Now the little square in front of the inn gate was as silent as a tomb. I pushed my prisoner through the gate and Nerio slammed him into the gatepost and then dropped him.
‘Go away,’ I shouted. ‘Or come at us, and see what happens.’
Naturally, I said nothing of all this to Father Pierre, but there was no hiding the two men bound to chairs in the common room.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Let them go. I have what I came for. I would like to leave as soon as possible.’
I pushed them out the gate with good humour. They had heard nothing of our planning, and we were free to go. Sabraham and I had made a plan – not an elaborate plan, but one that would have appealed to every routier I knew – in the kitchen.
Back with the legate, I said, ‘No dinner at the guildhall? No solemn Mass to mark the occasion?’
Father Pierre looked away. He was shattered; I could see his eyes full of tears. I had missed the signs, and I was frightened. You have to understand, he was a pillar, a tower. I don’t think I had ever seen him so used up, and so unhappy.
‘I have paid a high price for the crusade,’ he said. ‘These men …’ His eyes met mine. He was struggling against saying what he felt. Father Pierre’s lapses of hot-blooded humanity were both a relief to us – and a terror. But he knelt down on the inn floor and prayed for guidance, and then he rose. ‘Let us leave this place,’ he said.
I found Nicolas Sabraham looking at me from the kitchen door.
We smiled at each other.
Our smug self-assurance lasted as long as it took to draw a breath, and then we heard the unmistakable sound of breaking glass.
Marc-Antonio ran for the stairs, but he was too late.
The innkeeper had escaped.
I was the third man into his room, and I instantly realised two things – that his room was over the kitchen, and that someone had unlocked his shutter. There was no other way he could have got out the window.
He’d jumped on to the stable roof and then was gone.
‘I think he knows what we plan,’ I said to Sabraham.
He frowned. ‘If we’re quick—’
‘True as the cross,’ I said.
It took long minutes to get the horses saddled. Sabraham and his men went out the back of the tavern. We’d lost our hostages and our plan was betrayed – someone had let the innkeeper go. Who?
Before the legate’s horse was out in the yard, I could see men in harness moving in the alleys.
But I had two cards to play, as well. No, to be fair, Sabraham had the cards.
In Genoa, every free man has a crossbow. It is their favourite weapon; silent, mechanical, good at sea or on land. Every free man from Monaco to Liguria has one, and my greatest fear was a storm of bolts. It was evening in winter, already full dark. That had to cut the odds a little.
And the podestà’s men were overawed. They gave us space, and they were not well-organised. I’m going to guess that their Milanese master didn’t trust his lieutenants, so, as he could not appear himself, they were rudderless.
The quarter hour struck in the neighbourhood church. We had ten mules with all the legate’s goods, mostly desks and a portable altar and other necessaries.
We kept the gate closed.
Father Pierre looked at me. His face was pale and he was deeply unhappy.
‘I must ask you what you have been driven to do,’ he said.