Frank thought it would probably take surgery to get rid of the cringe he was feeling.

Tom Stone had a truly awful way of reaming out his sons. Perfectly reasonable, calm and polite, his soft-spoken admonition littered with hippie ethic and the wisdom of the nineteen-sixties. That was why Giovanna looked thoroughly bewildered. As well she might. She'd been born and brought up in seventeenth-century Venice, and on the wrong side of the tracks at that. So the sight and sound of a twentieth-century hippie deploying his thoroughly weird parenting skills in a lecture on the rights of women, sexual politics and Respect For Cultures Not Our Own was completely outside her experience.

Frank didn't feel that it helped any that his father, hippie that he was, still referred to women as "chicks" despite being nearly three centuries away from the sixties.

Chapter 19.

"I embarrassed you?" Giovanna asked, her tone an odd combination of cool challenge and nervous anxiety. She was now sitting next to him in the gondola taking them back to her father's establishment-she'd not tried to work a boat herself, this night, not wearing those fancy clothes-and regarding him with narrowed eyes.

"No, Giovanna," he said. "I'm not embarrassed by you. It's just . . . It's just that, well, I'm told it's not a big deal in Venice-prostitution, I mean, uh, courtesanship rather-but it is a big deal where we came from. And, uh, it's a different kind of big deal depending on who's talking about it."

He could sense he was babbling but saw no alternative but to babble further. Babble he did, thus, with all the fervor that a drunk with a hangover seizes upon the hair of the dog. "What I mean is that some Americans will denounce you for consorting with harlots and others-like my dad-will denounce you-well, my dad doesn't really denounce anybody, it's a lot worse than that-for being a sexist pig and exploiting women." Keep babbling, keep babbling, maybe there's a bottom to this pit. "And, uh, we didn't know the customs, and it took us by surprise. And we're supposed to be part of a diplomatic mission."

Giovanna's eyes weren't narrow now. They were slits. It suddenly dawned on Frank . . .

Giovanna put it into words. "You think I am a whore?" Her tone of voice was decidedly dangerous, and Frank could feel panic rising. He hunted frantically for reverse gear.

"No, no!" he said, louder than he'd meant. "That's not what I meant! I never thought so, please-not once!-it's the filthy minds of those aristocrats, that's what really caused the trouble!"

Bingo. Even a babbler, now and then, babbles his way clear of disaster. Giovanna's eyes were still slits, but her hostile gaze shifted from Frank to scan the surroundings. By great good luck-oh thank you whatever gods may be-the gondola was passing a stretch of Venice where the mansions of the Case Vecchie were concentrated. The mansions, like the merchant nobility themselves, had the feel of tawdriness under the glitter.

"They are pigs," Giovanna hissed. "Just like them-to flaunt their whores by making them wear red shoes!"

A light at the end of the tunnel. Frank could only hope it wasn't a freight train coming. "Yes, yes-that's pretty much what my dad was talking about." In his own screwy way, but Frank saw no reason to dwell on that subject. "I had no idea it would cause any problem, honest! I just wanted to take you to a party where we might have some fun, and, and-"

Go on, say it, said a little voice in the back of his mind; but he couldn't, not yet. "I'm sorry," he managed at last. "I thought you'd like to be taken somewhere fancy like that. I should have thought about what kind of mess it might drop you in."

Giovanna was visibly softening now. Very rapidly, in fact. She even put her hand on his. It was like she'd touched him with a live wire.

"It is not your fault, Frank."

"I guess. I just screwed up tonight. It was me embarrassed you. I'm sorry." He wondered if he should try puppy-dog eyes, and then thought better of it. The dating tactics that had worked in up-time America-okay, occasionally worked, Frank was really no Lothario-were completely out of place here. Hippie upbringing or not, Frank was no fool. The Marcolis might be revolutionaries, but they were still seventeenth-century revolutionaries. Their radicalism, he was quite sure, only went so far-and probably not that far at all on some subjects. One of which undoubtedly included what they would regard as matters of family honor. With a capital H. In red ink, with a border of daggers and skulls-and-crossbones. The fact that Antonio Marcoli had magnanimously waived the necessity of a chaperone didn't mean that he would have casual up-time attitudes about sex. "Freedom" was one thing; "free love" another.

And besides . . . Frank wasn't really just interested in getting laid. Not that he wasn't interested in that, of course. For an instant, he had to fight down a ferocious surge of hormones that threatened to addle his wits completely at the worst possible time. But sex was only part of it. He didn't understand why, exactly-maybe he had a taste for the exotic-but something about Giovanna excited him far more than any American girl he'd ever had the hots for.

Giovanna sniffed, putting her nose in the air. It was a very pretty nose. For the first time, ironically, it dawned on Frank that it was also what people usually called an "aristocratic nose." A lot like Sophia Loren's, in fact. Odd that he hadn't noticed that before-since he'd certainly noticed the resemblance to Sophia Loren's figure. Um. Well, maybe his dad was right. A little bit. Maybe Frank did suffer from a touch of callow adolescence. What his dad called "infantile boob fixation."

Giovanna sniffed again. The sound, this time, had the flavor of doom about it. A very aristocratic sound, as it happens. "You should not apologize, Frank! I will not have it!" Then, more softly-oh, very softly indeed-and with suddenly warm and open eyes: "I am not embarrassed to prick the pretensions of the parasites who grind the blood and flesh of the Italian nation under their filthy heels."

