The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  Then it speaks. It calls to Stanley in a low croaking voice. It calls him by his name, his birth name, the name he buried with his dreadful grandfather, the name no living soul but his mute lunatic mother knows.

  Or at least, many years from now, this is how you will remember it.

  Stanley stumbles backward. The little dog stomps gracelessly toward him. The figure on the rail is turning around. If Stanley meets its gaze, everything that he is will disappear. This is what he came here for. This is what the book has tried to tell him. Some dark thing in this world shares his face.

  He reaches for the pistol but the pistol is gone. He dropped it, lost it, never had it, put it in the fieldpack and then forgot. The thing on the rail speaks in its unearthly made-up language; this time, some part of Stanley understands. Now: its face. Its spectacle-lenses are lit by unborrowed interior fire.

  Stanley turns and runs. He runs until his infected leg screams with pain, and he keeps running until the pain goes away. He runs until he can hear nothing but the muffled beat of his own shoes on the pavement. He runs until he can’t see straight. He runs away from the ocean and away from the moon that pulls it, from street to unfamiliar street through the mess of the centerless city, until he has no notion of where he is or how he came to be there, until he’s shaken every memory of the shoreline loose from every route that might lead back to it, until those memories connect to nothing but themselves and the book: an island of narrow tangled passageways, suspended in a void.

  59

  The water must be near. Each time Crivano wakes, he’s aware of gusting wind, small waves striking the base of the wall behind his head. The sound is a pleasant muddle at first—a confusion of bright splashes—but when he concentrates he can hear patterns in it, or almost-patterns: regular pulses, slightly out of phase, recalling elaborate handclap games that idle children play.

  It occurs to Crivano that these unmatched pulses might conceal a larger design—one that, properly discerned, might give clues about the dimensions of the building he’s in. But it is, of course, in his temperament to think such things. He smiles, then winces as pain runs laps between his nose and chin.

  He has no recollection of coming here. Most of last night is spilt quicksilver in his fingers. He can remember wielding arms in fear and anger, maiming and killing many men, fools who took courage from wine and ignorance and superior numbers and who were poorly suited to oppose a real soldier, a janissary, even an aged one like Crivano. His memories of violence are always unsettling, because in them he is never himself. The animal that looks through his eyes and moves his limbs in combat seems not to possess a memory of its own—which, he supposes, is how it comes to kill so well. The thing in him that fights is like the thing in him that fucks, or shits: he shares a body with it, but it is not he. So he tells himself.

  He thinks again of Lepanto, of the Lark. His friend was never so ardent of spirit as in the weeks before the battle, never so full of song. As the fleets massed in the Gulf of Patras, every eye on the Gold and Black Eagle was upon him; every face grinned and every heart gladdened at his valor. But when the fighting began, the Lark would not shoot. He never retreated from his position on the quarterdeck, never wavered when the Turks swarmed: he pushed them back tirelessly until the moment the cannonball took him. But his arquebus went unfired till Crivano—blood-spray hissing on the overheated barrel of his own weapon—took it up. The Lark was a fine soldier, and had he survived to matriculate at Padua he would have made a marvelous physician, far better than the one Crivano has become. But he was no killer.

  Crivano tries to sit up; his sore body refuses. Beneath the sheets his legs twist in inert agony, wrenched by swordsman-footwork, cramped by hours folded in Obizzo’s boat. His arms are no less distressed. He manages to drink a clay cup of water he finds beside the bed, but hasn’t enough strength to lift the pitcher and refill it. He sleeps again.

  At some point a girl enters the room: a Jewess, bearing a steaming bowl of soup and a small chunk of bread. She sets these beside the pitcher, refills the cup, and departs, making no attempt to rouse Crivano. He rises to eat and drink—the soup is rich, mild, thick with goosefat—then lies down again. Nearby, perhaps in the next room, he hears a woman in the throes of carnal ecstasy and wonders if this place might be a bawdyhouse. If so, the whore on the other side of the wall is very enthusiastic, or very convincing.

