Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,

-E'en then would be some stooping, and I choose

Never to stoop.

Chapter 29.

Stoner began to realize, as he stared at the forbidding stack of documents in front of him, the truth of two essential propositions.

First, that there was a very real value in the rejection of materialism, which was that it saved you a lot of work.

The second was that a cheerful willingness to be helpful was going to get taken cheerful advantage of sooner or later.

Magda and Sharon and Benjamin Luzzatto had come in grinning from ear to ear. Well, Sharon was grinning from ear to ear, Magda was smiling demurely and Benjamin was wearing his professional po-face with a hint of cheer. It didn't matter. Sharon was grinning enough for seven or eight people, let alone three.

"We have been shopping," Magda said brightly.

"Exactly," Sharon added, "when the going gets tough, the tough go-"

"-shopping," Stoner capped the quotation, just as he went weak at the knees because Benjamin had produced what looked like about thirty kilos of paper and actual by-God parchment, done up in no-messing-around by-God red tape. He dropped the package on the table with an expensive-sounding thud.

Benjamin then cracked a smile himself. "We have been very busy, but we need some signatures and seals to make it proper and legal."

Stoner looked from the paperwork to the short, bright-eyed Jewish lawyer and commercial agent. And back again. And back to Benjamin. At least Benjamin wasn't grinning his head off, although Stoner suspected that was because he took money seriously and not because he wanted to help Stoner mourn his final passage into the world of bread-headdity. Nevertheless, the sight of a lawyer, smiling-even a short, runty, friendly one like Benjamin-would normally have sent Stoner diving through the window into the canal. Had Benjamin been grinning as widely and sharkily as Sharon was doing, he doubted whether he'd have bothered to open the window first.

"So, what is all this?" he asked, gesturing weakly.

"Money," said Magda, uttering the code-word that told him to more or less leave it to her. "And commodities for all of the industries at home, and some other deals to make it all work."

"All this just to buy stuff?" he asked, fishing for a full explanation of some kind. He supposed short words and a diagram were too much to hope for . . .

"Ah," said Benjamin. "I have here-" He reached inside his kaftan. Benjamin sometimes found it convenient to get by in Venice by dressing as a Turk rather than wearing the distinguishing marks of his Jewish faith, and the Venetian authorities seemed willing to tolerate the minor subterfuge as long as he didn't overdo it. Stoner didn't understand the social complexities involved in the little dance, but he always found that garment a bit amusing. The garb of a hippie back up-time had originally been the garb of a rich Muslim.

What wasn't so amusing was what Benjamin was pulling out. Stoner felt his heart sink as Benjamin produced one of Grantville's precious stock of laptops. Powerpoint slides and spreadsheets had been treated as the direct Word of God by every seventeenth-century businessman who had arrived in Grantville. The Sephardim, though, had been particularly enthusiastic; the Viennese scion of the Abrabanel clan, Don Moses, was widely known as a slideshow bore of truly terrifying proportions. Stoner held up his hands. "Benjamin, can I just have the edited highlights?"

Benjamin looked perplexed. "Signor Stone, all of it is important. And the Signora Stone, she has made some most excellent trades in your behalf. There is, first the share in the Mocenigo fleet to-"

Sharon put a hand on Benjamin's shoulder and the birdy little lawyer ran down to a halt. Stoner realized, with the first spark of joy he had felt since the three of them had walked in, that she was genuinely, freely grinning, not just keeping her end up for company.

"Stoner," she said, "it breaks down nice and simple. We sold shares in all the potential mines that our exploratory crews have been finding. We sold metals futures in the mines that are ready to start producing this year. King Gustav's copper concessionaires have been coming through us for the Mediterranean market because we agreed to work-what was it, Benjamin?"

"Del Credere," said Benjamin.

