Through Darkest Europe Read online

  “What did she say?” Dawud inquired now.

  “We can wear whatever we want.”

  With his jowls and heavy eyebrows, Dawud’s frown seemed fiercer than it was. “I’m not sure I can stand that much freedom.”

  “Don’t worry,” Khalid said. “This is Italy. That’s about as much as you’ll find.”

  * * *

  In the end, Khalid and Dawud decided to keep to the international style when they went to Grand Duke Cosimo’s entertainment. They were from the Maghrib, after all. It wasn’t as if Cosimo and his associates didn’t already know as much. And it wasn’t as if the Aquinists didn’t already know, either.

  The cab that took the Maghribis to the Grand Duke’s palace dropped them off at the base of the Palatine Hill. A long walk up still awaited them. “Sorry, friends,” the driver said. “I can’t get any closer.”

  Khalid sighed—the man was obviously right. Cosimo’s security arrangements were even more comprehensive than the Aquinas Seminary’s. He didn’t want anyone with a weapon getting close enough to the palace to use it. After Dawud paid the driver, the man zoomed away. Khalid and Dawud presented themselves at the lowest checkpoint. “Yes, my masters,” a lieutenant said in decent Arabic. “Your names are on the list of invited guests. Now if you will let me see some identification, so I may be sure the faces match the names.…”

  Resignedly, they displayed their documents. He gave them the same careful scrutiny the guards at the Ministry of Information and the Aquinists had. When he was satisfied, he returned the IDs. That didn’t let them advance toward the palace—not yet. It only won them a patdown and scrutiny from a metal detector.

  “Do you want me to turn my head and cough?” Dawud asked the man who was searching him. Khalid’s patdown was also that intimate; he wasn’t sure his doctor felt him so attentively.

  “Won’t be necessary,” the Italian answered, grinning. “And I do believe you’re clean, so you can go on.” A moment later, Khalid also passed muster. The Grand Duke’s men now knew exactly how much change he carried. What they would do with that knowledge, he hadn’t the faintest idea. He didn’t think they did, either.

  Spotlights and floodlamps lit the grounds as brightly as the sun would have. Up toward the palace at the top of the Palatine Khalid trudged, Dawud huffing and puffing beside him. If the Jew were thinner—and if he didn’t smoke—the climb might have seemed easier to him. But that thought slipped from Khalid’s mind as a couple of Italian words resonated there. Palazzo. Palatino. Palazzo. Palatino. He whistled softly. This was the place from which all palaces took their name.

  Grand Duke Cosimo tried to mix Roman notions of elegance with modern notions of security. The results were … well, mixed. Splendid brickwork veneered the outwalls of the Grand Duke’s palace—unfortunately without disguising the massive reinforced concrete from which those outwalls were made. By the same token, towers didn’t adequately conceal the quick-firing guns and antiaircraft missiles they housed.

  As for the spinning radar dish atop the palace, it was the latest model from Arkansistan. The Maghrib had tried to sell Cosimo its newest version, but he’d got a better deal from the republic in the Sunset Lands. Khalid suspected Cosimo might have gone with the Arkansistani radar even if the Maghrib’s price were lower. He wasn’t the sort of man who wanted to put too much of his safety in his next-door neighbor’s hands.

  “What would Augustus have thought of all this?” Dawud asked, waving toward the overwrought splendor they were approaching.

  Khalid tried to remember what he knew about the founder of the Roman Empire. If ever there’d been a canny ruler, Augustus was the man. “He would have admired the strength, and he would have thought Cosimo was foolish to put it on display,” Khalid answered after a moment.

  Dawud grunted. He walked on for another couple of paces, then nodded. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

  Some Christian cathedrals from after Aquinas’ time had bronze doors with splendid reliefs on them. The Grand Duke’s doors had splendid reliefs, too. But his proclaimed the greater glory of Cosimo, not of God. And, when the doors swung open after Khalid and Dawud passed another search, the bronze exterior proved as much a façade as the brickwork on the outwalls. The doors were even thicker than those at the Ministry of Information, and made of layers of steel and ceramic like a bank vault—or the skin armoring a main battle tank.

