Through Darkest Europe

by Harry Turtledove

  “Sounds good,” Khalid said. This time, Dawud was the one who nodded.

  “And to return to your question,” Crocetti continued smoothly, “if the Aquinists take over, very little happens to my businesses. People always want to gamble. Men always want to lie down with women. God wills it, you might say.” He smiled the amused smile of a man who’d seen everything more than once.

  “You know that. We know that.” Khalid couldn’t match the mob boss’ cynicism, but he could come close. “Do the Aquinists know it, though? Or would they shoot you or hang you to discourage the others?”

  “It’s possible. I haven’t lost a lot of sleep over it,” Crocetti said. “But what you are telling me is that you want me to support Grand Duke Lorenzo and not just wait to see what happens and then ride the horse whichever way it is going. Or am I wrong?”

  “No, Signor, you’re not wrong—as you know perfectly well,” Dawud said. Crocetti smiled again, this time the self-satisfied smile of a man who knew he knew what he knew. The Jew continued, “But if you back him now, he’ll owe you something later on.”

  “He will—if he wins,” Dino Crocetti said. “But even if he does, will he pay it back? Princes—and Grand Dukes, as well—have sadly short memories when it comes to debts like that.”

  “You’re wasted in Naples, Signor,” Khalid exclaimed. “You should come to the Maghrib. In a year or two, you’d be our spymaster, or else running the underwazirate in charge of war.”

  “It could be.” Whatever Crocetti’s flaws, modesty wasn’t one of them. He displayed those perfected teeth again. “But why on earth would I want less power there than I enjoy here?”

  Khalid started to laugh. Then he realized the Italian wasn’t joking. He wasn’t just a high-ranking functionary here in Naples. He had the authority of a prince, if not the title.

  Before Khalid could reply, the waiter brought in the fish soup. It was wonderful. Khalid had looked for nothing less. Crocetti knew what the best here was, and knew how to get it. Halfway through, Khalid said, “However you look at it, you aren’t a natural ally for people who think having fun is sinful.”

  “I daresay not,” Dino Crocetti answered. “I am not their natural enemy, either, though. I try to get along with everyone, from Prefect Vaccaro to people like you.”

  “Ah, but if they don’t want to get along with you…?” Dawud said.

  “Then I adjust as needed.” If anything fazed Crocetti, he didn’t let on.

  If you don’t play along with our side, your life gets more complicated. Khalid thought about coming out with it, but held his peace. Obvious threats would only make the Neapolitan scorn him. And Prefect Vaccaro was all too likely to warn Crocetti of any trouble blowing his way. If Lorenzo III started getting rid of police prefects as well as crime bosses, the ones he didn’t get rid of would probably discover they’d been secret Aquinists all along.…

  What he did say was, “This is fine, fine soup.”

  “I’m glad it pleases you, my master,” Crocetti replied. That was the respectful politeness of Arabic, nothing more. He remained in effortless control of the situation here.

  In due course, the rice cake with beef and mushrooms came in. It might have been even better than the soup. Before Khalid tasted it, he wouldn’t have bet more than a copper that such a thing was possible. He wasn’t sure it outdid the soup, but he also wasn’t sure it didn’t. More wine accompanied it, and Italian ice cream followed. Khalid found he had a much harder time disliking Dino Crocetti than he had before they ate together.

  “Well, gentlemen, I’m glad you seem to have enjoyed Ciro a Santa Brigida,” the Neapolitan said, which told the investigators where they’d been eating. Crocetti lit a cigar. Beaming, Dawud ibn Musa followed suit.

  “Think about what we’ve had to say, that’s all,” Khalid told the boss.

  “Assolutamente, my master,” Crocetti said. “I do know which end is up, I promise you. Is there anything else, or shall I have Enrico drive you back to your hotel?”

  “Give our regards to the prefect next time you see him,” Dawud gibed.

  “Assolutamente,” Crocetti said again. He blew a smoke ring up toward the ceiling. “It shouldn’t be long.”

