“Not doing as badly” was a relative term, of course. The ghetto was as down-at-the-heels as most of Venice, and the plague had probably hit it worse than it had the rest of the city. Having met them on the way in and walked them up to his office, Luzzatto had remarked that the place felt empty these days. Hard as it was to imagine, before the plague it had apparently been much more crowded.
Luzzatto sent an office-boy running for coffee and began with introductions. “Signora Nichols, Signora Stone, may I present to you Messer Giuseppe Cavriani, who is the agent in La Serenissima for the Cavriani family.” That provoked a round of charmed-to-meet-yous and a rather lengthy one, as Cavriani insisted on rising and bowing. Sharon wondered how he managed it without knocking something over.
Coffee came, presented on quite a nice tray—although the tray itself had to be balanced between two stacks of parchment briefs tied up in bundles with actual by-God red tape. While Luzzatto was fussing over the tiny cups and the Turkish-style coffee pot, Sharon took a good long look at Cavriani.
She knew the name—the family name, at least—even if she’d never met the man. That had been part of the briefing which Ed Piazza had given them, before they left on this mission to Venice. Today, Piazza was the appointed governor of the province of the USE known either as “Thuringia” or “East Virginia.” (That depended on who you talked to. No official decision had been made yet regarding the eventual name of the province which had once been a semi-independent nation under Grantville’s leadership. In fact, the official government stationery of the province still read “United States.”) But before that he’d been the secretary of state of the original small U.S.; and, during that time, he’d been approached by one of the representatives of the Cavriani clan. Ed hadn’t gone into the details, for reasons he had declined to give—which, to Sharon, meant diplomatic skullduggery and maneuver. She’d asked her father about it, and he’d told her he was pretty sure the Cavrianis were also agents of the Neapolitan radicals as well as legitimate continental businessmen.
Although he hadn’t explained his reasons, Ed Piazza had asked all of them to report to him if they ran across any Cavrianis in Venice. And . . .
Now they had.
Sharon was a bit intrigued to see that a Cavriani in the flesh didn’t look at all like the combination of bomb-throwing anarchist and suave Genevan man-of-affairs she would have imagined. If anything, he looked like a younger, shorter version of Father Mazzare. Less gray at the temples, a little fuller in the face, he had the same aquiline profile and deepset eyes. He smiled rather more readily, though, and had an animation that contrasted with Mazzare’s habitual cool demeanor.
Luzzatto explained that he wanted them to consult with Messer Cavriani, because although he wasn’t Case Vecchie or even a retainer of one, he did have a lot of connections throughout Europe by way of his extended family, which was based in Geneva. After Luzzatto had finished explaining all the things the Cavrianis did, what Sharon gathered was that they were professional middlemen. Luzzatto did not say anything about whatever their political proclivities might be.
Well . . .
Sharon decided she’d go along with Luzzatto’s inclinations. He was probably right, she reflected, that using a middleman like Cavriani gave them better prospects than trying to deal directly with the trading houses themselves.
“So, please,” said Cavriani after Luzzatto’s prologue was done, “tell me what you are trying to achieve on the Rialto. Maestro Luzzatto has given me sight of your list of desiderata, and I have heard a great deal from my cousin at Geneva about how you Americans work.”
“Nothing bad, I hope,” said Sharon.
“Oh, no, no, no—quite the contrary. Dear Leopold attended your Rudolstadt Colloquy, you know, and heard the argument there.”
Leopold Cavriani. Yes, that was the name Ed Piazza had mentioned, Sharon could now remember. She relaxed a bit. If this Cavriani wasn’t trying to hide his connection with the other one, he was presumably not up to anything worse than middling-level skullduggery. Of course, in Venice—all of Italy, so far as she could tell—middling-level skullduggery probably put you somewhere on the third or fourth level of Dante’s Inferno.