The Mirror Thief (24 page)

The linkboy leads him past a church, then into a bustling campiello. The workers they pass are flush-faced and soot-blackened; their eyes are red-rimmed and hard, like they’ve come lately from battle. Near the campiello’s wellhead a workman is beating and cursing another, pounding heavy fists on his skull and shoulders. The attacker wears a thick bandage on his forearm; the man he strikes is little more than a boy. When the young man falls, his assailant kicks him until his nose and mouth are well-bloodied. Then a pair of stout fellows steps in and halfheartedly pulls them apart.

Here, dottore, the linkboy says. The Salamander.

Crivano gives him a few copper gazettes and sends him on his way. No sign marks the building: an ordinary two-story shop, its shutters replaced by rectangles of clear aqua glass, firelight falling through the
drapes behind them. There’s another window set in the door, this one stained a startling orange, with a translucent red lizard wriggling at its center. The door swings open with a touch.

He’s not sure what to expect inside—knife-wielding gamblers, bare-bosomed whores—but it’s a quiet place: a large room lit by oil lamps with a hearth at the far end; an old woman and what must be her grown son at work behind a long wooden counter; a ceiling hung thickly with game, sausages, cured hams. In the corner a young man strums a cittern, singing wordlessly. A halfdozen or so laborers are scattered across eight tables, dining or sipping cups of wine. Crivano spots the two he’s looking for right away, but stands empty-faced in the entrance until the old woman comes for his stick and robe.

Would you care for soup, dottore? We have good sausage, too. And a pheasant.

Just wine.

Crivano seats himself at an empty table. After a moment, the glassmaker Serena appears at his elbow, his hat in his hand. Dottore, he says.

Maestro. Will you join me?

Thank you, dottore. Please allow me to present my eldest son, Alexandro.

The boy is twelve or thirteen, with a serious face. He already bears small scars on his hands and forearms from the furnaces. His bow is dignified and respectful. His eyes are a man’s eyes. Crivano thinks briefly of his own youth: when he and the Lark left Cyprus for Padua, they were this boy’s age. He doubts greatly that either was so poised.

You help your father in the workshop? Crivano says.

Yes, dottore.

He also studies with the Augustinians, Serena says. He’s a good student.

Serena musses the boy’s chestnut hair with his broad right hand. His first three fingers lack their tips; each ends abruptly with a variegated whorl of scar tissue. Crivano hadn’t noticed this before. Do you enjoy your studies, Alexandro? he asks the boy.

No, dottore.

Serena laughs. He’d rather be working the glass, he says. He thinks the lessons are worthless. Sometimes I agree. The friars make him learn Latin, and the language of court. Why? Better for a tradesman to learn English, don’t you think? Or Dutch.

As he says this, Serena gives Crivano a pointed look that makes him uneasy. Well, maestro, Crivano says, those are the languages of the nobility. And tradesmen want to sell to the nobility. Is this not so?

Tradesmen want to sell to those with access to money and markets, Serena says. Like the English. And the Dutch.

As Serena settles into the chair his son pulls out for him, Crivano steals a glance across the room. The silverer Verzelin hasn’t moved from his spot by the fire. He’s slumped forward, his head on the table. Crivano knows him by the tremors in his legs.

Serena has placed a parcel on the oak planks. Those sketches you gave me were very good, dottore, he says. Very clear and detailed.

Yes. I didn’t make them.

Serena smiles. My compliments, then, to your friend’s draughtsmanship, he says. He leans forward. I understand why your friend wants to remain in the shadows, he says. This kind of work—not everyone will do it. Not these days.

You don’t want the job?

I’ll do the job, dottore. But I’ll have to choose my help with care. As you’ve seen, there has been—how to put it?—an increase in piety throughout the patriarchate. Piety of a particular sort. And all of us praise God for this, of course. But often we’re surprised to find practices once thought merely eccentric now being decried as heresy. I see this happen in my own workshop. So I must be cautious. For this piece, of course, we also need a metalworker who can be trusted. Fortunately I know of one.

Crivano nods. He has opened his mouth to reply when a yelp comes from near the hearth; Verzelin is upright in his chair. He jerks his head left and right, barking gibberish, then slouches to the table again. The cittern player shoots a quick look at him, but never breaks time.

He’s drunk? Crivano says.

He’s mad.

