Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Anzolo grimaces, waves an impatient hand. All innkeepers are outlaws, dottore, he says. We must be. It is my pleasure to oppose the sbirri. I hate them! Everyone in the Rialto hates them. But poor and desperate people sometimes sell them their eyes and their ears. When you go out again, assume that you are everywhere observed.

Crivano resumes his pacing. I’ve done nothing wrong, he says. Believe me.

It doesn’t matter, dottore.

I have to go out, Crivano mutters, half to Anzolo, half to himself. There are errands I must attend. But how? How am I to move freely through the streets?

Anzolo shifts his weight, angles his shoulders toward the door: sympathetic, but eager to distance himself. Crivano can hardly blame him. I’ll send word to Rigi, Anzolo says. The porter at the Contarini house in San Samuele. I recall correctly, do I not, that you are acquainted with Senator Giacomo Contarini? That’s very good. That will help you. Rigi can collect your things and lodge you until this matter is resolved. You’ll be safer there than here in the Rialto, dottore. Far safer.

Crivano nods. Yes, he says. That’s wise. But don’t send for him until I’ve gone out again. Between myself and my equipage, I’d like to divide the sbirri’s attention.

As you wish, dottore. They’ll search your room once you leave, of course. I won’t be able to stop them. I will try to prevent them from ruining or stealing your possessions, but the best I may manage is to keep tally of what’s lost.

Crivano steps to the window, parts the drapes to look down on the Street of the Coopers. Leisurely crowds move from storefront to storefront. The Jews’ Sabbath: no red hats or yellow turbans in sight. A cloaked figure watches from across the street; he looks young and sturdy, but also stupid and feckless. Crivano lets the curtain fall.

Do you think the girl told them about me? he says.

Anzolo is silent for a while. I spoke to her this morning, he says. I gave her a meal. She was in fair spirits, and she said you were generous. If she tells them anything, I think she’ll wait until she’s certain it won’t make any difference. No one hates a sbirro more than a whore, dottore. And she’s a good girl.

I’m sorry that I brought her here, Anzolo.

Tell your priest, dottore, not me. If I forbade such women in my rooms, my enterprise would collapse. I therefore cast no stones. I should go, dottore. They will be waiting for me.

Crivano bolts the door behind Anzolo, listens to his footfalls recede down the corridor. The muted voices from downstairs are soon drowned out by churchbells; it’s later than he thought.

Could it be that the sbirri he saw near Minerva were following neither him nor Narkis, but Ciotti? After all, Ciotti sells the Nolan’s books; the Inquisition is bound to be suspicious of him. But this can’t all be about the Nolan, can it? Crivano’s plot with the mirrormakers and the Nolan’s heresy are linked only by pure accident: his attendance of the friar’s lecture, coupled with its unfortunate topic. Whatever demoniac impulse could have prompted Tristão to suggest it?

That clever sbirro downstairs seemed very interested in the mirror that Serena and Verzelin made. He wanted Crivano to describe it. Why? Could he have deduced its purpose? Perhaps this is about heresy after all — or about secret knowledge, at least. Just another skirmish between the Republic and the Pope: the Council of Ten seeking to keep account of the city’s magi in advance of renewed meddling by the Inquisition. Perhaps no one yet suspects the glassmakers’ pending flight.

Obizzo still doesn’t know of their plans. How to tell him, without leading the sbirri to him?

Crivano opens his trunk and withdraws items from it: a quill, two jars of ink, a sheet of foolscap. He sits and stares at the blank page for a long time. Then he stands to resume his pacing.

The sunbeams under the window inch across the floor. Crivano pulls the curtains open, flooding the room with light, and returns to his trunk. He removes the letters of advice and the wooden grille from its false bottom, tucks them into his doublet, and replaces them with his esoteric books. The sbirri will surely discover these; let them think they’ve found something. The gecko who drops his tail.

Crivano removes the snaplock pistol from its case and holds it to the light. He wishes he’d taken it to the Lido and fired it sometime over the past few days; he’d meant to. Now he’ll have to make guesses.

He draws back the cock — his thumb straining mightily against the spring — until it catches, then fixes a fresh flint in its clasp. He pulls the trigger: a shower of sparks, and a loud snap that makes him blink. The sharp smell tickles his nose.

Crivano wipes down the mechanism, cleans the barrel, clears the touchhole with a needle and a puff of air. Then he shakes grains of black powder into the flashpan, closes it, and pours more down the barrel. Unsure of proper quantities. Erring toward excess. He cuts a strip of wadding, rests a heavy lead ball in it, pushes it into the barrel with the ramrod. Then he loosens his belt and tucks in the pistol, aligning its grip with a slash in his robe, within reach of his right hand. The afternoon sun casts his silhouette against the floor; he inspects it, watching for the pistol’s telltale bulge, until he’s satisfied.

He sits again. Taking up the foolscap, he tears it neatly across the edge of the table, then tears it again until it’s quite small. He dips his quill into the first jar — the ink colorless as water — and writes. He blows across the paper until the liquid has vanished, then cleans his quill, opens the second jar, and writes again, this time in deep black. A brief message; a few simple instructions. Tiny letters in neat rows.

He rolls the paper into a tight tube, ties it with a bit of gauze from his box of physic. Then he approaches the window — climbing across the bed to the corner, keeping his head down, so no one who watches from the street can see — and pins the rolled paper into a fold of the curtains, on the backside of the fabric, where it overlaps the wall.

Now, perhaps, he is ready.

On his way out, he leaves keys in the locks of his trunk and his box of physic. They’re good locks, expensive; it seems a pity to have them broken.

The world outside greets Crivano with the fierce clarity of a nightmare. The sun crawls down the firmament; a pale daub of moon lingers at the horizon. Rough breezes lurk between buildings, pouncing at odd intervals, and delicate changeable clouds rush like vengeful angels to the east. The ultramarine field they cross could herald any weather. Everything arrayed beneath it appears fleeting, provisional, doomed.

Each passing face seems glimpsed through a lens, so acutely does it prick him; the texture of every surface looms so sharp in his vision that it seems to chafe his skin. Many years have gone by since terror last awakened him like this. What most troubles him is how little mind he’s paid by the city’s innocuous inhabitants: they obstruct his path like sleepwalkers. Among them he is insubstantial, a miasma.

His antagonists, however, find him often enough. Sometimes it’s the sbirri themselves, brazen in their matching cloaks. Sometimes it’s a lingering stare — a beggar, a water-vendor, a whore — that’s withdrawn the instant he returns it. Sometimes he simply feels eyes follow him, or senses that a street is too quiet. Has this watch been kept over him since he arrived? Is he only now able to perceive it?

He strides purposefully, his stick’s ferrule ringing the flagstones and thumping the dirt, but in fact he has no purpose save to frustrate the sbirri and ascertain their tactics. His boots dissect the Rialto, tramp its every street at least twice, step into shops and churches, turn corners so capriciously that he surprises himself. Once he’s begun to intuit the sbirri’s methods — one will follow him for a block’s length, then vanish as another takes his place — he crosses the new bridge to the Mercerie and treads its busy thoroughfares until he hears work-bells herald the day’s approaching end. Then he boards a traghetto and crosses the Grand Canal again. This is the long afternoon’s one moment of repose: kneading his sore shins under the boat’s canopy while accidental gusts crease the water in vague patterns and the sbirri track him along the banks.