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Authors: Gary Jennings

BOOK: The Journeyer
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“You do not have to decide your choice this instant. Let us discuss your case instead. How do you intend to plead?”
“Plead?” I said, indignant. “I shall not plead, I shall protest! I am innocent!”
Brother Ugo looked over at the Jew again, and distastefully, as if he suspected that I had already been receiving counsel. Mordecai only pulled a face of skeptical amusement.
I went on, “For my first witness I shall call the Dona Ilaria. When she is compelled to tell of our—”
“She will not be called,” the Brother interrupted. “The Signori della Notte would not allow it. That lady has been recently bereaved and is still prostrate with grief.”
I scoffed, “Are you trying to tell me that she grieves for her husband?”
“Well …,” he said, with deliberation. “If not that, you can be sure that she exhibits some extreme emotion because she is not now the Dogaressa of Venice.”
Old Cartafilo made a noise like a smothered snicker. Maybe I made a noise, too—of dismay—for that aspect of the situation had not before occurred to me. Ilaria must be seething with disappointment and frustration and anger. When she sought her husband’s removal, she had not dreamed of the honor he was about to be accorded, and she with him. So now she would be inclined to forget her own involvement; she would be consumed with a desire to exact revenge for her forfeited title. It would not matter on
whom
she vented her rage, and who was an easier target than myself?
“If you are innocent, young Messer Marco,” said Ugo, “who did murder the man?”
I said, “I think it was a priest.”
Brother Ugo gave me a long look, then rapped on the cell door for a guard to let him out. As the door creaked open at his knee level, he said to me, “I suggest that you do choose to hire some other advocate. If you intend to accuse a reverend father, and your prime witness is a woman bent on vendèta, you will need the best legal talent there is in the Republic. Ciao.”
When he had gone, I said to Mordecai, “Everyone takes it for granted that I am doomed, whether I am guilty
or not.
Surely there must be some law to safeguard the innocent against unjust conviction.”
“Oh, almost surely. But there is an old saying: the laws of Venice are supremely fair and they are sedulously obeyed … for a week. Do not let your hopes get too high.”
“I would have more hope if I had more help,” I said. “And you could help us both. Let the Brother Ugo have those letters you hold, and let him show them in evidence. They would at least cast a shadow of suspicion on the lady and her lover.”
He gazed at me with his blackberry eyes and scratched reflectively in his fungus beard, and said, “You think that would be the Christian thing to do?”
“Why … yes. To save my life, to set you free. I see nothing
un
-Christian about it.”
“Then I am sorry that I adhere to a different morality, for I cannot do it. I did not do that to save myself from the frusta, and I will not do it for both of us.”
I stared, unbelieving. “Why in the world not?”
“My trade is founded on trust. I am the only moneylender who takes such documents in pawn. I can do that only if I trust my clients to repay their loans and the accrued interest. The clients pledge such papers only because they can trust me to keep their contents inviolable. Do you think women would otherwise hand over
love letters?”
“But I told you, old man, no human being trusts a Jew. Look how the Lady Ilaria repaid you with treachery. Is that not proof enough that she thought you untrustworthy?”
“It is proof of something, yes,” he said wryly. “But if even once I should fail my trust, even on the most dire provocation, I must abandon my chosen trade. Not because others would think me contemptible, but because I would.”
“What trade, you old fool? You may be in here the rest of your life! You said so yourself. You cannot conduct any—”
“I can conduct myself according to my conscience. It may be small comfort, but it is my only comfort. To sit here and scratch my flea and bedbug bites, and see my once prosperously fat flesh shrinking gaunt, and feel myself superior to the Christian morality that put me here.”
I snarled, “You could preen yourself just as well
outside—”
“Zito! Enough! The instruction of fools is folly. We will not speak of it further. Look here on the floor, my boy, here are two large spiders. Let us race them against each other and wager incalculable fortunes on the outcome. You may choose which spider will be yours … .”
