The Mirror Thief(62)
The traghetto puts out its fares. The Tyroleans hurry off to the south, shouldering identical burdens with identical hunches. Crivano stands aside to watch them go as the sniffling gondolier takes on more passengers. Behind him the mist has lifted, and a few Alpine snowcaps hang above the horizon, like chips in an old fresco.
The smell of boiling pitch from the Arsenal has scoured away the tideland miasma, and Crivano tucks his sudarium back into his doublet. Columns of black and white smoke rise in ghostly parallel to the new belltower at San Francesco della Vigna, a near twin of the one in the Piazza: leaner, nearly as tall, its steep pyramidal crown already crazed by lightning-strikes. Crivano shades his eyes and notes that the side of the belfry overlooking the Arsenal has been bricked up. To spoil the vantage of spies, he imagines. Crivano and his fellows are hardly the only foreign agents intriguing against the Council of Ten.
As he starts his long trek back to the Rialto, he tries to walk slowly—to be calm and alert, to abandon himself to the currents of the streets—but his head and neck ache, faces turn monstrous in his sight, and he finds himself rushing, heedless of what he passes. As he’s crossing the Calle Zon bridge a sluggish exhalation of bubbles breaks the canal’s surface, and he stops, overcome by nausea, to lean against the stone balustrade. Black silt rises from the bottom, corrupting the emerald water, and Crivano imagines Verzelin somewhere in the lagoon, tethered to his stone block. At peace at last. The only physic for him.
He claps the sudarium to his face, breathes through it, and the spearmint helps to focus his thoughts. He has failed to anticipate how exhausting this would be: the need to keep a scrupulous interior tally of crimes committed, of lies told. The mildest contradiction or the most innocuous statement of fact might suffice to doom him if spoken within range of the wrong ear.
Still worse: in his constant braiding of the strands of his conspiracy, Crivano finds himself inclined toward stasis, estranged from the objective that actually brought him here. When it came, the behest of the haseki sultan seemed straightforward enough: locate craftsmen adept at fashioning the flawless mirrors for which every civilized land celebrates the isle of Murano, and return with those craftsmen to the Ottoman court, so that that the industry might become established there. But Crivano soon learned—to his dismay, if not his surprise—that the fabrication of mirrors is a complex undertaking, one that requires the labor of at least two specialists: a glassmaker conversant with formulae and techniques to yield a crystalline substance of near-perfect transparency, along with a silverer able to shape that material into flat sheets backed with a reflective alloy. With Muranese mirrors increasingly craved in every European court, those who possess such skills might reasonably expect incomes to shame the most prosperous pasha. Convincing such men to quit the island of their birth—an island upon which watercraft converge daily from every compass-point, delivering a particular inventory of raw materials to the factories wherein these men and their fathers and the fathers of their fathers learned and refined their methods—persuading such men to forego such advantages in order to set up operations ex nihilo in a Muhammadan land where their language and customs will be utterly alien: this seemed to Crivano to present a grave rhetorical challenge.
And so Crivano lied. Based on his accrued understanding of the industry, he guessed that Amsterdam—another city of canals, one with its own nascent glassworks—might present itself to the Muranese as a tempting destination. Whatever his reasons, the glassmaker Serena concurred readily enough. Verzelin did as well—or so it seemed, until Crivano was forced to conclude that the silverer’s own reasoning was not so much occluded as lost, annihilated by whatever affliction had come to sap his brain. Disaster! The fool was too erratic to be of use in the haseki sultan’s project, yet still coherent enough that any ravings about an imminent flight to the north might not have been dismissed by the authorities. In the end, there was only one option. The man murdered himself.
This Obizzo, on the other hand, is perfect. For the hundredth time Crivano wonders how Narkis was able to find him: an expert silverer, a reasonable man, a fugitive with eighty ducats on his head. Now, after last night, his fortunes are wedded irrevocably to Crivano’s own. Of course, like all glassmakers, his disposition is somewhat choleric—Crivano dreads the task of pacifying him when he crosses the gangway and finds himself trapped in a city very different from the Amsterdam he has been expecting—but this is a trifle. The man is a godsend. Whose god sent him, of course, remains unresolved.
Laughter and a filthy song carry down the canal. Crivano turns to see a group of young nobles—drunk, garbed as Chinamen, joined by a pair of masked whores—cross the bridge to the old Zon house and pound on its heavy wooden door. The men must have been set upon lately by a mattacino: he can smell musk even over his spearmint oil. One of the false Chinamen gapes at him with kohl-slanted eyes. Crivano turns, crossing the bridge back the way he came.
In the Campo Santa Giustina he stops to seek out a monument to the Battle of Lepanto, certain he’ll find one, but there’s nothing. The church itself is cracked and sagging: he peeks through the entrance to see a pair of rock-doves waddling across the narthex, pale light dappling the flagstone floor from holes in the roof. He forces a sour smile, turns south again. How quickly times change. How sweet to forget.
Tomorrow is the last night of the fair. Two weeks ago, on Ascension Day, Crivano was the guest of honor on the Contarini family galley: he stood on the garlanded quarterdeck next to Giacomo Contarini himself and lent the old man a steady shoulder as they approached the mouth of the lagoon. He watched Doge Cicogna teeter aboard his Bucintoro, heard his clear voice carry across the waves—we espouse thee, O sea, as a sign of true and perpetual dominion—even as his councilors scrambled to keep him upright long enough to toss the ring over the side. Later that afternoon, on the Lido, Crivano took communion not far from the firing range where he and the Lark proved themselves as bowmen twenty-two years before. Then he sat through an interminable banquet in order to receive a fleeting audience with Cicogna himself. The Republic thanks you, my son, for your heroic efforts in her service. The shrunken old doge clearly had no notion of who Crivano was, or of what his heroism consisted; he dozed off even as the words left his tongue, and Crivano was whisked away as fireworks bloomed over the distant roofs of the city. Probably just as well.