* * *
The back room was smoky and dark, since at this time of day no direct sunlight was coming through the narrow windows on one wall. Just right for a conspiracy except that it was very large. There was nobody in it other than the Marcolis, Marius, and one other man, standing next to a large table toward the back.
“You know the new guy?” Ron asked Frank quietly.
“No. I wonder if he’s part of this or if he just wandered in?”
Giovanna leaned close, and it was all Frank could do not to writhe in pleasure at the feel of her breath on his ear. “It is Michel Ducos, of the Paris Committee. He is attached to the French embassy, but is one of us.”
“The Paris Committee?” Frank hadn’t been aware there even was a Committee of Correspondence in the French capital. Gretchen Richter must have been busy when she passed through the city as part of Becky Stearns’ diplomatic mission!
He wondered how hard a time of it the Committee people were having in Paris. Richelieu’s agents were rough, by all accounts. On the other hand, Ducos looked like a mean customer himself, so maybe they were getting on okay if he was any kind of measure of the rest of them. He was a tall, narrow man with a hatchet face—the kind of face that couldn’t say ornery son of a bitch more plainly if you tattooed it on his forehead. He was on his feet talking to Marcoli senior, a tumbler of something unregarded on the table beside him.
“Si,” said Giovanna. “Their special embassy came a few weeks before yours, and Michel came with them as one of their servants. He came straight to us, and has given us much information about the comte d’Avaux.”
Frank heard the Michel and inwardly snarled. The guy’s a fast worker, he thought, and then told himself to cool it. “Who’s this Count Devo, then?”
“The French ambassador, and a very bad man.”
“That figures. Works for Richelieu, does he?”
“Si. He is infamous for his troublemaking in the Germanies and in Italy, and now he comes to Venice again. Michel tells us he is here to make trouble for you Americans.”
Ducos turned his head. “D’accord,” he said. Frank realized that while in conversation with Messer Marcoli, Ducos had been keeping track of the conversation on the other side of the room. Ducos went on: “Seigneur le Comte is one of Richelieu’s creatures. A man most dangerous to the advance of liberty, Monsieur Stone.”
So the guy already knew his name, too. Frank decided to make introductions anyway, and named Gerry and Ron for the Frenchman. Giovanna’s father and Marius Pontigrazzi they already knew, and finally he learned the names of Giovanna’s brothers: Salvatore and Fabrizio.
There were also Dino and Roberto Marcoli, twin brothers also in their teens, and another older guy in his late thirties or early forties. Frank recognized all three of them. They’d been with Antonio Marcoli in the embassy the day before, although they hadn’t really been introduced. The older man turned out to be the father of the twins and one of Antonio’s many cousins. He was also Antonio’s brother-in-law; or had been, at least, until Giovanna’s mother died in the plague.
Frank would have been surprised by that, and a little taken aback, if he hadn’t already learned that the general American tendency to avoid cousin marriage was not shared in most of the world. Miz Mailey had once told him the prohibition against it in many U.S. states was a result of a combination of the influence of the eugenics movement in the 1920s and anti-immigrant attitudes. Nowhere outside of North America had it been prohibited and it was actually quite common, even in the twentieth century of the universe they’d come from. He’d found the whole thing rather amusing at the time, given the longstanding wisecracks about inbred West Virginians. In their new world, the former West Virginians were considered maniacal exogamists.
The cousin/brother-in-law was named Massimo Marcoli, and was apparently the intellectual theorist of the group. At least, he had a stack of pamphlets fresh from Germany with him.