The True Adventures of Nicolo Zen (10 page)

“How can I thank you?” I said as Bartolomeo shook my hand.

“You just did. I only wish I could do more for you.”

“You have never heard of Massimo the Magnificent?” the woman said. “Are you not a Venetian?”

A swarthy, gray-haired woman with cold eyes and a clackety voice, she was the landlady of the late Signor Agnetti, the glovemaker who had given my father the clarinet that, to date, had brought me both good and bad luck. Agnetti had been one of six tenants who rented an apartment in the brown building the woman owned on the Calle del Forno, a sleepy side street in the Giudecca. We were standing outside her door beneath a low sky. A storm was approaching from the east. The first flakes of snow were falling.

“I am from Mazzorbo,” I said.

“That explains it. I thought only geese and woodcocks lived there. And mosquitoes,” she added with a smirk.

I didn’t like this woman, but I held my tongue.

“Massimo is the greatest magician in Venice, maybe all of Europe,” she went on. “I saw him myself at the Teatro dei Miracoli. Agnetti, may he rest in peace, was Massimo’s cousin. They could not have been less alike. Massimo performs for kings and queens; Agnetti was a shopkeeper. He had no wife, no children, and no friends I ever saw.”

“When did he die?” I said.

“Last November. He was three months behind in his rent.
His shop had been shuttered. He was skin and bones, coughing through the night. Keeping his neighbors awake. The day he died, I had gone to the constable to obtain an eviction notice.” She shrugged. “Instead, they took away his body and confiscated what possessions he had left. He and Massimo did not get along. How could they have?” she added contemptuously.

I realized with some excitement that this Massimo was the cousin my father had told me about, who had given Agnetti my clarinet. It made sense that such an extraordinary instrument could be traced back to a magician.

“May I ask you where Massimo lives, signora?”

“Not many people know. But I do. My cousin’s husband is an undertaker in San Polo. His place of business is across the street from a cobbler who is said to be Massimo’s gatekeeper. Only the cobbler can provide outsiders with access to the magician’s house.”

“On what street can I find this cobbler?”

She curled her lip, which seemed to be her way of smiling. “That you’ll have to find out for yourself. I’ve given you enough information.”

I saw there was no point in pressing her further.

“Who are you, anyway,” she said, narrowing her eyes, “and why are you so interested in Agnetti?”

“My father knew him. I wanted to meet him.”

“I can’t imagine why,” she said, and with that turned her back on me and entered her house.

I couldn’t have imagined, either, before Signora Botello, Bartolomeo’s sister, put the idea in my head. With her sons gone, I believe she was happy to have a boy under her roof. Giving me
a note for the owner, she sent me to the shop where she used to purchase her sons’ clothes, and I was soon outfitted with a topcoat, trousers, three shirts, boots, and a felt hat. At my request, she cropped my hair short; my days of wearing it long enough to suit either sex were over. When she was half done, I asked her to cut off another couple of inches, so that it barely flared out from the sides of my hat. On my second night at her house, Signora Botello cooked me a fine meal of fried mullets and rice, and afterward asked me about my ill-fated tenure at the Ospedale. She did not condemn me for posing as a girl; in fact, she told me I should be proud I nearly got away with my ruse.

“And you were promoted to Prima Clarinetto!” she said with delight.

But when I told her the story of Aldo and the wine cellar, her mood darkened. “Don’t worry about your friends,” she said. “Bartolomeo will do all he can.”

