I was off the walkway and around the corner and down the lane called Fondamenta Arsenale into the city before Iago emerged from the door.

Onward to find my giant and my monkey! What elation I felt at the prospect of their calls of joy when they found I had rescued them. It had been some time since I had basked in the accolades due a hero, even from a monkey and a great drooling half-wit. They would be balm on my much-abused soul.

Ten: Intrigue Beneath the Bawd

TEN

Intrigue Beneath the Bawd

A horrible, shifty-eyed creature was that Pocket—a rascal of the lowest order, he was,” said my former landlady, a nine-toothed crone of roughly nine hundred years in age, and a ghastly judge of character, assigned by the doge to care for dignitaries not housed at the palace. I had asked for separate quarters after Jeff bit the senator’s wife and Drool wandered into the Cathedral of St. Mark next door, sans trousers, during high mass, his great dong swinging in time with the bishop’s smoking thurible.

“A raucous, gutter-mouthed little libertine he was,” the crone went on.

“Is that so?” said I, in my most courteous voice. “I heard that he was much loved in his native land, and the children sang songs of his kindness.”

“Bollocks to that—‘the king of bloody Britain or France,’ he’d say, the lying cur. But the doge liked him, Lord knows why, so I had to put up with him. But I’ll tell you my reckoning: I reckon, wearing that skintight silver-and-black motley, and that cracking big codpiece, I reckon that little one was a deviate. Never saw him with a girl, didn’t even have a go at Signora Veronica’s like the other men of his means, but couldn’t say two words what it wasn’t about bonking this and shaggin’ that—I reckon he was havin’ his way with the neighborhood cats in the night.”

“Perhaps he was being faithful to his lady love,” said I.

“No more constant than a fart on a hot skillet, was that one, just up and taking off one day, leaving the big ninny on his own, and what a state he was in. When the little fool went off, he come to my door three, four times a day lookin’ for him, then asked to have a look at my tits before he’d go away. I’d give ’im a flash, outta good Christian charity, and he’d be on his way—have himself a tug in the courtyard, he would, then be back asking again an hour later. You know, a woman my age don’t get that kind of attention much anymore. It was appreciated. That boy’s as dense as a bloody doorknob, but really, just a big slow lamb. He kept that up for a week till they came and got him.”

“They? The doge’s men? Soldiers?”