“There is good news and bad news,” Heinzerling whispered. “The good news is that the radio will soon be functional. Tonight, they say.”
Mazzare nodded. Then, braced himself. Gus Heinzerling did not use the expression “bad news” lightly.
“The bad news is that Joe Buckley was just spotted, entering the building next door. With luggage.”
It was all Larry Mazzare could do not to groan aloud. As if things weren’t complicated enough already!
Chapter 12
One of the great things about the seventeenth century, Joe Buckley reflected, was that you couldn’t be left behind. Back up-time, what he had just done would have called for accreditations and passes and all manner of like nonsense and paperwork. If nothing else, airplane tickets.
Here and now, as the coming man in the field of investigative journalism that he was inventing a few hundred years early, Joe had just had to buy a good horse and try to keep up.
There was a downside, of course. A sore ass was only half of it. Name recognition was the other half. Between the Imperial Post and every other one-horse town boasting a printing press, there had been a lot of places on the route that had received his reports from Grantville and Magdeburg. Most of them didn’t pay, which was a bind, but copyright and syndication were for the future. Nevertheless, his name was getting well known around Europe, bylined in all manner of odd corners. He’d even seen some pieces he definitely hadn’t written but which had his name on them. Which was flattering, even if he never saw so much as a copper groat for it.
Still, he’d hardly put his hand in his pocket from Thuringia through Switzerland to Italy. Even in the rural backwaters where literacy was down around the thirty percent mark, in little towns where lack of practice lost people the letters they’d had, there was generally someone who’d read his stuff out in the tavern. Joe was the only twentieth-century-trained investigative journalist practicing his trade in the here-and-now, so far as he knew—which made him something of an instant superstar.
But—and it was a big but—his every attempt to get something on or about the ambassadorial party to Venice had so far been thwarted. Now, though, he had a top-floor suite of rooms in a building adjoining the palazzo that held the newly arrived embassy of the United States of Europe. The place was something of a dump, even though it had been home to the Swedish ambassador for a while. But there had never been any strong diplomatic presence from Sweden here and, so far as Buckley could tell, most of Venice was a dump anyway.
Joe dropped his bags, and took a moment to reflect on how he had changed. A good eight inches off the waistline, what with a lot more walking and riding and—surprise—a better diet. When the seventeenth century ate well, it generally ate healthily, he’d found. He was also now fairly fluent in three languages and able to get by, just, in two more. Of course, one of the ones he had trouble with was Italian, but he would improve that soon enough.
Behind him, a couple of the palazzo’s staff were unpacking his gear and putting it away. He stared out of the window and contemplated the rooftops of Venice. From here he could see—well, no more than two or three streets away, but he was looking east across the city from quite close to the western end. Rooftops, all the way. Under every one, he thought, a story to be told.
And that was the other half of the change in fashion he’d started. He talked to the people who lived just under those roofs, and told the stories of the Rich and Famous from their point of view. Back in the twentieth century, of course, there had been precious little of that. The media was mostly controlled by big corporations, and that meant sucking up to the corporate bosses who owned them. It was the same in the seventeenth century, in a way. Poor people didn’t own printing presses here anymore than they had up-time. But there was a big difference in social status. A man who, back up-time, would be a CEO and entitled to some major ass-kissing was, in the seventeenth century, merely “in trade” and thought the less for it.