Looking for Marco Polo (10 page)

“Suddenly the crowd stills. A prisoner is brought to the dock in a black gondola.

“Punishments and public executions took place between those landmark columns—flogging and branding for stealing, heads chopped off for murder. It’s said to be bad luck to walk there.

“This prisoner’s crime was not so great. He got locked in a wooden cage and hoisted partway up the gray column. People teased and threw cabbages and fruit at him until workers came and set up the gaming tables again. Within minutes the merchants and nobles were rolling dice and slapping down cards as they roared out their stories, everyone talking at once like an opera and nobody minding.”

The doctor looked at his watch. “I’ve got to run an errand. How about I drop you at your hotel for a lie-down? On the way we can look at the merchants’ palace they’d never have let Marco into—the place with books about silk growing on trees and dog-headed Chinese.”

Boss gave the doctor a look.

They caught the pitching waterbus to the Rialto Bridge. The lagoon water smelled like the ocean; it was gray, not green like the canal water.

Boss looked forlorn, head down, his paws spread wide to keep from falling as the boat plunged and yawed.

Mark moved close and hugged him. “I’ll steady you,” he whispered.

Boss licked his face. Mark smiled. No dog had ever had a chance to do that before, and he still wasn’t sneezing.

Every quarter mile or so the vaporetto would stop like a land bus, honking the smaller boats out of the way. A sailboat was luffing in the channel, unable to move. The bus swerved wide as the sailboat pitched crazily in the wake.

The merchants’ palace was white and grand like a Greek temple, with columns out front, carved gargoyles, and medallions. There was writing over the entrance.

“What’s it say?” Mark wanted to know.

“‘Let all who trade here do so honestly,’” the doctor translated.

“Did they?”

“Ha!” said Hornaday with a sharp laugh.
“Caveat emptor
—‘Let the buyer beware’—has always been the merchants’ rule, but the doge and his council had regulations to keep things fair and protect the reputation of Venetian goods. They checked quality, weights, and measures. It wasn’t unusual to see smoke rising in the market square when the governors discovered defective cloth or some bad spices and ordered the stuff burned.
Public examples like that kept folks honest, because the doge’s men didn’t just burn what was bad; they torched the cheater’s entire stock.”

“Okay if Boss stays with me?” Mark asked when they got to his hotel.

“Sure,” said Doc. “I’ll meet you at one for lunch at the signora’s.”

Mark and Boss headed upstairs to Mark’s room. As Mark slid the Chinese pillow under his head, the dog floated up and lay down beside him, uttering a long whistling sigh of joy as he stretched out full length. But a few minutes later, Boss began to jerk and twitch in his sleep, quivering, his teeth chattering. A bad dream! Mark put out his hand to comfort him.

Boss awakened, looked up at Mark, then licked the boy’s hand in gratitude, sighed, and went back to sleep. Mark lay there watching in case the nightmare came back. It felt good being needed. He’d never felt that way before.

He was tired but he wasn’t sleepy. His mind was going all over the place, sights and images boiling around in his head like the flakes in one of those snow globes.

Gradually the swirl of ideas settled on one thing: St. Mark’s. Seeing the light shining out, hearing the music—he had to get inside to see what Marco had
seen. He had to go back. He had some money, and his mother had given him a book of vaporetto tickets.

Boss was suddenly wide awake, ready for whatever Mark had in mind.

The boy tried to leave word with the hotel clerk, but when the man saw the dog again, he scuttled back into his night closet.

They caught the waterbus and rode down the Grand Canal to the San Marco stop.

The crowds in the cathedral yard were thicker than before. Mark gritted his teeth. There was a wall of people he figured he’d never get through.

Then he noticed a display of Italian sunglasses on a souvenir cart. It gave him an idea.

He went to the cart and tried on a pair. He checked them out with Boss. The dog nodded.

Mark gestured to the man and said, “I’ll take these.”

“Twenty euro,” the man said.

Mark pulled out what he had in his pockets: thirteen euros plus the book of vaporetto tickets.

“You have anything cheaper?” he asked.

“No,” said the man. Then he smiled. “What you have there—the money and the tickets—I sell them to you for that, Mister Hollywood.”

Somehow from behind the glasses the crowd wasn’t so intimidating.

Mark took hold of Boss’s collar. The dog led him toward the open tourist gates slowly and deliberately, his great plume waving, his blue tongue out and slobbering as he grinned and hooted his way through the crowd.

They got to the great doors.

Mark nodded to the dog. Boss sat down, prepared to wait for Mark for as long as necessary. Mark let go of the leash and merged with the warm, shuffling tide that sounded like silk rubbing on silk.

He was in. He pulled off the glasses and waited while his eyes adjusted to the smoky dim. There was organ music and singing far away. The space was huge, the domed ceilings soaring higher than anything he’d ever seen. The slanting winter light coming in from one side was golden, touching the mosaic pictures in the domes over his head. There was Noah tenderly helping a pair of long-necked green and turquoise birds into the ark while others just as gorgeous but azure with white dots waited their turn. And then, farther on, there were the merchants in their little black boat bringing back a long casket with the bones of Saint Mark over a vivid sea of black swirls on gold. As the boy stared, he could almost feel their boat pitching and heaving over the deep.

He had goose bumps. The hair on the back of his neck went up. “Marco,” he whispered. “You were here. You saw those sailors, you knew the story, you could feel the water. Maybe you stood right where I am now.” He shivered, but he wasn’t cold.

