“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.”