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Out of a Job?
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I am no ordinary assassin. As one of the foreign agents of the Most Serene Republic, it is my task to bring our wayward glassmakers back into the fold. I prefer the carrot to the stick, and the stick to the dagger.
But if need demands it, I am an assassin. In Normandy, I left one recalcitrant glassmaker with a dagger in his heart. And, lest his colleagues think it a chance street killing, I attached a note to the hilt. It bore but one word: "Traditore." As the French say, " pour l'encouragement d'autres." Or perhaps that should be, " decouragement"?
How I despise these ingrates. The
security of the Venetian Republic rests on its economic power, and
that, in turn, on its mastery of certain arts, glassmaking being
primus
inter pares. Yet they dare to pass
on our precious secrets, knowing full well what damage it will do to their
homeland. And are not the glassworkers
the most pampered of craftsmen? Why, regardless of their birth, the masters are
permitted to marry the daughters of the nobility.
My bird, Tomasso, had flown the coop again. We had tracked him to London, and a member of the Ambassador's staff had been sent to offer Tomasso a nice sum of money to return home. He had laughed, assuring our envoy that his noble British patron would pay him more, and that if he had to be confined to an island, he would rather it be England, not Murano. Despite the difference in climate.
The domestic branch of my department had been watching his family, of course, hoping that he might come home for a conjugal visit, and arrested his wife as she tried to slip out of the country to join him. She was imprisoned, and persuaded to write letters begging him to return. We passed those letters on to Tomasso.
They seemed to have some effect on him and he promised that he would come home as soon as he finished a particular job for his nobleman. One, he assured us, that didn't implicate any Venetian secret. Then it was until an outbreak of the plague subsided. Then he had to wait for the roads to clear.
I decided I had heard enough excuses, and set up the arrangements to abduct him. Such are tricky, since you must find the renegade alone, if at all possible, and get him out of the country before he is missed. He must have noticed something, because next thing I knew, he was gone.
I rode the post to Dover—which ate quite a chunk in my expense account, being eighty miles at two and half pence to the mile—but by the time I got to the docks, he was off and away.
Nor did I find him in Calais.
The first new rumor I heard of him was in Paris. I hoped he would settle down there long enough for me to set up a retrieval, but he didn't oblige me. Couldn't find a good enough deal, I suppose.
My pursuit was a blur of long roads and bad food, crisscrossing France, the Netherlands, and Germany. I caught up with him at last in Lauscha, in Thuringia. There, he had settled down to a life of making titanic gilded waldglas beer goblets for the feasts of barely literate princelings. What a comedown!
The town was small enough for strangers to be noticed, so I spread some coins about and waited for him to head out. I knew he would do so, eventually; he was in town only to sell his wares and buy supplies. The walglashutten, where the glass is actually made, have to be located near a source of wood for the fires, and as soon as they exhaust the local supply, they are moved.
We took him like a coney in a trap. Within a trice, he was disarmed, bound and gagged. At first he thought we were common bandits. Well, that was probably the usual occupation of my hirelings, but he realized quickly enough what I was.
He made gagging sounds.
I cuffed him. "You wish to scream for help? So sorry, I cannot oblige you."
He shook his head vigorously.
"You wish to tell me something?"
He nodded.
"Very well. I will let you speak. In a whisper." I put my knife against his throat, and one of my henchman removed the gag, then stepped back. "Remember. Whisper."
"This is an exercise in futility. There is nothing I know that is of any real value to Venice. Not anymore."
That ends the preview. Probably in the middle of a sentence. Sorry.