  On his home ground, he was more than a match for even the Jew’s sarcasm. The investigators went back to the odorous alley. They got into the Pontiak. Enrico drove away with the sublime disregard for life and limb that looked to be every Italian’s birthright. Why they didn’t get back with a dented hood and with bicyclists draped over both front fenders Khalid couldn’t have said, but they didn’t.

  “So much for that,” he grumbled when they walked into their room.

  “Hey, we got a demon of a supper out of it,” Dawud said. “Dino was buying, too, so we don’t have to put it on the swindle sheet. And whatever else he is, he’s no dope. He can stay in business with Lorenzo. With the Aquinists, he takes his chances. I don’t think he likes taking chances he doesn’t have to.”

  “Here’s hoping.” That was the best Khalid could do.

  * * *

  “I hate those bosses,” Annarita Pezzola said after the investigators returned to Rome and Khalid told her how things had gone in the south. Dawud was reporting more formally to Major Badoglio.

  “You could do worse than Crocetti.” Khalid hoped that wasn’t the good food talking. He didn’t think so, but how could you know for sure?

  “You could do better, too,” Annarita answered. “The bosses are almost as much a part of the past we need to break away from as the Aquinists are. They corrupt whatever they touch, and they touch everything in the country. As long as they can get their way with bribes and murders, Italy will never be honest and modern.”

  She spoke with great conviction. It wasn’t that Khalid thought she was wrong, either. If greasing a palm could get you whatever you wanted or needed, your land wouldn’t go forward as fast as it would if you could trust your officials.

  But … “The bosses aren’t trying to murder the Grand Duke and let the fanatics take over.”

  “Not right now, no,” Annarita admitted reluctantly. “But they’ve risen against the Grand Dukes before. They want to be lords in their cities, not just crime bosses. And with the money they siphon away from the treasury through their gambling and their whores and their smuggling, they almost are.”

  “One set of enemies at a time.” Khalid was a practical man. Most investigators were, and had to be. “If you try to take them all on at once, you won’t beat any of them.”

  “I know that here.” Annarita tapped a temple to her forefinger. “But here”—she laid a hand on the sweetly rounded flesh above her heart—“I hate it. What kind of country are we when the only way to get anything done is to pay somebody off? It makes me embarrassed to be an Italian.”

  Italy, Aragon, Castile, Portugal, France … They were all notorious for corruption. Khalid gave Annarita what consolation he could: “It’s even worse in the little German states, I hear.”

  “Oh, joy!” If she was consoled, she hid it very well. “This ought to be a country where things run as smoothly as they do on your side of the Mediterranean. If Cosimo had lived for another twenty years, if the Aquinists hadn’t murdered him, it might have turned into one like that.”

  “Maybe.” Khalid didn’t want to argue with a woman he found so attractive, but he also didn’t believe her. If the old Grand Duke had ruled for another twenty years, Italy would have been an honest, orderly place as far as his eye could reach, and not a digit farther. Out of his gaze, the bosses would have kept right on doing all the profitable but illicit things they did, and they would have kept crossing police prefects’ palms with silver, too, to get them to look the other way. Italy had run like that since the Roman Empire collapsed, and probably had run like that back when Rome was strong.

  “You think I’m crazy,” Annarita said. For all his efforts, something in his voice must have given him away.

  He shook his head, denying everything. “What I
think is that you’re wasted in Italy. I’ve told you so before. You could do much better for yourself in the Maghrib, especially now that Lorenzo’s Grand Duke.”

  Now that your patron’s dead, he meant. Italy ran that way. The crime bosses were patrons, too, big ones. That was part of the reason they were so hard to root out. Police prefects were also patrons. So were bishops.

  To a certain degree, things everywhere worked that way. People with power helped other people they liked, and those people paid the favor back or else paid it forward. In the civilized world, though, law and custom put checks on the system. Not in places like this.

  “I’d be a foreigner there. I’d still be a woman there, even if that isn’t as hard as it is here,” Annarita said. “And you have too many educated people there already.”

