Looking for Marco Polo (6 page)

“Go now. Stand tall and think well of yourself. It will show. Act proud and even the emperor of the East will think the better of you. What he wants most to know is how the princes of Europe maintain their dignity. You will show him.”

Mustafa paused and spat out an apricot pit.

He looked hard at the boy through his bleared
eyes. “Not all who set out on the Road of Silk return,” he said.

He closed his eyes and sagged back against the mooring post.

After a pause the boy asked, “Will I see you again?”

“Inshallah
—if it is the will of Allah,” whispered the old Arab. “For now, farewell.”

The room was quiet save for the sound of the doctor’s deep breathing and occasional snores.

Then Boss rattled his tags.

Mark jerked up and looked around.

“Okay if I come up?” the dog whispered. “It’s cold down here.”

The dog was wagging his tail. Dried out, it was a big black plume.

Mark gasped.

“Boss?” he whispered. “You … you talk?”

The dog grumped and nodded.

“Up?” he asked again.

Mark patted the covers.

Boss glided up. Mark put his arm around him, curling his fingers in the dog’s deep fur. It felt good. He liked the smell. It didn’t make him sneeze.

“I wasn’t really cold,” Boss rumbled as he snuggled close. “I just said that so you’d let me up. My breed is from Tibet. It’s cold there in the mountains, and we sleep outside, which is why my coat is so heavy. It sheds wet too. Except when I fall in the canal.”

“Ooh!” Mark exclaimed, hugging the dog as if to save him. “Do you fall in a lot?”

“Once,” Boss said with a shudder. “That was enough.

“It was a couple of years ago. I was a puppy. I stumbled getting off a pitching boat and got crushed between it and the dock. My master fished me out of the water, but I was a mess, leg broken, bleeding all over. He figured I was as good as dead, so he chucked me onto a passing garbage scow.

“Hornaday saw it happen. He flagged the scow, jumped aboard, waded through all the slime and stink, and picked me up. Filthy and bleeding as I was, he carried me close against his body.

“He took me to his office, laid me out on the table, and gave me a shot. I went numb. He washed me with doctor soap. It smells like chemicals. One sniff of it now and it all comes back. He painted my cuts with medicine so bitter I gave up trying to lick it off when the cuts started itching.

“It wasn’t until he started to stitch my cuts that I
noticed his hands. He got hurt in Iraq trying to doctor a teacher at a girls’ school when an unexploded bomb went off. He has to hold his right hand with his left to steady it.

“To cast my leg he made splints from kindling wood, snapping them to size on the table edge. The snaps sounded like when my leg broke.

“He put both hands on my chest. They were warm and dry, but they twitched. ‘Easy now,’ he said, looking me in the eye. ‘Don’t move.’ His eyes are the color of chocolate, steady as dogs’ eyes. His sweat has a sweet, strange smell. It’s the medicine he takes for his twitch that makes him smell the way he does, but I didn’t learn that until later.

“He began pulling and twisting my leg to line up the ends of bone. It didn’t hurt, but I could feel the ends grinding together. It was like when you get dirt in your food and you chew it—you get this sandy grating sound in your head.”

“Oh man,” Mark groaned.

Boss grunted. “It was bad, all right. Doc said he should shave my leg before he taped it so the hair wouldn’t pull when the break healed and he’d have to pull off the splints and everything, but he didn’t have clippers, so he taped right over the hair.

“When he finished, my leg looked like a wrapped ham. When the break healed and he unwrapped me, it was like you stuck a piece of duct tape on your arm and then ripped it off—get it?”

Mark winced. “Yeah.”

“The hair never did grow back right,” Boss said, sticking out a motley-looking leg. The hair was wispy like the back of an old man’s head.

“Doc told me I was lucky the bone had snapped clean,” the dog said as he snuggled up against the boy again. “He said if it had been crushed, he would have had to put me down.”

“Oh no!” Mark exclaimed so loudly he and Boss both looked to see if he’d awakened the doctor.

