Something about that last bugged Frank a little, but he wasn't going to worry about it now. "No, guys," he said, doing his best to imitate his father-in-law doing the mafia-don act he put on for Murano's low-life. He held up a hand. "I see how this is. You guys," he said, waving a hand at the gang in the street, "I see how it is. You got your money, you did what you came for, go collect your pay. It's over. And next time, you take the money, you come here and have a quiet drink, and go back and just say you did it, okay?"
There was a pause. "What about all that stuff you wrote?" came a voice from the back.
There was always one, Frank figured. "I never wrote it," he said. "And I wouldn't. Only guy gets to fuck my wife is me, you hear?" he shouted, grinning. "If you saw her, you'd understand why I feel real strongly about that."
That got a few grins. Hey, it's working. He decided he'd strike while the iron was hot. "I figure you all got someone you feel that way about too, and I ain't going to mess with that."
"But you wrote—" said the heckler, and Frank noted that he was staying in back.
"I—WROTE—NO—SUCH—THING!" he roared at the top of his lungs. "The bastards are trying to get you angry at your best hope of getting what's coming you, is all. They've seen what the Committee's done in Germany and they don't want it happening here! You think some stinking Spanish nobleman wants to see you doing well? When he's getting fat off your hard work?"
There was a round of muttered "no's," although Frank would have guessed that most of these guys hadn't done a day's work in their lives.
"Right!" he pressed on. "So maybe they want to tell you a few lies and get you mad at us over bullshit! That's what it is. Nothing but fucking bullshit. Now, you guys going to go home, or come in for a drink, or what?"
In the end, most of them drifted off. A couple of them came in for a couple of drinks, but seemed kind of embarrassed, and the regulars didn't exactly make them feel welcome. Frank wished he could fix that. If he could just get a few of these fellows on his side he'd have someone who could tell him what the hell was going on with all this rent-a-mob stuff. It wasn't like it was even doing much harm, apart from the odd rock getting thrown and Frank having a hell of a repair bill. As it was, all he could get out of them was that some guy had offered them a bit of money and a skinful of drink to turn out and throw rocks at Frank's Place, and some guy had passed around the handbills and gotten quite irate about the whole sharing-of-women thing. And that was it, apparently. Two of them had "worked" for these guys before, and they were usually in one of the taverns on the Via Ripetto picking up warm bodies for this kind of thing. There were some guys all but making a living at it.
Still, it was more than he'd got up to now, through Benito asking street kids. And he wondered if they'd be dumb enough to let, say, Dino or Fabrizzio join one of their hired crowds. That would get them a lot more information, assuming he could drill the Marcoli boys with the absolute necessity of keeping their yaps shut and not arguing with whatever bullshit they were asked to shout or hand around.
He decided he'd sleep on it.
Chapter 20
Rome
Sharon had been in the Palazzo Barberini for less than an hour, and was already feeling under siege. Ruy had wandered off to discuss poetry with someone or other—Sharon suspected that he almost certainly had the poor fellow completely confused by now—and she had been, well, mobbed was the only word for it, by every single one of the physicists, physicians, astronomers and in a couple of cases outright charlatans that His Eminence Cardinal Antonio Barberini seemed to have surrounded himself with.
She'd exchanged maybe ten words with the cardinal, a short, slightly pudgy, bright-eyed little fellow who, whatever his priestly vows, came off as gay as the eighteen-nineties. Which was some achievement for a man born in the early seventeenth century. Doubtless he'd be around again later; it beggared belief that this invitation had turned up for no good reason after nearly three months of very polite cold shoulder from his uncle the pope. For now, though, she was having trouble keeping the names straight of the dozen or so guys who were literally hanging on her every word. She'd managed to get through a blow-by-blow account of the operation she'd done on her fiancé, and made a list of the mistakes she'd made for them to learn from.
That seemed to puzzle them. She'd read up on the way science operated in this time after the business with Galileo. Half of what would be peer-reviewed journals, in later times, was filled with outright bragging. That was a good part of the reason that scientific controversy reached the levels of venom that had got Galileo in trouble. Not that, judging from some of the stories her dad told about getting papers published, it was much different in the twentieth century. It was just that the backbiting and nastiness tended not to end up mixed in with the science.