Billy simply nodded. Conrad Ursinus made appropriately polite noises, and Mazzare wondered again how he would go over with the Arsenal. The guildmasters and workers there were said to be notoriously jealous of their skills and prerogatives. Young as he was, Conrad Ursinus was as senior a man as the ferociously busy Magdeburg shipyards could spare, and another trained down-timer.
He was also a man who had grabbed opportunities; in his case, three of them. First, he was an officer in the growing U.S. Navy. Second, he’d parlayed his nearly completed carpenter’s apprenticeship into a job as a shipwright and then as a slip foreman, and had the beginnings of credentials as a naval architect. On top of that, he had been part of the first wave of baseball players when the sport had gotten going in Grantville. The heavily plebeian and often-radical German population of Magdeburg had also adopted baseball, with all the ferocious enthusiasm with which they adopted most things American. Conrad was one of the stars of the Magdeburg Yard Dogs, for whom he played first base—and his friend Billy was the star pitcher for the Marine Corps team.
Whether the two of them would succeed in introducing the sport to Venice was another question. Mazzare knew that baseball was a popular sport in up-time Italy, if a minority interest, but it was as nothing to the Italian national religion of soccer. The Stone boys were enthusiasts for that sport, and Mazzare knew they had plans to introduce it in Italy. They might well succeed, despite Conrad and Billy. Mazzare could remember turning out for a game or two when he’d been in Rome, and the sheer mania that a Lazio crowd was capable of . . .
First, of course, they’d have to figure out where to play either game. Venice was not exactly a city with lots of parks and open space—and Mazzare had already firmly explained to all the young men involved that the Piazza San Marco was strictly off-limits. He foresaw enough problems, without having to deal with a doge aggravated by a baseball or a soccer ball breaking one of his windows. Or, worse yet, one of the windows in the Basilica.
He shook his head and went on with the introductions. “Captain Lennox here—”
“Good day to ye,” said Lennox. He had a glass in his hand, and was visibly trying not to stand at attention.
“—is head of our embassy guard, which is a function our Marine Corps discharges for reasons of tradition. We also have with us my good friend and colleague the Reverend Simon Jones—”
“Please to meet you,” said Jones, raising his glass.
“Who is one of the ministers at Grantville’s Methodist church. And this is my curate, Father Augustus Heinzerling. I believe you’ve already met.”
Heinzerling nodded a greeting, and Luzzatto gave another half-bow in return.
“Forgive me,” Luzzatto said, “for I may not understand the Christian religion perfectly, but I understood that your Methodist church was Protestant, Reverend Jones?”
“It is, yes,” said Jones, clearly anticipating the question. “If you’re wondering whether that means Father Mazzare and I should be enemies, the answer is no, not in the twentieth century. Our churches never settled their differences of doctrine, but outside of a few troubled places and a few small minorities of troublemakers on both sides, Catholic and Protestant never do more than chide each other for their lapses in doctrine. As to our being friends, that is a happy accident of our having shared interests outside our respective religions.”
“Indeed,” said Mazzare, “a happy accident.” He smiled. Jones had learned Italian fairly well in the months they had had before leaving Grantville, but he hadn’t quite relaxed into the language. It was bizarre to hear the plain-spoken minister suddenly start talking in that grammatically perfect and excruciatingly pronounced way, in slow and measured sentences, after hearing him in voluble and homey eloquence all these years.
It was a question of practice, of course. Mazzare had grown up with Italian from his parents, refreshed it with a two-year stint in Rome, and was both fluent and colloquial in the language. The twentieth-century version of it, at least. He had had no difficulty with the Venetian dialect once he had attuned his ear to it, but Jones was still having trouble. Indeed, very few people hereabouts could understand his twentieth-century formal Italian, since it was a language hardly anyone in this time actually spoke.