As it turned out, he did more than I expected. Several hours after Bartolomeo met with the Master, Aldo was expelled from the Ospedale. The Master was furious with Aldo, as much for his actions as the fact that he refused to divulge who his confederates might be. The Master forbade him ever to set foot in the Ospedale again. But because Aldo was blind, and ostensibly helpless in the world, the Master secured him a place in the boys’ orphanage of San Benedicto at the eastern end of the Castello, near an iron foundry where many of the boys were sent to work. The orphanage was one of those stark, dark establishments I had dreaded. For Aldo it was surely an infernal transition: after having had the run of the Ospedale, his own room, and the powers—much abused—of a minor functionary, he was now one of two
hundred members of a rough-and-tumble population in gloomy wards, a newcomer with no status or protection. Still, I did not underestimate his ability to overcome such obstacles, ruthless and amoral as he was. And when I thought of Adriana and Julietta, any sympathy I might have had for him evaporated.

Luca and Marta evidently informed the Master that I had run away. They claimed to be baffled as to why, and they did not inform him of my true identity, which surely would have cost them their jobs. When Bartolomeo met with the Master, he did not disclose my secret—which he knew could only further damage my reputation—but managed to implicate Aldo without mentioning my own visit to the wine cellar. The fact that Aldo had refrained from telling the Master my true identity, and thus getting Luca and Marta in trouble, convinced Bartolomeo that Aldo must be in cahoots with one or both of them. Aldo either feared retribution from them or hoped to serve them again.

Puffing his pipe at his sister’s table, Bartolomeo said, “When the Master asked me if your disappearance could be connected to Aldo’s corruption, I lied and said no. As for your friend Julietta, I haven’t been able to find out anything. But I believe that Adriana and the other girls are safe for now. After what’s happened, Luca and Marta won’t dare to stir things up again.”

After dinner, Signora Botello asked if I would play the clarinet for her. After all she’d done for me, I was happy to oblige her. She and Bartolomeo listened to me run through a portion of the Master’s Sonata no. 6. I enjoyed playing for the two of them in that warm, quiet room. When I was finished, I saw the surprise in their faces.

“My god,” Signora Botello said, “no wonder Signor Vivaldi made you a soloist. You could perform at San Angelo, or anywhere else.”

“She’s right,” Bartolomeo agreed. “You do not need to be at the Ospedale to put your gift to use. There are many orchestras and chamber groups that would welcome you.”

“You really think so?”

“I’m positive. Vivaldi heard it immediately. You said he told you so at your audition. Let me think about this.”

This was the reason I sought out Signor Agnetti the following day: to discover anything I could about my clarinet, especially the origin of its powers and their true nature. If I was going to pursue the sort of career Bartolomeo suggested—which, I confess, felt like a wild fantasy—I needed to know if I could rely on my clarinet. With Agnetti gone, and the source of the clarinet revealed, I had an even better chance of acquiring this information.

I took a traghetto across the canal from the Giudecca to the Zattere and then followed the increasingly dense, zigzagging alleys into San Polo. By then, the snow was falling fast, disappearing into the canals and concealing the cobblestones beneath a shimmering carpet.

It took me two hours to find four funeral parlors, and none had a cobbler across the street. I thought my chances were better this way because I was sure there would be more cobblers than morticians in San Polo. I was wrong. Exasperated and cold, despite my new coat and boots, when I asked two porters carrying a table across the Campo San Boldo where I could find a cobbler, they directed me to an address, not five minutes’ distance, on the
Calle Filosi. The cobbler’s name was Gamba, and I was delighted to see that his shop was directly across the street from a mortician’s parlor.

Signor Gamba was a thin, bespectacled man with rough, out-sized hands and a shiny bald head. Neatly hammering nails into the soles of a blue shoe, he paused to allow me to introduce myself.

“I was told,” I went on, “that you could direct me to the address of Massimo the Magnificent.”

He looked me up and down. “Who told you that?”

“The former landlady of Signor Massimo’s cousin, Benito Agnetti.”

“And how would she know anything about it?”

“She said a relative of hers is the mortician across the street.”

“Gandolfo?”

“I suppose so, sir. She didn’t mention his name.”

He thought about this. “And why would you want to see Massimo?”

This was the question I was waiting for. I took my clarinet out from inside my coat. “Massimo gave this clarinet to his cousin, who gave it to my father, who gave it to me. I need to ask him about it.”

