Frank could only catch bits. It sounded like he was going to have to calm things down. "Dino, Fabrizzio, hold the door closed!" he bellowed. Once he was certain they were heading that way he ducked through the now-milling crowd to get Giulio and Giovanna apart.
When he got there she was yelling that he was a big dumb ox who should've ducked, and he was letting her know that if she ran a decent house this sort of thing wouldn't happen. Better, Frank figured, than Giulio running outside to take 'em all on, but still not helping any.
"Sorry to interrupt this conversation!" he yelled over the noise. The pair of them weren't even a half of one per cent of the racket in the room, and conversation was putting it a bit too gently for the business of the pair of them yelling at each other at the top of their lungs. Neither of them was listening to the other or, for that matter, Frank.
There was a hammering at the door. Dino and Fabrizzio were holding it shut, and were getting the bolts in. Frank began to wish he'd gotten around to fixing those old and balky fasteners a bit sooner, but it'd been easier to persist with a few seconds swearing and jiggling every morning and night.
There was a bright side, though. Everyone shut up.
At the same time. In a room full of Romans, that was a miracle in itself.
Bang, bang, bang. There was shouting in the street outside, but no way to tell about what.
Frank figured he had to take charge somehow. "Giulio, come with me."
He had no idea whether or not the big guy was any use in a fight, and had no idea how to tell. Once upon a time, he'd thought big and strong was the way to tell, but then the one guy he knew who was good in a fight—he'd gotten the story from Billy Trumble—was a short, wiry Catalan who was older than Frank's dad. Still, having a big guy standing behind him would help.
And now he had backup. He hoped that would keep there from being any trouble. "Open the door, guys."
Dino and Fabrizzio looked at each other and looked at Frank. Frank saw that both of them had brought the cudgels that were kept behind the bar. Maybe that'd help, too, although the two Venetian boys weren't anyone's idea of hulking goons. Scrawny little guys from the wrong side of the tracks, those two. Not that they didn't know a thing about street-fighting, being from Murano, where it was the local sport. And Frank had seen them pile into a gang of muggers with a will, that first night he'd visited them at home. It's just that you wouldn't know it to look at them, and that meant someone might try something, not knowing that the pair of them were pretty handy with those clubs.
They shot the bolts and opened the big double door wide in front of Frank. He stepped out, not letting himself have any time to chicken out. The street was dark, apart from where light spilled out from the couple of other buildings that were occupied around here. Frank's first guess had been off. There were maybe a dozen guys out there. All of them at least half drunk, if not more. A couple had been standing right by the door, and having it open in front of them had clearly come as a surprise. Well, Frank thought, don't waste it.
"What are you doing, you sons of whores?" he roared, stepping right up to the nearest drunk. The guy looked like he'd been stunned. Certainly not about to call Frank's bluff.
Some of the others weren't so taken aback. "Whoremonger!" "Pimp!" and "Pervert!" were the few cries Frank could pick out. His grasp of Roman idiom wasn't good enough for more than the basics of the local swearing.
"Yeah, says who?" Giulio shouted. Bellowed, rather.
"Yeah, show yourself!" Frank shouted.
He really wasn't happy about this. The whole stand-up-to-a-bully thing just wasn't his scene. Back down and take elaborate comedy revenge later, that was his style, but it just wasn't going to work here and now. Time to find out if confrontation worked.
A moment's tense silence . . . Not right away, it doesn't, Frank thought to himself. Aloud, "Come on! You got a problem with me, step right the fuck up." He pointed at the ground in front of him. He wasn't sure why, he just thought he'd seen it on TV one time.
More silence, a couple more shouts from the back of the crowd, calling him a pimp and a few other things. He looked around. Most of them had drifted closer, and enough windows were opening that Frank was starting to see faces instead of just pale, unshaven blobs. He didn't recognize any of them, and a dark suspicion began to form.
Behind him, he heard Dino say, "You want we should break some heads, Frank?"
"Yeah, say the word," Giulio added.
"I shall probably regret this," came Piero's voice, and the sound of something steely slipping out of a scabbard, "but I do not feel that I can let this pass without intervening."