‘How is Rosa?’ asked Ezio.
‘Better, but she was hurt worse than we thought, and she tries to run before she can walk!’
‘Sounds like her.’
‘It’s typical.’ Antonio paused. ‘She wants to see you.’
‘I’m flattered.’
‘Why be? You are the hero of the hour!’
Some days later, Ezio was summoned to Antonio’s office and found him poring over his model of the Palazzo Seta. The little wooden manikins had been redeployed around it, and there was a pile of papers covered in calculations and notes on the table by its side.
‘Ah! Ezio!’
‘Signore.’
‘I have just returned from a little foray of my own into enemy territory. We managed to liberate three boatloads of armoury destined for dear Emilio’s little palazzo. So we thought we might organize a little fancy-dress party, with us dressed in the uniforms of Barbarigo archers.’
‘Brilliant. That should get us into his fortress without any problem. When do we start?’
Antonio held up a hand. ‘Not so fast, my dear. There is a problem, and I’d like to ask your advice.’
‘You honour me.’
‘No, I just value your judgement. The fact is, I have it on the best authority that some of my people have been suborned by Emilio and are now his agents.’ He paused. ‘We cannot strike until the traitors are dealt with. Look, I know I can depend on you, and your face is not well known within the Guild. If I were able to give you certain pointers about the whereabouts of these traitors, do you think you could deal with them? You can take Ugo with you as back-up, and whatever task-force you may require.’
‘Messer Antonio, the fall of Emilio is as important to me as it is to you. Let us join hands in this.’
Antonio smiled. ‘The very answer I expected from you!’ He gestured Ezio to join him at a map table which had been set up near the window. ‘Here is a plan of the city. The men of mine who have defected meet, as my own loyal spies tell me, in a taverna here. It’s called Il Vecchio Specchio. There they make contact with Emilio’s agents, exchange information, and take their orders.’
‘How many?’
‘Five.’
‘What do you want me to do with them?’
Antonio looked at him. ‘Why, kill them, my friend.’
Ezio summoned the group he had hand-picked for the mission the following day at sunset. He had laid his plans. He dressed them all in Barbarigo uniforms from the boats Antonio had sequestered. Emilio, he knew from Antonio, believed that the stolen equipment had been lost at sea, so his people would suspect nothing. Together with Ugo and four others, he descended on Il Vecchio Specchio soon after dark. It was a Barbarigo hangout, but at that time of night only a handful of customers were there, apart from the turncoats and their Barbarigo controls. They hardly looked up as they saw a group of Barbarigo guards enter the inn, and it was only when they were surrounded that their attention turned to the newcomers. Ugo pulled back his hood, revealing himself in the half-light of the taverna. The conspirators made to rise, astonishment and fear written in their faces. Ezio placed a firm hand on the shoulder of the nearest traitor, then with a detached economy of effort thrust his now-released Codex blade between the man’s eyes. Ugo and the others followed suit and dispatched their traitorous brethren.
In the meantime, Rosa had continued to make a gradual and ever-impatient recovery. She was up and about, but she depended on a cane to get around, and her damaged leg was still swathed in bandages. Ezio, despite himself, and constantly making mental apologies to Cristina Calfucci, spent as much of his time as he could in her company.
‘Salute, Rosa,’ he said on a typical morning. ‘How are things? I see your leg is healing.’
Rosa shrugged. ‘It’s taking for ever, but I’m getting there. And you? How are you finding our little town?’
‘It is a great city. But how do you cope with the smell of the canals?’
‘We’re used to it. We wouldn’t like the dust and filth of Florence.’ She paused. ‘So, what brings you to me this time?’
Ezio smiled. ‘What you think and also not what you think.’ He hesitated. ‘I was hoping you could teach me how to climb like you do.’
She tapped her leg. ‘Time was,’ she said. ‘But if you are in a hurry, my friend Franco can do almost as well as me.’ She raised her voice. ‘Franco!’
A lissom, dark-haired youth appeared almost instantly in the doorway, and Ezio, to his private mortification, felt a pang of jealousy that was apparent enough for Rosa to notice. She smiled. ‘Don’t worry, tesoro, he’s as gay as Santo Sebastiano. But he’s also as tough as old boots. Franco! I want you to show Ezio some of our tricks.’ She looked out of the window. An unoccupied building opposite was covered with bamboo scaffolding tied together with leather thongs. She pointed. ‘Take him up that for a start.’