  When next he wakes, the light through the room’s small window has acquired the first blush of evening. He feels stronger. He sits up, drinks again—the soup-bowl has gone—and throws off the covers to stand on his trembling legs. He’s naked, bandaged extensively; he loosens his dressings to examine the wounds. Scraped right thumb. Short deep cut on his left arm. Crescent gash on his left side, haloed by a yellow-edged bruise. His ears still hiss and whine with the echo of last night’s pistolshot; his right hand and forearm ache from the jolt of the wooden grip. On the table where the soup was, Crivano finds a steel shaving-mirror—similar to his own—which he uses to check his face: blood crusted in his nostrils, a sooty bruise on his chin. The mirror shows his face in patches, blurry around the rim; it feels familiar in his hand. He realizes that it is indeed his own mirror: one his father gave him years ago, shortly before he left Cyprus. The mirror was packed in Crivano’s walnut trunk, the one that vanished from the White Eagle. How has it come to be here?

  He steps to the open window, cautious to avoid unfriendly eyes. As he draws near, a gust further disorders his sleep-mussed hair.

  Below is an unfamiliar junction of broad canals. Across the water, rosy sunlight strikes the unadorned façades of a row of buildings, much taller than anything around them: on one, Crivano counts eight rows of small windows between the roof and the waterline. No quay edges the buildings; no water-gate offers access. The walls look as impermeable as those of a fortress or prison. To the left, Crivano spots the onion-dome that crowns the Madonna dell’Orto belltower. That, along with the cast of the sunlight behind him, locates him north and east of the Cannaregio Canal. He’s looking at the walls of the Ghetto.

  He becomes aware of a sound: a soft chirp emanating from a nearby chamber, sluggish and monotonous, like a locust’s mating-call. He turns toward the room’s exit. A set of clothes—not his own—hangs from pegs by the door: fresh garments of a sort that might befit a prosperous tradesman. The fabric feels rough and heavy against his skin. Crivano dresses slowly, with effort, then steps through the doorway into the corridor beyond.

  He comes to a cluttered kitchen, where a serving-girl hurries to set out a simple meal of bread and cheese and green apples. At the end of the room is a table, Obizzo seated there, crossbow leaned in the corner behind him. The mirrormaker’s big hands are busy at some task, issuing the noise that Crivano has followed here.

  He glances up disinterestedly as Crivano limps into view. Good evening, dottore, he says. I see you’ve chosen to go on living.

  Crivano opens his mouth, then closes it, unwilling to spend vitality on a reply. He crosses the room to the table. The serving-girl ignores him.

  Obizzo has a leather-fletched bolt in his scarred left hand; he scrapes an iron file along its heavy pyramidal tip. Black powder falls with each pass, sprinkling the tabletop, dusting the thick hair on Obizzo’s wrists, sticking to the underside of the file itself, drawn by some weak force hidden in the metal. Crivano leans on a chairback; he’s afraid he’ll be unable to rise again if he sits. Then, after a moment, he sits. Where are we? he says.

  South of Saint Jerome. Outside the New Ghetto. Not far from the Cerberus, the locanda where we’ll meet tomorrow night. Your friend brought us here. You remember?

  My friend?

  Your friend. The physician. The hypocrite Jew.

  Crivano nods. Tristão, he says.

  If he gave his name, Obizzo says, I don’t remember it.

  He stops filing, tests the quarrel’s point with a broad thumb. Then he puts the bolt down and leans forward. Listen, dottore, he says. What about this n
ew plan? I like it, but I don’t trust it. It’s too simple. What do you think?

  Crivano squints. New plan? he says.

  Your friend hasn’t told you, then. He fears the sbirri may have learned of our arrangements. About the trabacolo we’re to meet in the lagoon, I mean. He says that I should row our party—Serena and his family, the young fugitive nun, and you, and him, which is to say your Jew doctor friend—to the trabacolo just as we’ve planned. Only there we’ll play a trick. We’ll pretend a loading and unloading of passengers. All will get off my boat, then come aboard again, in different garb. I’ll row us to Mestre. From there we’ll go overland to Treviso, to Bassano del Grappa, to Trento, and across the mountains into Tyrol.

