The Mirror Thief(61)
Verzelin gasps, stops in his tracks. Even in his blighted state he recognizes Obizzo at once. You, he says.
Crivano lifts his walkingstick crosswise in both hands and drives it against the base of Verzelin’s skull. Verzelin’s head pops forward, he staggers, and Crivano slips the stick under his chin, laying it across his neck just above the thyroid cartilage. Then he tucks the right end of the stick behind his own head, levers it back with his left arm, and crushes Verzelin’s larynx.
Verzelin struggles, clawing the air, and Crivano catches his right wrist with his free hand to wrench it immobile. Obizzo has Verzelin’s legs; he twists them, grimacing fiercely, as if Verzelin is a forked green sapling he’s trying to snap in two. Held off the ground, Verzelin writhes, grasping at nothing with his unbound left arm. There’s a dull pop—a femoral head dislocating from an acetabulum—and Verzelin’s body goes heavy and slack.
Like Antaeus, Crivano thinks. He holds on awhile longer, certain that the stick is tight across the carotid artery. Many years have passed since he last did this. He thinks about those other men—the touch and the smell of them, the sound of their interrupted breath—as he waits for Verzelin to die.
Come on, come on, damn it! Obizzo whispers. His hat has fallen; he retrieves it, puts it on backward, turns it around, watching the lights in the nearby buildings with stray-dog eyes. Every soul in Murano would know him at a glance.
All right, Crivano says. Take his legs.
They put Verzelin’s body in the bottom of the hull and hide it with sackcloth. Crivano wraps the cord around the torso—both legs, both shoulders, a double-loop at the waist—and ties it with a surgeon’s knot.
Obizzo is in the stern, his long oar at the ready. That’s enough, dottore, he says. Get out and cast me off.
Crivano springs to the quay and plucks at the dockline. Be certain to put him in the water at San Nicolò, he says. Sink him in the channel. If the cord breaks, he should float out to sea.
When will I hear from you?
Crivano loops the line and drops it into the sandolo’s bow. I’ll find you in the Rialto, he says.
When?
Crivano doesn’t answer. He watches Obizzo bring the small boat about. The sleeves of Obizzo’s coat slide back when he lifts his oar, baring his thick forearms, and Crivano wonders what wild canards he tells his passengers to explain the burns that mottle his furnace-roasted skin. After a few long strokes and an angry backward glare, Obizzo fades into the dark.
The insipid honking of geese comes from somewhere overhead. Crivano looks for the pale undersides of wings, but finds none. When the sky grows quiet again, he pulls the white linen from the holly-oak branch, wipes Verzelin’s spittle from his gown and stick, and throws the damp cloth into the lagoon. Then he rounds the point and returns to the Street of the Glassmakers, following it back across the long bridge, studying the shop windows along the way.
His locanda is on the Ruga San Bernardo: lively by day, quiet at night, with no lock on its outer door and stairs to the lodgers’ rooms directly off the foyer. The widow who runs the place will hear him come in, but she won’t remember the hour. He bolts his door and rests his head against its wood and breathes deeply, conscious of the gallop of his pulse. Then he lights the clay lamp on the little table, hangs his clothes on the pegs beside the bed, and unties his purse.
Two pinches of basil snuff cool his blood, but he’ll stay awake until he returns to the Rialto. He performs a few stretches that he remembers from the palace school at Topkap?, then sits and breaks the blue wax on Serena’s letter to Trist?o. Unfolded, the outer layer of rag paper reveals a second document with an identical seal; Crivano sets this aside. Then he flattens the sheet that enclosed it, holds it over the lamp’s flame, and waits for the hidden writing to appear.
26
A cool wind leavens the fog over the lagoon, and the belltower of San Michele floats into view off the traghetto’s bow. Aside from Crivano, the boat’s only passengers are two tightlipped Tyrolean merchants, bundles clasped between their knees. The gondolier has no songs; he pauses often in his rowing to blow his nose and tighten his greatcoat against the morning chill.
Crivano is suffering a bit of rhinitis himself, along with a tightness in his throat, probably from the sleepless night. His has been a year of many such nights: recent episodes of hard travel, and prior to those long hours spent reading for his disputation, preparing to argue Galen with puffed-up chancellors who knew the Qanun of Ibn Sina only in translation, who’d never read al-Razi at all. Many a dawn found Crivano awake at his cluttered desk, or completing a difficult alchemical process in his tiny laboratory, and he’d rub his eyes and don his cloak and step out to wander the breezy colonnades of Bologna, feeling a melancholy thrill of inviolability, as if by waiting out the night he’d found a way to stop time, to free himself from human concerns. What pleased him most was that no one could see what he’d done, could know that he still had use of the day they’d discarded. And this, of course, echoed other secrets. Eyeing the smooth faces of students half his age as they shook off sleep and hurried to their lectures, Crivano would bite his inner cheek and marvel at his own lethal strangeness: the spider in the flower, the cuckoo in the nest.
A white pulse flashes through the mist off starboard, the wings of an egret, and now Crivano sees scores of them, nested in a bend of willows at the eastern edge of San Cristofero della Pace. The tide is low, coming in: rocks slimed with eelgrass lie exposed in the shallows, and sea-smell fouls the air. Crivano presses a scented cloth to his face and watches a distant pair of fishermen work in their cut-reed weir. When he turns forward again, the square flanking towers of the Arsenal are before him.