Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

She smiles under her veil. Moving him forward. Her eyes fixed on the stone floor. The nun, on her feet again, hovers behind them.

Perina gives his forearm a surreptitious squeeze. You’ll help me, she whispers.

I — will try.

The door swings open and the night comes in, airy and echoless. Belltowers and chimney-funnels and the edges of tiled rooftops cast black outlines against the western sky, while shadows rise in the streets below. The canal’s surface shuffles the left-behind light — blue heavens, orange lanterns — and Crivano slouches toward it, descending the convent steps. Halfway down he sags against the rail and turns back. Perina still stands in the door. Your cousin, he says. The senator. What did he say about me?

She’s surprised by his question, at a loss for an answer. Very little, she says. Nothing, really.

He only arranged our meeting.

Yes, she says. I asked him to do so.

The nun is behind her, one hand on her shoulder, the other on the doorframe. Perina’s veiled eyes are lost in the dusk.

Then how, Crivano says, did you first learn that I knew your brother? That I fought at Lepanto?

There’s a lengthy silence. A breeze rustles the crowns of the sea-pines in the churchyard. Dottore de Nis, she says at last. Dottore de Nis told me.

Good night, dottore, the gatekeeper nun shouts as she shuts the door. Do be vigilant in the dark.

The bolt slides home with an emphatic boom. In the ensuing silence, Crivano stares at the gray oak planks of the convent door until lamplight vanishes from the gaps between them. Then he takes a swift weary inventory — his parcel, his stick — and turns south, toward the church of the Apostles and the Rialto beyond. In the distance the belltower in the Piazza glows like a hot iron against the starry sky; Crivano can see pale flashes of night-birds around it, feasting on insects summoned by the fire.

When he comes to the Saint Sophia Canal he takes a few unsteady paces to the water’s edge, sets his burdens down, and parts his robes to piss, splashing the quay, tracing crazy patterns across the surface, nearly wetting himself. He wants to dwell on what he’s just heard but cannot: he needs to find Obizzo, to give him the news. He never should have come here. What perversity impelled him? Was it engendered in himself, or — somehow — by the crooked city streets, which seem willfully to frustrate his errands, to distract him with queer spectacles, strange musings, unfamiliar impulses? Even now each shuffling step toward the Rialto brings him no closer: he sees the Grand Canal flash between palace walls but finds no path that leads there.

In the campo of Saint John the Golden-Tongued he finally gives up, chooses a street he’s certain will connect him to the Mercerie, and emerges instead behind the German fondaco, at the Grand Canal at last, near the very spot where the new bridge spans it. Crivano hurries to the Riva del Carbon, searching the face of every idle gondolier in the hope of glimpsing Obizzo. When he’s nearly reached the Morosini house — where last night he half-listened to the Nolan’s lecture — he turns around again. The bridge is a needle-fanged maw over the water, its broad philtrum lit with torches; their phantom twins gambol in the waves below.

In the works of Thrice-Great Hermes, we read of the double essence of Divine Man, of how He looked down from the armature of the spheres and fell in love with Nature when He saw His reflection upon Her waters . Climbing the bridge’s sloped central pathway, Crivano spots a figure he recognizes leaning against the marble balustrade: the wart-footed streetwalker, alone, tired, probably hungry, but not in any visible distress. She’s looking down at the city: rows of inscrutable palaces, lanterns winking from black outlines of boats. The expression she wears is familiar from his janissary years; he saw it sometimes, albeit rarely, in the faces of peasants displaced by the sweep of armies. How wondrous, it seems to say, is this thing that destroys me.

Crivano slips from the waning procession to stand undetected behind her, close enough to study the sinews in her neck and shoulders, to smell the many days of peppery sweat her skin has accrued. The brown dye on her hands and forearms has faded somewhat. When she stirs, adjusting her weight, Crivano hastens away.

The Universe, in all its disorder and variety, is the mirror which captured Divine Man’s as-yet-unseen reflection. But its seeming chaos masks a unity: Amphitrite, the Ocean, who also corresponds to the waters wherein naked Diana bathes when she is glimpsed by Actaeon, the Intellect . Crivano wanders south to the limit of the Riva del Vin, north to the fishmarket, long vacant at this hour, though still reeking. Boatman after boatman after boatman, soliciting fares, awaiting their masters, laughing and cursing with their fellows. Obizzo is nowhere to be found. On his way through the Ropemakers’ Square Crivano realizes that the image he’s fixed in his brain — the lens through which his mind’s eye has been scanning the canal-sides — is not Obizzo’s broad countenance but the lean face of dead Verzelin. He’s confused the features of a man he murdered. He could have passed Obizzo a dozen times tonight and never known.

He slumps against a pillar in the colonnade of the Treasury and closes his eyes, breathing through his sudarium. Sober now, but aching, exhausted. The White Eagle seems very far to go. A baffled heaviness that’s stalked him all day has at last overtaken him; he still cannot fathom its source. The aim of all his intrigues is now practically within his grasp: in mere days his work will be done. So wherefore this misdirection, these impediments, that seem to bubble from the ferment of his own brain? Even now, as he tries to retrieve Obizzo’s visage, the only image that appears is Perina’s veiled face, her beseeching eyes. Only escape , she said. Nothing more .

There is another course that Crivano could take. The thought rattles his heart. How easily Obizzo could join Verzelin on the lagoon’s floor: a fugitive, he’s practically dead already. Then a private word to the senator— I have recognized one of the Turks at the fondaco as the chief tormentor of my days in bondage, and I must be revenged —to protect him from the sultan’s agents. A meeting with Narkis in a secluded spot; a stiletto between his ribs. Serena would say nothing; what could he say? In two decisive sweeps, the conspiracy would be erased. Here, then, is the ultimate perversion: Crivano could abandon the betrayal masked by his current respectability and become respectable. The gecko who drops his tail.

He has the senator’s blessing. He could wed the foolish lovely girl. What would prevent it? Who would object? He could forsake his current treachery for a treachery altogether more loathsome and more profound, a treachery unknown to every other living soul. The idea is not without its appeal: to become, at last, the perfect impostor.

Someone is watching. Crivano opens his eyes.

It’s the whore. She’s only steps away, standing with her back to the canal. Her expression empty, or emptied. Here I am, it says.

Until now he has taken her for a provincial girl, selling herself during the Sensa for extra coins; in doing so, he may have been too hasty. She’s chosen this moment with care. She seems certain of what he’ll do; more certain than he is himself. He wonders how that could be possible.

He tucks away his sudarium and steps toward her; she greets him politely. He inquires after her foot, and she says that it still troubles her. He asks if she has a bed for the night, and she says that she does not, not yet, but that she’s sure she’ll manage. Then he asks her price.