Shouts from the campo ahead: a group of portly nobles costumed as New World savages—wooden clubs, fur loincloths, twigs and dry leaves in their hair—chasing after a gang of common boys, hollering propositions. Show us that downy-wreathed cock of yours, you young devil! The boys laugh and run toward Crivano; the handsome one in the lead kicks a leather ball before him with unworried ease. Firelight through a casino window brushes the boy’s face, and for an instant he’s the Lark—pausing to catch his breath in a football game, plucking ripe medlars from a fruit stall in the Rialto, dancing a galliard across the deck of the Gold and Black Eagle.
Then the boy skids to a halt, stops the ball with his toe, takes a few limping sidelong steps while beckoning to his comrades, and he’s no longer the Lark, no longer a boy at all, but the crop-headed whore from last night, the one with the warty foot and the dye-stained hands. As they rush by, he sees that each of her companions is also a young woman, a whore attired as a boy, no doubt to tempt rarefied fancies.
As the last of them passes, Crivano’s gaze returns to the first, to her smirking face. A fine evening to you, dottore, she says, and doffs her cap with a stifled giggle. Then she gives the ball a mighty kick, and is gone.
In the next moment the sham savages are upon him, slowed hopelessly by their rope-and-wood sandals, hooting like jungle apes as they shoulder past. One of their number—bald and squat, with the face of a cruel idiot child—takes a halfhearted swing at Crivano’s head with his cudgel; Crivano ducks, and cracks the man across the ribs with his own stick. The blow echoes with a hollow meaty sound, but the man lumbers on, unperturbed, after the fleeing whores. Too drunk to notice pain. Tomorrow he’ll have a pretty bruise he won’t recall receiving, at the very least. Crivano half-hopes the cur will black out unnoticed in a sottoportego somewhere, drown in the night on his own blood.
Here’s your light, dottore!
A torch bobs toward him, sweating fiery beads of pitch that vanish as they strike the pavement, clutched in the hand of a linkboy of about seven years. On the opposite side of the campo, under the star-sifted indigo sky, Crivano can make out the orange lights of more mooncursers, probably the elder brothers of this one.
I’m looking for the Morosini house, Crivano says.
It’s nearby, the linkboy says, then narrows his soot-rimmed little eyes. But it’s not easy to find, he says. I could show you.
Crivano sighs. He’s late, tired, suddenly famished, and he dips into his coin-purse to sprinkle dull green copper into the urchin’s upraised palm.
31
The Morosini house is on the Riva del Carbon, just north of the church of San Luca; it’s small, or seems so in the shadow of the looming Grimani palace two doors down. Candlelight pours from every window of every floor. Watching the bright and dark shapes that pass before those portals, listening the many-tongued chatter within, Crivano recalls a wicker cage of colored birds he once saw offered for sale by a wild-eyed Somali boatman, somewhere near Heliopolis on the delta of the Nile.
Two torches blaze in sconces at the open landward door, and Crivano brushes past the linkboy to walk inside. He wonders how he’ll manage even rudimentary exchanges with his learned peers given the disturbance he’s just suffered. Were it not for Trist?o he would not have come tonight—yet even as he thinks this, he can feel his body disentangling from its shock, comforted by rote performances of salutation and gratitude.
A footman hastens from the water-gate to greet him, then disappears and returns with the steward, a muscular Proven?al with a neat black beard and a stoical expression. Good evening, dottore, he says with a deep bow. The Brothers Morosini welcome you.
I apologize for my tardiness, Crivano says as he surrenders his stick and his robe. Has the banquet concluded?
With the sweep of an arm, the steward invites him upstairs. The staff is clearing the table now, he says. Tonight’s address is soon to begin.
A muffled catlike yowl issues from Crivano’s empty stomach. I see, he says. If there is any way I might be granted access to whatever esculents remain, I’d be grateful. I’m afraid unforeseen circumstances prevented me from taking a meal prior to—
Of course, the steward says as they emerge onto the piano nobile. I’m sure we can make some arrangement. Forgive me, dottore, but may I ask your name?
Crivano, Crivano says. Vettor Crivano.
The man snaps to a halt, clears his throat, inhales deeply, and his stentorian voice echoes from the beamed ceiling. Gentlemen! he says. Dottore Vettor Crivano!
There are nearly two dozen men in the great hall, divided into shifting groups of twos and threes and fours. A few look his way and nod. Crivano sees nobles and citizens, lawyers and physicians, scholars and friars; he overhears discussions in German, French, English, Latin, and the language of court, along with the Republic’s own tongue. Under the hum of voices he can hear a soft chime of plucked strings, but his sight finds no players. Neither does it locate Dottore de Nis.