 
MORE time passed, in dismalness, and then Brother Ugo came again, stooping in through the low door. I waited glumly for him to say something as disheartening as he had the other time, but what he said was astounding:
“Your father and his brother have returned to Venice!”
“What?” I gasped, unable to comprehend. “You mean their bodies have been returned? For burial in their native land?”
“I mean they are here! Alive and well!”
“Alive? After almost ten years of silence?”
“Yes! All their acquaintances are as amazed as you are. The entire community of merchants is talking of nothing else. It is said that they bear an embassy from Far Tartary to the Pope at Rome. But by good fortune—
your
fortune, young Messer Marco—they came home to Venice before going to Rome.”
“Why my good fortune?” I said shakily.
“Could they have come at a more opportune time? They are even now petitioning the Quarantia for permission to visit you, which is not normally allowed to anyone but a prisoner’s advocate. It may just be that your father and uncle can influence some lenity in your case. If nothing else, their presence at your trial ought to give you some moral support. And some stiffness to your spine when you walk to the pillars.”
On that equivocal note, he departed again. Mordecai and I sat talking with animated speculation far into the night, even after the coprifuoco had rung and a guard growled through the door hole for us to extinguish the dim light of our rag lamp.
Another four or five days had to pass, fretful ones for me, but then the door creaked open and a man came in, a man so burly he had to struggle through it. Inside the cell he stood up, and he seemed to keep on standing up, so tall was he. I had no least recollection of being related to a man so immense. He was as hairy as he was big, with tousled black locks and a bristling blue-black beard. He looked down at me from his intimidating great height, and his voice was disdainful when he boomed loudly:
“Well! If this is not pure merda with a piecrust on it!”
I said meekly, “Benvegnùo, caro pare.”
“I am not your dear father, young toad! I am your uncle Mafìo.”
“Benvegnùo, caro zio. Is not my father coming?”
“No. We could get permission for only one visitor. And he should rightly be secluded in mourning for your mother.”
“Oh. Yes.”
“In truth, however, he is busy courting his next wife.”
That rocked me on my heels. “What? How could he do such a thing?”
“Who are you to sound disapproving, you disreputable scagaròn? The poor man comes back from abroad to find his wife long buried, her maid-servant disappeared, a valuable slave lost, his friend the Doge dead—and his son, the hope of the family, in prison charged with the foulest murder in Venetian history!” So loudly that everybody in the Vulcano must have heard, he bellowed, “Tell me the truth! Did you do the deed?”
“No, my lord uncle,” I said, quailing. “But what has all that to do with a new wife?”
My uncle said more quietly, with a snort of deprecation, “Your father is an uxorious man. For some reason, he likes being married.”
“He chose an odd way to demonstrate it to my mother,” I said. “Going away and staying as he did.”
“And he will be going away again,” said Uncle Mafìo. “That is why he must have someone with good sense to leave in charge of the family interests. He has not time to wait for another son. Another wife will have to do.”
“Why another anything?” I said hotly. “He
has
a son!”
My uncle did not reply to that with words. He merely looked me up and down, with scathing eyes, and then let his gaze roam around the constricted, dim, fetid cell.
Again abashed, I said, “I had hoped he could get me out of here.”
“No, you must get yourself out,” said my uncle, and my heart sank. But he continued to look about the room and said, as if thinking aloud, “Of all the kinds of disaster that can befall a city, Venice has always most feared the risk of a great fire. It would be especially fearsome if it threatened the Doge’s Palace and the civic treasures contained in it, or the Basilica of San Marco and its even more irreplaceable treasures. Since that palace is next door to this prison on one side, and that church adjoining on the other side, the guards here in the Vulcano used to take particular precautions—I imagine they do still—that any smallest lamp flame in these cells is carefully monitored.”
