The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  Bologna?

  Indeed. A colleague of mine at the university asked me to have it made.

  Who?

  I will not tell you that.

  Can you describe the mirror to me?

  I can, Crivano says. But I will not.

  Lunardo smiles, as if this genuinely pleases him. He reaches into his doublet, withdraws a rumpled wad, smoothes it on the tabletop: a pair of well-worn chamois gloves, flesh-colored, very finely made. I urge you to reconsider your reluctance, dottore, he says. I will not insist that you speak, but the tribunal will do so, I fear.

  The tribunal? Or the Council of Ten?

  Lunardo doesn’t respond. He begins to pull on a glove, sliding his fingers inside with great care and patience; against his skin the chamois all but vanishes. So, dottore, he says, was your little entertainment last night quite to your liking? I can’t remember if I’ve tried that particular girl. There are, after all, so very many.

  Our dialogue is concluded, Crivano says, pushing back his chair. Good day, sir. To you, and to your fellows.

  She’s hardly the one I would have picked for you, dottore, I confess. But there is a certain satisfaction, I suppose, in a really cheap whore when you know you can afford better. So long as she knows it too. Right, dottore? Such enthusiasm!

  You are a dog, sirrah. I will not speak to you again. Tell your masters that they may find me here at the White Eagle if they have further business with me. And when next you plan to cross my path, wear those distasteful gloves, and look to your life.

  As Crivano turns, his eyes make a slow sweep of the room and the street outside, taking in every face he sees: he needs to be able to recognize them again. The few innocent patrons here all inch their chairs out of his way, huddle over their plates in a pantomime of disinterest.

  Lunardo raises his voice as Crivano departs. I can certainly understand, he says, why you were so quick to hire a girl last night. I can hardly walk past a convent without my prick turning to stone. And most of them are practically brothels anyway. Aren’t they, dottore?

  Crivano is hesitant to expose his back to Lunardo, but he doubts the man will strike. If the sbirri were ready to do him harm, they would have done it. They want something from him, for him to give something away. What?

  He meets Anzolo’s eyes as he crosses the parlor. I’ll be in my room, he says.

  Lunardo comes to his feet now, too, but he’s in no hurry. Weren’t you going out, dottore? he shouts.

  I was, Crivano says. I am no longer.

  He’s in the corridor, on the stairs, inside his room, bolting the door. He paces the empty area between the bed and the wall—clutching his head in his hands, unable to think of anything—until Anzolo’s knock comes. I’m sorry, dottore, Anzolo says as he hurries inside. I tried to warn you.

  You did warn me. I thank you. And I pray your interference with these knaves will not bring any great misery upon you.

  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 i
t, 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.

  55

  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.

  By now they will have guessed that he’s waiting for darkness. In this they are nearly correct. The innumerate moments before the single bell announces sundown contain his final chance to contact Obizzo; he’s resolved not to let it escape him.

  Shutters close in the Rialto, pushcarts rattle home, carpets slide from windowsills. Crivano stops in a cutler’s shop, drinks a cup of wine in a casino. Waiting for the light to turn gold. They’re following more closely now: almost always, it’s the men in cloaks. Eventually they’ll lose patience—sure that they’ve either missed the crucial gesture, or that he’s withholding it—and they’ll fall on him. He has no good lies to tell under torture, no time to invent or rehearse them. If they take him, he’ll say what he knows.

  There: a glow on the belltower of the Frari. He hurries into the street, zigzagging toward the great confluence at Campo San Aponal. A glance over his shoulder reveals two cloaks, both close behind.

  In the campo he mixes with the milling crowd, holding his breath until he sees them: linkboys, gathered with their lanterns on the church steps, laughing and tussling at rough plebeian games while they wait for the darkness to come. Crivano sweeps toward them. Holla, mooncursers! he shouts, rubbing his palms together. Who would earn a bit of silver before the sun has gone?

  The boys swarm. Crivano squats on his haunches, opens his purse to remove a bright ducat. Their unblinking eyes converge on it, aligned like compass-needles. This coin is more than any of their fathers will earn in a week—if indeed any of them have fathers. The youngest among them doesn’t even know what it is; another boy’s terse whisper puts an explanation in his small ear.

  So, Crivano says, who among you rabble knows the Contarini house, in San Samuele?

  A shrill chorus of affirmation follows.

  Be at ease, whelps! Crivano says, and passes the coin to a tall harelipped boy. I have silver enough for all. You, varlet, to earn your coin, will deliver a message to Rigi, the Contarini porter. Now—who knows the Morosini house, in San Luca?

