Piero whistled softly to the dog and it came to the stern. He held out a small leather loop attached to the tiller and waited as Xerxes turned to face the prow, then took the strap in his mouth.
“Avanti!” Piero whispered, and the dog’s eyes fixed immediately ahead of the boat, on the far horizon. “Go straight, my little beauty. Papa needs a break.”
He came and sat with Laura and Daniel in the middle, balancing his weight on one side against their combined on the opposite.
“You see this, Daniel?” he asked, looking at the two sleeping men. “This pair love each other like a couple of little doves. Don’t mind the American, now. He’s Scacchi’s choice, for better or worse, and jealousy’s such a mean little thing. Men loving men…I don’t get it. But what’s it to me? Nothing.”
Daniel was silent.
“And nothing to you, my new friend, I know,” Piero added. “That’s not why Scacchi invited you here. He told me. Not that a fool like me pretends to understand. He says these things you wrote…”
“My paper,” Daniel offered.
“Yeah. He says they’re the best. OK? But…just be patient. See that dog?”
Xerxes stood stiffly in the stern, eyes on the horizon, leather strap lodged firmly in his jaws.
“He’s a marvel,” Daniel observed, and truly believed as much.
“More than that. He is proof of the existence of God.”
“Piero!” Laura scolded him. “That is sacrilegious.”
The big man’s eyes were a little glassy. Daniel did not want to consider how much Campari had been consumed on the long, slow voyage across the lagoon to the airport.
“Not at all. He is a proof of the existence of God, and I shall tell you why. You are aware, Daniel, that he is a G-dog. I may not say the G-word out loud, of course, since he’ll be off that tiller in a moment, sending us around in circles, barking like a she-wolf in season, and waking those two slumbering lovers over there. You understand my meaning?”
Turning his body to ensure the dog did not see him, Daniel mimed the action of pulling a shotgun to the shoulder and releasing the trigger.
“Exactly. Yet he is the most ancient of breeds. Why, I shall take you to Torcello in the good ship Sophia one day and show you the great, great-to-greatest grandfather of this very dog sitting in a mosaic on the wall there. All that, long before the G-things even existed! Explain that, my girl.”
Laura slapped him on the knee. “It is called evolution, you fool.”
“It is called the work of God. For God, you see, does not know time as we do. When He invents the spaniel, He does so understanding that one day some other of His creatures shall invent the G-thing. So He places within the animal’s blood the knowledge of it there already, saving Himself the trouble of inventing some new animal when the need arises. For God, Time is just another of His creations. Like trees. And men. And water. And…”
He extended the plastic beaker. “Spritz! Furthermore…”
Laura filled it to halfway, tut-tutting. “Furthermore, Piero, you are dead drunk.”
He looked miserable all of a sudden. “I guess.” Then he sniffed the air as if it had changed, and peered at the dog, with its dark, damp nose held high in the stern. The boat had shifted direction to the east, though no one had noticed. Piero walked to the back of the boat and straightened up the tiller to put them back on course.
“Avanti, Xerxes,” he said gently. “We go home to Sant’ Erasmo later. After we drop these good people off in the city. Home.”
Laura threw him a couple of pillows from her side of the boat.
“Home,” the big man repeated, then stared at Daniel. “Scacchi said you didn’t have one. That right?”
“My mother died a year ago,” Daniel answered. “My father left before I was born. But I have somewhere to live.”
“No relations?”
“None close.”
“And you a clever guy too?” Piero seemed surprised. “So much for what the books say.”
Laura tut-tutted again, stumbled to the other side of the boat, made the pillows into a makeshift bed, then came back to sit beside Daniel.
“A man who has no home has nothing,” Piero declared. “Like that Paul there. It’s Scacchi’s choice. OK. And God knows the old man pays for it, what with that disease the American gave him. But this isn’t his home. He doesn’t have one. Where are they going to put him when he dies? Probably in a casket on some plane back to America, where he came from.”
“Piero,” Laura said with only the hint of scolding in her voice. “You sleep, now. Please.”
“Yes,” the large man said, and lay down on the pillows, fitting his enormous frame onto the narrow wooden ledge with a precision that could only have come from much practice. In the stern the dog gave a low whine but never once let go of the leather strap. Daniel Forster looked at Laura. She raised her glass to him and said, “ Salute.” San Michele, with its endless round of recycled graves, was beginning to make itself apparent to their left. Daniel touched his plastic beaker to hers and tried to think of the famous names buried there: Diaghilev and Stravinsky and Ezra Pound… The city had lived inside his thoughts for so long, its districts memorised, its history picked over for months on end. He had wondered if the reality might turn out to be a disappointment, a living theme park preserved only for the tourists. Something told him already this would not be the case, but also that the real city, the real lagoon, would be different from the picture he had built in his imagination out of the constant stream of books he had borrowed from the college library.
His thoughts clouded over, became confused. Then he realised that Laura had extended a long, slim, tanned hand and that she was very pretty indeed.
“I am the servant here,” she said. “I am cook, housekeeper, nurse-maid, and anything else you can think of. You must know that Scacchi, while he has his foibles, is the kindest man on earth. You will remember this, please, in your dealings with him.”
“Yes,” he replied, shaking the hand awkwardly, wondering whether this was a warning about his own behaviour or that of the master of the house. Wondering, too, whether she really expected him to kiss that small patch of tanned flesh she held out to him.
“And as for Piero,” she continued, “he is a holy fool. Paul and Scacchi are — you have a phrase in English—‘like two peas from the same pod.’ It is just that one bears his fate more bravely than the other, though perhaps a sense of guilt has something to say about the matter there also. I love them both, and will be grateful if, for the period of your stay here, you either learn to love them, too, or affect to do so.”
“I shall, of course.”
She tapped him lightly on the knee. “Silly boy. How can you say that? You don’t even know us yet.”
He smiled, feeling she had caught him out. “Then what would you have me say?”
“Nothing. Just listen. And wait. I know men find these things difficult. Oh, damn!”
The boat had shifted direction again. Xerxes was trembling in the stern.
“To think he can let a dog steer us home.”