The Serpent of Venice (35 page)

“Ah, writing your own loans again. How do you like the spectacles?” He had fetched them from his desk and fit them on his nose.

“They are serviceable.” He also betrayed a weak smile, a rare gem upon the surly Jew. “But you will do nothing to deprive me of my revenge.”

“Good Shylock, have I not told you before, I’m but the weapon of your revenge?”

“Aye, he’s a wickedly dangerous marauder, cradled like a frightened lamb in the arms of his great lummox,” said Jessica. She tweaked my nose and turned on her boot heel with a flourish. “I’ll bring us some wine, Signor Polo,” she said. “Then Papa and I will take you home to your family.”

“You cannot go out in those clothes,” said Shylock. “A good Jewish girl does not wear pirate—”

Jessica reeled on him with the same fierceness in her eye she had shown right before the scream.

Shylock turned away and pretended to have something important to do in the opposite direction. “Fine, fine, dress like a pirate. I am just glad your mother cannot see you thus . . .”

“I’m telling you, Iago, the fool is alive. Even if the note had not mentioned a fool, the monkey was called Jeff. How many monkeys called Jeff, dressed in motley, can there be in Venice?”

Antonio paced his apartments while Iago sat calmly at his table, cleaning his fingernails with his dagger. They’d let him out of irons after only two days at sea. The sailors whose job it was to keep him had been persuaded that their prisoner might, indeed, become their new commander. With Othello and Desdemona dead, and Cassio burdened with his duties in Corsica, no one could even figure out how the council could prosecute the charges. By the time they’d reached Venice, he’d walked off the ship with his weapons restored, and only the promise that he would appear before the council on the appointed date.

“I don’t believe it. Calm yourself, Antonio, I control the orbit of the spheres of fate. With Othello dead, we may yet see your protégé as senator and our plan will go forward.”

Antonio had always been frightened of Iago, his rough certainty and willingness to violence was out of place in the genteel world of commerce, where battles were metaphors and triumphs measured in profits, but now, after his time in Corsica, Antonio also feared the soldier had gone quite mad.

“They found pieces of Salarino and Gratiano in the canals today,” said the merchant. “Pieces of them. And the note came due the day after they were to remove Shylock. I have to answer Shylock’s suit before the council tomorrow. He’s going to cut out a pound of my flesh.”

“Gentle Antonio, the Council of Venice will never allow the Jew to collect his bond. A Jew? No more than they would prosecute me for actions against the Moor. We are Venetians, they are outsiders. Justice favors the favored sons. If it comes to it, I have a plan for your trial that will play for both our interests. You cannot imagine the force that has come to my aid, the creature conjured into being by my hatred for the Moor.”

“Yes, yes, so you’ve said.” Antonio had, without intent, been moving away from the soldier the entire time they had been talking, until he was nearly standing with his back at his own door, the stairwell being the only way to find further distance, short of leaping out a window. “But you said, too, that Brabantio had been eaten as if by some creature, and this—thing—this thing of darkness, it killed your friend Rodrigo. You saw it.”

“I was going to kill Rodrigo anyway. My hatred simply anticipated my desires. Ah, perhaps it was such with Brabantio as well—the imp of my ire anticipating the need to have the old man out of the way before I even knew it myself.”

Antonio put his hand on the door latch before he answered. “Because the
imp of your ire
couldn’t have thought of a better way to bollix up our entire venture than by killing the essential partner? I tell you, Iago, the little fool is alive, and he works, even now, against us. My good sense tells me that your tale of a creature is a false vision, a hallucination brought on by handling that infernal sticky potion of Brabantio’s, but a false vision did not put ragged pieces of my friends in the canal. A hallucination did not put a fool’s head in the casket at Belmont to thwart Bassanio’s marriage to Portia. Your grand and powerful hatred did not send a note ticking off my dead friends like so many sausages on a shopping list. I tell you, Iago, the fool lives, and he works his revenge against us.”

Iago sighed. “Well, we shall just have to kill him again.”

“His will is done now. Tomorrow I have to stand before the court and answer Shylock’s bond with a pound of my flesh.”

“Then Shylock shall have to be removed as well.”

“But you have no men, no forces, and neither have I. I cannot send Bassanio to do such dread deeds. It is not in his nature. He is already distraught at the deaths of his friends.”

“Calm yourself, merchant. This is my business. I still have some of Rodrigo’s fortune cached away at Arsenal, and between his gold and my will, forces will come to our aid before morning.”

“Oh, Nerissa, I am beside myself with worry.” Portia fussed at her dressing table while Nerissa arranged her shoes into mismatched pairs in the closet. “I sent Father’s lawyer, Balthassar, to Padua a week ago with a letter to our cousin, Bellario, who is a doctor of law, and I fear he will not return with the response before the morning. If he does not, I know not how we will aid Bassanio in saving his friend Antonio.”

“How would we aid anyway? All the funds of the estate are out of your reach, lady. And even the funds by all the suitors have stopped coming with rumors that there could be no winner among the players.”

“We shall help them by pleading the case, Nerissa. As a doctor and clerk of law.”