  “Not as many as we need. We never have as many as we need,” Khalid said.

  “We haven’t got enough here. We especially don’t have enough educated women here,” Annarita said. “And I am an Italian. I want to be proud to be an Italian, not embarrassed. I want to make this a place all Italians can be proud of.”

  “Even the ones who don’t want to pay any attention to you because you’re a woman and the ones who don’t think women have any business getting an education to begin with?” he asked.

  “Even those,” she said firmly. “I want to help make this a place where there aren’t so many ignorant people like that.”

  “And the ones who yell ‘God wills it!’ want to make this a place where that kind of ignorance is king no matter who the Grand Duke is. They want to make Italy a place where it’s illegal for women to get an education and illegal to listen to them if they do,” Khalid said.

  “I know. I’m not likely not to know, am I?” Annarita answered. “You can run away, though, or you can stay and fight to make things better. That’s what I aim to do.”

  “And if you wind up in a country where the Aquinists are running things?” he asked. “They’ll jail you or they’ll hurt you or they’ll kill you, and you won’t have a chance to make things better.”

  “Maybe I’ll be a martyr for the cause. That’s not useless, either. Christianity had martyrs”—she used the Italian word this time, not the Arabic shahid—“before Islam did. Or maybe I’ll see that I can’t do anything then, and choose that time to leave.”

  “If you’re able to,” Khalid said.

  “If I’m able to,” Annarita agreed. “Life is full of different chances. You do what you do and you see what comes of it. Then you do something else, and you see what comes of that. What else can you do?”

  “Well…” Khalid glanced at his watch. It was getting close to the twelfth hour of the day, the time when the sun went down. He plunged: “You could come to supper with me.”

  She studied him. She looked more amused than surprised, so she must have noticed that he’d noticed her. “All right,” she said. “We can do that. But what happens next? You share your hotel room with the Ebreo. He’s a funny fellow, but people don’t always want company.”

  That was more forward than he’d expected her to be, more forward than some women from the Maghrib would have been. She took her modernity seriously. She took most of the things she did seriously. That was part of the reason she interested Khalid.

  “We’ll figure something out,” he said. “Or if we don’t tonight, maybe we will some other time.”

  Now she beamed at him. “Good,” she said. “You always like to think someone wants to take you out for some reason beside what you have between your legs. That you’re a person to him, not just a pussy.”

  No matter how the Catholic Church frowned on them, reliable ways to make sure you didn’t plant a baby in a woman when you lay down with her had radically changed customs in the Muslim world over the past lifetime. Even there, though, most women still felt the same way Annarita did. Evolutionary biologists claimed there were sound reasons they did. Khalid didn’t know about that. He did know he wouldn’t have wanted women to be just like men. Half the fun would have gone out of the game if they were.

  They went to an eatery not far from his hotel. It was crowded. Several people in the place were complaining about dining so early. They didn’t appreciate Grand Duke Lorenzo’s curfew. Neither did Khalid, once he remembered it. If he went somewhere with Annarita after supper, he’d either spend the night there or take his chances dodging Lorenzo’s patrols.

  The same thing seemed to occur to her. “I think we’ll have to find another time,” she said. “Don’t worry, though. I won’t change my mind—unless I do, of course.” Her eyes twinkled.

  “La donna è mobile,” he said in his indifferent Italian.

  “I’m not nearly so fickle as half the men I know,” Annarita said, and he believed her. She went on, “I do suppose I asked for that,” so he knew he hadn’t made her angry.

  They were finishing their second course when something exploded in the distance. Sirens screamed through the streets. “That doesn’t sound good,” Khalid said, frowning.

  “No. It doesn’t,” Annarita said. “It’s from the direction of the Vatican, too. I hope his Holiness is all right.”

  Khalid hoped the same thing, perhaps even more than she did. Pope Marcellus saw that times had changed, and that Christianity needed to change to keep up with them. How could anyone guess whether his successor would feel that way, too?

