Through Darkest Europe Page 8

  He waited for what Annarita would come out with next. She seemed to be weighing her words. That let Khalid look away, in the direction the serving girl had gone. He couldn’t see her any more; she must have walked into the next room.

  Through the rest of the chatter that made up the background at a function like this, he heard Grand Duke Cosimo rumble, “Hello! You’re new here, sweetheart. When did they take you on? You’re cute!”

  Annarita’s face went white. “We don’t have any new people at this function. We—”

  She and Khalid both took one step in the direction of the other room. A woman’s voice, softer, answered the Grand Duke as they both filled their lungs to shout. If that wasn’t the girl whose face had seemed to shine, he would have been astonished. And if it was …

  Khalid yelled just as the bomb went off.

  Next thing he knew, he was on the floor. Someone else—a gray-haired woman—was on top of him, and thrashing like a goose that had just met the chopper. Something warm and wet splashed his face. Tasting salt, he realized it was blood. The blast had stunned his hearing, but the matron’s shrieks drilled through the thick cotton wool that seemed to have been stuffed into his ears.

  He shoved her off him. One of his arms complained, but he didn’t think it was broken. The gray-haired woman was all over blood. Dimly, dully, he realized she’d shielded him from the worst of the blast. He did what he could for her. He tore a strip from her tattered gown and used it and a fork lying nearby to make a tourniquet. He hoped it would do some good.

  Then he looked around for Dawud, and for Annarita. The young woman was just sitting up, a few cubits away. She had a cut over one eye, and another on the side of her jaw. But she could move both arms and both legs, and seemed in possession of her wits. She said something to Khalid—he saw her lips move. He couldn’t make out what it was, though.

  He cupped a hand behind one ear. When he did, he discovered the ear was bleeding merrily, as ears have a way of doing. Not all the blood on him came from the matron, then. At the moment, a tattered ear was the least of his worries.

  “The Grand Duke!” Annarita said, loud enough for him to understand her.

  “It is with him as God wills,” Khalid answered. After what had just happened, that couldn’t mean anything but He’s dead, and there may not be enough of him left to bury.

  Khalid struggled to his feet. One of his ankles hurt, too, but he could walk. Now, where was Dawud? There lay the cigar girl, her gown blown half off her so Khalid could see her shapely legs. They weren’t worth admiring, not any more. Something had smashed in the side of her head. Her blood pooled on the carpet. She would never get up again—that was all too plain.

  Dawud ibn Musa sprawled behind her. Even as Khalid limped over to him, the Jew groaned, stirred, and sat up. He cradled one wrist in the crook of his other arm. The grimace on his blood-spattered face argued that he had broken something. But he said the same thing Annarita had: “The Grand Duke?”

  “Kaput.” That wasn’t Arabic or Italian. Khalid didn’t know where he’d picked it up. Dawud got it, though.

  As Khalid had before him, he heaved himself upright. He said something in very colloquial Arabic when he tried to put weight on his left leg. His limp was worse than Khalid’s: he walked like a sailor with a peg leg. Each step brought a couple of more pungent colloquialisms. All the same, he stayed with Khalid as they made for the room where the blast had gone off.

  Four of Grand Duke Cosimo’s guards rushed past them. The guards had started from farther away, but they could move much faster than the two Maghribis. They almost bowled Khalid over. He said not a word. Complaining to trigger-happy men with assault rifles struck him as a losing proposition.

  The guards skidded to a stop. That wasn’t because even more blood puddled in the other room, though it did. One of the dark-uniformed men crossed himself. A moment later, two others made the same gesture.

  They weren’t shoulder to shoulder. Coming up in their wake, Khalid had no trouble seeing between them. There lay what was left of Cosimo. Khalid recognized the Grand Duke by his clothes and decorations, not his face; not much of that was left. A few cubits away from him, a cut-glass punchbowl, miraculously unbroken, had fallen on the floor. In it sat the serving girl’s head, face up. She still looked exalted. Her features hadn’t yet relaxed into death’s blankness.

  One of the guards said something in Italian so electrifying, it made Dawud’s Arabic curses sound like endearments. Khalid hadn’t dreamt Italian could do that. You learned something new every day.

