The Mirror Thief (73 page)

Who?

The linkboy. The messenger.

Perina relaxes her grip on his hand. Her expression is baffled, exasperated. What curtain? she says.

Over her shoulder, the twisting street that leads to the campiello has gone entirely black at its center. As if the night itself has gathered there, clotted like a wound. Crivano looks up from Perina’s face. Merciful Christ, he whispers.

Listen, dottore. We must—

Crivano drops his stick, seizes Perina by the collar, and pulls her against his chest. She lets out a startled squeak as her face strikes his ribs. His fingers scurry along the fabric of his robe until they find the slit, then search inside for the smooth grip of the snaplock pistol. He’s vaguely aware of the sound of his own chattering teeth.

Already the fiend is almost upon them, gliding with the silent speed of a diving owl. It seems to hang on the air, not to move at all. As if the space between it and them is simply vanishing, shrinking like the foot of a snail. Crivano’s hand has found the pistol. As he draws it, the cock catches the fabric of his robe. The fabric rips.

Perina pushes away from him; he claps his hand on the base of her fuzzed skull and pulls her back with a thump. The pistol is free. He thrusts out his arm. The demon is yards away now. Its ash wand held high. Smoke streaming from its beak. Perina turns her head to protect her mashed nose, and Crivano moves his left palm over her exposed ear. Then he wrenches back the cock—opening a bloody furrow across his thumb’s first joint—and pulls the trigger.

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.

Two packed charter buses are unloading in the porte-cochère as Curtis enters the lobby of his hotel: 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—

—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.

Outside, Curtis climbs into the first idling taxi. It’s another Fortune Cab, black and white and magenta, and Curtis wonders if it’ll be the same cabbie who took him to the lake this morning. But when he sits down and sees the eyes in the rearview mirror, they’re Saad’s. Saad? Curtis says.

I’m sorry?

It’s not Saad: this guy is younger, less relaxed, not Arabic. Bangladeshi, maybe. But the white hair is the same, and the wrinkles. Can you take me to the Quicksilver, please? Curtis says.

In Henderson?

No, Curtis says. In the hills east of here, the edge of the valley. It’s a new place. A few blocks off North Hollywood, above the Mormon Tem—

Yes, the guy says. Now I know. Thank you.

He makes good time to the freeway and Lake Mead Boulevard, using the same route Saad took. He doesn’t try to make conversation, and Curtis appreciates that. In the fast-failing light, Curtis opens
The Mirror Thief
one last time, wanting to read a little more before Stanley takes it back. Curtis isn’t thrilled about how things have gone out here, but he figures at this point he ought to be satisfied. He’s not satisfied, though. Not even close. Maybe once he sees Stanley he will be.

As Curtis reads, he tries to imagine finding the book the way Stanley found it, to guess what strange pull it could have exerted on a fifteen-year-old Brooklyn kid with a dead father and a crazy mother and a fifth-grade education. Curtis can’t fathom it. He thinks of his dad’s stories about growing up in Shaw in the Fifties, then of his own fifteenth year—what it felt like, what went on in his head—but he can barely recall, and the memories suggest no new route into the book. Instead Curtis just winds up thinking about Jay Leno: how friendly and cheerful he seemed. How that friendliness and cheer seemed to close him off like a stone wall, and how that wall could have been hiding anything. Or nothing. He thinks about the conventioneers performing for each other in the hotel lobby, and of the cocktail
waitresses performing for the well-heeled grinds in the Oculus Lounge. He thinks about the bartender at New York with the Staten Island accent, and about Saad
—you do this rap for all your fares
?—and about Argos’s blanked-out features, shifting in the hot light off the lake surface. He thinks of himself in high school, practicing his game-face in his grandparents’ bathroom mirror. Trying to be convincing. Trying to convince himself.

A couple of UNLV co-eds dressed as leprechauns are stationed between the Quicksilver’s riverstone columns; they grin and wave as Curtis’s cab pulls up, bend to pin plastic shamrocks to the cardigans of wheelchair-bound gamblers. Curtis pays his cabbie, steps onto the rubbery sidewalk. At the valley’s opposite edge, Mount Charleston is a blue shadow on the purple dusk. The setting sun lights its snowcap like a brand.

Welcome to the Quicksilver! one of the leprechauns says. Need some luck?

No thanks, Curtis says. I’m not playing tonight.

The PA in the lobby has swapped its New Age flutes and rainsticks for New Age bodhráns and uilleann pipes. The kid behind the counter wears a green plastic bowler hat, keeps himself busy by adding links to a six-foot paperclip chain. Hello, Curtis says. I’m Curtis Stone. Walter Kagami is holding a room for me.

The kid hands over a keycard in a small paper envelope. Top floor, he says. First door on the right. It’s a suite.

The elevators are on the far side of the gaming floor. There’s not much traffic at the tables or the slots, but what traffic there is moves awfully slowly, and Curtis doesn’t feel like navigating it. He tracks the right-hand wall to the bow windows that overlook the sunken courtyard, then follows them across the length of the casino. Lights are coming on below: in the palmtrees, under the recirculating fountain and the waterfall. The guineafowl that he saw last time are not to be found—gone wherever they go at night—but a peacock has climbed atop one of the stone picnic tables, and as Curtis passes, he spreads and shakes his tailfeathers into an oscillating iridescent screen.