I must be careful here. Say too much, and I spoil the particular pleasure of meeting Lino Briani for the first time in A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy. But I 
may confess a few things about where he came from and why I chose to put him in the novel at all.
Costanza’s older brother is fashioned after a real person I had the misfortune of knowing some years ago. He was an engineer at a company I managed in Brazil. Twenty-nine years old and still as spoiled as the most entitled member of a frat house. His family was not affluent, yet all his friends were from the wealthiest families in the city. For the better part of ten years I loved him as a dear nephew—until he betrayed me. Twice. I am old-fashioned; I always give people a second chance. Some people get more than a hundred. People call me a sucker.
He was also the cockiest cock in the yard. In the beginning I found it endearing, put it down to youth, smiled, and moved on. Then, as the years passed, it stopped being endearing. It stopped making anyone smile. He became a bully, someone who would publicly humiliate those he judged to belong to an inferior social class. In his own mind he was a genius, and everyone around him was stupid. He nursed a profound inferiority complex about his height, which was in truth perfectly average. What was not average was his ego. That imbalance gave him a larger-than-life, almost comical quality that could either entertain or exhaust, depending on the day and your patience. In short: a little cock. Little Lino.
I had alluded to him several times before he appears in Chapter Twenty-Two on his return from a business trip to Venice, as befits a Florentine cloth merchant of his station. I introduced him first as someone much loved within his household. That was deliberate. A villain who arrives already hissed at is a cheap villain; one who arrives with the warmth of a family around him is something more interesting.
The turn comes when Lino discovers the secret romantic relationship between Lorenzo and Vittorio. What he does with that knowledge tells the reader everything: he does not report it out of principle or outrage. He sees an opportunity. He will use what he knows to advance his influence in the Signoria, or he will go to the inquisitors. The choice he offers Lorenzo—marry my sister, or face ruin—is not 
the act of a man with convictions. It is the act of a man who believes that information is currency and that everyone has a price.
And yet. I strived not to portray him as a simple antagonist. That is not how I write villains, nor would it have been true to the man who inspired him. Lino Briani is not monstrous. He is human, which in some ways is worse. He possesses charm, family loyalty, and genuine feeling. That makes his choices more troubling than pure malice would. I will say no more.
Readers of A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy will soon form their own opinion of Cortona‘s Little Lino—the turd afloat in the pond.
Rio de Janeiro, the ii day of June, MMXXVI
A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy is now available at major online bookstores.
