Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [228]
With Nicholas, he left the Arengo and issued into the frying-hot Milanese sunshine. He forgot, for the moment, his complaints. Everything in Milan was huge. In front was the biggest church Felix had ever seen. It was half-built and covered in scaffolding, with brown-backed workmen in breech-clouts moving from plank to plank like seagulls on the Crane. You had to watch, in case a pulley stuck and a bucket emptied before it should. The hammering behind came, Nicholas said, from the workshops, where they brought the marble in from the pool.
Felix wanted to see the wonders of the Medici Palazzo, which was supposed to be their next port of call. He had put on part-coloured hose and his best tunic, which was yellow, and had bought a straw hat that morning, to protect his complexion from the sun. He looked forward to meeting Tommaso’s brothers, whom Tommaso envied, and to whom Felix, nonchalantly, was confiding a box of silver and draft bills to be transferred to Tommaso in Bruges.
On the way to the Medici, Nicholas called at the bench of a notary and retrieved three packets of papers, which he paid for in silver. Then, finding a tavern near the Piazza Mercanti, he took Felix inside and ordered wine, while he opened the packets and examined them. They proved to be two complete sets of the credit notes supplied by Jaak de Fleury, copied to the last word and fully notarised. One copy for themselves. One copy to be lodged with Maffino, the Fleury agent in Milan, as a convenience for any future exchanges. And the originals, which they were taking now to be sold to Pigello Portinari of the Medici.
“To be sold?” Felix said.
Nicholas, refolding the packets, seemed unaware that he’d said anything worth remark. “Well, it’s the best way of getting our money,” he said. “Or at least the bit I got Monsieur Jaak to acknowledge. Maybe you want to come trailing down to Geneva every six months to try and collect, but I don’t think it’s worth it. Instead, let the Medici squeeze the silver out of Jaak de Fleury through their Geneva branch.”
Felix stared at him. He said, “Why should the Medici do it?”
Nicholas put the packets away and signed to the landlord. “They’re always doing it. It’s their business, debt-collecting. They handle papal bulls in the same way exactly. And anyway, they owe me a favour. I’ve composed them a cipher that no one living can decode. Including me.”
Felix continued to stare at him. He said, “You mean the Medici are going to pay you all the money Jaak de Fleury owes us?”
Nicholas said, “Well, all he’s admitted to owing us. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To raise money to rebuild your business. That’s why I couldn’t go straight back to Bruges.”
“I thought it was because –”
“It is. As well. But don’t think in public,” said Nicholas. “Come on. Pigello and Accerito await you.”
The Palazzo Medici turned out to be a long, low, edifice with a row of very fancy windows above a sort of bastion wall of squared blocks. Felix thought that they would be given wine Italian-style from a big copper cooler in the loggia, but the loggia was only just being built and wine would have turned into mud anyway, he could see.
They were met by Pigello Portinari, who had the same nose as Tommaso, but had been stuffed and packaged at a different shop, which probably happened when you became purveyor and financier to a ducal court. He had a sloping brow, and bags under his eyes. He looked as bald as doctor Tobias, but the top of his head was concealed by a sort of roofed pillbox, below which he had on a short tunic with his shirt and hose because of the heat. It had a low belt, to disguise the thickness of a good trencherman’s waist. Felix felt very cordial towards