Falcon in the Glass

by Susan Fletcher

  Dark. Renzo breathed in the sweet scent of wood shavings, the sharp tang of turpentine, of paint. Vittorio took the candle from his lantern and lit it on a still-smoldering coal. By the lantern’s flickering glow they made their way among trestles and workbenches, neat stacks of lumber, planed and sanded planks of many sizes, racks of tools, and barrels full of iron nails and wooden pegs. Despite himself Renzo was impressed by the size of the shop, by the fineness and condition of the tools, by the signs of orderly conduct of craft. Signore Averlino didn’t dress richly or hold himself grandly; there was nothing about him to suggest that he was the padrone of such a place. Renzo had pictured a tiny, dark shop, cramped and cluttered, with maybe one other woodworker and a single, clumsy apprentice.

  He drew his fingers across well-oiled, ornately carved panels, each with a winged lion at the center. He peered into crates of wide and narrow bands of iron, iron hasps and hinges, iron locks, iron studs, and pointed iron spikes.

  But where were the doors?

  “I know he’s making doors,” Renzo said, feeling foolish. “I heard him say it. And look at all the hinges, the hasps.”

  “Oh, he’s making doors, all right.” Vittorio set his lantern on a table. “But they’re all in pieces. There’s no way of knowing which parts go with which.”

  Renzo caught sight of something on the table before him. He moved the lantern, set it down beside a stack of paper.

  They were neat sketches, with cross sections indicated, materials specified, and measurements marked. The working drawings. Renzo bent over, examining them. They put him in mind of clockwork, with each part fitting precisely into an adjacent part, and all of it gearing together. There was an elegance to this work that he had not appreciated before.

  He flipped through the stack of drawings, then stopped. And there they were. Exterior doors. Thick wood; carved panels; iron straps and studs; high, barred windows. Two different doors marked prisons. One wide and tall. The other narrow and short.

  Vittorio came up beside him. Together they pored over the drawings. “I don’t see any weakness in the design,” Vittorio said. “I don’t see how they could be jimmied, or the window bars pried loose.”

  Renzo scanned the drawing again. No. Impossible. “Have you seen the bars?” he asked.

  “The window bars?”

  Renzo nodded. “Have you seen them here in the shop?”

  “No. They may not have been made yet. Look, Renzo, I’ve humored you long enough. Let’s go.”

  Humored? Was that how Vittorio saw him? As a child, to be humored?

  Renzo turned his back on Vittorio. He hunted through the workshop again, peering beneath tables and behind shelves, into open barrels and crates. At last he discovered them stacked against the far wall — two sets of heavy iron bars.

  He picked them up, set by set, and laid them on a bench. Each set had a rectangular iron frame around the outside; the bars fit into holes in the frame. One set had bars the width of a grown man’s thumbs; they were as long as the distance from Renzo’s knee to his ankle. These matched the bars in the drawing of the larger door. The other bars were shorter, thicker. Renzo ran his fingers along the smooth surfaces of the bars and felt a little jolt of excitement.

  They were flat black, which wouldn’t be difficult to copy. And the frames for the bars were constructed without nail holes. Which meant that the frames would be set into the door, not nailed to it. Good! Because if someone were to hammer at the frames holding the bars Renzo was imagining, the bars might shatter.

  For they would be made of glass.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “It’s crazy,” Vittorio said.

  “I know.”

  “You could get caught making them.”

  “So I’d break them.”

  “They wouldn’t feel like iron, anyway. Whoever touched them would know.”

  “I can make them feel like iron.”

  “You can’t make them cold like iron.”

  “If the room is cold, the glass will be cold enough. It wouldn’t work in summer, but . . .” Renzo huffed out a breath of frozen air. “See? And it’s not likely to get much warmer for a while.”

  “We’d have to come back here, and by then the iron ones might have been mounted in the doors.”

  “So we could . . . I don’t know . . . pry the doors open and replace the bars?”

  “And then somebody would have to go to the dungeon.”

  Renzo dipped his head in acknowledgment. That was the part he didn’t want to think about. The impossible part.

