Mike didn’t look up. He just groaned, deeply and theatrically. “What does this do to our own operations in Venice?”
“Surprisingly little, as it happens.” Nasi had checked that first thing. The story—more like an editorial—that Buckley had filed on d’Avaux’s intrigues in the Venetian state had come as no great surprise. Only a few details differed in Buckley’s account from the reports Nasi had gotten himself. Francisco suspected that was due to the journalist making mistakes rather than to any defects in the organization his cousin was running in the Most Serene Republic. Unlike Buckley’s, those reports came with sources attributed and with reliability assessments.
“Little?” Stearns was looking up and frowning. “Surely they’re about to have the mother of all mole-hunts right about now?”
“Oh, surely they will. The French embassy there has an efficient and effective man in charge of—things.” Nasi didn’t want to put it more specifically than that. A man handling espionage and counterespionage could have surprisingly wide duties. Especially if his name was Michel Ducos.
“He probably already knew that Buckley was speaking to the servants at the embassy, Michael. It is a standard enough ploy, even if few people do it as effectively as Joe Buckley. The only surprise will have been the publication of the material. As far as we can tell the French were assuming that Buckley was one of our spies—one of the reports they filed even suggested that he wasn’t the real Buckley but an impostor.”
Stearns chuckled. “Makes a change for them, doesn’t it? Decades of journalists who either printed the press release, relied on rumor and hearsay or just flat-out lied. Suddenly they’ve got a for-real investigative journalist out after them. Ha! Do that French viper some good.”
“D’Avaux or Richelieu?”
Mike snorted. “Pair of ’em. Had far too much freedom of action, you ask me. Bit of publicity beyond pamphleteering and state-approved sermons, just what they’re short of.” He grinned.
Nasi snagged a tablet and a pencil to make a note. “We will encourage—oh.” Nasi looked at that grin.
The grin got wider. “Time to stir this particular pot, I think. Get the propaganda guys on it. The line is that we deny all knowledge of Buckley, and while we deeply regret any inconvenience caused, we can’t intervene and the appropriate remedy would appear to be a slander action—no, strike that, let’s just have some standard ringing declaration for freedom of speech and the press, rule of law, contrast with the despotism of other and by definition lesser nations, France and her tyrannical Hapsburg allies, iron heel of Charles Stuart, et cetera, et cetera.”
“But we keep our distance from Buckley?”
“Oh, sure. Maybe warn our folks in Venice to do something if it looks like he’s going to get killed. Say, how likely is that?”
“In Venice? Should the Venetian authorities decide he should die, he will die. Quickly, overnight, with no one to see how the thing is done.”
Nasi remembered a scene he had witnessed as a boy, visiting Venice. Corpses, hanging with their legs broken, twisting in the light sea air over the Piazza San Marco. They had been hung there overnight, with no witnesses to the deadly and secret work of the Council of Ten. The same day, a mob of Arsenalotti at the Spanish embassy chasing Bedmar out of town. A little later, all of Europe catching light, and the sparks seeming to flare up at home. The mad sultan Mustapha enthroned and deposed three months later, the world gone mad.
He brought himself back to the present, away from the pull of memories of a former home. “So unlike the civilized manner in which these things are done in the City,” he said. “The pasha who offends the sultan is ordered to report for execution, and report he does. If he does not, the executioner goes to him, and—” He drew a finger across his throat. “All done out in the open. Honest. Healthy.”
Mike nodded solemnly. “Oh, couldn’t agree more. Can’t be having executions in the dark and on the quiet, oh no. Publicity, that’s the ticket.”
Neither of them held their faces straight for more than a second or two, breaking out in matching broad smiles. Nasi treasured moments like this, when Mike was not feeling the load so much. The world that Nasi had grown up in had far more idle nobles and underworked functionaries, a wealth of sinecures for hangers-on to occupy and work at in dilettante fashion. It might make for a great deal of waste, but it also made for plenty of leisure time among the governing classes. The sultan, to pick the most obvious example, generally had all his state business over with by lunchtime—and him no early riser, at that—on any given day. It left him with his afternoons to fill with a regular schedule of the arts, literature, science and drinking. Mostly drinking, as it happened.