Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Welles checked out in ’63, the same week as Jack Kennedy. You didn’t hear about it till months later, passing through L.A. after wearing out your welcome in Palm Springs. You sent Synnøve flowers anyway; Walter helped you figure out how to do it. She sent a nice card back, brief and vague, snapshots from the funeral enclosed. No familiar faces. The girl nowhere to be seen.

Welles’s death sent you back to the book, which for a few years you’d put aside. You half-expected the spell to be broken, but it wasn’t — though the book had changed, shifted along invisible faultlines. Or maybe you’d grown into it, in ways he’d surely predicted. You’re a gambler! You live by skill and fortune . By then it was true. Even today the old bastard finds ways to poke at you, to jerk your strings. He must’ve known you’d find your way here eventually. The city’s been waiting — a trap he baited — and you’ve waltzed right into it.

Just how much of your life has he scripted? That scene yesterday between the columns was pure Welles: probably playing in his head the first night you met him. You were running a card game on the boardwalk. I won a dollar from you . Still, kneeling there with the sea at your back, you never felt like a sucker or a patsy — and it was hard not to take satisfaction from it: moving the cards with your old fleet hands, working the switch, there at the very center of the web you’ve been walking.

Maybe that’s why you weren’t too surprised when you looked up to find Damon watching you: leaning against the marble railing of the loggetta, eating gelato with a plastic spoon, appearing and disappearing in a line of tourists queued behind an upraised umbrella. He wore a new linen suit, a new wool overcoat, and a deeply pissed-off expression: the ensemble of a traveler who’s left someplace in a hurry, who had time to pack nothing but cash. A battered leather shoulderbag hung at his side, flap unbuckled, within easy reach of his right hand. You grinned at him, but you’re not sure he saw it. You have no idea, really, what other people can see.

For another ten minutes or so you kept the cards going while Damon finished his ice cream, started drifting closer. Just as you began to think about how best to get away, a cop showed up — lithe, poised, runway-model handsome, state-funeral tidy — and answered the question for you, helping you stand, gently shooing you away. Oh, thank you, signore , you said, plenty loud enough for Damon to hear. I’m sorry, but I’m not feeling well. And this city is so confusing! I’m staying at the Aquila Bianca in San Polo. Can you tell me how to get there?

So now you wait. Damon’s probably bivouacked this very minute at the bacaro across the street, flipping through a magazine, wondering when you’ll come down, or when he should go up. Odds are the bacaro closes for a couple of hours after lunch; most of them do, it seems. It’s getting late. You have a clear picture of what comes next: Damon will knock back the last of his wine as the proprietor motions to the exit, he’ll rub his sleepless eyes and adjust his coat as the door locks behind him, and then, with a few easy steps, he’ll cross the gray flagstone street.

You won’t be making it back to the Biblioteca Marciana. Probably just as well. You’ve seen what you came to see, well past the point of diminishing returns. The library girls brought them to you on platters, helped you tug on the white gloves that protect their frail pages: the collected correspondence of Suor Giustina Glissenti. You understood hardly any of it, but you knew the one word you were looking for, and you were certain your eyes wouldn’t miss it.

It wasn’t there. You flipped through again to be sure: backward this time, slower, your nose an inch off the paper. The result was the same: no mention anywhere of anyone named Crivano. Why would Welles lie? Did he lie? Even at this dead end you turned up clues, or what might be clues. The nun’s letters stopped after 1592, the same year Crivano supposedly fled the city. Suor Giustina’s name doesn’t appear in her convent’s records after that date — but it isn’t listed before that date, either, although you did find a record of another Glissenti girl: a cousin, maybe. To make matters worse, some letters that were supposed to be in the box were missing. Why? How long have they been gone?

It felt something like cardcounting: filling in gaps based on what little you can see. Walter and Donald could probably figure it out in a heartbeat — but they’re not around, and your head doesn’t work like that: if you can’t see it, then you’re at a loss. But you can almost always see it. Almost always.

Patterns: that’s what you’re best at. Seeing the figure in the tealeaves. You could spot it — you’re sure you could — if you had a little more to go on, a few more dots to connect. Vettor Crivano flees this city one thousand lunar years after Muhammad leaves Medina: some kind of echo there. Ezra Pound is released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital a few weeks after you depart the shoreline; he dies and is buried half a mile from here, at San Michele, the same year Veronica is born. John Hinckley, Jr. watches a movie, shoots a president — launching Curtis on his own funny trajectory — and then gets locked up at St. Elizabeth’s. All of this must add up to something, must spell something out. You’re running out of chances to put it all together, to see it whole.

Or maybe soon you’ll see everything.

At the desk downstairs there’s only the proprietor, visible through the window from the street; Damon shouldn’t find it hard to get around him. You hope he’s careful enough to take that extra step. He’ll lean over the wooden counter, match your name to your room number, and soon he’ll be on the stairs, fixing a suppressor to a pistolbarrel, hiding the weapon with a glossy newsmagazine. The lock — quaint, old-fashioned — won’t slow him down. The well-oiled door will swing open, and he’ll see the neat berm your legs make on the bed.

By then, of course, you’ll already be in the mirror.

It’s not easy, but you’ve practiced. Quick trips at first: a few seconds, in and out. Then longer stretches, deep dives into un-space. Not unlike learning how to swim. What you recall from the other side is the hugeness of it. And the unity: coming back, the idea of separateness becomes laughable. If passing through is hard; returning is much harder. Because, why bother, frankly?

But you do come back. Surfacing in Curtis’s suite, in Veronica’s room, in the suite at Walter’s joint. Letting people see you when you got confident enough. Their startled reactions proving that what you felt was true. Proving something, anyway.

This time will be different. More like learning to breathe water. You have been very patient. You have waited a long time.

Damon will stand over your body for a while. Sniffing the shitty air. He’ll step to the bedside, sit lightly on the mattress. Watching you. Then he’ll set his gun on the stacked blankets and flick a finger hard against the tip of your nose. He’ll find a penlight in his coat, lift your eyelid with his thumb, and shine the beam into your slack clammy face. Then he’ll sigh, and turn, and look out the window at the campo below.

Eventually he’ll stand, pick up the pistol. He’ll press the thick barrel against your head, resting it in the orbit of your left eye, and he’ll hold the newsmagazine above it, opened to catch the spatter. Der Spiegel : you’ll be able to read the cover over his shoulder. In Göttlicher Mission , it says.

He’ll shoot your eyes out, one at a time. He’ll drop the wet red magazine on your chest, wipe his hands on the blanket. On his way to the door he’ll pick up the passport that he had his friends in D.C. make for you: it’s on the chest of drawers, easy to find. On his way back to his own hotel he’ll drop it in a canal, fastened with an elastic band to a palm-size chunk of stone.