The Borgia Betrayal: A Novel (17 page)

“So we have heard,” David said quietly.

I was not surprised. Although thousands of Jews had been forced to flee Iberia the previous year, others managed to stay on by declaring themselves
conversi,
converts to the “one true faith.” Such men and women lived under a pall of suspicion but so long as they gave no evidence of backsliding, Their Most Catholic Majesties had to tolerate their presence or risk discouraging all conversions to Christianity.

“Don Diego Lopez de Haro,” David went on, “is expected to reach Rome in ten days. He intends to enter into negotiations with Borgia regarding several matters, of which we are regrettably one. However, the primary purpose of his visit is to reconcile His Holiness with the King of Naples.”

“Reconcile how?” I asked. This was crucial. That Borgia sought an end to his troubles with Naples was unquestioned, but there was only so far he would—or could—go. He was counting on the Spanish monarchs, once sufficiently bought, to devise a solution he could accept.

“By convincing Borgia that his interests do not lie with Naples’s enemies, namely the Sforzas.”

The family to which His Holiness, in recognition of his debt to them, was about to give his daughter.

“The Spanish want to stop the wedding,” I said. It was an appalling thought, raising the specter as it did that by so doing, Borgia would not only be stripped of a vital ally just as the trouble with della Rovere was heating up but that in the process of disappointing the Sforzas, he would acquire them as a powerful enemy.

Carefully, I said, “His Holiness expects a more helpful approach from Their Most Catholic Majesties in return for his very generous gift of whatever it is that the great Colombo has found.”

David shrugged. “He can expect whatever he likes but the plain truth is that, now that they’ve gotten a look at him as pope, the Spaniards are appalled by Borgia. They don’t expect the Vicar of Christ to be a saint but he goes too far even for them.”

“Are you saying they want to see him deposed?” If that was true, worse was piling on top of bad. When that happens, catastrophic usually isn’t far off.

“Not necessarily,” David said. “For all their religious posturing, Ferdinand and Isabella want what will best serve their own power. A weakened Borgia in thrall to Spain for his very survival would suit them well enough.”

Sofia had been listening with care to everything we said. Now she broke in. “We cannot allow that to happen! As Borgia goes, so do we.”

“I despise the man,” David said. He had never been one to stand on ceremony but now anger fueled his candor. “However, I don’t see that we have any choice. The merchants and rabbis can yabber over this all they want, trying to figure out where to throw their money, but we have to act.”

“If Borgia’s position could be strengthened,” I said. “If he was not under threat from Morozzi and through him from Savonarola—” And if the threat from della Rovere could also be removed. I would not speak of what His Holiness had charged me to do but it was uppermost in my mind. Della Rovere’s death could resolve a great deal, so long as it was not laid at Borgia’s door.

“We have less than a month to the wedding,” David said. “If Morozzi and Il Frateschi aren’t defanged by then, I fear the worst.”

“We must find where they are hiding,” I said.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Benjamin look up. He carefully removed the cat’s cradle from around his fingers, tucked it back in his pocket, and stood.

“I think I know a way,” he said.

14

“The who?” I asked. In the quiet of Sofia’s apothecary shop, empty of customers at the hour between late afternoon and the first stirring of evening, I thought I must surely have heard Benjamin wrong.

“The king of the
contrabbandieri,
” he said in a tone that suggested my ignorance of so august a personage was difficult to credit. “You must have heard of him?”

We adults glanced at one another with mingled uncertainty and incredulity.

“I don’t think so,” I said finally.

“Well, perhaps that is not so strange,” Benjamin said, brushing off the lapse with a wave of his hand. “A man in his position has to be careful who he trusts.”

“What exactly is his position?” David asked.

“He is king of the smugglers, or at least a lot of them. It’s like a guild, of sorts. Alfonso the First—that’s his name—had the idea of starting it so that they weren’t all competing and fighting with each other. At first there was a lot of skepticism but Alfonso is clever; he didn’t try to force anyone but instead let them come to their own conclusions when they saw for themselves that he treats everybody fairly. Now most of them wouldn’t want to go back to the old ways, even if some still grumble from time to time.”

