“Get her into the sedan,” he ordered, dragging the woman none too gently himself, baby or no. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Barbarigo, you don’t understand.”
“I think, madonna, I understand a little too well. What should have happened in Ca’ Foscari seven years ago, I intend to see happens now. I will make you mine. You will be rescued in spite of yourself.”
To Andrea’s surprise, she came more complacently now. A little firmness would manage her. By the time they got to the sedan and he’d opened the door, he couldn’t help but give Sofia a quizzical look.
“Well, what is there left for me here in Turkey?” she snapped at him, as if the logic was all too simple.
The child, Andrea reminded himself. Her son Muhammed.
But Sofia said nothing about any child. “The plot has failed,” she said instead, “now that Khalil is dead.”
“I don’t notice you weeping.”
“But I might. I just might.” This shrill pinnacle of her voice had ugly edges. “Khalil was our only hope for Cyprus.”
“Cyprus?” The consideration that there might be more at stake here than the possession of one woman’s body for one man’s pleasure took Andrea quite off guard. “You mean to tell me you’d corrupted that high-ranking officer?”
“Why are you so surprised?”
“But—how?”
“Andrea,” she cooed. “You need to ask?”
Andrea struggled to ignore a heavy flush. “He was going to stop the invasion of Cyprus? Cause a rebellion, create a diversion, refuse to fight—and spare Cyprus?”
“Barbarigo, why would I want to stop the invasion of Cyprus?”
“Because Venetians would die, of course. Because Cyprus belongs to Venice.”
“What benefit have I in that?” The moonlight caught a halo of her hair against the black arch of the sedan’s interior. “Hellborn hair” was the description that came first to mind.
“I’m going to take you back home.”
“Where I’d be one foolish, silly noblewoman among a thousand.”
Andrea closed his eyes against a dizzying wave of guilt. And upon the slate of his eyelids he saw the face of one of the Republic’s other noblewomen, the candlelit features of Melissa Foscari, intent on the sweetness of her madrigal. “Yes!” he shouted.
“No.” Her calm was terrifying. “If Turkey takes Cyprus, my son—my princely son—will soon rule it, along with everything else. And I—I rule him.”
“And—and your friend the janissary?”
“Perhaps you know—”Andrea was keenly aware that Sofia punctuated her sentence by laying her hands on his chest. He could feel their heat through both velvet and linen. “—perhaps you don’t. Sokolli Pasha is doing everything in his power to stop the invasion.”
“I hear he hasn’t much success, not against the besotted will of the Sultan.”
“Yes, Selim is a problem. What I would give the man who’d find a way to murder him.” Sofia had slipped her hands up his chest now and was toying with the lace of his collar. And he had worn it for just this purpose. “However, in the meantime, Joseph Nassey is a good substitute.”
“Joseph Nassey.” Andrea choked on his voice’s thickness.
“The Jew, Selim’s most fervent corrupter. So easily corrupted himself. The Jew, you must know, is my creature.”
“What would you give, Sofia? And for what?” The effects of her touch were going to his head.
“Although so far I’ve only been able to get Nassey to plead for invasion.”
“And what did you expect Khalil to do to Sokolli Pasha?”
“Assassinate him, of course.”
Andrea felt her withdraw from him with the same timing a skillful lover uses just before the enveloping climax. Andrea felt himself drawn helplessly after her, aching for that climax.
And then it came. From the bowels of the sedan behind her, Sofia had retrieved a neat silver and pearl-inlaid pistol. He had no time to consider where she got such a new-styled weapon, nor where she’d learned to use it. Not only did she travel armed, but she traveled with it primed and charged. And she didn’t flinch to level it at his face. Nor to lay the cock to the wheel.
One single lazy second drawled across time. Andrea moved through it as though through water, and as if he had nothing but water to breathe.
The ball caught the walleyed bravo in the midst of his leer with no warning whatsoever.
The Pasha’s peacocks set up a terrific pandemonium in reply.
Andrea ignored that difficulty for the moment, focusing on the recoil instead. With the shot’s help, he flung Sofia firmly back into the sedan and fixed the outside latch, flimsy but temporarily sufficient.
The bravo’s death groans had so disconcerted the other two accomplices, however, that they had loosed their grip on Ghazanfer. The monster of a eunuch, backed against a wall and holding them off with fists and boots alone, began to squeal in his obscenely feminine voice, “Murder! Help, for the love of Allah!”
People began to stir behind the neighboring lattices and the night watch couldn’t be too far off. But with Andrea’s inspiration, the bravos renewed their restraint and stifled the eunuch.
“Cut the capon’s throat,” Andrea hissed to the bravo whose dagger was most at the ready. He wasn’t at all certain that three could get the sedan to their shoulders, but there was no time to beg Ghazanfer to come along.
Then blood, black but spangled silver by the moon, spurted. It was not Ghazanfer’s thickly chinned and grossly unnapped throat that gave life out with a sigh, however, but the knife-wielding bravo, from beneath his flimsy mask.
A figure had suddenly dropped behind the fracas as if from the sky. When it freed itself, yet more eunuch’s robes were unfurled and Andrea recognized Sokolli Pasha’s head khadim, the one who called himself Veniero, who must have clambered over the palace walls.
The remaining bravo didn’t even wait to determine this much; he vanished up the alley in the direction of the Hippodrome. A moment later, Andrea was in his wake. Not a moment too soon, for the pistol, reloaded in the sedan, fired again, spraying up dirt at his heels and, in the other direction, he narrowly avoided