  “Who succeeds?” Dawud asked.

  That hadn’t occurred to Khalid yet. As soon as his partner posed the question, he wondered why not. Because you just came much too close to getting killed? part of him suggested. That was a reason, true, but it didn’t seem reason enough. The main reason Khalid and Dawud had come to Italy was to try to help keep the country stable. Well, Italian stability lay as dead as the Grand Duke. Along with the reek of cordite, the stenches of blood, burnt flesh, and shit said that was very dead indeed.

  “Who succeeds?” Dawud asked again, more insistently, and Khalid realized he hadn’t answered.

  Slowly, he said, “Cosimo has a son.” His wits weren’t working well at all. “Two sons,” he amended. “I think one of them is of age.”

  “I think you’re right.” Dawud sounded anything but reassured. Khalid wasn’t reassured, either—nowhere near. Republics had ways to carry on when they lost a head of state. In lands like Italy, everything depended on the strongman’s character. If the next strongman wanted to take the country in a new direction, what could stop him?

  For that matter, if the Grand Duke’s heir didn’t turn out to be a strongman, how many ambitious marshals and ministers would try to overthrow him? Which of them would look for backing from the Pope? Which would look for backing from the Aquinists? Would rivals play the game of coup and countercoup, or would Italy dissolve into civil war?

  Those were all interesting questions. Khalid had answers to exactly none of them. He feared no one else did, either.

  The assassin’s face stared up at him from the punchbowl. She still looked preternaturally serene. The expression of total certainty her remains bore filled him with certainty of his own. “Aquinists,” he said, his voice harsh.

  “Astounding, Tariq. What leads you to this astonishing conclusion?” Dawud replied. Battered though Khalid was, he almost hit the Jew. Dawud had the presence of mind—if that was what it was—to impersonate a popular detective’s dim-witted sidekick.

  Before Khalid could say anything—or swing on his colleague—a doctor in a white tunic pushed past him. As the guards had before him, the man stopped short and crossed himself. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” he burst out. “Why did anyone bother calling me? I can’t raise the dead.”

  “Plenty of living wounded.” Khalid automatically spoke Arabic. He wasn’t surprised when a physician trusted by the Grand Duke proved to understand the language. Pointing to Dawud, he added, “You can start with my friend here.”

  Dawud and the doctor both shook their heads. “I’m standing up,” the Jew said. “I don’t think I’ll keel over right away. Let him take care of the people who are down.”

  “Yes,” the doctor said, and then, “Dio mio, how did one of those maniacs get through the security checks? Whoever let that happen…” He didn’t go on with words. Instead, he sliced a finger across his throat. Then, without waiting for a reply from the Maghribis, he bent down over a writhing man with a shattered leg. Before long, blood splashed and splotched that immaculate tunic.

  One of the Grand Duke’s guards turned toward—turned on—Khalid and Dawud. He might have been a watchdog, still snarling outside a house that had burned down. “Who the devil are you people? What are you doing here?” he growled.

  Carefully—so the guard could see he wasn’t reaching for a weapon—Khalid took out his wallet and showed his ID. Dawud did the same with his good hand. His other arm hung at h
is side like a dead thing.

  “Oh. The infidels.” Disdain clogged the guard’s voice. But then he said, “Well, you’d’ve wanted to keep his Supreme Highness breathing, anyway.”

  “Sì. È vero,” Khalid said, glad the fierce man could see that much. And it was true. The only worse disaster would have been the murder of the Pope. That would have thrown all of Christian Europe into chaos, not just Italy. Then Khalid realized he had no idea whether Marcellus IX was safe. The Aquinists might have succeeded with two murders, not one alone. “Is his Holiness all right?” Khalid asked the guard.

  The man’s scowl got fiercer. Khalid hadn’t dreamt it could. “As far as I know, he is, but I don’t know very far. He’s in God’s hands.”

  That came closer than Khalid would have liked to the Aquinists’ defiant cry of God wills it! He went into the room where he’d been talking with Annarita Pezzola. She wasn’t there any more. Was she looking for Cosimo’s son and heir, or would she have decided there’d be no place for her in the government without the man who’d placed her at his side? Khalid had no idea. He wondered if Annarita did.

