Tom Swan and the Last Spartans 1 Page 7

  Swan blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘Of course I have it,’ Spinelli said. ‘It is the only surety I have for my money.’

  ‘I believe that the Holy Father needs it back,’ Swan said. I was so sure I knew what was going on. His entire construct had just collapsed, and half the pieces were missing now. On the other hand, his mission was much simpler.

  ‘Of course, that’s what the letter says. But I was to have … many things, before I had to give up the tiara.’

  Swan made a face. ‘What sort of things?’ he asked.

  ‘Notes of hand, at least, and perhaps some hard incomes I could tax in Spain. Twenty thousand ducats does not grow on trees, young man. But you work for Bessarion, a thrifty churchman. I suppose you know about the value of money.’ Spinelli shrugged.

  ‘His Eminence is a little concerned, it’s true, about his own funds,’ Swan said.

  ‘Blessed Saint Thomas. Why?’ Spinelli’s puzzlement seemed genuine.

  Swan had a terrible feeling he’d missed something.

  ‘Because you departed from Rome in rather a hurry and your bank is closing,’ he said.

  Spinelli shrugged. ‘I have been moving back to Florence for more than two years, since my wife, of blessed memory, begged me to stop working in Rome. But none of my customers …’ He paused. ‘Why did you not address these concerns to my factor in Rome?’

  Swan shook his head. ‘His Eminence never instructed me to talk to your factor.’

  ‘You went to my house, though?’ Spinelli asked.

  Swan paused. ‘Yes.’

  ‘So! What did Landi Giannetti tell you that brought you here?’

  Swan was thinking furiously. He was afraid that mere moments might matter, and that he had made a stupid mistake. Out of Italy too long. Was Spinelli spinning him a web of deceit?

  If so, the man was a superb actor.

  ‘Your house was empty,’ Swan said. ‘All the furnishings gone, and nothing left but a box …’

  ‘… of books. Shit. I knew something was wrong when the carter didn’t bring me my books.’ Spinelli punched his right fist into his left hand. ‘Damn it.’

  ‘Who is Landi Giannetti?’ Swan asked.

  ‘He was my factor in Spain, but I brought him home to run Rome for me,’ Spinelli said.

  Swan shook his head to clear it. ‘Can you show me the tiara?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Spinelli said. ‘You must know, Ser Thomas, that as long as I have it in my possession, I fear for it. It is too valuable. I have ten thousand ducats’ worth of silk and velvet here. A fire would ruin me. But that tiara … Saint Thomas.’ The man shook his head.

  Swan was on to his new variation of the plot. Perhaps the tiara had been stolen and Spinelli wasn’t aware … ‘Where do you keep it?’ he asked.

  Spinelli gave him another withering look. ‘In the storeroom, in the lockbox, with the Tartary silks,’ he said. ‘Come.’

  He summoned an apprentice, who went and unlocked a small coffer and handed him a heavy ring of keys.

  The two men walked back across the working yard and into a warehouse, a building almost as well constructed as the shop. Spinelli went to an iron-bound chest as tall as a child and secured with three heavy locks. He unlocked them, and opened the massive thing.

  He lifted out the tiara. It was as big as a melon, and weighed twenty pounds. It was covered, literally covered, in jewels. There were pearls and sapphires in profusion, and a row of rubies, and a magnificently executed crucifix in gold and enamel. Christ looked as if he might come to life.

  Swan tried to imagine that a substitution had been made; that the jewels were fake. Finally, after a sigh of pure awe and another of frustration, he handed the marvellous, incredible, ostentatious and slightly ridiculous thing back to Spinelli.

  ‘I’m an idiot,’ he said. ‘But the Pope still needs this back.’

  Spinelli frowned. ‘I need to go with you,’ he said with decision. ‘I cannot let a loan of that size go, and I have to know what has happened to Landi. He served me for years; and my partners before me.’

  Swan paused. ‘Your partners?’

  Spinelli nodded. ‘Before I had my own bank, I was clerk and then junior partner to another. Landi came with me.’

  Swan sighed. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I think we need to move quickly,’ he added after a pause. ‘I suspect that you are being set up to … fail.’ He still couldn’t see it, but the sense of urgency was strong.

  Spinelli frowned. ‘By who?’ he asked. ‘When are we leaving?’