“Why, yes, they—”
“Shut up. They do that because if in the nighttime such a lamp were to set fire to, say, these wooden bed planks, there would be urgent outcry and much running about with pails of water. A prisoner would have to be let out of his burning cell so the fire could be extinguished. And then, if, in the smoke and turmoil, that prisoner could get as far as the corridor of the Giardini Foschi on the canal side of the prison, he might think to slide away the moveable stone panel in the wall there, which leads to the outside. And if he contrived to do that, say, tomorow night, he would probably find a batèlo idling about on the water immediately below.”
Mafìo finally brought his eyes around to me again. I was too busy contemplating the possibilities to say anything, but old Mordecai spoke up unbidden:
“That has been done before. And because of that, there is now a law that any prisoner attempting such an arson—no matter how trivial his original offense—will be himself condemned to burn. And from that sentence there is no appeal.”
Uncle Mafìo said sardonically, “Thank you, Matùsalem.” To me he said, “Well, you have just heard one more good reason to make not a try but a success of it.” He kicked at the door to summon the guard. “Until tomorrow night, nephew.”
I lay awake most of that night. It was not that the escape required much planning; I simply lay awake to enjoy the prospect of being free again. And old Cartafilo roused up suddenly out of an apparently sound sleep to say:
“I hope your family know what they are doing. Another law is that a prisoner’s closest relation is responsible for his behavior. A father for a son—khas vesholem—a husband for a female prisoner, a master for a slave. If a prisoner does escape by arson, that one responsible for him will be burned instead.”
“My uncle does not appear to be a man much concerned about laws,” I said, rather proudly, “or even much afraid of burning. But Mordecai, I cannot do it without your participation. We must make the break together. What say you?”
He was silent for a while, then he mumbled, “I daresay burning is preferable to a slow death from the pettechie, the prison disease. And I long ago outlived every last one of my relations.”
So the next night came, and when the coprifuoco tolled and the guards commanded us to put out our lamp, we only shaded its light with the pissòta pail. When the guards had gone on by, I spilled most of the fish oil from the lamp onto my bed planks. Mordecai contributed his outer robe—it was quite green with mold and mildew and would make the blaze smokier—and we bundled that under my bed and lighted it from the lamp’s rag wick. In just moments the cell was clouded black and the wood had begun to flicker with flames. Mordecai and I fanned our arms to help the smoke out through the door hole, and clamored loudly, “Fuoco! Al fuoco!” and heard running feet in the corridor.
Then, as my uncle had predicted, there was commotion and confusion, and Mordecai and I were ordered out of the cell so the men with water buckets could crawl in. Smoke billowed out with us, and the guards shoved us out of their way. There was quite a number of them in the passage, but they paid us little heed. So, aided by the concealing smoke and darkness, we sneaked farther down the corridor and around a bend in it. “Now this way!” said Mordecai, and he set off at a speed remarkable for a man of his age. He had been in the prison long enough to have learned its passages, and he led me this way and that, until we glimpsed light at the end of one long hall. He stopped there at a corner, peered around it and waved me on. We turned into a shorter corridor furnished with two or three wall lamps, but otherwise empty.
Mordecai knelt, motioned for me to help, and I saw that one large square stone in the bottom of the wall had iron grips bolted to it. Mordecai seized one, I the other, and we heaved and the stone came away, revealing itself to be shallower than the others around it. Wonderfully fresh air, damp and smelling of salt, swept in through the opening. I stood up straight to take a gratefully deep inhalation, and in the next instant I was knocked down. A guard had sprung from somewhere and was shouting for help.
There was a moment of even more confusion than before. The guard threw himself upon me and we thrashed about on the stone floor, while Mordecai crouched by the hole and regarded us with open mouth and wide eyes. I found myself briefly on top of the guard, and took advantage of it. I knelt so that he had my full weight on his chest and my knees pinned his arms to the floor. I clamped both hands over his loudly flapping mouth, turned to Mordecai and gasped, “I cannot hold—for long.”
