1635_ Cannon Law - Eric Flint [79]
"Señora Stone," Sanchez said, "your husband's thinking is in accord with that of a professional soldier. I can find no fault in his reasoning. Duty is not always both honorable and pleasant, and is frequently neither."
That didn't go over too well with Giovanna either, Frank noticed, but decided that pressing it now wasn't such a good idea. "We should get back," he said to Giovanna. "We need to make sure the guys are ready for the lunchtime rush."
They said their good-byes to Sharon, and Sanchez agreed to come over and make a start on the defenses of the Committee and have lunch with them. On the way out, as they turned along the street to head for the bridge that would take them to their own side of the river, Sanchez leaned over, and in conversational tones, said, "Our movements are being reported. One of the people who have been watching the embassy building for the last few days just ran away, doubtless to deliver tidings of your departure."
"You saw?" Frank fought the urge to turn around. He didn't know much about this sort of thing, but he figured letting on that they knew was a wrong move.
"A small boy, who was standing with a group of ruffians. Who, I might add, did not accord well with the character of this quarter of Rome."
"Did you see where he went?" Giovanna asked.
"The opposite way from our present direction," Sanchez said, pausing a moment to tip his hat to a lady passing them, "running fast. A risk of using street urchins in this kind of business, they do not know how to be inconspicuous."
"What do we do?" Frank asked, trying hard to give an air of just chatting with an old friend as we stroll along.
"Nothing, Señor Stone," Sanchez said. "Let them believe we do not know we are being watched."
The rest of the walk back passed without incident.
Chapter 18
Rome
Cardinal Antonio Barberini was not, in any measure, a happy man. He stood at the window overlooking the square where, money permitting, he would be wheedling his uncle to commission a new fountain. The piazza needed it, frankly. Something by Bernini, if the man had time to work on it before he died. The trouble with Bernini, of course, was that he was so good, he had more commissions than he could truly keep up with.
Right now though, the problem with the piazza was not so much the absence of fountain, but the very real and present presence of what looked like a couple of hundred people. Not, if one were to be truly pedantic, a mob. They didn't seem to have a great deal to say for themselves, and while there would certainly be pockets being picked and minor scuffles, the whole scene didn't look criminal. Or, at least, not from this elevated and removed vantage.
It was just—untidy. Badly composed. An eyesore. A little while ago, he'd asked that someone be sent to wander through the crowd and see what had drawn them. Idle curiosity, really. The fellow who'd gone out—someone had picked out one of the below-stairs porters as being most likely to blend in, and Barberini could see the point, the man looked quite charmingly villainous—had come back a few moments ago saying that the crowd wasn't really there for much. A couple of the fellows Barberini's man had talked to had been paid to turn up and the rest had hung around to see if anything was going to happen. That alone would just have been an amusing oddity of idleness and the beginnings of a long, hot summer.
It was not alone. There was the paper. That had been handed to the porter, he said, within minutes of him setting foot in the square. There were street-boys down there giving them to anyone with hands to hold them. The porter could not read it, but had kept it to show his boss. Barberini had it in his hand now, read once and then gripped tightly. Naturally, the thing was scurrilous beyond belief. No one who actually knew him would believe a word of it. Not least because the author had at one and the same time accused him of sins against