The Mirror Thief (33 page)

Until today he has never once tried to imagine what it must have been like for the women: searching the harbor at Kyrenia for some Genoese or Ragusan captain willing to make arrangements, then crushed in the dark hold of a rolling ship among splintered crates and bolts of cloth, palms clamped over their children’s wet faces, because what if the Turks were to hear? During the sack of Tunis in 1574, word got round to Crivano’s orta that the wife of a Spanish officer had barricaded herself and her five daughters in a house on the harbor’s edge. The taunting janissaries took an hour to break her door, by which time the wife had smashed each young skull with a belaying pin and slit her own throat. What stories did young Perina hear from the downturned mouths of her mother and sister before the plague came for them? What might she remember of those stories now? How is it possible?

Could Narkis know about her? It seems unlikely. If he did, why would he care? A pure product of the Ottoman boy-tribute system, he’s always seemed perplexed by the tangle of agnatic bonds that defines the Frankish world.
I come from Macedonia, from high in the mountains. Before the Ottomans took me, I had never seen a church, or a mosque. I had seen no writing of any kind.
I had not seen gold, or glass. Now I have traveled to Mecca, to Punjab, to Kathmandu, to China. I do not think of my family. If they ever try to think of me, then they have no way of understanding what it is I have become
. Likewise, Narkis could hardly understand what Perina signifies to Crivano. But what
does
Perina signify? If none but Crivano himself can say, can she be made to mean whatever he wishes? Can she be said to mean anything at all?

What if the haseki sultan knows? The idea stops him in his tracks, as if the wall he walks beside has just collapsed to reveal an unsuspected maze of hidden passageways; for an instant he’s lost, dislodged from whatever current has been guiding his mindless path through the streets. A short while ago he crossed a bridge. Was it the bridge behind the house of the Garzoni, or the one behind the Corner palace? He dithers for a moment at a constricted junction until a pack of revelers—four wigged and rouged young men wearing ladies’ gowns, in pursuit of a plump fifth diapered like a baby and otherwise nude—charges around the north fork and scrambles past him. Crivano spits a curse at their backs, continues the way they came.

He met the haseki sultan only once. Her summons arrived some months prior to his first encounter with Narkis, and Crivano thought nothing of it at the time: she was negotiating with a group of Genoese bankers and needed an interpreter’s services.
I have heard favorable reports about you, Messer Crivano
. The sound of that old name on the air—not
Tarjuman
, the name the viziers had given him—raised gooseflesh under his fine new caftan.
You were born in Cyprus, yes? Tell me about that
.

Even in middle age she was relentlessly beautiful, nestled like a jewel among her cushions. Her scarlet entari worked with gold thread, the gömlek that billowed from her sleeves sheer as spidersilk. Terrifying. Grotesque. Like anything made beautiful by pure necessity must be.
And after the fleet returned from Tunis, your orta went east to fight the Safavids, is that so?
A full hour of questions, each one put to him in his native tongue. Her speech inelegant and tedious, but clear, and free from errors. The Genoese bankers never arrived; in time, Crivano was dismissed. Practice, he assumed. Although he never could decide whether the haseki sultan was practicing a language new to her, or one from years before that she’d
forgotten. He’d heard the rumors, of course: the sultan’s favorite concubine was the daughter of one of the Republic’s most ancient families, installed in the harem after being abducted by pirates from a family galley when she was little more than a child. Crivano had always found the tale difficult to believe. Having now spoken with her, he figured her more plausibly as the issue of Dalmatian fisherfolk than any sort of displaced Frankish noble. Still, it was remarkable, wasn’t it, how rapidly the sultan’s favor turned toward the Republic after this girl bore him a healthy son?

So the rumors persisted. And always at their margins, in whispers that were not even whispers, a more profound fantasy lurked. If this haseki sultan truly was a child of the Republic, wasn’t it possible—however remotely—that her supposed abduction had been orchestrated from the outset by the Council of Ten? That an unlikely ploy to place one of their operatives inside the harem had succeeded beyond their wildest hopes? That their girlish spy had risen to become the Turks’ de facto empress, and had birthed the sultan his heir? It was marvelous and perverse to imagine: where for centuries all the armies of Christendom had been thwarted, this once-nubile creature had prevailed. Small wonder Lepanto could be so easily forgotten.

