The eyebrow stayed up. Caesare made no pretence that he didn’t understand what Benito was talking about. “And if I say—no noise?”
Benito remembered a certain window, and a certain escapade that no longer seemed so clever, and the shadowy men on the canalside walkways—and shuddered. “Then it’ll be quiet, m’lord. Real quiet. Babies wouldn’t wake up.”
“And how long can I expect this sudden fit of virtue to last?” Caesare asked with heavy irony.
“It’ll last, m’lord, long as you got use for me. Though, I reckon—” Benito grinned suddenly, engagingly, “you’ll have to crack me over the ear, now and again. Claudia used to—about once a week.”
Caesare’s eyes narrowed a little as he studied Benito. The boy held steady beneath that merciless gaze, neither dropping his own eyes, nor shifting so much as an inch. Finally Aldanto nodded in apparent satisfaction.
“You’ll do as I say? Exactly as I say? No arguments?”
“Yes m’lord. No arguments, m’lord. I can spot a professional when I see one, m’lord. Happen you could teach me more than a bit, no? I learn quick, even Valentina says so. One other thing, though—Marco, he went an’ spent all the rent money on your medicine, and both of us had to leave work to help out here, so there’s nothing saved.” Benito was not averse to rubbing that in, just to remind Aldanto that they’d already bankrupted themselves for him, and that debt could work both ways.
He got a bit of satisfaction when this time he definitely saw Caesare wince. “Money’s a bit tight.”
Benito shrugged. “I understand. Giaccomo’s boys don’t come cheap. But we’re broke. So we either got to stay here, or hit the attics again. Happens the attics are no bad notion; you’ve got to get over the roofs to get in them—hard for folks to sneak up on you.”
Aldanto shook his head, closing his eyes for a moment.
“Mercy—” he mumbled, “—what have I let myself in for this time?”
He cast a glance behind Benito. “Maria—you’ve got some stake in this too—”
Benito didn’t look around, but heard Maria flop down in a chair behind him.
“I think it’s no bad idea,” she said. “Let them stay here. Lots of comings and goings—maybe not all by doors—confuse the hell out of any watchers.”
Aldanto looked over at Benito again, and Benito had the peculiar feeling of seeing someone quite near his own age looking at him out of those adult eyes for one brief flash.
“Hey, the attics ain’t so bad,” he gave a token protest. “I lived there two years. You get some heat from the house and if you keep quiet you don’t get found out and have to move too often. Better than the marshes by a long way.”
Aldanto shook his head. “I’d rather you were where I could see you.”
Benito shrugged. “Well, if you let us stay, we stay. But we’ve got jobs. We’ll kick in.”
“You’d better.” That was Maria, behind him.
Caesare shook his head again. Sighed. “Well then, Benito Valdosta, I think we may have a bargain even if my bones tell me it may well be a partnership made in Hell.”
Benito just grinned “Hey, not for you, m’lord. But for people acting unfriendly-like? Against a team like the three of us, you, me, and Maria, m’lord Caesare? They haven’t a chance!”
* * *
Harrow had panicked at first, when he’d seen who was picking the boys up—he’d broken out of the knot of fighting loco he’d tipped into the water and struggled vainly to get to the gondola before it could carry the boys off. The treacherous bottom had betrayed him. By the time he’d hauled himself out of the washout the two boys were aboard the gondola and being sculled away, back into the shadowed bowels of the city.
Then recollection came to him, and he edged past the brawl back into depths of the swamp, comforted by this new evidence of the Goddess’s intervention. Aldanto was former Montagnard; a man with an assassin’s knowledge, a snake’s cunning, an eel’s ways, a duelist’s defenses. If the Montagnards were after the boys, what better protection could they have than that of the man who knew most about the ways the Visconti operated, from firsthand experience?