  Another doctor worked on more wounded, and a servant was spreading a tablecloth over the body of the cigar girl Dawud had been chatting up when the bomb went off. “Such a waste,” Dawud said. “Such a damned waste.”

  “Well, yes,” Khalid agreed. “But when did that ever stop anybody?” He hoped Dawud would be able to name a time when it had. All the Jew did, though, was shrug a small, sad, painful shrug—which was just what Khalid himself would have done in his place.

  V

  Muslims put their dead into the ground as quickly as they could. So did Jews. As far as Khalid al-Zarzisi was concerned, that was not only custom—it was also a mercy to those who mourned. Once they got the funeral behind them, they could start picking up the pieces of their own lives.

  “They have closure,” he said to Dawud ibn Musa.

  Dawud raised one of his bushy eyebrows. “Such a pretty word,” he murmured. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it actually meant anything?”

  Khalid felt a flush rise and hoped he was too swarthy to show it. “You know what I’m trying to say.” If he sounded defensive, well, he was.

  “Oh, sure.” The Jew nodded. “I just wish you’d found some better way to say it.”

  “Such as?”

  “Don’t make me think so hard. It’s too early in the morning.” Dawud waved at the alarm clock and the lamp on his nightstand and the curtain rod about the hotel-room window—all good places to plant a bug. “If the Aquinists are listening in, or the nice folks from the Ministry of Information, maybe they’ll come up with something.”

  “I doubt it,” Khalid said.

  Dawud nodded once more, this time mournfully. In death customs as in so many other things, the Christians of Western Europe went their own way. They delayed burial to give themselves more time to grieve, and to make a show of grieving. They did that even when the deceased was a postman or a seamstress. When he was the ruler of one of their most powerful nations …

  More than a week would pass between Grand Duke Cosimo’s murder and his funeral. Part of that was to allow for the usual weeping and wailing, the rest to allow foreign dignitaries to gather in Rome. Whatever the reasons behind it, it struck Khalid as barbaric.

  Not that he could do anything about it no matter how it struck him. Cosimo’s elder son had been crowned as Lorenzo III, Grand Duke of Italy, as soon as the Grand Duchy’s security services made sure he was safe. Pope Marcellus anointed and blessed him. No one wasted time on any of that.

  But Lorenzo hadn’t asked for Khalid and Dawud to come from the Maghrib to Italy. His father had, but that seemed to mean little to him. He was going to do things the way he wanted to do them. He was as headstrong as any other European despot, in other words.

  After a couple of days of getting brushed off whenever he sought an audience with the new Grand Duke, Khalid tried the only other ploy he could think of: he telephoned Annarita Pezzola. He did it from a kiosk a good distance from the hotel, one chosen at random. If anyone could listen in on that call … maybe that line was tapped from the other end.

  He had more than the usual trouble getting through to her. He’d expected as much, and kept feeding coins into the slot. At last, he reached a flunky of a level high enough to have heard his name. That worthy put him through to the late Grand Duke’s aide.

  “I hope you are well,” she said in her fine Arabic after Khalid stumbled through greetings in Italian.

  “I was going to say the same thing to you,” he answered, relieved to return to the wide world’s language.

  “Cuts, bruises, scrapes—my ears still ring,” she said. “Nothing salves and time won’t fix.”

  “I’m about the same,” Khalid told her. “But time is what I wanted to talk about with you. Can’t the new Grand Duke see how dangerous it is for him to wait so long before burying his father? He gives the killers more time to plan an attack on the funeral.”

  “I have told him this. So have his generals and his spies. He may be more inclined to listen to them,” Signorina Pezzola said. “But the choice is his. He wants a state funeral, to show what an important man his father was on the world stage, and Grand Duke Cosimo was very important indeed. No one can doubt that.”

  As Khalid dropped more money into the pay telephone, he wondered if she was someplace where she could be overheard. Cosimo had been a strongarm man whose importance, such as it was, lay in backing the moderate Pope and keeping at least a small check on the Aquinists. Whether Lorenzo would manage even so much … Everyone could doubt that.

