The Master of the Ledger (Paperback)

Every figure in it was true. That was how the thing was done.

Pera, across the water from Constantinople, 1452. Giacomo Lomellini is twenty and the best hand in the Genoese colony, a clerk with a rare gift: a line ruled true without a straightedge, a column carried to the denaro without paper. He keeps the one creed that governs the books, that you write it as it happened and date it the day it happened.

Then the guns open across the water. Pera declares its neutrality and keeps its counter open, and both sides come to it with money. Every sale is entered at the posted price and dated the day it was made.

One ordinary sale of tallow, timber and cartage. One ordinary tidiness, a delivery moved forward three days. Nine days later Giacomo watches seventy galleys come over the ridge behind his own town wall, hauled overland on a road greased with his own consignment.

He will keep two books for the rest of his life: one that saves his people, and one that convicts him. He will never show either.

The books agree with each other. The cellar does not.

Paperback, 6 x 9 in, 318 pages. ISBN 978-0-557-74381-0.