  ‘How soon can you manage it?’ Swan asked. His views had changed. He’d intended to kidnap Spinelli if required. Which, seeing how rich he was and how plentiful were his workers, now looked like an idiot’s plan anyway.

  Spinelli looked at the tiara. ‘I need to speak to the governess who minds my children. I can ride in two hours.’

  Swan nodded. ‘Give me the tiara,’ he said.

  Spinelli brought a servant, Antonio. The five of them had a dozen horses and two pack mules.

  An hour out of the gates of Florence, Swan looked back. There wasn’t a great cloud of dust behind them, which was good.

  Clemente reined in by him. ‘You have the jewelled crown,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Swan admitted.

  ‘And this man is Spinelli himself.’

  ‘Yes,’ Swan admitted.

  Clemente shook his head. ‘So, this did not go as you expected?’

  Swan looked at the young man. He was no longer a boy. And Swan increasingly saw him as a student, not a servant. ‘I confess to you, Clemente; as of this moment, I no longer have any idea what is going on. However, I have the tiara and I have the banker. So long as I can get both of them alive to the Holy Father, we win.’

  Clemente held out Swan’s long sword in its scabbard. ‘My thought exactly, Ser Thomas.’

  ‘Sometimes you remind me of Peter,’ Swan said.

  Clemente smiled. ‘That is very kind of you.’

  That night they did not stop at an inn. Inns were spotting stations for bandits and homes of every infamy. Swan didn’t need to add any random dangers to his road home, and it was still possible that his earlier theory about Forteguerri was somehow correct.

  He chose a campsite in the hills north of the road and apologised to Spinelli, who laughed.

  ‘You are sorry for giving me a night under the stars, messire?’ he asked. ‘And no fleas?’

  ‘I am afraid for the tiara,’ Swan said.

  Spinelli nodded. ‘Indeed, and I have almost three thousand ducats on the other mule,’ he said.

  Swan was almost unable to breathe after that. ‘Maestro! I do not even trust me!’

  Spinelli nodded. ‘Oddly, I do trust you, Suane.’

  Swan and Clemente cooked a good meal; steaks pounded flat with some spices, cooked with rounds of fat and of marrow, all rolled together and then done on thin sticks over the open fire. It was a hunter’s meal, and Spinelli and his servant ate it with gusto. Both men grinned.

  ‘You eat well, you men of action,’ Spinelli said. He drank the last of the wine in Swan’s handy flask, and Swan put it away carefully; glass was expensive and delicate. ‘I’m afraid that’s the last of my wine,’ he said.

  The banker produced a heavy clay bottle from the mule that proved to hold a healthy measure of a very good Tuscan wine. All five men toasted the saints and each other.

  Later, when the younger men were mostly asleep, Swan looked at Spinelli, who poured him the last drops of wine.

  ‘Why did you leave Rome?’ Swan asked.

  Spinelli was silent for a long time, and Swan thought he might have taken offence. But instead, the older man leaned back, produced a flask of glass, far finer that Swan’s, and poured each of them another cup of wine.

  ‘I can’t do it any more,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t do what?’ Swan asked.

  Spinelli shrugged. ‘Finance lunacy,’ he said. ‘Do you have any idea what war costs, messire?’


  Swan laughed. ‘Better than most,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ Spinelli asked. He put his back against an oak so old that when Carthage ambushed Rome on this very road, the oak might have been a sapling. ‘Tell me what it cost to keep your company in the field for a month.’

  Swan drank some of the excellent wine. ‘How many men?’

  ‘You tell me,’ Spinelli said.

  ‘Well, when I left Venice, I had thirty-eight lances. And some English archers and some Greeks and a few mounted crossbowmen. Almost two hundred men, with four hundred horses.’ Swan was looking at the stars.

  Spinelli grunted. ‘Go on.’

  ‘We pay each lance fourteen florins a month; double pay for the month of the Battle of Belgrade. Horse fodder as found; sometimes I had to pay.’ Swan was still reckoning. ‘A thousand florins a month. More if I had to quarter them in inns, or hire doctors, or get repairs made. Actually less in the field.’

  Spinelli nodded. ‘And of course, officer’s pay,’ he said.

  Swan shrugged. ‘I’m hardly a great captain. I have never been paid.’

  Spinelli laughed. ‘You are not going to make much of a condottiere at this rate.’