  Everyone could, and Khalid did. He realized he couldn’t say so straight out. That would have landed him in hot water even in the more easygoing Maghrib. He did say, “Doesn’t he realize the fanatics will be gunning for him, too?”

  “If he doesn’t, it’s not because no one has told him,” Annarita Pezzola replied. “He has taken certain precautions. I happen to know”—she lowered her voice—“he has taken Corrector Pacelli into custody.”

  “And the Corrector went?” Remembering Domenico Pacelli’s stern, brave features, Khalid had trouble believing it.

  But Annarita said, “Oh, yes. He went. The new Grand Duke told him that if he refused the army and air force would level every Aquinas Seminary in the Grand Duchy, regardless of the cost.”

  The cost would be civil war—civil war mixed with the terror the Aquinists favored. If the new Grand Duke showed he was willing to risk it, or at least convinced Domenico Pacelli that he was, he had more steel in him than Khalid would have looked for in an untested young man. Or he might. “When I met the Corrector, I didn’t think he was a man who feared death.”

  “I … said the same thing to Grand Duke Lorenzo,” Annarita said slowly.

  “And?” Khalid asked when she didn’t go on.

  “And he thanked me for my view of the matter, and told me he would use his own judgment,” she answered.

  She was bound to have more experience than young Lorenzo III. That would have been true even if Cosimo were carefully grooming his son for the succession. As far as Khalid knew, Cosimo hadn’t been. Like so many tyrants in modern Europe or in the old days in the Muslim world, he’d surely had trouble imagining that he might pass from the scene.

  Worse, Annarita Pezzola was a woman. Even a sophisticated Muslim leader might have had to remind himself she owned a brain as well as a pleasing shape. Cosimo had listened to her, yes. But she was, Khalid thought, several years older than the new Grand Duke. That was all too likely to make Lorenzo think she was no more than a lover with a jumped-up job title to give her a veneer of respectability.

  Even on brief acquaintance with her, Khalid didn’t believe that. She was as sharp as Grand Duke Cosimo had judged her. But to a European man—especially to a young European man—women were most likely to be for making supper or making babies.

  Sighing, Khalid said, “Dawud and I will still do everything we can t
o keep Lorenzo safe. So will our government. We need stability in the Mediterranean.”

  “Thank you,” Annarita Pezzola said. “I will pass that on to his Supreme Highness.” She paused again. “Although I don’t know how long I will be able to continue in his service.”

  “If he dumps you, he’s a fool,” Khalid said bluntly.

  “He is the Grand Duke. He has the right to advisors who suit him,” she said.

  “What would you do then?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Teach, perhaps. A convent school is not like a madrasa, but it might be better than nothing.” She sounded like someone trying to convince herself and not having much luck.

  “You could come to the other side of the sea. People there would be more likely to judge you for what you can do, not for what kind of clothes you wear,” Khalid said.

  “I don’t think I would want to do that,” she answered. “I would be a foreigner, an immigrant, a Christian immigrant. I know the kind of work most Christians do in the Maghrib—the kind your people don’t care to.”

  “You wouldn’t be like that. You have the language, the skills—”

  “Thank you, but no thank you. This is my country. This is my world, for better and for worse. I will live in it. And now I had better go.”

  Khalid had been about to put another coin into the telephone. He didn’t bother, because the line was dead.

  * * *

  Rome filled with dignitaries. Helicopters buzzed around the airport like angry bees, making sure no one attacked incoming airliners. The Maghrib sent its underwazir for foreign affairs. So did Egypt. The Wazir of the Seljuk Sultanate came. More distant Muslim countries sent less senior officials. Representatives also came from China and Nippon and the Hindu states of southern India.

  The European lands, though, went further yet. One of their own had perished, and the surviving rulers came to Italy to honor his passing. The King of Aragon and the Queen of Castile flew in on the same plane, which was bound to set gossips’ tongues wagging. The Crown Prince of Portugal arrived by himself, except for a contingent of stone-faced bodyguards.