"And, in view of your most diligent and excellent work otherwise, Señor Quevedo y Villega," Borja said, amazed at the man's ability to keep his face straight, for the provocation of just such an assault had in no small measure been directed by the agent himself, "I can do no other than accept your most gracious apology in the spirit in which it was offered, and tender the forgiveness which is by Christ's law your merest due."
Quevedo sketched a bow of acknowledgement from where he sat, but did not trouble to disarrange his footwear from the chair on which his feet took their ease. "Your Eminence is most charitable in overlooking his most humble servant's many failings." It was all Borja could do not to strike his insolent face where he sat.
He took a deep breath. "Is there anything further that I should include in my dispatch?"
"Only, Your Eminence, that the Committee of Correspondence, as well as acts tending to the general disorder, are inducing the common citizenry of Rome to acts of immorality. I had agents present earlier in the evening at their principal den, and I grieve to report to Your Eminence that the place was the scene of the most lewd cavortings and intoxication. The corruption of the city's youth seemed to be their principal end, Your Eminence. Such lasciviousness and abandon must needs be stopped. I also have a full dossier of the material circulated about the city under this organization's aegis and name. Your Eminence, it is fomentation of the most disgusting sort, calling for revolution, brigandage and the atheistic folly of separation of church and state. Production is in the thousands, and naturally Your Eminence will be concerned about an attack on the morals and faith of the best-educated of the common folk—those who can and do read. Not least because the Inquisition appear to have been suborned by these wretches. The felon Stone visits there regularly, twice a week it is said, and not once have efforts been made to arrest him. The connection is obvious."
"I thank you, Señor Quevedo y Villega. Doubtless my secretary will take a full report from you in due course. Ferrigno?"
"Yes, Your Eminence?"
"Go and prepare the draft. I want a dispatch for my signature within the hour. Ensure His Excellency is asked to put in hand the measures already agreed with all possible haste, and encypher that part. Use your discretion as to what other parts must be encyphered, but have a mind that this matter is urgent, both here and in Naples."
"Yes, Your Eminence." Ferrigno was still scribbling as he left.
"So, Señor," Borja said when Ferrigno had shut the door, "was it the stupidity of the civil authorities?"
"Largely, no. The unpredictable nature of the common folk and a number of useful coincidences were among our principal advantages. That the matter worked on the first provocation was of great good fortune. The matter could so easily have died away to the status of street-gossip for the next week."
"The hand of the Holy Spirit!" Borja cried aloud. "I was surer of nothing else!"
"Your Eminence's insight into such matters is well known," Quevedo said gravely.
In the end, the dispatch went on a fast horse to Naples at two in the morning. The shooting at the gate had died down an hour before.
Chapter 25
Rome
The drive back from the Palazzo Colonna was anything but dull, Sharon noticed. Cities being what they were, preautomobile, sound carried. The cool that came with the Mediterranean spring night let it carry even further. Somewhere, there was trouble. The roaring of a crowd, somewhere, and the sound of shooting.
"Sounds like it's a long, hot, night," her father remarked as the carriage driver trotted his team along a broad street.
"It would appear that the disturbance earlier was not the last," Ruy added. "It is the time of year for it."
"Bread prices?" Rita asked.
"Indeed. This year's harvests are not yet in, and last year's are running low, and last year's was nothing special. If there is trouble, it spreads quickly." As if to underscore Ruy's words, a column of cavalry came along the street in the opposite direction, heading toward the river.
"Where will they be heading?" Melissa asked, craning her neck in the open-topped carriage as the horsemen went by.
"Probably to the rougher neighborhoods across the river," Sharon told her. That side of the river had become run-down during the years the papacy was in Avignon. Despite the fact that the POPE had been back in the Vatican for decades, the area had never recovered. The neighborhood right under the Vatican's walls was the roughest of all, and the adjoining parish where Frank had sited the Committee's headquarters wasn't much better. There were tough neighborhoods on this side of the river, the area around the Ripetto docks for one, but for sheer nastiness the streets within the Leonine wall that was part of the Vatican's medieval defenses were Rome's low point.