  Swan drank more wine. ‘You have a point there. Let me add that we only fought mounted once, and we were very, very lucky. If we’d lost a lot of horses, I’d have run out of money in no time.’

  ‘So let me go over this for you. You had about a thousand a month in expenses for fewer than two hundred men. Can we just say five florins a month per man?’

  Swan shrugged. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘So … let’s suppose the Holy Father is maintaining an army in the Marche – he is, you know. About six thousand men.’

  Swan nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. The Pope was fighting the Malatesta and a consortium of other local barons for feudal rights in what some called the ‘patrimony of St Peter’ with various degrees of humour.

  ‘How much does that make, a month? To keep six thousand men, mostly mounted, in the field?’ Spinelli smiled and drank wine.

  ‘Three thousand florins,’ Swan said.

  ‘This is why I am a banker, and you are a soldier,’ Spinelli said. ‘Thirty thousand florins, brave knight. Really, more, by the time you buy all that fodder and some carts and some new artillery, and let’s not forget to build castles and pay spies and couriers.’

  ‘Let us not forget these things,’ Swan agreed.

  ‘And let’s maintain our company of lances in Hungary,’ Spinelli said, ‘and let’s build a fleet of warships on the Tiber, crew them with professional oarsmen and then man them with marines – all professional soldiers.’

  Swan raised both hands in surrender. ‘Stop.’

  ‘No. It never stops. Let’s just say for argument that the sum is fifty thousand florins a month for war.’ Spinelli moved to get comfortable among the roots of his tree. ‘A month.’

  ‘Christ,’ Swan said. ‘I didn’t know there was that much money in the world.’

  ‘It’s far, far worse than that, really, because I’m not even counting extra payments, like sending money to Scanderberg and Hunyadi and various bishops and cardinals. All for war.’ Spinelli smiled wryly. ‘And the worst of it is that not a florin ever comes back. Money spent on war is all lost. None is returned. It is as if we threw it in a great fire.’

  ‘Christ,’ Swan said again.

  ‘Even then, it’s far worse.’ Spinelli seemed to be relishing his tally. ‘You see, since Eugenios, of reverend memory, the Holy Fathers have squandered what they had on wars and treasures. Treasures are far better; everyone can see them, and you can borrow against them. When you have no money, what do you do?’

  ‘Starve?’ Swan said.

  ‘No,’ Spinelli said.

  ‘Borrow?’ Swan asked.

  ‘Exactly. What rate of interest do you pay when you borrow?’ Spinelli asked.

  ‘I just borrowed five hundred ducats and I already owe one hundred,’ Swan said.

  ‘That’s terrible. I can loan you as much for half the rate of return. But that’s beside the point. Your banker trusts you?’ Spinelli asked.

  Swan shrugged. ‘Yes. I’ve always made good, and I’ve run some errands for him.’

  Spinelli nodded. ‘So, no one trusts kings or the Pope. They’ve refused to pay too many times. One King of England broke three Italian banks to fight his wars.’

  Swan smiled. ‘Someone was foolish.’

  ‘As a consequence, even when a Holy Father offers tax schemes and farms out the incomes of, say, a rich bishopric in Spain …’ Spinelli smiled. The firelight made his narrow, bearded face satanic.

  ‘Farms?’ Swan asked.

  ‘When the Holy Father wants money in a hurry, he grants us bankers the right to collect all the papal tithes, or all the rents, or what have you, in an area. I’m still trying to collect from the Bishop of Toledo, who borrowed a great deal of money and thinks he can get away from me. He probably believes he can have the Inquisition seize me.’ Spinelli poured the last of the wine into Swan’s cup and offered a toast. ‘You see, no one wants to pay the bankers. So when we offer on a loan, we charge a lot more interest than your Jew.’

  ‘I didn’t say he was a Jew,’ Swan said.

  Spinelli shrugged. ‘No? Anyway, any of the German houses would charge the Holy Father close to half. The Medici are cheaper, but not much. When I joined the Borromei, we were the cheapest of all and we could work in Spain, so we got all the loans for a while.’ He sat back. ‘Anyway, since the papacy spent all of this year’s money back in 1447, any emergency money for wars in this fiscal year must come from loans against direct income, at almost fifty per cent interest. So your fifty thousand florins for war just cost the Holy Father a hundred thousand florins, and then the banker holding the loans has to try and collect. Sometimes you collect more than you loaned, and sometimes less. Sometimes you have to hire soldiers to collect. I hope you see the irony.’