  From whom did he buy this? Khalid wondered. From one of the modern countries of the Muslim world, surely. Grand Duke Cosimo wouldn’t have trusted his safety to something the Italians made themselves. The doors should have thudded when they closed behind the men from the Maghrib, or so it seemed to Khalid. But they made not even a whisper of sound.

  Musicians played in the courtyard, sometimes on instruments you might have heard anywhere in the world, sometimes in traditional European modes. Violins and a harpsichord sounded respectively screechy and jangly to Khalid, but he was no connoisseur of such matters. He’d read articles claiming a place for European music right alongside the classical canon. Then again, only a fool believed everything he read.

  A prominent servitor came up to him and Dawud. No one except a prominent servitor would have had the amazing bad taste to wear a keffiyeh with European-style clinging trousers and short tunic. “You gentlemen are…?” he inquired in Italian. They gave their names. “Oh. You’re them,” the man said, switching to fluent classical Arabic. He waved. The musicians paused. He loudly announced the newcomers. The musicians resumed. He spoke again, in lower tones: “Please come with me. The Grand Duke wants to make your acquaintance.”

  Whatever the Grand Duke wanted, the Grand Duke got. That seemed to be the unspoken assumption in the servitor’s eyes. Whether the Aquinists would agree was something else again.

  Like the musicians, Cosimo’s courtiers and their ladies paused as the Maghribis walked by. That was not mere politesse on their part, though; they wanted to size up the prominent strangers. Most of the Grand Duke’s men wore robes and headcloths that wouldn’t have looked out of place on wealthy men from Zanzibar to Canton. The rest—nearly all of them graybeards—clung to local fashions. Only the one servitor so disastrously tried to mix them.

  There stood Cosimo, chatting with a Christian priest. The holy man’s somber black costume reminded Khalid he was on the other side of the Mediterranean. Cosimo’s well-tailored robe and shining white keffiyeh would have been at home all over the world. The Grand Duke’s looks certainly wouldn’t have seemed out of place in Tunis. Cosimo was in his fifties, and looked younger at first glance because he touched up his hair and his whiskers. He had bushy eyebrows, a prow of a nose, and the watchful eyes of a man who knew he had plenty of things to be watchful about.

  “Ah, the Maghribis,” he said when the servitor presented Khalid and Dawud. His classical Arabic was even better than his man’s. “I hear you stuck your heads in the lion’s mouth the other day.”

  He was well informed. A man in his position who wasn’t well informed probably wouldn’t hold his position long. “That’s right, your Supreme Highness,” Khalid said.

  “And what do you think of the Aquinists?” Cosimo asked.

  “They seem more … capable than I expected them to,” Khalid answered after a couple of heartbeats groping for the word he wanted.

  The Grand Duke nodded. Medals and rosettes and ribbons gleamed on his chest. Like the reliefs on the door, they were dedicated to the greater glory of Cosimo. He might be—indeed, Khalid knew he was—a Christian, but he wanted his subjects to revere him. “I know what you mean,” he said. “You expected them to roll their eyes and foam at the mouth and maybe thrash a little”—he jerked spasmodically, but without spilling the drink in his hand—“too, didn’t you?”

  “Well…” That exaggerated, but not by a great deal. Khalid also found himself nodding. “Yes, your Supreme Highness. I suppose so.”

  “They’d be less dangerous if they did,” Cosimo said. “They can act like modern men and use
all the tools modern men have come up with—to serve ideals a thousand years out of date.”

  “I think that’s true,” Khalid said slowly. It was also one of the pithier ways of summing up the Aquinists’ challenge he’d ever heard. Cosimo might worship at the shrine of Cosimo along with his subjects, but he was nobody’s fool.

  “A lot of grandeur in those old notions. A lot of glamour, too,” he said. “If you’re doing something for God, you don’t need to worry about the right or wrong of it. You don’t need to worry at all—you’re heading straight to heaven. You just do what you do, and everybody else had better look out.”

  As he spoke to Khalid, his dark eyes darted now left, now right. Every so often, he would glance over his shoulder. In another man, that would have been rude. Cosimo just seemed cautious.

