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 Trist?o 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.