Crivano removes the snaplock pistol from its case and holds it to the light. He wishes he’d taken it to the Lido and fired it sometime over the past few days; he’d meant to. Now he’ll have to make guesses.
He draws back the cock — his thumb straining mightily against the spring — until it catches, then fixes a fresh flint in its clasp. He pulls the trigger: a shower of sparks, and a loud snap that makes him blink. The sharp smell tickles his nose.
Crivano wipes down the mechanism, cleans the barrel, clears the touchhole with a needle and a puff of air. Then he shakes grains of black powder into the flashpan, closes it, and pours more down the barrel. Unsure of proper quantities. Erring toward excess. He cuts a strip of wadding, rests a heavy lead ball in it, pushes it into the barrel with the ramrod. Then he loosens his belt and tucks in the pistol, aligning its grip with a slash in his robe, within reach of his right hand. The afternoon sun casts his silhouette against the floor; he inspects it, watching for the pistol’s telltale bulge, until he’s satisfied.
He sits again. Taking up the foolscap, he tears it neatly across the edge of the table, then tears it again until it’s quite small. He dips his quill into the first jar — the ink colorless as water — and writes. He blows across the paper until the liquid has vanished, then cleans his quill, opens the second jar, and writes again, this time in deep black. A brief message; a few simple instructions. Tiny letters in neat rows.
He rolls the paper into a tight tube, ties it with a bit of gauze from his box of physic. Then he approaches the window — climbing across the bed to the corner, keeping his head down, so no one who watches from the street can see — and pins the rolled paper into a fold of the curtains, on the backside of the fabric, where it overlaps the wall.
Now, perhaps, he is ready.
On his way out, he leaves keys in the locks of his trunk and his box of physic. They’re good locks, expensive; it seems a pity to have them broken.
55
The world outside greets Crivano with the fierce clarity of a nightmare. The sun crawls down the firmament; a pale daub of moon lingers at the horizon. Rough breezes lurk between buildings, pouncing at odd intervals, and delicate changeable clouds rush like vengeful angels to the east. The ultramarine field they cross could herald any weather. Everything arrayed beneath it appears fleeting, provisional, doomed.
Each passing face seems glimpsed through a lens, so acutely does it prick him; the texture of every surface looms so sharp in his vision that it seems to chafe his skin. Many years have gone by since terror last awakened him like this. What most troubles him is how little mind he’s paid by the city’s innocuous inhabitants: they obstruct his path like sleepwalkers. Among them he is insubstantial, a miasma.
His antagonists, however, find him often enough. Sometimes it’s the sbirri themselves, brazen in their matching cloaks. Sometimes it’s a lingering stare — a beggar, a water-vendor, a whore — that’s withdrawn the instant he returns it. Sometimes he simply feels eyes follow him, or senses that a street is too quiet. Has this watch been kept over him since he arrived? Is he only now able to perceive it?
He strides purposefully, his stick’s ferrule ringing the flagstones and thumping the dirt, but in fact he has no purpose save to frustrate the sbirri and ascertain their tactics. His boots dissect the Rialto, tramp its every street at least twice, step into shops and churches, turn corners so capriciously that he surprises himself. Once he’s begun to intuit the sbirri’s methods — one will follow him for a block’s length, then vanish as another takes his place — he crosses the new bridge to the Mercerie and treads its busy thoroughfares until he hears work-bells herald the day’s approaching end. Then he boards a traghetto and crosses the Grand Canal again. This is the long afternoon’s one moment of repose: kneading his sore shins under the boat’s canopy while accidental gusts crease the water in vague patterns and the sbirri track him along the banks.
By now they will have guessed that he’s waiting for darkness. In this they are nearly correct. The innumerate moments before the single bell announces sundown contain his final chance to contact Obizzo; he’s resolved not to let it escape him.
Shutters close in the Rialto, pushcarts rattle home, carpets slide from windowsills. Crivano stops in a cutler’s shop, drinks a cup of wine in a casino. Waiting for the light to turn gold. They’re following more closely now: almost always, it’s the men in cloaks. Eventually they’ll lose patience — sure that they’ve either missed the crucial gesture, or that he’s withholding it — and they’ll fall on him. He has no good lies to tell under torture, no time to invent or rehearse them. If they take him, he’ll say what he knows.
There: a glow on the belltower of the Frari. He hurries into the street, zigzagging toward the great confluence at Campo San Aponal. A glance over his shoulder reveals two cloaks, both close behind.
In the campo he mixes with the milling crowd, holding his breath until he sees them: linkboys, gathered with their lanterns on the church steps, laughing and tussling at rough plebeian games while they wait for the darkness to come. Crivano sweeps toward them. Holla, mooncursers! he shouts, rubbing his palms together. Who would earn a bit of silver before the sun has gone?
The boys swarm. Crivano squats on his haunches, opens his purse to remove a bright ducat. Their unblinking eyes converge on it, aligned like compass-needles. This coin is more than any of their fathers will earn in a week — if indeed any of them have fathers. The youngest among them doesn’t even know what it is; another boy’s terse whisper puts an explanation in his small ear.
So, Crivano says, who among you rabble knows the Contarini house, in San Samuele?
A shrill chorus of affirmation follows.
Be at ease, whelps! Crivano says, and passes the coin to a tall harelipped boy. I have silver enough for all. You, varlet, to earn your coin, will deliver a message to Rigi, the Contarini porter. Now — who knows the Morosini house, in San Luca?
Crivano produces another ducat to more agitated yelps, more grasping fingers. The harelipped boy is half-turned, half-crouched, ready to run; his hiss-honking voice cuts through the din. What’s your message, dottore? he asks.
Be patient, my pup: you shall have it soon enough. You there! Here’s a coin for you. Your task is to seek out Hugo, the Morosini porter.
For hours now Crivano has recited these instructions in his head, memorizing them like an incantation, like a magic spell — which they might as well be. He dispatches a third boy to Ciotti at Minerva, a fourth to the gatekeeper-nun at Santa Caterina, a fifth to the small casino near Santa Giustina where he spoke drunkenly of Lepanto. He has more ducats in his purse than there are linkboys. He directs another to the apothecary who sold him the henbane, another to the gondolier who last ferried him from Murano, another to the proprietor of the glass shop on the new Rialto bridge. In his mind he has assembled a map of the city: the city not as it is, but as he has encountered it these past few weeks; a map constellated from his movements and memories, congruent with tangible marble and brick, but submerged beneath the visible surfaces. Now each set of directions aims a lowly urchin down these imaginary thoroughfares.
The most vital errand he delegates to a boy who’s a bit quieter than the rest, who meets his eye coolly, who listens and thinks. He’s neither the youngest nor the oldest among them. He won’t be a linkboy for very long. You, Crivano says, laying the ducat in the boy’s palm, will go to Anzolo at the White Eagle. Do you know the place?