Chapter 17
When the American ambassador had moved on and the lesser lights in their train had passed also, Bedmar turned to Sanchez. “Not bad, for his first time.”
“Oh?” Sanchez returned from whatever internal fugue he had been pursuing to save himself from tedium.
“The American priest. There might almost be a diplomat made of him, if he survives this town.” Bedmar nodded to himself. The people from the future bore watching, whatever the rest of the hierarchy might say—which was decidedly mixed—if Mazzare was any guide.
“And if he survives your attentions, Your Eminence.” Sanchez grinned through his mustaches. “That business over the shoes was a trifle unnecessary, I thought.”
“Oh, Sanchez,” Bedmar said, “do permit a tired old man his fun.”
Sanchez chuckled. “Oh, I will, if he will permit me mine. Did you see the Moorish one?”
Bedmar nodded, although with some reservation. “Looked more like an Ethiope to me.”
“You know what I mean. What they all call a Moor here in the Italies that hardly ever see one.”
Sanchez’s eyes seemed, to Bedmar, to be getting a little dreamy. The man was incorrigible. The old Catalan goat had buried three wives that Bedmar knew about. And while he had been faithful to all of them, so far as the cardinal was aware, he had something of a notorious reputation during those periods he was unmarried. Even now, at his age!
Bedmar reminded himself, on the other hand, that it was that same vigor which made Sanchez such a useful man to have around. Not to mention a comfort, of a certain specific and necessary sort, in the event of dire necessity. Even now, somewhere in his late fifties—no one, including Sanchez, knew the precise year of his birth—only a fool or someone inexperienced in such matters challenged the Catalan lightly. Wives were but a small portion of the people Ruy Sanchez had seen lowered into graves. The chief distinction enjoyed by the wives was that Sanchez had not put them there.
Still, there were times the man annoyed Bedmar. If for no other reason than the many aches and pains from which the cardinal’s body now suffered. Sanchez was but a few years younger than he, yet the Catalan still moved with the ease and grace of a man in his thirties.
“Dark meat, Sanchez?” Bedmar asked nastily. “Where did you learn that taste?”
Sanchez gave him a sidelong, blank gaze that would have chilled the cardinal, had he been any other man. Belatedly, Bedmar remembered that the first of the Catalan’s wives, won and lost during his youth in New Spain, had been an Indian woman of some sort. He’d also heard that one of the bodies resting in a grave somewhere—Cordoba, he thought, if he remembered the story correctly—was that of a man who had sneered at Sanchez for the fact.
“My apologies,” the cardinal murmured. “That was uncalled for.”
Sanchez harumphed, clearing the matter aside. Then, smiled slightly. “Tell me, Your Eminence . . . would it matter if I learned it here tonight?”
Bedmar was still feeling a bit testy. “It would indeed matter, Sanchez, if it turned out you did something foolish to compromise our—” He stopped.
“Ah, Your Eminence has perhaps seen the difficulty with that notion?”
Sanchez trying to be arch was laughable. Bedmar knew for a fact that the man’s alleged nobility was an arrant pretense. Sanchez had no less than seven certificates of limpieza, not a one of them saying the same thing as the others. A gentleman Sanchez might be reckoned today, but sometimes the Catalan peasant-soldier just shone through.
Bless his iron little heart. Two of those corpses rotting in graves—two, that the cardinal knew of—had tried to kill Bedmar himself.
“No, no.” Bedmar waved an admonitory finger. “Am I not a diplomat? A prince of the Church? A man of learning?”
Sanchez snorted. “You are the man I had to get out of this town one step ahead of a mob of angry Arsenalotti. And it was not the step of a man with long legs, I might add.” He looked down on his cardinal. Bedmar’s short stature next to, well, just about anyone was a running joke between them.