  Swan lay under the tree, looking at stars. ‘A hundred thousand florins a month.’

  ‘Twice that,’ Spinelli said. ‘Every month. And for what?’

  Swan looked at him. There was no firelight – the coals had burned way down, so that there was just a ruddy smudge to indicate that the banker was there. ‘We saved Belgrade,’ he said.

  Spinelli laughed. ‘No, Hunyadi saved Belgrade, and he spent another half-million of his own revenues and the Kingdom of Hungary’s revenues to do it, I’d guess. And let’s not even speculate on the cost of the fortifications to Belgrade. Which, of course, are now ruined.’ His laugh floated across the coals. ‘No, we did not save Belgrade. All we did was save Hunyadi’s financial stability at the height of the campaign.’

  ‘But we did,’ Swan said.

  Spinelli shook his head. ‘Ever watch a peasant work?’ he asked. ‘I mean, ever sat under a tree all day and watched a man with a plough? He works all day, every day. In a year, he feeds his family and makes about five florins.’ Spinelli laughed. ‘Tell him. Go and tell him what it cost to save Belgrade.’ His laugh was bitter. ‘Tell him when he’s about to pay one of those five florins to you as his tithe to the Church.’

  Swan sat in shock. It was like finding your woman with another man, and realising you’d known for some time, but hidden the reality from yourself, he thought.

  ‘Eugenios left a sizeable amount of money?’ Swan asked.

  Spinelli was quiet for a while. ‘Yes,’ he said. The coals no longer lit him. It was like talking to a disembodied voice.

  ‘Is there really a treasure?’ Swan asked.

  Spinelli sighed. ‘I didn’t use to think so,’ he said. ‘But now I wonder.’ Swan heard him get up, stub his toe on an oak root, and curse. ‘The wine’s gone.’

  ‘I thank you for it. Good wine.’ Swan rose too.

  ‘You are a good man. Educated, not a thug. I’m glad it was you who came for me. Besides; we share Saint Thomas, and all his doubt, I can tell.’ Spinelli coughed. ‘Time for bed. I worry about my Landi. He’s
bright enough, but he was there with the books when the old Pope died, and if anyone knew where the treasure was, it was Landi.’

  Swan nodded.

  ‘And the Holy Father is desperate for money,’ Swan said.

  Again Spinelli was silent. ‘They always are,’ he said at last.

  They really had little choice but to take the Via Cassia, the old Roman highway, despite the plethora of unwelcome fellow-travellers and the looming presence of the robber barons of the region, each with his own petty castle on the heights above the road. Swan was painfully aware of the extent of the treasure he was guarding, and he watched the pedlars, merchants, peasant women, farmers and mendicants on the road with less than his usual generous eye.

  But his greatest precaution was Clemente, who was sent ahead every morning as soon as they awoke, on the worst horse, dressed to approximate some local lordling’s poorest retainer. Clemente moved an hour ahead of them, and practised his tradecraft by leaving them signs that indicated that the road was safe, or at least clear of known agents. Swan still dreaded Forteguerri, or Antonelli, or Piccolomini, or the Medici – perhaps all in league, or perhaps just one faction – seeking to take the tiara by force on the road, or Spinelli himself.

  Clemente’s signs gave him some reassurance; a twist of thread on a tree, a bit of coloured cloth by a roadside fountain, a simple ‘x’ in chalk on a mile marker. Swan varied the signs from day to day, more to train the boy than from caution, but when, a few miles from Rome on the third day, he saw a charcoal ‘c’ on the base of a Roman statue stolen long ago, he immediately loosened his sword in his scabbard and gave Kendal a look.

  Kendal had been talking to a pair of middle-aged English pilgrims on their way to Rome, but he nodded and reined in, even as Clemente himself appeared from a press of oncoming horse traffic.

  Swan realised that the boy had left the sign and slipped off the road. That told him a good deal. ‘Eh, Tommaso!’ he called, already chary of using Spinelli’s name on the road, and waved towards a side lane that ran to a vineyard. He waited, heart beating hard, as Spinelli’s two servants passed him, their hands on their daggers, and then the mules. Then Kendal, and finally Spinelli himself. In a few beats of the heart, they were off the broad road and in the cool shadows of the hedges on either side and the poplar trees beyond, in a lane so narrow that only one horse or mule could pass at a time.