Crivano looks at Serena, doing his best to feign surprise.

Serena shrugs. It happens to them sometimes, he says.

To whom?

To the silverers. They go mad. No one knows why. Runs in their families, I suppose.

Crivano looks at Verzelin again. He’s rolling his forehead back and forth across the wood, spilling his wine. Can he still work? Crivano asks. As if this concern has only now occurred to him.

Serena is silent for a moment. Then he flips aside the folds of white cotton that envelop the parcel before him.

The gesture seems to uncover a hole cut through the tabletop. Leaning forward, Crivano expects to see Serena’s legs, but his eyes find instead the exposed beams of the ceiling—and then a face, his own, with terrible clarity. He puts a hand on the table’s edge to keep his balance.

Go on, dottore. Pick it up.

Crivano slips his slender fingers beneath the cloth and lifts the mirror to his face. It’s about a foot long, several inches across, rounded at the corners, in precise accordance with Tristão’s sketch. The glass is perfectly flat, uniformly thick and clear. Crivano tilts it toward the firelight to check the silvering and finds no blemishes. A dancing ghost-light appears across the room, on the wall above the hearth, and then vanishes when he tilts the glass back.

Verzelin made this? Crivano asks.

Serena smoothes his thick beard, watching Verzelin with weary eyes. Made it, he says, or caused it to be made.

It’s remarkable. Flawless.

Nearly so, yes.

Is the glass that your shop makes so clear?

Serena grunts. Even clearer, dottore, he says. If I want it to be. But if you ask me, which I admit you did not, I’d tell you that this glass is
too
clear. Your friend had better keep the damp off it, or in a year or two—

He makes a flatulent sound with his mouth.

—it’s gone. Melted away like a fancy sweet. Very clear glass cannot abide moisture, dottore. Your friend should keep this wrapped in dried seaweed, always. For what he’s paying he should make it last.

Crivano is barely listening, staring at his own face. Like every gentleman, he owns a small steel mirror, and over the years it has taught him to recognize himself. But this glass has made it a liar. He sees himself now as others see him, have always seen him: the shape of his head, the way his expression changes, the space his body fills in a room. He scans the map of damage written across his face and wonders how much can be deciphered: the divot in his jaw from a janissary arrow, the ear notched in Silistra by a whore’s hidden razor, the front tooth chipped by the boot of a Persian onbashı in the instant before the musket went off. With a quick intake of breath Crivano replaces the cloth and pushes the parcel back toward Serena. How long to attach the frame? he asks.

Not long. No more than a day.

My friend won’t need it so quickly.

Once it’s finished, Serena says with a sad smile, I don’t want it in my shop.

He reaches into his tunic—good fabric, Crivano notices, and fairly clean—and produces a rectangle of white paper, folded and closed with a blue wax seal bearing the device of the Siren, his family’s shop. Give this to your friend, he says. It’s my estimate, along with a list of alterations I’ve made to his design. If any are unacceptable, I must be informed prior to sundown tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll complete the piece.

Crivano takes the paper, tucks it into his own doublet. There’s a commotion: Verzelin is on his feet, staggering. The man with the cittern angles away, ignoring him, pretending to tune his strings.
Christ!
Verzelin shouts, followed by something Crivano can’t make out. A thread of phlegm dangles from his beard, golden in the firelight. Crivano sees a pair of dark stains on the table Verzelin left. The smaller is spilled wine; the larger, he realizes, is saliva.

Verzelin walks toward them, lurching spasmodically at every other
step.
He walks among us, brothers!
he hisses. He’s pointing at Crivano.
Promises! Promises! Promises of deliverance!

Crivano keeps his eyes steady. The front of Verzelin’s shirt is soaked with sweat and drool. Amazing, Crivano thinks: all those hours at the furnaces, and still so much phlegm. Surely he’s incurable now. Still, best not to take chances.

Verzelin shapes his words with effort, seeming to gag on them.
I have called!
he says.
I am his prophet! The peacock, he’s a holy bird, isn’t he a holy bird? He walks our streets! Follow him, brothers!

He’s out the door, gone. Crivano tenses, tries to keep the strain off his face.

That, Serena says, is not quite the sort of piety I was talking about.

I should speak with him.

Not much of a point, dottore.

I have his payment. For the mirror.

