The Serpent of Venice (12 page)

Upon Jessica’s urging, Shylock sent me to Tubal’s house an hour before sundown, and I was met by two great hulking Hebrews dressed in the same dark gabardine and yellow hat as myself. Called Ham and Japheth, they were certainly the largest Jews I had ever seen.

“Ham, you say? Can’t say our people lack a sense of irony, can you? Surprised your brother wasn’t called
Bacon
or
Bangers
. Ha!” I amuse myself sometimes.

“We are named for the sons of Noah,” said Should-Have-Been-Bacon.

“Of course,” said I. “That’s what I meant—great meaty blokes like you two in a city surrounded by water. Like Noah’s sons.”

They were young, just coming into their beards, it appeared, so they did not further question my balderdash. This is why we send youth to war: spotty lads possessed of passion but void of purpose will cleave to the most slippery species of bullshit. Ham and Japheth would make fine filler for the sausage grinder of war. But for now, they would do as guards for gold.

Tubal directed us from the dock in front of his house, where a broad-beamed boat waited with oarsmen standing at each end. He was still in his dark gabardine, but without his yellow hat he had a great explosion of curly black and gray hair that was broken only by a shiny white bald spot in its center, as if an albino turtle was hiding down a mine in the dark. “This boat will take you to the dock in front of Antonio’s house, which faces the Lido, so you will not have to go into the canals of the city. You, Lancelot, Shylock says you have seen Antonio’s men. Let the boatmen come into the dock only after you recognize them and confirm that they are ready to receive the gold. You jump to the dock and assure the way is clear all the way up the stairs to Antonio’s apartments and that he is in residence. Only then may Ham and Japheth leave the boat and carry the gold up the stairs to Antonio’s apartments. Turn it over to Antonio himself, and offer to stay while he counts it. Then have him mark this receipt before you return. It must be signed or the law will not support the bond.”

Tubal gave a rolled-up parchment to Ham, who tucked it into his gabardine.

“Go. Go, go, go,” said Tubal. “They will be expecting you.”

Ham and Japheth wrestled the heavy chest into the boat, which settled lower into the water with the weight of the gold and the two huge Jews.

The boatmen rowed us eastward around the outside of La Giudecca, around the island of San Giorgio Maggiore (the dot on the “i” of the long island of La Giudecca) and across the mouth of the Grand Canal, where even at dusk, the boats moved like a flock of confused ducks maneuvering for bread crusts thrown in their midst. The water of the lagoon had taken on a silvery sheen from the setting sun, which blocked the view beneath, but some small fish broke the surface perhaps fifty yards to our right, and I could see the wave of whatever large creature was below the water chasing them, moving parallel to our boat, toward Arsenal.

“Tuna,” said Ham, catching my eye and probably seeing the alarm there. “Sometimes they come into the lagoon in the evening. Maybe a dolphin.” He smiled and slapped my shoulder to comfort me and I returned his smile.

I did not think it was a tuna, or a dolphin.

“Relax, Lancelot,” said Japheth. “The threat to our task will not come from the sea, but from such sharks as walk the land, and we are ready for them.” He pulled aside the fringe of his gabardine and I could see a heavy oaken club hanging from his belt. I looked to his brother who grinned as he revealed an identical cudgel that he’d concealed.

I shrugged. “Say, what say ye, just for sport, instead of giving Antonio the gold, you two surprise him by bludgeoning him to pulp, perhaps a few of his cohorts, then we take the gold back to Tubal and have a drink and a good laugh over it?”

Really, what good was it to have two huge Jews with clubs if you couldn’t use them to bludgeon your enemies to meaty paste? Granted, it wouldn’t be the slow, ironic retribution that Shylock was hoping for, but I thought he might recover from the disappointment and would deal somewhat better with a more unpleasant surprise he was about to receive.

“That would be wrong,” said Japheth.

“Wrongish,” said I, making the sign of tipping scales with my hand. “Not like it’s written in stone, is it?”

“Actually—” ventured Ham.

“Oh, all right—it’s like sailing with an ark full of fucking lawyers with you two. Fine, we’ll just deliver the sodding gold and leave Antonio unbludgeoned.”

