It would be different if he had come out in his own proper person, of course. No one would dare provoke Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz. That was half the reason for the finery. It kept the idiots at bay. Tonight, though, he was simply Manuel, in town because he'd hired on with the traveling arrangements of cardinal thus-and-so. He'd got away with not being specific so far and meant to continue in that vein. A simple porter, at a loose end until his master decided to go back to Spain, out for a few drinks and to see the sights. A complete and utter hayseed who would want anything and everything explained to him in short words. For the first time in years, he felt severely underdressed. And no one seemed to give a crap about offending Manuel, no matter how impressive the set of knives he had at his belt. He might not be able to arm himself as a gentleman, but without weapons he felt not just underdressed, but naked.
While he mused, someone was jabbering at him. "Que?" he asked. Manuel, he had decided, didn't speak Italian well, and was a bit simple.
"I said, you're not from around here, are you?" The speaker was an oily looking, pinched-faced fellow with pox scars on his cheeks who had come and sat on the bench beside Ruy at the scarred, scorched and splintered table. Ruy made a small wager with himself that he was about to be offered the services of whatever tired and ugly drab the wretch was pimping tonight.
"No," Ruy replied, downgrading his command of Italian a good few notches, "I from Barcelona. Just came to Roma, yes?" He gave the fellow his best friendly-country-idiot grin.
"Know your way around the city, yet?" There was a calculating light in the man's eyes, and Ruy shortened the odds on him being a pimp considerably.
"No' really," Ruy said. "Mostly I just shift boxes and things for cardinal." He shrugged. "First time off I get in two weeks. All done now, though, till we go back to Barcelona. Getting paid to do nothing." Ruy made his friendly-idiot grin good and ingratiating. However odious this fellow was, pimps, being idle, usually had good gossip.
"'S that right? You know, if you're looking for a little fun, I might know someone who can help you." The fellow's leer got so broad Ruy began to imagine it falling off one side of his face. And, of course, he mentally handed himself a large bag of gold in satisfaction of the wager.
Try the obvious approach first, then. "I don't know," he said, frowning a bit as if worried. "I hear of trouble in Rome right now, lots of riots and disorder and things. I figure maybe there's constables working extra-hard, eh?"
The pimp—Ruy noted that like many such, he wasn't going to give his name to anyone he wasn't sure was a customer—waved a hand in idle dismissal. "Naw, don' worry about nothin' like that. Ain't any real riots, except maybe one or two. Most of it's just guys turning out to cause a little ruckus and run away before the militia come. 'S a couple of guys organizing it, got a whole bunch of money to spend, too."
"Why?" Ruy felt quite proud of the puzzled frown he now wore. He felt that anyone seeing him would expect him to start grazing. And, of course, the effort of pretending to be this stupid was helping cover the fact that he was delighted to have hit paydirt so quickly. Only four hours of damnably awful wine and worse tavernas. Just this pox-rotted pimp to endure, and he could call it a night and get back to civilized company such as he had grown used to over the years.
The pimp shrugged. "Who knows? They say they're Committee of Correspondence, but they ain't. Those guys are all over by the Borgo, at Frank's Place, and they don't want no trouble, whatever they say about those crazy folks up in Germany and Venice. Me, I'm in eating money, mostly, so I don't bother with 'em. Don't go looking for trouble, that's my motto. And the militia caught one lot of guys went out for these other guys, y'know? Some guys got hurt."
"Bad?" Ruy tried his best to get his eyebrows into his hat, made his eyes go big and round. Stop overacting, Sanchez, he told himself.
The pimp didn't notice. "Some guys got killed. A few more didn't make it after they got hurt. That American moro from Germany, the one they say is such a miracle-working dottoressa, she was there and helped some guys. I figure if that's what these folks from the future do, they're okay with me."
It was intriguing that the fellow had dropped an American term into the flow of Roman dialect, but Ruy cautioned himself not to make too much of it. He'd already concluded that whatever other changes the up-timers were making to history, "okay" seemed certain to infect every language in Europe. The pestiferous word seemed as contagious as the plague.