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Rebecca's look got more long-suffering. "‘Simple country boy,'" she mimicked. "I doubt you were ever that, Mr. Piazza, even as a toddler. I am firmly convinced you had mastered Machiavelli's The Prince by the age of nine. Judging from the evidence."

"Fourteen, actually—and I wouldn't say I ‘mastered' it. The truth is, I found it pretty boring."

"Why did you read it, then?"

"I was on my Italian ethnic identity phase at the time. I worked my way through a bunch of stuff. I started with Dante. I read the whole trilogy, too, not just the Inferno. Damn near turned me into a lapsed Catholic. Heaven seemed deadly dull. Then I read Boccaccio's Decameron, which I enjoyed a lot. Then I read Petrarch, which killed my interest in poetry for almost a decade. Then I plowed into Machiavelli. By then, though, I was pretty much going on stubborn determination and The Prince did me in. After that, I pursued the search for my cultural roots through the movies. El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Marriage Italian Style, Arabesque, The Countess From Hong Kong, stuff like that."

Rebecca frowned. "Except for the marriage film—and I suppose the one about the Roman Empire—what is their relevance to Italian heritage?"

Piazza grinned. "Sophia Loren. She's in all of them. I delved into quite a few Gina Lollobrigida classics too, although she was a bit before my time. Then I discovered Claudia Cardinale and Monica Vitti and my devotion to Italian culture became boundless. I even watched Red Desert three times, and that's some ethnic solidarity, let me tell you. God, that movie's dull. Except for Monica Vitti, of course."

"I think I will not pursue this matter any further. Lest my image of you as an urbane and genteel man of the world suffers terminal harm." Rebecca gestured toward a far door. "This way, please. The others are already here."

Ed could hear Constantin Ableidinger when he was still twenty feet away from the door—which was closed, and thick. The former schoolteacher who'd been the central leader of the Ram Rebellion and was now Bamberg's representative in the USE House of Commons was one of the loudest men Piazza had ever met. Ableidinger seemed to find it impossible to speak in any tone of voice softer than a fog horn.

"—he mad?" were the first two words Ed understood, followed by: "What would possess him to do such a thing?"

Melissa Mailey's much softer response was muffled until Rebecca began opening the door. Ed caught the rest of it:

"—a shame, it really is. Wilhelm always seemed much shrewder than that."

The discussion broke off as Piazza and Rebecca entered the room. The eight people already present turned to look at them. They were sitting at a meeting table made up of four separate tables arranged in a shallow "U" formation. The open end of the "U" was facing away from the door, allowing the participants to look out of a wall of windows which gave a view of Magdeburg's scenery.

Ed wondered why they'd bothered. There was a lot to be said for the capital city of the United States of Europe. It was certainly dynamic—and not just in terms of the booming industries that produced the smoke and soot that turned the sky gray except after a rainfall. Under Mary Simpson's leadership, Magdeburg was becoming the cultural center of the nation, as well. She and Otto Gericke were also pushing hard to have a major university founded in the city.

Scenic, though, Magdeburg was not. The view through the windows was mostly that of blocks of the functional but dull apartment buildings that housed most of the city's working class; with, in the distance, the ubiquitous smokestacks from Magdeburg's many factories, mills, forges and foundries. It was probably the ugliest urban landscape Piazza had ever seen, except the mills lining the Monongahela southeast of Pittsburgh when he'd been a teenager.

Then again, those same working class districts were what gave the Fourth of July Party a political hammerlock over the city and province of Magdeburg. So there was a certain logic to the seating