He smiled at me. “I do now, too. Here you are, and before I’ve managed to get into any trouble at all. Let’s go in here.” It was another wineshop, on a corner, with only a few tables out on the street. He ducked through the door and I followed. The interior was small and dark. The patrons were older, and many of them were wearing dusty aprons, by which I deduced that they were stonemasons. Pico ordered wine, and we sat down together on a bench in a corner. The place was crowded, but the patrons moved over to make a little room for us. “If we speak Greek, we’ll have perfect privacy here,” he said in that language. “We probably would have back there, but that’s a scholars’ tavern, so you never know.”

It was amazing, really. A count by birth, a Humanist by inclination, befriended by Ficino, imprisoned by the Inquisition, saved by Lorenzo and Savonarola, taken to the City an instant before death, snatched to Olympos by Zeus, set to work with Athene, abandoned by her in Bologna mere months before it was due to be sacked, and still his optimism was undimmed. There aren’t many like him. “Do you know where Athene is?”

He looked wary again. “She was going somewhere she thought was too dangerous for me. And since you’re here, it seems she was right. Do you know where she was going, or should I explain?” He glanced at the oblivious guzzling stonemasons as if worried that they might be able to speak Greek after all.

“Give me whatever she gave you to give to me.” I put out my hand.

“It’s in my cell.”

“You left it in your cell among a lot of thieving Augustinians?” Optimism is not always a virtue.

He shrugged. “It’s inside my copy of Ficino’s Plato, which they think is magic and won’t touch. Besides, I’ve given a copy of it to Raffaele Maffei, in case.”

“Why don’t you simply keep it in your pocket?” I growled. “And Maffei? The Volterran encyclopaedist? Why Maffei?”

“When you’re not a count in Renaissance Italy, you’re always getting your pocket picked. And Raffaele is an old acquaintance. He thinks I’m my own illegitimate son.”

“Let’s hope for the copy in your Plato,” I said. I put my full winecup down on the table and stood. We wouldn’t be driven to Maffei’s copy in any event. If the original copy was missing, I could go back to a time when Pico had it and recover it—ten seconds after he had left it alone in his cell, if that’s what it took.