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what’s under the water, Carlo. Let them have it.” He slept.
     
    He sat up struggling, his arm shaken by his wife.
    “Wake up, it’s late. You’ve got to go to Torcello to get those men. Besides, they’ve got your scuba gear.”
    Carlo groaned.
    “Maria says Giuseppe will go with you. He’ll meet you with his boat on the Fundamente.”
    “Damn.”
    “Come on, Carlo, we need that money.”
    “All right, all right.” The baby was squalling. He collapsed back on the bed. “I’ll do it. Don’t pester me.”
    He got up and drank her soup. Stiffly he descended the ladder, ignoring Luisa’s instructions and warnings, and got back in his boat. He untied it, pushed off, let it float out of the courtyard to the wall of San Giacometta. He stared at the wall.
    Once, he remembered, he had put on his scuba gear and swum down into the church. He had kneeled behind one of the stone pews in front of the altar, adjusting his weightbelts and tank to do so, and had tried to pray through his mouthpiece and the facemask. The silver bubbles of his breath had floated up through the water toward heaven; whether his prayers had gone with them, he had no idea. After a while, feeling, somewhat foolish—but not entirely——he had swum out the door. Over it he had noticed an inscription and stopped to read it, facemask centimeters from the stone.
Around This Temple Let the Merchant’s Law Be Just, His Weight True, and His Covenants Faithful
. It was an admonition to the old usurers of the Rialto, but he could make it his, he thought; the true weight could refer to the diving belts, not to overload his clients and sink them to the bottom…
    The memory passed and he was on the surface again, with a job to do. He took in a deep breath and let it out, put the oars in the oarlocks and started to row.
    Let them have what was under the water. What lived in Venice was still afloat.
    —1980
     

 
     
     
     
     

     
     
    “She rules all of Oz,” said Dorothy, “and so
she rules your city and you, because you are in the
Winkie Country, which is part of the Land of Oz.”
“It may be.” returned the High Coco-Lorum,
“for we do not study geography and have never
inquired whether we live in the Land of Oz or not.
And any Ruler who rules us from a distance, and
unknown to us, is welcome to the job.
—L. Frank Baum,
The Lost Princess of Oz
     
     
    am not, despite the appearances, fond of crime detection. In the past, it is true, I occasionally accompanied my friend Freya Grindavik as she solved her cases, and admittedly this watsoning gave me some good material for the little tales I have written for the not-very-discriminating markets on Mars and Titan. But after The Case of the Golden Sphere of the Lion of Mercury, in which I ended up hung by the feet from the clear dome of Terminator, two hundred meters above the rooftops of the city, my native lack of enthusiasm rose to the fore. And following the unfortunate Adventure of the Vulcan Accelerator, when Freya’s arch-foe Jan Johannsen tied us to a pile of hay under a large magnifying glass in a survival tent, there to await Mercury’s fierce dawn. I put my foot down: no more detecting. That, so to speak, was the last straw.
    So when I agreed to accompany Freya to the Solday party of Heidi Van Seegeren, it was against my better judgement. But Freya assured me there would be no business involved; and despite the obvious excesses, I enjoy a Solday party as much as the next aesthete. So when she came by my villa, I was ready.
    “Make haste,” she said. “We’re late, and I must be before Heidi’s Monet when the Great Gates are opened. I adore that painting.”
    “Your infatuation is no secret,” I said, panting as I trailed her through the crowded streets of the city. Freya, as those of you who have read my earlier tales know, is two and a half meters tall, and broad-shouldered: she barged through the shoals of Solday celebrants rather like a whale, and I, pilotfishlike, dodged