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them with her black shawl was a better idea. Hours seemed to pass, yet the sun remained stationary. At last Siobhan reemerged from the Romancier, a smile playing on her pale lips.
    “Mancini’s room is at the top of the stair, down the hall to the right, the last door to the left,” Siobhan proclaimed.
    “He’s still in Firenze then?” Diana remarked, surprised he hadn’t made his escape.
    Siobhan raised her hands, palms up in a shrug.
    “Huh,” Diana said, accepting her good fortune. “Very well, then. I’ll get into the room and let you up with the rope.”
    Siobhan nodded and looked at Diana out of the corner of her eye. “May God grace your fortune.”
    Diana kept the shawl around her shoulders, trying to look the least out of place as possible. She knew there was no way to truly accomplish this. She was too rich, too young, too beautiful for the Romancier, with or without mourning clothes. She held her head high though, kept her gaze straight, making herself look purposeful as if she had every right to be there, and knew exactly where she was going.
    Walking through the door of the Romancier she nearly lost her resolve. It was dark and smelled of alcohol, anger, and urine. She started for a moment, her lungs trying to find breathable air, her eyes blinking out the sting. After a moment she pressed on, stairs visible through the dim light. To her right she perceived a long wooden table with a stack of liquor behind it. A balding man eyed her quietly from behind the stand. There were other men in the room; quiet, unsavory, emitting that stench of failure, resentment, and lust which made the Romancier seem like the first port of stop on an oceanic tour of Hell.
    She ignored them, forged ahead. Their ungodly desires would be stoked by her physical features, which were fairer than any of this lot might hope to touch. Yet men such as these feared a woman of power, and she needed to be that woman. She must have succeeded for she reached the stairs and ascended them without molestation, without so much as a comment.
    At the top of the stairs she exhaled, realizing only then she had held her breath. She found the door Siobhan had directed her to. With shaking hands she pulled a metal barrette from her hair and used it to disengage the unsophisticated lock that held the door.
    The room beyond was small and poorly adorned. It was a corner room with two windows, a small bed with straw mattress, a small desk and a plain wooden armoire. Closing the door, Diana went to the window and found Siobhan waiting below. Using the rope to let her up proved to be easier said than done. Siobhan might not have been a big girl, but she had fifteen pounds on Diana, and there was no piece of furniture to which to tie the rope. Ultimately the door latch had to do, and a moment later a huffing Siobhan tumbled into the small room.
    “Doesn’t exactly travel in the highest of fashion, does he?” Diana remarked, looking around.
    “Oh I don’t know. I’ve had worse. Not everyone needs satyrs and nymphs cavorting on the ceiling above them to sleep at night.”
    “All right, look around for…I don’t know, evidence.” A thorough search of the room wouldn’t take terribly long. Diana opened the armoire and was greeted by the aroma of clothes long past agreeableness. She pinched her nose. “Is bathing truly so expensive that the poor can so ill afford it?”
    Siobhan giggled. “It is said that bathing too regularly may bring upon malevolent humors. If I may say so, it may be of some value to you, lady, to see some of the world beyond Firenze. Try Roma; the whole city stinks. People follow around the pope in hopes that a few puffs of his perfumed grace might alight on themselves.”
    “Let’s not mix our burglary with blasphemy. One sin at a time.” A quick look through the wardrobe revealed nothing. She didn’t have the heart of desperation yet to go through the clothes that hung there.
    “Here, under the bed!” Siobhan called