The Fox Knows Many Things: An Athena Fox Adventure by Mike Sweeney

Author:Mike Sweeney [Sweeney, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-12-04T22:00:00+00:00

Venice didn’t do night-life. Not the way I was used to. There wasn’t the competing thunder of dance clubs, there wasn’t the glare of colored lights everywhere, voices weren’t raised to get over the noise and it didn’t look like a fight would be breaking out anytime soon.

Heck, there weren’t even that many places open. Instead, this was a strolling evening, a laid-back evening of sipping espresso and wandering the back ways and watching the boats pass on the water.

It was quieter too. The Moors had barely struck the bell high above the city when Venice started quieting down. The streets seemed bare by comparison, now that the pigeons had returned to their great white roosts.

Even the lighting was more intimate. Sure, the buildings around Piazza San Marco were illuminated. The Rialto Bridge, too, was pale in the light. But most of the light was ground-floor shops and Victorian-looking street lamps. It was a ground-level experience, a people experience.

I sipped. My latest stunt hadn’t done my knee any favors. Besides, I’d walked enough for one day.

The duckboards were all up and the Piazza was dry once again. Tides. It had to be tides. Probably that’s what acqua alta meant.

There had been a metal panel that slid into the door of the shop they’d taken me to. The lower floor was painted with some sort of thick glossy paint but otherwise looked quite ordinary. More Paris Effect. You didn’t get grass huts in modern Africa and I was willing to bet there weren’t a lot of paper walls in Japan. The differences were subtler.

From what I gathered, the family used to stay upstairs of the shop. Now they rented it. To tourists. It made me start to really wonder what day-to-day was like in streets choked with tourists. It must be like living in the Fisherman’s Wharf area of my hometown. Good luck if you needed groceries or socks; it was all souvenir shops and pizza joints until you got to Bay Street.

Seeing their back room, talking to them however briefly, had been a too-short glimpse behind the painted walls of Euro-Disney and I treasured it.

The evening was cooling off. A bit of music was drifting my way. Latin jazz. A bit of that Calypso beat, maybe? It seemed like too much effort to go find it. I was tired. Tired of running, tired of struggling with languages. I wanted to be back in a familiar bed and around the people I knew and back to what little of a personal routine I’d managed to have back home.

I yawned. There was still too much time to kill. My ship didn’t leave before midnight. I couldn’t even board until ten. But it was getting steadily darker and more quiet and as much as it was romantic and all I was done with that. This wasn’t a time for admiring the water and getting lost in cute little back streets. This was time to get to the terminal and move on.

I got to my feet.

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