Free The Venetian by Mark Tricarico Page B

metaphysical riddles, their denial of power stemming not from their fount of intellectual and moral superiority but rather from their lack of courage to claim it.
    “Shall we get this over with? I have business to attend to.”
    Business? At this time of night? The voice chilled his blood as it always did. The man could have said ‘What a lovely day’ and Francesco would have shivered all the same. The night was dark and the man spoke from the shadow of a sagging palazzo. He was invisible, black on black, and Francesco wondered whether this was by design, the man cultivating an air of malevolence. The good humor with which Francesco usually conducted his affairs shriveled under the frost of his disposition.
    “Report.”
    Francesco didn’t respond immediately, heard the impatient sigh.
    “The father. What is happening with him?”
    “The father is as good as dead. The man is broken, a ghost. There has been no contact since the first time, and he wanders about like a lost child. He has not set foot in his workshop since the murder. I cannot fathom how he survives.”
    “He went to the church. Why?”
    How did he know about the church? It seemed the watcher was being watched. Francesco hoped he could hide the surprise in his voice. “That I do not know, but when he left he appeared even more desolate than when he entered.”
    “Good. And what of your…new employee?”
    “I am keeping him busy with meaningless errands,” Francesco answered with no small amount of pride. Despite his distaste for this man, he reluctantly acknowledged that he still strove to please him. “He seems to be a man of little conviction, in a way as lost as his father. He will give us no trouble. He is more than happy to leave this to the council.”
    “Fortunately,” the shadow said, “the only man in that family is already dead.” He smiled in the gloom and Francesco at last saw a small piece of him, wishing to God that he hadn’t.
    ***
    HE SIGHED, MASSAGED his temples. He could see nothing, the night impenetrable. He had been invisible to Francesco, the fat merchant speaking to his left shoulder instead of his face. Invisible. He had to stay that way until this was finished. And when it was, when Venice lay in ruin, its gluttonous aristocracy wandering about glassy-eyed in its tattered finery wondering what had happened, perhaps he would emerge from the shadows to show them the face of their destruction.
    In fact, he had been invisible for as long as he could remember, his once proud family banished into obscurity, wandering the city they had served like shadowy wraiths. Oh it hadn’t been anything overt. No, Venetians are only conspicuous in their consumption. When it comes to the more delicate task of destroying lives, they are much more subtle. A well placed word here, a publically witnessed slight there, and the effect was as devastating as a denunciation in the Piazza San Marco. Why be reminded of your failings when it was so much easier to erase them? His grandfather had been murdered at Constantinople, defending the city against the heathen Turks. He was butchered, skewered like a boar, waiting for Venice to send reinforcements while the senators wrung their hands like old women.
    He still remembered the stories, would never forget the tales of those darks days when the emperor sent warning to the rest of Christendom that the relentless, insatiable Turks were coming. Constantine had begged, had pleaded for Venice to save the Empire. For eight months they waited, waited for help that would never come.
    And his grandfather died, impaled like an insect on a pin, scanning the horizon for Venetian sails that would never leave the lagoon. But rather than honor his grandfather’s sacrifice, Venice thought it better to act as though his family had never existed.
    His father had never recovered from the humiliation, had become angry, always angry. But rather than hate Venice as he should have, he took the coward’s way out and turned