"I noticed." Buckley gave Ron a wry grin. "I met one of your Baker Street Irregulars on the way here. Name of Benito. Nice kid, under the dirt. I might have given him a clinching argument about learning to read. Told him I made money writing."

"I can't say I know all their names. But I'll mention him to Massimo, see if we can't follow up on that for you."

"Thanks," Buckley said, and then he saw Ducos. He stood up and called out, "Michel!"

Ducos looked around, face blank, and then he saw Buckley and smiled back. "Joe!" He came over. "You know, Monsieur Buckley, you nearly got me into terrible trouble at the embassy, publishing what you did."

"Eh? What's that?" Marcoli rose and came over, a suspicious note in his voice. "How in trouble, Michel? And who is this?"

"Monsieur Marcoli, permit me to name Monsieur Buckley to you, American journalist. Monsieur Buckley, if Monsieur Stone has not already had the honor, this is Monsieur Marcoli, who is the leader of this Committee of Correspondence."

"You know each other?" said Marcoli, and then, "Jesu! That Buckley? Are you?"

Buckley nodded and Marcoli favored him with an enthusiastic embrace and a flurry of protestations of how honored he was to have Buckley there.

"But what is this talk of trouble?" Marcoli asked at length.

"Monsieur Ducos was kind enough to give me some information for my story about d'Avaux," Buckley said.

Marcoli beamed. "Michel? That was you? You kept that quiet!" And he was off again, this time embracing and congratulating Ducos. Phrases like blow against the oppressor, and struck the serpent with the sword of truth drifted out like flecks of foam from a torrent.

And with that, they were all friends. Marcoli promised Joe a full interview, perhaps the very next day but not today, since they had a private business meeting right after the public meeting.

Buckley saw Gerry Stone with oil up to his elbows emerging from the back room, where apparently he was chief of maintenance on the Committee's printing press. Frank wandered in too, but hardly seemed to notice Joe's presence beyond a murmured: "Oh, hi, Mr. Buckley."

Come to that, the lad hardly seemed to notice his own presence, when Marcoli's daughter was in his line of sight. Which was . . . almost always. Buckley snickered to himself. Teenagers. It was pretty clear that Giovanna herself was very happy with the situation.

Not that anything was "going on," Joe was certain. Frank Stone and Giovanna Marcoli moved around each other like a double star. Constant glances back and forth did for the force of gravity-pretty damn ferocious force, judging by the frequency of the doe-eyed looks they gave each other-but Buckley noted that they almost always maintained a certain distance. The double handful of Marcoli sons and cousins were watching the couple all the time, from what Joe could tell. Not with any hostility, no-in fact, it was obvious they all approved of Frank. But there'd be no hanky-panky here, either, fervent revolutionists or not. Lurking somewhere under the approval was the hint that if their sister might cry-or ought to, even if she didn't-one Frank Stone might bleed.

But that was the only positive note. The meeting started as advertised. A few of the urchins drifted in-Benito among them, Buckley noted. But other than them and the members of Marcoli's extended family, Ducos, the Stones and Buckley himself, the meeting had the traditional audience for such events: three old men and a dog. One of the old men remained fast asleep throughout Marcoli's hour-long speech. So did the dog.

There wasn't even anyone Buckley could peg as the Obvious Cop, who might at least have explained the execrable turnout. Which was a shame, in a way, because while Antonio Marcoli was not rowing with both his oars in the water, he was a damn fine speaker. Buckley got most of it down, and figured he could let the guy revise and extend it later to fill in what he'd missed.

And that was it. A chorus of good-byes and good nights, and almost the entire inner corps-Messers Marcoli and Massimo, Giovanna, three of the boys, Ducos and the Stones-departed. They were going to deal with "routine administrative business," according to Ron Stone.

Fair enough, Buckley thought. He stayed in the main room of the taverna for one last drink before quitting for the evening and returning to his rooms to sit down and write up his notes.

He was halfway down his glass of wine when he realized something didn't make sense. Routine administrative business?

That didn't require three USE visitors or their visiting rep from the Paris Committee. My journo-sense is tingling, Buckley thought.

