Odd. Was something else going on out there? Something more exciting than just sitting around and jabbering about politics?
Joe decided he’d find out. If nothing else, he supposed, it would be a way to spend the day. Besides, it was probably time he took a look at the Committee of Correspondence in Venice, even if he was pretty sure it was mostly a joke. He checked his watch again. There was plenty of time to get there for the daily public meeting they tried to get a decent turnout for—and failed miserably, from what Joe had heard.
And the idiot was still singing. He’d reached the end of the song and started again! The way it echoed up from the canal and the buildings opposite made it doubly, trebly annoying. Buckley found himself wishing for some traffic noise, a sound he hadn’t heard in nearly three years. Definitely, he decided, time to get out of the house. Even if he got nothing from the Venetian committee, he could mooch about Murano and play tourist.
* * *
A boat over to Murano was easily had, and getting out from among the filthy canals of downtown Venice and into the seabreeze and the salt air of the lagoon did Buckley a world of good.
Murano, even in midafternoon with the sunlight across it, looked like a seedy and disreputable pile. Sure, it had its nice neighborhoods, and the glassblowers had always been one of the better-off classes of Venetians. Not dirt-poor, anyway. But like almost everything in Venice, Murano was looking down-at-the-heels. The smoke from the kilns gave it a positively brooding air.
He got off the boat at the right pier for the neighborhood he wanted. Looking around, his imagination immediately painted a set of tracks along the water’s edge with a big sign, saying: You are now entering The Wrong Side. All of the clues were there. Peeling stucco, even more than usual for Venice. Great patches of plaster missing, the brickwork grinning through from underneath like the teeth of bleached skulls. The laundry strung across the streets—alleyways, in any other town—was gray and patched. More rats than in the neighborhoods that could afford catchers. And, above all, a hunched, wary surliness about the inhabitants, such of them as there were.
He was almost immediately accosted by a grimy little kid. Urchin, to the life, he thought. Sighing, he dug in his pocket for a coin before realizing that the kid was holding out a piece of paper. He took it. It was as grimy as the kid was, the print slightly smeared.
He looked back down at the kid. The look of pathetic gratitude and the thick sheaf of handbills still in his hand spoke volumes. Buckley looked around. So did the litter of discarded . . .
He checked the paper in his hand again. Ha! Yes! Committee of Correspondence flyers scattered along the path and floating dejectedly in the water.
“No one interested, kid?” Buckley returned his hand into his pocket for that coin. For some time now he’d been keeping a hefty handful of small change in his pocket for just this sort of occasion. Besides, the poor little brat looked like he could use a meal.
“No, messer,” the kid said. “Messer Marcoli, he is a good man, he gives me soup and money to give out the papers, but no one wants them.” The tone was mournful and the big, brown, hang-dog eyes positively heartbreaking.
“Something for you, then, kid,” Buckley said, handing over the coin.
The eyes started to glisten, the lower lip started to tremble. “Aw, hell, here’s another. Take a break, on me.”
“No, messer. Messer Marcoli wants to tell everyone about the new world coming, and I want people to come and hear him, so I stay.”
“How old are you?” Buckley asked, beginning to see his story taking shape and glad he’d followed this whim. “And what’s your name?”
“Eight years, I think, and my name is Benito.” Benito sniffed, and added a streak of snot to the grime on his already filthy shirtsleeve.
“Does your mama know you’re working for Messer Marcoli? Your papa?”
“Messer, I’m an orphan. Messer Marcoli, he feeds some of us and we help him with his papers, si?”