I’ll
pay him for the mirror, dottore. You pay
me
for the finished piece.

Serena looks at Crivano with narrowed eyes, like he’s an imbecile, but Crivano is already rising to his feet. I’ll return to collect the piece in two days, he says. Send word to me in the city if the project is delayed. I’m lodged at the White Eagle.

It takes Crivano a moment to pay for his wine and to retrieve his robe and stick. By the time he’s muttered his valedictions and returned to the campiello, Verzelin is nowhere to be seen. He can’t have gotten far in his condition, but which way? Crivano looks for the linkboy who brought him here, but the boy has moved on. He could ask anyone else, of course, but he doesn’t want to leave more of a trail than necessary.

He opts to turn right, down the Street of the Glassmakers. It’s long and straight and brightly lit—by glazed lanterns hung over doors, and also from within, by the white-hot furnaces—and edged along its left-hand side by a small canal choked with boats. If Verzelin came this way, he’ll be no trouble to spot.

Crivano hurries forward, his walkingstick clutched by his side. He notes the brightly colored insignia of the shops he passes: an angel, a siren,
a dragon, a cockerel devouring a worm. The shutters are all opened, the wares are on display, and more than once he’s startled by the image of his own anxious face.

A hundred yards down the fondamenta, just past a small fishmarket, Verzelin sways in front of the Motta mirrorworks, the shop that employs him, bellowing at his colleagues inside. The shop’s racks and shutters are a gallery of silvered panels—ovals and circles and rectangles, pocket-size or inches across, with frames of inlaid wood or wrought metal or chalcedony glass—and they render him in fragments: his hollow chest, his twisted limbs, the silent O of his shouting mouth.

I’ve caught the Lord!
he says.
I have, I have, we all have! But what’s the good of catching if you never follow?
No one in the shop comes to the windows; passersby give him wide berth. The bricks at his feet are spritzed with white foam.

Crivano watches from a short distance up the quay. This is better, he thinks: better that he and Verzelin left the Salamander separately, and better that he’s had time to think. By now Obizzo will have moored the boat; he’ll be nearby, half a mile at most. The question is how to move Verzelin in the right direction. Crivano dealt with too many madmen during his years in Bologna to believe himself capable of anticipating their actions, but he has an intuition about this one, and no better ideas.

He saunters forward, giving the mirrormaker an empty stare. Verzelin goes silent, his febrile eyes returning Crivano’s gaze, his lean bearded face a riot of tics and twitches. Then Crivano walks past him, carrying on down the fondamenta, the iron ferrule of his stick clicking sharply on the pavement.

Confounded, Verzelin discharges a spate of rapid gibberish, unintelligible and bestial, and Crivano picks up his pace. There’s an opening on
the right: the Street of the Potters. He makes the turn. Another glassworks here, along with two osterie and a lusterware factory; the other shops are dark and shuttered. Halfway down the block, Crivano steps into the recessed doorway of a mercer and waits.

Verzelin isn’t far behind. With each step, his body angles left; he corrects himself like a ship beating to windward. The few people on the street hasten from his path. He murmurs as he comes.
The peacock
, he says,
he’s a holy bird, a holy bird, a holy bird
.

Crivano steps into the open; the moonlight catches him. Verzelin, he says.

Verzelin blinks, squints. Dottore? he says. Dottore Crivano?

Yes. I’m here.

I conjured you, Verzelin says. I called you from the glass.

We must go, Verzelin. Do you understand? We must leave Murano tonight.

Verzelin stares without comprehension, then squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head, like a child who’s tasted raw onion.

Listen to me. The guild and the Council of Ten have learned of our intentions. The sbirri are looking for you right now. There’s a boat nearby waiting to take us to Chioggia, but we must hurry.

Verzelin grimaces, stares at his shuffling feet. In his expression Crivano can see an army of fleeting impulses being enveloped by profound weariness. I will follow, Verzelin mutters. I have looked. In the glass. What I have seen. And I will follow.

Crivano finds a dry spot on Verzelin’s upper sleeve and tugs it to urge him along. There’s a wide square ahead—early-rising merchants’ wives filling pails at the well—and they angle away from it, following the curve of the street until they’re parallel to the glassmakers’ canal. Potters are at work nearby, singing a maudlin song about a drowned sailor, but he and Verzelin have the pavement to themselves.