“Here, lad,” he said. “Let me do that.”
“No. One can escape. You go.” I heard more running feet somewhere in the corridors. “Hurry!”
Mordecai stuck his feet out through the hole, then turned to ask, “Why me?”
Between grapplings and thrashings, I got out a few last words in spurts, “You gave—my choice—of spiders. Get out!”
Mordecai gave me a wondering look, and he said slowly, “The reward of a mitzva is another mitzva,” and he slid out through the opening and vanished. I heard a distant splash out there beyond the dark hole, and then I was overwhelmed.
I was roughly manhandled along the passages and literally thrown into a new cell. I mean another very ancient cell, of course, but a different one. It had only a bed shelf for furniture, and no door hole and not so much as a candle stub for light. I sat there in the darkness, my bruises aching, and reviewed my situation. In attempting the escape, I had forfeited all hope of ever proving my innocence of the earlier charge. In failing to escape, I had doomed myself to burn. I had just one reason to be thankful: I now had a private cell. I had no cellmate to watch me weep.
Since the guards, for a considerable while thereafter, spitefully refrained from feeding me even the awful prison gruel, and the darkness and monotony were unrelieved, I have no idea how long I was alone in the cell before a visitor was admitted. It was the Brother of Justice again.
I said, “I assume that my uncle’s permission to visit has been revoked.”
“I doubt that he would willingly come,” said Brother Ugo. “I understand he became quite irate and profane when he saw that the nephew he hauled from the water had turned into an elderly Jew.”
“And, since there is no further need for your advocacy,” I said resignedly, “I assume you have come only in the guise of prisoner’s comforter.”
“At any rate, I bring news you should find comforting. The Council this morning elected a new Doge.”
“Ah, yes. They were postponing the election until they had the sassìn of Doge Zeno. And they have me. Why should you think I find that comforting?”
“Perhaps you forget that your father and uncle are members of that Council. And since their miraculous return from their long absence, they are quite the most popular members of the community of merchants. Therefore, in the election, they could exert noticeable influence on the votes of all the merchant nobles. A man named Lorenzo Tiepolo was eager to become Doge, and in return for the merchants’ bloc of votes, he was prepared to make certain commitments to your father and uncle.”
“Such as what?” I asked, not daring to hope.
“It is traditional that a new Doge, on his accession, proclaims some amnesties. The Serenità Tiepolo is going to forgive your felonious commission of arson, which permitted the escape of one Mordecai Cartafilo from this prison.”
“So I do not burn as an arsonist,” I said. “I merely lose my hand and my head as a murderer.”
“No, you do not. You are right that the sassìn has been captured, but you are wrong about its being you. Another man has confessed to the sassinàda.”
Fortunately the cell was small or I should have fallen down. But I only reeled and slumped against the wall.
The Brother went on, at an infuriatingly slow pace. “I told you I brought news of comfort. You have more advocates than you know, and they have all been busy in your behalf. That zudìo you freed, he did not just keep on running, or take ship to some distant land. He did not even hide in the warrens of the Jews’ burghèto. Instead, he went to visit a priest—not a rabìno, a real Christian priest—one of the under-priests of the San Marco Basilica itself.”
I said, “I tried to tell you about that priest.”
“Well, it seems the priest had been the Lady Ilaria’s secret lover, but she turned bitter toward him when she so nearly became our Dogaressa and then did not. When she put away the priest from her affections, he became remorseful of having done such a vile deed as murder, and to no profitable end. Of course, he might still have kept silent, and kept the matter between himself and God. But then Mordecai Cartafilo called on him. It seems the Jew spoke of some papers he holds in pawn. He did not even show them, he had only to mention them, and that was enough to turn the priest’s secret remorse into open repentance. He went to his superiors and made full confession, waiving the privilege of the confessional. So he is now under house arrest in his canònica chambers. The Dona Ilaria is also confined to her house, as an accomplice in the crime.”

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