“He was much impressed,” Cavriani continued with what seemed to be real enthusiasm, “by the contrast between the manner in which these things are traditionally done in the Germanies and the way in which you Americans approach business. He also had high praise indeed for your Maestro Piazza. A very able and forthright man, according to Leopold.”
Sharon nodded, but decided to say nothing. In point of fact, she thought Ed Piazza was a very able and forthright man herself. She also liked him personally. On the other hand, he’d spent most of his adult life as a high school principal. High school had not agreed well with Sharon Nichols. She’d been one of those bright-but-easily-bored kids who had been habitually labeled an “underachiever” in high school and hadn’t really come into her own until she reached college. She’d admit it was probably childish, but even after several years of college and almost three years of the seventeenth century, she was still nursing something of a grudge. In her opinion, high school principals were probably assigned somewhere to the fifth or sixth level of the Inferno.
“Now, let us to business!” Cavriani said brightly. “Just how were you proposing to get some of this? Half of it I never heard of, to be honest. And I hear you got short shrift from the Casa Falier a couple of days ago. Yes?”
“We certainly did, and the fellow was very rude!” snapped Magda. “I should like it if we do not use their services at all for this business.”
Cavriani rocked a hand back and forth in doubt. “I think maybe you got Messer Petro Falier on a bad day.” He snickered. “Not that he has many good days, you understand. He’s a sharp customer, that one, although as you say, lacks in the manners department. You aren’t the first he’s been that way with, and the story surprised no one when it got around that you’d had bruises off him. And, Signora Stone, may I add that all the Rialto heard what you called him to his face, and two-thirds of it agrees with you. But, as I say, he’s good and his House is good, too. So, if we need Casa Falier for anything, we try to delay it until we’ve got you, ah, raised in the profile a little, yes?”
He’d tried out an English phrase on them. “I think you mean, ‘until we’ve raised our profile a little,’ ” said Sharon. She’d heard some of that about the Rialto. Occasional boulders of English in the stream of Veneziano Italian. She’d decided it was because there were a lot of English merchants in town, handling this end of the Levant trade, and that she was probably missing other imported words from other languages that she didn’t recognize. On the other hand, that phrase was straight out of the twentieth century. Had the tendency of visiting Nasis and Abrabanels to pick up MBA-babble started to spread to other communities than the Jewish one? Sharon hoped not.
“Ah, I thank you,” said Cavriani. “When we are visibly making deals in this town, there will almost certainly be a brief fashion to be seen trading with your good selves. Brief, but if we work quickly we will be able to do much in that short time to establish ourselves. And if, in that time, such business as you take to Casa Falier is expressly reserved for factors other than Messer Petro Falier, the prestige he will lose . . .” Cavriani’s face was the very picture of schadenfreude. “And, of course, just to rub it in, his fellow factors will ask him for advice on the deals they are doing for you, so we will even get the benefit of his experience.”
“Will he not simply lead them astray?” Magda asked.
Cavriani’s grin turned wry. “Petro? I think not. The man’s a notorious pedant. And besides, what price his good name as a trader, for everyone acknowledges that he knows his business, if he publicly gets it wrong?”
“Ah, I see,” said Magda, nodding in satisfaction.
Sharon almost giggled. Magda, concurring in a plot to visit humiliation on the pompous, abrasive Messer Petro Falier, looked like she was going native in Venice real fast. “Thanks for that pointer, Messer Cavriani. Now, to our own business, we’ve spent the time since we arrived going about and getting a feel for the place, and we’ve revised our ideas about the kind of deals we want to put together. You see, we’ve got some money that might well amount to down payments on everything on our list, but hearing the traders talk we thought we might be a little more ambitious and perhaps use it as seed money. Also, we’ve been cultivating the people to whom Signora Stone’s husband has been talking, some of the businessmen he’s been advising on chemical industry—”