The pleasantries concluded, with no mention of ducks for good or ill, the doge moved away.
“We’re not in Kansas any more,” Jones murmured.
Mazzare smiled, and looked around. That left only—but no, the entire French party were visibly and pointedly giving Mazzare their backs.
The rest of the soiree passed quietly.
For Mazzare, at least.
* * *
Frank thought it would probably take surgery to get rid of the cringe he was feeling.
Tom Stone had a truly awful way of reaming out his sons. Perfectly reasonable, calm and polite, his soft-spoken admonition littered with hippie ethic and the wisdom of the nineteen-sixties. That was why Giovanna looked thoroughly bewildered. As well she might. She’d been born and brought up in seventeenth-century Venice, and on the wrong side of the tracks at that. So the sight and sound of a twentieth-century hippie deploying his thoroughly weird parenting skills in a lecture on the rights of women, sexual politics and Respect For Cultures Not Our Own was completely outside her experience.
Frank didn’t feel that it helped any that his father, hippie that he was, still referred to women as “chicks” despite being nearly three centuries away from the sixties.
Chapter 19
“I embarrassed you?” Giovanna asked, her tone an odd combination of cool challenge and nervous anxiety. She was now sitting next to him in the gondola taking them back to her father’s establishment—she’d not tried to work a boat herself, this night, not wearing those fancy clothes—and regarding him with narrowed eyes.
“No, Giovanna,” he said. “I’m not embarrassed by you. It’s just . . . It’s just that, well, I’m told it’s not a big deal in Venice—prostitution, I mean, uh, courtesanship rather—but it is a big deal where we came from. And, uh, it’s a different kind of big deal depending on who’s talking about it.”
He could sense he was babbling but saw no alternative but to babble further. Babble he did, thus, with all the fervor that a drunk with a hangover seizes upon the hair of the dog. “What I mean is that some Americans will denounce you for consorting with harlots and others—like my dad—will denounce you—well, my dad doesn’t really denounce anybody, it’s a lot worse than that—for being a sexist pig and exploiting women.” Keep babbling, keep babbling, maybe there’s a bottom to this pit. “And, uh, we didn’t know the customs, and it took us by surprise. And we’re supposed to be part of a diplomatic mission.”
Giovanna’s eyes weren’t narrow now. They were slits. It suddenly dawned on Frank . . .
Giovanna put it into words. “You think I am a whore?” Her tone of voice was decidedly dangerous, and Frank could feel panic rising. He hunted frantically for reverse gear.
“No, no!” he said, louder than he’d meant. “That’s not what I meant! I never thought so, please—not once!—it’s the filthy minds of those aristocrats, that’s what really caused the trouble!”
Bingo. Even a babbler, now and then, babbles his way clear of disaster. Giovanna’s eyes were still slits, but her hostile gaze shifted from Frank to scan the surroundings. By great good luck—oh thank you whatever gods may be—the gondola was passing a stretch of Venice where the mansions of the Case Vecchie were concentrated. The mansions, like the merchant nobility themselves, had the feel of tawdriness under the glitter.
“They are pigs,” Giovanna hissed. “Just like them—to flaunt their whores by making them wear red shoes!”
A light at the end of the tunnel. Frank could only hope it wasn’t a freight train coming. “Yes, yes—that’s pretty much what my dad was talking about.” In his own screwy way, but Frank saw no reason to dwell on that subject. “I had no idea it would cause any problem, honest! I just wanted to take you to a party where we might have some fun, and, and—”
Go on, say it, said a little voice in the back of his mind; but he couldn’t, not yet. “I’m sorry,” he managed at last. “I thought you’d like to be taken somewhere fancy like that. I should have thought about what kind of mess it might drop you in.”