“It was Massimo’s clarinet?”

“I believe so.”

“Wait here,” he said, putting down his hammer and disappearing through a curtain, into the back of the shop.

A moment later, he returned with a boy half my age who barely glanced at me before running out the door and down the street.

Gamba pointed to a worn bench behind me. “Sit there and keep silent,” he said, and began hammering nails into the soles of the other shoe.

After about twenty minutes the boy returned, breathless, nodded to Gamba, and went back through the curtain.

“Come here,” Gamba said. “I’m going to give you these directions only once, so pay attention. First, put on these blue shoes—they will fit you perfectly.”

“But my boots—”

“Put them in this bag and carry them with you. And don’t interrupt me again.”

I hesitated, then pulled off my boots and slipped on the shoes. They had white soles. They seemed weightless. And they did fit perfectly.

The cobbler gave me directions. “When you arrive,” he concluded, “give this to the footman.” He handed me a small medallion embossed with a lightning bolt on one side and a closed eyelid on the other. “And do not remove those shoes until you are told to.”

The address to which the cobbler directed me was in a courtyard off the Ramo Regina, a dead-end alley overlooking the Rio di San Cassiano, an unusually blue, almost turquoise, canal that connected the Grand Canal and the Rio della Madonnetta. I knew this courtyard was not far from the cobbler’s shop, yet it took me an inordinate amount of time to reach it. I followed streets and alleys that, once entered, seemed to extend themselves with each step I took. The more I hurried my pace, the longer the streets grew. In fact, after turning off the Calle della Chiesa, putting the cobbler’s shop behind me, I had the strange sensation that these streets and everything on them—houses, shops, even the pedestrians I encountered, faceless in the falling snow—had materialized only seconds before I appeared. As if none of it was any more permanent than the thick mist rising off the canal. The snow stung my cheeks, and I felt light-headed, with a cold pit in my stomach. Thinking it might offer me relief, I was tempted to take off the blue shoes and put on my boots. But I remembered the cobbler’s warning. Venice is a labyrinth, where citizens as well as visitors can lose their way; but I seemed to have entered a more complex maze within the larger maze—at the center of the city, yet apart from it, so murky it was as if I were wandering inside someone else’s dream.

Finally I was so dizzy that I stopped and leaned against a
wall and closed my eyes. I counted to twenty, to calm myself, but when I opened my eyes again, I became even more disoriented: no longer leaning against the wall, I found myself at my destination, a courtyard at the end of the Ramo Regina. There were four small houses on the ramo, then the courtyard, surrounded by a high wall with an iron gate. On a brass plaque beside the gate was the street number the cobbler had given me. Only one thing was missing: the house to which the courtyard should have been attached!

I could see the leveled rectangular plot where a house ought to stand, and the bushes that would have flanked it, and even the outline for a path from the courtyard to the front door. But no house. There was only a small park on the far side of the courtyard. At its center, there was a marble bench and a white statue. As I walked across the courtyard, I saw that the statue was a tall, mustached, long-haired man in a cape and boots. He was standing atop a lion and a leopard, one foot on each, brandishing a sword. His blank eyes were turned to the sky. There were statues of lions all around Venice, for it was the symbol of the city, but I had never seen one like this. I circled the statue twice before sitting down on the bench. The afternoon had flown by. Dusk was coming on, and though the snow was falling harder than ever, the gray clouds parted suddenly for a ray of orange light that turned the Rio di San Cassiano into molten lava and the brick walls and paving stones of the ramo into bars of gold. Everything became so bright that I had to cover my eyes, and it was only then, through the chinks between my fingers, that I saw the house to which the park and courtyard belonged.

It was a large white house, four stories with a white-tiled roof
and tall windows with white shutters. In fact, every aspect of the house—doors, chimneys, cornices, metal fixtures—was white, including the limestone path to the front door.