“Ja?”
“I think we maybe ought to turn out for Tom’s lectures, don’t you?”
“Well, naturally . . .” Magda said, frowning at the implied suggestion that she hadn’t been going to support her man.
“No, that’s not what I meant. I mean we should go with our trading hats on. Not every chemist is as unworldly as your Stoner.” She smiled to take any possible sting out of the words. To hear Magda tell it, as well as being the most frustrating thing about Stoner, his impracticality was one of the things she loved most about him. “And maybe there’s a slice of that action to be had.”
Magda, grasping what Sharon was driving at immediately, grinned back. And it was not a friendly grin, either. Sharon realized that there was something deeply predatory about her friend, something that had been aroused to a terrible hunger by the scent of deals in the water.
She suspected that the next few weeks were going to be very interesting indeed. As Magda crossed the room to mop Tom’s fevered brow, Sharon began looking around for Luzzatto to make an appointment.
Chapter 23
Singing. Some damned idiot was singing, somewhere in the street below. He’d been at it for some time, too, long enough to wake Buckley up. Joe rolled over and grabbed his watch. No need for the backlight function, it was already full day.
That helped wake him up as well. The fact that he’d gotten a suite of rooms with a nice, big, east-facing window that gave him a view of the Isola di Sant’Elena and its cathedral, and beyond that the Lido and the sea, was all very well. But the sun came up right in the window and the first thing it did in the morning was heat the room up to somewhere near boiling point. The bull’s-eye panes in the window didn’t help; they focused the sunlight onto the far wall in a strange and eye-watering pattern of rippled light.
Just after midday, he saw from his watch. He could probably have figured that by the position of the sunlight on the wall. Joe lived in a permanent paranoia of his watch breaking. He’d had the good fortune to have a self-winding model, nothing fancy, but it was one of the few timepieces from the old universe that was still working. He’d only been half-joking with himself when he’d thought to mark the position of the sun on the wallpaper at every hour. A couple of times he’d had scares that his watch was about to wind down. He wound it anyway, for the reassurance of having the time right.
He rolled out of bed, and stood swaying for a moment before rooting around for the chamberpot. He hadn’t gotten into bed before about four o’clock that morning. He’d stayed light on the sauce, but that didn’t mean he felt particularly human this morning. Afternoon, rather.
This was a town that liked to party, and party good and hard at that. Would it be too much, he wondered, to do a tourist guide piece? Venice could certainly use the income, and there were plenty of people in Europe with money who might want to come down here for a week or two.
He coughed, good and hard. Those tavernas could be damned smoky. The prevalence of tobacco in seventeenth-century Europe had come as a surprise to Joe, as it had to most of the up-timers. But where many up-timers had been relieved that their addiction could still be fueled, Joe had quit smoking as soon as the cigarettes ran out. Unlike some others, he’d not been able to bring himself to try what passed for pipe tobacco in this day and age. The stuff was so wretched that just sitting in a tavern was as good as going through a whole pack in an evening.
Buckley opened the window and spat out of it, watching the phlegm drop four floors to the canal. Then he sent the contents of the chamberpot after it, flinging it out so it didn’t land on the footpath that ran along the edge of the water. He wasn’t supposed to do that, but everybody did anyway.