by Robert Adams
Naturally, the Archbishop picked it up, and after straining to read the worn lettering on the obverse, he drew a silver-framed lens from out his own belt-pouch and adjusted its elevation up and down until he could pick out the lettering.
"Rupen, this is a Sicilian coin. It was minted at Palermo. It looks quite old."
"As I recall, it was about two hundred years old when it was bought and defaced by someone I knew, Hal. Turn it over and tell me what it says."
The Archbishop found that the reverse of the antique coin had been shaven or possibly ground down, and upon the thus-smoothed surface had been engraved letters and numbers in a flowing, flowery script.
He read aloud, "'From C. A. to R. A., My Prince Charming, Honeymoon, June, Sicily, 1970.' But Rupen, why would anyone so ruin an old thing this way?"
Rupen looked as if he wanted to spit. "Because she was a spoiled, selfish bitch, Hal. I know, please believe me, and that is a gross understatement of the woman's character, too. She 'gave' it to me, but she was the one who had it pierced and wore it to flaunt about, after we got back from a thirty-two-day honeymoon that ended up costing me an average of seven hundred dollars a day . . . and that was only the bare beginning, too."
"Hal, my second wife, Carolyn, could go through more money in a day of shopping than I could've imagined possible before I married her, and with less of value to show for the money she'd spent, too. She would be on hand without fail, charge plates in hand, every time one of the big stores had a junk sale. We ended up having a cellar and an attic actually crammed with boxes of useless items she'd bought 'because they were reduced'—shrimp deveiners, egg slicers, cheese wires, three-minute hourglasses of cheap plastic, bales of plastic dishes and bowls and tumblers and cups and cutlery."
"That she bought clothing and jewelry and shoes and whatnot was far easier to understand than her endless collection of pure junk. And God knows she loaded up on clothes and shoes and jewelry, hats, belts, toiletries, a million and one assorted accessories, furs, yon name it, and always only the best that my money would buy, too."
"Hal, I was making damned good money, but I couldn't seem to make it come in as fast as she could shovel it out. Not only was she a big spender, she was a big giver, as well; she thought nothing whatsoever of writing thousand-dollar checks to one of her 'causes,' a large number of which seemed to have to do with radical or at least left-liberal politics, these being the exact antithesis of the culture in which she had been reared."
"But she was always giving money to various members of her family, too, and not only money, either. I recall coming home from a business trip to find the entire dining-room set gone—table, chairs, sideboard, matching custom-made corner china cabinets, serving cart, the works. Carolyn was not home, of course—there was a junk sale on somewhere downtown that day—but the cook told me that Carolyn had had some movers come in, load the furniture on their van, and deliver it to the home of one of her brothers."
"Hal, when that happened, we had only been married about eight months and living in that house only about two of them, and that set of furniture was brand, spanking new and had set me back over five thousand dollars. I phoned the company and told Bagrat that I was back in town but I wouldn't be at the office until the next morning, then I settled down to wait for Carolyn."
"She didn't show up until well after eleven that night, reeking of whiskey and loaded down with shopping bags full of plastic and metal and glass junk . . . plus a bracelet that I'd never seen before."
"When I demanded to know why she'd given our furniture to her brother, who happened to be a thirty-odd-year-old doctor working for the Veterans Administration and could, conceivably, afford to buy his own damned furniture, she began to scream that I was a selfish bastard, that since I had not even been born in the U. S. I had no right to be making the kind of money that I was making, but that since I was making it anyway, she meant to see that it went to benefit the people who should rightfully have it. She pointed out that as she was my legal wife of record and that as the Commonwealth of Virginia had on its books a community property law, she had as much right to dispose of any property bought after marriage as I did. She went on to say that if I didn't like what she did or the way she did it, I could pack my bags and leave and she would charge me with desertion and divorce me, and that she had no doubt but that in such circumstances a court of law would give her everything she asked for, which would be everything I owned, plus a hefty amount of monthly alimony."
"She snagged a bottle of Scotch out of the kitchen and kept belting it down straight between screaming and cursing and threatening me with financial ruin and telling me candidly just why she really had been willing to marry an unpedigreed mutt like me to begin with. Finally, she threw the empty bottle at me, then passed out cold, and I undressed her and put her to bed."