Ezio spent the rest of the morning – three hours – chasing after Franco, under Rosa’s strident direction. At the end of it, he could clamber up to a giddying height with almost all the speed and address of his mentor, and had learned how to jump upwards from one handhold to the next, though he doubted if he’d ever reach Rosa’s own standard.
‘Lunch lightly,’ Rosa said, sparing him any praise. ‘We haven’t finished for the day.’
In the afternoon, in the hours of the siesta, she took him to the square of the massive redbrick Frari church. Together they looked up at its bulk. ‘Climb that,’ Rosa said. ‘Up to the very top. And I want you back down here before I have counted three hundred.’
Ezio sweated and strained, his head swimming with the effort.
‘Four hundred and thirty-nine,’ announced Rosa when he rejoined her. ‘Again!’
At the end of the fifth attempt an exhausted and sweating Ezio felt that all he wanted to do now was smash Rosa in the face, but that desire melted when she smiled at him and said, ‘Two hundred and ninety-three. You’ll just about do.’
The small crowd that had gathered applauded.
15
Over the following months the Thieves’ Guild tackled the tasks of reorganizing and refitting. Then, one morning, Ugo arrived at Ezio’s lodgings to invite him to a meeting. Ezio packed his Codex weapons in a satchel and followed Ugo to the headquarters, where they found Antonio, in an ebullient mood, once again moving the little wooden manikins around the model of the Palazzo Seta. Ezio wondered if the man wasn’t a little obsessed. Rosa, Franco and two or three of the other senior members of the Guild were also present.
‘Ah, Ezio!’ he smiled. ‘Thanks to your recent successes we are now in a position to counter-attack. Our target is Emilio’s warehouse, not far from his palazzo. This is the plan. Look!’ He tapped the model and indicated lines of little blue wooden soldiers ranged around the perimeters of the warehouse. ‘These are Emilio’s archers. They represent our greatest danger. Under cover of night, I intend to send you and a couple of others up to the roofs of the buildings adjoining the warehouse – and I know that you are up to this task, thanks to Rosa’s recent training – to drop down on the archers and dispose of them. Quietly. As you do so, our men, dressed in the Barbarigo uniforms we have captured, will move in from the alleyways around and take their places.’
Ezio pointed to the red manikins within the warehouse walls. ‘What about the guards inside?’
‘When you’ve dealt with the archers we’ll gather here…’ Antonio pointed to a piazza nearby which Ezio recognized as the one where Leonardo had his new workshop – he wondered briefly how his friend was progressing with his commissions, ‘… and discuss the next steps.’
‘When do we make our move?’ asked Ezio.
‘Tonight!’
‘Excellent! Let me have a couple of good men. Ugo, Franco, are you with me?’ The two nodded, grinning. ‘We’ll take care of the archers and meet you as you suggest.’
‘With our men in place of their archers, they won’t suspect a thing.’
‘And the next move?’<
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‘Once we’ve secured the warehouse, we’ll launch an attack on the palazzo itself. But remember! Be stealthy! They must not suspect a thing!’ Antonio grinned, and spat. ‘Good luck, my friends – in bocca al lupo!’ He patted Ezio’s shoulder.
‘Crepi il lupo,’ Ezio replied, spitting too.
The operation passed off that night without a hitch. The Barbarigo archers didn’t know what had hit them, and so subtly were they replaced with Antonio’s men that the guards inside the warehouse fell quietly and without much resistance to the thieves’ onslaught, having been unaware that their comrades outside had been neutralized.
The attack on the palazzo was next on Antonio’s agenda, but Ezio insisted that he went ahead first to assess the lie of the land. Rosa, the last stages of whose recovery had been remarkable thanks to the combined skills of Antonio and Bianca, and who could now climb and leap almost as well as if she had been back to her full fitness, wanted to accompany him, but Antonio, to her anger, vetoed this. It crossed Ezio’s mind that Antonio, in the end, considered him more expendable than her, but he brushed off the thought and prepared himself for the reconnaissance mission, strapping on his left arm the Codex guard-brace with its double-dagger, and, on his right, the original spring-blade. He had a lot of difficult climbing to do, and he didn’t want to risk the poison-blade since in any circumstances it was a truly lethal weapon and he was keen to avoid any accident with it that might prove fatal to himself.
