The Mirror Thief(155)
The gondoliers moor their boat in a vacant berth next to another batela, this one riding quite low, filled to the gunwales with split alder. The fragrant fresh-cut wood is a garish orange in the sun. As the boatmen lash their lines to a palina and ready an oar to lift the strongbox, Crivano springs to the quay and enters a door bearing the device of the siren—a stained-glass chimera with shapely bare breasts and the claws of a raptor—hung in a frame of dark wood. The shop’s shelves are crowded with the output of the attached factory: great crystal pitchers in the shapes of sailing ships, wide shallow goblets for red wine, carafes so thin and so clear as to be visible only by their filigree, interspersed with urns and plates and dishes of calcedonio glass in odd and startling hues. The shop-girl behind the counter listens meekly to a plump woman in an elegant saffron zimarra; as Crivano enters, they both turn and curtsy. The older woman’s eyes flash when she notes his black physician’s robes; her mouth tightens. Serena’s wife. She knows who he is, why he’s here. Good day, Crivano says. I’m looking for Maestro Serena.
As he speaks, the thin goblets along the walls shiver with the sound of his voice; their high chime gilds its roughness, rings into the stillness that follows. The woman’s reply is a low murmur to which the glass does not react. Yes, dottore, she says. You will find four men here who answer to that name.
Crivano smiles. This is good: the woman knows who he’s looking for, but she’s clever enough not to give that fact away. She’ll be no trouble in the escape: an asset, even. Narkis has nothing to fear. My business is with Boetio Serena, Crivano says. I have payment for him, and I would like to collect an item that he has crafted for me.
Mona Serena turns to the girl. Show the dottore to the workroom, she says.
The girl leads him through a side door, down a hallway, and then asks him to wait. She tugs open a thick portal banded with iron—heat billows through the gap, along with the smell of scorched air—and vanishes to the other side. In a moment she returns with young Alexandro in tow, the boy whom Crivano met at the Salamander. Ash dusts Alexandro’s face and hair, paints the edge of his jaw where sweat has smeared it. He wipes his hands on a linen rag with the air of a man eager to get back to his business. Dottore Crivano, he says with a bow. Your visit honors us.
Crivano returns the greeting. Young maestro, he says, I need to have a word with your father.
He’s mixing the batch now, but he’ll be done soon. I can show you to our parlor if you’d like to wait there. Or may I address your concern?
The look on the boy’s face makes it evident that his question is no question: his purview extends to all that occurs here. Crivano assesses his cool eyes and easy bearing—so like the Lark’s—and realizes that this is why Serena chose to join Crivano’s conspiracy, to remove his family from Murano. The glassmaker, he recalls, has two elder brothers; those brothers have many sons of their own. Alexandro practices his family trade not only as if he’s studied it diligently, which no doubt he has, but as if he has an inborn genius for it. Yet he will not run this shop in his lifetime.
On the pavement outside, Crivano says, are two gondoliers. You will find them in song, I imagine, asway with drink, and bearing between them a strongbox heavy with coin. This is payment for a piece your shop has made. Collect it from them with my thanks—but do not trouble yourself to fetch the item I’ve purchased. I’ll wait for your father. I have an unrelated matter to discuss with him.
As you wish, dottore. I’ll show you to the parlor.
Is there a chance, Crivano says, that I might linger in your workroom instead? I’m curious to witness the exercise of your craft. Or would my presence compromise confidential procedures?
Alexandro considers this, then smiles. It would, he says, if you are able to scry the insides of our skulls, to see the secrets hidden there. Otherwise there is no danger. I’ll grant you access, but keep well clear of the furnaces and the hot glass. Unless you’re prepared to spend your physic on yourself, dottore.
A nervous grin: for an instant, the boy seems his true age. But this passes, and he leads Crivano through the heavy door.
Crivano wonders whether he shouldn’t have waited in the parlor after all: the air stings his eyes and nose, all but cancels the aroma of his sudarium. The space before him swarms with frenzied scrambling men, silhouetted by the hard coppery light cast by two furnaces that blaze at the workroom’s far end like the infernal tombs of arch-heretics. Alexandro aims him toward a stack of crates in the corner, directs him to take a seat. My father will be with you shortly, he says.
Serena himself works nearby, ladling water into a tub of white batter as a laborer stirs it. Behind them another workman shapes paste from a second tub into small white cakes, sets these cakes to dry on a rack near the smaller furnace. Now Serena laughs; he musses the stirrer’s filthy hair and crosses the factory floor, past rag-draped wooden trays where fused lumps of frit are cooling, to meet the sweat-drenched drudge who breaks the snowy frit with an iron maul. Serena stops him for a moment, bends to pick up a shard, studies it, drops it again. Then he moves to the larger furnace, checking the work of the man who loads the broken frit into crucibles, the man who stirs and skims the molten glass, the man who pours the melt into steaming pans of clean water. Here again Serena stoops, fishes a blob of cool glass from a pan, and holds it to the light that pours through the furnace’s glory-holes.
Crivano makes a quick count of the laborers and arrives at ten: young men, a few boys, mixing the batch, working the glass and the frit, feeding the furnaces, splitting wood. And these are only preparatory gestures: no one has yet begun to work the glass into finished shapes. This task, he guesses, will fall to Serena’s older brothers and their favored sons; in Constantinople it will be Obizzo’s charge. But who will keep the furnaces burning steadily, and how will he know what temperature is right? Who will choose the wood to fire them, the stones to build them, the clay to seal them? The man who skims the crucibles in the long furnace is using a metal scoop with a long handle; Crivano has never seen the likes of it for sale in any tinsmith’s shop. Will such tools have to be made? Who will know how to make them? Has the haseki sultan any notion of what will be required for production to begin?