Frank got himself a coffee and sat down at the table with Father Mazzare. His carefully rehearsed opening gambits were all failing him. “Uh, I . . .” he got out, and then dried up.
“Something troubling you, Frank?” Mazzare asked.
“Well, not as such, no,” he said. “Only you seemed to be the best guy to ask about it, and, uh . . .”
“So, not girl trouble, then?”
Frank nearly fell out of his chair. How did he know? “No, no, no!” he said hurriedly, thankful for the small mercy that he hadn’t had a mouthful of coffee at the time. “It’s, uh, it’s more of a religion thing, actually.” There, that’d explain the nerves, he thought.
“Well, don’t worry about offending me,” said Mazzare. “I’ve almost certainly heard worse.”
“Uh, sure.” Frank stopped and thought. He was settling down a bit, and took a sip of his coffee. It was good, just as advertised. Probably the Nasis again, he thought, and then got back on track. “It was just that me and Ron and Gerry were out and about yesterday, and we heard some guys talking about the Galileo thing, you know, with the Inquisition?”
“Hmm. Yes, there would be talk about that, wouldn’t there? Where did you hear it?”
“Oh, you know, around.” Frank realized that this was heading into dangerous territory. He wondered if that whole silence-of-the-confessional thing would extend to him telling Father Mazzare that he was involved with bunch of lunatic revolutionaries who wanted to stage a raid on the Inquisition, and he was going along because he’d fallen madly in love with the daughter of the head looney even though some part of Frank understood perfectly well that it was probably just youthful infatuation but so what? Look what happened to Romeo and Juliet and they were still talking about it half a millennium later.
Probably not, he decided. Firmly, he fought down the sudden urge to confess everything. If he was grounded, he probably wouldn’t see Giovanna again—a thought that was a lot scarier than any number of Inquisition goons.
Mazzare waited, patiently.
“Just . . . around,” Frank said, to fill the silence.
Mazzare gave a sly grin. “And not, in any sense, in any kind of taverna or wine-shop where you might have stopped off for a refreshing glass of wine or two, right?”
Frank felt the whole of Venice give a slight lurch under him. How does he do this? Can he really read minds like Gus says?
The grin was still there. “Oh, all right, seal of the confessional, Frank. It’s down to you what you tell your father. Just try to stick to the respectable ones, and know your limits, all right? A little wine for thy stomach’s sake is all very well, but it’s easy to overdo it if you don’t have experience in handling the stuff.”
Relief. Mazzare thought he was out drinking on the sly. A small sin to cover a greater one.
Frank grinned back. “Don’t worry, Father, we learned our lesson about hangovers and throwing up. It’s cool.”
“Good. Well, no more lecture, then.” Mazzare sighed, reached for the coffee pot and freshened his mug up. “About Galileo, then, what did you want to know?”
“Well, it’s the whole deal with the Inquisition, you know?” That about covered it, and it wasn’t an outright accusation that Mazzare was an agent of a sinister organization trying to hold back the progress of science.
“Ah, I see. You want to know if we can do anything about it?”
Another lurch. He can’t know—or can he? Who knows what they teach priests how to do in those seminaries. The Catholic Church didn’t stick around for two thousand years by being a bunch of dummies. Play it safe. “Well, it’s not so much that, as, well . . .”
“You want to know what I think? Because I’m a priest of the Church that’s putting him on trial?” Mazzare’s face was taking on a decidedly severe look, now.
“Uh, if it’s a problem, or you don’t want to talk or anything or if, uh, I should . . .” Frank realized he was gabbling.
Mazzare waved him down. “No, no, relax. I can’t say I’m too happy about the whole business, to be honest. Just because I’m on the staff, I don’t have to be happy about head office policy, you understand? At least, not on nonreligious subjects, anyway.”