Black

"You choose."

I am looking down at the two daggers displayed in front of me - one with an ornately carved handle and one black as onyx and my feeling of dread grows.

I can't remember how I have come to enter this old curio shop.  I had turned left down the Piazzale Roma, when I should have gone right and, at the end of a crooked alleyway, some glint of light had caused me to bow into a thatched doorway our of mere curiosity. A flailing misadventure through a tapestry showroom had led me here, amid dusty stacks of cracked parchment and antiquity, face to face with a scowling Italian dwarf offering me a gilded chest.

I am acutely aware that Julia has sent me on a fool's errand.  As the cruise ship docked in Venice, there was some twittering about a birthday gift needed for a great-nephew - one that she had neglected to purchase in Ravenna.  Only one of us had accumulated two passing semesters in Intermediate Italian, she reasoned, and, besides, she wasn't feeling well. So, of course, like a good fiancee, I went.

The musty room of mottled wood was set up more like a storeroom and less like a shop, but a little man with a waxy mustache accosted me as I bumbled forth into blackness.  His suspicious gaze told me that he had already pegged me as a gawdy American tourist.

I somehow felt the burden to speak first.  "I need to buy a gift."

As the dwarf bent down to rummage behind a desk, I had realized that we were not alone in the close quarters of the shop. Bulky forms stirred in the darkness and I could hear the clink of glasses and see the reflection of a gold tooth.  Strange that I hadn't noticed this before.

Now here I am, facing the miniature Italian, himself almost overshadowed by the ornate chest he has cradled in both arms.  Inside the chest are the two weapons, accompanied with those ominous words.  "You choose."

I hesitate.  It occurs to me that maybe Julia hadn't really been seasick - that maybe her haste to get me off the boat and into the bowels of Venice had more to do with the recent quarrels we have been having.

A larger man, burly and muscular, lurches forward from the black and snatches up the onyx dagger.  The second rapier is being urgently forced into my fingers.  Rustles of paper and the glint of a monocle pierce the surrounding gloom.

The dwarf grins and it is the most horrible grin I have ever seen.  "É un duello."

My Italian is failing me.  I realize that my phrasebook is back on the boat, and now I am being forced into the center of the room.

Are those coins jingling in the background?

The larger man aims the onyx dagger.  The dwarf cackles and he won't stop repeating those words, "É un duello."  "É un duello."

What is happening?