[Assiti Shards 05] - 1635 - Cannon Law by Flint Eric

Author:Flint, Eric [Flint, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1-4165-0938-0
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2006-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

The evening at the Palazzo Colonna was quite refreshingly dull.

Chapter 24

Rome

Frank returned from the embassy to find his place full of people, most of whom he'd never seen before. Pretty much all the regulars were in, though. And everyone wanted to know if it was true that the Spanish were about to invade. The best Frank could manage was "not right now." He could tell a lot of folks weren't believing him, but nobody seemed to be calling for barricades and the like yet. In fact, everyone seemed to have settled in for a goodly long evening of drinking, dancing and generally hanging out.

Dino, Fabrizio, Benito and Giovanna were moving quickly and dealing with the rush for beer and wine and pizza. Frank had a moment's unease about whether a crowd like this could drink his bar dry, and decided he was probably okay for stock—and it looked like some of the guys from the soccer league were starting to get down with the whole working-together thing they did in Germany's Freedom Arches and were helping out.

Frank had taken a flying leap earlier in the day. Getting people to spread out in the right neighborhoods and find the guys hiring rent-a-mobs had been easy. Lots of his regulars didn't have day-jobs, as such, being hired by the day, and could afford to take the occasional day off. And, being as they were pretty pissed about the whole nearly getting killed thing, and Frank had goosed 'em up a bit by ranting about the Spanish—he was kind of pissed himself—they'd been pretty enthusiastic about getting themselves planted in today's faked demonstration to find out where it was.

What hadn't been quite so certain was that anyone would show, when he asked for volunteers to turn up and bring friends. He'd timed it for after the usual working hours, since the bad guys had done the same thing. They were having trouble recruiting, according to a couple of reports. The crowd he'd got was gratifyingly large, and not a penny spent. If anything, he'd had more trouble persuading them not to just charge in and rip the poor slobs who'd taken the money limb from limb. Frank had managed to bring them round to the idea that it wasn't right to beat up on someone for being so desperate he had to take Spanish money. And it'd all come off pretty sweetly, so now he'd just led maybe fifty guys—the others had peeled off into other tavernas on the way back—into a bar that was already crowded.

Giovanna took one look and just dealt with it. It was a warm night, the stable yard was clean and hadn't been used for stabling in a while, so she got a few of the soccer players to drag some tables out there and break the really old furniture out of storage in the stables. Then, with the musicians persuaded to play an outdoor gig and the dancing moved outside, it was all going smoothly again. Frank took a moment to open the yard gate as well.

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