Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (37 page)

Ezio held out a hand to quiet them. “We all know that a victory is not a victory until it is absolute.”

“And Cesare may indeed be muzzled, but he lives,” said Machiavelli quietly. “And Micheletto—”

“Exactly!” Ezio said. “And as long as there are pockets of Borgia diehards, both here and in the Papal States, there is still seed from which a Borgia revival may grow.”

“You are too cautious, Ezio! We have won!” cried Bartolomeo.

“Barto, you know as well as I do that a handful of city-states in the Romagna remain loyal to Cesare. They are strongly fortified.”

“Then I’ll go and sort them out!”

“They will keep. Caterina Sforza’s army is not strong enough to attack them from Forlì, but I have sent messengers requesting her to keep a close watch on them. I have a more pressing job for you.”
Oh, God,
thought Ezio,
why does my heart still skip a beat when I mention her name?

“Which is…?”

“I want you to take a force to Ostia and keep a sharp eye on the port. I want to know about any suspicious ships coming into, and, especially, leaving the harbor. I want you to have messengers on horseback ready to bring news to me here the instant you have anything to report.”

Bartolomeo snorted. “Sentry duty! Hardly the sort of work for a man of action like me!”

“You will get as much action as you need when the time is ripe to move against the rebel city-states I’ve mentioned. In the meantime, they live in hope, waiting for a signal. Let them live in hope; it’ll keep them quiet. Our job is to snuff that hope out! Forever! Then, if they don’t listen to reason, they still won’t put up half the fight they would now.”

Machiavelli smiled. “I agree with Ezio,” he said.

“Well, all right. If you insist,” Bartolomeo replied grumpily.

“Pantasilea will enjoy the sea air, after her ordeal.”

Bartolomeo brightened. “I hadn’t thought of that!”

“Good.” Ezio turned to his sister. “Claudia. I imagine the change of regime hasn’t affected business at the Rosa in Fiore too badly, has it?”

Claudia grinned. “It’s funny how even princes of the Church find it so hard to keep the devil between their loins in abeyance. However many cold baths they say they take!”

“Tell your girls to keep their ears to the ground. Julius has the College of Cardinals firmly under his control, but he still has plenty of enemies with ambitions of their own, and some of them might just be mad enough to think that if they could set Cesare at liberty again, they could use him as a means of furthering their own ends. And keep an eye on Johann Burchard.”

“What—Rodrigo’s master of ceremonies? Surely he’s harmless enough. He hated having to organize all those orgies! Isn’t he just a functionary?”

“Nevertheless—anything you hear—especially if it leads to diehard factions still at large here—let me know.”

“It’ll be easier, now that we no longer have Borgia guards breathing down our necks every minute of the day.”

Ezio smiled a little absently. “I have another question to ask. I have been too busy to visit, and it troubles me, but—how is Mother?”

Claudia’s face clouded. “She keeps the accounts, but, Ezio, I fear she is failing. She seldom goes out. She speaks more and more often of Father, and of Federico and Petruccio.”

Ezio fell silent for a moment, thinking of his lost father, Giovanni, and his brothers. “I will come when I can,” he said. “Give her my love; ask her to forgive my neglect.”

“She understands the work you have to do. She knows that you do it not only for the good of us all, but for the sake of our departed kinsmen.”

“The destruction of those who killed them shall be their monument,” said Ezio, his voice hard.

“And what of my people?” asked La Volpe.

“Gilberto, your people are vital to me. All my recruits remain loyal, but they see that life returns to normal, and most of them long to return also to the lives they led before we persuaded them to join us in the struggle to throw off the Borgia yoke. They retain their skills, but they are not sworn members of our Brotherhood, and I cannot expect them to bear that other yoke we bear—for it is a yoke that only Death will relieve us of.”

“I understand.”

“I know the men and women under your command are city bred. Some country air will make a change.”

“How do you mean?” asked La Volpe suspiciously.

“Send your best people into the towns and villages around Rome. There will be no need to go further out than Viterbo, Terni, L’Aquila, Avezzano, and Nettuno. I doubt if, beyond the rough circle around Rome that those towns define, we’d find much. There can’t be many diehards left, and those there are will want to be within striking distance of Rome.”

