“Now hold on, Father! My job is to get important information to the people who matter, which is all of them.”
“And the hell with the consequences?”
Buckley wasn’t going to back down. “Well, not all of them. It’s just that most of them are worse than shutting up.”
“Point,” Mazzare admitted. He notched his estimation of the journalist up a point or two. Joe had been caught in the Ring of Fire when he turned out for Rita Stearns’ wedding. He’d been a friend of Rita and Sharon’s at college, a graduate student in journalism, and he’d found himself in at the birth of modern journalism. The first newspapers of a recognizably modern type had been in print for perhaps twenty years, with pamphlets and broadsides before that. Nowadays, the Imperial Post service carried news dispatches around Europe to feed hungry presses.
Like everything else, news reporting had developed an arsenal of tricks and techniques over three and a half centuries, and Buckley was equipped with a beginner’s arsenal of them. So when he’d discovered that there was work for him in this time, he’d gone at it with enthusiasm. Dedication, even.
Mazzare had read some of his stuff. Buckley would never have won a Pulitzer Prize. On the other hand, by seventeenth-century standards he was polished, crisp, informative, original and readable. Whether he was popular for his originality or whether the twentieth-century style would catch on remained to be seen, of course.
“Look,” Joe said, “I moved out of the building next door a while ago.” He hesitated just an instant, then: “I did that precisely to put some distance between you and me, so nobody would think we were connected politically. I live all the way across Venice now.”
That was a fib, Mazzare thought. He was quite sure that Joe had moved simply because he discovered he couldn’t afford the rent in this rather ritzy part of Venice. Buckley’s argument was silly anyway, since the reporter spent perhaps half his nights taking advantage of the hospitality at the USE embassy. Not that Mazzare begrudged him the free food and drink. He had his own memories of life on a tight budget.
Mazzare wondered how Buckley had managed to stay so fundamentally naive after almost three years of the seventeenth century, and especially after all the digging he seemed to have done in Venice. Beneath the patina of a tough street-wise news reporter was a young man who still really thought it was all something of an exciting game.
“Joe,” he said gently, hoping Buckley wouldn’t take it as condescension, “the fact that you don’t live nearby anymore means exactly nothing to the people you need to worry about. These are people who routinely scheme and maneuver on a continental scale. Please—be careful. Try to be at least a little discreet. Powerful people in these times can have you killed or jailed, and they will get away with it. Or you’ll find yourself having to fight a duel, or getting sued or something.”
Buckley’s grin was pure joie de vivre. “But, Father,” he said, “I’m young and popular. That makes me invulnerable!” After a moment, he went on, “Seriously, though, I do watch my back. The thing is, there’s a lot of journalists out there, and the powerful tend to ignore us. They think that they’re taking the long view that a lot of yapping nuisances—”
“Good phrase, that,” Mazzare put in, in a sudden spirit of pure mischief.
Buckley snorted his amusement, acknowledging the hit, and went on. “They think that sooner or later everything blows over. But it doesn’t, of course. Woodward and Bernstein are a long ways off yet, but there’s already a lot of light being shone on the doings of the muckity-mucks.”
“Some of it’s less than honest, though,” Mazzare said. “I know they’ve already invented the press release. What’s that piece of slang? ‘Tear off and print’?”
Buckley smiled ruefully. “I know, I know. Laziness wins nine times out of ten. But the principle is there.”
“Still. Be careful.”
“I will, Father, don’t worry. Both ways before stepping into the, uh, canal.”
Mazzare chuckled. Anyone who fell into one of Venice’s canals had more pressing problems, even assuming he could swim, than being run over by an oncoming boat. There was all manner of ordure and filth in them; the ebb and flow of the lagoon as the Adriatic’s gentle, almost nonexistent tides washed back and forth cleaned them a little, but there was still the unmistakable whiff of eau de sewer down close to the water.