The Borgia Betrayal: A Novel Read Free Page A

or not. It may be a place of unimagined riches or it may offer nothing but death and ruin. Spain will find out soon enough.”
    The steward looked comforted by my reassurances yet something still troubled him.
    “Have you heard the rumors?” he asked, bending a little closer so that I smelled the anise on his breath. It was not an unpleasant scent but it could not fully mask the nervous sourness emanating from his stomach.
    “Which rumors? Each day, each hour brings new claims wilder than the last.”
    “I don’t know how wild these are. Indeed, I fear they may be all too true. It is being said that man, Pinzón, captain of La Piñta, is dying of a disease no one has seen before. He is covered in strange pustules and consumed by fever.”
    I had heard the same rumor and shared Renaldo’s fear, though I was not about to admit it. Sailors frequently returned home with all manner of ailments, but this was different. By all reports, no one had ever seen the scourge that was killing the subcaptain of Colombo’s fleet. Nor was he alone; several other men who had sailed with the great discoverer were similarly stricken. There were even reports, as yet unconfirmed, that the same symptoms were appearing among the whores of Barcelona, the city to which many returning crew members had gone.
    “We must pray for him,” I said solemnly.
    Renaldo paid that no more mind than I intended. “Of course, of course,” he said. “But about the decree—you are quite certain?”
    I assured him that I was and pleaded a pressing need to be elsewhere, which was true enough. Moments later, I was crossing the vast piazza, crowded as usual with all manner of tradesmen, gawkers, priests, nuns, pilgrims, dignitaries, and the like. The Vatican was, as always, open for business.
    The sun, drifting westward, was warm on my face and I felt as though I could truly breathe for the first time in hours. Even the muscles in the back of my neck that had become so tense as I waited upon Borgia unclenched, if only a little. Behind me, the crumbling hulk of Saint Peter’s lurked, more than a thousand years old and in dire danger of collapse. I did not look in its direction but as always, I was vividly aware of its presence.
    Certain events the previous year haunted me still. Waking and sleeping, I relived the desperate search through Saint Peter’s for a lost child in the hands of a madman bent on ritual murder. What I had seen in the corpse-clogged catacombs was nightmarish enough but it faded to inconsequence when compared to the terror that had followed in the vast, abandoned garret under the basilica’s crumbling roof.
    As though all that weren’t enough, I had gotten it into my head that one of my dark calling should not go out of her way to attract divine attention, as I surely would do were I ever foolish enough to face God again on the very rock where His Church was built.
    Fortunately, there had been no need to do so. Borgia himself despised the dreary pile; he had visited it only a handful of times since becoming pope and spoke regularly of pulling it down. He had some scheme in mind to build a new, more glorious basilica that would stand as a tribute throughout time to his papacy. Sadly, the funds for such an ambitious enterprise did not exist and were not likely to anytime soon.
    It was just as well that no one seemed to notice, far less care, that I avoided setting foot inside Peter’s Church. I could not remember when I had last made the prerequisite confession for the cleansing of one’s soul. There had been that night the previous summer when I broke down and admitted to Borgia that the possibility that I had killed Pope Innocent VIII, the Vicar of Christ, God’s chosen representative on earth, troubled me. He insisted on giving me absolution and I, weak as I am, accepted. We were both rather drunk at the time, which perhaps helps explain it.
    Since then I had killed no more than three times, always in response to the attempts on