One advantage of narrow alleys and no street lighting was that it was comparatively easy to sneak around the back unseen and crouch under a shuttered window.

He listened to what was being discussed. Something about Galileo, was all he caught at first. Then, as his ears adjusted after maybe a minute, he silently reached for tablet and pen.

Dynamite. That patron saint is getting candles for a year. And if I can't find out which saint it is, the way my luck's running tonight, I might as well give up.

Chapter 24.

Maestro Luzzatto's office wasn't what Sharon Nichols thought of when she heard the words Expensive Commercial Lawyer. It was more what she thought of when she heard the words broom closet. Actually, given the amount of paper and vellum stuffed into every available nook and cranny and piled atop the desk-albeit in neat, fussy piles-it was still more what the words filing cabinet brought to mind. The office was absolutely tiny, and part of a building shared with about thirty other lawyers. Some of the less well-established ones were crammed two and even three at a time in rooms about this size. With her and Magda and the man Luzzatto had brought them here to meet, the place was stuffed wall to wall with bodies and legal impedimenta.

She would have ascribed it all to ghetto crowding, but she knew this was pretty much what real law offices always looked like, even back in the century she'd come from. She'd dated a law student in college for a few months-whose father had been a lawyer before him-and he'd told her that all law offices had a population-and-paper density that shamed Calcutta. The aim of the game was to pack as many fee-earners as possible into as little rented space as possible. The elegant, book-lined rooms they showed people on TV shows were modeled on the conference rooms reserved for client meetings. The actual working space, he'd told her, usually looked like an explosion in a paper mill followed by a commando raid by the coffee-ring gnomes.

Still, she was sure this level of crowding was extreme. That was, of course, the ghetto effect. The word still gave Sharon a touch of conceptual whiplash, not least because this neighborhood was the original "Ghetto" for which all the others would be named in the centuries to follow. Plus, this was the place where the Jews lived, rather than the black folks. Not that Sharon had any real personal experience herself with the black ghettos of the old United States. She only knew the ghettos of up-time America from stories her father occasionally told, and the few months she'd spent working for him in his clinic.

The Jewish ghetto in Venice wasn't really a poor neighborhood, either, even if the severe crowding could make it look that way at times. The inhabitants might live packed in like sardines, but they did pretty well-although they suffered disproportionately from fires and disease. Venice might not like their company much, but Jews could do business just as well as Christians on the islands of the lagoon; and when it came to making a deal, they made the same deals as everyone else. They even had the advantage-if you were prepared to go looking for a bright side to the seventeenth century's equivalent of Jim Crow laws-of sumptuary regulations which forbade them the extravagant finery of the Venetian upper crust. Maintaining that facade could be extremely expensive, so the Jews probably weren't doing quite as badly as the rest of Venice out of the current lean time.

"Not doing as badly" was a relative term, of course. The ghetto was as down-at-the-heels as most of Venice, and the plague had probably hit it worse than it had the rest of the city. Having met them on the way in and walked them up to his office, Luzzatto had remarked that the place felt empty these days. Hard as it was to imagine, before the plague it had apparently been much more crowded.

Luzzatto sent an office-boy running for coffee and began with introductions. "Signora Nichols, Signora Stone, may I present to you Messer Giuseppe Cavriani, who is the agent in La Serenissima for the Cavriani family." That provoked a round of charmed-to-meet-yous and a rather lengthy one, as Cavriani insisted on rising and bowing. Sharon wondered how he managed it without knocking something over.

Coffee came, presented on quite a nice tray-although the tray itself had to be balanced between two stacks of parchment briefs tied up in bundles with actual by-God red tape. While Luzzatto was fussing over the tiny cups and the Turkish-style coffee pot, Sharon took a good long look at Cavriani.

She knew the name-the family name, at least-even if she'd never met the man. That had been part of the briefing which Ed Piazza had given them, before they left on this mission to Venice. Today, Piazza was the appointed governor of the province of the USE known either as "Thuringia" or "East Virginia." (That depended on who you talked to. No official decision had been made yet regarding the eventual name of the province which had once been a semi-independent nation under Grantville's leadership. In fact, the official government stationery of the province still read "United States.") But before that he'd been the secretary of state of the original small U.S.; and, during that time, he'd been approached by one of the representatives of the Cavriani clan. Ed hadn't gone into the details, for reasons he had declined to give-which, to Sharon, meant diplomatic skullduggery and maneuver. She'd asked her father about it, and he'd told her he was pretty sure the Cavrianis were also agents of the Neapolitan radicals as well as legitimate continental businessmen.