Suddenly the dog’s blunt nose began twitching. “Have you got food up here?”

“Food?” the boy asked.

“Yes,” said Boss, snuffling around. “I smell food.”

“In my backpack at the foot of the bed—I’ve got some leftover frittata from breakfast. You want it?”

“Sure! I follow my mother’s rule: Never pass up anything that smells good.”

Mark reached into the backpack. He’d left it unzipped.

The napkin was empty. Not even a crumb.

“That’s funny …,” he said.

“No, it isn’t,” Boss growled. “It’s the rats. Turn your back, they steal.”

“Rats up here?” Mark shuddered.

“They’re everywhere,” Boss whispered as he slipped lightly off the bed. “You find people, you’ll find rats.”

The dog nosed around.

“Let’s see where they’re getting in.

“Yup,” he grunted. “There it is. See that crack there in the corner? That’s his door. I’ll bet his people have been working this place since Marco’s time.”

Mark got out of bed and looked at the crack.

“It’s too small for a rat,” he whispered.

“Uh-uh,” muttered the dog. “Lemme tell you, to get at food rats can squeeze down like you wouldn’t believe.”

Boss squatted down in front of the crack. “Rat?” he called softly. “Rat? Come out.”

There was a rustling, but no one came out.

“Never mind,” said Boss. “He’s embarrassed. Bring more frittata tomorrow, you’ll meet him.”

“I don’t want to meet him. I want to put down poison.”

“No,” said Boss. “You don’t want to do that. Rats have to live too.”

“He’ll bite me while I’m sleeping.”

“I never heard that. You ever see anyone bit by a rat?”

“No …,” Mark said slowly.

“Me neither,” said Boss. “Anyway, I heard you and Doc talking about Marco Polo. I know a lot about him.”

“You?” exclaimed Mark.

“Hey,” said Boss, sitting up and puffing out his chest, “a lot of what the doctor knows he got from me. My line goes back to the dog Marco met when he got sick in the mountains on his way to meet the great Kublai.”

“The big black dog he returned to Venice with?” Mark said.

“That’s my ancestor,” said Boss. “His dog saved his life the night he came home, but that was years and years after Marco sat on the dock with Mustafa. You met Mustafa, right?” the dog asked.

Mark hesitated, then nodded.

“You want to know about Marco Polo?” Boss asked.

Mark nodded quickly and got beneath the covers again.

“I can tell you about him,” Boss said, nodding his big head. “I got it from my great-great way back. He was with Marco for nearly everything that happened from the time the boy got sick in the mountains to his
going to Kublai, his travels in China, and finally his trip back to Venice. He was along for all of it.

“And listen,” said Boss in his deepest whisper, “if my forebear hadn’t been with Marco the night they got back to Venice, you’d never have heard of Marco Polo, and neither would anybody else. So if you want to know about him, the place to start is the night of his homecoming.”

Mark made a doubtful face.

Boss stiffened.

“Do you think I’m making it up?” he huffed.

“No, no,” Mark whispered.

“The story was passed down to me,” Boss said importantly. “Dogs have history just like people. We know. We remember. We don’t start fresh, generation after generation, dumb as the first jackal that hung around a caveman hoping for a bone.

“Listen,” whispered Boss, nudging Mark’s head with his wet nose and giving him a lick. “Are you really awake? If you are, I’ll tell you what Marco’s home coming was really like.”

“I’m awake,” the boy whispered, twisting away from the dog’s nose as he wiped his face.

Just then something moving on the floor caught Mark’s eye. The boy peered hard at the corner. There
was a small gray figure rocking on its haunches.

“We’re awake too,” the figure said. “We’ll keep Boss straight. We were there too, you know.”

“Jeez!” Mark shuddered, snatching up the covers. “Rats!”

Now there were five pairs of glittering dot eyes.

Boss laughed. “I told you he’d show,” he said. “Rats can’t pass up a story any more than they can pass up frittata. That’s Count Leonardo and his clan.

