“I think I should prefer the something,” she said.
Chapter 30
Buckley put down his pen. There, finally done. A complete write-up on the current activities—plight might be a better word—of the Committee of Correspondence in Venice. Tiny numbers, worthless budget, reliance on street kids, the lot. Combined, however, with a wild plan to liberate Galileo from the clutches of the Inquisition.
Damn, damn, damn, damn. It might be the greatest story of the year, maybe the decade—like being able to scoop John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry—and Joe wasn’t sure if he could print it. No, scratch that. He could print it, all right. But the consequences . . .
He thought back ruefully to a conversation he’d had with Father Mazzare only a couple of weeks before. Worse than the consequences of keeping quiet, indeed.
He’d heard a lot from eavesdropping, and filled in the rest from conversations with Michel Ducos. The French sympathizer of the Committee was generally taciturn, but put a few drinks in him and he sometimes became downright loquacious. Joe had met Michel’s type before. The kind of guy who, a few sheets to the wind, just couldn’t help bragging about things.
Somehow they’d gotten news of Galileo being moved to Rome. Somehow they’d gotten hold of weapons, too. What kind and from where Joe hadn’t been able to find out, except that he was sure that at least some of them had been provided by the Stone boys.
And that was an explosive element to the story, right there in itself. Even if the Stone boys hadn’t provided weapons, the fact that they were knee-deep in the plot would be enough to connect it inseparably with the United States of Europe. Only the week before, Buckley himself had done a piece on the copies of Galileo’s book that were flooding out of a press somewhere, and he figured he could guess the source now.
Knee-deep? Joe smiled to himself. Say better: up to their elbows in it. He remembered Gerry, smeared up to the elbows with oil and ink, the very image of a hillbilly jackleg mechanic. He must be running one of the Committee’s presses into an early trip to the great scrapyard in the sky. How they were getting them out and to the Inquisition was anyone’s guess. On the whole, given Joe’s record in finding out things he’d rather not have known, he wasn’t sure he wanted to make any efforts in that direction.
Buckley himself had spoken out in his article in favor of Galileo, of scientific freedom, of freedom of speech. And here he was with an opportunity to make damned sure the man stayed in the toils of the Inquisition and do himself a good turn into the bargain. On the one hand, the scoop of the year, maybe the decade. On the other, Galileo-Gali-freaking-leo!-in a damp cell somewhere. That was a nice clear image in Buckley’s mind. Galileo’s fierce, bearded visage, unbowed and defiant, glaring out through the bars of some dank cell.
It was all horsepuckey, of course. Buckley knew about the house arrest and the soft treatment the old guy was getting. No slouches in the PR department themselves, the church, they weren’t going to give the man at the cutting edge of seventeenth-century science any treatment anyone could describe as medieval. In truth, there was something more than a little comical about the idea of the Marcolis and the Stones busting him out of a luxury apartment in Rome.
Buckley sighed deeply, looking at the tablet full of notes from which he’d compiled the story. Many of those notes he’d scribbled from hiding under that window. He’d managed to divert any suspicion by spending quite a bit of time in the open with members of the Committee on Murano and elsewhere. Interviews with Marcoli and Massimo, the lot, all of it purporting to be—which was truthful enough, in itself—material for an article on the Committee’s overt work.
Well . . . Joe decided he’d send that part of the story in the mail to Magdeburg. He’d send it in the morning, after a good night’s sleep. And when he’d done that, he’d think about the rescue story. Maybe he’d send it, too. Maybe he wouldn’t. He was too tired to think clearly right now.