Now that I thought about it, I supposed that made sense. With excise taxes high and every lordling eager to take advantage of them, it is no wonder that enterprising individuals find ways to buy and sell goods more economically. Indeed, the more taxes and other difficulties mount, the more the business of the city is forced underground. And in Rome, it is literally underground, as goods of every description come and go through the very passages I wished to discover.

Even so I remained hesitant. “How is it you know of him?”

Benjamin’s grin split his face from one side to the other. “Because he used to be one of us—a pickpocket, I mean. We’re his
fratelli
. He still trusts us more than anybody else.”

He—whoever he was—might also judge that children were inherently more trustworthy than adults and in that regard, I could not disagree with him. On the other hand, I was concerned that Benjamin remained a part of the world I thought he had left.

So, apparently, was Sofia, for she said, “Don’t you mean that you used to know this person, Binyamin?”

To give the boy credit, he had an explanation ready to hand. “If I worried that everybody I do errands for is obeying every law, there are two nuns in Santa Maria Maggiore who I might be able to work for. And you, too, of course. That’s about it.”

He was exaggerating—slightly, but I took his point. Besides, this was no time to stand on niceties.

“I should meet this man,” I said.

Immediately, David said, “I’m going with you.”

“He might not like that,” Benjamin cautioned. “It would be better if Donna Francesca and I went alone.”

I saw the boy’s point—a child and a woman were bound to appear less threatening than would a man of David’s stature and manner. But at the same time I was relieved when he rejected the idea.

“Neither one of you is going alone,” he said. “If the great Alfonso has a problem with that, he can take it up with me.”

I was more concerned about what the smuggler king would think of Benjamin for daring to bring strangers into his domain. Out of respect for the boy’s pride, I did not say so but I resolved to make sure that he came to no harm.

Taking leave of Sofia, who urged us to have every care, we made our way to the Piazza di Santa Maria in front of the ancient church dedicated to the Virgin, although some say far more ancient deities are also worshiped there. The usual crowd of women was gathered around the old octagonal fountain, drawing water and, far more important, exchanging gossip. They glanced at us as we passed. I averted my face and was relieved when no gust of chatter erupted behind us. In those days, there were still places that I could go unrecognized, although increasingly they were rare. Idle apprentices—lingering unnecessarily over errands set them by their masters—passed the time of day leaning against the walls of the stone houses framing the square and watching the girls go by. A few young noblemen, always on the outlook for trouble, ambled through. The silliest of them strutted with their hips turned out to emphasize the size of their genitals displayed beneath snug particolored hose and short doublets. More than a few made use of the horsehair wadding that had become all the rage among a certain class of males. Truly, it was a wonder they could walk without continually bumping into whatever happened to be in front of them.

As we crossed the piazza, David found a moment to put a private word in my ear. “Take no unnecessary chances with this fellow. I have never heard of him, whoever he really is, and there are others we can turn to for help.”

Why it is that seemingly everyone I know believes that I rush into danger without a second thought bewilders me. Rather than argue about it, I assured David that I would be cautious. We proceeded down a narrow lane that constricted further into an alley before seeming to end at a blank wall draped in ivy.

“Are you sure this is the way?” I asked.

Benjamin grinned at me over his shoulder, reached under a swath of the ivy, and lifted it to one side. Beyond I glimpsed a black opening just large enough for a single person at a time to enter.

“There are many entrances to the underground,” he said as we followed him within. From the sack that dangled at his waist, Benjamin drew a flint, iron pyrites, and a small bundle of rushes set in a steel lamp to which he set a spark with such ease as to make me wonder exactly how often he ventured into the stygian depths.

“You can find them all over Rome but you have to know where to look.”

