There was more in the way of an answer than Marco had expected. He’d thought to get a simple note. Instead—instead there were several pages, all in the duke’s precise hand.
Marco picked up the letters and began to read.
* * *
Petro Dorma’s private study was bright as only the best room in a wealthy man’s house could be; walled on two sides with clear, sparkling-clean windows and high enough to catch all the sunlight available. A beautiful Cassone. Linenfold scrollwork on the polished wooden panels on the walls, soft Turkish rugs on the floor—an expensive retreat fitting the head of one of the rising stars of Venice, both in commerce and government.
It struck Marco that despite being balding, Petro was an incongruously young man for such an important post in a republic which traditionally favored septuagenarians and octogenarians for its leaders. Although . . . not always, especially in times of crisis.
” ‘—purchased seven months ago by Marchioness Rosa Aleri,’ ” Petro read, his words dropping into the silence like pebbles into a quiet backwater. ” ‘Cousin to Francesco Aleri.’ ” He looked over the top of the letter at Marco, who was seated stiffly on the other side of the desk. “How certain can your grandfather be of this, Marco? How can he tell one knife from another?”
Marco still had the blade in his hands, and chose to show him rather than tell him. He unscrewed the pommel-nut and slid the hilt off the tang, laying bare the steel beneath. He tilted the thing in his hands so that it caught the light from Petro’s windows, and touched a hesitant finger first to the tiny number etched into the metal just beneath the threads for the nut, then to the maker’s mark that was cut into the steel below the quillions, where it would be visible. “This is a signed blade, Petro,” he said softly. “Signed means special, and special means numbered. Valdosta has always kept track of what special blades went where. Of course,” he added truthfully, “unless we get a blade back into our hands for sharpening or cleaning, we can’t know who gets it after the original buyer.”
“How many people know about this?” Petro Dorma’s eyes were speculative; darkly brooding.
“That we keep track?” Marco considered his answer carefully. “Not many, outside the swordsmithy. Not many inside the swordsmithy, for that matter, except the ones making the signed blades. I don’t think Mother ever knew, or if she did, she’d forgotten it. I doubt Benito was ever told about it; he wasn’t really old enough when we left. The duke, me, Cousin Pauli, and whoever is working in the special forges. Maybe a dozen people altogether. That much I’m sure of. I’m pretty sure my grandfather was counting on me remembering.”
The right corner of Petro’s mouth lifted a little. “That remarkable memory of yours at work again, hmm?”
Marco nodded. “Grandfather showed me once how the signed blades were registered, when he took me through the forges. He’ll remember that, I know he will. So he’ll be pretty well certain I do, and probably figured that was why I sent the knife to him.”
“So we have, at the very least, a tenuous link right back into the Milanese camp and as far from Senor Lopez as possible. He works for the Grand Metropolitan of Rome . . . of that much I am sure. I am not sure just what he’s doing here. He and the two priests who came with him spend most of their time doing charitable work in the poorest quarters of the city, but I’m quite sure that’s not his ultimate purpose. And I don’t think Ricardo Brunelli really knows what Lopez is doing any more than I do. Yet if your friend Katerina is correct, it was the Petrine who was actually there. Interesting.”
After a long silence Marco dared: “Well, Petro—now what?”
“I need more. Aleri seems to have disappeared—since the day before Milan began their embargo, in fact. Yes. I was having him watched.” It was as close as Marco had seen Petro Dorma come to admitting that he was one of the shadowy Council of Ten that watched over the Republic’s safety.