by Eric Flint
"Which is true," Ducos said, in a rare excursion into commentary.
"Naturally," d'Avaux agreed. "The truth was all it needed. And by representing the League of Ostend as a matter of distracting the Spaniards from the Mediterranean where they compete with the Turk's Algerines, we ingratiate ourselves further with the Turk. It is simple work to advance ourselves in this matter by the most traditional of means, while the rest of Europe is more pressingly engaged elsewhere and trade outside the Mediterranean is disrupted."
"And so the emissary?"
D'Avaux permitted himself another smile; this session was proving quite pleasant after its inauspicious beginning. "The emissary has been sent—you may depend upon it, Ducos—to satisfy the Grand Turk's curiosity about these peculiar Americans and to warn Venice to have no truck with them, on pain of the sultan's displeasure."
"What does the seigneur want done?"
D'Avaux paused, while he composed his thoughts. Ducos was a good servant in this, especially. He stood always ready to do his superior's bidding. "I believe," d'Avaux said at length, "we should see that the Turk's undoubted prejudices are validated in full."
Ducos remained silent and attentive, while the germ of an idea sprouted in d'Avaux's mind. "See that Buckley's attention is diverted toward the Turk. Let us see how they react to perceived insult."
"Yes, Seigneur le Comte."
D'Avaux fixed his man with a steady gaze. "The Turk's response, of course, will most likely be sanguinary."
"Yes, Seigneur le Comte," Ducos said, and withdrew.
When the room was silent and d'Avaux was sure he was alone, he permitted himself a small chuckle, and then a brief prayer of thanks. Sometimes, the secondary causes through which God worked were truly remarkable. The Turk, indeed! How pleasant to use such a tool, atop another like the Huguenot heretic.
It was, of course, a given that the Mahometan religion was of the devil. They were also notorious funders of Protestant arms in the Germanies. The current Grand Turk had a reputation as more of a monster than most. A prodigious brute of uncommon size and strength, he was by repute taking the Turkish state all the firmer in his grip by the simple expedient of terrorizing all who opposed him. Executions by the thousand were reported in some years. Of course, lacking the Law and the Order that it brought with it, such brutal measures were all that would answer the Turk's purposes.
And having to resort to such in his own home land, who would doubt that his emissaries would do otherwise to someone who offended them in Venice?
Did d'Avaux care to wager, he felt, he could do worse than to hazard a small sum that Ducos would not need to act on his instructions at all.
* * *
"Well, that didn't go quite as I expected," Sharon said.
Magda's only response was to stump along toward the gondolas tied up at a pier, muttering a litany of some kind in German. Sharon was catching, perhaps, one word in three. She understood those because they were swear words. It was a wonder that the paintwork on the palazzi they were walking past didn't blister. Even the Marines who had been sent along because they were carrying cash were probably learning some words, and Sharon was mildly worried because their officer was Billy Trumble, who seemed like such a sweet kid under the uniform.
"I wonder what we were doing wrong?" Sharon tried, when the pyroclastic flow had subsided.
"Going to the place of business of an ill-mannered arschloch, that is what we were doing wrong!" Magda snapped. And then: "Oh, please forgive me, Sharon. I should go back and give that, that—" She shuddered. "I should give to him a piece of my mind, that is what I should do."
Sharon tried a smile on for size. "You already did that, honey."
She was rewarded with an answering grin. "Oh, nein. I gave him a talking-to, quite mild for me. I should go back and insult him properly, I think."
Sharon pantomimed horror. "But, Magda, we'd get arrested. He all but died of fright right there on the spot."
That was almost true, she thought. They'd gone into Casa Falier to keep an appointment with one of their senior agents. Maestro Luzzatto had given them a list of brokers who dealt in the goods on their "shopping list," and they had decided that the simplest way to go about it was to visit one of them and ask him. Luzzatto had cheerfully admitted he was not a specialist in the kind of trading they were doing, but would hunt up some friends and acquaintances who could help more directly when they had scouted the lay of the land. After all, most of the stuff on their list he'd never even heard of.