“But, lady, only men may be doctors of law.”

“That is so, and so shall we be men. We shall dress as men, with jeweled daggers at our waists to show our authority, and great empty codpieces, where the court thinks our brains and abilities reside. I will turn feminine mincing steps into a manly stride, and speak with a voice that breaks like one passing from boy to man. And I’ll wager, when we appear as men, I’ll be said to be the prettier of the two.” She giggled.

“No doubt, sweet Portia, and your brash nature and unfounded self-confidence shall further convince all that you are the better man.”

A servant appeared in the doorway then, and cleared his throat.

“Lady, a visitor at the door for you. He asks that you meet him at the servants’ entrance.”

“A gentleman?” said Portia. “Well, show him into the foyer and I will make an entrance.”

“No, lady, not a gentleman, and the caller is for Miss Nerissa. He is a clown.”

“A clown?”

“Yes, mum. The visitor wears the motley of a fool. He would not give his name.”

“I’ll be right down,” said Nerissa.

She was gone for perhaps half an hour, in which time Portia noticed that she was having a particularly difficult time choosing shoes for dinner.

When she returned, tears streaked Nerissa’s face. “Portia, oh lady, I’m so sorry. Your sister.”

“What? What, Nerissa?”

“Desdemona is dead.”

As the gondola from Belmont glided up to the landing at Shylock’s house, I could see one of Tubal’s huge Jews, I know not which, eclipsing the doorway. Not alarming in itself, except I could see his heavy club dangling from a lanyard at his wrist, and we had approached at such an angle that I could see the other huge Jew poised at Shylock’s side door, ready to shoulder through it.

“Not a word,” said I to the gondolier. “Throw my bundle on the landing after me.” I plopped a coin down by his feet, and ran the length of the boat, leapt, and landed on the cobbles, coming up from a roll with one of my daggers in hand just as Jessica was opening the door.

I sent the dagger flying into the back of the thug’s knee, and when he bent over in pain, I sailed feetfirst over his back, into the house as Jessica stepped back in alarm. I had landed on my hip on the table, which I slid across, drawing another dagger as I landed on my feet.

“Drool! Side door!” I called, just as the side door exploded inward and banged back on its hinges. I sent the dagger straight to the oaf’s thigh and he tumbled into the house, leading with a long butcher knife. Drool had been sitting by the fire and now stood over the huge Jew as surprised as if he’d just discovered a live snake in his breakfast porridge.

I turned to face the attacker I’d wounded at the door. My friend Kent had taught me that, as a rule, with men of great size, it was more important to stop them first, rather than try to kill them in one blow.

I held my third dagger by the blade, poised to throw. “This one in your eye, boy,” said I. “Do twitch and I will send thee to a porkless Hebrew hell with stunning swiftness.”

He stopped struggling to gain his feet and froze on the spot; good fortune, for I was not sure that I would hit the mark, so long out of practice I was. If I’d missed, he might have bludgeoned us all to death. I heard Jessica’s intake of breath as she looked over my shoulder toward where the other huge Jew had fallen and was rising.

“Drool, hit him!” I called.

I took my eyes off my own huge Jew just long enough to see Drool smash a heavy, three-legged stool across the knife-wielding brother’s head, showering the room with splinters, kindling, and a fine spray of blood. The downed brother went limp on the floor, quite unconscious, perhaps dead.

I held my dagger fast. “Drool, fetch my dagger from that chap’s thigh. And come get the other one from this one’s knee.”

“Jones!” said Drool, noticing that I was again in possession of my puppet stick, which I’d shoved down the back of my jerkin for the gondola ride. “Me wee friend.”

“Get the knives, you great slobbering dreadnought,” said the puppet Jones, a bit breathless from the tumbling and whatnot.

Drool went around the table, a bloody knife in one of his hands, and regarded the huge Jew who stood in the front door. “It will hurt when I pulls out the knife,” Drool said to the huge Jew with no menace whatsoever. “Sor-ry.”

The huge Jew seemed as disturbed by the sight of a man-shaped creature larger than himself nearly as much as he was by the blade in his knee.

“He and I will both kill you if your club hand moves, Ham, so be brave lest you be twice slayed.”

“I’m Japheth,” said the giant Hebrew.

“I don’t give a jostled jeroboam of monkey jizz, you yellow-hatted buffoon. If you move, you die.”

Japheth gasped as Drool pulled the knife from his leg. Drool stepped back just as Jessica came around from the side with a half-full wine bottle, which ended its arc by bouncing off the huge Jew’s forehead, unbroken, sending him back a few steps from the door.

“Well done, love,” said I. “Can’t account for the thickness of his hat nor the density of his great noggin, but a normal bloke would’ve been right well brained.”

She smiled and curtsied, despite that she was still shaking a bit from the adventure.

“Take your brother and go home,” said I to Japheth. “Tell Tubal what happened here and that there are no more layers between him and his mayhem. If two hours pass and he is still on La Giudecca, he and his whole family will be floating dead in the canal by morning, and you two with them.”