The Thief Lord

"But I have another idea," he said. "Naturally, you will have to pay for destroying the merry-go-round. But this time you won't pay with your life, and you won't pass off any more bad money."



"What then?" Barbarossa looked up at him suspiciously.



"Thanks to you, Morosina and I cannot undo what we have begun," said Renzo. "And neither can the Thief Lord, or you. But I will let you go, if you give me all the cash you have in your shop. Not just in the register, but in your safe as well."



Barbarossa backed away in shock -- and nearly fell down the steps. Prosper grabbed him by the scruff of the neck at the last moment, but as soon as he was back on his feet Barbarossa pushed his hand away.



"Are you crazy?" he squawked at Renzo. "And how will I live? I will hardly be able see over the shop counter now. Why is it all my fault that rotten wing broke off?"



"Yes, why indeed?" Scipio sat down with a sigh on the cold steps and looked straight into Barbarossa's eyes. "I mean, it couldn't possibly be your fault that you crept on to this island with a bag of poisoned meat -- or that you dragged Morosina by the hair ..."



Barbarossa opened his mouth, but Renzo cut him off.



"We will go in to town together," he said, "and you'll give me the money. In return, I won't take revenge for the merry-go-round or the dogs. Believe me, we could. We could draw the Carabinieri's attention to the little orphaned boy who believes he is Ernesto Barbarossa. Or we could ask Scipio and Prosper to take you to the home of the Merciful Sisters. It's your choice, you can still buy yourself out of all this."



Barbarossa stroked his chin and angrily dropped his hands when he realized it was bare and beardless.



"Blackmail," he grumbled.



"Call it what you will," Renzo replied. "Though I could find a few choice words to describe what you've done on this island today."



Barbarossa looked at him so pathetically that Prosper had to laugh.



"I'd take him up on his offer, little redhead," he said. "Otherwise Morosina will feed you to the dogs."



Barbarossa clenched his chubby fists helplessly. "Fine, I accept," he said, looking up at the dogs who had settled on the top step. "But it's still blackmail."



46 Barbarossa's Punishment



It was early afternoon when they all returned to Venice. But the sky was covered by such dark clouds that Prosper thought that dusk must have already fallen.



He had completely lost all sense of time. The night before -- when he and Scipio had headed off for the Isola Segreta -- seemed like months ago, and now he felt like a traveler, returning from a journey through strange and distant lands. It began to rain as Scipio steered his father's boat onto the Grand Canal. The wind drove cold raindrops into their faces like hardened tears.



"How much longer do I have to be stuck in this hole?" Prosper heard Barbarossa moaning.



Scipio had locked Barbarossa in the cabin to make sure he didn't try any new tricks. Renzo was following them in Barbarossa's boat, a big barge in which the redbeard had probably intended to bring a few things back from the island. Barbarossa had of course denied this. Morosina had stayed on the island to look after the dogs. When Renzo had said goodbye to the mastiffs, they had wagged their tails so feebly that he looked quite worried as he boarded Barbarossa's boat.



"How are you going to get back to the island?" Scipio asked him as they moored the boats by a jetty in a secluded canal.



"Oh, I think I'll borrow Signor Barbarossa's boat for a while," Renzo answered. "It's much handier than my sailing boat. And it will also stop him from paying me any surprise visits."



Barbarossa muttered something unfriendly before grumpily trudging ahead. Scipio had given him the clothes that he'd worn as a boy, but even they were too big for Barbarossa. The shoes kept slipping off his feet at every other step, and the more he tried to put on a dignified face, the more people kept turning around to laugh.



Scipio's grown-up figure also attracted a lot of curious attention. Renzo had given him his old cape as a present, making Scipio look as if he had just stepped out of an oil-painting. Prosper walked next to him, feeling very self-conscious. He missed Scipio's familiar features, which even with the mask had never seemed as strange as this. Scipio kept smiling at him, trying to reassure him, but it didn't help much.



The rain pelted down even harder on to the pavement, and when they finally reached Barbarossa's shop, the alley was practically deserted.



With a very glum expression, Barbarossa unlocked the door and switched on the light. He let the "CLOSED" sign hang behind the glass, and locked the door as a precaution.



"You have to let me keep a third," he complained as he led the way into his office. "At least! What else am I going to live off? Do you want me to starve miserably?"



It was much easier for him, now that he was smaller, to negotiate his way through his crammed shop, but he still tried to swagger past the shelves like he used to in the past. The attempt looked so strange that Scipio started to mimic him behind his back.



"What's the silly giggling about?" Barbarossa asked when Prosper and Renzo burst out laughing. Then he vanished through the beaded curtain with an indignant look on his face. The three followed him.



"Get out!" Barbarossa barked at them. "You'll get the money, but the safe combination is none of your business."



"We'll close our eyes," Prosper said. He moved a chair underneath the poster of the Accademia Museum behind Barbarossa's desk.



"You spied on me!" Barbarossa hissed as he struggled to climb on to the chair. "You and your hedgehog friend. Since when have you known that the safe is behind the poster?"



Prosper shrugged. "We didn't know," he answered, "but Riccio always suspected that it was there."



"You're just a bunch of cowards!" Barbarossa growled, while he awkwardly removed the poster from the wall. "Robbing a little child. The pestilence and pox on you. Just you wait until I've grown back to a decent size ..."



"That should take some time," Renzo interrupted him. "Now open it! I have to see a vet; you may remember why...Thinking about it, I'd say you were getting off more than lightly."



Barbarossa stared at the safe.



"I've forgotten the combination!" he said. But Renzo gave him such an ominous look that it immediately came back to him.



"Is that it?" Renzo shouted as Barbarossa held out two wads of bills toward him. "That's what you've been moaning about all the time? It's hardly enough for the vet!" Without a further word, Renzo turned around and walked back into the shop.



"What's he doing now?" Barbarossa jumped off the chair and rushed after Renzo. "Don't touch anything, do you understand?"



Renzo stood in the middle of the shop, underneath the chandelier with the colored glass petals, and looked around. "What would you take?" he asked Scipio. "What would be a proper compensation for him smashing my lion wing and changing our lives forever?"



Scipio opened a glass cabinet and took something out of it. "What about this?" he asked. He put the sugar tongs he'd stolen from his father's house into Renzo's hand.