The Mirror Thief(199)

Claudio. Two hundred eighty-seven. To be fragrant. Or seventeen. Fortunate. To dream. Or eight. To breathe after. To long for.

You’ve seen him every now and then: small speaking parts in movies and TV shows, a face in the corner of a soap-opera magazine. A different name, of course, which makes it hard to be sure. But the sightings have been steady through the years, so you figure he’s doing all right. He could be famous, even; you wouldn’t necessarily know. You hope he’s happy, wherever he is. You hope he got those long brown fingers around some of what he wanted.

It’s all good and scattered now: every piece of those days. If the whole scene had passed out in the sand, been carried off by the tide, you wouldn’t have been surprised. But that’s not what happened: it blew up instead. Larry Lipton’s youth book came out in ’59, and against all expectations it was a big hit. Every poet and painter from Santa Monica to the Marina del Rey became famous for a while, mostly as somebody else’s punchline, and right away the fame started killing them: dope, disease, murder, suicide. Charlie drowned himself in ’67; cancer took Stuart in ’74. Alex published his own book in ’61 and never wrote another. Somehow he kept his junk habit going for another twenty-odd years. His real life’s work.

Welles checked out in ’63, the same week as Jack Kennedy. You didn’t hear about it till months later, passing through L.A. after wearing out your welcome in Palm Springs. You sent Synn?ve flowers anyway; Walter helped you figure out how to do it. She sent a nice card back, brief and vague, snapshots from the funeral enclosed. No familiar faces. The girl nowhere to be seen.

Welles’s death sent you back to the book, which for a few years you’d put aside. You half-expected the spell to be broken, but it wasn’t—though the book had changed, shifted along invisible faultlines. Or maybe you’d grown into it, in ways he’d surely predicted. You’re a gambler! You live by skill and fortune. By then it was true. Even today the old bastard finds ways to poke at you, to jerk your strings. He must’ve known you’d find your way here eventually. The city’s been waiting—a trap he baited—and you’ve waltzed right into it.

Just how much of your life has he scripted? That scene yesterday between the columns was pure Welles: probably playing in his head the first night you met him. You were running a card game on the boardwalk. I won a dollar from you. Still, kneeling there with the sea at your back, you never felt like a sucker or a patsy—and it was hard not to take satisfaction from it: moving the cards with your old fleet hands, working the switch, there at the very center of the web you’ve been walking.

Maybe that’s why you weren’t too surprised when you looked up to find Damon watching you: leaning against the marble railing of the loggetta, eating gelato with a plastic spoon, appearing and disappearing in a line of tourists queued behind an upraised umbrella. He wore a new linen suit, a new wool overcoat, and a deeply pissed-off expression: the ensemble of a traveler who’s left someplace in a hurry, who had time to pack nothing but cash. A battered leather shoulderbag hung at his side, flap unbuckled, within easy reach of his right hand. You grinned at him, but you’re not sure he saw it. You have no idea, really, what other people can see.

For another ten minutes or so you kept the cards going while Damon finished his ice cream, started drifting closer. Just as you began to think about how best to get away, a cop showed up—lithe, poised, runway-model handsome, state-funeral tidy—and answered the question for you, helping you stand, gently shooing you away. Oh, thank you, signore, you said, plenty loud enough for Damon to hear. I’m sorry, but I’m not feeling well. And this city is so confusing! I’m staying at the Aquila Bianca in San Polo. Can you tell me how to get there?

So now you wait. Damon’s probably bivouacked this very minute at the bacaro across the street, flipping through a magazine, wondering when you’ll come down, or when he should go up. Odds are the bacaro closes for a couple of hours after lunch; most of them do, it seems. It’s getting late. You have a clear picture of what comes next: Damon will knock back the last of his wine as the proprietor motions to the exit, he’ll rub his sleepless eyes and adjust his coat as the door locks behind him, and then, with a few easy steps, he’ll cross the gray flagstone street.

You won’t be making it back to the Biblioteca Marciana. Probably just as well. You’ve seen what you came to see, well past the point of diminishing returns. The library girls brought them to you on platters, helped you tug on the white gloves that protect their frail pages: the collected correspondence of Suor Giustina Glissenti. You understood hardly any of it, but you knew the one word you were looking for, and you were certain your eyes wouldn’t miss it.

It wasn’t there. You flipped through again to be sure: backward this time, slower, your nose an inch off the paper. The result was the same: no mention anywhere of anyone named Crivano. Why would Welles lie? Did he lie? Even at this dead end you turned up clues, or what might be clues. The nun’s letters stopped after 1592, the same year Crivano supposedly fled the city. Suor Giustina’s name doesn’t appear in her convent’s records after that date—but it isn’t listed before that date, either, although you did find a record of another Glissenti girl: a cousin, maybe. To make matters worse, some letters that were supposed to be in the box were missing. Why? How long have they been gone?

It felt something like cardcounting: filling in gaps based on what little you can see. Walter and Donald could probably figure it out in a heartbeat—but they’re not around, and your head doesn’t work like that: if you can’t see it, then you’re at a loss. But you can almost always see it. Almost always.