The Serpent of Venice (15 page)

The
fool, Pocket, craven fish-fucker—

“
I still have Salanio’s dagger,” said I. “And it’s razor sharp, if you would prefer to narrate as a castrato for the duration.”

CHORUS:

And so the noble fool, Pocket,

Did lay his plans to breach Villa Belmont,

And undo Antonio’s plan for his protégé,

Then make way to rescue from prison

His companions, the estimable Drool and Jeff.

“Now you’re just groveling, you pernicious lickspittle,” said I as I made my way into the square at St. Mark’s. It was too late to find a ferry to La Giudecca, and too early to try to catch a ride with a fisherman, so I curled up in an alcove by the great cathedral and dozed, riding the dreamy waves of Viv’s poison in my blood until the bells rang at dawn, calling the faithful to mass.

Gondolas had begun to arrive at the landing at the docks at St. Mark’s, and I spotted the gondolier who had taken Shylock and me to the Rialto yesterday.

“Oy, boatman,” I called. “Remember me? Shylock’s secretary.” To aid his memory, I put on my wounded yellow hat, which was stained with a bit of my blood as well as bearing its own stab wounds.

“Aye,” said the gondolier, who was buffing his oar in an unsavory manner. “Wasn’t you taller yesterday, though?”

“Rough night,” said I. “Say, mate, could you give us a lift to La Giudecca gratis? The dice turned against me. I’ve not coin left to my name.” I lifted my bare foot to show him that I’d lost even my shoes. It was a pitifully sad sight. Pitiful. I felt tears welling.

“Your master fired me, didn’t he?” said the obstinate boatman. “I don’t think any favors are owed.”

I might have argued—convinced him of payment later and a return to Shylock’s good graces, but I had no gut for guile or persuasion. “Look, I’ll give you this smashing dagger. It’s got a fake jewel in it.”

The boatman eyed the dagger. It had a wide hand guard with jewels, probably colored glass, at the tips, as well as one set in the pommel. Rather garish, considering it was unlawful to carry unless one was a soldier, but as Salanio had said, shortly before his talking bits were detached from the rest of him, everyone had knives.

“A bloke would have trouble if a gendarme found that about his person,” said the gondolier.

“Well, you can sell it to a cutthroat on the docks, can’t you? Look at the bloody thing. It’s like new. There’re at least a dozen dirkings left in it, and that’s not even counting stabbing the odd apple or orphan.”

“Blimey, you’ve a gruesome tongue for a Jew.”

“Aforementioned bad night, innit? Now, the dagger for fare to Giudecca, or you may hold it as security until I receive pay from my master,
and
I’ve another job for you tonight as well, for which you’ll be paid ten times your normal fare.”

The boatman pushed down on his oar and the blade breached the surface and dripped. “Ten times my fare? To where?”

“The Villa Belmont. You know it?”

“Everybody knows it. And any gondolier will take you there. Why ten times the normal fare?”

“We don’t land at the dock. Back of the island. Midnight. No lantern or torches on your boat. You let me off, wait an hour, and bring me back. That’s all.”

“An hour? You burgling the place? I can’t be part of that. Every time I row under the Bridge of Sighs I can hear the prisoners wailing. I couldn’t take that. I’ve a wife, you know.”

“No, no, nothing of the sort. You’ve heard the late senator’s daughter is to be married?”

“Princes from all over coming to pay her suit, I hear.”

“Well, before she’s wed, she wants to shag a Jew, just to see what it’s like. She’s heard that the circumcised member is a sexual delicacy that will drive a lady to mad heights of ecstasy.”

“That true?”

“ ’Course not. Tankard of turtle toss, that is, but I’m not going to be the one to talk her out of it.”

“A fine lady like Portia’s going to shag a scruffy little Jew like you?”

“Ten times your normal fare,” I sang in an ascending scale.

“And I keep the dagger?”

“Cradled like a babe to your breast,” said I.

“Deal!” called the boatman. “Hop aboard.”

Astonishing, the level of complete bollocks a Venetian will buy for the promise of coin. Greed is a festering chancre on the merchant soul.