  Crivano produces another ducat to more agitated yelps, more grasping fingers. The harelipped boy is half-turned, half-crouched, ready to run; his hiss-honking voice cuts through the din. What’s your message, dottore? he asks.

  Be patient, my pup: you shall have it soon enough. You there! Here’s a coin for you. Your task is to seek out Hugo, the Morosini porter.

  For hours now Crivano has recited these instructions in his head, memorizing them like an incantation, like a magic spell—which they might as well be. He dispatches a third boy to Ciotti at Minerva, a fourth to the gatekeeper-nun at Santa Caterina, a fifth to the small casino near Santa Giustina where he spoke drunkenly of Lepanto. He has more ducats in his purse than there are linkboys. He directs another to the apothecary who sold him the henbane, another to the gondolier who last ferried him from Murano, another to the proprietor of the glass shop on the new Rialto bridge. In his mind he has assembled a map of the city: the city not as it is, but as he has encountered it these past few weeks; a map constellated from his movements and memories, congruent with tangible marble and brick, but submerged beneath the visible surfaces. Now each set of directions aims a lowly urchin down these imaginary thoroughfares.

  The most vital errand he delegates to a boy who’s a bit quieter than the rest, who meets his eye coolly, who listens and thinks. He’s neither the youngest nor the oldest among them. He won’t be a linkboy for very long. You, Crivano says, laying the ducat in the boy’s palm, will go to Anzolo at the White Eagle. Do you know the place?

  Soon every mooncurser has a coin. Crivano stretches from his crouch to peek over their heads; the two cloaked sbirri watch from the crowd, twenty paces off. Crivano motions the boys near, then whispers. To all, he entrusts the same message: Look behind the curtain.

  What curtain do you mean, dottore?

  The men whom you seek, Crivano says, will know what curtain. Or they will not. It doesn’t matter.

  Who do we say the message is from?

  Say only what you know: that you were sent by a dottore, with light hair and a forked beard. That will suffice. And be nimble and clever, lads, for sbirri are about who would deter you. All go together now, on my command! Ready?

  A loud handclap sends them charging like unleashed hounds. The sbirri have anticipated Crivano’s stratagem, but they’re at a loss for a response; they make half-hearted grabs for the nearest passing boys, then turn back to Crivano with incensed expressions. Crivano scans the crowd—four more cloaks dispersed at the edges of the campo, some now flying in pursuit of his little messengers—then bolts to the right, around the belltower and behind the apse, doubling back toward Campo San Silvestro. Dottore! a voice calls. He ignores it.

  The sun is down. The first bell rings at the Frari to the west and San Marco to the south; then the sound spreads to San Polo and San Aponal and San Silvestro like ripples over water. Crivano loops back again, without intention or direction. He passes the sbirro with the mutilated face who a moment ago was following him. In a gap between shops he sees one of
his linkboys scurry by; he’s unable to recall where he sent that one. He’s very tired now. He wants to return to the White Eagle, but he can’t. Not yet.

  The crowds thin as the sky grows dark; soon, Crivano fears, he and the sbirri will be the streets’ only occupants. He begins to seek the shortest and narrowest passages, where he can disrupt his pursuers’ view. Once the second bell has rung, he thinks, I’ll go back to the locanda and sleep. Not till then.

  As he’s navigating a constricted bend, looking over his shoulder, a strong arm snakes from a doorway and clamps hold of his elbow. He pulls away, fights to raise his stick, then notes the turban and caftan. Stop, Narkis says. Come this way. Quickly.

  Algae-slick steps fall away to the right. Crivano has passed them six times today, probably. He failed to remark them at all until nearly sundown, and even then he took them for an ancient water-gate which once opened onto a canal long since filled with mud and silt. Now, as he struggles to retain his balance against Narkis’s impatient tug, he sees that it’s the entrance to a sottoportego, leading to a small high-walled corte. At bright noonday this passage would be dim; at dusk it’s midnight-black for most of its length. On the lowest step, some small creature has left a lump of feces, now crowded with glossy black flies; they scatter as Narkis and Crivano rush by, shooting straight up, slowing as they rise, fading in all directions like sparks from a fire.

  Narkis whispers as he hurries Crivano forward, speaking Turkish with his old elegance and felicity. You have been discovered, Tarjuman effendi, he says.

  Crivano’s sputtered response is in the local tongue; his agitated brain won’t find the Turkish words. I know that, damn you, he says. I’ve had sbirri at my heels since the morning. I’ve only just now managed to get word to Obizzo.

  Obizzo?

  The mirrormaker.

  Narkis freezes, as if turned to stone. Then he claps a hand to Crivano’s chest. That business at the church with the linkboys? he says. That is what that was? That is how you sent your message? Are you mad? What if the constables intercept them?