A ridiculous scenario. But like a weaving drunkard measuring his steps, the more Crivano tries to steer his mind away, the more insistently it returns. If it were so—and it couldn’t be—what would it mean for him? If the long puppet-strings that guide his movements do not terminate in Constantinople, but merely round the pulley of the haseki sultan to end somewhere in the darkening streets he now treads, how would that change the nature of his mission? Where might the unknown architect of this peculiar conspiracy have placed Perina in its structure? How is it possible?

However Crivano tries to conceive the plot, it refuses to hold a shape, and remains formless as a gob of spit. What preoccupies him in these speculations about the haseki sultan—in these conjectures about a woman who, so far as he can judge, simply hungers after flat mirrors and intends to see them manufactured by her subjects—are the echoes of his own story he hears in them. A child of the Republic sails the pirate-haunted seas, there to be redirected and transformed. A Christian child bows toward
Mecca; who can say what is in that child’s heart? When, after many years, the child encounters a face from home, what recognitions occur? Which are disallowed? Which can be evaded?

How is it possible? It’s a stupid question. The girl’s existence seems improbable only because he’s never considered that it could be the case. He went so long without news of home or family, without giving them a thought. He had to. His eventual freedom depended on it, on his seeming indifference. When he needed signposts and antecedents, he never sought them in the world, but only in myths and fancies half-remembered from his childhood, refashioned according to his momentary need. He always found them. Was his indifference only seeming? If so, what did it conceal? These are better questions, but they slide from his attention like quicksilver on an ointment slab, and he’s disinclined to pursue them.

Shouts from the campo ahead: a group of portly nobles costumed as New World savages—wooden clubs, fur loincloths, twigs and dry leaves in their hair—chasing after a gang of common boys, hollering propositions.
Show us that downy-wreathed cock of yours, you young devil!
The boys laugh and run toward Crivano; the handsome one in the lead kicks a leather ball before him with unworried ease. Firelight through a casino window brushes the boy’s face, and for an instant he’s the Lark—pausing to catch his breath in a football game, plucking ripe medlars from a fruit stall in the Rialto, dancing a galliard across the deck of the
Gold and Black Eagle
.

Then the boy skids to a halt, stops the ball with his toe, takes a few limping sidelong steps while beckoning to his comrades, and he’s no longer the Lark, no longer a boy at all, but the crop-headed whore from last night, the one with the warty foot and the dye-stained hands. As they rush by, he sees that each of her companions is also a young woman, a whore attired as a boy, no doubt to tempt rarefied fancies.

As the last of them passes, Crivano’s gaze returns to the first, to her smirking face. A fine evening to you, dottore, she says, and doffs her cap with a stifled giggle. Then she gives the ball a mighty kick, and is gone.

In the next moment the sham savages are upon him, slowed hopelessly by their rope-and-wood sandals, hooting like jungle apes as they
shoulder past. One of their number—bald and squat, with the face of a cruel idiot child—takes a halfhearted swing at Crivano’s head with his cudgel; Crivano ducks, and cracks the man across the ribs with his own stick. The blow echoes with a hollow meaty sound, but the man lumbers on, unperturbed, after the fleeing whores. Too drunk to notice pain. Tomorrow he’ll have a pretty bruise he won’t recall receiving, at the very least. Crivano half-hopes the cur will black out unnoticed in a sottoportego somewhere, drown in the night on his own blood.

Here’s your light, dottore!

A torch bobs toward him, sweating fiery beads of pitch that vanish as they strike the pavement, clutched in the hand of a linkboy of about seven years. On the opposite side of the campo, under the star-sifted indigo sky, Crivano can make out the orange lights of more mooncursers, probably the elder brothers of this one.

I’m looking for the Morosini house, Crivano says.

It’s nearby, the linkboy says, then narrows his soot-rimmed little eyes. But it’s not easy to find, he says. I could show you.

Crivano sighs. He’s late, tired, suddenly famished, and he dips into his coin-purse to sprinkle dull green copper into the urchin’s upraised palm.

The Morosini house is on the Riva del Carbon, just north of the church of San Luca; it’s small, or seems so in the shadow of the looming Grimani palace two doors down. Candlelight pours from every window of every floor. Watching the bright and dark shapes that pass before those portals, listening the many-tongued chatter within, Crivano recalls a wicker cage of colored birds he once saw offered for sale by a wild-eyed Somali boatman, somewhere near Heliopolis on the delta of the Nile.

