Falcon in the Glass
Page 18
Renzo nodded. But this was likely what Vittorio had told himself when he’d put his family at risk by leaving Murano.
“And what about Signore Averlino?” Renzo asked. “If it’s discovered that the dungeon bars are made of glass, suspicion will land on him.”
“I’ll write out a confession for the authorities and leave it with you. I’ll say I did it all — that Signore Averlino had nothing to do with it, and neither did you, or any other glassworker. I’ll say that if the Ten want evidence of Signore Averlino’s innocence, they should look for the iron bars in the carpentry shop. I’ll tell them where.”
“But that will make him look guilty!”
“Ah, but that’s where you’re mistaken. A guilty man would have gotten rid of the evidence long before. Only an innocent man would still have those bars in his workshop.”
His reasoning seemed risky, thin. God willing, this will all work out. They’d had no right to put Signore Averlino at risk. And yet . . .
Night after night over the past week, Renzo had dreamed of Letta’s kestrel, imprisoned in a block of solid glass but still alive, its heart trembling wildly in its breast. Sometimes the bird blurred and changed until it was Letta inside the block, or only his own heart beating. Each time, he took up a hammer and tried to break the glass, but it refused to shatter. Tiny chips and splinters flew off it. Spiderweb-like cracks penetrated deep. But the glass was strong, and he didn’t know if he could break through in time.
Now he heard voices, outside. Pia, chattering out a question. Mama’s calm reply.
Vittorio leaned forward, across the table. “Renzo,” he said, his voice soft and urgent. “I hear things, at night.”
“Hear things?”
“It may be nothing, but . . . I think it’s time for me to leave.”
“You mean leave our house?”
“Yes, that too. I’ll leave tonight. Don’t worry. I’m strong enough. I know places where I can hide. And after we rescue the children, I’ll leave the republic altogether.”
“But where will you go? Back where you were before?”
Vittorio shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll find a new place, one more hospitable to strangers. But that ship — the one the children are taking — it could carry me well away from the lagoon. Make a tenth falcon, Renzo. That one will be for me.”
38.
I Miss My Father
Twelve days.
Renzo worried that the days wouldn’t pass quickly enough, that the mob would overpower the guards, that the glass bars would be discovered. He worried that the days would pass too quickly, that he wouldn’t be able to finish the extra birds, that Vittorio wouldn’t have time to conclude his preparations.
Sometimes he found himself imagining Letta, Vittorio, and the children on the ship, sailing away out of the lagoon, into the Adriatic Sea. Where would they go?
Once, many years before, Papà had spread out a great map on the kitchen table. He had drawn a finger across the map, showing Renzo all the places where the glass they made was sent. East, to Istanbul. West, around the boot of Italy and thence to Spain. Through the Strait of Gibraltar, then north to Portugal, France, and the British Isles.
Where would they disembark?
Where would they make a life?
Renzo didn’t know. It was best, Vittorio had told him, that he not know.
In the meantime there were the ten extra birds to make. The new fire tender could bring him glass for the wings. The rest Renzo could manage on his own.
One night several days later, when the fire tender admitted him to the glassworks, he saw that someone was there at the furnace before him. Renzo crept forward in the dark and watched.
It was Sergio.
That afternoon there had been another ugly scene between Sergio and the padrone. Sergio had shown his father a falcon he had made. The padrone had ridiculed his work — loudly, so that everyone heard.
Though Sergio had feigned indifference, he had not been able to hide his bitterness and humiliation.
Now Renzo wondered: Would it be worse to have your father right there before you and still not feel his loving care?
But no. What could be worse than losing your father altogether? At least Sergio could hope.
Renzo watched as Sergio lifted the gather, as he rolled it on the malmoro, as he put his lips to the blowpipe.
Would this be another bird?
Yes. But when Sergio began to shape the beak, Renzo could see that he had it all wrong.
Sergio cursed. He struck the pontello against the edge of the broken-glass pail. The bird cracked off and landed with a crash.