  As Obizzo is speaking, Crivano looks down at his own raw and bandaged hands on the tabletop. Then he closes his eyes. Recalling Narkis’s tearful face in the darkness off the corte, then imagining that face lifeless, breaking the moon-silvered surface of a canal: a dark oval interrupting the film of light. The last time Crivano sat with Narkis in Constantinople—it was the afternoon before he met Polidoro in the hippodrome, before he delivered the hide of Bragadin to the bailo of the Republic and passed unsuspected into Christendom again—they drank a pot of sweet kahve together at a quiet kıraathane in Eyüp, and Narkis explained the haseki sultan’s plan, and what would be in store for them. Thirteen years of Crivano’s life were contained in that conversation: thirteen years that ended yesterday. When they finished, Narkis upended Crivano’s cup, removed the brass zarf, and lifted it to reveal the pattern left by the dregs. Turning the copper dish with a pale hand, he spoke earnestly of what the leavings portended. Each fleeting moment, Tarjuman effendi, contains every moment. The result of our most mundane act is full of messages that tell us what Fortune wills. Crivano peered at the black-brown circle of sludge—two curved slits in its midst, dark liquid bleeding from its edges, a muddy blot eclipsing the bright metal—and tried not to laugh.

  Well, dottore? Obizzo says. What do you think?

  Crivano opens his eyes, doesn’t look up. It’s a good plan, he says.

  You think so? What if the sbirri are waiting in the lagoon to intercept us? What if informants on the Terrafirma spot us on the road, and send word to the Council of Ten? What then?

  If they intercept us, Crivano says with a sigh, we will kill them, just as we killed them last night. If they find us on the road, we’ll take another road. On the Terrafirma we can hide ourselves. On the sea we cannot.

  Obizzo frowns. He takes up his file again. This is a new song for you, dottore, he says. I hope you’ve learned all the verses.

  They sit wordless for a while, the file buzzing across the bolt’s corners. A pale ghost sweeps through the kitchen: the serving-girl affixing her backspread yellow veil. When it’s pinned, she opens a door and rushes down the steps without a glance. The food she’s prepared sits covered on the counter.

  Curfew, Obizzo says. In the Ghetto by sundown, or she’ll have trouble. She’s bold to be working in a Christian house at all, isn’t she? If that’s what this is.

  Crivano pushes back from the table, sags in his chair. It shifts and groans, but it holds together. Not unlike Crivano himself. Where’s Tristão? he says.

  With a flick of the bolt, the mirrormaker indicates a corridor to his right. In his workshop, he says. I think it’s a workshop. That heavy door at the end of the hall.

  Crivano nods. Then he puts his palms on the chair-seat and forces himself up. His legs are stronger, but still unsteady. His hands no longer return automatically to the shapes of the walkingstick and the rapier-grip; he can almost straighten his fingers.

  The door in the hallway is broad enough to permit the passage of a large handcart. A chaos of sharp smells seeps from behind it, most of them mysterious, some familiar from Bologna and the secret processes Crivano studied there: the sour tang of dissolution and separation, the acrid torment of materials sublimed and calcined, the unsettling sweetness of reductions and coagulates. He lifts his fist—the tendons in his forearm still disordered by the pistolshot—and raps the hard black wood. After a moment, he knocks again. Then he tries the latch.

  The door opens easily, sucked forth by a gust of wind, to reveal an airy room. Windows line two walls, giving a view of the apse of Saint Jerome, the lagoon beyond, the snowcapped ridges of the distant Dolomites, the red sun over the edge of the world. The space before is crowded with apparatus: jars and bottles of colored and crystalline glass, tongs and long spoons, mortars and pestles, complex networks of alembics and cucurbits and retorts, a delicate many-bulbed pelican, low shelves crowded with books and herbs and phials of colored powders, clay crucibles and leather bellows like those in Serena’s factory. In the middle of the room, between a long reverberatory furnace and an iron brazier burning with a smokeless fire, is a cylindrical clay athanor of the traditional type. Behind it, propped on a wooden easel, is the glass-framed talisman that Serena crafted from Verzelin’s mirror. The dark room that the mirror shows moves whenever Crivano moves; after a few steps, his own white hands appear in the glass. Anxious, he looks away.

  Tristão is nowhere to be seen. Crivano stops, calls to him. Tristão? he says.

