“Del Credere,” said Benjamin.
“Del Credere, and maybe I’ll explain that later. But we got a few good copper contracts and beat the price up here, which made our friend in Bohemia sweat a bit. He sent a couple of angry messages saying that we were messing up the market deliberately. I understand a number of folks back in Magdeburg told him not to be such a baby. Anyway, that’s as may be. Once we started shifting the copper here, and the mining shares in all manner of other things, we had some seed capital and took up a number of margin loans to get into the serious action—”
Stoner sank down to sit cross-legged on the floorboards, feeling rather the way he did after a good deep toke: a little dizzy with hypoxia before the real rush hit.
“I surrender,” he said in a weak voice. Then, more firmly: “How much of the stuff on the list could you get? You’ve been at this for nearly two months, but we haven’t had anything delivered yet—”
He looked up, from face to face. He couldn’t quite read the expressions. “What?”
Silence. First Sharon, then Magda, and finally Benjamin picked a chair and sat down. Looking harder, Stoner saw that Benjamin was looking faintly pleased with himself, but was waiting for his clients to talk. Magda looked like she had gotten the cream, and was now smiling as widely as a properly-brought-up guildmaster’s daughter could. Sharon was back to grinning like a maniac.
“What?” Stoner asked again. The grin was proving infectious, although he didn’t know why.
“Well, you know that the biggest item on the list was the hundredweight of lac?” Sharon asked.
“That wasn’t one of mine,” Stoner said, “but, like, I’ll take your word for it.”
“Well, we went for that one first and found a place downtown that had some.”
Magda sniffed. “That man was no gentleman.” She uttered the phrase with the same tone and spin and venom some people used for the phrase baby-eating satanist.
Sharon snorted. “The jerk told Benjamin that if his clients wanted a hundred pounds of anything but spice we could buy retail like the other peasants.”
“Ha!” Magda said. “Sharon does the poltroon too much justice. He used coarse language as well.”
Sharon looked hard at Magda.
Magda looked back, perfectly calmly. “Well, I know what that word meant in Latin, and from the tone of voice he used I presumed he meant it in Venetian.”
“Oh,” said Sharon, evidently surprised.
Stoner wasn’t; sufficiently riled, Magda could take the hide off a wild boar with her language, much of it from the classics at that.
“Anyway,” Sharon went on, “I said to Benjamin that we should buy in bulk and from source if we could.”
Benjamin nodded. “The signoras were mostly insistent that we not deal through that house for anything. Naturally, I was proactive on my clients’ behalf.”
Stoner wondered if his wince had shown. Laptops and PowerPoint weren’t the only things that the Istanbul Sephardim—and, apparently their Spanish and Italian cousins—had taken to. Godawful MBA-speak was catching among them like the clap in a whorehouse. Stoner recalled discussing that with Sharon’s dad, Doctor Nichols. The good doctor’s theory was that the Abrabanels had gone over Grantville’s limited stock of legal and financial textbooks looking for any tricks they had missed. Whatever else they had found in the course of those studies, they had been particularly taken by the management jargon. The fact that they seemed to have an eye for the most anus-clenching excesses was, Doctor Nichols reckoned, their big joke at the expense of the twentieth century that most of the up-timers hadn’t gotten yet.
Stoner saw that there was a question expected of him at this point. “So, what did you do?”
Sharon put an arm around Benjamin, who looked briefly alarmed and then appeared to force himself to relax. “Benjamin was magnificent,” she said. “We spent a couple of days over in the ghetto picking up local information and making contacts, getting notes of introduction, that kind of thing. And then we went shopping. You see, Stoner, this is one of those towns where they don’t make much of anything except the glass, which I’ll tell you about, but they do make deals. You should take a walk through the Rialto sometime, it’s wall-to-wall deals.”