Renzo approached the furnace. Sergio glanced his way. “What are you doing here?”
Renzo shrugged. “You’re not the only one who needs to practice.” He picked up a blowpipe and gathered a molten blob of glass from the crucible. He half-expected Sergio to object, but he did not. For a while they worked side by side in the heat of the furnace, with neither words nor looks of acknowledgment, like two cats sharing a patch of sun.
When it came time to make the beak, Renzo reached for the borsella. He began to murmur, as if to himself, not looking at Sergio: “Starting now, lifting up and up like so. Turning here, like so.” Sergio turned to watch, letting his own work grow cold. When it was time for Renzo to make a wing, Sergio cracked his own piece into the broken-glass pail and fetched molten glass for Renzo’s bird. He watched. At last Renzo cracked his bird off the blowpipe and bore it to the annealing oven. He returned to the furnace. Gathered more glass.
Sergio regarded him, said nothing. Renzo offered him the blowpipe with the newly gathered glass. Sergio hesitated, then took it and began to work. Renzo was silent until it came time for Sergio to make the beak, then, “Lift it now,” he said. “Turn it now. A little farther. Yes, there, there, there — just there.”
When the bird was done, they looked at it together. It was not perfect, but it was respectable. The beak looked nearly right, and the angle of the wings was much improved. Sergio cracked the bird off the blowpipe and bore it to the annealing oven.
Renzo gathered more glass from the crucible. Sergio watched him work. When it was time, he brought glass for the wings. Neither spoke.
But when the bird was nearly finished, Sergio said, “Why are you doing this? Why are you showing me how?”
Renzo shrugged. What could he say? Because I’m stealing these birds from your father to give to the captain? Because I want to pay for them some way? Because I may soon find myself in deep disgrace, and I want someone to remember something good of me?
Renzo cracked his bird off the blowpipe. Picked it up with the lifting irons. “I miss my father,” he said. “I miss his teachings too.”
◆ ◆ ◆
Signore Averlino had not come to mass the Sunday after he’d found Renzo in his workshop, but the following Sunday, there he was. He greeted Renzo without a hint that he had found him lurking there, crouching waist deep in water, in the middle of the night. He treated Renzo as he ever had, with kindness and respect.
But this time Renzo was different. He looked Signore Averlino in the eye; he smiled at him; he yielded his seat next to Mama without her having to motion him aside.
After mass Renzo watched Signore Averlino watching Mama. Renzo marked how he stood patiently aside as Mama greeted her friends, how he politely greeted them and listened to what they had to say. About the price of sugar and wheat; about a feud between two neighbors; about a graveyard rumored to have been robbed. About the death that had visited one of the parish households, and the birth that had blessed another. Papà, Renzo recalled, used to be at the center of every conversation — dispensing wisdom and advice, telling stories, making people laugh. Renzo had thought that this was so because Papà was an exceptional man. Everyone had wanted to be near Papà. He had drawn them in like a blazing hearth on a chill winter’s night. But now Renzo saw that exceptional men come in varying hues. The man at the far edge of the crowd, the one whom people
noticed least, could be every bit as remarkable.
Outside, Pia skipped across the walk and slipped a coin to her beggar. For the first time, Renzo approached him too. His face was hidden in the shadows of his hooded cloak, but the gnarled fingers spread wide as Renzo came near. Renzo’s coin clinked against Pia’s; the beggar murmured his thanks.
◆ ◆ ◆
The assassin closed his fingers about the coins. He did not like showing his hands to the boy. But it had been dark that night; there had been blood and pain and fighting; chances were the boy would not remember the specific geography of this handful of misshapen fingers.
The uncle had disappeared again. The assassin did not know yet precisely where he had gone, but he knew where to watch. Eventually the uncle would surface, and then . . .
Ordinarily the assassin would have dispatched him long ago. He would have stolen into the house; he would have finished it. But he had grown soft, he had grown weak, he had grown dangerously ineffective. Truth: He could not bear to frighten the little girl. He could not bear for her to feel unsafe inside her very home.