Although he hadn't explained his reasons, Ed Piazza had asked all of them to report to him if they ran across any Cavrianis in Venice. And . . .

Now they had.

Sharon was a bit intrigued to see that a Cavriani in the flesh didn't look at all like the combination of bomb-throwing anarchist and suave Genevan man-of-affairs she would have imagined. If anything, he looked like a younger, shorter version of Father Mazzare. Less gray at the temples, a little fuller in the face, he had the same aquiline profile and deepset eyes. He smiled rather more readily, though, and had an animation that contrasted with Mazzare's habitual cool demeanor.

Luzzatto explained that he wanted them to consult with Messer Cavriani, because although he wasn't Case Vecchie or even a retainer of one, he did have a lot of connections throughout Europe by way of his extended family, which was based in Geneva. After Luzzatto had finished explaining all the things the Cavrianis did, what Sharon gathered was that they were professional middlemen. Luzzatto did not say anything about whatever their political proclivities might be.

Well . . .

Sharon decided she'd go along with Luzzatto's inclinations. He was probably right, she reflected, that using a middleman like Cavriani gave them better prospects than trying to deal directly with the trading houses themselves.

"So, please," said Cavriani after Luzzatto's prologue was done, "tell me what you are trying to achieve on the Rialto. Maestro Luzzatto has given me sight of your list of desiderata, and I have heard a great deal from my cousin at Geneva about how you Americans work."

"Nothing bad, I hope," said Sharon.

"Oh, no, no, no-quite the contrary. Dear Leopold attended your Rudolstadt Colloquy, you know, and heard the argument there."

Leopold Cavriani. Yes, that was the name Ed Piazza had mentioned, Sharon could now remember. She relaxed a bit. If this Cavriani wasn't trying to hide his connection with the other one, he was presumably not up to anything worse than middling-level skullduggery. Of course, in Venice-all of Italy, so far as she could tell-middling-level skullduggery probably put you somewhere on the third or fourth level of Dante's Inferno.

"He was much impressed," Cavriani continued with what seemed to be real enthusiasm, "by the contrast between the manner in which these things are traditionally done in the Germanies and the way in which you Americans approach business. He also had high praise indeed for your Maestro Piazza. A very able and forthright man, according to Leopold."

Sharon nodded, but decided to say nothing. In point of fact, she thought Ed Piazza was a very able and forthright man herself. She also liked him personally. On the other hand, he'd spent most of his adult life as a high school principal. High school had not agreed well with Sharon Nichols. She'd been one of those bright-but-easily-bored kids who had been habitually labeled an "underachiever" in high school and hadn't really come into her own until she reached college. She'd admit it was probably childish, but even after several years of college and almost three years of the seventeenth century, she was still nursing something of a grudge. In her opinion, high school principals were probably assigned somewhere to the fifth or sixth level of the Inferno.

"Now, let us to business!" Cavriani said brightly. "Just how were you proposing to get some of this? Half of it I never heard of, to be honest. And I hear you got short shrift from the Casa Falier a couple of days ago. Yes?"

"We certainly did, and the fellow was very rude!" snapped Magda. "I should like it if we do not use their services at all for this business."

Cavriani rocked a hand back and forth in doubt. "I think maybe you got Messer Petro Falier on a bad day." He snickered. "Not that he has many good days, you understand. He's a sharp customer, that one, although as you say, lacks in the manners department. You aren't the first he's been that way with, and the story surprised no one when it got around that you'd had bruises off him. And, Signora Stone, may I add that all the Rialto heard what you called him to his face, and two-thirds of it agrees with you. But, as I say, he's good and his House is good, too. So, if we need Casa Falier for anything, we try to delay it until we've got you, ah, raised in the profile a little, yes?"