I’m dead.
But all Marcoli did was slap him on the shoulder. Then, pried him loose from Giovanna and pulled him close for a very Italian embrace of his own. And then, back at arm’s length, one hand on each of Frank’s shoulders.
“Splendid man!” Marcoli pronounced. “You are a credit to our cause—and to your own nation, of course.”
Back into the embrace. Back out again, at arm’s length, hands on shoulders. Frank couldn’t help being reminded of any number of mob movies he’d seen. It was kind of eerie. The father of his girlfriend—well, he had hopes, anyway; and things were sure looking good—was a cross between John Brown and the Godfather.
Eek.
“Frank,” said Marcoli, “your generosity speaks well of you personally. But—trust me!—fine feelings are wasted on such as them. Criminals in the end are but lackeys for the exploiters. Because of their poor origins, we allow them one warning. More would be a waste of our time and effort—both things of which the revolution is in short supply.”
He was dead serious, too. There wasn’t a dishonest bone or a poseur’s fingernail anywhere on Antonio Marcoli’s body. Goofy or not, Frank realized, this man was no parlor pink. Words he used like exploiters and lackeys and The Revolution—you could practically hear the capital letters—came trippingly from his tongue. He might be an impractical man given to harebrained schemes, but a faker he wasn’t.
Oh, well. For Giovanna . . .
Frank did make a note to himself that, if there was ever a next time—not that he wanted there to be—he’d try to pick a Love Of His Life with a different kind of father. Maybe a bookkeeper whose idea of adventure was reading a novel. A Jane Austen freak. No westerns or thrillers. Short. Scrawny. A ninety-seven-pound weakling. Nearsighted—no, practically blind . . .
“Come, Frank,” said Marcoli, putting one arm around Frank and the other around his daughter. He guided them back down the alley toward his door, away from the final grisly moments of the street justice he’d dispensed. “You must stay the night with us. You should not carry that away as your memory of Venetian hospitality, eh? We can send a note to the embassy by a gondolier, so they won’t worry.”
Frank hoped like hell Marcoli meant the mugging, and not what had been done to the muggers. The guy might seem like a rather endearing, barmy coot when it came to his enthusiastic plans. But when it came to action, he had all the old Venetian charm of a mob capo.
On the other hand . . . there was the prospect of spending the rest of the evening with Giovanna. Not the night, of course. The one thing Frank Stone was not about to contemplate—in Antonio Marcoli’s own house!—was trying to sneak into his daughter’s bedroom.
“See?” Antonio demanded. “It is too cold to return, this late at night. Already you are shivering.”
Chapter 20
Joe Buckley drained the last of his glass, and thought about pouring another. He thought better of it. He’d matched the Frenchman Ducos drink for drink in the earlier part of the evening, and the hangover was already starting to nibble at the frontal lobes of his brain. He looked over his notes and decided they were legible, although how they’d look in the cold hard light of morning was anyone’s guess. His last ballpoint had died months ago. Thankfully, the modern-style fountain pen had proven a massive hit with Germany’s stationers and while they weren’t cheap they were very good indeed. In fact, the only ones being made yet were the kind of finely crafted high-end items he’d always liked back up-time. Good notepaper was the problem, since the Turkish stuff fine enough for handwriting tended to be expensive, and the newsprint of the time turned into a blotched rag if you wrote on it with anything harder than a feather pen.
The embassy’s reception room was quiet, the silence marred only by the crackling in the grate and Captain Lennox’s heroic snoring. Jones and Mazzare were looking bone-weary and ragged. Everyone else seemed to have gone straight to bed. If they’d had a debrief, they hadn’t done it anywhere journalistic ears might catch a word or two. Buckley was bone-weary himself, and wanted nothing so much as to drag himself across the way into his own building and his own bed. But he was still on that fine line between drunken bravado and sober enough to know better, which was why he was aching to start asking questions but keeping quiet anyway. Besides, with no deadline to meet, he told himself, he could leave the polite request for an interview for the morning, when everyone would be better rested and feeling more accommodating. There was that to be said for biweekly publication and filing stories by horse-borne mail; you could take a few hours off now and then. He had the Ring of Fire to thank for never having had the tyranny of a daily news hole to fill, and this week’s was already nicely plugged with a damned good story about d’Avaux.