“Sure, with maybe a detour on the way?” Ron sniggered.
“Jesus, Ron, you think I want to get killed? Besides, I think this is the real deal. Got to do it right, you know?”
“You said that about Missy. And Gudrun. And—”
“This time it is,” Frank said sternly. “And you are, I kid you not, dead meat if you mention any of that to Giovanna, understand?”
“Scout’s honor,” Ron said, raising his right hand.
“You weren’t ever a scout, and that’s the Vulcan live-long-and-prosper sign anyway,” Frank pointed out.
“Same difference.” Ron shrugged. “Besides, enlightened self-interest. I may need your silence about my past one day.”
“Point.” Frank leaned back on the gondola seat. He took a deep, satisfied breath and sighed it out.
In Germany, winter still had its grip on the land. But Venice in March was Venice in spring.
Venice was truly, truly beautiful in the springtime. Even the stink of the canals seemed pleasant.
Chapter 16
There were advantages, Cardinal Bedmar reflected, to being persona non grata in Venice. Sourly, he studied the mob packed into the doge’s palace. At least he’d been spared this unpleasantness since his arrival from the Spanish Netherlands a few weeks earlier. This was the first time he’d been invited to participate in one of the Venetians’ beloved gala events, as one of the fish crammed into the barrel.
And why had he been invited at all? he wondered. Probably just because the Venetians enjoyed rubbing his nose in the fact that the ambassador from the infant “United States of Europe” enjoyed more status here than one of the representatives from the ancient and glorious Spanish Empire.
“My feet hurt,” the cardinal announced.
“Yes, Your Eminence.”
“And my back hurts,” he went on.
“Yes, Your Eminence.”
“And with all this insincere smiling, Sanchez, my God-damned face hurts.”
Sanchez shifted from one foot to the other, a slight wince creasing his face. “Your Eminence bears his suffering well.”
“Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, did I not know you better I would swear you were being sarcastic.” Cardinal Bedmar spoke the words in the low undertone that all diplomats learned for functions like the one they were attending, his face hardly moving from its practiced smile.
“Oh, no,” Sanchez drawled, likewise. “For that would be a heretical proposition of disrespect to a prince of the Church, rather than simply suggesting—as one old man to another—that Your Eminence is not the only one who is too old for this.”
Sanchez, like the cardinal himself, was two-faced in the service of his country. In theory, a cardinal’s gentiluomo like Sanchez was simply his master’s close-protection man, the last line of defense for a prince of the Church and the bearer of a sword where a cleric ought not to wield one in his own person. In practice, Sanchez ran errands for his master the one-time diplomat.
Sometimes downright odd errands, those were. There had been few enough of them, though, in past years. Bedmar had been in near-retirement on the Council of Flanders, and until the year before Flanders had been quiet. As quiet, at least, as the nearby presence of the pestiferous Protestants in the United Provinces allowed. But all that had changed since the arrival of the Americans in what had come to be known as “the Ring of Fire.” Now these bizarre people said to come from the future and their Swedish ally had kicked over the ant-heap in Germany.
On the positive side, most of the Netherlands was back in Spanish hands since the Dutch fleet had been destroyed through treachery and Cardinal-Infante Don Fernando had led a daring seizure of Haarlem. There were new men all over the place, in the Spanish Netherlands, brought by the cardinal-infante. The old warhorse Cardinal Bedmar had been sent back to Venice after fifteen years away. Some genius had decided he was the man to come in and foil whatever plot the Americans were working toward here, despite Bedmar’s notoriety in the Serene Republic.
And so, tonight, Bedmar and his trusted assistant Sanchez were in the Sala de Gran Consiglio of the doge’s palace, paying more attention to the magnificent Tintoretto paintings on the walls and ceiling than any of the pomp and flummery the Venetians loved so much. Bedmar had spent the evening so far smiling at people whom he had, fifteen years earlier, tried to have killed, ruined, or subordinated to foreign conquest.