The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  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.

  He was content then to miss the revels in the Piazza—that odd mélange of depravity and tradecraft—but now he finds himself eager to see them before they end, to lose himself in their crush and spectacle. After three wrong turns down three dead-end streets he picks up the canal again just past the apse of San Lorenzo—he can hear workers stacking tile and singing on its roof, though they’re too high to be seen—and shoulders his way across a bridge through a crowd of violet-capped Greeks to the fondamenta on the opposite side. He crosses again a bit farther on, passes the plain façade of San Antonin, the gothic palaces of the Campo della Bràgora, and just as he’s certain he’s lost his way he emerges onto the Riva degli Schiavoni to find the Bacino of San Marco arrayed before him, shimmering like a curtain of cut-glass beads.

  He steps from the flow of traffic to look across the water. The monumental church of San Giorgio Maggiore that dominates the view was barely begun when he and the Lark first came here. Farther west on the Giudecca, the cool and stately Redeemer is entirely new to him. Both façades are pure white Istrian stone, blinding in the sun. Impossible structures in an impossible city. They remind him of Greek ruins he saw in Efes, but that doesn’t diminish their strangeness. Their massive doors seem poised to open on a world never seen by human eyes.

  A peote flashes past, on its way to meet an incoming carrack; its keel and oars barely disturb the water’s surface. Crivano suddenly wishes he could forget his first glimpse of the city—wrestling with the Lark over the best spot on the rail as the Molo came into view—so that he might now see it fresh, weigh it fairly against other miracles he’s witnessed in the intervening years: the labyrinthine medina of Tunis, the pyramids of the Giza Plateau, the living rock temples of Wadi Araba. He leans against a palina at the quay’s edge, closes his eyes, and tries to retrieve the feeling of the days spent waiting out the quarantine in Malamocco, the memory of standing on a rock wall at the lagoon’s edge as a storm came in. The Lark was somewhere behind him, singing and clowning for some peasant girls—My noble friend and I are going to Padua to become physicians. Come, let me examine you!—while he leaned into the wind, trying to sort the shapes of belltowers from the distant scud.

  Sleep is stalking him: he jolts awake to find himself tipping forward, seizes hold of the palina to keep from toppling into the waves, and his walkingstick clatters to the ground. Crivano stops it with his foot, stoops to pick it up.

  A group of merchants has gathered nearby on the quay. They’re watching the approaching carrack; he follows their
eyes. The ship’s mainmast is gone—partly splintered, partly hacked through at shoulder-height, as if someone took an axe to it while the ship ran before the wind—and as it draws closer he sees that its hull is bristling with arrows, pocked with lead shot, stained rust-brown under the scuppers.

  Christ have mercy, one of the merchants mutters. The pirates are at it again.

  The uskoks, you think? his fellow asks.

  Who else, fool? Look at the blood! That craft played host to a cannibal feast, of that you can be certain. The merchant spits into the waves. Someone should tell limp-pricked old Cicogna that his new bride cuckolds him with the Devil himself, he says. And their bastard whelps now have the run of our waters.

  Crivano turns to go. Ahead, just off the Riva, a troupe of gypsy acrobats performs somersaults on the foundations of what’s to be the new prison. Crivano pushes through the crowd across the bridge to the Molo, passing the arcades of the Doge’s Palace as he makes his way to the twin columns. Five long tables stretch between them, manned by masked attendants shaking bone dice in clay cups. Behind each table a long queue of merchants and farmers snakes toward the artisans’ booths. The new wing of the Library boxes in the Piazzetta like a canyon; two rows of wooden stalls run its full length, into the Piazza itself. A disordered throng moves from exhibit to exhibit—sturdy peasant women from the Terrafirma, German pilgrims provisioning for the Holy Land, silver-veiled brides in damask gowns—and Crivano takes a deep breath and steps forward to join it.

  Grotesque profusion! Engraved boxes and majolica vessels. Sachets and vials and pomanders of scents. Octavo breviaries and pornographic woodcuts. Trellises draped with chaplets and fake pearls. Shelves bowed by the weight of shoes, combs, caps, hose, needles. Pigment-vendors grinding their products into careful mounds. Goldsmiths, coppersmiths, and tinsmiths twisting chimeras from wire and foil. Empty-eyed bravi fingering knifetips. Greeks peddling leather, Lombards peddling linens, Slavs peddling wool.

  As he moves among the displays, Crivano realizes that he has managed to forget his entanglements, to loose his mind’s grip on the intrigues that lend purpose to his days, to become for a moment exactly what he seems: an idle man engaged in the survey of merchandise. Some weeks ago, when he arrived in the city, moments such as these came upon him only rarely; he’d emerge from them with a start, like one who remembers he’s left a coin-purse unattended. Now Crivano has come to suspect that he is safest at these times: browsing for goods, entertaining his Contarini patrons, debating learned citizens about trivia of mutual interest. Dissembly can hardly fail him when he does not dissemble. He wonders whether he might one day succeed so completely in forgetting himself—his whole occult catalogue of betrayal and deceit—that he’s able to meet the evidence of his corruption with sincere bafflement.

  A pair of mattacini rushes from the steps of the Basilica, launching from their plaited slings blown-out eggs stuffed with musky rags, and the shouting and shrieking crowd parts before them. Crivano steps through the gap, around the loggetta of the belltower into the Piazza itself. The shapes and textures of this place have been so vivid to him during the twenty-odd years he’s been away that he tends to forget how few days he and the Lark actually spent here. His recollections have served as a kind of beacon in times of confusion and difficulty, a means of tracking his passage through the world. But now that he’s come back, he’s been surprised to discover how much his mind altered during his absence: how much it augmented or elided or rearranged to suit the dictates of his imagination. He feels himself moving not through the city that has haunted him for so long, but through a city that is itself haunted by that city.

