Only one, now. The physician. They found the Turk a short while ago, afloat in the Madonnetta Canal.
Dead?
Of course, dead. You think he was swimming? As far as who killed him — the sbirri, or the Turk’s own accomplices, or perhaps he died by his own hand—
Shush! Who goes there?
They’ve seen him. The tired muscles of Crivano’s legs and back protest as he rises from his seat on the steps, ambles forward.
Good Christ. That’s him.
Their light falls on his face; he squints. These look like ordinary city commoners: sleepy unskilled tradesmen carrying clubs and a lantern through the streets for a few extra coins. Men with debts and families. The three of them exchange bleak looks, trapped in a moment that none has wished for. Then Crivano shifts his walkingstick to his left hand, and begins to draw the rapier.
Run! the first watchman barks, but the other is already running: orange sparks fly from his clattering lantern as he stuffs a wooden whistle between his lips. Thin harsh notes pierce the cooling air. Crivano hears people in adjacent houses stir.
He lets the watchmen go. By now the sbirri must be close; these two will find them soon enough. The campo of San Giacomo dall’Orio is but a short distance away, the Grand Canal not much farther on: Crivano could be safely aboard a boat within minutes. But he’s going to wait in the campo instead. He’s not quite satisfied, not quite finished. Behind him the dark streets scroll like pages in an old codex, one he’s struggled for years to parse. He feels as if he’s reached the end only to discover that he’s been misreading it all along — taking for literal truth what was meant as allegory, or vice versa. He wants to flip back to the beginning, to start over with fresh eyes. Even if doing so means he can never be free of it. Even if it’s too late now for understanding anyway.
A few paces ahead, at the next intersection — a narrow street branching to the west — a chill settles over him, and he stops, aware that he’s being watched. For a long time he remains motionless. Knowing already. Not wanting to see it. Finally, with effort, he twists his stiff neck to the left.
It’s perhaps a hundred feet away, down the sidestreet, backlit by a fat yellow moon. Blocking the light. Crivano can see the outlines of its wide-brimmed hat, its ash wand, its beaked mask. He can’t smell the asafetida, but he can see the smoke: little wisps adrift before its glinting glassy eyes.
He wants to go to it. To kill it. To come to the end. But as he’s drawing his sword he hears a shout from somewhere behind him, and another answering it: the spread of the watchmen’s alarms. He looks away for an instant, and when he glances down the sidestreet again, the fiend is gone.
He isn’t ready for this. He hurries forward on clumsy legs, tingling like he’s been still for too long, like he’s exchanged his body for another’s. In the campo torches blaze at the church’s side door; strange shadows waver under trees. The thing is everywhere now: always at the corner of his eye. He turns, turns again. Sniffing the air.
The church door opens with the pressure of his shoulder; Crivano steps into candlelight. No priest inside. No one here at all. As if the city belongs only to him and the demons he’s conjured. He walks to the west end of the nave, dips his fingers in the font and crosses himself, feeling foolish for doing so. Along the walls, from chapel to chapel, he takes long breaths to cool his blood and brain. Looking at everything. The ship’s-keel roof. Fossil snails in the floor. A green marble column taken during the Crusades. Paintings of saints and the Virgin. One shadowy canvas — John the Baptist preaching to a rapt and reverent crowd — seizes and won’t relinquish his attention, and he steps forward to examine it.
This is surely the hand of the mad craftsman of whom the senator spoke: the one who believed himself hounded by sbirri and magicians, the one who cast himself from a window toward his death. Crivano manages an ironic smirk, but it falters. It’s all too easy to imagine: the painter’s confident departure from Bassano del Grappa. The thrill he must have felt when the city first met his eyes. The heavy charge given by his patron: to maintain the imago urbis, to distill and sublime eight quicksilver centuries with a few daubs of pigment, a few brushstrokes. The vision of beauty and order that burned in him; the anguish he felt when, from within and without, that vision was betrayed. It’s all there on the great canvas, rendered clearly enough: in the rapturous upturned eyes of a woman in the audience, in the sourceless darkness that weights everything from above. Crivano clenches his teeth and thinks of reckless Tristão in his laboratory, of Narkis dead in the warm filthy water, of the Nolan rotting in his long-coveted cell. The pathetic example of Narcissus warns us against a direct approach to the mirror, for then our eyes meet only our own image. In such a closed circle, no good can result. The example to emulate is that of noble Actaeon, who entered the grotto of the Moon by accident, who cast his slanted gaze toward the pool’s silvered surface, and who glimpsed there, half-submerged, the goddess’s unclothed form. Fools, Crivano thinks. All of them. To want what they wanted. To seek what they sought.
The side door opens. A man steps through it. He wears a rapier and the cloak of a sbirro. He and Crivano look at each other without expression for several long breaths. Then the man opens the door again, and steps outside.
Crivano’s tread is well-practiced; the soles of his boots are soft. He catches the door before it has fully closed. The sbirro is a few paces ahead, beckoning to his two fellows in the campo; he turns as the door opens, and Crivano drives the ferrule of his stick into the side of the sbirro’s head, just above the ear.
The two sbirri in the campo draw their rapiers and charge. Crivano steps over the fallen man, unsheathes his own blade, waits for them to close the distance. As he’s anticipated, they’re fierce and ruthless, but not skilled swordsmen. He stabs the first in the kidney, the second in the eye.
The second sbirro screams, throws down his sword, hides his face in his hands, and screams again. Then he bolts, runs headlong into the trunk of an old bay laurel, and collapses in mute convulsions. The kidney-hit sbirro sinks to the packed earth — slowly, like a sick drunk — and begins to weep and moan. Crivano kicks him twice at the base of his skull to silence him.
More shouts: someone has heard. Looking down the Street of the Dyers and the Ruga Bella, Crivano sees lanternlight in the distance, lending color to the brick walls, shaping buildings from the blackness. He falls back and rounds the church’s corner, passing the twin hemispheres of the apse, dashing through the Campiello of the Dead.
He’s about to follow Broad Street north — the Grand Canal two hundred yards away, not yet visible — when something draws his eye. Shadows on the base of the old belltower. Two silhouettes cast by a pair of torches, identical and overlapping, as though seen through crossed eyes. The torchlight emanates from a gap between buildings, a gap he hasn’t noticed till now. Crivano stares at the oscillating shadows until he sorts out details: the curve of a beak, the ellipse of a hat-brim, a long slim wand aslant a wrist.
He tiptoes to the gap, pressing his shoulder to the bricks, then circles wide as he turns the corner, his rapier at the ready, his stick high to ward off attack. But nothing’s there — no figure to block the light, no torches to cast it — only a dark and narrow street edged by modest shops, moonlit at its midpoint by the transit of a canal. The air over the tiny bridge swirls with rising mist. Crivano moves steadily forward, his sword’s blood-streaked tip an antenna in the dark.
On the other side of the canal, beyond the curtain of fog, the street changes. Quiet before, it’s now entirely silent: devoid of tittering rats, soft human snores, the lap of water. Here the storefronts seem implausibly perfect: no brick chipped, no wood rotten, every window tidily glazed. It seems like a backdrop for an elaborate intermedio, or some similar spectacle. As if it might topple backward at any slight touch.