“They’ll be hard to find.”

“You must try. You know yourself how even a small force in the right place can do untold damage.”

“I’ll send out my best thieves. Disguise them as peddlers.”

“Report anything you find back to me—especially news of Micheletto.”

“Do you really think he’s still out there somewhere? Mightn’t he have got back to Spain, or at least the Kingdom of Naples? If he isn’t dead already.”

“I am convinced he is still alive.”

La Volpe shrugged. “That’s good enough for me.”

When the others had gone, Machiavelli turned to Ezio and said, “What about me?”

“You and I will work together.”

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure; but before we go into details, I have a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Why not use the Apple?”

Ezio, sighing, explained as best he could.

When he’d finished, Machiavelli looked at him, took out his little black notebook, and wrote in it at length. Then he stood up, crossed the room, and sat down next to Ezio, squeezing his shoulder affectionately as he did so. Any such gesture from Machiavelli was as rare as chickens’ teeth.

“Let’s get down to business,” he said.

“This is what I have in mind,” said Ezio.

“Tell me.”

“There are women in this city who may help us. We must seek them out and talk to them.”

“Well, you picked the right man for the job. I am a diplomat.”

Gaining access to the first woman Ezio had in mind was easy—Pope Julius had seen to that. But getting her to talk wasn’t.

She received them in a sumptuous parlor on the
piano nobile
of her large house, whose windows (on four sides) provided sublime vistas of the once-great city, now part crumbling, but also part magnificent, since the last few Popes had poured money into self-aggrandizement.

“I don’t see how I can help you,” she said after listening to them, but Ezio noticed that she didn’t meet their eyes.

“If there are pockets of diehards in the city, we need to know about them,
Altezza
, and we need your help,” said Machiavelli. “If we find out later that you have held out on us…”

“Don’t threaten me, young man,” retorted Vannozza. “
Dio mio!
Do you know how long ago it is since Rodrigo and I were lovers? Well over twenty years!”

“Perhaps your children…?” asked Ezio.

She smiled grimly. “I expect you are wondering how a woman like me could have produced such a brood,” she said. “But I tell you there is very little Cattanei blood in them. Well, in Lucrezia, perhaps; but Cesare…” She broke off, and Ezio could see the pain in her eyes.

“Do you know where he is?”

“I know no more than you do. And I don’t care to. It’s years since I’ve even seen him, though we lived in the same city. He is as one dead to me.”

Clearly the Pope was being very careful to keep Cesare’s whereabouts secret. “Perhaps your daughter knows?”

“If I don’t, why should she? She lives in Ferrara now. You could go and ask her, but it’s a long way north, and the Holy Father has forbidden her ever to return to Rome.”

“Do you see her?” asked Machiavelli.

Vannozza sighed. “As I said, Ferrara’s a long way north. I don’t care to travel much these days.”

She looked around the room, glancing at the servants who stood near the door, and occasionally at the water clock. She’d offered them no refreshment and seemed eager for them to go. She constantly kneaded her hands together. An unhappy woman, and ill at ease, but whether that was because she was concealing something, or because she was being forced to talk of people she’d clearly rather not talk about, Ezio could not say.

“I have—or, rather,
had
—eight grandchildren,” she said unexpectedly. Ezio and Machiavelli knew that Lucrezia had had several children by her various husbands, but few had survived childhood. People said that Lucrezia had never taken pregnancy very seriously, and indeed she had had a habit of partying and dancing right up to the moment of her accouchement. Had that alienated her from her mother? Cesare had a daughter, Louise, who was a child of four.

“Do you see any of them?” asked Machiavelli.

“No. Louise is still in Rome, I think, but her mother has made sure that she’s much more French than Italian.”

She rose then, and the servants, as if on cue, opened the room’s ornate double doors.

“I wish I could be of more assistance…”

“We thank you for your time,” said Machiavelli drily.

“There are other people you might like to talk to,” said Vannozza.

“We intend to visit the
Princesse
d’Albret.”

Vannozza pressed her lips together.
“Buona fortuna,”
she said, without conviction. “You’d better hurry, too. I hear she’s making preparations to leave for France. Perhaps, if I’m lucky, she’ll come and say goodbye.”

