Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

The insipid honking of geese comes from somewhere overhead. Crivano looks for the pale undersides of wings, but finds none. When the sky grows quiet again, he pulls the white linen from the holly-oak branch, wipes Verzelin’s spittle from his gown and stick, and throws the damp cloth into the lagoon. Then he rounds the point and returns to the Street of the Glassmakers, following it back across the long bridge, studying the shop windows along the way.

His locanda is on the Ruga San Bernardo: lively by day, quiet at night, with no lock on its outer door and stairs to the lodgers’ rooms directly off the foyer. The widow who runs the place will hear him come in, but she won’t remember the hour. He bolts his door and rests his head against its wood and breathes deeply, conscious of the gallop of his pulse. Then he lights the clay lamp on the little table, hangs his clothes on the pegs beside the bed, and unties his purse.

Two pinches of basil snuff cool his blood, but he’ll stay awake until he returns to the Rialto. He performs a few stretches that he remembers from the palace school at Topkapı, then sits and breaks the blue wax on Serena’s letter to Tristão. Unfolded, the outer layer of rag paper reveals a second document with an identical seal; Crivano sets this aside. Then he flattens the sheet that enclosed it, holds it over the lamp’s flame, and waits for the hidden writing to appear.

A cool wind leavens the fog over the lagoon, and the belltower of San Michele floats into view off the traghetto’s bow. Aside from Crivano, the boat’s only passengers are two tightlipped Tyrolean merchants, bundles clasped between their knees. The gondolier has no songs; he pauses often in his rowing to blow his nose and tighten his greatcoat against the morning chill.

Crivano is suffering a bit of rhinitis himself, along with a tightness in his throat, probably from the sleepless night. His has been a year of many such nights: recent episodes of hard travel, and prior to those long hours spent reading for his disputation, preparing to argue Galen with puffed-up chancellors who knew the Qanun of Ibn Sina only in translation, who’d never read al-Razi at all. Many a dawn found Crivano awake at his cluttered desk, or completing a difficult alchemical process in his tiny laboratory, and he’d rub his eyes and don his cloak and step out to wander the breezy colonnades of Bologna, feeling a melancholy thrill of inviolability, as if by waiting out the night he’d found a way to stop time, to free himself from human concerns. What pleased him most was that no one could see what he’d done, could know that he still had use of the day they’d discarded. And this, of course, echoed other secrets. Eyeing the smooth faces of students half his age as they shook off sleep and hurried to their lectures, Crivano would bite his inner cheek and marvel at his own lethal strangeness: the spider in the flower, the cuckoo in the nest.

A white pulse flashes through the mist off starboard, the wings of an egret, and now Crivano sees scores of them, nested in a bend of willows at the eastern edge of San Cristofero della Pace. The tide is low, coming in: rocks slimed with eelgrass lie exposed in the shallows, and sea-smell fouls the air. Crivano presses a scented cloth to his face and watches a distant pair of fishermen work in their cut-reed weir. When he turns forward again, the square flanking towers of the Arsenal are before him.

The traghetto puts out its fares. The Tyroleans hurry off to the south, shouldering identical burdens with identical hunches. Crivano stands aside to watch them go as the sniffling gondolier takes on more passengers. Behind him the mist has lifted, and a few Alpine snowcaps hang above the horizon, like chips in an old fresco.

The smell of boiling pitch from the Arsenal has scoured away the tideland miasma, and Crivano tucks his sudarium back into his doublet. Columns of black and white smoke rise in ghostly parallel to the new belltower at San Francesco della Vigna, a near twin of the one in the Piazza: leaner, nearly as tall, its steep pyramidal crown already crazed by lightning-strikes. Crivano shades his eyes and notes that the side of the belfry overlooking the Arsenal has been bricked up. To spoil the vantage of spies, he imagines. Crivano and his fellows are hardly the only foreign agents intriguing against the Council of Ten.

As he starts his long trek back to the Rialto, he tries to walk slowly — to be calm and alert, to abandon himself to the currents of the streets — but his head and neck ache, faces turn monstrous in his sight, and he finds himself rushing, heedless of what he passes. As he’s crossing the Calle Zon bridge a sluggish exhalation of bubbles breaks the canal’s surface, and he stops, overcome by nausea, to lean against the stone balustrade. Black silt rises from the bottom, corrupting the emerald water, and Crivano imagines Verzelin somewhere in the lagoon, tethered to his stone block. At peace at last. The only physic for him.

He claps the sudarium to his face, breathes through it, and the spearmint helps to focus his thoughts. He has failed to anticipate how exhausting this would be: the need to keep a scrupulous interior tally of crimes committed, of lies told. The mildest contradiction or the most innocuous statement of fact might suffice to doom him if spoken within range of the wrong ear.

Still worse: in his constant braiding of the strands of his conspiracy, Crivano finds himself inclined toward stasis, estranged from the objective that actually brought him here. When it came, the behest of the haseki sultan seemed straightforward enough: locate craftsmen adept at fashioning the flawless mirrors for which every civilized land celebrates the isle of Murano, and return with those craftsmen to the Ottoman court, so that that the industry might become established there. But Crivano soon learned — to his dismay, if not his surprise — that the fabrication of mirrors is a complex undertaking, one that requires the labor of at least two specialists: a glassmaker conversant with formulae and techniques to yield a crystalline substance of near-perfect transparency, along with a silverer able to shape that material into flat sheets backed with a reflective alloy. With Muranese mirrors increasingly craved in every European court, those who possess such skills might reasonably expect incomes to shame the most prosperous pasha. Convincing such men to quit the island of their birth — an island upon which watercraft converge daily from every compass-point, delivering a particular inventory of raw materials to the factories wherein these men and their fathers and the fathers of their fathers learned and refined their methods — persuading such men to forego such advantages in order to set up operations ex nihilo in a Muhammadan land where their language and customs will be utterly alien: this seemed to Crivano to present a grave rhetorical challenge.

And so Crivano lied. Based on his accrued understanding of the industry, he guessed that Amsterdam — another city of canals, one with its own nascent glassworks — might present itself to the Muranese as a tempting destination. Whatever his reasons, the glassmaker Serena concurred readily enough. Verzelin did as well — or so it seemed, until Crivano was forced to conclude that the silverer’s own reasoning was not so much occluded as lost, annihilated by whatever affliction had come to sap his brain. Disaster! The fool was too erratic to be of use in the haseki sultan’s project, yet still coherent enough that any ravings about an imminent flight to the north might not have been dismissed by the authorities. In the end, there was only one option. The man murdered himself.

This Obizzo, on the other hand, is perfect. For the hundredth time Crivano wonders how Narkis was able to find him: an expert silverer, a reasonable man, a fugitive with eighty ducats on his head. Now, after last night, his fortunes are wedded irrevocably to Crivano’s own. Of course, like all glassmakers, his disposition is somewhat choleric — Crivano dreads the task of pacifying him when he crosses the gangway and finds himself trapped in a city very different from the Amsterdam he has been expecting — but this is a trifle. The man is a godsend. Whose god sent him, of course, remains unresolved.