‘My son, it is all too possible, that it is we who are the heretics. Peter wrote letters to the Corinthians and the Thessalians, but none whatsoever to the French, the Italians, or the English.’ He laughed his lovely laugh and then looked directly at me. ‘Don’t tell the Pope,’ he said. And changed the subject.
At any rate, we all had dispensations, from Father Pierre as legate, to hear Mass under the Greek rite, and I had never done so, so we went to Mass. The singing was very different from our own, but beautiful, and Fiore said it was like masses he had heard in Venice.
We were in the church just long enough to admire the lamp, a magnificent hanging lamp of silver, when Nerio’s sudden burst of religious enthusiasm was explained by the arrival of the girl from the doorway down the hill, wearing a veil. I didn’t know her, but Nerio beamed at her – oh, that man!
At any rate, immediately after Mass, all the Greeks went out into the tiny square and drank wine, and Nerio sat with his lady. He had a little Greek and she had a little Latin, and they conversed with long looks that smoked and smouldered.
We heard the shouts and did nothing, because we were a little drunk and the Greeks were being very friendly, but when one of the shouts became a scream, Fiore was on his feet, sword in hand. I suppose I should say that, in Romania, men openly wore swords, even longswords, and all of us had ours by our sides.
I followed Fiore when he ran past the church and plunged into the darkness. The streets were narrow, wound like a tangled skein of yarn, and were as steep as a mountain. As we ran, we heard shouting again. This time, we could clearly perceive that the shouting was Italian and the screaming was from a woman. We cut down another street and came out above a round tower and found four men fighting one while another fumbled at a screaming woman’s clothes. He had her on her back.
There was another man down, but in the darkness, it was very difficult to make out who was who.
The single man fighting four had his back to the tower – they call it the ‘Tower of the Winds’ – and he would charge out into them, swing wildly, and then back away. The four were cowards: they would not close with him.
I became convinced that the single man was Carlo Zeno. Some combination of movement and the tone of the shouts.
Zeno – if it was he – was trying to cut his way through to the woman. She, in turn, was resisting her would-be rapist with spirit. She kicked him in the head, and when he tried to raise her skirts, she got them over his head and stabbed him with a knife. I know this, because by then I was upon them, running full tilt. I gave him the pommel of my sword in the back of his head and left him to his tender victim.
I passed them and pressed into the back of Zeno’s mêlée. He was beside himself, and he used his sword two-handed, sweeping it back and forth, trying to make a hole in the four men facing him.
I kicked one in the back of the knee. He went down and I stamped on him while thrusting at a second man, and Fiore passed his blade over the head of a third and threw the man into the wall of the tower so hard that he died.
The fourth man fell to his knees. He wept and begged – attacker to victim in a matter of moments.
Zeno stabbed him through the mouth as he begged. It was a pretty thrust.
The failed rapist was thrashing his heels on the ground in his death throes. His intended victim had cut his throat.
Miles Stapleton ran up behind us, but it was done.
Gianni di Testa was lying at the foot of the tower, his head broken by an iron club. We carried him to the priest’s house and then bought wine for the woman. She was Greek, and possibly a prostitute. The men were foreign scum, waterfront workers from Piraeus. If anyone knew them, no one claimed their corpses.
The rest of the evening was not very pleasant.