Frank almost choked. The tone was of a piece with the moonlight on the water of the lagoon, with the soft strains of distant music that reached them from a myriad of Carnevale parties. The words? Straight from Revolution 101. Or Introduction to Storming the Bastille. No, wait, that was the French revolution. What had the Italians called theirs? The risorgimento, he thought. It was led by some guy in the future named . . .

The only thing Frank could remember was that the name rhymed with Pavarotti. Of course, that was no help, since half the names in Italian rhymed with Pavarotti.

Verdi? No, that was the opera guy.

Whatever. It didn't matter, because that had all happened in another universe. In the here and now, it looked like the name was going to be "Marcoli." At least, that seemed to be the ambition of Giovanna's father. Frank had a horrible feeling he had no choice but to get with Messer Marcoli's program completely, if he wanted to get anywhere with Giovanna.

"Well," he said, trying to be as gruff and manly about it as he could, "if it's all right with you. I should have checked first, though. Wasn't respectful to just drop you in all that with no warning." Yeah, make out you planned it all along, that's right. Dumbass. At times, Frank wondered if there was any way to get rid of that treacherous little voice in the back of his mind. Stand it against a wall and shoot it, maybe.

But he couldn't dwell on the political risks involved, not with Giovanna looking at him like that. She had a smile on her face again. A shy one, to his surprise-though not so shy that those glorious dimples weren't showing.

A moment of truth dawned on Frank. That moment of truth, he dimly understood, that eventually comes to young males who aren't hopelessly self-absorbed-which, of course, excluded most of the beastly critters-that girls have minds of their own. And that they, too, have treacherous inner voices that they'd often like to send to the chopping block. They, too, plan and plot and scheme and-most of all-wonder what they look like to the young man they're fascinated with.

Hot damn! The little voice was back online, and finally saying something he wanted to hear. She's actually interested in me! REALLY interested! No fooling!

He gave himself a little mental shake. The plain truth of it was that he was now almost certain that she was The One. The last thing he could afford was to lapse into teenage folly. Be cool, Frank. Maintain!

But she was talking again-and, Frank guessed, had made her own decision that The Right Thing To Do Now Was Stay Cool. "As to the diplomacy, Frank, I think you are fretting unnecessarily. Who cares what the stinking Case Vecchie think? My father will have his own opinion."

Oh, swell. Antonio Marcoli's reaction, when he heard about the evening, was exactly what Frank was worried about.

That he would hear about it from Giovanna, Frank didn't doubt for a moment. What separated Giovanna's father from a comic opera figure was that the man was genuinely charismatic. Even Frank had felt the pull of Antonio Marcoli's magnetically intense personality. And that charisma was something he exuded as a father, not simply as the leader of a political group. Giovanna and her brothers-the cousins, too-were closely attached to him and obviously trusted him and confided in him. It simply wouldn't occur to Giovanna not to tell her father.

Frank cringed, right there on the gondola seat. Another vivid image had just flashed through his mind. If earlier fantasies about Giovanna had caused certain organs to swell, this image caused them to shrivel right up. The Marcolis, lined up in order of seniority, each with a knife in his hand, waiting their turn to carve a large and painful piece out of Frank's hide. Or-

The organs in question raced for cover, gibbering with terror. Frank almost clutched himself. Fortunately, a further image brought surcease from pain: Antonio Marcoli, passing out pistols to his clan, so that the lot of them could riddle Frank's poor mutilated body with bullet holes for good measure . . .

To his astonishment, Giovanna burst into laughter. He gaped at her.

"Oh, Frank! The expression on your face-it's priceless!" She covered her mouth with a hand, trying to stifle the laughter.

"I don't see what's so funny," he growled.

"Why do you think-" She had to break off, overcome by giggles. By the time she recovered, Frank saw that the gondola was about to moor.

I'm dead. The organs in question seemed to have vanished entirely, now. Not that it mattered, of course, since Frank Stone would never have any use for them. Not in the short span of life left to him.

As the gondola drew up, Giovanna came lithely to her feet and extended a hand. "Come. My father will react differently than I think you expect."

Seeing no option-what the hell, at least he'd go down holding her hand-Frank started to follow her. Over her shoulder, Giovanna smiled and said: "But do not forget to pay the gondolier. That is something to really worry about."

With a start, Frank realized that he had completely forgotten that small matter. Hastily, he handed over some coins without even trying to figure out if they came to the right amount. From the look on the gondolier's face, though, he'd overpaid him considerably.

Frank didn't stop to get change. He had other things on his mind; and, besides, at least the gondolier would mourn his passage.

Once he stepped ashore, though, he felt himself relax a little. The gondolier had let them off at a pier rather than enter the narrow canals of the island. Murano was a small island just to the north of Venice's main islands, where Venice's glassblowing industry had been concentrated since the thirteenth century. But since Murano had a somewhat unsavory reputation, most gondoliers refused to enter it directly.

That meant they had a bit of a walk to get to the Marcoli building. Blessedly.

Even more blessedly, because Giovanna tucked her hand into his elbow. She was almost snuggling him. She'd never done that before.

"If you don't mind, I'd like to use your arm," she said sweetly. "The footing is not good here. And it's very dark."

The excuse was transparent. The footing was no worse than anywhere in Venice, and Frank had seen her earlier, practically dancing across it with light and sure feet. True, that had been in daylight, and it was now well after sundown. But there was a full moon out, and visibility really wasn't that bad.