  “It’s crazy, Renzo!”

  “I know.”

  He picked up the thicker set of bars. His earlier excitement had fled. Some cowardly part of him wished he hadn’t found the bars, because in that case there’d have been nothing he could do.

  But he had found them.

  Surely the Ten would only banish Letta and the other children. But if it was worse than that . . .

  Well. He had to try something.

  If only so he could sleep.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Vittorio studied the sketches while Renzo emptied the leather pouch he had inherited, filled with Papà’s equipment — a sharpened quill, a vial of ink, a rolled-up piece of parchment, and three different kinds of calipers. He measured the lengths and diameters of the bars themselves and the lengths, widths, and depths of the rectangular iron frames that held the bars all together.

  “Look at this bit of cleverness,” Vittorio said, pointing to one of the drawings. “The door comes together like two hands praying, leaving tidy notches between the layers to hold the window bars in place.”

  Renzo looked at him. It seemed that the craftsman in Vittorio was intrigued.

  “But when they nail the halves of the door together,” Renzo said, “isn’t it bound to jar the glass and break it?”

  “It’s all held together with iron straps and studs. Nothing is nailed; it’s done with an auger.”

  Still, Renzo thought, you didn’t need a hammer to crack a set of glass bars.

  He was rolling up the parchment with his measurements when Vittorio laid a hand on his arm.

  “Did you hear that?”

  He shook his head.

  “Outside, by the canal.”

  Vittorio blew out the candle. They stood motionless in the dark. Renzo heard the soft hiss of Vittorio’s breathing. He thought he heard the splash of a wave against the seawall, and a little thumping scrape.

  Vittorio crept toward the door.

  Renzo stuffed Papà’s tools into the bag — all except for the large, straight calipers with the pointed ends. He dropped the coal onto the floor and ground out the last remaining sparks, then put the tin box in the pouch, pulled it shut, and slung the looped pull-string over one shoulder. He felt for the lantern and took it in one hand; he felt for the calipers and gripped them in the other. Slowly he groped his way through the dark to the door, where Vittorio waited.

  “What is it?” Renzo whispered.

  “Shh.” Vittorio unlatched the door and pushed it a little ajar. He was still hesitating when the latch sprang from his grasp, and the door was flung wide.

  A dark, hooded cape. A white full–face mask hiding a face. The man came at Vittorio, pulling him through the doorway, twisting him to one side. A hand — large and twisted — rose above Vittorio, and by the starlight Renzo made out the shimmering outline of . . . What was it? A thin cord of some kind. It dropped over Vittorio’s head and tightened around his neck.

  Vittorio gasped, put his hands up to his throat, tried to pull the cord away. He sputtered, made a terrible gurgling noise.

  The mask had turned away from Renzo, but he could clearly see one of the hands that held the cord. He stabbed it with the pointed tips of the calipers. Again. Again.

  A grunt of pain. Vittorio stumbled backward. A flash of steel; the man lunged at Vittorio. Vittorio ducked, then howled. Renzo rushed at the attacker, dropping the lantern and flailing wildly with the calipers. His t
oes thunked against a paving stone; he toppled forward onto the man. He felt the ends of the calipers gain purchase, felt them pierce through some sinewy barrier. Then they sluiced on in, as if through soft pudding.

  A groan. The man twisted out from beneath him, began to rise. Renzo felt the calipers start to lurch from his grip, but he held them tight, yanked them back.

  They were slick with blood.

  The man tottered to his feet. A clang; something metal hit the pavement. A dagger. The man bent as if straining to retrieve it, but Renzo was quicker; he scrabbled across the pavement and kicked the dagger into the canal.

  The man cursed. He was bleeding. Blood on his hands, blood on his arm. His cloak had pulled away from one shoulder, and blood bloomed in a spreading stain across his shirt. He leaned over, coughed up something dark. He straightened, turned toward Renzo. The mask regarded him, pitiless and blank. Renzo rose to a crouch, his hand clenching the calipers tight.

  The man turned from him and was seized with a spasm of coughing. He spat, and staggered away.

