She smiled. 'I know how you feel, but please allow me to hone the skills I am sure you have naturally. Think of my teaching as an extra weapon in your armoury.'
She started his training that very day, recruiting those girls who were off-duty, and trusted house-servants, to help her. In the high-walled garden behind the house she organized twenty of her people into five groups of four. They then started to mill
around the garden, crisscrossing each other, talking and laughing, some of the girls casting bold looks on Ezio, and smiling. Ezio, who still carried his precious pouch at his side, was immune to their charms.
'Now,' Paola told him, 'discretion is paramount in my profession. We must be able to walk the streets freely - seen, but unseen. You too must learn properly how to blend in like us, and become one with the city's crowds.' Ezio was about to protest but she held up her hand. 'I know! Annetta tells me you do not acquit yourself badly, but you have more to learn than you know. I want you to pick a group and try to blend in with them. I don't want to be able to pick you out. Remember what almost happened to you at the execution.'
These harsh words stung Ezio, but the task didn't appear to him that difficult, provided he used his discretion. Still, under her unforgiving eye he found it harder than he'd expected. He would jostle clumsily against someone, or trip up, sometimes causing the girls or the male servants in his selected group to scatter from him, leaving him exposed. The garden was a pleasant place, sunlit and lush, and birds chirruped in the ornamental trees, but in Ezio's mind it became a labyrinth of unfriendly city streets, a potential enemy in every passerby. And always he was nettled by Paola's unremitting criticism. 'Careful!' she would say. 'You can't go charging in like that!' 'Show my girls some respect! Tread carefully when you're near them!' 'How do you plan to blend in with people if you're busy knocking them around?' 'Oh, Ezio! I expected better from you!'
But at last, on the third day, the biting comments grew fewer, and on the morning of the fourth he was able to pass right under Paola's nose without her batting an eyelid. Indeed, after fifteen minutes without saying a word, Paola called out: 'All right, Ezio, I give up! Where are you?'
Pleased with himself, he emerged from a group of girls, himself the very model of one of the young male house-servants. Paola smiled and clapped her hands, and the others joined in the applause.
But the work didn't end there.
'Now that you have learned to blend into a crowd,' Paola told him on the morning of the following day, 'I am going to show you how to use your new-found skill - in order to steal.'
Ezio baulked at this but Paola explained, 'It is an essential survival skill which you may need on your journey. A man is nothing without money, and you may not always be in a position to earn it honestly. I know you would never take anything from anyone who could not afford to lose it, or from a friend. Think of it as a blade in a penknife, which you seldom use, though it's good to know it's there.'
Learning how to pick pockets was a lot harder. He would sidle up to a girl successfully enough, but as soon as his hand closed on the purse at her girdle, she would scream 'Al ladro!' and flee from him. When he first managed to draw some coins out successfully, he stayed where he was for a moment, triumphant, then felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. 'Ti arresto!' said the manservant who was playing the role of a city watchman, grinning; but Paola did not smile. 'Once you've stolen from someone, Ezio,' she said, 'you mustn't linger.'
He was learning faster now, though, and was beginning to appreciate the need to acquire the skills he was being taught as necessary for the successful accomplishment of his mission. Once he had successfully fleeced ten girls, the last five without even Paola noticing, she announced that the tutorial was at an end.
'Back to work, girls,' she said. 'Playtime's over.'
'Do we have to?' the girls murmured reluctantly as they took their leave of Ezio. 'He's so cute, so innocent.' But Paola was adamant.
She walked with him alone in the garden. As always, he kept one hand on his pouch. 'Now that you've learned how to approach the enemy,' she said, 'we need to find you a suitable weapon - something far more subtle than a sword.'
'Well, but what would you have me use?'
'Why, you already have the answer!' And she produced the broken blade and bracer which Ezio had taken from his father's strongbox, and which even now he believed to be safely stowed in his pouch. Shocked, he opened it and rummaged. They were indeed gone.
'Paola! How the devil - ?'
Paola laughed. 'Did I get them? By using the same skills I've just taught you. But there's another little lesson for you. Now you know how to pick a pocket successfully, you must also learn to be on guard against people with the same skill!'
Ezio looked gloomily at the broken blade, which she'd returned to him with the bracer. 'There's some kind of mechanism that goes with them. None of this is exactly in working condition,' he said.
'Ah,' she said. 'True. But I think you already know Messer Leonardo?'
'Da Vinci? Yes, I met him just before -' He broke off, forcing himself not to dwell on the painful memory. 'But how can a painter be of any help to me with this?'
'He's a lot more than just a painter. Take him the pieces. You'll see.'
Ezio, seeing the sense of what she was telling him, nodded his agreement, then said, 'Before I go, may I ask you one last question?'
'Of course.'
'Why have you given your aid so readily to me - a stranger?'
Paola gave him a sad smile. By way of an answer, she drew up one of the sleeves of her robe, revealing a pale, delicate forearm - whose beauty was marred by the ugly, long dark scars which criss-crossed it. Ezio looked and knew. At some time in her life this lady had been tortured.
'I, too, have known betrayal,' Paola said.
And Ezio recognized without hesitation that he had met a kindred spirit.
5
It was not far from Paola's luxurious House of Pleasure to the busy back streets where Leonardo's workshop was, but Ezio did have to cross the spacious and busy Piazza del Duomo, and here he found his newly acquired skills of merging into the crowd especially useful. It was a good ten days since the executions, and it was likely that Alberti would imagine that Ezio would have left Florence long since, but Ezio was taking no chances, and nor, by the look of the number of guards posted in and around the square, was Alberti. There would be plain-clothes agents in place as well. Ezio kept his head well down, especially when passing between the cathedral and the Baptistry, where the square was busiest. He passed by Giotto's campanile, which had dominated the city for almost one hundred and fifty years, and the great red mass of Brunelleschi's cathedral dome, completed only fifteen years earlier, without seeing them, though he was aware of groups of French and Spanish tourists gazing up in unfeigned amazement and admiration, and a little burst of pride in his city tugged at his heart. But was it his city, really, any more?
Suppressing any gloomy thoughts, he quickly made his way from the south side of the piazza to Leonardo's workshop. The Master was at home, he was told, in the yard at the back. The studio was, if anything, in a greater state of chaos than ever, though there did seem to be some rough method in the madness. The artefacts Ezio had noticed on his earlier visit had been added to, and from the ceiling hung a strange contraption in wood, though it looked like a scaled-up skeleton of a bat. On one of the easels a large parchment pinned to a board carried a massive and impossibly intricate knot-design, and in a corner of it some indecipherable scribbling in Leonardo's hand. Agniolo had been joined by another assistant, Innocento, and the two were trying to impose some order on the studio, cataloguing the stuff in order to keep track of it.
'He's in the back yard,' Agniolo told Ezio. 'Just go through. He won't mind.'
Ezio found Leonardo engaged in a curious activity. Everywhere in Florence you could buy caged songbirds. People hung them in their windows for pleasure, and when they died, simply replaced them. Leonardo was surrounded by a dozen such cages and, as Ezio watched, he selected one, opened the little wicker door, held the
