The Mirror Thief(69)
For a long moment she doesn’t look up. It feels strange to walk, she says.
There’s physic for it. You should seek it out before you ask a barber to cut.
Her eyes are angry, but the anger doesn’t seem to be for him. And what does a girl pay for that? she asks.
Crivano gives her a warm smile, and opens his palms.
She stares at him. Then her face sags, and she looks back to her foot. The hour grows late, dottore, she says. You name a price for your physic, and I’ll name a price for my cunt. And then perhaps we’ll make a bargain.
Crivano’s mouth drops open. He closes it, and grinds his teeth. The girl brings her fingers to her lips, spits on them, and wipes them across the wart. It clarifies against the damp whorls of her calloused skin.
So, wench, Crivano says, his voice ugly in his own ears, does the entire city take to whoring for the Sensa? Or do all you slatterns come here from abroad? Good christ, every brothel from here to Munich must be shuttered.
I guess someone can answer that for you, dottore, she says. But not I. Ask a Bavarian pimp if you meet one. Will you lend an arm?
She’s looking up again. For an instant he’s inclined to strike her, to break her lean mannish jaw with the knob of his stick. But he gives her his arm, and she pulls her boot on. Thanks, she says. And a good day to you.
He stands by the wall to watch her limp away, her kerchiefed head bobbing among the crowds bound for the Mercerie. He half-expects to see her stop—to pitch a lewd proposition to a pack of merchants or pilgrims or sailors, to detour with one or several of them to a sidestreet or sottoportego or darkened doorway, to offer up her lean flesh for their abuse—but the girl moves ahead steadily until she’s gone from sight.
And then, at the White Eagle, on his way upstairs to his room and his books, he remembers a long-ago morning out riding with his brothers south of Nicosia on the Larnaca Road. Their party came upon a procession of Cypriot girls with an ass-drawn cart, bringing baled henna to market. The girls were all bent double under their heavy packs, even the youngest; all stared fiercely at the pitted surface of the old Roman road. Maffeo spat at them as they passed, and Dolfin stood in his saddle to display his cock. Those girls are probably all dead now, Crivano figures: killed during the invasion by the troops of Lala Mustafa. Or they’re in harems, or they’re rearing Turkish bastards, or they’re living now just as they were living then. The distant cedars of the Tro?dos formed a green shadow in the west that morning; he recalls watching them with unblinking attention after he turned his head away.
The girls’ strong arms were dyed brown to the elbows, their legs dyed brown to the knees. Every nail on every finger was a ghostly pink oval, edged by a sepia ring, and that, Crivano thinks, must be why the insolent slut seemed so familiar.
28
The late morning arrives harsh and white: a veil of smoke traps light in the thick air above the tiled rooftops, and the Grand Canal is a listless river of quicksilver. The sun presses gently on Crivano’s black robes, warming him from the core, and he feels himself grow weightless, on the verge of being borne aloft, like a Chinese sky-lantern. The thousandth year of the Hijra is only months away, and it’s suddenly easy to imagine the Prophet stirring in his tomb. This is a day to herald the end of the world.
He shades his eyes to find an idle traghetto. A grizzled boatman beckons with a brusque wave, and Crivano steps aboard his tidy black-hulled sandolo. The Contarini house, he says. In San Samuele.
In reply he gets only a flash of raised fingers and a bestial bleat: the boatman has no tongue. Crivano counts him out a palmful of gazettes, then sits in the shade of the canopy. Looking over his shoulder as the long oar chews the water, he can make out the hazy shape of the new bridge, its single span arching like the brow of a submerged leviathan eye. It slips from sight as the sandolo’s bow swings west.
The broad highway of the canal is paved with broken bits of sun, reflections that outshine the sky itself. The windowsills and balustrades that edge the water are draped with bright patterned carpets from Cairo and Herat and Kashan, but the rows of windows behind them are impenetrable voids. The shouts of the Riva del Vin are fading, and from time to time Crivano can hear the laughter and soft voices of unseen daughters of the Republic, bleaching their frizzed coiffures on hidden terraces somewhere high above.
Heavy-lidded from the rolling boat, he keeps himself awake by pondering what blasphemy a gondolier might pronounce, or to whom he might pronounce it, that would oblige him to forfeit his tongue. In this city blasphemy is the gondolier’s cant and his lingua franca, as indispensable as his oar; it seems more likely that this rough fellow is a slanderer, or was. This comforts Crivano: the reminder that denunciation can also impose a cost on its utterer. He smiles to himself, tilts his face to catch the sun.
He’s not certain Narkis would endorse his expenditure of the better part of a day in Senator Contarini’s court—this excursion will do nothing to advance their plot—but Crivano feels justified nonetheless in making the visit. The Senator is his sole legitimate connection here, the authority that has established him as a person of substance and introduced him to the circles in which Narkis requires him to move; the association must therefore be cultivated. If Crivano displays something beyond dutiful resignation at the prospect of acquainting himself over extravagant meals with the most distinguished minds in Christendom, well, Narkis can hardly object, can he? Besides, how otherwise might Crivano spend the afternoon? Sequestered in his rented room, awaiting a response from Narkis that might not materialize for weeks?