The Serpent of Venice

Salarino drew his dagger to intercept the simian if it leapt for his face as it had Gratiano’s, but instead the monkey ran by on its hind feet, wiping its paw on Salarino’s boot before scampering down the canal, then up a drainpipe until it disappeared over the roof.

“A monkey?” said Gratiano, stunned and hatless.

“Ha!” said Salarino. “He wiped shit on your face.”

“Well, he wiped shit on your boot.”

“He gave me a letter,” said Shylock.

Gratiano swiped at his face, which was smeared with a dark brown streak. He sniffed his fingers. “It’s not shit. It’s sticky. Smells of pitch.”

Shylock broke the seal and did not notice that there was a menorah pressed into the wax. “I don’t have my spectacles,” said Shylock. “I can’t read this. What does it say?”

Salarino snatched the parchment away from Shylock and held it out to catch the last of the twilight. “It says, ‘Don’t be afraid. You are safe.’ ” He tossed the letter into the canal. “Well, that’s a load of monkey bollocks, because you are most definitely not safe. Grab him, Gratzi.”

Gratiano had taken one step toward Shylock when the serpent came out of the canal right below Salarino’s feet and rose as if she was climbing through water, her front claws stripping the muscles from his arms like gloves while her rear claws sliced his thighs down to the bone before he could fall. The scream Salarino was composing was cut off as the serpent’s tail slashed his throat back to his spine.

Without a tick she flowed with the fountain of water that had erupted from the canal with her, fifteen feet up the side of the building, describing a great arc as she bounded along the wall over Shylock’s head and dropped, jaws wide, on Gratiano, who was just turning to run. She caught his entire head in her mouth and twisted in the air like a great fish on the line as she fell back into the canal, dragging Gratiano beneath the water’s surface with her. Salarino collapsed into a lumpy puddle of meat and bone and oozed over the edge of the walkway into the canal. A second later, a razored talon broke the surface and pulled the corpse under.

Shylock stood, shivering, covered in blood and freezing water, watching the canal settle as the red stain spread to the other side.

“Pie would have been good,” he said to the empty air.

He kicked Salarino’s dagger into the canal and hurried on his way, keeping his eyes wide open to dry in the cold, afraid to close them lest he see again the thing from the canal in the dark of a blink.

Antonio found morning stretching deep into the afternoon as he tried to shake off the hangover from his night of debauchery and alibi at Signora Veronica’s. Bassanio had retrieved him from the brothel in the morning and had trundled him home to his apartments, but light, sound, air, and regret were still painful, and they had not yet heard from Gratiano and Salarino about the Jew’s answer for a plea of grace.

Bassanio had kept the fire going and was boiling all the hope out of a chicken, in promise of some curative soup from a recipe concocted for him as a boy by his nursemaid, but for all his fretting and contrite fussing, he was only making his failure to attain financial rescue from Portia more annoying.

She had said: “I would pay double, treble, three thousand ducats for a friend of this description, Bassanio, but until I marry the man chosen by the dreaded caskets, I have only the allowance to maintain Belmont. Unless I appeal to my sister, who is away in Corsica, and as you need the ducats in less than a week, word could not even reach her in time. For you, for your friend, I would do all, but I cannot offer a fortune that is not mine.”

Bassanio looked up from stirring his soup. “Perhaps the Jew will relent. Maybe he has learned to be more kind since his daughter ran off.”

“Mercy might be more forthcoming had she not run off with our Lorenzo,” said Antonio from under a blanket, where he sat enshrouded on the divan, hiding from the light and other harsh realities.

There came a light knock at the door.

“There,” said Bassanio. “That might be Gratiano and Sal now.”

“Because they are known to always knock timidly before entering,” said Antonio, but the sarcasm was lost on his young protégé.

Bassanio opened the door.

“There’s a monkey at the door with Gratiano’s hat.”

“A monkey?”

“He says his name is Jeff.”

“He says that?” Antonio liked monkeys. He almost looked. “The monkey says that?”

“Well, no, there’s a collar around his neck, and on it there’s a brass tag, and it says ‘Jeff.’ Oh look, there’s a letter in his hat. Not the monkey’s hat. Gratiano’s hat.”

“What’s the letter say?”

“What’s the letter say?” Bassanio asked the monkey.

“No, Bassanio, read the letter, don’t ask the monkey.”

“Oh, right. He probably only reads Hebrew.”

Antonio pulled the blanket off his head and said, “What in the name of Saint fucking Mark are you talking about?”

The monkey screeched and bounded off down the stairs.

Bassanio closed the door and turned slowly to his friend, the letter in hand. “I didn’t want to tell you, since they failed so miserably . . . but I hired the thieving Hebrew monkeys of La Giudecca to fix the caskets to win Portia in marriage. See here, the menorah pressed in the sealing wax, that is their sign. Funny, he didn’t have on a yellow Jew hat, but a little black harlequin’s hat. Perhaps it’s a Jewish holiday.”

Antonio hadn’t thought his headache could worsen. But yes. “Break the seal, Bassanio. What does it say?”

Bassanio unfolded the letter and read:

“?‘Four friends have been taken

To Death’s savage pool.

No pound of flesh flayed

Shall appease a wronged Fool.

Condolences.’?”

Bassanio looked over the edge of the parchment at his bedraggled friend, whose eyes had gone wide. “Ha! The last line doesn’t even rhyme. What does it mean?”

“It means that the gondolier with Salanio’s dagger lied. He did not receive the dagger from Sal to carry the message to you, and it was not a small Jew he took to Belmont in the night. And Salarino and Gratiano are not going to come through that door with good news.”

TWENTY-TWO

No Shit, Shylock

Shylock did not see us there, in his house, when he entered, so intent was he upon closing the door behind him and locking it, putting a hefty slab of oak between him and whatever was in the outside world. He leaned his forehead against the door and stood there, shivering and out of breath. When Jessica came behind him to wrap a towel around his shoulders, he screamed, and she jumped back.

“Papa,” said she.

“Look!” said I. “I’ve returned your loving daughter. Go ahead, give the girl a proper cuddle.”

“I have no daughter,” said Shylock, his back pressed so firmly against the door that I think it was the first time I had not seen him hunched over. Jessica clutched the towel to her bosom and backed away, trying to squeeze back tears.

“Thief!” he said to me. “Where are my ducats?”

“Look, I’ve brought Marco Polo!”

“Where is my turquoise?”

“And I’ve brought this monkey called Jeff. Look at his little fool’s kit.”

“What of my other jewels?”

“And look at this great drooling nitwit. Bigger even than Tubal’s two huge Jews.”

“Charmed,” said the ninny.

“I have seen this monkey,” said Shylock.

“Jeff,” provided Drool.

“He gave me a letter not an hour ago.”

“I know,” said I. “I sent him with the letter.”

“?‘Don’t be afraid,’ it says. ‘You will be safe,’ it says. Then that thing, that creature, that monster—”

“That were the dragon Pocket shagged.”