"It was a few minutes later, when I was rambling through the huge purse she habitually carried, trying to find the receipt for the new bracelet so I could know how much I'd been soaked for, that I found a gift box, custom-wrapped. Feeling a little guilty for the fight we'd had, I opened it. Inside was a gold cigarette lighter and a case of what was patterned like snakeskin with gold fittings; the lighter had been engraved and the engraving read, 'to S.F. with all my love C.'"
"Well, Hal, I dumped the purse at that point, found her checkbook, and figured just about what she'd written on our joint account since the last statement, and the next morning, while she was still snoring, sleeping off her drunk, I went out and rented a panel truck and a storage garage, then took everything that I really treasured out of that house and put it either in that garage or in a new, large safety deposit box. Then I withdrew from the joint account all but a few hundred dollars over the amount of checks she already had written. Then I went and found myself a damned good divorce attorney and asked a hell of a lot of questions, and armed with his advice, I started laying plans to get out of l'affaire Carolyn as painlessly and inexpensively as was possible, given the way that the divorce courts of Virginia seemed to be loaded in favor of the woman in almost any proceeding."
"Still acting on my new attorney's advice, I continued to live with Carolyn, for all that it became pure hell after she became aware that I had paid off all her charge accounts and then closed them and I was no longer depositing to the joint checking account, and I threatened to close it too if she overdrew it again. I gave her a thousand dollars each month, paid weekly in company checks, drawn on an Ademian Enterprises account in a Fredericksburg bank."
"I also found and hired on a private detective, none other than my old friend Mr. Seraphino Mineo, Sara the Snake, Herr Kobra, and God knows how many other noms de guerre. By then he was operating a security business, though how a man with his mob connections had been cleared for a private detective's license was and still is a mystery to me . . . maybe the CIA helped him as he'd helped them, years before, in Europe."
In a plain, painfully neat single-room office over a luggage-repair business on Main Street in Richmond, Sam Vanga (Rupen had nearly laughed himself sick at the in-joke: in Italian, vanga was a word for shovel or spade), referring to a spiral notebook from time to time, said, "Mr. Ademian, your wife is flat no good, but I guess you know that a'ready, or you wouldn't of hired me, huh? I'm just glad I can fin'ly do somethin' to help you, 'cause you sure as hell pulled my balls out of a deep crack back you remember when, and I ain't never forgot it, neither. But back to your wife. She ain't just got one stud, she's got at least three, maybe four. One of them's a nigger, too. The main one though, the one she's with the most, anyhow, is a writer what lives up in . . ." He riffled through the pages of the notebook briefly, then continued, ". . . up in Fairfax County, Virginia. It's real boondocks where his house is, right on the river. The road down to it won't take no real car; I had to rent a Land Rover to get in there. He's got a Jeep pickup and he comes and meets her in this little hick town called Dranesville."
"He ain't a bad-looking feller, forty years old, divorced, lives with two,
three cats in a tri-level house, mostly keeps to hisself, but the folks in Dranesville I talked to who'd met him said he was a reg'lar feller who paid his bills and didn' seem to be a drunk or doper or nothin'. But he don't socialize much and some the folks was wondering if he wasn't queer, till he started picking up your wife there in town and taking her out to his place for sometimes as much as a week at a time, they say."
"But like I say, Mr. Ademian, he's just one of 'em, and prob'ly the best of the bunch at that; most her taste in studs is a pure taste for shit. All three the others lives right here in Richmond." Again, he riffled pages until he found the one he wanted.
"Arnie Mohr, he's a Jewboy. He ain't a doper, and that's about the only good thing I can say about the fucker. He's wunna the ringleaders of a Commie-front outfit called Southern Students Strike Against War and Poverty and two, three other outfits just like it. You want that one hit, just say the word, I'd really like doing it to him . . . real slow and hard. He tells ever'body he's twenty-seven, but I got good, firm info he's thirty-five and he's been throwed out of colleges all over the place. Your wife, she ain't his only cooze and meal ticket, neither, see, he's got a whole string of women with more money then sense, plus a little fairy that lives with him, too."