Pulling his hood up over his head and using the new techniques of upward leaping which Rosa and Franco had taught him, he stormed up the outer walls of the palazzo, silent as a shadow and drawing less attention, until he was on its roof and looking down into its garden. There he noticed two men in deep conversation. They were making for a side gate leading to a narrow, private canal which led round the back of the palazzo. Following their progress from the roof, Ezio could see that a gondola was moored at a little jetty there, its two gondoliers clad in black and its lanterns doused. Sure-footed as a gecko on the roofs and walls, he hastened down and sheltered himself in the branches of a tree from which he could hear their conversation. The two men were Emilio Barbarigo and, as Ezio recognized with a shock, none other than Carlo Grimaldi, one of Doge Mocenigo’s entourage. They were accompanied by Emilio’s secretary, a spindly man dressed in grey, whose heavy reading glasses kept slipping down his nose.
‘… Your little house of cards is crumbling, Emilio,’ Grimaldi was saying.
‘It’s a minor setback, nothing more. The merchants who defy me, and that piece of shit Antonio de Magianis will soon be dead or in chains, or working the oars of a Turkish galley.’
‘I’m talking about the Assassin. He’s here, you know. That’s what’s made Antonio so bold. Look, we’ve all been robbed or burgled, and our guardsmen have been outsmarted; it’s as much as I’ve been able to do to keep the Doge from poking his nose in.’
‘The Assassin? Here?’
‘You numbskull, Emilio! If the Master knew how stupid you are, you’d be dead meat. You know the damage he’s already done to our cause in Florence and San Gimignano.’
Emilio made a fist of his right hand. ‘I’ll crush him like the bedbug he is!’ he snarled.
‘Well, he’s certainly sucking the blood out of you. Who knows if he’s not here now, listening to us as we speak?’
‘Now, Carlo – you’ll be telling me next you believe in ghosts.’
Grimaldi fixed him with his eyes. ‘Arrogance has made you stupid, Emilio. You do not see the whole picture. You are nothing but a big fish in a small pond.’
Emilio grabbed him by the tunic, and pulled him close, angrily. ‘Venice will be mine, Grimaldi! I provided all the armaments to Florence! Not my fault if that idiot Jacopo didn’t use them wisely. And don’t try to make things bad for me with the Master. If I wanted to, I could tell him some things about you which would –’
‘Save your breath! I must go now. Remember! The meeting is set ten days from now at San Stefano, outside Fiorella’s.’
‘I’ll remember,’ said Emilio sourly. ‘The Master will hear then how –’
‘The Master will speak, and you will listen,’ retorted Grimaldi. ‘Farewell!’
He stepped into the darkened gondola as Ezio watched, and it glided off into the night.
‘Cazzo!’ muttered Emilio to his secretary as he watched the gondola disappear in the direction of the Grand Canal. ‘What if he’s right? What if that damned Ezio Auditore is here?’ He brooded for a moment. ‘Look, get the boatmen ready, now. Wake the bastards up if you have to. I want those crates loaded now and I want the boat ready in half an hour by your water-clock. If Grimaldi is speaking the truth, I must find a place to hide, at least until the meeting. The Master will find a way of dealing with the Assassin…’
‘He must be working with Antonio de Magianis,’ put in the secretary.
‘I know that, you idiot!’ hissed Emilio. ‘Now come, and help me pack the documents we spoke of before our dear friend Grimaldi came calling.’
They moved back towards the interior of the palazzo, and Ezio followed, giving away no more sense of his presence than if he had been a spirit. He blended into the shadows and his footfall was no more noticeable than a cat’s. He knew Antonio would hold off the attack on the palazzo until he gave the signal, and first he wanted to get to the bottom of what Emilio was up to – what were these documents of which he had spoken?