As the gondolier worked his oar, the sea breeze blew some of the fog from my mind. I would have to do my business at Belmont, then somehow find my way to Genoa and ransom Drool, and in the meantime there was Iago’s undoing to attend to as well. I wondered if the soldier might not try to murder Shylock at Antonio’s house on Michaelmas, before he left for Corsica. His intent had surely been to remove the Jew, to free Antonio from his bond, but would he do it so early in the intrigue, or perhaps wait to see the outcome of Bassanio’s attempt to marry Portia and ascend to the doge’s council? If he succeeded, and gained access to Brabantio’s family fortune, the three thousand ducats would be as a star in the dusted heavens to what they stood to gain, but all was in the timing. And was I not going to see to Bassanio’s failure myself? Was I hastening Shylock’s assassination by pursuing my own scheme?

Clearly, I needed breakfast, then rest, if I was to storm Villa Belmont at midnight.

A group of Jews was waiting for the ferry on the docks at Giudecca. Among them I spied Tubal, and I hoped I’d be able to slide by him without notice, but the gondolier steered his boat into the very slip by which Tubal stood.

“Lancelot Gobbo,” called the old man. “I would have words with you.”

“A moment, signor,” said I. I looked to the boatman. “Meet me here, at midnight, as the bells of St. Mark’s toll.” The gondolier nodded and patted the dagger he’d hidden under his shirt.

I jumped up onto the dock by Tubal. “Aye, sirrah!” said I, snapping to attention, bloody pert and nimble spirit of mirth that I am, despite being much abused and still slightly drugged.

“You left yesterday before the gold was delivered, and the chest was short the count by a ducat.”

“Well, it was all there when I left. Did you ask the two huge Jews who were with me?”

Tubal stepped back and looked me over, from the cuffs of my raggedly cut sailcloth trousers to my now too long gabardine, to my impaled and bloodstained yellow hat.

He said, “Weren’t you taller yesterday?”

“Ate a bite of ham and woke up badly beaten and a foot shorter,” said I. “Bloody Torah’s not fucking about on that bit—a bloke needs to stay off the pig if he knows what’s good for him.”

“It would appear. Perhaps, though, you’re worn down from spending my gold.”

“Oh, sod your sodding ducat, Tubal. If you were so worried about your gold, you should have never let it out of your sight, delivered it yourself instead of trusting me and the great Hebrew oxen brothers. Look at me: I couldn’t look any more untrustworthy if I was wearing a pirate hat and being followed by a choir singing scoundrel songs. And them two—”

“Ham and Japheth are strong and take the risk to their persons even as I take the risk to my fortune. I have seen people of our tribe slaughtered over a rumor they carried plague, over being on the wrong side of a river at nightfall. A Jew does not get to be an old Jew by putting a three-thousand-ducat reward on his own head.”

“But isn’t that just what you’ve done to Shylock by funding his loan to Antonio?”

“Not so, he is protected by the law. If Shylock dies, the bond is due his heir, and since he has no sons, that would be his daughter.”

It seemed that Iago, the soldier, did not know this subtlety of the law. Once he found out, the danger would not be only to Shylock, but to Jessica.

“I nicked your ducat, Tubal, used it for good deeds, and will see it returned to you presently with interest, but for now, do bugger off, as I’ve business to attend to.”

“You—” Tubal had raised his finger and was shaking it to prime his lecture, but I ducked under his arm and was in the narrow alley across the island before the rant could commence.

Off to find Jessica. Another calamity threatened, another rescue to be attended to—what a bawdy bitch is fate when the best bit of a bloke’s day is a brace of bloody mermaid murders.

TWELVE

To Belmont and Beyond

H
old still, thou squirming rat,” said Jessica, cruelly stabbing me.

“Stop poking me with the needle, thou vicious harpy,” said I.

By now Viv’s venom had subsided and I could feel the stinging of the knife wound on my ribs and the claw punctures in my sides, as well as the needle being driven in me by the sadistic madwoman.

“Stop being such a coward. One more stitch and the wound will be closed.”

“Coward, am I? I suffer great bodily injury to deliver your message and return with glad tidings and I am a coward?”

“I’ve made consideration for your glad tidings, which is why I am tending to your wounds instead of letting you die from fever when they fester.”

How could I tell her that not only was she not going to elope with her beloved, but that he was quite headless at the bottom of the sea? It would be no comfort to her to know that he had been a scoundrel intent upon stealing her favor and her father’s fortune. So, I had told her a different tale, and she was ready to sally forth into the arms of her bright and hopeful future. She had not been so gleeful when I’d first told her.