There were four men waiting in front of Antonio’s house. The boatmen brought their craft into the landing bow first, allowed me to hop off, then backed off, as they had been instructed. I was agile on the tall chopines now, and only someone who was looking for it might have noticed my gait to be unnatural, less nimble than on my own tender feet. I nodded to the four, three I’d recognized from the Rialto that afternoon: Gratiano, the tallest; the handsome one, Bassanio, the one for whom the gold was meant; and two other shorter, rounder fellows who might have been the same person, if not twins, brothers, and although I had seen one of them on the Rialto, I couldn’t have said which one.

“Lorenzo?” I asked the closest.

“Salarino,” said he.

“Then you are Lorenzo?” I asked the other.

“Salanio,” said the other.

I looked from one to the other. “You’re joking?”

“I told you, Jew,” said Gratiano. “We will see Lorenzo later.”

“Right,” said I. “I’m to check the stairwell for more scoundrels, then I’ll be back down to signal for the gold.”

“Top floor.” Gratiano grinned and gestured to the doorway of the nearest building.

Off I went.

“Hey, what did he mean by
more
scoundrels?” said Salanio, or perhaps the other one, as I entered the building.

I was up three floors in two ticks, but the wooden chopines were making such a racket, I moved to the edge of the stairs and threw my weight on the banister before going up the last flight. Then I heard the voice.

“Don’t worry, Antonio, if there is no one to collect your bond, you shall be free of it, regardless of the fortunes of your ships.”

Iago. My body reacted with a shiver despite my resolve of spirit. I had had no such reaction to seeing Antonio, but then he had never seemed the dangerous one.

“We would just, well, assassinate the Jew?” Antonio sounded shocked. “Everyone would know.”

“We are starting a war, Antonio. You can’t run the whole thing on cynicism and profit. At some point blood
will
be spilled. There
will
be killing.”

“I know, but I thought it would be far away, unpleasant, but removed, like a rumor.”

“I will see your hands stay clean, Antonio.”

“The gold is here,” said Antonio.

He must have looked out on the lagoon and seen the boat.

“Rodrigo has been to Belmont,” said Iago. “Nerissa says there is no way to discern the correct casket. Several of Brabantio’s lawyers, as well as a senator, watch over the process. Suitors come in from many ports. Princes and dukes.”

“We will find a way. The lady Portia yearns to be wed to Bassanio. She is her father’s daughter; I have full confidence in her cunning.”

“It will be on you, then. Rodrigo and I are bound for Corsica after the Michaelmas Carnival to see to the undoing of the Moor and Cassio. When next we meet, I shall be a general and you shall own a senator.”

I listened for footsteps, and panic rose in my throat like a scream. Why did Iago engender such fear? I had lived a life infested with villains, Iago was no darker. Still, it was my very frame that shuddered, not my nerve.

“I wonder, Antonio, why do you not marry the fair Portia yourself, and
be
the senator, rather than
own
one?”

“I am too old for her, and I hold great affection for Bassanio. I would not stand in the way of true lovers.”

“What a noble and poetic heart you have, good Antonio,” said Iago. “And yet no wife with whom to share it. Enjoy Veronica’s this evening.”

Then the heavy boot heels on the floor and I was down the stairs, three at a leap, sliding on the banister where I could, until I came catapulting out the front door and across the cobbles, nearly plunging into the lagoon. The two Sals caught me, one on each arm.

“Come, come, it’s all clear,” said I to the waiting boatmen and the huge Jews. “Tell Shylock I had other business to attend to.”

I was off the walkway and around the corner and down the lane called Fondamenta Arsenale into the city before Iago emerged from the door.

Onward to find my giant and my monkey! What elation I felt at the prospect of their calls of joy when they found I had rescued them. It had been some time since I had basked in the accolades due a hero, even from a monkey and a great drooling half-wit. They would be balm on my much-abused soul.

TEN

Intrigue Beneath the Bawd

A
horrible, shifty-eyed creature was that Pocket—a rascal of the lowest order, he was,” said my former landlady, a nine-toothed crone of roughly nine hundred years in age, and a ghastly judge of character, assigned by the doge to care for dignitaries not housed at the palace. I had asked for separate quarters after Jeff bit the senator’s wife and Drool wandered into the Cathedral of St. Mark next door,
sans
trousers, during high mass, his great dong swinging in time with the bishop’s smoking thurible.

“A raucous, gutter-mouthed little libertine he was,” the crone went on.

“Is that so?” said I, in my most courteous voice. “I heard that he was much loved in his native land, and the children sang songs of his kindness.”