At Tom Stone's request, his wife and Sharon had taken on one of the secondary tasks of the USE mission to Venice, which was to try to fulfill as much of the wish list of chemicals, raw materials and useful items that had been thrown together by the combined efforts of Grantville's and Magdeburg's corps of technologists. A lot of the stuff—certainly the material in the smaller quantities—was needed for research into things that probably weren't going to pay off for years to come. Others were vital strategic supplies. Zinc, for example, which was already being imported from Asia but which few Europeans outside of Grantville recognized as a distinct element.
Magda actually chuckled. "I think we need to make a better plan, Sharon."
"I think we may well, at that. It seems they want us to buy wholesale."
"If we do not want to buy retail, 'with the other peasants,' " Magda muttered.
"Did he really say that?"
"Ja, he did! He muttered it, but I heard him. Filthy manners, that swine."
There was a rumble from the Marines behind them.
"Ma'am?" asked Lieutenant Trumble, "you want we should go back and maybe have a stronger word with the man?"
"Oh, no, Billy," said Sharon hastily. "That won't be necessary. He just doesn't get any more of our business, is all. Bad service, and we tell everyone who wants to hear. Simple." She smiled at him as brightly as she could, having visions of the repercussions of three of the USE's uniformed finest turning up to terrorize a respected Venetian merchant house. Billy Trumble would be for diplomacy what a bull would be for a china shop.
Magda sighed. "We go back to the embassy, then, and plan afresh."
"Well, maybe." Sharon was seized by a sudden wild impulse. "How about we go do a little personal shopping instead? We've got money of our own, after all—and three big strong boys here to carry our purchases. That's a rare opportunity, let me tell you."
"Shopping?" Magda looked intrigued.
"Yeah, shopping. We call it retail therapy. Just the thing after a disappointing experience. One of the finer inventions of the twentieth century."
Magda smiled her agreement. "Shopping!" she said.
Sharon looked back at the Marines. Billy was the only up-timer of the three, and his face was a picture.
* * *
The embassy was quickly settling into a routine of drinks before dinner, which was just getting going when Sharon and Magda got back. The down-time Marines had been introduced to the pleasure of accompanying ladies in a serious retail frenzy; thereby proving, to Sharon's satisfaction, that blank-faced stoical response was hardwired into the male genetic code. Born three hundred years before the invention of the mall, they had developed the stance and the face without even having to think about it. Sharon had been amused, despite herself. And besides, shopping was just plain fun.
They'd gotten back, squared accounts from their own funds, and changed for dinner.
"Any success, ladies?" Father Mazzare asked.
"Not yet, no," Sharon said. "Explored a blind alley this morning, and took the rest of the day just exploring. We're going to get hold of Maestro Luzzatto as soon as we can and work up a real plan of action."
She and Magda hadn't just been shopping, actually. They'd crossed and recrossed the Rialto district as they'd picked up souvenirs, clothes and assorted pretties, and watched deals go down left, right and center. Venice was a town that, however tight margins currently were, lived and died by dealing. When the weather was good, Venetians came out and
did it in the street, strolling across the piazza and in taprooms and tavernas everywhere. Wander into the right part of town and you heard everything being bought and sold. They'd even taken a look at the Palazzo Ducale, and walked through the Imbroglio, which had given its name to the kind of insanely complicated political and commercial deals that were put together there.
Eavesdropping had been fruitful. Sharon and Magda had gotten some idea of the kind of trading they wanted to do here, and they were already revising their plan of attack.
