“Who can tell behind a mask? He was young, that’s all, and he had money. Splashing coin all about while he played zara.”

“The other two?”

“Just men,” the older woman said, impatient. “What’s it to you?”

“Better if we know what they look like. What if they come back?” I gave a dark look at Anna’s corpse, so still on the table between us. “What if it’s one of you lovely girls next time they feel like a bit of fun?”

“Not likely.” The first girl made a face, dingy light from the windows cutting sharp shadows over her nose, which had been broken at least once by some drunken sailor or laborer. “One was right ugly—in livery, you know. Some lug of a guardsman. I wouldn’t service a man like that for a bag of ducats.”

“You’d service the Devil himself for a single ducat,” her friend told her. “Much less a bag of them!”

“What kind of livery did this guardsman wear?” I cut in before the first girl could bristle.

“I don’t know, he had a cloak on. Had a horse embroidered on his chest, though.”

“It wasn’t a horse,” the other girl contradicted. “It was a bull. All embroidered in red.”

“No, it was a horse . . .”

“The third man?” I said, crossing Anna’s hands over her flat breast. “What did he look like?”

Blank looks and shrugs among them. “Just a man,” the older woman said finally. “Sounded like a Spaniard. Or maybe he was Venetian.” A sniff. “Who can tell with these foreigners?”

Dio. “What about him, this Spaniard or Venetian?”

“He came later, after the other two. Pinched my bottom, and didn’t even offer a coin. Said they should all go back to the Inn of the Fig, because there were prettier girls there.”

I felt a sudden savage wish that they had gone back to the Inn of the Fig, and killed some prettier girl than Anna. A pretty girl with a black heart and a greedy hand; someone who had abandoned a baby on a hillside or given customers over to be robbed and killed by bravos—some girl with sins on her head that merited such a death.

Such a death. Staked to a table, and for what? Had Anna fought too hard, and they’d panicked and cut her throat to silence her? Even in a tavern as seedy as this one, shrieks of murder and blood coming from the night might have roused a response from one of the cramped little wine shops or rented rooms across the narrow street.

I wondered how many noble families in Rome liveried their guards in a red bull or horse.

I wondered if it was the guard who wore the marks of Anna’s nails on his face—or the Spaniard-Venetian, or the boy in the mask.

I wondered if any of them went to Inn of the Fig regularly.