a well built, pleasant boat. Not beautiful as a gondola is, of course. But it needs an engine.”
“I might get you a jeep engine. One that was condemned and you could work it over.”
“Don’t talk about such things,” the boatman said. “Things like that don’t happen. I don’t want to think about it.”
“You can think about it,” the Colonel said. “I’m talking true.”
“You mean it.”
“Sure. I don’t guarantee anything. I’ll see what I can do. How many children have you got?”
“Six. Two male and four female.”
“Hell, you mustn’t have believed in the Regime. Only six.”
“I didn’t believe in the Regime.”
“You don’t have to give me that stuff,” the Colonel said. “It would have been quite natural for you to have believed in it. Do you think I hold that against a man after we’ve won?”
They were through the dull part of the canal that runs from Piazzale Roma to Ca’Foscari, though none of it is dull, the Colonel thought.
It doesn’t all have to be palaces nor churches. Certainly that isn’t dull. He looked to the right, the starboard, he thought. I’m on the water. It was a long low pleasant building and there was a trattoria next to it.
I ought to live here. On retirement pay I could make it all right. No Gritti Palace. A room in a house like that and
