Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

The midmorning light casts strange shadows down the Mercerie as the textiles billow in the late-spring breeze. Underfoot are traces of last night’s revels: spilled wine, soiled ribbon, fragments of eggshell. Looking south toward the Piazza, Crivano thinks he can make out Narkis’s turban, slipping in and out of sight like a moon among clouds, but he can’t be sure. A couple of laborers from a coal ship pass by, laughing boisterously, their eyes clamshell-white in their blackened faces. A group of bravi loiters at the corner of a sidestreet, watching the workmen, watching Crivano too. One of the ruffians, probably late of the wars in France, has a face so mutilated it hardly can be called a face: a slash of a mouth and one glaring eye emerge from a welter of scars. Crivano shudders, walks the other way.

This Spalato development is no good. He’ll need to find Obizzo soon, give him the news, but first he’ll have to settle on the best way to tell the story. He can’t imagine how he’ll keep Obizzo contained once they’re on the mainland. He knows very little about the man. Four years ago Obizzo was sentenced to the galleys for assisting his elder brother’s flight from Murano; he’s been hiding ever since. His brother now runs a prosperous glassworks in Amsterdam, a city for which Obizzo expects to be bound soon himself. In this belief, of course, he is mistaken. Crivano knows these things, and also that Obizzo is willing to murder. He and Obizzo know that about one another now.

He leaves the Mercerie, continuing down a wide straight thoroughfare toward the Grand Canal, where the crowds move more quickly. He’s eager to return to the White Eagle, where he hopes to have time enough to open his new books — to place the wooden grille over the coded message, to see what Narkis has planned for him — before he has to depart for Murano. But then, on the Riva del Ferro, he stops.

The bridge again. With most of the boats now loaded and unloaded and sailing for the Terrafirma, it’s unobstructed, clearly visible from the quay. Colors reflected from the surrounding façades turn its white limestone surfaces slightly golden, like the seared flesh of a scallop, and snakes of light play along the underside of its grand arch. Crivano imagines what might have been built instead — the mock-Roman temples that Ciotti described — and smiles. The new bridge is breathtaking in its practicality, so well-matched to the hidden rhythms and textures of the Rialto that it almost vanishes.

In the city that can build this, he thinks, great deeds are surely possible.

Despite, or because of, their obvious drunkenness, the two gondoliers Anzolo has found are resolute and quick: they slide a beechwood oar through the iron rings of Tristão’s strongbox and lift it aboard their batela as if it’s a stag they’ve poached. Then they seat Crivano on a bench with the box between his boots and row hard toward the Cannaregio Canal, trading verses of a strange barcarolle about a doomed lady who weaves an enchanted web. Soon they’ve passed beneath the Bridge of Spires — another new construction, another single span — and through the muddy encrusted layers of the city’s newer neighborhoods to meet the open waters of the lagoon. The bow swings north, then east. Crivano breathes through his sudarium and crouches over the strongbox, his stomach clenching each time the keel tilts on an errant wave.

A flat crack comes across the water, and a white cloud rises from a sandolo off the bow: a pair of hunters shooting diving ducks. A second plume appears in the farther distance, at the marshy edge of San Cristofero della Pace, and the sound of the shot arrives a heartbeat later. Off starboard a crew of shouting laborers is clustered around a barge, now stranded by low tide; they’re driving piles in the muck, turning shallow water into solid earth, extending the city outward.

The batela angles north again, aimed at the mouth of the Glassmakers’ Canal, a smudge of furnace smoke on the vacant sky. Crivano can make out a green shadow at the island’s edge: the stand of holly-oaks where he crushed Verzelin’s throat. He wonders in passing whether the mirrormaker’s absence has been widely noted or commented upon, but this speculation fails to hold his interest, and he turns his eyes toward the city again. The boatmen’s oars slash the water, the pale willows of the nearby islands slide across the unearthly obelisk of San Francesco della Vigna, and Crivano feels a rush of astonishment, a sudden recollection of what it was like to see the city for the first time. Two days ago on the Molo it eluded him: clear in his mind but lifeless, a picture of itself. He’s able to reach it now only by way of a memory from years later: he was traveling the King’s Highway in the caravan of an adventurous young vizier, and they made a detour to al-Bitrā, the ruined capital of the Nabataeans, south of the Dead Sea. As he walked among the empty temples, rosy monoliths carved into the canyon walls, he could think of nothing but the moment when he and the Lark first glimpsed the Basilica’s domes: built on nothing solid, every constituent substance estranged from its origin. The impossible city of their ancestors, precipitated from the mist.

The gondoliers moor their boat in a vacant berth next to another batela, this one riding quite low, filled to the gunwales with split alder. The fragrant fresh-cut wood is a garish orange in the sun. As the boatmen lash their lines to a palina and ready an oar to lift the strongbox, Crivano springs to the quay and enters a door bearing the device of the siren — a stained-glass chimera with shapely bare breasts and the claws of a raptor — hung in a frame of dark wood. The shop’s shelves are crowded with the output of the attached factory: great crystal pitchers in the shapes of sailing ships, wide shallow goblets for red wine, carafes so thin and so clear as to be visible only by their filigree, interspersed with urns and plates and dishes of calcedonio glass in odd and startling hues. The shop-girl behind the counter listens meekly to a plump woman in an elegant saffron zimarra; as Crivano enters, they both turn and curtsy. The older woman’s eyes flash when she notes his black physician’s robes; her mouth tightens. Serena’s wife. She knows who he is, why he’s here. Good day, Crivano says. I’m looking for Maestro Serena.

As he speaks, the thin goblets along the walls shiver with the sound of his voice; their high chime gilds its roughness, rings into the stillness that follows. The woman’s reply is a low murmur to which the glass does not react. Yes, dottore, she says. You will find four men here who answer to that name.

Crivano smiles. This is good: the woman knows who he’s looking for, but she’s clever enough not to give that fact away. She’ll be no trouble in the escape: an asset, even. Narkis has nothing to fear. My business is with Boetio Serena, Crivano says. I have payment for him, and I would like to collect an item that he has crafted for me.

Mona Serena turns to the girl. Show the dottore to the workroom, she says.

The girl leads him through a side door, down a hallway, and then asks him to wait. She tugs open a thick portal banded with iron — heat billows through the gap, along with the smell of scorched air — and vanishes to the other side. In a moment she returns with young Alexandro in tow, the boy whom Crivano met at the Salamander. Ash dusts Alexandro’s face and hair, paints the edge of his jaw where sweat has smeared it. He wipes his hands on a linen rag with the air of a man eager to get back to his business. Dottore Crivano, he says with a bow. Your visit honors us.

Crivano returns the greeting. Young maestro, he says, I need to have a word with your father.

He’s mixing the batch now, but he’ll be done soon. I can show you to our parlor if you’d like to wait there. Or may I address your concern?