The Mirror Thief(75)
Crivano shifts his weight, watches the crystal lens roam the painted surface. If one is to wield power, he says, then one must control the image of power. Or so a certain clerk of Florence would have us believe.
Contarini chuckles. I tell myself as much, he says. Often I do. Of course, that same clever Florentine also warns us of men who dream about ideal republics that have never existed. These fools—how does he put it?—are so tormented by the notion that how we live is very distant from how we ought to live, that they disregard what is done in favor of what should be done. Thus do they invite ruin upon themselves, their realms, their families. I sometimes suspect that I should count myself among these dreaming fools. But this suspicion always fails to shame me.
The glass glides across the canvas: green clouds, red apples, tranquil brown cows. What became of him? Crivano says.
Of whom?
Of the painter, senator.
Contarini straightens, and his hand falls away, polishing the lens on his sleeve. Against his father’s counsel, he says, Francesco began to associate with a group of learned young nobles. Politically aggressive, impatient with the Pope’s dictates, involved with the search for secret knowledge. These were hardly the same nobles who had made his family wealthy. This conflicted allegiance made Francesco anxious, and his was not a temperament well-suited to anxiety. It seems clear in retrospect that he suffered from a certain infirmity of the mind. According to his poor wife, he became convinced that the sbirri of the Council of Ten were hounding him, and intended to do him harm. He believed that they attacked him with demoniacal magic while he slept, expunging and altering his memories. Or so has his wife testified. To me it seems equally likely that he simply sought release from the world, as some men do, and always have done. In any case, some six months ago he leapt from the highest window of his rented home. The fall did not kill him, but it broke him quite badly, and despite the exertions of our friend Dottore de Nis he remains bedridden today, unable to perform for himself even the most mundane of tasks. In his infinite mercy, God did not permit the natural progression to be upended in this instance: he granted heartbroken old Jacopo eternal rest in February. And any day now, I imagine, Francesco will follow his father to the grave.
Crivano furrows his brow and studies the canvas, as if it might disclose some hint of its maker’s madness, but it remains as it was. I don’t suppose, he says, the painter’s fears could have had any substance?
His fears about the sbirri, you mean? Contarini says with a macabre smile. Or those concerning demonic assaults upon his sleeping mind?
About the sbirri.
The senator arches his eyebrows, shakes his head, looks away. I made inquiries, he says. I suppose as the man’s chief patron I felt responsible to some degree. The wife’s allegations seemed unlikely, but—owing to the peculiar activities of some of Francesco’s young friends—not quite out of the question. The Inquisition claimed to know nothing of him. The Ministry of Night pled ignorance as well.
And what of the Council of Ten?
Contarini claps his hands softly, cupping his palms as if to trap a fly, then flattens them, rubbing them slowly together. From the Ten, he says, I received only the routine obfuscation. They never deny anything, you know. Their potency rests on the common perception that their eyes and ears are everywhere. A denial might suggest that they don’t know what you’re talking about. Thus the truth of the matter must remain sealed in their leonine jaws, just as the secret of Francesco’s spoilt memory can be known only—
Contarini breaks off with a laugh, claps Crivano on the arm. I was about to say that it’s known only to Somnus and his three silent sons, he finishes But you’re on fine terms with dewy-winged Somnus, aren’t you, dottore? You must be, given how swiftly you have reinstated me to his good graces.
This is an obvious ploy to abandon the subject—a clumsy one by the senator’s standards—but Crivano can’t thwart it gracefully. Instead, he forces a courteous chuckle. I’m pleased to hear this, senator, he says. I’m honored to have been of service in this small matter.
Hardly small when you’re the sleepless one, dottore, Contarini says. He gestures toward the door in the corner, the door from which he emerged. Will you join me in my library? he says. It’s in shameful disarray at the moment, but I’ll give you a brief tour. If anything you find there will be of use in your studies, then we shall make arrangements.
You’re far too kind, Senator, Crivano says. I dare not impose—
But the senator is already gone, leaving Crivano little choice but to follow him. As he steps to the library door, the old man’s voice carries from inside. Here’s an odd thing, it says. I know not—perhaps you will—whether this might be some lingering echo of the cowslip wine, or simply the consequence of prior deficiency, but for the past few nights, dottore, my dreams have been all but overwhelming in their intensity.
For an instant Crivano stands paralyzed at the library’s threshold, stunned at the plentitude before him, before he manages to venture inside. Rather larger than the anteroom he just quit, this chamber is so loaded with treasure as to seem smaller, little more than a closet. Its walls appear at first to be constructed entirely from paper and leather: new octavos, old quartos, ancient codices, some piled flat, some with their banded edges showing, others spine-out in the modern style, and none of them chained. Only after a hard blinking glance do slivers of oak begin to materialize: a right-angled grid of shelves and cubbyholes that undergirds everything, keeping it in place. What meager territory remains unclaimed by bookcases is given over to diagrams, schematics, the sketches of engineers and architects, displayed in simple wooden frames. Crivano’s vision flits between them—real and imagined structures exploded by eye and pencil onto featureless landscapes of white—until it locates a familiar image: the clean symmetrical fa?ade of the new Church of the Redeemer.