“It’s true what Leo says,” Boss added. “His kind were around the night Marco came home.”

“We were around here a long time before that,” Leo boasted. “We came in on the first boats.”

Mark leaned up on an elbow.

“Do you bite people?” he whispered.

“Do you?” asked the rat.

Mark pulled the quilt up to his chin. He was uneasy about the rats being so close.

“Okay,” whispered Boss in his husky, rumbling voice. He kept it low so as not to awaken the doctor.

“When Marco left Venice with his father and uncle, they expected to be gone four or five years. They were gone more than twenty. People thought they were dead. In those days if no one heard from you or got word about you for a long time like that, your name got entered in a book and your property was given away.

“Put yourself in Marco’s place. Imagine leaving home today and not returning for twenty-four years! You’d look different. Everyone you saw would look different, and they’d only remember you the way you’d looked the last time they’d set eyes on you.
What would you say? How would you identify yourself?”

“I don’t know,” Mark murmured. He felt the anxiety of it in the pit of his stomach. He realized he had no way of proving who he was. If you’re not recognized in a place, who are you? Where do you belong?

“What would you do?” the dog asked. “Nobody knows you. Nobody has reason to trust you. You’re at the mercy of others. Maybe they’re scared of you just because of the way you look. I know about that! You saw how it was—that clerk out there would have kicked me down the stairs if he could have.”

“Which you would have deserved, coming in here stinking and muddy, shaking your dog wet all over,” Count Leo scolded. “But as for looks scaring folks off, the boy beside you shivers just looking at us rats.”

“Silenzio!”
Boss growled.

“What would you do?” he asked Mark again. “You’ve come home and nobody recognizes you. What’s so special about you that you could use to get people to remember who you are?”

“There’s nothing special about me,” Mark whispered, shaking his head. “I guess I’d ask if they remembered the boy who couldn’t breathe.”

“That’s it!” the dog exclaimed. “That’s exactly how Marco proved who he was.”

“What happened?”

“We’ll get there,” Boss said. “Right now it’s dark and silent at Ca Polo, just after midnight on a moonless foggy night. These three tough-looking guys show up with this big dog at the family palazzo: Marco, his uncle and father, and my great-great. Marco looked nothing like the boy he’d been. The Polos looked like greasy beggars, hair oiled and tied back under filthy turbans, skins stained an odd color from the grease and juices they’d rubbed on for disguise and protection against the desert sun. Their boots were wolf-skin galoshes with the hair inside.”

Boss’s ruff was up. “They looked like bandits or worse,” he said. “They’d been gone so long they’d forgotten Venetian manners. Even their speech was strange with Persian and Mongol thrown in. Like Mongols, they spat every time they finished speaking. They smelled.”

“Spat?” Mark interrupted. “They spat when they talked?”

“Listen,” Boss whispered, “that was the least of it. Their personal habits would have shamed a rat.”

“Maybe even a dog,” the count hissed.

Boss acted as if he hadn’t heard. “They crowded under the entry arch,” he continued, “three men, a gray donkey, and the great Tibetan dog—the biggest dog
ever seen in Venice—my great-great generations back. He’s the hero here.”

Mark sat up. “I know that arch,” he whispered. “I saw it earlier today. I stood under it.”

Boss nodded. “It was a dangerous time. Venice was at war with Genoa. Spies lurked. The place was full of secrets and enemies. Every stranger looked suspicious. Were these guys thugs? The only baggage they had was what was on the back of Marco’s donkey. Their stuff from China was still on shipboard. They had no papers. Who were they? They had no keys. They were locked out.”

Hornaday erupted in a loud snore. Boss froze. The doctor shifted in the creaking chair, there was another rumble, then the rhythm of sleep again.

“The donkey was tired and hungry,” Boss whispered. “He twitched his huge ears and tossed his harness bells. He could smell the other animals and their food. He stomped and shifted as he waited for the door to open. His load was heavy; the straps chafed.

“His master pulled at the bell rope and called out, ‘I’m Marco Polo, let me in!’