  He’s made nearly a full circuit of the Piazza before he notices that it’s grown larger. The old pilgrims’ hostel has been demolished—replaced by a new Procuracy, maybe half-finished, in a fussy classical style—and the square’s trapezium broadened. This space holds the fair’s most elaborate installations: here the glassmakers’ tables display leaping dolphins, reared dragons, winding serpents, a glass armada under full sail. Crivano draws closer to admire a miniature castle with scarlet banners, edged by a bosk of frothy trees and a moat bubbling with citrine wine.

  But this all pales beside the mirrormakers’ showcase. They’ve linked their booths with a wooden passageway of columns and rafters, like a pergola bereft of vines, and hung the inner surfaces with an assortment of flat glasses. Beneath a canvas banner at the entrance—VIRTUTUM SYDERA MICANT—five strapping guildsmen beckon to passersby, doffing their caps and singing in rough harmony. Their tune is borrowed from an old frottola, one the Lark used to perform, though Crivano can’t recall its true words.

  A simple art, ladies! If everyone knew it,

  then every globe-blowing jackass would do it.

  Demonstrate here? Do you take us for fools?

  Come visit Murano! We’ll show you our tools!

  As Crivano elbows his way across their threshold, his halfsize image slides into view around him—to his right, to his left, overhead—while others, smaller still, appear alongside those, ricocheted from the mirrors opposite. Every glass surface he passes shows a procession of windowed chambers, endlessly iterated, with Crivano the living void at its center. He reaches for his sudarium, hurries to the other side.

  The costumed crowds, the shiny heaps of luxuries: it all might have been pleasant had Crivano arrived well-rested, but in his current state it’s unsettling, a parade of morbid compulsions, and suddenly he’s sorry he came. Near the clock tower he buys a pastry—a fritter studded with almonds, dusted with fine white sugar—and he eats it as he strolls along the basilica’s façade, assaying the gold and the marble, the cool serpentine and carnal porphyry, the encrustation of ancient spoils. Over the northernmost vault a mosaic depicts the theft of the corpse of Mark the Evangelist from infidel Alexandria; this image triggers a quick flood of memories: his first meeting with Narkis, nearly thirteen years ago, roused from sleep in his quarters in the Divan Meydanı. I have come to you, Tarjuman effendi, on behalf of the haseki sultan. She has made an interesting suggestion. A week later, waiting by the obelisk in the old Roman hippodrome. Strange men hidden in the shadows, their breath clouding the moonlit air. Run, messer! The devils are at my heels! Plucking the bundle from Polidoro’s trembling fingers—miserable Polidoro, the thief, the slave, the dupe—as the guards’ shouts rang out.

  Then, later that night, the embassy in Galata, holding his breath while the bailo unwrapped it: a packet of human skin, neatly folded, its tanned surface fuzzed with short red hair. The old bailo green-gilled, unsteady, choosing his words with caution. Rest assured, messer, that you will be duly rewarded for recovering the remains of this great hero of Christendom. Well, they were somebody’s remains, anyway. Within the month he’d sailed through the Golden Horn aboard a Lucchese galley, bound for Ravenna, his University of Bologna matriculation certificate safe inside his doublet. Wearing, for the first time in his life, the black robes of a citizen of the Republic. Another metamorphosis accomplished.

  Crivano had planned to return to the White Eagle through the Mercerie—he wants to have a look at the new bridge over the Grand Canal—but the crowds will be worse that way, and he’s grown impatient with crowds. He passes under the old Procuracy and follows the long Street of the Blacksmiths, where he’ll be able to hire a gondola. Walking quickly against the flow of traffic, he lowers his head and sweeps his stick to fend off the provincial whores gathered along every route, two or three deep. By the time he reaches Magazine Street the mobs have thinned, and he moves with little effort.

  In the Campo San Luca he allows himself to be distracted by a band of wandering performers as they improvise a satire about a mountebank alchemist. It’s clear soon enough that these are not ordinary clowns: no urchins ply the audience on their behalf, the actor playing the charlatan shows some real knowledge of Latin and alchemy, and their jokes—sharp gibes at Philip of Spain and the Holy See among them—gild the edges of a substantive argument, one that might
cause them trouble if aired in the Piazza.

  Every lesser metal, the sham alchemist lectures, aspires toward gold, just as every acorn would fain become an oak.

  Speak to the point! a player masked as a clever Jew demands. I would follow to the tree you speak of, dottore, but you cut a crooked path through the bush!

  The alchemist feigns irritation. These circumlocutions protect secret knowledge, my simple friend, he explains, just as the finest berries are hid by leaf and thorn.

  For all this fellow’s shrubby words, the masked Jew shouts, I’d think an alchemist naught but a learned squirrel!

  Crivano laughs at this exchange, winces at a sharp lampoon of Bolognese rhetoric that finds its mark, and applauds as the performance ends and the alchemist is chased away, running toward Campo San Paternian, counterfeit nuggets dribbling from his robe. Crivano is about to follow, to discover who these educated pranksters really are, when a gasp runs through the square behind him, and a woman shrieks.

  In the campo near the mouth of Oven Street a dark form has appeared. Like nearly everyone else, the figure is disguised, but its costume is hardly festive: it wears a wide-brimmed black hat, a long black robe of waxed linen, and the dull bronze mask of a plaguedoctor, beaked like the head of a monstrous tropical bird. Townsfolk scatter and cross themselves as it moves through the square; a few curse it, but none stands in its way. The few unhidden faces in the crowd are convulsed with anguish, an inventory of recalled suffering inscribed in their expressions.