  From the corner opposite the windows, behind an inlaid-wood screen of which Crivano had taken no notice, a soft commotion arises, followed by Tristão’s voice. Ah! it says. Forgive me my neglectful inattention, Vettor. Even now I emerge to greet you. And let me add that I am greatly relieved to be once more in your waking presence. I have been most concerned. Tell me, how do you feel?

  Crivano is slow to answer, disinclined to converse with one he cannot see. I feel bad, he says. I’m slow and sore. Too old for fighting.

  You battled admirably last night, the screen says. So Perina’s report informs me.

  Perina, Crivano says. How is she? She took a hard blow from a sbirro’s cudgel.

  Bruised. Not badly. She will soon recover. I am tending to her.

  Crivano grunts, nods, looks at the screen. It’s open at the bottom; he can see Tristão’s slippered feet. Tristão, he says, what are you doing?

  Tristão doesn’t answer. After a moment, he steps into view. He’s attired casually in a belted tunic and hose; he looks well-rested, alert. In his outstretched hands he carries a large brass chamberpot, and as he crosses the room, Crivano catches the odor of feces. Oh, Crivano says. I see.

  Perina and I bandaged your injuries, Tristão says. She has, I believe, a genuine gift for the treatment of wounds. If you have been able to review our work, I hope you have found it to be adequate.

  I have, Crivano says. And I have. For that I thank you. I suppose I should thank you, too, for engineering my rescue last night. Before I do so, I should like to determine if it was you who put me in danger in the first place.

  Tristão stops at a high wooden counter, sets the chamberpot down. He stands with his back turned, his eyes on the distant mountains. A difficult question, he says at last. I do not believe that I placed you in danger. Partly Narkis bin Silen did this. Partly you did it yourself. Also, as always, we must blame Fortune. It is true that I might have helped you more, and sooner. I might have informed better, or explained more. But in so doing I greatly would have endangered myself and my own project. Therefore, I did not. It burdens my heart to confess this, but it is indeed so.

  Against the windows, his slender black form is edged by fire. He does not move except to speak. A pair of flies has come upon the chamberpot; they float above it in tight spirals, fighting the changeable breeze.

  Tristão, Crivano says, what in God’s name has transpired?

  Tristão turns. His face appears and disappears in the scarlet sunset. The events of the past week, he says, are perhaps best likened to an obscure codex with a broken spine, the contents of which have been scattered everywhere. All interested parties possess a few pages, but only the book’s author knows the whole. Indeed, even the author himself may have forgotten.

  Who is the author?

  I do n
ot know.

  Crivano frowns, crosses his arms. Pain shoots down the length of his right ulna, and he uncrosses them again. Very well, he says. Tell me this. What is your interest? How did you come by your pages?

  At first Tristão doesn’t answer. He lifts a touchwood from the counter behind him, ignites it in the brazier, and puts it to the wicks of several candles around the room. The high ceiling begins to catch their light. In both Ghettos, he says, I am acquainted with many learned men. Among the so-called German Jews of the New Ghetto, and also in the Old Ghetto, where my own people live. Through these men I have come to correspond with scholars in many cities, Constantinople perhaps foremost among them. Generally our correspondence consists of discussion about our mutual pursuit of secret knowledge, but sometimes we share news, or ask of each other simple favors. This is how I came by my pages.

  Someone in Constantinople told you about me. Someone told you that I’m a spy for the haseki sultan.

  I have learned that you believed yourself to be so, yes.

  And you knew of the plot with the mirrormakers.

  I knew what you knew of it, Tristão says. I also knew that Narkis bin Silen had made other arrangements for their removal. Please understand that this, to me, was only trivia. It remained so until I became aware that your enterprise was ruined. At that time I perceived a means of helping you, and of helping myself also. Only then did I interfere.

  You arranged my meeting with Narkis at Ciotti’s shop. You knew it to be watched by sbirri. You wanted us to be seen by them. To be seen together.

  What you have spoken, Tristão says, is indeed so.

  Why?

  Tristão lights the last of the candles, throws the slender brand into the brazier. Then he gathers handfuls of firewood chips from a bin and drops them in, as well. They flare and blacken on the white-hot coals, and for a moment the round brazier seems to recapitulate the setting sun.