The Mirror Thief(168)
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 Trist?o 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 it, 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.