Looking for Marco Polo (2 page)

“No elevator?” Mark asked.

“Let’s leave our stuff here,” his mother said. “I’ll get someone to bring it up.”

They started up the stairs together. Mark stumbled on the fourth flight. His mother steadied him. They’d been up all night flying from Baltimore.

“You’ll be okay,” she told him. “Jet lag. It’ll pass.”

The door at the top had glass in the center with ALBERGO SAN RAFFAELLO in gold like on the lamp outside. The handle was the head of a broad-faced bearded man.

The door opened into a small, brightly lit room with mirrors and sculptures and a small reception desk. Everything was small, even the chairs. The furniture had traces of gold trim. It smelled of polish.

After she arranged things with the clerk, Mark’s mother pointed him to his room. It was next to hers. His door key was attached to a heavy knot. “So you won’t forget to leave it at the desk when you go out,” she explained.

They went into their rooms, leaving the doors open so they could talk.

“Hey, Mom!” Mark called over. “What is this place? There’s a Madonna on the wall!”

“Shhh … Keep it down!” his mother said as she came into his room. “Italians put up religious ornaments for a blessing. It’s the custom.”

Mark looked around. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“Down the hall. The door marked ‘WC.’ We have to share it.”

Mark drooped. “Share it? Who with?”

“Everyone on this floor,” she said cheerfully, pointing to the other doors. “You peek out to see if the WC door is open. If it is, make a run for it before somebody beats you to it. It’s kind of fun.”

“Oh man,” Mark muttered, feeling his way down the dark hall.

“It smells!” he exclaimed when he came out. “And there’s no shower or anything!”

His mother went over and stuck her head in. “That’s Venice! Seawater and sewage,” she said with a shrug. “I’ve been in worse. For a shower you go up to the front, the door just before the reception desk.”

“Not very private,” Mark grumbled, flopping down on his mother’s bed. “Not like a Hilton.”

“Maybe it was Marco Polo’s Hilton,” she suggested. “Speaking of which …” She went and dug around in her suitcase, pulling out a book. She tossed it onto the bed next to him. “I guess you forgot this.”

It was the book his father had given him, the one with Marco Polo, the grimacing camel, and the scary Kublai Khan on the cover. He’d read the first few pages and tossed it under his bed.

“I didn’t forget it,” he muttered. “I left it behind. I don’t care about Marco Polo. I care about Dad. That’s why we came. I didn’t come to find out about Marco Polo. Venice smells bad.” He made a face. “Even my room smells bad, and the floor’s all up and down.”

“Maybe you can put that in your next letter to Dad,” his mother said, taking things out of her suitcase and hanging them up in the wardrobe.

“I don’t have any paper. But, anyway, why bother? He’s not even getting ’em!”

Mark scowled and fanned the pages of the Marco Polo book. It felt hot.

“You don’t know that,” said his mother.

“No closets here either,” Mark complained, “just these big old boxes with doors on the front. Mine looks like it could fall over. I’m leaving my stuff in my backpack.”

“Suit yourself,” his mother replied as she bustled about. When she was finished, she sat down next to Mark and opened her cell phone. He knew who she was calling: the agency that had been responsible for sending his father into the unknown; the agency that didn’t seem to care whether his father ever came back again or not.

“Marian Hearn here,” she said into the phone. “Yes, we just arrived. Good. You have my cell phone number. Call me when you hear anything.
Anything!”

She shut the phone and nodded firmly. “They’re sending out a search party tomorrow. I knew our coming to Venice would light a fire under those people.”

“Does that mean we can go home now?” Mark asked. He was only half joking.

“Oh, come on!” his mother snapped. “We’re staying put right here until they find him. I’m showing up in their offices every morning until they do. Now, I’m hungry. There’s a café on the corner. Let’s go.”

“I’m not hungry,” Mark said, yawning. “I just want to stay here and sleep.”

“Nope.” His mother stood up and grabbed his arm. “We need to get out in the sunlight to reset our body clocks.”

