“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 … .”
11
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.”