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.”