"Del Credere, and maybe I'll explain that later. But we got a few good copper contracts and beat the price up here, which made our friend in Bohemia sweat a bit. He sent a couple of angry messages saying that we were messing up the market deliberately. I understand a number of folks back in Magdeburg told him not to be such a baby. Anyway, that's as may be. Once we started shifting the copper here, and the mining shares in all manner of other things, we had some seed capital and took up a number of margin loans to get into the serious action-"

Stoner sank down to sit cross-legged on the floorboards, feeling rather the way he did after a good deep toke: a little dizzy with hypoxia before the real rush hit.

"I surrender," he said in a weak voice. Then, more firmly: "How much of the stuff on the list could you get? You've been at this for nearly two months, but we haven't had anything delivered yet-"

He looked up, from face to face. He couldn't quite read the expressions. "What?"

Silence. First Sharon, then Magda, and finally Benjamin picked a chair and sat down. Looking harder, Stoner saw that Benjamin was looking faintly pleased with himself, but was waiting for his clients to talk. Magda looked like she had gotten the cream, and was now smiling as widely as a properly-brought-up guildmaster's daughter could. Sharon was back to grinning like a maniac.

"What?" Stoner asked again. The grin was proving infectious, although he didn't know why.

"Well, you know that the biggest item on the list was the hundredweight of lac?" Sharon asked.

"That wasn't one of mine," Stoner said, "but, like, I'll take your word for it."

"Well, we went for that one first and found a place downtown that had some."

Magda sniffed. "That man was no gentleman." She uttered the phrase with the same tone and spin and venom some people used for the phrase baby-eating satanist.

Sharon snorted. "The jerk told Benjamin that if his clients wanted a hundred pounds of anything but spice we could buy retail like the other peasants."

"Ha!" Magda said. "Sharon does the poltroon too much justice. He used coarse language as well."

Sharon looked hard at Magda.

Magda looked back, perfectly calmly. "Well, I know what that word meant in Latin, and from the tone of voice he used I presumed he meant it in Venetian."

"Oh," said Sharon, evidently surprised.

Stoner wasn't; sufficiently riled, Magda could take the hide off a wild boar with her language, much of it from the classics at that.

"Anyway," Sharon went on, "I said to Benjamin that we should buy in bulk and from source if we could."

Benjamin nodded. "The signoras were mostly insistent that we not deal through that house for anything. Naturally, I was proactive on my clients' behalf."

Stoner wondered if his wince had shown. Laptops and PowerPoint weren't the only things that the Istanbul Sephardim-and, apparently their Spanish and Italian cousins-had taken to. Godawful MBA-speak was catching among them like the clap in a whorehouse. Stoner recalled discussing that with Sharon's dad, Doctor Nichols. The good doctor's theory was that the Abrabanels had gone over Grantville's limited stock of legal and financial textbooks looking for any tricks they had missed. Whatever else they had found in the course of those studies, they had been particularly taken by the management jargon. The fact that they seemed to have an eye for the most anus-clenching excesses was, Doctor Nichols reckoned, their big joke at the expense of the twentieth century that most of the up-timers hadn't gotten yet.

Stoner saw that there was a question expected of him at this point. "So, what did you do?"

Sharon put an arm around Benjamin, who looked briefly alarmed and then appeared to force himself to relax. "Benjamin was magnificent," she said. "We spent a couple of days over in the ghetto picking up local information and making contacts, getting notes of introduction, that kind of thing. And then we went shopping. You see, Stoner, this is one of those towns where they don't make much of anything except the glass, which I'll tell you about, but they do make deals. You should take a walk through the Rialto sometime, it's wall-to-wall deals."

"I, uh, heard."

"Yeah, and part of it was all of those shares you got."

"What? What shares?"

Magda sighed, and she and Sharon looked at each other. Magda looked hard at Stoner. "You recall that you have been giving lectures and seminars on alchemy and physic-?"

Stoner leapt to his feet. "Now hold on-you charged admission?" He realized as the words escaped that he had raised his voice. He took a deep breath. "Guys, I'm sorry and all for shouting, but I wouldn't have agreed to that."

Magda was first to get over the shock of Stoner looking angry. "No, Tom, schatz, we did no such thing!" Stoner could see that she was a little upset that he might have thought so.