  Dawud ambled back, carrying a murky-looking drink with a candied cherry in it. “Yes, yes, the Jew,” the Grand Duke muttered, as if reminding himself. “Your people have even more to lose than Christians or Muslims if the Aquinists get their way, eh?”

  “Who, us? Christ-killers? The old dispensation, too blind to see that Jesus was the Son of God or that Muhammad was the Prophet of God?” Dawud’s mouth twisted into a sour grin, like a white-haired father eyeing two proud, strapping sons who’d both outgrown him and wished he would dry up and blow away. “Yes, they love us, all right. Even more than other people do.”

  “You have an odd way of using the word love,” Grand Duke Cosimo said.

  “I have all sorts of odd ways, your Supreme Highness. I am a Jew,” Dawud answered easily.

  “Yes.” Cosimo’s one-word agreement spoke volumes about what he thought of the old dispensation. One of Dawud’s eyebrows lifted, ever so slightly. Khalid noticed, because he was looking for that kind of response. He didn’t think Cosimo did. Voice suddenly brisk, as if he was deciding he’d given these people enough time, the Grand Duke went on, “Maybe you’ll come up with something other people have missed. Here’s hoping.” He turned away.

  “Well, that was interesting,” Dawud said. A stranger listening—and some stranger was bound to be listening—would have found nothing amiss in words or tone. Khalid was no stranger, and heard what Dawud didn’t say. It came down to something like We’re supposed to be on his side? I’d almost rather work for the Aquinists.

  Khalid might almost have rather worked for the Aquinists, too. But almost was a word that covered parasangs and parasangs of ground. Your friends weren’t always the people you wished they would be. They were the people you disliked less than your enemies, and sometimes you had to make the best of it.

  Such cheerful reflections made Khalid ask, “Where did you get that drink?”

  “Right over there.” Dawud pointed. Sure enough, a burly Italian in a gaudy medieval-style tunic of crimson-and-gold-striped velvet stood behind a bar, mixing drinks with a quickness nearly magical. The cheroot he puffed damaged his authenticity, not that he seemed to care.

  “What would you like, sir?” he asked when Khalid stood before him.

  “Gin and quinine water,” Khalid said.

  “With lemon juice?”

  “Please.”

  “Coming up.” The barman’s hands were building the drink even as he spoke. He gave it to Khalid. The Maghribi slid a coin across the bar. With a nod of thanks, the barman made it disappear as fast as he’d fixed the drink. Khalid sipped and then smiled. The fellow hadn’t stinted on the gin.

  A man in military uniform eyed Khalid. “You are a Muslim, yes?” he asked in slow Arabic.

  “Yes,” Khalid said. “And so?”

  The officer pointed toward the gin and quinine water. “You sin by your own faith’s rules, yes?”

  “That is between me and God, sir. Not between me and anyone else,” Khalid answered pointedly.

  “What about your priests? Your qadis? Your mullahs?” Cosimo’s henchman groped for the word he wanted.

  “What about them?” Khalid said. He and the officer eyed each other. They might both use Arabic, but they didn’t speak the same language. To Khalid, religion was a cloak, not a straitjacket.

  Plainly, the Italian had different notions. He started to say something else, but waved instead, as if to give it up as a bad job. Then he asked the barman for a fresh drink of his own. His principles intact, he gulped it down.

  Dawud was talking to the priest who had been speaking with the Grand Duke. Khalid couldn’t make out what they were saying, not through the noise of the crowd. He could see the priest’s face. The man looked interested, then suddenly astonished. He threw back his head and guffawed. Whatever Dawud had come out with, he liked it.

  The officer, perhaps fortified by his drink—and it wouldn’t have been his first, oh, no—approached a pretty girl carrying a tray of little sandwiches. Alcohol always made you think you were suave and debonair. The trouble was, it didn’t really make you that way. The girl took herself off as fast as she could. The officer stared sadly after her. He had to wonder what had gone wrong. Khalid could have told him, but he didn’t think the Italian would have appreciated it.

  Plenty of pretty women strolled through the palace. Some of them carried food. Some had wineglasses on their trays. And some were just … there. Like a sultan in days gone by, the Grand Duke could and did call out beauties to please his guests.