"The other white boy she's banging here in town is a feller useta be her teacher at the city college. He teaches soshology or somethin' like that and he's married, but his wife's crippled, can't get out of the bed without help, and he and your wife bang right in the room next to her, but here again, she ain't the only broad he's screwing, some of 'em are still his students, too. I got some bona fide info on him, too, from some folks I useta do jobs for, years back." He winked broadly.
"This fucker's tied up with the Commies too, useta be one, maybe still is. He's forty-five, was in the army in World War II but didn' never go overseas. When they tried to call him back in for Korea, he suddenly turned up with a punctured eardrum. He's alla time tryin' to raise money for all kinds of hell-raising groups . . . but the word is that don't much of what he collects ever get where he said it was going to."
"Now the nigger, he's a doper—grass, hash, acid, coke, horse, morph, mushrooms, he does it all and some I prob'ly ain't never heard of besides, plus booze—and when he can get hisself a gig, he plays guitar and sings and they say he ain't half bad. They say he and your wife useta be a big thing, but she don't see him much anymore sincet you cut off the bread she was laying on him so's he could buy dope and all."
"Here're the pictures, Mr. Ademian, but just of her and the Jewboy and her and the college teacher; like I say, she ain't seein' Eugene Gentry, the nigger doper, much anymore, and that feller out in the boondocks, he keeps his drapes drawed up tight whenever she's in the sack with him, and even when he's alone there, too. But that's a good way to live, 'cause ain't no good burglar going to bust into no winder he can't see what's waitin' for him through, I can tell you that for a fact."
"Now, if you want them all hit, Mr. Ademian, I'll do it for you. The Jewboy and the teacher I'll do for free, 'cause I don't like fucking Commies, see, the damned Commies hurt a lotta my family when they took over Cuba, see. The other two, I'll take out for a rock-bottom price, but only for you, Mr. Ademian, I'll—"
Rupen had shaken his head. "Thank you sincerely, Sera . . . Sam, but I don't want any of them killed, I just want out of an unfortunate mistake of a marriage, as cleanly as possible, cheaply as possible, and quickly as possible. Your report and testimony and these pictures will, I'm sure, get me that which I'm seeking from the courts: justice."
"This willing murderer you hired," said the Archbishop, "never gave you the name of the other man your wife was committing adultery with, then, Rupen?"
"Yes, I'm certain that he did, that it was also in the written report that I received from him and took to my attorney along with the photographs, but I simply cannot recall what that name was. Maybe I need to take some lessons from your Irish or Scotch memory experts?" Rupen shook his head ruefully.
"Nonetheless, you now think that that nameless adulterer and home-wrecker who so wronged you was Bass Foster," said the old man bluntly.
"Well, Hal," said Rupen, "a lot of the things I do remember about that man do seem to dovetail in to things you know about His Grace of Norfolk, you know. Writer, living by a river in northern Virginia—what would you think in my place, especially, if you had found this"—he flicked a fingernail against the edge of the old gold coin—"in effects supposedly the possessions of that person?"
Harold of York sighed and shrugged. He really had no answer.
In far-off Italy, the warring raged and the land bled and men, women, and children died horribly. After an epic defense, besieged Perugia finally fell to the Moors and their mercenaries ran wild and uncontrollable through its streets—looting, raping, torturing, maiming, killing, burning, and otherwise destroying. When at length even the Moors had had enough, they tried to check the orgy of death and destruction and ended having to wage pitched battles to do so, losing more troops thusly than they had lost in the actual intaking.
Florence, besieged for the third time since Pope Abdul's death, held firm as she had on both previous occasions, taking severe and steady toll of the Spaniards and their Macedonian mercenaries in sally and in defense of their city walls.
The city of Rome, policed by completely impartial Pontians hired from Omar of Turkey, lay relatively peaceful, aside from a recent rash of assassinations which had taken clerical and lay lives from all of the four major factions and not a few of the minor ones as well. But there was no open fighting of any sort; the coldly merciless men of Pontos saw to that.
A force of Moors, Spaniards, and Greek mercenaries laid siege to Montevarchi, in Tuscany, only to find their entrenchments shortly surrounded by the entrenchments of a force of Italians, Hungarians, Goths, and Burgundians, who proceeded to besiege the erstwhile besiegers.