  After a few minutes later, the cook—who also seemed to be the owner—came out and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the radio says two men in an auto blew themselves up at the edge of the Vatican. The streets were crowded—it killed people, and wounded more. His Holiness is safe, though, God bless him.” He made the sign of the cross.

  So did several of the diners and both waiters in the place. “Now,” Khalid said, “the next interesting question is whether they were going after the Pope or only spreading terror around.” Only spreading terror around? That was what had come out of his mouth, all right. There were worse things, even if he would have had trouble believing it before he came to Italy.

  “No one from the Ministry of Information can question them now,” Annarita said. “Satan will have to take care of it in hell.”

  “They think they’re going in the other direction,” Khalid said. That was, of course, part of the problem. Men drunk on the hope of heaven didn’t care what happened to them in this world. It made stopping them much harder. Khalid feared death not least because he suspected this was the only life he had. The Aquinists truly believed in the world to come.

  He couldn’t even kiss Annarita good-bye after supper. He might have back in Tunis, but straitlaced Italy frowned on public shows of affection between the sexes. Feeling like a man from a bygone time, he squeezed her hand and walked back to the hotel alone.

  XI

  Dawud ibn Musa was watching television when Khalid let himself into their room. “Guess what?” the Jew said without looking away from the screen.

  “You mean, besides the bomb at the edge of the Vatican a little while ago?” Khalid said.

  “That’s nothing. Those fools didn’t get anywhere close to the Pope. They just killed a bunch of nobodies,” Dawud said, his voice full of scorn. “But a couple of other Aquinists came that close to killing the King of France.”

  “They didn’t do it?” Khalid asked.

  “No. They didn’t realize the lectern he was standing behind and the glass on it were armored. He’s cut and bruised, and the news says he may lose the hearing in one ear, but he’s not blown to shreds like Cosimo.”

  “A good thing, too!” Khalid exclaimed. King Jean, like the late Grand Duke, was trying to yank his country into the modern world by the ears. Khalid had seen the Dauphin, his son, at Cosimo’s funeral rites, but had no way to judge how well the young man might follow in his father’s footsteps, or even whether he would want to do that.

  “It’s good that they failed. It’s bad that they tried, and worse that they almost did it,” Dawud said. “One of the King’s generals is
dead, and a police official, too. More are injured. Not enough of the Aquinists with the bomb to bury.”

  He was right about that. The TV showed the town hall where the attempt took place. Red smears near the podium were all that remained of the would-be assassins.

  Khalid flopped down on his own bed. He had more things on his mind than fanatics who blew themselves up for the greater glory of God. “Um … Dawud…” he said tentatively.

  “What’s up?” his countryman asked when he didn’t go on right away.

  “Remember how you teased me a while ago?” Khalid asked, still approaching things in a gingerly way.

  “When?” Dawud asked, which was a fair question: he did it at any excuse or none.

  “When you offered to take another room because I might want some privacy in this one.”

  “Well? What about it?”

  “That … might not be such a bad notion after all.” Khalid didn’t like the idea of telling Dawud to clear out so he could use the room for making love. But he liked the idea of having nowhere to make love even less.

  A grin spread across Dawud’s fleshy face. “I’ll move out, then. Just so you know, I’ve already cleared it with the people who order us around. They will spring for separate rooms, believe it or not.”

  “You told them you needed your own room because I’ve found a lady friend, and they went along with it?” Khalid had trouble believing him.

  Well he might have, too. Dawud threw back his head and laughed. “I’m dumb, Khalid, but I’m not that dumb,” he said. He was anything but dumb, as Khalid knew perfectly well. Laughing still, Dawud went on, “I told ’em it was for security reasons. If the Aquinists fire a rocket into our room in the middle of the night now, they can kill both of us. If we have separate rooms, they only blow one of us to smithereens. The other one can keep on helping Grand Duke Lorenzo. That, they went along with.”

  No, Dawud ibn Musa wasn’t even slightly dumb. He knew how to talk to security higher-ups in their own paranoid language. Khalid got up and set a hand on his shoulder. “You’re all right—you know that?”