Ezio and Machiavelli had risen, too, and made their farewells.

Once outside in the street, Machiavelli said, “I think we’ll have to use the Apple, Ezio.”

“Not yet.”

“Have it your own way, but I think you’re a fool. Let’s go and see the princess. Lucky we can both speak French.”

“Charlotte d’Albret won’t be leaving for France today. I’ve got men watching her palazzo, in any case. No, there’s someone else I want to see first. I’m surprised Vannozza didn’t mention her.”

“Who?”

“Giulia Farnese.”

“Doesn’t she live in Carbognano these days?”

“My spies tell me she’s in town. We have to take advantage of that.”

“What makes you think we’ll get any more out of her than we got out of Vannozza?”

Ezio smiled. “Giulia was Rodrigo’s last mistress. He was passionate about her!”

“I remember when the French captured her. He was beside himself. And then the French foolishly ransomed her for three thousand ducats. He’d have paid twenty times that amount to get her back. And he’d probably have struck any kind of deal they wanted. But I guess that’s what happens when your mistress is well over forty years younger than you are. You get besotted.”

“Didn’t stop him from dumping her when she turned twenty-five.”

“Yes. Too old for him by then! But let’s hurry.”

They made their way north through the narrow streets in the direction of the Quirinale.

On the way, Machiavelli noticed that Ezio was looking increasingly uneasy.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Have you not noticed anything?”

“What?”

“Don’t look around!” Ezio was terse.

“No.”

“Then I think we’re being followed—by a woman.”

“Since when?”

“Since we left Vannozza’s palazzo.”

“One of her people?”

“Perhaps.”

“Alone?”

“Think so.”

“Then we’d better shake her.”

Impatient though they were to get on, they slowed their pace, looking in shop windows, even pausing at a wine booth. There, over the rim of his beaker, Ezio caught sight of a tall, athletically built blond woman dressed in a good but unassuming dark green robe of some lightweight material. She’d be able to move fast in clothes like that if the need arose.

“I’ve got her,” he said.

They both scanned the wall of the building against which the booth was erected. It was a new place, constructed in the fashionably rusticated style of large roughened slabs of stone separated by sunken joints. At intervals, iron rings for tethering horses had been set into the wall.

It was perfect.

They made their way to the back of the booth but there was no way out there.

“We’ll have to be quick,” said Machiavelli.

“Watch me!” replied Ezio, putting his beaker down on a table near the entrance. A few seconds later he was halfway up the wall, with Machiavelli close behind. Bystanders gaped as the two men, their capes fluttering in the breeze, disappeared over the rooftops, leaping across alleyways and streets, and sending tiles skittering down, to smash on the cobbles or flop in the mud of unmade lanes as the people below ducked or jumped out of the way.

Even if she’d been able to, the woman couldn’t climb vertical walls, however conveniently easy they were, in a long skirt, but Ezio saw that her dress had a carefully disguised slit to the thigh on one side, enabling her to run, and she was tearing through the streets after them, thrusting aside anyone who got in her way. Whoever she was, she was well trained.

But at last they lost her. Breathing hard, they came to a halt on the roof of San Niccolò de Portiis and lay down flat, keenly scanning the streets below. There seemed to be no one unduly suspicious among the various citizens in the streets, though Ezio thought he recognized two of La Volpe’s thieves working the crowd, using sharp little knives to cut purses. Presumably two not selected to go out into the surrounding countryside, but he’d have to ask Gilberto about it later.

“Let’s go down,” suggested Machiavelli.

“No—it’s easier to stay out of sight up here and we haven’t far to go.”

“She didn’t seem to have much trouble following us. Lucky for us there was that roof with a high wall around it, where we could change direction without her noticing.”

Ezio nodded. Whoever she was, she’d be reporting back by now. He wished she were on his side. As things stood, they’d have to get to the large apartment Giulia kept in Rome fast, and then out of the Quirinale district. Maybe he should detail a couple of his recruits to watch their backs on any future forays. The Borgia diehards were lying low under the new Pope’s tough regime—but only to lull the authorities into a false sense of security.