"Yes, you announced yourself as well as any majordomo might have done that service for you. Permit me to introduce myself." The Frenchman held out a hand. "Michel Ducos. You are with the embassy from Grantville?"

"Pleased to meet you. As to the other, no, I'm not. Well, not really. I'm from Grantville, though."

"Yes. Tell me, are you that Joe Buckley?"

"The one and only," Buckley said, smiling broadly. It was always a pleasure to meet a fan.

"I have read some of your writings, you know." It was said almost shyly. "Are you trying to find news of the diplomatic reception?"

"Yes, I am. Are you with the French embassy?"

"I am, indeed. A humble clerk, which is why I must wait outside with the other servants. The Venetians are most strict about such things."

"I noticed. Their people are a lot less talkative than most, too." Buckley waved up at the doorway, where the bouncers had relaxed back into their formation. He noticed that no one else was trying to gatecrash.

"Ah, that is because they are not ordinary servants on these doors. I think it would take an uncommon sort of fellow to get past such as they." Ducos leaned close. "Agents of the State Inquisition," he whispered.

"No kidding?" Buckley said, raising his eyebrows. That was unusual. Not just rent-a-cops on the door, but the genuine article. Secret police, at that. He suddenly had a burning desire to get inside, and a crushing disappointment that he wouldn't.

Still, he might see what he could do here. "The French embassy, you say? A clerk? Tell me, what exactly does a clerk do in an embassy? And why don't we find somewhere out of the cold night air? My treat."

"That does indeed seem like a most convivial suggestion." Ducos beamed. "I warn you, though, I know very few secrets, and I am duty bound not to divulge what paltry things I do know."

Yes, he could salvage something from this evening after all. A clerk would be bound to know a thing or two he could print. Buckley looked around for the nearest taverna.

Chapter 18.

As they left the end of the receiving line the Stones came over to Mazzare.

"Father?" said Tom, "Do we, uh, mingle now?"

It was all Mazzare could do not to break into laughter. Tom Stone was wearing a face that said Beam me up, Scotty-which completed the remarkable picture he made in the suit he was wearing. After their marriage, Tom's wife Magda had fallen on the purple velvet drapes at Lothlorien, declaring them too good for mere curtains. How she had gotten a jacket and britches out of them was nobody's business but her own, but the tie-dyed vest and canary-yellow shirt made the whole ensemble truly eye-watering.

And . . .

As nothing next to the Venetians. Nearly two months of the year were Carnevale to these people, and conspicuous consumption their national religion. Between the cloth-of-gold and other bright colors, the room looked like a mating dance for birds of paradise. Stoner, if anything, blended in fairly well with the other dowdy birds from northern Europe.

If Tom had been used to being the most garishly dressed individual in any given room, he was going down in purple-velvet flames tonight. "How are you bearing up?" Mazzare asked.

"Oh, fine," Stone said, frowning the question back at Mazzare.

"Fine too," said Mazzare, suddenly slightly embarrassed. "I thought you'd find this sort of thing, oh, I don't know-" He waved a hand in the air, and was startled when a glass of wine was put into it by a passing servant.

Stone snagged a drink for himself. "Formal?" He shrugged. "Sure. But, you know, folks seem friendly enough. And, frankly, once you've negotiated the hierarchies and pecking orders of a typical commune full of anarchists and individualists, this sort of thing-" He snapped his fingers for it, ducal display and noble hauteur and all.

"I suppose it must come as something of a relief to have rules to follow."

Stoner grinned. "Sure, man. Hippies take vacations from disorder in the army. Two weeks of drill and discipline and orders and we're refreshed and ready for another year of letting it all hang out."

Jones had walked up to catch the tail end of the joke. "Speaking of things hanging out, I just got taken aside by one of the Sestieri's men."

"Who?" Stoner asked.

"Henchman of one of the-well, I guess 'town fathers' does as well as any other way to put it. He wanted a word about the boys. Frank, to be precise."

Almost as one, they all looked down toward the bottom of the room where, spared the ordeal of the receiving line, Stone's three sons were surrounded by a crowd of younger folk and were keeping the waiters busy.

"What about the boys?" Magda asked, suspicion in every syllable.

"Ah, well. That, ah, that is to say-" Jones began to color slightly, realizing that he was speaking to the boys' stepmother.

Stoner began to look worried, and Mazzare realized his own suspicions were building to match Magda's. The comments that Bedmar had passed were falling into place in Mazzare's mind with a certain lubricious inevitability. He narrowed his eyes. "I think you'd better overcome your embarrassment, Simon."

Jones took a deep breath. He was now a fairly fetching shade of pink. "It's like this. You know we asked the boys to come here with us as much to keep them out of mischief as anything else?"

Nods went around. It had, in point of fact, seemed like a good idea at the time. Mazzare could feel those words in the air, just as damning an indictment as ever they had been.

"And, ah, Frank asked if he could bring a date?"

The penny dropping with Magda was almost audible. "Schweinerei," she murmured.

Stone put a hand on his wife's arm. "Now, Magda, let's not leap to conclusions-"

"I am not leaping to conclusions, Thomas," she hissed. "I am making a reasonable inference from the data as reported to me." She glared at him.

Mazzare winced. That one seemed to be common to all marriages he had seen in action. Hanni gave fair warning that she was about to go nuclear with Gus by quoting theology and Scripture at him. Magda used scientific jargon. In a moment of utter whimsy, he wondered if Stoner had learned any classical philosophy to use in his turn when-

He lost the train of thought to what Jones was saying "-but mostly the Venetians seem to be upset because she's not wearing red shoes."

"Red shoes?" Mazzare said, realizing that for a supposed diplomat he was altogether further behind this conversation than he ought to be. "That means-oh."

Magda's expression was a sight to scare children.

"Tom," said Mazzare hastily, in the faint hope of smoothing this over before the mushroom cloud erupted, "will you have a word with Frank? Not so much about embarrassing us a little-"

"Speak for yourself, Larry," Jones cut in, "but I am more than a little embarrassed."

"Quite. Tom, I think we may have a problem here. We just brought three country boys and turned them loose in a city which is famous for its, ah-"

Magda muttered a very old-fashioned word in German.

"I was going to say courtesans, actually," Mazzare said firmly. Not only had he heard what Magda had called the girl in question, but he'd also heard it used of women who'd been perfectly respectable before, and gone on to be perfectly respectable after they'd played out the bad hand of cards they'd been dealt. Clear moral categorizations were double-edged things, in his view. The world had some very tight corners in it. That was no life for a woman who wanted any self-respect, and he figured the alternative had to be very hard indeed to get her there. The last one he'd spoken to had narrowly escaped burning as a witch.

Then the incongruity hit him. "Hold on," he said. "I thought I recognized that young lady." Maybe two-thirds of the people present were wearing at least half-masks, and most of the people who were masked were wearing full grotesques of one sort or another. The various diplomatic parties were bare-faced, though, as were the doge and his retinue of city dignitaries. So was the girl accompanying Frank, which hardly fit-

"What's the huddle for, guys?" Sharon asked, walking up.

"Hello, Sharon." Mazzare nodded in the direction of the Stone boys. "Do you know anything about Frank's date?"