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.