  Renzo watched, transfixed, until the man disappeared into an alley. He let out his breath, loosened his grip on the calipers. He turned to his uncle, still lying on the pavement.

  “Vittorio,” he said, “let’s go.”

  Vittorio moaned.

  “Uncle?” Renzo went to kneel beside him. Blood everywhere. On his face, his throat, his cloak, his hands.

  “I can’t see,” Vittorio said.

  Renzo set down the calipers and pulled Vittorio’s hands away from his face. Blood. So much blood. A wound to the head? Renzo wiped some of it away with a corner of his cloak. Now he could see the cut itself, slashing from Vittorio’s temple and across one eye. Renzo daubed at the blood near the eyes. Then stopped and stared.

  One of Vittorio’s eyes looked up at him. But where the other eye should have been . . . was a mass of bloody pulp.

  30.

  Leaks

  His first mistake, the assassin thought, had been pausing to look at the boy. It wasn’t that he’d broken a rule. The boy was not his intended target, and so the rule he had made for himself — never look quarry in the eye — did not apply.

  Still, he shouldn’t have paused, shouldn’t have looked. The look had penetrated, unexpectedly. It had broken his rhythm. Thrown him off. He’d made a similar mistake with the boy’s father. He hadn’t gone in intending to kill him — not for certain. As it had turned out, that death was not required. Except that the father had fought, fought hard and too well. In the end he’d had to die.

  A waste.

  The assassin hated waste.

  Painfully he leaned forward in bed and wound the end of the bandage about his shoulder. The wound wouldn’t kill him; he knew that now. Earlier he hadn’t been sure. But the bleeding had slowed, and when he spit into the pail, it was pink — no longer the full, rich red of grapes on the vine. Not leaking anymore, inside him. The calipers must have grazed his lung, but they hadn’t pierced it, or at least hadn’t torn it. He would live.

  True, he’d have to rest awhile. But he must strike again, and soon. He couldn’t afford to wait.

  The calipers. That had been his second mistake. He’d had no reason to think the boy might have a weapon. But he should have looked; he should have checked.

  He took a sip of wine from the cup on his night table. It hurt to move his arm. Hurt to swallow. Hurt to breathe. His fingers ached — his warped and untidy fingers. Which used to be so supple. Which didn’t used to cause him any trouble at all.

  Morning light had begun to ooze through his windows, leaking watery shadows onto the wall, striking light on the bent silver cloak pin on the table by the cup.

  No, he thought, his first mistake had come much earlier. He had underestimated them. All his other mistakes —and there had been many — had flowed from that. He ought to have struck right away, on Murano, the moment he’d recognized the defector meeting his nephew at the boat. But he’d been curious; he’d continued to follow. And then, in Venice, he shouldn’t have chosen the cord. It should have been a stiletto to the kidney, or a snap of the neck.

  Had the cord seemed softer somehow? Less painful for the boy to witness?

  He set down the wineglass, then gingerly lay back in bed. Something heavy there, squatting on his chest. He closed his eyes.

  The pain had been astonishing. Bright. So blazingly bright. That, too, had distracted him. It had been long since he’d felt that kind of pain.

  He drifted back to his first time, when he was seventeen, and to another enemy of one sort or another. Had it been a spy? A conspirator? A defector? He couldn’t recall. The man had seen him coming, had stabbed him in the side with a sword. He in return had slit the man’s throat. Then dropped to his knees and heaved into the canal.

  He drifted farther back, to the village where he was born — and to a time when he was not alone. The little brook that gurgled past their cottage. The sweet smell of apple blossoms in spring. The grape vines heavy with fruit. His mother’s voice, and his little sister . . .

  So like the other one, she was. Their faces overlapping . . .

  He had thought he could lock up his sister in a tight little box in memory. Let her out only when he wished. But the boundaries were blurring, had sprung a multitude of leaks; the memories threatened to flood him. It would not be long before he made another mistake, one he could not hide, and then . . .

  Carefully he sat up again. Took another sip of wine. Yes, the pain had ebbed, but he could still feel the weight there on his chest.