  One of those beauties, Khalid realized, he had seen before. He needed a moment to remember where. She’d been walking through the Forum at the same time as he and Dawud had. He wasn’t the most forward type with women, and never had been. His one venture into matrimony, almost half a lifetime earlier, had been brief and unhappy. All the same, that visit to the ancient Roman square gave him a perfect approach now. And maybe the alcohol emboldened him, as it did with the Italian officer.

  He made his way through the crowd toward her. When their eyes met, he dipped his head. “Salaam aleikum,” he said—Peace be unto you.

  “Aleikum salaam,” she replied—To you also peace. The greeting and response were old as time. Any two people could exchange them and be polite. Polite still, she waited to see what he would say next.

  He nearly flubbed it. Even from her first two words, he realized she was Italian, not Muslim at all. And he’d been so sure! Nothing for it but to go ahead anyhow: “When you were in the Forum a few days ago, did you see the Column of Phocas?”

  Her black eyebrows jumped like a raven’s wings when the bird was taking flight. “How did you know I was there?” she demanded. She waited again, warily now. If she didn’t like his answer, he knew he would never get the chance to ask her anything else.

  “I was, too, with my friend,” he said. “I saw you then, and now I have met you.”

  “So you have.” She seemed anything but sure the idea pleased her.

  Pretending he didn’t notice that—and doing his best not to notice it in truth—Khalid pressed on: “May I ask your name?”

  This time, her hesitation was too long for him even to try not to see it. At last, she said, “I am Annarita Pezzola.” She gave him her first smile, a very small one. “And if you are who I think you are, we have spoken before, even if we have not met.”

  “Why, so we have! I should have known your voice.” Khalid formally introduced himself. He raised his glass in salute to her. Then he asked, “Why wouldn’t you have wanted me to know you were in the Forum? This is your city, your country, after all.”

  “Because I went as a worldly woman, not like—this.” She gestured. By European standards, her dress was stylishly cut. But it covered almost all of her. In most of the world, it would have seemed a hundred years behind the times, likely more. Most of the women here wore modern clothes. But they were wives or mistresses or decorations. She was the Grand Duke’s administrative assistant, and dressed for business in Western European women’s fashion.

  “Why did you do it?” Khalid asked.

  “Because I wanted to feel free for a little while,” she answered. “To feel like a proper person, a person who
doesn’t have to hide herself in a tent.” She gestured again.

  Even before, Khalid hadn’t thought she would be connected to the Aquinists. Cosimo would have thoroughly vetted her. And educated, talented Christian women were the least likely of their faith to love the doctrine that came out of the seminaries. To the Aquinists, women were good for bearing children, for cooking, for praying, and not for much else.

  “I admired what you didn’t hide,” Khalid remarked.

  “Thank you. A woman wants to be admired. You didn’t make rude remarks, the way those stupid policemen did,” Annarita said. “You and your partner were civilized about it.” She frowned a little. “Why didn’t I notice you there?”

  “Where you were dressed like a Muslim woman, to fit in my partner and I were dressed like European men,” Khalid said.

  “That’s right—your partner. The Ebreo.” The Italian word slipped into her Arabic. “He’s here, too, of course?”

  “Yes.” What was Dawud doing right now? A glance found him: he was talking with a statuesque blonde with a tray of fine cigars from the Sunset Lands. By the way she was laughing, the Jew’s chances were probably better than Khalid’s. The senior investigator nodded. “Over there.”

  “Ah. I see.” Annarita Pezzola sounded tolerantly amused. “Well, he’s not the first fellow to like Luisa.” That she would know the name of a cigar girl didn’t surprise Khalid, but did tell him she was bound to be good at her job. She went on, “And how is the Ministry of Information?”

  Her eyebrows drew down and together: not much, but enough to say she didn’t care for the Ministry or a lot of the people who worked there. Khalid didn’t care for some of the people there, either. That didn’t mean they didn’t do a necessary job, though.

  Later, he thought he should have reacted more when the serving girl with the exalted look on her face walked by. But that was later, and later was, as usual, too late. They always told you to look for that kind of thing, or for anything else in your surroundings that seemed out of place. But he wasn’t on duty, he was talking with the first woman who’d interested him in a long time, and part of him casually assumed a lot of Europeans would be religious fanatics—and would look it.