Then he ambled around the western half of the piazza. There wasn’t really much to see there, though. If he remembered the guide book correctly, a lot of that area would be changed by Napoleon. The French emperor had even demolished a church somewhere in the pile of buildings to build a dancing hall. In this day and age, however, the buildings were just devoted to Venice’s elaborate bureaucracy.
Buckley found bureaucratic edifices even more boring than bureaucrats. So, deciding he’d fiddled away enough time, he headed toward the back of the Palazzo Ducale. There had to be a rear entrance somewhere.
Rounding the corner, he saw it—but that entrance was, if anything, as strongly manned as the front door. Right, nothing else for it. He marched up, and hacking out a sentence as best he could in Veneziano Italian, said: “Joe Buckley, Associated Press,” and made to march past.
Unlike twentieth-century bouncers, the bouncers in this day and age had big guys with halberds backing them up. More for show than in any expectation of an armed rush of gatecrashers; but in best guard-style, they crossed their halberds over the door, staring straight ahead the while. Buckley could feel the liveried footmen he’d just breezed past smirking behind them.
“There is no entry this way, friend,” said one of them.
“Aw, come on,” Buckley said. “All I need is to get in and see what’s going on. Don’t you read newspapers?”
“No, Messer Buckley, I don’t,” the guy said, still smirking.
Buckley became aware that there was a crowd nearby. Time, he decided, to withdraw with as good a grace as he could. “So,” he said, “been a busy night, then?”
That earned him a blank stare.
“You see,” he went on, into the silence, “I figure guys like you, you get to see who sneaks in to this place without everyone out front seeing, right? Guys like you could probably tell me more about what’s going on at a function like this than I could figure out by going inside, yeah?”
He looked hopefully from one to the other. Usually, by this point, they started bragging about luminaries they’d served at whatever banquet the night before. Or better, dishing the dirt on what lousy table manners they had. That was always a good way in to the real juicy stuff.
Not from these guys, though. One nodded to the other, or some sort of signal passed, and then two guards he hadn’t seen stepped up smartly, one to each elbow, and he was frog-marched back to the steps down to the street. He ended up hopping down the steps, trying to keep his balance, his hat and his dignity and managing two out of the three.
He snarled a word that had been old-fashioned in his own time but was futuristic here.
“Americain, monsieur?” The voice was somber yet light in tone, the diction oddly stilted somehow.
Buckley looked at the fellow who’d detached himself from the crowd that was, basically, lounging about in the street. Tall and narrow and clad in what looked like dark, dark brown. Buckley pegged him as a high-end servant, as these things went.
“Uh, Francais?” he asked, diffidently.
“Ah, oui,” and the man launched into a gabble of French that Buckley couldn’t follow.
“Uh, plus lentement, s’il vous plait,” he said, looking hard at the guy. He had a broad-brimmed hat on, shadowing much of his face, but there were guys with torches moving about and Buckley could get glimpses of what lay under the hat. So that’s what hatchet-faced means, he thought.
The torrent of French slowed, and the volume went up slightly.
Glad it’s not just Americans who do that, Buckley thought. He still wasn’t following the guy. He had some kind of broad accent that was giving him serious static.
“You got any Italian?” he asked, in that language.
“Why, certainly, Monsieur Buckley.”
“You caught my name, huh?”
“Yes, you announced yourself as well as any majordomo might have done that service for you. Permit me to introduce myself.” The Frenchman held out a hand. “Michel Ducos. You are with the embassy from Grantville?”
“Pleased to meet you. As to the other, no, I’m not. Well, not really. I’m from Grantville, though.”