I studied my former mistress. She had not guarded her skin in Carbognano; she’d come back to Rome with a faint golden tang to her face and bosom. Most ladies would never have gone out in public without covering themselves in white powder for the proper fashionable paleness, but she didn’t bother, setting her golden skin off instead with a pale gold gown just a shade darker. She looked like one of her favorite golden roses, and now of course all the ladies of Rome would be leaving off their sun hats, hoping to look so ripe and beautiful. I remembered Savonarola’s Angels attacking her for no other reason than that. They’d taken Botticelli’s incipient portrait of her, they’d tried to take her hair, they’d even taken a kiss in all the struggling. I remembered the black pang of jealousy that had stabbed me when my mistress kissed that lout, even if it was only to push him over backward. No, I did not like Savonarola’s Angels or the master they served. Perhaps that mad Dominican spoke truth of the Pope but his was an ugly truth, and I found him an ugly little man.

Perhaps it takes one such man to know another.

Giulia was still waiting for my answer.

“I came today because I like watching people die,” I said at last. “Didn’t you know that, madonna?”

“No. You don’t like it at all.”

“Well, I still do a great deal of it. Juan Borgia, Pantisilea—”

“Was that you?” Giulia’s voice rose, and I saw grief flash through her eyes. “They pulled her body out of the river, and I thought—”

“No, she was Michelotto’s. I don’t like killing women, so when it came to parceling out the victims, I picked Perotto and he picked her.”

“My poor Pantisilea . . .” Giulia’s voice trailed away; she crossed herself and I saw tears in her eyes.

I still saw her face in my dreams, poor silly girl, but I couldn’t say that. “She didn’t suffer,” I said instead, and kicked another stone out of my way. “I’ll say that for Michelotto; no one suffers when he kills them. Better than me; I botched Perotto. He ran straight for the Pope as soon as he saw me coming. Am I perhaps getting a reputation?”

“Is it a reputation you deserve?”

“I am a killer, Giulia.” I said it brutally. “I am small and amusing and you like me for that. But I am not your jester, or your bodyguard, or your poet.”

“You are a man who understands Virgil and translates Homer and can hold a child spellbound with a story for hours,” Giulia replied. “A man who once told me he dreamed of having enough time someday to translate the Odyssey into Italian, and study the verses of the Provençal troubadours.”