Moving deeper into the dusk and hush of the cathedral, it felt as if he were walking in the hold of a great ship, moving up toward her prow. He became aware of the incense and candle smoke. It was heavy to breathe. There were trays of candles in niches along the sides of the cathedral, their light flickering off paintings, polished panels of marble veined like old wood, columns carved like spirals and capped with bunches of leaves, relic boxes on stands—some made of crystal edged with gold, others of ivory and carved stone—each filled with a holy object or martyr remains. In one, he saw what looked like a circle of rusted barbed wire on a faded silk pillow stained with what might have been drops of blood. In the next, he saw a Bible bound in jewels with a broken blade smashed into it. In another, there was a skull with auburn hair and teeth and beside it a severed hand.

He walked slowly toward the high altar, where Saint Mark’s bones were kept.

Everything was polished stone, even the uneven
floor that dipped in some places and rose in others so sometimes Mark caught himself stumbling. The stones were laid in patterns so confusing he had to look up. As he did, he saw a figure like the signora’s Madonna
smiling in a niche, only there wasn’t any paint splashed on her. She seemed to be smiling at him, nodding.

“My dad,” he whispered. “Please, Lady, watch out for him.”

He moved with the hush of shuffling worshipers up the stairs to the high altar. It was covered with embroidered silks, a tall golden crucifix in the center, on either side smaller jeweled religious ornaments and a pair of tall candelabra. There were mosaic figures on the sides, glittering in vivid colors outlined in black and gold. The music was close now, men’s voices chanting from above. The light was hazy, as if pouring through fine golden dust. The incense was dizzying.

He made his way to a pew and sat down. Overhead there were images of angels. No one was sitting close by, but it felt as if he wasn’t alone.

Maybe Marco sat here,
he thought,
with his aunt and the cook and everyone for Christmas Mass.

Suddenly he was cold. He remembered Boss. He stumbled out. Boss had made himself small in a corner by the door beside a tiny old gypsy woman who was crouched there begging. Mark gestured that his pockets were empty; he had nothing for her. She understood.

The dog led him away.

Mark was broke. They had to walk back to the signora’s restaurant.

Mark and Boss were waiting at Signora Eh’s when Doc came in. As they finished eating, Doc rolled up his napkin. “Who sent Marco to Kublai?” he asked.

Mark was surprised. “Didn’t he go with his father and uncle as a merchant to trade? Or for the pope? He says in his book they carried a letter from the pope, so maybe the pope sent them?”

“They traded as they went along,” the doctor replied, “but I don’t think that was their main purpose. Marco reports what goods were available, but he never talks abut trying to make converts or gloats about making a good bargain. Other merchants’ journals are full of brags about the deals they made, but we don’t get that from him, and we don’t hear much about the pope’s letter either.

“No, I think they were on a secret mission for the
doge. He wanted permission for Venetian merchants to use the Chinese spice ports. He figured that would give them a real edge over the Genoese.”

Mark shook his head. “If he really was on a secret mission for the doge, why didn’t he say so?”

“Because he’d been sworn to silence,” the doctor replied. “Years later he figured it was okay to tell what he’d seen, but to say why he’d gone, who’d sent him, and who paid for everything—that would have given away too much to the Genoese, so he never did.

“The way I see it, the doge needed someone to go in secret to negotiate with Kublai. Marco’s father and uncle turned up at just the right moment. They’d met Kublai, after all, and the doge trusted them. They’d been giving him secret information about the East for years.”

“You mean they were spies?” Mark asked.

“Not exactly,” the doctor said, “but merchants make good informants. They remember what they hear as they nod and listen over cups of liquor and piles of money. Gossip and bargaining have always gone together. Without your knowing it, a good merchant can talk you into anything.

“The way I imagine it,” he went on, “late one night a man came to Ca Polo with a sealed message. It wasn’t
signed, but from what the messenger hinted, Marco’s father guessed it was from the doge. It directed him to go with the messenger to meet someone who would arrange his voyage to China.

“They went by boat to the marshy island where the Jews had to live, Giudaico—‘Jew place.’ The doge’s messenger led them to a darkened house.

“The man knocked. There was rustling inside, then the door opened a little. There were whispers. The Polos slipped in like shadows. The man who’d brought them stood guard.

“The Jew they were sent to meet was there with his brother. They lit candles and unrolled a map of the route Chinese junks sailed.

“Marco’s father had never seen such a map. It was better than anything in the doge’s palace. It was exact and detailed. It had been painted on paper at Kublai’s court.

“Kublai ruled his empire from maps like that. He’d long since given up trying to ride his boundaries; instead, he ran his finger across his maps, giving orders, directing lives and roads and crops a thousand, two thousand miles away.

“The Jew gave the map to Marco’s father along with a note introducing him to the Jew’s friends and
relatives and asking that they arrange the Polos’ passage to China and give them slips that would serve for gold as they traveled.

“The visitors never sat down. The whole business took five minutes in hushed voices.”

“Why all the sneaking around?” Mark asked.

“Because the doge didn’t want anyone to know what he was trying to get from Kublai, and it wouldn’t look good if word got around that he was relying on the Jews for help. Jews were looked down on in Venice in those days, but they could do things in the Middle East that other Venetians couldn’t. They had connections with Arab merchants and caravanners, and they had contacts in the Indian and Chinese ports. Their links of friends and family could arrange payment from Egypt to China without moving a ducat. Gold was heavy and dangerous to travel with; the Jews paid each other with slips of paper. They lived by the old expression ‘Travel light and you can sing in the robber’s face.’