Crivano turns—allowing himself only the briefest glance at the hairless face, the white turban—and plucks the empty jar from Narkis’s fingers. Yes, he snaps. It is. My thanks to you.
The apothecary shakes a pile of leaves onto his scale, scrapes a few back into the cylinder to reach the proper weight, and quotes Crivano an astronomical price, which he pays without protest. The leaves fall into the jar; the cork is replaced and hammered tight. Very great power, the apothecary says, waggling a finger. Not for play.
With no second glance at Narkis, Crivano quits the shop and hastens toward the White Eagle again, eager to put distance between them. He reckons his report will be read within the hour—the wooden grilles decode more swiftly than they encode—but he can’t begin to guess how long Narkis will take to formulate a response. In the meantime, the thousand surrogate eyes of the Council of Ten watch from every balcony and every window. Somewhere in the lagoon, Verzelin’s gassy corpse strains surfaceward against its decaying fetters.
As he walks, Crivano is attentive to faces, alert for any he recognizes. He’s fairly certain that sbirri followed him during his first days in the city—an understandable precaution, given what the authorities know of him—but he doesn’t think he’s being shadowed any longer. No doubt informants still track his movements, but they won’t have noticed anything suspicious today. Crivano is a physician; physicians frequent apothecaries. Nothing unusual in that.
He’s nearly back to his locanda when a figure catches his eye: a rustic girl of perhaps twenty years, leaning against the cracked stucco of a joiner’s shop. She bends forward to study her black-soled foot, her right leg folded at the knee; a boot sags empty on the pavement below. The girl’s hands are stained brown to their wrists from some recent labor: tanning, dyeing, packing fabrics. Her drooping headscarf reveals cropped russet hair, shaved and partly grown back, as if she’s lately been treated for ringworm, or run afoul of the Inquisitor. She prods the filthy ball of her foot with brown thumbs, heedless of passersby, appearing and disappearing as they cross before her.
Something about her is familiar, though Crivano doesn’t think he’s seen her before. He watches for a moment, then draws closer and watches for a moment more. Well-muscled arms extend from her sleeveless blouse, sun-cooked nearly to match the stains. The angles of her face are boyish and hard. The small toes of her bare foot curl inward, the large one tips back, and Crivano discerns the irregular ellipse of a verruca in the pad beneath it. Does that give you pain? he asks.
For a long moment she doesn’t look up. It feels strange to walk, she says.
There’s physic for it. You should seek it out before you ask a barber to cut.
Her eyes are angry, but the anger doesn’t seem to be for him. And what does a girl pay for that? she asks.
Crivano gives her a warm smile, and opens his palms.
She stares at him. Then her face sags, and she looks back to her foot. The hour grows late, dottore, she says. You name a price for your physic, and I’ll name a price for my cunt. And then perhaps we’ll make a bargain.
Crivano’s mouth drops open. He closes it, and grinds his teeth. The girl brings her fingers to her lips, spits on them, and wipes them across the wart. It clarifies against the damp whorls of her calloused skin.
So, wench, Crivano says, his voice ugly in his own ears, does the entire city take to whoring for the Sensa? Or do all you slatterns come here from abroad? Good christ, every brothel from here to Munich must be shuttered.
I guess someone can answer that for you, dottore, she says. But not I. Ask a Bavarian pimp if you meet one. Will you lend an arm?
She’s looking up again. For an instant he’s inclined to strike her, to break her lean mannish jaw with the knob of his stick. But he gives her his arm, and she pulls her boot on. Thanks, she says. And a good day to you.