“Corsica? He talked of Cyprus. Why Corsica?”

“Lorenzo was quite insistent,” said I. “And he insists I accompany you, to assist and protect you.”

“But the whole reason I wanted a slave was so Lorenzo and I could run away together and not feel guilty that there was no one to take care of Papa; if you come with me—”

“We will bring your guilt as well. You wouldn’t have escaped it anyway. It is a parent’s gift. I was orphaned as a babe, yet carry the curse of my parents’ guilt like a woodpecker around my neck.”

“You mean an albatross. The curse is supposed to be an albatross around your neck.”

“You’re positive?”

She nodded. “Albatross.”

“I was a very poor child. The nuns that took me in couldn’t afford an albatross, so they just put a bit of string on a woodpecker the cat brought in.”

“Well, that’s not the same, is it?”

“An albatross is a crashing huge bird, innit? You can’t just go garroting a small child with it, that would be heinous, even for nuns.”

“But as a metaphor for guilt—”

“Well, quite right, as a metaphor, the size of the bird really doesn’t matter, I suppose.”

“Since you were lying outrageously anyway,” she provided.

“Well, you may choose whichever guilt fowl you would like strung around your neck, but mine is a crashing-huge swan—with an eye patch.”

“Fine, you’ll have to book passage. I’ll give you money.”

“And Lorenzo said you are to disguise yourself as a boy,” said I. “Cover your hair and, you know, your bits.” I gestured to her more obvious bits.

“Well, as long as my Lorenzo will be in Corsica, so will I.” She rolled her eyes and hugged herself in that dreamy, girlish way that lifted and accentuated her more obvious bits, and I felt the sudden weight of a one-eyed guilt swan for having to deceive her.

“Come here, sit,” said she. “That knife wound won’t heal if left open like that. It needs cleaning and some stitches.”

“You can do that?”

“I can.”

And so she had.

When she was readying to tie off the last stitch, she said, “Not much I can do for the puncture wounds on your sides. Clean and bandage them.”

“Don’t trouble yourself, then,” said I. “They’ll probably just poison my blood with madness and I’ll die.”

“Those are like the wounds on your bottom when I found you, aren’t they?”

“Pish-posh, not at all, are you daft?” said I, as I tried to formulate some credible explanation for the claw marks. But alas, I was spared . . .

“Jessica!” came Shylock’s voice from outside the door, the latch rattling.

“You may not be long for this world anyway,” Jessica whispered to me as she went to unlatch the door, leaving needle and thread hanging from my ribs.

Shylock came through the door with great vigor and enthusiasm for a man of his years.
Great
vigor and enthusiasm.

“What? What? What? What? What?” said he, with what I really suppose, honestly, was more anger than enthusiasm.

“I sense a question coming—” said I.

“You! You! You! You! You!” said the Jew, waving a finger under my nose.

“And
there
is the answer,” I replied.

“What are you? What kind of creature? What foul villain? You would eat of my food, live under my roof, and then you would steal from me? You—you—you— you—”

“And there he goes—”

“Philistine!” Shylock paused, trembled, his index finger doing a palsied anger twitch under my nose.

“Is that a good thing?” I asked Jessica, who had returned to my side on the bench where she’d been knotting the last stitch. She shook her head and looked back to her task.

“So,
no,
then,” said I.

“You-you-you—
Philistines
are the ancient enemies of the Hebrew people. Goliath was a Philistine!”

“Oh, so they’re tall?” said I. “Smashing!”

“No! Not
smashing.
Goliath was an enemy, a scourge on the Hebrew people, an evil giant!”

“Well, you don’t know that, do you?”

“I know. Everyone knows. It says so in the books of the Kings.”

“But what if he was just a normal-size bloke, and David was a more diminutive hero, like myself? A smaller fellow—with a huge
schlong,
of course.” I nodded at the bloody obviousness of the last point.

“Goes without saying,” added Jessica, nodding along with me.

Shylock repointed his twitching, accusatory digit at his daughter. “
You
do not say such things in my house. You—you—you—you—”

“Run along, love, it appears that Papa’s been stricken with an apoplexy of the second person.”

“I’m finished,” said the lovely Jewess. She stood and breezed by her father and out the front door.