I nodded but did not speak. The narrowness of the passage and the weight of the darkness relieved only by the faint glow of the rushes pressed in on me. I am not one of those unfortunates susceptible to acute unease in small places but even so I was relieved when I saw, before we had gone very far, a faint glow up ahead.

It proved to come from a shaft cut toward the surface, admitting the slanting light of late afternoon. We encountered other such openings as we continued on. I felt a slight breeze stirring air that would otherwise have been stale at best and possibly too spent to sustain life.

“It’s not much farther,” Benjamin said.

True to his word, we came shortly to a wider passage lit on both sides by torches set in brackets along the walls. At its end, the stone and brick walls widened out into a broad chamber that, at first glance, appeared to be filled with a haphazard jumble of crates, barrels, chests, and objects of indeterminate shape. Only as my eyes adjusted to the light did I realize that a cluster of people were gathered at the far end around a raised platform.

“Come on then,” Benjamin said. “But both of you let me do the talking, all right?”

We assured him that we would as I tried to comprehend my surroundings. The walls bore the faint tracings of murals in which men and women in the garb of the old Romans gazed out at us with varying degrees of solemnity and amusement. The floor showed a scattering of mosaic tiles that had covered it in the distant past. The air smelled of old stone, dust, earth, and wood smoke. I concluded that I was in a villa long since covered over by the layers of the city built above it and reoccupied by those with reason to stay out of sight.

Benjamin urged us forward toward the dais. The two dozen or so people gathered there were all young, some no more than children, and garbed in a motley collection of garments that paired the brocade waistcoat of a nobleman with the miter of a bishop and the leather jerkin of a soldier. Some of the boys had shaved their heads, giving them the look of fierce hatchlings. A few sported star- and crescent-shaped brandings on their cheeks that I knew to be the marks of Roman gangs. The girls, some very young, had attached themselves to these boys, several of who had gathered two or three to his side while others had to be content with one. All gazed at me with frank suspicion bordering on hostility.

Alfonso the First,
il re dei contrabbandieri,
lounged at the center of all this, on an ornately carved chair covered with gilt such as Borgia himself would not have despised. He was little taller than myself with close-cropped hair, gangly limbs, and raw-boned features. I made his age to be about seventeen or eighteen years, testament to the hard life of Rome’s poor in which fewer than half saw twenty. Added to that the dangers of a smuggler’s existence and I was not surprised that older rivals had fallen by the wayside.

Two girls of no more than fifteen years stood to either side of him, leaning close to display their pippin-sized bosoms. Each had a hand on one of his thighs. They were both blond and at first look appeared to be at least sisters, if not twins.

Nothing in the appearance of
il re
explained his rise to power over the others, save for the hard gleam in his eyes that bespoke at once intelligence and will.

“Who’s this then?” he demanded, his voice slightly high and strident but lacking nothing in authority.

“Friends,
padrone,
” Benjamin said with no sign of the fear he must have been feeling, for I certainly was. We were surrounded by brigands, all no doubt willing to do their chieftain’s bidding in an instant. No one in the world above knew where we had gone. If we did not return, our fate would become one more of those enduring mysteries in Rome, trotted out from time to time over the years and mused about before being forgotten again.

Bowing his head with every indication of true deference, Benjamin approached the throne.

“They have come to ask for your help, if you would be so gracious as to give them audience?”

“You mean they’ve come to try to buy it,” the smuggler king said. His acolytes laughed though none smiled.

I shot a quick glance at David, who did not appear amused but who was, grace to God, holding himself in check.

Alfonso studied us for a moment before affording us a single nod. I took that as an indication that I could speak. Choosing caution as the wisest course, I addressed him as I would Borgia when he was in a middling good mood but still required careful handling.

“It is true, sir, that we do not expect something for nothing. However, we are hoping to convince you that our interests align with yours in a matter of great importance.”

Whether because I had spoken instead of David—it is always assumed that a man will take the lead—or whether
il re
was simply innately cautious, he took a moment to think this over. At length, he said, “What matter?”