Frank didn't really know what to think. He'd heard of stuff like this happening in Magdeburg. That raw boom town had nothing much in the way of a police force, outside of the few areas where Swedish or U.S. soldiers patrolled, and the crime rate had initially rocketed. Until the Committees of Correspondence had established their own rough-and-ready street law. "Rough-and-ready" was the right expression, too. Frank knew that some criminals had wound up in the Elbe river.

He'd even approved of it himself, when he'd heard about it. But somehow "street justice" was harder to take in person than at a distance. He found himself wishing-for the first time in his scapegrace life, ha!-that Dan Frost were here. Grantville's one-time police chief had been a pain in the ass often enough, sure. But nobody had ever worried about being beaten in a cell, much less the ley de fuega, when Dan Frost took them into custody. There was a lot to be said for professional law enforcement, when you got right down to it, at least when it was done fair and square.

By then, though, Frank discovered that he was nuzzling Giovanna's hair. Which was every bit as luxuriant and healthy as her lungs and . . . well, everything else. So he found it easy enough to forget about the rest.

At least, until he realized that Antonio Marcoli had left off supervising the mayhem and was standing at his elbow.

Frank froze. Okay, so he wasn't doing anything with Giovanna you could really call "feeling her up," but . . .

On the other hand, she was practically feeling him up-boy, those little hands felt great-and he suddenly remembered that The One's papa standing at his elbow was the very same guy who'd just calmly given orders on the subject of broken bones, slit noses, sliced-off ears . . . judicious decisions that castration wasn't probably necessary even though it was a charming idea and maybe another time . . .

I'm dead.

But all Marcoli did was slap him on the shoulder. Then, pried him loose from Giovanna and pulled him close for a very Italian embrace of his own. And then, back at arm's length, one hand on each of Frank's shoulders.

"Splendid man!" Marcoli pronounced. "You are a credit to our cause-and to your own nation, of course."

Back into the embrace. Back out again, at arm's length, hands on shoulders. Frank couldn't help being reminded of any number of mob movies he'd seen. It was kind of eerie. The father of his girlfriend-well, he had hopes, anyway; and things were sure looking good-was a cross between John Brown and the Godfather.

Eek.

"Frank," said Marcoli, "your generosity speaks well of you personally. But-trust me!-fine feelings are wasted on such as them. Criminals in the end are but lackeys for the exploiters. Because of their poor origins, we allow them one warning. More would be a waste of our time and effort-both things of which the revolution is in short supply."

He was dead serious, too. There wasn't a dishonest bone or a poseur's fingernail anywhere on Antonio Marcoli's body. Goofy or not, Frank realized, this man was no parlor pink. Words he used like exploiters and lackeys and The Revolution-you could practically hear the capital letters-came trippingly from his tongue. He might be an impractical man given to harebrained schemes, but a faker he wasn't.

Oh, well. For Giovanna . . .

Frank did make a note to himself that, if there was ever a next time-not that he wanted there to be-he'd try to pick a Love Of His Life with a different kind of father. Maybe a bookkeeper whose idea of adventure was reading a novel. A Jane Austen freak. No westerns or thrillers. Short. Scrawny. A ninety-seven-pound weakling. Nearsighted-no, practically blind . . .

"Come, Frank," said Marcoli, putting one arm around Frank and the other around his daughter. He guided them back down the alley toward his door, away from the final grisly moments of the street justice he'd dispensed. "You must stay the night with us. You should not carry that away as your memory of Venetian hospitality, eh? We can send a note to the embassy by a gondolier, so they won't worry."

Frank hoped like hell Marcoli meant the mugging, and not what had been done to the muggers. The guy might seem like a rather endearing, barmy coot when it came to his enthusiastic plans. But when it came to action, he had all the old Venetian charm of a mob capo.

On the other hand . . . there was the prospect of spending the rest of the evening with Giovanna. Not the night, of course. The one thing Frank Stone was not about to contemplate-in Antonio Marcoli's own house!-was trying to sneak into his daughter's bedroom.

"See?" Antonio demanded. "It is too cold to return, this late at night. Already you are shivering."

Chapter 20.

Joe Buckley drained the last of his glass, and thought about pouring another. He thought better of it. He'd matched the Frenchman Ducos drink for drink in the earlier part of the evening, and the hangover was already starting to nibble at the frontal lobes of his brain. He looked over his notes and decided they were legible, although how they'd look in the cold hard light of morning was anyone's guess. His last ballpoint had died months ago. Thankfully, the modern-style fountain pen had proven a massive hit with Germany's stationers and while they weren't cheap they were very good indeed. In fact, the only ones being made yet were the kind of finely crafted high-end items he'd always liked back up-time. Good notepaper was the problem, since the Turkish stuff fine enough for handwriting tended to be expensive, and the newsprint of the time turned into a blotched rag if you wrote on it with anything harder than a feather pen.

The embassy's reception room was quiet, the silence marred only by the crackling in the grate and Captain Lennox's heroic snoring. Jones and Mazzare were looking bone-weary and ragged. Everyone else seemed to have gone straight to bed. If they'd had a debrief, they hadn't done it anywhere journalistic ears might catch a word or two. Buckley was bone-weary himself, and wanted nothing so much as to drag himself across the way into his own building and his own bed. But he was still on that fine line between drunken bravado and sober enough to know better, which was why he was aching to start asking questions but keeping quiet anyway. Besides, with no deadline to meet, he told himself, he could leave the polite request for an interview for the morning, when everyone would be better rested and feeling more accommodating. There was that to be said for biweekly publication and filing stories by horse-borne mail; you could take a few hours off now and then. He had the Ring of Fire to thank for never having had the tyranny of a daily news hole to fill, and this week's was already nicely plugged with a damned good story about d'Avaux.

