“I gave the boys a lecture about exploitation, just to be on the safe side,” Stoner said, looking considerably more serious now. “Maybe we should say something to the soldiers?”
The two pastors digested that in silence.
“Doubt it’d do any good,” Jones said at length.
“True,” Mazzare agreed gloomily. “Although I suppose they’ll be discreet about it. Maybe we should say something to them about security?”
More silence.
Buckley thought the gloom was misplaced. First, there was something downright comical about two ministers fretting about security lapses on the part of the soldiery when they had a Scotsman named Lennox in charge of that very matter. Buckley knew for a fact—he’d gotten two different accounts, both agreeing on all the major points and both wickedly amusing—that Lennox had thoroughly reamed out Billy Trumble and Conrad Ursinus for their behavior the night the embassy had finally arrived in Venice. Since then, the two young officers looked to have ramrods up their ass.
Secondly, and more important, Mazzare and Jones underestimated—by about an order of magnitude, Buckley thought—the difference that up-time social habits made in the attitude of their hired help. Just being treated like a regular working stiff was a major step up from the condescension of the served to their servants that was the norm in the seventeenth century. Half of Buckley’s journalistic success depended on that simple fact, which infected even the journalists of the time. They went for interviews with the Great Men and their hangers-on and wrangled for admission to the councils and conferences at which great matters were discussed and decided. Buckley just asked the waiters and footmen what they’d seen and heard, and so got in on things that others were excluded from. He had to be careful sometimes to cover up sources, but it worked every time.
He’d gotten the idea while doing a story on Admiral Simpson. The man’s household staff had fallen over themselves to dish on the man and his wife. To Buckley’s surprise, it had all been praise. But getting that experience stood him in good stead in Venice. The French embassy, in particular, leaked like a sieve.
Which reminded him of what he’d actually written. “I’m for my bed,” he said, gathering up his papers and nodding to the other three.
They bid him good night, and he left with all the dignity of a half-drunk journalist getting the hell out before anyone asked him what he was actually going to file for this week’s story.
* * *
After Buckley’s departure the two pastors and the hippie lapsed into companionable silence for several minutes. Lennox’s snores took on the breathy, whistling tone of a man well away in the land of Nod.
“You think pinching that Scot warthog’s nostrils would help?” Jones finally grumbled.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Stone, “I find the noise kind of restful. Almost as good as a ticking clock.”
Mazzare chuckled at the banter. Jones’s acid wit and Stone’s casual, good-natured humor had eased a lot of the frustration of their journey to Venice. Switzerland in winter had been no joke, even for the hard-bitten cavalrymen of their Marine guard. “What we could do with, I think,” he said, “is pinching Buckley’s mouth.”
“You think he’s up to no good?” Stone asked.
“Depend on it,” Jones said, still glaring at Lennox. “Man’s a damned nuisance. He’s bound to be up to something that’ll bite us all on the ass.”
Jones’ run-in with Buckley had been a fairly quiet business, for all the newsman’s efforts at scandal-mongering after the Ecumenical Relief Committee had gotten its mysterious boost in funding over the winter of 1631. Away from prying ears in the garage at Mazzare’s rectory, Jones had waxed positively sulfurous, using a great deal of what he called “agricultural metaphor” to describe the journalist and the inquiries he’d been making.
“Has anyone heard what he’s been up to?” Mazzare asked. “I asked Gus to look into it, but he hasn’t gotten back to me. Fortunately, Joe can’t use the radio to file anything—although I’m sure he knows we have one. But Joe’s plenty ingenious, so he’ll figure out some other way to get his stories across the Alps.”