A white flare as the pan ignites, and a breathy whoosh. Then nothing. His vision wrecked by the flash, Crivano stares into the blackened street, his lips twisted in a rictus of idiot horror. His eyes can discern nothing but the twin glassy spheres that move toward him through the void, aglow like glory-holes. They are coming. They have always been coming. Now they are here.
The pistol fires. From its muzzle emerges a globe of flame that erases everything and vanishes, leaving only a pulsing afterimage on Crivano’s seared eyes. But the roar of the blast remains, a howling hiss, an undiminishing echo that runs circuits of the street until he can hear nothing else. Perina has broken away; she’s looking at him, gesturing, screaming. Her voice reaches him not as sound, but as a gentle pressure on his face. She grabs his left hand, pulls. His right arm, the arm with the pistol, is over his head. He lowers it gingerly. He’s aware of sharp pain in his bludgeoned ears: a lacerating high-pitched chime that, he realizes, is the sound of broken glass striking the pavement under every window on the street.
The plaguedoctor is gone. Crivano’s eyes rake the smoke-shrouded air, and the pavement where the monster stood, but they find nothing: no pink mist, no pooled blood, no beaked mask, no ash wand. Blown to bits, he thinks. As if the pistol were a cannon. Blown to bits. Blown to bits. Blown to bits.
The cloud of smoke from the blast is rising, signaling their location. Perina’s face is streaked with angry tears; she twists his arm, looks over his shoulder. Crivano searches the ground around his feet for his dropped walkingstick, then sees that Perina is holding it. He tries to put the pistol back in his belt, but his arm won’t move as it should. His hearing is returning, heralded by a dull ache; he can make out Perina’s urgent whisper, shouts from the Campiello of the Dead. Sbirri are coming over the bridge: three that he can see, more lights behind them. The first freezes when he sees Crivano, fear animating his dull eyes, and the second stumbles to avoid a collision. They huddle together on the bridge, scuffling their feet like tethered dogs.
Perina and Crivano turn and run. She’s fast, he’s tired and old, and he can’t keep up. Fallen glass splinters and cracks beneath the sbirri’s feet: they’re gaining on him. By the time he turns into the campiello they’re on his heels. One brushes a hand against his shoulder, then collapses with a thud and a gasp, tripping up the man behind him. Crivano sees the sandolo now, Obizzo outlined against the setting moon, lowering his crossbow to stand in its stirrup, a fresh bolt clamped between his teeth.
Perina has already cast the boat off. Crivano catches a foot on the gunwale as he jumps, lands facedown in the hull. Dozens of dry bouquets are crushed under his chest; the odor of lavender fills his sinuses, followed by the ferrous tang of blood. The sandolo rocks but doesn’t capsize. Crivano rises with effort, wipes his injured nose.
Obizzo fires again, catching a sbirro in midair as he vaults from the quay; the man drops with a splash. More rush into the campiello, but caution slows them. Obizzo passes the crossbow and quiver to Crivano and takes up his oar; Crivano steps in the stirrup and fixes the string to the nut, then levers it back while he gropes for a bolt. By the time it’s loaded, they’re a safe distance from the sbirri’s angry cudgels, but Crivano fires and wounds one anyway out of spite.
Damn you, dottore! Obizzo growls. Save your bolts. A caorlina crowded with these devils still awaits us on the Grand Canal.
Crivano blows his nose into his palms, shakes the mess overboard. The scent of lavender reaches him again. How did you find me? he says.
With difficulty, thank you. Your messages were a lot of bilgewater. I had to row along till I heard the hue and cry, then follow the noise. What in God’s name was meant by that nonsense about the curtain?
Messages? Crivano says. How many—
Obizzo shushes him. Torches have appeared on the bridge ahead. Crivano loads another bolt, takes Perina’s position in the bow. A quick brightness in the west: at first Crivano takes it for a casino’s hearth-lit door, but it’s what remains of the vanishing moon, peeking at them from a dead-end street. Good luck, it seems to say. I can do nothing more for you tonight.
The torches on the bridge have been smothered; dark shapes now crouch where they shone. Crivano snorts, swallows blood and phlegm, and nestles the crossbow’s buttstock against his shoulder. The sandolo’s black keel slices the mist-veiled water, heading north along the Saint John Beheaded Canal.
COAGVLATIO
It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions. The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations — some accurate, some not — and capable of being studied by pure, nonempirical methods. Without the notion of the mind as mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested itself.
57
Two packed charter buses are unloading in the porte-cochère as Curtis enters the lobby of his hoteclass="underline" conventioneers with rolling suitcases and sheathed laptops sweep through the glass doors, an unbroken column from the sidewalk to the registration desk. Curtis isn’t quick enough to find a gap; he stops under the armillary sphere to wait them out. They collect their keycards, break away, recombine in cheery clumps, crushing hands and clapping shoulders, calling back and forth in sportscaster voices, shooting each other with finger-guns. Somebody passes bearing a huge foamcore placard—
9:00 a.m. — The Three Most Powerful Skills For Success In Sales
9:45 a.m. — How To Achieve Your Personal Best In Times Of Turmoil
10:30 a.m. — A Soft Sell Opener Guaranteed To Get You A “YES!”
11:15 a.m. — Four Ways You Will Leave Your Comfort Zone
— and Curtis can see nothing of the person who carries it aside from a pair of white sneakers and eight curled fingertips.
Another big fake painting stretches overhead; Veronica, no doubt, could tell him what it’s a copy of. A hero on a winged horse, about to harpoon a fire-breathing monster. A man with chains drooping from his mouth. A guy with a broken-stringed violin, his arm around a naked lady. Another guy who plucks a lyre in front of a thick city wall while stone blocks levitate all around him. Curtis gets that the lyre music is lifting the stones, but he can’t tell if it’s supposed to be building the wall or taking it apart. The painting’s midpoint is a field of blue sky. A pair of gods floats there: Mercury with his snake-twisted staff, Minerva with her gorgon-faced shield.
The crowd of conventioneers thins and Curtis moves forward, then gets snared by a plainclothes security guard blocking the exit. The guard holds the door for a tall silver-haired man in a black bomber jacket who looks exactly like Jay Leno, and it takes Curtis a second to realize that it’s Jay Leno. Then he realizes that he’s standing in Leno’s path. Curtis’s hand is still extended from where he’d been about to push through the door, and Leno grabs it and shakes it. Hi! he says with a broad grin.
You’re Jay Leno, Curtis says.
Yeah, Leno says. Have a great conference!
He passes Curtis on the left. The security guard is right beside him, and gently eases Curtis out of the way. Leno and his small entourage pass through the lobby — Leno waving, shaking more hands, walking the same way every famous person Curtis has ever met has walked, quick and restless, like if they stop moving they’ll die — and then they all disappear through a passage to the left of the registration desk. Curtis watches them go. More people with luggage push past him into the lobby, chattering excitedly. Jay Leno! most of them seem to be saying.