, as the guidebook named it—Sharon wasn't sure if it bore that name quite yet, although the palazzo had been there long enough that it might—gave on to several little side streets that looked as though they might prove to be a shortcut through to the neighborhood where the USE embassy now stood. The road that should have led directly there seemed not to have been built yet. According to the guidebook, Mussolini, Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel had remodeled large amounts of Rome among them. So the relationship between the street plan in the back of the guide book and the streets Sharon and Ruy were actually walking was sketchy at best.
The attempt at a shortcut turned in to a rather confusing series of lefts and rights through increasingly narrow streets—alleys, to give them their right name—and it became obvious that even in the good parts of Rome there were places where the company was less than congenial. Sharon had no particular difficulty with that. While she had grown up in a nice part of town, her dad's ghetto clinic had been a place she'd gone with him from time to time. With him being so familiar with that kind of neighborhood Sharon had never really gotten the idea that the other side of the tracks was alien territory. So she wasn't more than mildly concerned—it being a bright morning, after all—until Ruy halted in mid-chat and stopped her with a hand on her arm.
"A moment, Sharon," he murmured, and then in two quick and surprisingly silent strides was at the mouth of a side-alley between two buildings, scarcely three feet wide. She just about caught the glint of his dagger and the blur of his arm reaching round the corner and suddenly Ruy was swinging around and bringing a roughly dressed individual with him into the middle of the narrow street they had been walking down.
He had one hand in the guy's collar and was jabbing the pommel of his dagger into the guy's arm just below the shoulder. "Good morning!" Ruy said, brightly, once the scream and the stream of Roman vernacular had subsided.
Another burst of obscenities.
"If you are going to follow us and work your way around to ambush, friend, be less clumsy, hey?" Ruy said, in Italian with a distinct flavor of gutter. Sharon had heard him address merchants and doctors and minor nobility in the floweriest formal phrases. She'd had no idea that he was also fluent in the kind of language she'd heard the stable hands at the embassy using.
"I wasn't doing—" The protestation was choked off in a strangulated squawk as Ruy flicked the tip of the dagger up the guy's face and held it, unwavering, maybe a quarter-inch from a wide, staring eye.
"Nothing?" Ruy finished for him. "Then why did I just have to make you drop that blade?"
Sure enough, there was a knife in the gutter. Maybe four inches of cheap metal, bright and worn-down from years of sharpening. With that, he had to have intended to simply stab Ruy straight from ambush—using it to merely threaten a man with three feet of Toledo steel on his hip would have been suicide.
"Nk," said the would-be mugger, who Sharon saw was probably only about fourteen or fifteen.
"Don't hurt him too badly, Ruy," Sharon said, "he's probably starving. In fact, here," she reached in to her purse and pulled out the little .38 she usually carried these days. "No, hold on—I—" She fished about again and came up with a few small coins. "Get yourself something to eat. You look like you could use it."
"Her copper or my steel," Ruy said in a mild tone, releasing him.
The mugger took the money and ran like hell.
"A nice touch," Ruy said, "with the pistol."
Sharon grinned back. "Would have been if it'd been intentional. It's just that I keep it on top of everything else."
"Also nice. Now, I believe that if we turn left at the end there, we will be back on the Via Veneto."
They passed the remaining half hour of their stroll with inconsequentialities and pastries they bought from a street vendor, and returned to the embassy in time for a mid-morning coffee.
Chapter 5
Rome
Franco was cooling his heels as usual in the mid-afternoon heat, savoring a bite of lunch—which was, in truth, his breakfast, the night before having been a busy one—when the money walked in. The guy was dressed down some, but it was clear that there was cash and to spare about him. A Spaniard, from the looks of the sword he'd got, and it was the sword that was the clue to the money. That and the knives that were just discreet enough not to attract attention, and just obvious enough to make sure any attention he got was polite. A lot of rich guys wore a sword just to let you know that they had the pull to make it worth your life to mess with them, but only the ones who really meant it carried knives as well. An older guy, some gray at the temples, dark longish hair and cavalier mustachios, neatly trimmed. The guy could afford a pretty decent barber. He carried himself like a well-trained swordsman, and that was another thing that took plenty of cash. Everything about him stank of money. You didn't even have to start making guesses about what he had hanging from his belt under that jacket to figure there was a useful amount of silver about his person.