“Bollocks to that—‘
the king of bloody Britain or France
,’ he’d say, the lying cur. But the doge liked him, Lord knows why, so I had to put up with him. But I’ll tell you my reckoning: I reckon, wearing that skintight silver-and-black motley, and that cracking big codpiece, I reckon that little one was a deviate. Never saw him with a girl, didn’t even have a go at Signora Veronica’s like the other men of his means, but couldn’t say two words what it wasn’t about bonking this and shaggin’ that—I reckon he was havin’ his way with the neighborhood cats in the night.”

“Perhaps he was being faithful to his lady love,” said I.

“No more constant than a fart on a hot skillet, was that one, just up and taking off one day, leaving the big ninny on his own, and what a state he was in. When the little fool went off, he come to my door three, four times a day lookin’ for him, then asked to have a look at my tits before he’d go away. I’d give ’im a flash, outta good Christian charity, and he’d be on his way—have himself a tug in the courtyard, he would, then be back asking again an hour later. You know, a woman my age don’t get that kind of attention much anymore. It was appreciated. That boy’s as dense as a bloody doorknob, but really, just a big slow lamb. He kept that up for a week till they came and got him.”

“They? The doge’s men? Soldiers?”

“Nah, the doge dropped the little miscreant like a thorned turd once Britain’s queen succumbed. ’Twas some merchants. Wearing fine silks. Young gents, three of them, two round and scruff, one quite tall and smooth. Said the little one had booked passage for the big one to Marseilles to join him.”

“But he went of his own accord?”

“Happy as a duck in water, saying he was going to see his best mate, Pocket, monkey chattering on his shoulder.”

“And are the fool’s things still in his rooms?”

“No, the merchants took everything along, said they were sending it to Marseilles with the big bloke.”

“Thank you, signora. This will help my master, who seeks the fool.”

“You Jews livin’ in luxury out on La Giudecca got no idea what kind of trash we have to put up with here in Venice proper.”

“You haven’t been to La Giudecca, have you?”

“I’m a proper Christian,” she said, as if that was an answer. “But I hear you lot roll in your money and laugh like madmen. I’m told there’s not a speck of good Parma ham on the island, though.”

“Well, that last is true.” I flipped her a coin. “From the little fool. For your trouble.”

I began to walk away. “But this is a gold ducat,” said she.

“Aye.”

“I don’t make this in two months.”

“Perhaps you misjudged this Pocket.”

She tucked the coin into her skirts then ducked into the courtyard and closed the heavy gate before anyone spotted the glitter of her gold. (I am a trained thief. One can’t expect me to ride in a boatload of gold and leave it unmolested. One ducat. What is one ducat?)

Had they murdered Drool and Jeff? Surely if they had just drowned them, the old woman would have gotten word. It was fully dark now, a windless night, and Venice took on the feeling of a city paved with black glass, the odd lantern, torch, or candle reflecting in the canals like distant windows into hell, the crescent moon throwing silver scythes across the water where it could find its way between buildings.

I made my way along the cobbled walkways and over the narrow bridges from my old apartments to the Grand Canal, then down the wide promenade that lined it, past palaces and the closed market booths of the Rialto, to Veronica’s, which lay down one of the more narrow canals on an open market square. The signora was a courtesan of the highest order, a Florentine, they said, who entertained the nobility of church and business in the sumptuous upper floors of a five-story building. The lower three floors were little more than a bawdy house with fine draperies, but it was patronized by the rich merchant and political classes, who sneered at tattered street harlots on their way to have their knobs gobbled by the broken bawds’ younger sisters. Here Jessica’s Lorenzo was supposed to meet his friends from Antonio’s entourage.

A young blond whore stood in the arabesque arched entryway, her dress of bloodred silk rolled down to her waist, her nipples rouged and attending a chill I did not feel in the sultry night air. Only in Venice could a whore wear silk, a cloth rare enough to be reserved for royalty in other territories.

“Shag a virgin, five shillings. Sail you off the edge of the world for six,”
^*
she called by routine, bored. The archway was lit by two oil torches, but she waved a small storm lantern as well, as if gondolas might have to navigate through the clear night to find her. “Hey there. I’m not supposed to service Jews, but it’s a slow night, so I’ll have you off on a stand-up around the corner for five shillings.”