The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [22]
Waiting for the lord Cosimo to call in his son and his staff, Nicholas saw nothing now in the way of capturing the Florentine agency for Trebizond. He had at the tips of his fingers the privileges of toll, tax and warehouse, compound, church and lodgings, food and wine and oil and labour which the Emperor had been prepared to offer the Medici. He had from Messer Alighieri, as full plenipotentiary, the extra privileges the Charetty company could expect, in return for one hundred trained soldiers. And that, passed on in moderation, would make it cheaper by far for the Medici to employ him than compete with him. He had no fear that they would offer armed help themselves. Milan had already tried sending troops east. It had been a disaster.
He was not disappointed. When the Medici son did appear—a zestful stout man of forty, followed by the men from the chancery with their pens and their ledgers—the ensuing discussion was challenging, but did nothing to weaken his case. On the question of troops, it was the old man himself who interrogated him. Old Cosimo, the urbane head of a tightly run empire of banking, who studied Plato and filled his house with artists; who had once stopped a meeting in order to show Cosimino, interrupting, how to fashion his whistle, “and had he asked me, I would have played on it too”. Hearing that, anyone would have known the farmuk couldn’t fail.
Now Cosimo the grandfather said, “So the special terms depend on the supply of an army. And what does the Emperor think is an army? Ten? A thousand?”
“He would be content with a hundred, if bowmen.”
“And you could take a hundred soldiers round the heel of Italy, up the Aegean Sea, through the narrows at Constantinople and into the Black Sea beyond without the Turks stopping you?”
“There are ways,” Nicholas said. “Messer Alighieri is confident.” He met the old man’s gaze with his own. The merry, shrewd eyes of Giovanni the son had, he knew, never left him. Giovanni’s hands, like his father’s, were twisted with gout. God, jealous of wealth, had visited Cosimo and both his sons with this affliction. The oddest sight known to man, so they said, was the spectacle of the three richest men in the world lying side by side in the same gout-ridden bed, squealing with anguish.
The lord Cosimo smiled, and his gaze, mildly ironic, shifted to Julius. “Youth and optimism. How fortunate you are in your young master. But let us look, we older people, on the less pleasant side. A company thrives on its reputation as much as on its actual profits. You may not contrive to smuggle your men into Trebizond. The Turk may attack Trebizond and ruin or kill you. The Turk may lay such a stranglehold on your trade that the tolls from the Black Sea will cripple you. If this venture fails, will it bring down your company?”
Nicholas supposed that, in one speech, he had hit on all Julius’s own personal fears. But Julius, too, knew his business. “Not at all, monsignore,” Julius said. “We are an old, well-funded business. We own our land and our buildings. The lady our owner is highly experienced, and has a good lawyer and excellent managers. The present venture comes from surplus capital and is expendable.”
It was the truth, so far as it went. He didn’t say what all of them knew, that only the initial funding had been supplied, from its surplus, by the Charetty company; and the risks now belonged to Nicholas personally. If he succeeded, the overall profit would be his. If he failed, he stood to lose what he had, on careful deposit in Venice. If he died—if he died, all he had in Venice or anywhere else would go to Marian. All he had of debts as well. He