City of God Read Online Free PDF

of the tables. The stools were neatly in place and the pens stuck up from their jars like tail feathers. The sweeper had already been here and the floor was shining, still damp in places from his mop. The smell of ink lingered in the air. Nicholas in his tracks, Bruni went out the doorway that opened on the long corridor beyond, where their offices were.
    The ambassador’s family was wealthy. The walls of his chambers were draped in carpets from the Low Countries, and the furniture, ornately carved and enlivened with touches of gilt paint, had come from Germany. Along the only wall without a window, rows of shelves held Bruni’s books. The windows were all heavily draped, and the room was dim and stuffy and close. Nicholas crossed from the door to the desk. Under a book lay two sheets of paper covered with Bruni’s rakish, disorderly script. Nicholas took them down to his own chamber, in the back in the building.
    In this cubicle there was room only for his desk and chair, his shelf of books, and the inward opening of the door. When he moved into this room there had been a second chair also, but he had removed it, to discourage visitors, and turned the desk to take up the space. He sat down behind the desk and read through Bruni’s letter.
    When he had finished it, he turned his head to look out the window. One shutter was open; he could see out over the small courtyard, paved in red brick, dotted with the white droppings of pigeons and swifts. A trellis was strung over the top of the courtyard, four or five feet below Nicholas’s window, but the vines had not yet begun to put forth the summer’s growth of canes and leaves. Nicholas planted his elbows on the desk.
    Bruni’s letter was a masterpiece of ambiguity, its central premise being that Valentino would either attack or retreat, unless he remained where he was. He advised the Signory to negotiate with the Borgia prince but conclude nothing. That was the traditional strategy of the Florentine Signory anyway: wait and see what happens. Nicholas could not remember who the chief officers of the Republic were at the moment. Every two months, elections raised an entirely new government to power. Since Nicholas had last seen Florence well more than ten years before, most of these statesmen were just names to him. In the constant shuffle in and out of office no one made a decision unless it was forced on him. Still, they hated indecision in their underlings. If the Borgia threat cost the Republic dear, someone would suffer, and Bruni was vulnerable, being out of the city.
    Across the courtyard, one of Bruni’s young aides appeared on the balcony and began to hang his shirts out to dry. He saw Nicholas and smiled and waved his hand. Nicholas looked down at the letter on his desk. He worked at keeping the rest of the delegation at a distance, yet some of them were tireless in distracting him. He turned his mind back to the real problem, which was to make a hero of Ercole Bruni.
    He took out his cipher books and translated Bruni’s letter into code. As he worked he changed Bruni’s ambiguities into his own conviction that Cesare Borgia would not attack Florence, but only hoped to frighten the Signory sufficiently that they would buy him off. From years of doctoring Bruni’s reports he had such a skill at it that he needed change only one word in ten, leaving out the temporizing phrase, converting a subordinate clause into a full emphatic sentence. Midway through he stopped to cut another quill. No one in the Signory would heed the letter, but afterward no one would be able to hang Bruni. Unfortunately, because of his surgery the letter was coming out much shorter than Bruni’s original; he filled in with a general overview of what he took to be the Borgias’ plans for the Romagna.
    When he had done that he rewrote Bruni’s original in the ornate language the ambassador considered elegant.
    While he was taking this draft in to