She would grieve for her uncle when he was gone. But that could not be helped.
39.
Inside the Mask
Late that night a heron, gliding low over the marshes in search of a juicy frog, saw three small boats moving through the curved ribbons of water that cut through the island of Murano.
The first boat glided down a wide canal and headed south across a moonlit stretch of open water.
The second made its slow way along a narrow stream, barely visible among the sedges. The third followed at a distance. The second boat hesitated before nosing out into the open, at the lip of the wide waters of the lagoon.
It did not, the heron saw, get far.
◆ ◆ ◆
Renzo moored his boat to the crowded dock in San Marco. On his way across the lagoon, he’d been grateful for the light of the full moon, but at the moment he longed for a nice, thick fog. He opened the bundle Vittorio had stowed beneath a strut and removed a ragged gown and a pair of women’s slippers. He bent to take off his boots, then jammed his feet into the slippers and shrugged off his cloak, damp with condensed fog.
The hammer was still there, bound to his waist with a leather belt.
He pulled on the gown over his shirt.
Now for the mask — smooth and white, with full, red lips. The visage of a beautiful signorina. Fumbling with the tie strings, Renzo secured it over his face. He knotted the head scarf at his chin and slipped the shawl over his shoulders, then bundled up his cloak and boots and stowed them in the bottom of the boat. At last he picked up the basket and slipped the handle over one arm.
He gazed at the blazing lights of the Doge’s Palace and summoned his will to move.
The night chill penetrated through shawl and shirt to shiver at his skin, still damp from the effort of rowing. Inside the mask his breath sounded loud. He felt leaden, unable to move. So many uncertainties to this plan. So many paths to disaster. He longed to turn back, to row north to Murano and tuck himself into his warm, soft cot.
And where was Vittorio? They weren’t supposed to meet — not yet — but Renzo had hoped to catch sight of him. Vittorio had assured Renzo that he was well enough to do his part, but was he?
Abruptly Renzo stood and stepped onto the dock. If he didn’t make himself go now, he feared he might lose heart altogether.
Stoop, Vittorio had said. Walk as if your knees pain you, as if your feet ache and your hips creak. It was a disguise inside a disguise: a boy dressed as an old woman wearing the mask of a beautiful girl. The more mixed-up and confusing, Vittorio had said, the better.
Bent over and shuffling, Renzo threaded his way through the piazzetta, still thick with jostling revelers even so late at night. He made for the Piazza San Marco, where he soon spotted the vendor Vittorio had told him of, the one who sold fritole. A man in a jester’s mask bumped into him; Renzo stumbled into the path of a man on stilts, who wobbled, cursing loudly and long. A hand latched on to Renzo’s arm and pulled him out of the way. Renzo looked up to see the mask of a long-beaked bird, looking strangely sinister. “Are you all right, Grandmother?” asked a kindly male voice.
Renzo nodded, shaken.
At last, with five warm fritole in his basket, Renzo turned toward the palace, toward the dungeon entrance.
And now, before him, he saw the mob of which the captain had spoken. Renzo held back — watching, moving his head side to side to take in the whole of the scene through the eyeholes of his mask. There were fifty, maybe seventy, people. Not angry and shouting but muttering, restless.
The sea captain had mentioned soldiers stationed near the door, but Renzo couldn’t see them beyond the crowd. And the dungeon guard? He couldn’t see him, either.
All depended upon the presence of the guard. He must mistake Renzo for a certain old woman who regularly visited her nephew in the dungeon. Vittorio had waylaid her and spoken to her days before. He had bought her shawl, her headscarf, her basket. He had paid her to stay away from the dungeon.
But suddenly Vittorio’s plans seemed hopeless. How was it possible that the guard would mistake Renzo for an old woman? And even if he did, wouldn’t he unmask him to make sure?
Again Renzo wavered. He could go back now. It wasn’t too late. Not yet.
But he slipped between two women in the rear of the throng and made his shuffling way through — weaving, seeking out gaps between the bodies, sometimes clearing his throat or tapping an arm in a silent request. The crowd murmured and shifted. The inside of the mask grew moist and stale.