Tom Stone came in as Buckley mused on the ruckus that was going to cause. The old hippy-turned-industrialist-and wasn't that a switch!-picked an armchair by Jones and plopped into it.

"Man, am I beat!"

"Tell me about it," said Jones. "My feet are killing me." He had kicked off his shoes and had both much-darned socks on public display on a handy hassock.

Mazzare sat up straighter. "How's Frank?"

Stone grinned. "Mortified, Father. You'd be pleased."

Mazzare chuckled. "Somehow, Tom, I doubt you play the stern father very well."

"Honesty and sweet reason, gentlemen, has always been my watchword in raising those boys."

"Ouch," said Jones. "That's just cruel, with teenagers. Makes me glad my own father believed in sparing not the rod. Or the belt, in his case."

"Man, I don't even like jokes about that."

"Sorry, Tom," Jones said, sounding like he meant it.

Buckley, almost automatically, wondered what lay behind that exchange. He knew altogether too little about any of the three leading figures in the United States delegation. Mazzare's background he had from the State Department press-pack on him, at least as far as his clerical career went. Chaplaincy for the USAF posted in England, a spell at the Vatican, work in the office of the archbishop of Baltimore before coming to pastoral work in Grantville. From Chicago originally. Other than that, nada.

Jones . . . Buckley had only what Rita Stearns had told him. No-Rita Simpson; he'd gotten the information from her after her marriage to Tom Simpson. He and Rita were friends from college, which was why Joe had been in Grantville on the day of the Ring of Fire.

All he knew about Jones was that he was a Grantville local boy, settled as the town's Methodist minister alongside his wife, who was from out of state. There had been that business back in 1631 when he'd somehow come by a sudden surge in church funds. The story had dried up in one cold lead after another and Buckley had reluctantly dropped it, but not without putting acres of bad blood between the two of them, however polite Jones might be to his face.

Stoner-what about him? There was a story waiting to be written. Probably an easy one to get, too, with the man's hippie openness. The problem was finding a time when Stoner was free and available. For a supposed counter-cultural slacker he worked long hard hours. Hippie, commune founder, chemist-like the reason for that wasn't obvious-and growing hash for the government.

Joe had tried to work that angle precisely once, when word got out. There was always good copy to be had from the War on Drugs. But then he'd had a visit from Doctors Nichols and Abrabanel after he'd published the first piece. Nichols had offered-no, insisted on-an interview in which he and Doctor Abrabanel had explained, in excruciating detail, all of the medical uses of cannabis, opium, cocaine and just about every narc-Buckley stopped himself. He'd used the word narcotic precisely once in relation to the drugs under discussion, which had prompted a long, technical and utterly patronizing digression from Doctor Abrabanel about how precisely none of these medicines were in fact narcotics at all, but euphoriants, analgesics, anti-whatevers and whocaresiates.

Whatever. The DEA came in for some trenchant comments from Doctor Nichols, before he'd gotten back to the topic at hand, which was how banning any one of the formerly illegal drugs would condemn hundreds, thousands, to unnecessary pain and hardship.

It had been a thoroughly dispiriting interview. Especially since, for a doctor, Nichols was a thoroughly menacing individual when he put his mind to it. Doctor Abrabanel, on the other hand, had been a lot more urbane and Buckley had turned his "suggestions" on how to make a face-saving retraction and change of line into, though he did say so himself, damn good copy. But the memory was still tender.

Mazzare was speaking again as Buckley's mind wandered. "Does he understand what the problem was?"

"Sure," said Stone, "although I think Frank figures we're being a bunch of old squares about it."

"What did he do?" Buckley asked. He decided it wouldn't be honest just to sit there and listen in, and besides it sounded like a story. If one of Stone's kids had gone along to the first major diplomatic function of the USE embassy to Venice and screwed up-maybe an article on the scandal of nepotism-the viper in the bosom of liberty-

"Not him," Stone said. "He's just having his first real crush. That's the teenage version of trying to get laid with panache and style." The old hippie was grinning. He clearly didn't think that whatever the offense had been was that great, although Mazzare and Jones were both frowning pastoral disapproval.

Buckley didn't ask the obvious question, but Stoner answered it anyway. "His date turned out to be a girl from an artisan family, dressed up in finery. No sweat-except the Venetian upper crust assumed she must have been a whore-since no lower-class girl could have afforded those clothes-and they were a bit miffed that she wasn't wearing the customary red shoes. Go figure."

"Oh." Buckley saw the story vanish before it even formed. Who wanted to hear about horny teenage boys and the fixes they got themselves into thinking with their dicks? Any villager in Germany could tell you that story. By the baker's dozen.

But maybe there was a different angle. A political angle. "Was she one of the chambermaids here?"

Stoner nodded.

Buckley smiled thinly. "Bet you dollars for donuts she was inserted into your staff by the local Committee of Correspondence, then. I know there's one here in Venice, although I haven't been able to find out much about them."

"Mister Buckley," Mazzare said sternly, "I'd really appreciate it if you'd be a little careful there. We are trying to avoid obvious links with the Committee. I realize asking that of you is probably a waste of my time. Still, I am asking." He sighed. "How many of our staff do you think belong to the Committee?"

Buckley shrugged. "Hard to say. For women, membership in the Committees of Correspondence tends to be elastic in areas outside of the United States itself. At a guess, I'd say Frank's new girlfriend is the only actual member of the Venice Committee-but if you looked closely, you'd find that lots of the other chambermaids are friends and relatives of hers. Think of them as Committee, once removed. Most of your staff, of course, are Francisco Nasi's people."