At sea, the warships of Genoa, Venice, Naples, and the smaller Italian maritime principalities did their best to keep the shipping lanes free from Moorish and Spanish privateers and other sea-robbers. These ships suffered cruelly for their efforts and right often were compelled to put into the closest well-equipped port or naval basin for repairs, which meant that strange sights frequently were seen—a Venetian frigata undergoing the fitting of a new mast in the yards of her traditional enemy, Genoa, a ship of the battle line of King John of Naples being repaired in Palermo.
Such things as this had never before happened in the memories of living men.
In his ornate and comfortable palace, safe from all mainland strife. Cardinal d'Este sat in the warm Sicilian sunlight and read with sadness of the deaths of old friends and wondered if ever the carnage would end . . . and if it then would end in his favor.
Unknown to him and the rest, he was fated to have his answer and an end to the Italian chaos far sooner than he could imagine. For even as he sat musing, an army of above thirty thousand fighting men was slowly moving through the passes of the Alps, headed south, toward Italy. There marched therein grim knights of the Teutonic and other orders, fur-clad Poles and Rus-Goths, squadrons of slant-eyed Kalmyks and Lithuanians, Prussians, Bohemians, Saxons, Bavarians, Brandenburgers, Tyrolers, Styrians, Carinthians, Savoyards, Switzers, men of Franche-Comte, Marburg, Munster, Cassel, Frankfort, Koln, Luxemburg, Stuttgart, Regensburg, Hamburg, and Bremen.
At the head of this mass of men rode a young man whom Bass Foster would have immediately known—Egon, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, leading his vassals and allies and mercenaries down to put an end to the Italian anarchy and to see a new Pope firmly installed before he led them all back through these same passes again.
Like most monarchs of Christendom and all other men of reason who believed in order and fairness, he had been sickened and very angered by what had followed the death of old Pope Abdul, not that he, personally, had been any too pleased with all that had transpired while still the devil-spawn Moorish bastard had lived and misruled the Church from Rome but
for Afriqah, the Spanish kingdoms, and his own selfish ends.
Unlike most of the aforementioned monarchs and other men, however, Emperor Egon was in a position to do something about the situation roiling through the Italian peninsula. He had only waited as long as he had because gathering such a host had taken time and effort and he had wanted to be certain that when he made his appearance in Italy it would be in such numbers that no one would even consider offering him battle, demur, or argument as he saw matters set right in Rome.
The electors had come as close as they ever before had come to refusal and open rebellion when he had presented them with his estimate of what this heterogeneous army would cost to raise, marshal, field, and maintain during the marches down to Italy and back. But he had managed not only to cool them all down but to get everything he had asked of them, in the end. He doubted that he could so easily have done so much with them a year back, but since his wife had recently given birth to a set of male twins, thus granting reasonable assurance to the succession of his house, he now wielded far more real power than in the past.
He meant to settle some old scores in Rome, set some flagrant injustices right—such as those wrought by Moorish malice upon his good friend King Arthur III Tudor and his unhappy, much-persecuted realm, and some serious vengeance must also be wreaked upon some of the Moorish bastards for the shameful treatment and eventual murder of his elder sister, Arthur's queen, by the Moorish minions in London. But he knew that he would have long enough in Italy to hunt them all out, try them in order to broadcast their misdeeds, and then arrange suitably impressive ways of publicly executing them; for entering Italy this late in the year, he knew that it would be next spring before the Alpine passes would be sufficiently free of snow to allow for the march back north.
CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH
His every nerve drawn tense as wire, Bass sat his mount, watching Sir Ali ibn Hussain, clad in his white herald's tabard, pacing his barb mare at a slow walk, and trailed by one of his squires, who bore the headless lance shaft from which depended the plain white square of linen cloth. From time to time, the Duke of Norfolk shifted the long glass to scan the head of the now-halted column of mounted men of Ulaid, over and among whom now coiled serpentine spirals of gray smoke from countless slow matches. Then, as Sir Ali drew closer to his objective, Bass concentrated entirely upon the possible foemen, for if a single shot was tired up the road there, if but one blade flashed free, he must immediately give his Kalmyks and galloglaiches the order to loose a volley from their long guns, then charge close enough to deliver a few deadly caracoles or pistol volleys loosed by one rank at a time. And finally, had the foemen not already either charged or broken and fled, it would be, must be, blade work.