At last he found himself at the fore of the crowd, facing a flight of steps, the dungeon door, and a cluster of uniformed men. They looked like soldiers. Which one was the guard Vittorio had spoken of?
What now?
He studied the door. It was the larger one with the deeper window, as he had known it would be. The one with bars of iron, not glass. As to where the other door was —
“Grandmother! Come along.”
Renzo turned his head, peering through the eyeholes. A man stepped forward, through the cluster of soldiers. He wore a uniform too, but it was different from the others.
The guard?
The man scowled and motioned impatiently. “Come along, old woman. Hurry!”
Renzo was seized with an urge to flee, to cast off his disguise and run back to the boat. But he shuffled ahead, limped up the stairs.
The guard led him to the door, flicking a finger at the basket.
Renzo thrust it toward him; the guard took one of the fritole and popped it into his mouth. He rapped thrice on the door with his spear, a deep, hollow thump, thump, thump. He reached for the latch; the great door creaked open.
A shout: Witches! Hang the witches! The crowd surged forward. The soldiers fanned out before the door, hoisting their spears.
“Quick, you!” the guard mumbled around his pastry.
Renzo slipped inside; the door slammed shut with an echoing clang, leaving Renzo alone.
A long, dark corridor stretched out before him, dimming to blackness in the distance. He could make out the shapes of doorways recessed in stone walls. The air was eerily still, but a chill oozed out from the stone walls and crept deep inside Renzo’s bones. It smelled different here — the mineral smell of stone and something else, something stale and sour.
Footsteps. A blaze of yellow torchlight bobbed toward him, the figure of a man beneath it. A second guard.
Belatedly Renzo remembered to stoop.
He twisted back to look at the door with its iron bars. No way out, unless the other glass bars had survived.
In a moment the second guard called, “Grandmother?”
His voice echoed down through the corridor:
. . . andmother?
. . . mother?
. . . other?
Renzo performed an exaggerated nod.
The guard drew quickly near. “I didn’t know you at first, G
randmother, with you looking so young today.” He smiled shyly at his own jest.
Renzo hoisted the basket. The guard plucked a pastry from it, took a bite, and smacked his lips appreciatively. “Grazie! ” he said. “Come along, then. I’ll light your way.”
Renzo had thought he’d be left alone to find his “nephew.” He’d thought he might have time to go searching for the little door. But now . . . what would he do when they reached the nephew’s cell? Surely the mask wouldn’t fool him. The bell of doom tolled again in Renzo’s inner ear, but there was nothing to do but set one foot down after another, following the guard.
The floor was slick in places; puddles of muck collected in the corners. Renzo devoutly wished for his good, sturdy boots instead of these useless slippers. By the light of the torch, he saw a dark line on the walls — thigh high. A high-water mark. Had the children been down here during the acqua alta? Standing in the frigid water with no shoes at all?
The stench grew stronger as they moved deeper into the dungeon, a stench of excrement, piss, and fear. From time to time he heard mumbling, or groaning, or laughter. He wished he could see inside the cells as they passed, but the barred openings in the doors were too high. He’d have to stretch up out of his stoop — too much of a risk.
Thump, thump, thump.
Behind them. A knock at the dungeon door.
The guard stopped. Groaned. “Wait here, Grandmother,” he said. “There’s someone else wants in. I’ll return directly.”
Renzo watched the torchlight bobble away back toward the door, listened to the guard’s echoing footsteps. Darkness closed in around him. He could hear a drip, drip, drip of water, and something scuttling along the stones.
Rats?
He shivered.
What should he do now?
The children might be in a cell farther along the corridor, or he might have passed them already.
But wait. Another sound, a run of clear, fluting notes. Familiar.
The little owl? From that day in the glassworks?
Renzo edged forward along the wall. The sound had not seemed close, but here in this echoing place it was impossible to tell. In a moment the wall dropped away to his right, and peering around a corner, he saw the dim outline of a flight of stairs.