Mark groaned, but he knew it was useless to argue.

They dropped off their keys and started down the stairs. Mark counted. There were sixty-eight.

It was midmorning but it felt like midnight. They’d been up for thirty hours. The fast-moving clouds overhead made Mark feel dizzy. When the sun broke through, it glittered on the water. Pigeons swirling up seemed to mimic the sunlight flickering off the waves. Strings of violet and white Christmas lights hung over the narrow streets, a few with white stars in the middle. Over the shop doors there were bunches of evergreens sprayed silvery blue and tied up with what the shop
sold—blue shoes and handbags above a leather shop, blue-painted books above a bookshop. The bakery had sprigs of pine with blue-painted loaves of bread.

They went into the café on the corner. It was warm and steamy and fragrant. Red-skinned oranges were piled high in a wire basket on the counter. A man was slicing and juicing them in a machine that sounded like a lawn mower. The juice spurted out like lumpy blood. The man seemed to have ten hands—slicing oranges, chopping onions and garlic, shredding mozzarella, cutting up vegetables, ham, and sausages.

The food smelled good. There was music playing, something quick with violins. Suddenly Mark was hungry.

One corner of the café was filled with a round-fronted brick oven with a half-oval opening at chest height. Mark could see coals and flames. He wondered if they cooked pizza in it.

In the opposite corner there was a niche with the statue of a golden-faced woman. She was an arm’s length tall. Flowers were banked up around her, so Mark couldn’t make her out, but it looked as if her body had been splashed with red and black paint. She didn’t look like any Madonna he’d ever seen before.

“Buon giorno,”
called the nodding waitress as she pointed them to a table on one side of the oven.

“Buon giorno,”
Mark’s mother said.

“Hi,” said Mark.

He sat down with his back to the oven. The heat felt good.

The woman circled back with a cup of coffee for Mark’s mother and a larger cup for him filled with hot milk and a little coffee.

As the waitress put down their cups, she pointed to a large, two-handled, gold-domed pot on the counter—
“Zucchero,”
she said. The thing looked like a sports trophy.

“Sugar,” Mark’s mother translated.

The waitress turned quickly and yelled something to the orange-slicing man. He wasn’t alarmed; he yelled back,
“Sì! Sì!,”
wiped his hands on his juice-stained apron, grabbed what looked like a canoe paddle, and hustled over to the oven to slide out a square pan bubbling over with tomato and browning cheese. It smelled wonderful.

Mark went to the counter to sugar his cup. The counterman looked up and smiled.

“Please?” Mark asked, pointing and gesturing to let the man know he wanted some of the stuff in the square pan.

“Lasagna? No, no, not yet,” the man said, shaking his head. “It must ripen. We cool it, then bake it once
more for
il pranzo.
You come for il pranzo—lunch—then you eat the lasagna. I save for you a big piece,” he said, spreading his hands wide. “Okay?”

“Okay,” said Mark. He looked in the case, then pointed to a yellow pancake. The counterman nodded happily, signaling that Mark had chosen the best thing for
la colazione
—breakfast—as he sprinkled on herbs from a big tin shaker and painted it lightly with olive oil before he slid it into the oven.

The pancake was a
frittata
—whipped egg baked with cheese and garlic and bits of ham and broccoli, his mother explained. It came with a glass of the dark red orange juice and a plate of small crescent-shaped pastries dusted white with sugar.

“Mmm,” said Mark as he took a bite of frittata.

The juice was sweet. The pastries tasted like almond, their sugar dusting fine as flour.

“So what did Marco eat for breakfast?” he asked.

His mother looked up from her cup. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe a cup of hot milk, but no coffee in it, I guess, and no sugar. Maybe a small round of bread smeared with fat, and an apple. Maybe an egg or a piece of fried fish.”

Mark made a face. “Fish for breakfast? Ugly!”

