“Very well. Would you care for a game?” I flicked my wrist, snapping the cards together. “We cannot play primiera with only two—perhaps Michelotto will join us? No? I must say, Michelotto, I have not missed that blank stare of yours. Perhaps a bout of one-and-thirty then, Your Eminence? A Spanish game, so surely it will be known to a Borgia.”

“Of course,” said Cesare.

He took one look at my battered and sticky cards and produced his own gilt-edged deck, dealing calmly as the other drinkers in the tavern eyed him from the corner of their eyes. Rich boys sometimes came here, stealing away from their tutors for a whore and a few drinks, but silent velvet-clad figures in masks, not so often. “A drink, gentilhuomo?” the tavernkeeper ventured, sidling around Michelotto’s statuelike gaze, but Cesare Borgia said, “Keep your swill,” without looking up from his cards, and after that no one approached our little table.

“I had not heard Your Eminence had returned from Naples yet,” I said, picking up my own cards. “Did King Federigo’s coronation proceed in style?”

“Tolerably. A bitch of a Neapolitan girl gave me the French pox, but one hears the pustules go away in time.” Cesare tapped the mask covering his face as he discarded a card. “You were hard to find, little lion man. I sent inquiries to Carbognano and Capodimonte first, thinking you had followed my father’s little giggler when she departed.”

“I am sorry to have misled you, Eminence.” I took another card myself.

“La Bella had no notion where you had gone. That surprised me.”

“Did it?”

“She seemed very anxious to discover your whereabouts.”

I knocked twice on the table: the sign to reveal cards. Cesare Borgia had a hand of seventeen; I had twenty-eight and scooped the coins.

The young Cardinal dealt again. “It was Michelotto who finally caught a glimpse of you, here in this tavern.”

I eyed the young Cardinal’s favorite murderer, who leaned against the wall cleaning his nails with his knife and ignoring us utterly. “What were you doing in the slums, Michelotto?”

“Michelotto likes the slums,” Cesare replied as though the man were mute. “On this occasion, he was having a drink after doing a little work for me.”

“Work?” I discarded a card.

“I’ve orders from the Holy Father to get Cardinal Piccolomini thoroughly unsettled before the next consistory. I’m having his guardsmen picked off at a rate of exactly one a week. It’s working nicely.”

I paused, looking at him. Cesare smiled, lounging across the rickety wooden chair in his velvet doublet with all the grace of a leopard. “Why admit such things to me, Your Eminence?”