The Serpent of Venice

“To the republic,” said the senator, raising his glass.

“To the Assumption,” said the merchant. “To Carnival!”

“To Venice,” said the soldier.

“To the delicious Desdemona,” said the fool.

And the merchant nearly choked as he looked to the senator, who calmly drank, then lowered his glass to the table, never looking from the fool.

“Well?”

The fool swished the liquid in his cheeks, rolled his eyes at the ceiling in consideration, then swallowed as if enduring an especially noxious medicine. He shuddered and looked over the rim of his glass at the senator. “I’m not sure,” he said.

“Well, sit, try a bit more,” said the merchant. “Sometimes the first drink only clears the dust of the day off a man’s palate.”

The fool sat, as did the others. They all drank again. The glasses clunked down. The three looked to the fool.

“Well?” asked Iago.

“Montressor, you’ve been had,” said the fool. “This is not amontillado.”

“It’s not?” said the senator.

“Tastes perfect to me,” said the merchant.

“No, it’s not amontillado,” said the fool. “And I can see from your face that you are neither surprised nor disappointed. So while we quaff this imposter—which tastes a bit of pitch, if you ask me—shall we turn to your darker purpose? The real reason we are all here.” The fool drained his glass, leaned on the table, and rolled his eyes coyly at the senator in the manner of a flirting teenage girl. “Shall we?”

The soldier and the merchant looked to the senator, who smiled.

“Our darker purpose?” asked the senator.

“Tastes of pitch?” asked the merchant.

“Not to me,” said the soldier, now looking at his glass.

“Do you think me a fool?” said the fool. “Don’t answer that. I mean, do you think me foolish? An ill-formed question as well.” He looked at his hand and seemed surprised to find it at the end of his wrist, then looked back to the senator. “You brought me here to convince me to rally the doge for you, to back another holy war.”

“No,” said the senator.

“No? You don’t want a bloody war?”

“Well, yes,” said the soldier. “But that’s not why we’ve brought you here.”

“Then you wish me to entreat my friend Othello to back you in a Crusade, from which you all may profit. I knew it when I got the invitation.”

“Hadn’t thought about it,” said the senator. “More sherry?”

The fool adjusted his hat, and when the bells jingled he followed one around with his eyes and nearly went over backward in his chair.

Antonio, the merchant, steadied the fool, and patted his back to reassure him.

The fool pulled away, and regarded the merchant, looking him not just in the eye, but around the eyes, as if they were windows to a dark house and he was looking for someone hiding inside.

“Then you don’t want me to use my influence in France and England to back a war?”

The merchant shook his head and smiled.

“Oh balls, it’s simple revenge then?”

Antonio and Iago nodded.

The fool regarded the senator, and seemed to have difficulty focusing on the graybeard. “Everyone knows I’m here. Many saw me board the gondola to come here.”

“And they will see a fool return,” said the senator.

“I am a favorite of the doge,” slurred the fool. “He adores me.”

“That is the problem,” said the senator.

In a single motion the fool leapt from his chair to the middle of the table, reached into the small of his back, and came up with a wickedly pointed throwing dagger, which caught his eye as it flashed in his hand before him. He wobbled and shook his head as if to clear his vision.

“Poison?” he said, somewhat wistfully. “Oh, fuckstockings, I am slain—”

His eyes rolled back in his head, his knees buckled, and he fell face-forward on the table with a thump and a rattle of his blade across the floor.

The three looked from the prostrate Fortunato to each other.

The soldier felt the fool’s neck for a pulse. “He’s alive, but I can remedy that.” He reached for his dagger.

“No,” said the senator. “Help me get him out of his clothes and to a deeper section of the cellar, then take your leave. You last saw him alive, and you can swear on your soul that is all you know.”

Antonio the merchant sighed. “It’s sad we must kill the little fool, who, while wildly annoying, does seem to bring mirth and merriment to those around him. Yet I suppose if there is a ducat to be made, it must be made. If a profit blossoms, so must a merchant pluck it.”

“Duty to God, profit, and the republic!” said the senator.

“Many a fool has found his end trying to resist the wind of war,” said Iago. “So shall this one.”

TWO

The Dark

What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m walling you up in the dungeon,” said the senator, who crouched in the arched doorway to the chamber in which I was chained to the wall.

“No you’re not,” said I.

Indeed, it appeared that he was walling me up, but I wasn’t going to concede that simply because I was chained, naked, and water was rising about my feet. Cautious, I was, not to instill a sense of confidence in my enemy.

“I am,” said he. “Brick by brick. The first masonry I’ve done since I was a lad, but it comes back. I was ten, I think, when I helped the mason who was building my father’s house. Not this one, of course. This house has been in the family for centuries. And I think I was less help than in his way, but alas, I learned.”

“Well, you couldn’t possibly have been more annoying then than you are now, so do get on with it.”

The senator stabbed his trowel into a bucket of mortar with such enthusiasm that he might have been spearing my liver. Then he held his lamp through the doorway into my little chamber, which he had already bricked up to just above his knees. By the lamplight I saw I was in a passageway barely two yards wide, that sloped downward into the dark water, which was now washing about my ankles. There was a high-tide line on the wall, about the level of my chest.

“You know you’re going to die here, Fortunato?”

“Pocket,” I corrected. “You’re mad, Brabantio. Deluded, paranoid, and irritatingly grandiose.”

“You’ll die. Alone. In the dark.” He tamped down a brick with the butt of his trowel.

“Senile, probably. It comes early to the inbred or the syphilitic.”

“The crabs won’t even wait for you to stop moving before they begin to clean your bones.”