The waitress answered the phone in the corner. Her whole conversation was “Eh? Eh! Eh. Eh. Eh. Eh!
Eh.” She was a short, round woman in worn-down bedroom slippers, a bright print dress, and a smeared blue-striped apron. Her voice went up and down like a saxophone.

When she finished the call, she shuffled over, her slippers
flap-flapping
with every step. Without asking, she poured more juice and put down another plate of sweet crescents. “Eh?” she said with a wink at Mark.

The two women chatted, then the waitress turned to Mark. “Why you spend Christmas in Venice?” she asked.

Mark licked the powdered sugar off his lips. “We’re looking for my father,” he said. “He’s lost.”

“Your father?” she cried. “He is lost in Venice?”

Mark’s mother put in gently, “Actually, he’s in the Gobi Desert, but the agency he works for is here in Venice. And he might not be lost. He’s doing research with the herders, following the path your famous Marco Polo followed across the desert.”

“Ah! Marco Polo!” said the waitress, seeming to swell up as she opened her arms and smiled at Mark. “Marco Polo. ‘Millionaire Marco,’ we call him for his big stories. He is like a sport star with us. I am sorry I cannot tell you how to find your father, but Marco Polo, he is all over Venice. Except for his body. They lost it. Give me your map. I show you where you look
for Marco … start here, this place, where is his home—Casa Polo.”

As they set out from Signora Eh’s café, a sharp breeze made them hunker into their coats and bury their hands.

“Hats would be good,” Mark’s mother said.

“I bet Dad wouldn’t wear one,” Mark said, setting his face and squinting. The cold wind made him tear.

“Bet he would,” his mom said, rubbing her ears. “Something woven out of camel’s hair like the herders wear.”

They heard the Christmas market before they saw it, a hum of happy people. Around the edges there were jugglers and clowns and men painted gold all over standing like statues before dishes for tips. Farther along a troupe of mimes in white pretended to sing opera without making a sound. From the way the
actors gestured, Mark could follow the story. People around him were swaying to the imagined music.

There was a stand for mittens, scarves, and hats. Mark’s mother stopped and quickly bought a beret for herself and a bright red wool watch cap like sailors wear. She held it out. Mark shrugged and pulled it on.

A tanned old man in a black hat was selling flowers from a rickety handcart he must have made and painted himself. It had the picture of a smiling golden-faced Madonna on the front. She was surrounded by strings of red and yellow flowers, blue leaves, and grinning red snakes. Some of the man’s teeth were gold. He was no taller than Mark, but he was broad and strong. His hat was dusty; his gray shirt was mended and stained. Mark noticed he wore more shirts underneath.

He had roses. Mark’s mother leaned over and sniffed.

“Ah,” she said with a sigh.

“From Sicily,” the man said proudly. “Where I from. At Christmas, roses in Sicily, so I bring here.”

“Wonderful. Just what we need,” she said. “Six, please.”

“For your room,” she said, handing them to Mark. “I read somewhere that in the old days Venetian innkeepers put flowers in the rooms to freshen things. Now yours will smell like Christmas in Sicily—or
springtime in Baltimore. Sniff!” she urged.

Mark did. “Thanks.”

The old man beamed.
“Buone, eh?—
Good?”

Mark nodded.
“Grazie,”
he said.

“Prego,”
replied the flower-seller with a polite nod.

“He can’t make much doing that, can he?” Mark asked as they walked into the buzzing warren of stands and tables. “I mean, he must be poor.”

“Looks to me like he knows how to be happy with what he’s got,” his mother replied. “It’s a gift few people have.”

The square was filled with vendors’ tables under gaudy striped umbrellas. One table had rows of what his mother said were
santons
—carefully painted hand-sized clay figures of Joseph, Mary, the wise men, the shepherds, and all the animals for crèches. The next stand was for puppets. Over it there was a large, sly-looking Puss in Boots in a shiny blue satin suit with silver fur cuffs and a jaunty black plumed hat. He was holding a seaman’s map in one paw, a globe in the other.