The Jewish lawyer had remained at the embassy to mind the store. “What does he say?” Mazzare asked.
“The State Inquisition is declining to investigate.”
Mazzare frowned. He had, naturally, reported the matter to the appropriate authorities as a murder. “Why?” he asked.
“They think it’s the Spanish or the French, and they can’t arrest any of the diplomats.”
“What?” Sanchez had heard.
Jones colored. “Señor Sanchez,” he said, “I’m only repeating what was told to me.”
Sanchez blew through his mustaches. “Did they have the courage to make this accusation to my face, I should be much tempted to take advantage of my diplomat status.” He smiled in a way that was all the more unnerving coming from a man of almost sixty.
Mazzare decided to try conciliation. “Now, señor, I feel sure the accusation was not meant for you personally—”
Sanchez threw back his head and laughed. “Your Excellency forgets that I was here for the conspiracy. Took part in it, in fact. The Venetians would believe anything of me.”
A cold wind was idly toying with the clothes of the few mourners who yet remained in the graveyard, but that was not all that made Mazzare shiver. The sheer Latin ferality of the man, when he chose to show it, was quite intimidating. In that moment Mazzare realized he himself could well believe anything of the stocky Spaniard, whom Sharon had once described to him as “Don Quixote on steroids.” It was easy to see him smiling in badly feigned innocence while a windmill was blown to smithereens by stealthily planted charges. Tilting he would regard as pointlessly ineffective.
“Behave, Ruy,” Sharon said.
“Forgive me, Dona Sharon.” Then, turning back to Mazzare: “And forgive my manner, Excellency. The plain fact of the matter is that our nations are in arms against one another. But neither I nor His Eminence the cardinal would resort to such as this. If nothing else, I am pricked by the suggestion that we should do something so foolish. The man Buckley was an annoyance to us, as I understand he was to you—”
Sharon had the good grace to look a little embarrassed at having apparently released a little diplomatic communiqué of her own. Mazzare decided he would do no more than issue a word to the wise—later.
“—but there are other means to deal with annoyances of his kind.”
“Quite,” Mazzare said. He’d heard rumors of prosecutions for libel and slander, challenges to duels and so forth. It had been only a matter of time before something had descended on Buckley; it was just that the murderer got to him first.
“Please accept my assurance and my word,” Sanchez continued, speaking very formally now, “Your Excellency, that to my knowledge this matter was not conceived of at the embassy of His Most Catholic Majesty.”
“Thank you, Sanchez,” Mazzare said.
Sanchez bid them all good day, and left immediately. That made sense. If the Venetians were casting aspersions of that character, his master the cardinal Bedmar and the Spanish embassy in general needed to know so as to start protesting immediately. Loudly and in strong terms; Mazzare wondered how Bedmar kept a straight face. The old cardinal was one of the sharpest operators in Venice, for all he played the role of feeble old man in over his head.
And, at that, he might well have to keep a straight face through all those protests. Sanchez was himself a competent operator, and had not gone so far as to pledge his word absolutely for the clean hands of the whole Spanish presence in Venice. There were, in effect, two missions from His Most Catholic Majesty in town right now, and no firm guarantee that the left hand knew what the right was doing. Mazzare had met Bedmar several times, and the other Spaniards likewise. Never in the same place, and always on neutral ground. The regular mission—the one from Madrid—was polite, reserved and distant, saying nothing and giving away less. Bedmar, on the other hand, seemed to be hinting at a second agenda, a possibility that there was more to discuss than just how little personal rancor there was arising from the fact that their mutual nations were at war. There was, however, nothing of substance in that as yet. It was, at best, frustrating.