Two torches blaze in sconces at the open landward door, and Crivano brushes past the linkboy to walk inside. He wonders how he’ll manage
even rudimentary exchanges with his learned peers given the disturbance he’s just suffered. Were it not for Tristão he would not have come tonight—yet even as he thinks this, he can feel his body disentangling from its shock, comforted by rote performances of salutation and gratitude.

A footman hastens from the water-gate to greet him, then disappears and returns with the steward, a muscular Provençal with a neat black beard and a stoical expression. Good evening, dottore, he says with a deep bow. The Brothers Morosini welcome you.

I apologize for my tardiness, Crivano says as he surrenders his stick and his robe. Has the banquet concluded?

With the sweep of an arm, the steward invites him upstairs. The staff is clearing the table now, he says. Tonight’s address is soon to begin.

A muffled catlike yowl issues from Crivano’s empty stomach. I see, he says. If there is any way I might be granted access to whatever esculents remain, I’d be grateful. I’m afraid unforeseen circumstances prevented me from taking a meal prior to—

Of course, the steward says as they emerge onto the piano nobile. I’m sure we can make some arrangement. Forgive me, dottore, but may I ask your name?

Crivano, Crivano says. Vettor Crivano.

The man snaps to a halt, clears his throat, inhales deeply, and his stentorian voice echoes from the beamed ceiling.
Gentlemen!
he says.
Dottore Vettor Crivano!

There are nearly two dozen men in the great hall, divided into shifting groups of twos and threes and fours. A few look his way and nod. Crivano sees nobles and citizens, lawyers and physicians, scholars and friars; he overhears discussions in German, French, English, Latin, and the language of court, along with the Republic’s own tongue. Under the hum of voices he can hear a soft chime of plucked strings, but his sight finds no players. Neither does it locate Dottore de Nis.

Nearby, a pair of young patricians argues spiritedly with a third: slightly older, with an absurd plume of hair, attired in a busked and bom-basted Spanish doublet that even Crivano can recognize as outmoded.
But Lord Mocenigo, one of the pair says, the ships of the Turk suffer worse than do our own the assaults of the uskok pirates. Surely blame must lie with the Hapsburg princes who ply them with weapons and gold?

So, Crivano thinks, this buffoon is Zuanne Mocenigo: the Nolan’s patron and host. He casts his eyes about the hall, trying to guess who the Nolan himself might be, until the elder of Mocenigo’s interlocutors disengages and walks toward him. Greetings, dottore! the man says, seizing Crivano’s arm. I must say, Tristão described you perfectly. I knew you at once.

If he erred at all, signore, Crivano says, it was no doubt from generosity. You, I gather, are one of my noble hosts, although I confess I know not which.

I’m Andrea Morosini. That’s my brother Nicolò there, in debate with Lord Mocenigo. Come, I’ll introduce you.

Milord, the steward says, forgive my intrusion, but the dottore has not yet taken his supper. If you’ll permit me, I’ll take him to the pantry now, and return him to you in a moment.

Yes. Of course. Go with Hugo, dottore. He’ll see you fed. Our Nolan friend is about to begin his lecture, but with any luck I can delay him. Oh, dottore?

Andrea takes Crivano’s elbow as he’s moving away. He’s somewhat shorter than Crivano. Athletic, poised like an acrobat, but soft. He leans in close and speaks.

You did a brave thing at Constantinople, he says. No one can dispute that. My brother and I are proud to have you in our house.

Before Crivano can consider what might have prompted this commendation, the steward is leading him through the huge room, past the long banquet table, now almost bare. The dark terrazzo floor is flecked by stone chips of mossy gray and blackbird-beak orange; its polished surface—like that of an underground pool—returns Crivano’s blurred image. As he walks, slow fireflies swarm before his drowned phantom self: the reflection of the candles on the brass chandeliers overhead.

To his right, through the door of a dayroom, he glimpses the musicians: a sturdy black-beaded man with a lute and a Servite friar wrestling
with a massive theorbo. They’ve paused in their playing for a good-humored squabble. No, the one with the lute says, plucking a repeated note. Down, he says. Tune down.