Chapter 148: The Podestà’s Price

At dawn, the quarter lay silent beneath the smell of tar, and the bells had yet to ring. Vito and Caterina followed an officer in Zeno’s payroll past the church, with Zaccaria and Domenego a step behind them, while the edicts on the church door fluttered in the wind.

No one needed to explain why they had been summoned. Some large merchant fleet in the waters, customs in the podestà’s books, and the warehouse keys at his belt all pointed to the obvious.

The podestà’s house had belonged to one of the old court’s great men before the sack, and it still had its marble stairs and a mosaic saint whose face had been hammered off.

In the entrance hall, clerks scratched away at their papers while wax warmed over a brazier.

Marino Zeno rose from his table to greet them.

Lean and gray at the temples, he wore a plain black gown bearing the Lion of Venice on one shoulder. He extended every courtesy with composure.

Vito assumed the bearing expected of him, squaring his shoulders and arranging his mantle to fall properly as he approached the table.

The week had brought one closed door after another. Constantinople had plenty of buyers but precious little coin, and such conditions suited men who traded in promises, not a merchant who needed cargo moving before the season was lost.

Zeno laid two fingers on the written offer and pushed it across the table. "Ah, my friends, you have walked the brokers’ streets, so I will not insult you by painting the picture. So, the dyed woolens, the metals, these I take and carry them inland under my name to the Greek nobility, and you will have grossi in your hand the very day the goods are delivered. Nine parts in ten of what this city would pay, if this city had a coin to rub against another."

His smile was small and reasonable.

"A bargain between sincere houses, no? I ask only the price of my seal."

The plain woolens and linen were excluded from the offer, held instead for the future, distant ports. The reality was that Zeno could wait through a winter for payment, but the Barozzini could not spare even a week, as every single one meant less sailing days and more wages paid to idle crews.

Vito’s voice came out in the high, glossy formal tone.

"Messer Podestà!"

A hand to the breast, a lowering of the eyes. "Your courtesy honors our house, and so generous an offer deserves a well-thought answer, as one tastes a good wine and doesn’t gulp it. We would beg the terms in writing, not that we doubt the word of so great a son of Venice, God forbid! But ink, Messer, ink has a better memory than the best of merchants."

Meanwhile, Caterina read the offer, her fingers beneath each line and lips shaping the figures. At the bottom the finger stopped and tapped twice, and she lifted her eyes with a smile.

It was a dangerous smile. "We’ll part with seventy parts in every hundred, Messer Podestà, for the dyed woolens, the metals, at your price. The thirty parts stay with us, for our buyers, ah, don’t look so grieved, they aren’t strangers. Every one of them is written in my branch’s books, and has paid in good currency since before the sack."

Those buyers were Venetian households whose stewards still paid in hard coin, along with a few Greek houses that had done business with the Contarini branch under the old emperors and continued to do so afterward.

Zeno inclined his head to her, half an inch past what courtesy required, and let his hand drift from the keys to the seal, as if a man might change his mind about which of his weapons to be seen touching. If the carve-out had stung, nothing in his face admitted it.

"Agreed, Madonna Caterina, and with a full heart."

He spread his hands, all injured generosity. "Did you imagine I would do otherwise? Fie! I had set aside your thirty before ever you crossed my doorway. A house that keeps its good customers is a house that knows itself, and I would not part you from yours for all the silver in the empire."

Caterina entered no credit for the podestà in her private reckoning.

The deal cost them one part in ten on everything Zeno bought, leaving them with less profit than a full-price sale would have brought. The alternative was more brokers, empty hulls, and a sea that would soon close for the season, costing them more while leaving them with no silver to show for their trouble.

Sometimes it was worth paying a man to clear the way, and this was one of those times.

Zeno pressed his seal into the wax, and the Lion took its bite. Vito’s neck had stayed warm from the first word to the last, just as the title promised when a house was reliable.

The box appeared as soon as the Lion had settled into the wax.

?? [TITLE ACTIVATED - OCCHIO DEL MERCANTE]

Zeno’s steward, a lean fellow who knew every door in the quarter and several in the Santa Sofia, escorted the couple to the Latin Patriarch’s court.

Thomas Morosini was a Venetian establishing the Latin rite in the churches of a Greek city, and he needed vestments, chalices, censers, candles, and missals more urgently than any baron needed iron. The sack had left him with altars everywhere and the cups melted down, and whatever else had survived, the churches hadn’t been spared.

The Patriarch’s steward checked the goods, though Morosini himself never appeared. That week, the crates went from the warehouse to the court, and the couple owed Zeno for securing their entry.

A favor to that man was unlikely to remain a favor for long.

Zeno’s clerks inspected the lots twice and issued a receipt for each one. There was enough wax on the papers to make a man wonder whether the parchment was there to support the seals or the other way around.

Over the following days, Zeno’s payment arrived in iron-bound boxes, while Caterina’s buyers paid through the accounting room.

At the long wharf, the ships rode high on the evening tide, light as corks, while Bepi sulked among them with no cargo to curse and nothing to measure with his thumb.

Caterina planted her fists on her hips and surveyed the hulls.

She flung one arm toward them and left it there, the sleeve pinned, the forearm bare. "Ecco! Look at them, marito, look! Riding high on the water like drunks at a wedding, bobbing and bowing and begging for one more cup. Only a fool sails with an empty belly, and a fool I did not marry... eh, not that kind, regardless. Tomorrow, tomorrow, we go and find these poor hungry girls some cargo to eat."

For several days, they walked through Constantinople with Zaccaria and Domenego following behind. They went down the Mese, through Perama and Kontoskalion, and into Psamathia, through warehouses where the empire’s remnants waited for merchants with silver to spend.

At the end of some streets, they found human beings roped together in rows and priced like everything else. Vito made no joke about that, and Caterina took his arm.

They followed the two rules Caterina had written on the sheet in winter.

Buy from those with silver in their purse, and make sure the ships could carry the goods across the water without ruining them. Since the buyers they hoped to reach lived on a far shore, they chose goods that would travel well and might appeal to them.

By the end of the second week, every receipt had arrived. They lay in a heap on the long table in the accounting room, each stamped by Zeno’s clerks, the Patriarch’s household, or a paying house.

The pens went to work, but no one yet knew what the heap of receipts would tell them.