1635_ Cannon Law - Eric Flint [45]
There was a flash of a blade through the air between Ruy and the lefferto who had spoken, and Frank could have sworn Ruy—a man in his fifties at least—had blurred as he moved. Ruy was back on his spot, the tips of his blades rock-steady, before the lefferto yelped and dropped his knife to grab his hand and clutch it in pain. Frank could see blood already starting to seep between the fingers of the gripping hand.
"But I doubt it," Ruy continued. "And even if you did, my intended is here. I have been present when she totally disemboweled a man. And you can see that she has already been busy today."
Frank looked. Sharon's dress wasn't just in some dark pattern. There were definite bloodstains all down her front. Frank hoped, fervently, that she'd been rendering emergency medical assistance. He'd heard what she'd done in Venice, too.
The lefferti clearly got the message. The one Ruy hadn't stabbed in the hand very slowly and carefully sheathed his knife. "Signor," he said, "if I have caused offense to you, I most humbly apologize. I shall go elsewhere and await the man with whom I truly do have a quarrel." With which he went to the door, giving Ruy and Sharon—especially Sharon—an ostentatiously wide berth. The other guy snatched up his knife and scuttled after him.
The rest of the room let out the breath they had all been holding. It came out as a collective sigh. Ruy sheathed his dagger, flourished a handkerchief to wipe his sword point and sheathed that weapon as well. Frank couldn't help seeing a big, mad, feral tomcat, preening after a victory over some lesser moggy.
"So," said Ruy Sanchez, grinning and swaggering in a way that Frank thought was indecent in a man older than his father, "who do I have to kill to get lunch?"
"Man, that's gruesome," Frank said, once Sharon had told the full story of her events of the morning and gotten on the outside of a pizza. Not that the bloodstains down her dress hadn't told a tale all by themselves. Benito had been sent over to the embassy to get her a change of clothes. While she could get away with walking around the Borgo filthy with someone else's dried blood, she had to go through a whole other class of neighborhood to get back to her embassy and the stains would cause comment at the very least.
"It might so easily have been worse," Ruy said over his wineglass. "Fortunately, their commanding officer was killed quickly, before he could compound his errors."
"Frank," Sharon said, "were you involved?"
Frank shook his head.
Sharon gave him a hard stare for a couple of seconds. "Frank Stone," she said at length, "if I find out that there's even the slightest hint of you even stretching the truth on this one—"
Frank held up his hands. "No, scout's honor, I swear. For crying out loud, Ms. Nichols, we're less than a quarter-mile from the Vatican here. It ain't much further to Inquisition headquarters. My record isn't exactly spotless, but jeez, give me some credit for not being totally retarded, hey?"
Sharon seemed to accept that. "I don't want to see you get in trouble, Frank. Not again. And I don't want to see you mess things up for anyone else around here, least of all me. I'm supposed to be an ambassador, and I really don't want to have to explain away another serious incident."
"Not on my account, you won't," Frank said. "Look, we serve meals, we serve drinks. We have a singers' night every Tuesday, and Dino and Fabrizzio are organizing a soccer league. We're getting a free school organized. We've got pamphlets on hygiene, basic medical care and technology as well as political affairs—and I make sure to keep those a little on the vague side. Stress on Italian unification, run pretty lightly when it comes to the role of Vatican."
He decided to leave unsaid the fact that Massimo's pamphlets ran a lot more toward the inflammatory side. Frank didn't write those himself, after all. Nor