  All at once it came to him how he would die — alone. Not now, but sometime in the not-too-distant future. Perhaps in this squalid little room, perhaps in another like it. Or it could happen suddenly. There would be a quick, bright pain, and then . . .

  Nothing. Oblivion.

  Or maybe the fires of hell.

  He wasn’t ready for that. Not yet.

  He would have to fulfill this commission. If he did not, they would seek him out, they would dispatch him.

  Think. He must think. It would not be by strength or skill at arms that he would finish this. It would have to be by guile.

  And after that, if he could manage to disappear completely, he might have a chance at life.

  31.

  To Snuff Out a Life

  Renzo stared, unable to look away. Something heaved in his belly, like a fish flopping, heavy and deep. At first, he’d thought the eye itself was gone, but now he could see that it was still intact but bleeding profusely and oozing a pale, runny goo like raw egg whites.

  A burst of laughter; Renzo ripped his gaze from the eye and looked about. A little way off, a cluster of bobbing lanterns — a group of partygoers threading away from them along the edge of the dark canal. Renzo leaped to his feet. “I’ll get help.”

  “No,” Vittorio said. “Stay. Don’t draw their notice.”

  “But your eye . . .”

  “Sit. Wait.”

  Renzo didn’t want to wait. He wanted to do something, get away from the horrible, ruined eye. Fetch someone else to deal with it. But he moved toward Vittorio and squatted down beside him. He wiped the calipers on his shirt. He put them into the pouch. In a moment the revelers disappeared down an alley.

  “Are they gone?” Vittorio asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  Was he hurt? How could Vittorio think of him, when his eye . . .

  “Are you?” Vittorio repeated.

  “I don’t think so.” Renzo patted himself about his chest and sides. Sticky. His cloak was all-over wet and sticky. He reached underneath and touched his shirt. It felt sticky too.

  Blood.

  But he didn’t hurt enough in any one place to have produced all that blood himself. It must be the blood of the man who had attacked them.

  “You have to bandage my eye. Can you do that?”

  The eye — a churn of gore.

  Vittorio didn’t wait for an answer but, groaning, rolle
d to a sitting position. “Tear a strip from the bottom of your shirt.”

  Renzo did. He wrapped the cloth twice about Vittorio’s head, covering the bad eye and leaving the good one exposed. He tied the ends of the cloth together. It was easier to look at Vittorio now.

  “Help me into the boat.”

  Renzo took his arm and tried to lift him to his feet, but Vittorio was too heavy; he cried out in pain. “It’s my ankle,” he said. “I’ll have to crawl.”

  In the distance Renzo heard more voices. Coming this way? But the boat wasn’t far, no more than five or six steps. Still, it took Vittorio forever, pushing a knee up under himself, scooting forward, pushing and scooting, pushing and scooting. Renzo held the boat steady as Vittorio sat at the edge of the canal and toppled into the bottom of the boat with a thud and an echoing splash. Renzo started to get into the boat, but Vittorio rasped, “The lock.”

  “What?”

  “Replace the padlock and snap it shut. I heard it fall.”

  But voices swelled, and a spray of lanterns appeared around a corner. A group of well-dressed young men and women, coming in their direction.

  “Uncle, I think we should go now.”

  “Fasten it,” Vittorio said. “Hurry.”

  Renzo bolted across the blood-slick pavement to the carpentry shop door. The hasp — empty. He dropped to his hands and knees and felt along the threshold, along the pavement, along the floor inside. His fingers flicked something hard; it skittered away from him. He groped for it; his fingers closed around cold iron. The padlock. Still open. He stood, shut the door, and threaded the shackle through the door’s hasp. He snapped the lock shut.

  The revelers were nearly upon him. Renzo scrambled back across the path, heading for the boat. One foot kicked something — Vittorio’s lantern. It clattered away on the pavement. Renzo slipped, went crashing down, knocking a knee so hard against a paving stone that for a moment he couldn’t breathe for the pain.

  Don’t cry, he told himself. Just don’t cry.