Free The Journeyer by Gary Jennings

snout.”
    “The J-Jew deserved it,” she said, the delicious pout lingering briefly on her lips.
    He murmured, “A chicken before a tribunal of foxes.”
    She laughed lightly but without humor. “Would you have preferred that I let the ch-chicken go to the confessional, Father?”
    I wondered if the lady was younger than she looked, that she addressed every man as father. But then I sneaked a look up into the man’s hood, I being shorter than he was, and saw that it was the San Marco priest of the day before. Wondering why he should be going about with his vestments hidden, I listened some more, but their disjointed conversation gave me no hint.
    He said, still in a murmurous voice, “You fixed on the wrong victim. The one who might talk, not the someone who might listen.”
    She laughed again and said archly, “You never speak the name of that someone.”
    “Then you speak it,” he murmured. “To the snout. Give the foxes a goat instead of a chicken.”
    She shook her head. “That someone—that old goat—has friends among the foxes. I require a means even more secret than the snout.”
    He was silent for a time. Then he murmured, “Bravo.”
    I assumed that he was murmurously applauding the performance of the frusta, which, after one last loud and piercing screech, was just then ending. The crowd began to mill about in preparation for dispersal.
    My lady said, “Yes, I will inquire into that possibility. But now”—she touched his cloaked arm—“that someone approaches.”
    He clasped the hood still closer about his face and moved off with the crowd, away from her. She was joined by another man, this one gray-haired, red-faced, dressed in clothes as fine as hers—perhaps her real father, I thought—who said, “Ah, there you are, Ilaria. How did we get separated?”
    That was the first time I heard her name. She and the older man strolled off together, she chattering brightly about “how well the frusta was done, what a nice day for it,” and other such typically feminine remarks. I hung far enough behind them not to be noticeable, but I followed as if I were being tugged on a string. I feared that they would walk only as far as the waterfront and there step into the man’s batèlo or gòndola. In that case I should have had a hard time following them. Everyone in the crowd who did not have a private craft was competing for the boats for hire. But Ilaria and her companion turned the other way and walked up the piazzetta toward the main piazza, skirting the crowd by staying close to the wall of the Doge’s Palace.
    Ilaria’s rich robe flicked the very muzzles of the lionlike marble masks which protrude from the palace wall at waist level. Those are what we Venetians call the musi da denonzie secrete, and there is one of them for each of several sorts of crime: smuggling, tax evasion, usury, conspiracy against the State, and so on. The snouts have slits for mouths and on the other side of them, inside the palace, the agents of the Quarantia squat like spiders waiting for a web to twitch. They do not have to wait long between alarms. Those marble slits have been worn ever wider and smoother over the years, by the countless hands slipping into them unsigned messages imputing crimes to enemies, creditors, lovers, neighbors, blood relations and even total strangers. Because the accusers remain unknown and can accuse without proof, and because the law makes little allowance for malice, slander, frustration and spite, it is the accused who must disprove the accusations. That is not easy, and it is seldom done.
    The man and woman circled around two sides of the arcaded square, with me close enough behind to overhear their desultory talk. Then they entered one of the houses there on the piazza itself, and, from the demeanor of the servant who opened the door, it was evident that they lived there. Those houses of the innermost heart of the city are not elaborately decorated on the outside, and so are not