Tom Stone came in as Buckley mused on the ruckus that was going to cause. The old hippy-turned-industrialist—and wasn’t that a switch!—picked an armchair by Jones and plopped into it.
“Man, am I beat!”
“Tell me about it,” said Jones. “My feet are killing me.” He had kicked off his shoes and had both much-darned socks on public display on a handy hassock.
Mazzare sat up straighter. “How’s Frank?”
Stone grinned. “Mortified, Father. You’d be pleased.”
Mazzare chuckled. “Somehow, Tom, I doubt you play the stern father very well.”
“Honesty and sweet reason, gentlemen, has always been my watchword in raising those boys.”
“Ouch,” said Jones. “That’s just cruel, with teenagers. Makes me glad my own father believed in sparing not the rod. Or the belt, in his case.”
“Man, I don’t even like jokes about that.”
“Sorry, Tom,” Jones said, sounding like he meant it.
Buckley, almost automatically, wondered what lay behind that exchange. He knew altogether too little about any of the three leading figures in the United States delegation. Mazzare’s background he had from the State Department press-pack on him, at least as far as his clerical career went. Chaplaincy for the USAF posted in England, a spell at the Vatican, work in the office of the archbishop of Baltimore before coming to pastoral work in Grantville. From Chicago originally. Other than that, nada.
Jones . . . Buckley had only what Rita Stearns had told him. No—Rita Simpson; he’d gotten the information from her after her marriage to Tom Simpson. He and Rita were friends from college, which was why Joe had been in Grantville on the day of the Ring of Fire.
All he knew about Jones was that he was a Grantville local boy, settled as the town’s Methodist minister alongside his wife, who was from out of state. There had been that business back in 1631 when he’d somehow come by a sudden surge in church funds. The story had dried up in one cold lead after another and Buckley had reluctantly dropped it, but not without putting acres of bad blood between the two of them, however polite Jones might be to his face.
Stoner—what about him? There was a story waiting to be written. Probably an easy one to get, too, with the man’s hippie openness. The problem was finding a time when Stoner was free and available. For a supposed counter-cultural slacker he worked long hard hours. Hippie, commune founder, chemist—like the reason for that wasn’t obvious—and growing hash for the government.
Joe had tried to work that angle precisely once, when word got out. There was always good copy to be had from the War on Drugs. But then he’d had a visit from Doctors Nichols and Abrabanel after he’d published the first piece. Nichols had offered—no, insisted on—an interview in which he and Doctor Abrabanel had explained, in excruciating detail, all of the medical uses of cannabis, opium, cocaine and just about every narc—Buckley stopped himself. He’d used the word narcotic precisely once in relation to the drugs under discussion, which had prompted a long, technical and utterly patronizing digression from Doctor Abrabanel about how precisely none of these medicines were in fact narcotics at all, but euphoriants, analgesics, anti-whatevers and whocaresiates.
Whatever. The DEA came in for some trenchant comments from Doctor Nichols, before he’d gotten back to the topic at hand, which was how banning any one of the formerly illegal drugs would condemn hundreds, thousands, to unnecessary pain and hardship.
It had been a thoroughly dispiriting interview. Especially since, for a doctor, Nichols was a thoroughly menacing individual when he put his mind to it. Doctor Abrabanel, on the other hand, had been a lot more urbane and Buckley had turned his “suggestions” on how to make a face-saving retraction and change of line into, though he did say so himself, damn good copy. But the memory was still tender.
Mazzare was speaking again as Buckley’s mind wandered. “Does he understand what the problem was?”
“Sure,” said Stone, “although I think Frank figures we’re being a bunch of old squares about it.”
“What did he do?” Buckley asked. He decided it wouldn’t be honest just to sit there and listen in, and besides it sounded like a story. If one of Stone’s kids had gone along to the first major diplomatic function of the USE embassy to Venice and screwed up—maybe an article on the scandal of nepotism—the viper in the bosom of liberty—