Tom was over by the fire, sprawled sideways across an armchair and perusing his notes. Given the volume of requests that had poured in as soon as the embassy arrived in Venice, Stoner had decided to postpone setting up his own laboratory in favor of purely educational work. He was about to start his lectures with a series on the practical problems of scaling lab processes to industrial ones, right here in Venice. He would be going to the university in Padua later, to do the more academic stuff on scientific method and real chemistry. He was absorbed in his material, so much so that he wasn't paying any attention to the room around him.
"I should go reassure my husband," Magda said. "He seems nervous."
"I think you're right," Sharon agreed. "And Magda?"
"Ja?"
"I think we maybe ought to turn out for Tom's lectures, don't you?"
"Well, naturally . . ." Magda said, frowning at the implied suggestion that she hadn't been going to support her man.
"No, that's not what I meant. I mean we should go with our trading hats on. Not every chemist is as unworldly as your Stoner." She smiled to take any possible sting out of the words. To hear Magda tell it, as well as being the most frustrating thing about Stoner, his impracticality was one of the things she loved most about him. "And maybe there's a slice of that action to be had."
Magda, grasping what Sharon was driving at immediately, grinned back. And it was not a friendly grin, either. Sharon realized that there was something deeply predatory about her friend, something that had been aroused to a terrible hunger by the scent of deals in the water.
She suspected that the next few weeks were going to be very interesting indeed. As Magda crossed the room to mop Tom's fevered brow, Sharon began looking around for Luzzatto to make an appointment.
Chapter 23
Singing. Some damned idiot was singing, somewhere in the street below. He'd been at it for some time, too, long enough to wake Buckley up. Joe rolled over and grabbed his watch. No need for the backlight function, it was already full day.
That helped wake him up as well. The fact that he'd gotten a suite of rooms with a nice, big, east-facing window that gave him a view of the Isola di Sant'Elena and its cathedral, and beyond that the Lido and the sea, was all very well. But the sun came up right in the window and the first thing it did in the morning was heat the room up to somewhere near boiling point. The bull's-eye panes in the window didn't help; they focused the sunlight onto the far wall in a strange and eye-watering pattern of rippled light.
Just after midday, he saw from his watch. He could probably have figured that by the position of the sunlight on the wall. Joe lived in a permanent paranoia of his watch breaking. He'd had the good fortune to have a self-winding model, nothing fancy, but it was one of the few timepieces from the old universe that was still working. He'd only been half-joking with himself when he'd thought to mark the position of the sun on the wallpaper at every hour. A couple of times he'd had scares that his watch was about to wind down. He wound it anyway, for the reassurance of having the time right.
He rolled out of bed, and stood swaying for a moment before rooting around for the chamberpot. He hadn't gotten into bed before about four o'clock that morning. He'd stayed light on the sauce, but that didn't mean he felt particularly human this morning. Afternoon, rather.
This was a town that liked to party, and party good and hard at that. Would it be too much, he wondered, to do a tourist guide piece? Venice could certainly use the income, and there were plenty of people in Europe with money who might want to come down here for a week or two.
He coughed, good and hard. Those tavernas could be damned smoky. The prevalence of tobacco in seventeenth-century Europe had come as a surprise to Joe, as it had to most of the up-timers. But where many up-timers had been relieved that their addiction could still be fueled, Joe had quit smoking as soon as the cigarettes ran out. Unlike some others, he'd not been able to bring himself to try what passed for pipe tobacco in this day and age. The stuff was so wretched that just sitting in a tavern was as good as going through a whole pack in an evening.
Buckley opened the window and spat out of it, watching the phlegm drop four floors to the canal. Then he sent the contents of the chamberpot after it, flinging it out so it didn't land on the footpath that ran along the edge of the water. He wasn't supposed to do that, but everybody did anyway.
He was right at the other end of downtown Venice from the embassy, now, up under the roof of a mostly empty tenement block. The rent wasn't bad, as no Venetian really wanted to live this high up if he could afford to be lower down. Besides, after the plague tenants were thin on the ground. The landlord had been almost ecstatic to find a renter.