‘Why won’t people listen to sense?’ Emilio was saying to his secretary as Ezio continued to tail them. ‘All this freedom of opportunity, it just leads to more crime! We must ensure that the State has control of all aspects of the people’s lives, and at the same time gives free rein to the bankers and the private financiers. That way, society flourishes. And if those who object have to be silenced, then that is the price of progress. The Assassins belong to a bygone age. They don’t realize that it’s the State that matters, not the individual.’ He shook his head. ‘Just like Giovanni Auditore, and he was a banker himself! You’d have thought he’d have shown more integrity!’
Ezio drew in his breath sharply at the mention of his father’s name, but continued to pursue his quarry as Emilio and his secretary made their way to his office, selected papers, packed them, and returned to the little jetty by the garden gate where another, larger gondola was now awaiting its master.
Emilio, taking his satchel of papers from his secretary, snapped a last order. ‘Send some overnight clothes after me. You know the address.’
The secretary bowed and disappeared. There was no one else about. The gondoliers prepared to cast off, fore and aft.
Ezio sprang from his vantage-point on to the gondola, which rocked alarmingly. With two swift elbow movements, he knocked the boatmen into the water, and then had Emilio by the throat.
‘Guards! Guards!’ gurgled Emilio, groping for the dagger at his belt. Ezio seized his wrist just as he was about to plunge the weapon into Ezio’s belly.
‘Not so fast,’ said Ezio.
‘Assassin! You!’ growled Emilio.
‘Yes.’
‘I killed your enemy!’
‘That does not make you my friend.’
‘Killing me will solve nothing for you, Ezio.’
‘I think it will rid Venice of a troublesome… bedbug,’ said Ezio, releasing his spring-blade. ‘Requiescat in pace.’ With barely a pause, Ezio eased the deadly steel between Emilio’s shoulder blades – death came quickly and silently. Ezio’s proficiency in killing was matched only by the cold metallic resolve with which he fulfilled the duty of his calling.
Bundling Emilio’s body over the gondola’s side, Ezio set to rifling through the papers in his satchel. There was much to interest Antonio, he thought, as he swiftly sifted through them, for there was no time now to examine them thoroughly; but there was one parchment which caught his own attention – a rolled and sealed page of vellum. Surely another Codex page!
As he was about to break the seal – shoof! �
� an arrow rattled and clanged into the baseboard of the gondola between his legs. Instantly alert, Ezio crouched, peering up in the direction the missile had come from. High above him on the ramparts of the palazzo a vast number of Barbarigo archers was ranged.
Then one of them waved. And acrobatically tumbled down from the high walls. In another second she was in his arms.
‘Sorry, Ezio – foolish prank! But we couldn’t resist.’
‘Rosa!’
She snuggled. ‘Back in the fray and ready for action!’ She looked at him with shining eyes. ‘And the Palazzo Seta is taken! We have freed the merchants who opposed Emilio, and we now control the district. Now, come! Antonio is planning a celebration, and Emilio’s wine cellars are legendary!’
Time passed, and Venice seemed to be at peace. No one mourned Emilio’s disappearance; indeed, many believed him still to be alive, and some assumed he had just gone on a journey abroad to look after his business interests in the Kingdom of Naples. Antonio made sure that the Palazzo Seta still ran like clockwork, and as long as the mercantile interests of Venice as a whole were not affected, nobody really cared about the fate of one businessman, however ambitious or successful he may have been.
Ezio and Rosa had grown closer, but a fierce rivalry still existed between them. Now she was healed, she wanted to prove herself, and one morning she came to his rooms and said, ‘Listen Ezio, I think you need a re-tune. I want to see if you’re still as good as you became when Franco and I first trained you. So – how about a race?’
‘A race?’
‘Yes!’
‘Where?’
‘From here to the Punta della Dogana. Starting now!’ And she leapt out of the window before Ezio could react. He watched her as she scampered over the red rooftops and seemed almost to dance across the canals that separated the buildings. Throwing off his tunic, he raced after her.
At last they arrived, neck-and-neck, on the rooftop of the wooden building that stood on the spit of land at the end of the Dorsoduro, overlooking St Mark’s Canal and the lagoon. Across the water stood the low buildings of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, and opposite, the shimmering pink stone edifice which was the Palazzo Ducale.
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