“Venice, then?” he grunted.
“I think so, yes,” replied Vitelleschi softly.
Barberini grimaced sourly. “They’re difficult, the Venetians.”
“So are the Americans.” The Father-General of the Jesuits shrugged. “Where better than Venice, to begin the probe?”
Barberini grunted again. “Mazarini as our go-between? That might be dangerous. The man is leaning in three directions at once—toward us, the French, and the Americans. Who knows where he might wind up, in the end?”
Vitelleschi was back to that unnerving, cool stare. “Who better, then, than Mazarini? Do not forget, Your Eminence, that it remains unclear where we might wind up. In the end.”
Part I:
September, 1633
She had
A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Chapter 4
“Trade, Michael, trade.”
“I know, Francisco, I know.” It was late, and Mike Stearns’ office in Grantville was as clean and tidy as the presidential staff could keep it after a day measured in the remorseless rhythm of twenty-minute meetings and a two-hour radio exchange session. That is, not very. It felt . . . in need of laundry.
Opening a window wasn’t an option. The autumn night that Don Francisco Nasi was musing on was a filthy one, slapping its rain and wind against the glass. It was the kind of night on which bad novels began. Real life, however, served up nights like this in their season without regard to melodramatic need or—Mike winced at the thought—a President who had a hundred-yard dash through the open to get to his bed. His very empty bed, since his wife, Rebecca, was hundreds of miles away, trapped in the Spanish siege of Amsterdam.
“There is still nothing from the vizier,” Francisco sighed. “There will be nothing to come.”
Mike nodded. Almost a year and a half, from the spring of 1632 onward, of patient and carefully drafted letters, friendly overtures carried to Istanbul by a dozen or more hands, had dropped into a black hole for all the good they seemed to have done. “I’ll say this for Richelieu. He may be a damned snake but at least he answers his mail. And accepts ambassadors, even if he does try to—”
Francisco turned and raised an admonitory finger. “Now, we cannot prove that. The English Channel is notoriously thick with pirates.”
Mike let out a theatrical groan, and leaned forward to knock his head on his desk. “Francisco,” he said, his voice muffled through two inches of paperwork already accumulated for the morrow, “I appreciate you’re head of the secret service, but do you have to be quite so cold-blooded? That was my wife on that ship.”
“Um.” Nasi smiled thinly. “Your wife, yes . . . along with Heinrich Schmidt and as tough a selection of soldiers as you could make. Not to mention Gretchen Richter, who causes bowel movements in princes. As I recall the report, the pirates were lucky to survive at all.”
His head still lying on the desk, Mike chuckled harshly. Whatever sour thoughts he had toward the world in general, on this sour night, Mike approved deeply of some of the people in it. Tough soldiers and young women who caused princes to squat on oubliettes being right at the top of his list.
Nasi echoed his chuckle. “You would prefer I stormed to Paris and called the cardinal out? Or just offered to meet his gentiluomo on his behalf? At dawn, with coffee and pistols?” Francisco twisted his mouth in the wry smile that, with a glitter of his dark eyes, served him as uproarious laughter did other men. “The talk of Europe, it will be—the Jew and the Cardinal! To the death! We would get the attention of the grand vizier’s diwan then, no error. The sultan, too—he likes a jest, especially if it involves someone getting killed.”
Mike sat up. “Yeah, what’s the deal there? From your briefings . . .” He suppressed a little laugh. The corps of Jewish merchants who were Grantville’s coffee lifeline to Istanbul had taken to PowerPoint and overhead projectors in a way that made Mike despair of the soul of early modern capitalism. One thing their reports were not, as a rule, was brief. “He’s mad as they come, according to you, but he seems to be running Istanbul like an effective and dynamic ruler, for a despot. So what is the problem with the sultan?”