For his own part, Joe liked it well enough. Someone who'd had the room before him—could have been any time in the last couple of centuries, from the rickety feel of the place—had liked to have plenty of light in the mornings, so they'd enlarged the windows. That kept the rent low, as well, because Joe was quite sure the rooms would be very cold in the winter. But he didn't care; he liked the light himself and planned to be gone by midsummer anyway.
The only real downside to the place was that his guidebook stopped working hereabouts. The map in the back had been drawn in the twentieth century and according to the street plan he was living in what would be, from the nineteenth century onward, a park. Finding the embassy was tough, too—where that stood would be Venice's railway station in three hundred years' time.
Buckley opened the package of laundry that he had picked up yesterday afternoon. That was an odd business. The modern clothes generally came back ruined, other than jeans, but the contemporary stuff usually got through fine. He guessed that was due to the local folks knowing how to deal with what they were used to, and not having a clue with care labels. That said, he'd never had a clue either. He'd gotten used to shapeless pullovers and faded colors in college.
Another change for the better in the seventeenth century: he was dressed better now. Natural curiosity had led him to go find out how they did it before the invention of the Laundromat. It turned out that they took the clothes apart to launder them, and then put them back together, an effort that made him appreciate all the more the pleasant sensation of pulling on clean clothes. Not that he did that as often as he used to. Wearing a shirt once and tossing it in the hamper was a luxury he couldn't afford any more.
What to do with the day, he wondered? He got his little stove going and began to brew breakfast. He'd gotten hold of one of Grantville's supply of primus stoves early on in his travels. He'd read a quote from Casanova's memoirs—a local boy, that one—some years before the Ring of Fire, and been mightily impressed by the old seducer's habit of carrying with him a bag packed with a stove and breakfast fixings wherever he went so he could "break his fast like a gentleman."
Living out of a suitcase in upper-floor garrets, Buckley appreciated it more for the ability to get hot coffee down him first thing in the morning without having to lay a fire he wasn't going to need to keep warm.
Still, as the coffee perked, he had a day to fill and no clear plan for what to do with it. And that idiot was still singing by the canal-side. He wished he'd spat on the caterwauling fool. Or worse. Something about love and the springtime, a folksong of some sort.
That put Buckley in mind of Frank Stone, and he grinned. What a perfect illustration of teenage maleness that was! Off at all hours hanging out with the Marcolis, a family of complete loons, because he was besotted with Giovanna.
Okay, sure, the girl herself was gorgeous, but still. And hauling his brothers along with him every time! The three of them were fixtures at the Casa Marcoli these days, helping to spread the word of the coming new world order to the largely indifferent population of Venice.
Although . . .
Now that Joe actually thought about it, there was something a little odd about that picture. The two younger Stone boys weren't even Frank's brothers. They were really step-brothers. And Giovanna was the only Marcoli daughter, so what the hell were they getting out of it? Hanging out with an obvious crank while their brother tried to get into the pants of the crank's daughter?
Odd. Was something else going on out there? Something more exciting than just sitting around and jabbering about politics?
Joe decided he'd find out. If nothing else, he supposed, it would be a way to spend the day. Besides, it was probably time he took a look at the Committee of Correspondence in Venice, even if he was pretty sure it was mostly a joke. He checked his watch again. There was plenty of time to get there for the daily public meeting they tried to get a decent turnout for—and failed miserably, from what Joe had heard.
And the idiot was still singing. He'd reached the end of the song and started again! The way it echoed up from the canal and the buildings opposite made it doubly, trebly annoying. Buckley found himself wishing for some traffic noise, a sound he hadn't heard in nearly three years. Definitely, he decided, time to get out of the house. Even if he got nothing from the Venetian committee, he could mooch about Murano and play tourist.
* * *
A boat over to Murano was easily had, and getting out from among the filthy canals of downtown Venice and into the seabreeze and the salt air of the lagoon did Buckley a world of good.
