Valour and Vanity (25 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“Denaro? Pay the man.”

Evidently, Denaro managed their money even when not pretending to be a customs clerk. He pulled out a handful of coins and counted out seven to Gallo. He bowed again to each of the men, and then took his leave. They waited until the door to their room shut, and then waited again until they heard the front door close.

As soon as it did, Coppa cursed. “Now what? Do you think you can still pull off a Hausman? I mean, they know we’re here. I don’t even know how. I swear I avoided all of the spots that either of them frequent.”

“It is all right, Coppa. I think it is fairly clear that Gallo is not as steady a tumbler as we’d hoped.” Spada tapped the ground with his cane. “Well, Bastone? Do you think you can make a
Verre Obscurci
without either of the Vincents?”

The apprentice, whom she had known as Biasio, hesitated. “Yes?”

“If they don’t work, then he can at least fake it,” Coppa said. “We’ll be gone with the money before the Lombardy-Venetia buyers realize. Or simply blow town with their deposit.”

“Short-term profit, gentlemen, is not as valuable as a repeat customer,” Spada murmured. “That is why we are here. Coppa, any further thoughts on the location of the real spheres?”

Coppa shook his head. “None. And I am fairly certain that Querini was telling the truth, but we should perhaps have Bastone ask again when he goes to work with him. He knows him better.”

Vincent made a startled intake of air at the same time Jane did. The real spheres? If they did not have them, who did?

Denaro humphed. “More and more, I think it must have been Gallo who made the swap. They worked when we first got them.”

“Or they cracked in transit,” Bastone said.

“Whatever the case, Bastone will have to make us a new one before the bidders come.” Spada tipped his glass to the former apprentice.

“You don’t understand how hard these are to make. I barely understand his papers.”

Coppa narrowed his gaze. “But you watched them. That was the whole point.”

“The folds were so thin. I only know they were using cold because they cracked a sphere the first night. I mean, it’s like this…” His gaze went distant as he looked into the ether and reached for a fold. Bastone paused, gaze turning toward the window until he appeared to be looking directly at Jane. “Hullo … What’s that?”

Sixteen

Tarot and Puppetry

The moment it became apparent that Bastone saw the thread of glamour they had pushed into the room, Vincent cursed. Jane hauled backwards to pull the thread out of sight, but Vincent held it firm. In the room, Bastone rose to his feet.

“He will see it.” She tugged again, but Vincent’s hands were in front of hers, and the thread did not move.

“He already has, but right now it is just a curious thread in the window. If it twitches, he will know someone is watching.” Vincent slid his fingers into the thread and pried apart the two pieces. “Here, hold this side steady, but let it untwist. Then tie it off.”

“What are you doing?”

“Making it look like it is the remnant of an anchoring thread for a street illusion.” He took the other end and let it begin to untwist. Taking a deep breath, he looked at Jane. “Do not worry.” Then he ran, holding the thread, directly across the street.

To someone who did not understand the toll glamour could take, what he did might appear commonplace. To walk with glamour, even a single thread, was difficult. But this was a very long thread that had required two of them to support its length. And yet … he crossed the street, maintaining it by himself, and the end of the thread in the window did not move. Not at all.

As he moved, he fed the end he was holding back into the ether in a steady spool so that he was constantly changing the relationship of the thread to the ether, the thread to himself, and the thread to the yoke while keeping the end that stood in the window absolutely steady.

And he did all this while running.

He did this while fatigued from having spent the past half hour spooling out glamour.

Jane was therefore dismayed, but not surprised, when he attained the other side of the street, tied off the glamour, and sagged against the wall. Leaning against it, he turned and gave Jane a merry wave, but he was clearly fatigued. His breath puffed into the cool November air in great jets of steam. They rose into the air like a signal fire.

Vincent frowned and closed his mouth, curving his hands over his nose to mask some of the steam.

Jane tied her end of the glamour off, making sure not to let it move. The thread had uncoiled so that it no longer carried images from the palazzo. She looked up at the window without the benefit of the
lointaine vision
and was alarmed to see Bastone standing there. She shrank back, before remembering that she stood in a
Sphère Obscurcie.
She glanced across the road to see if Vincent’s breath might be visible from the window, but he was no longer standing against the wall.

For a moment, Jane thought that he had cast a
Sphère
as well, before understanding that he sat, sagged against the base of the wall. Her instinct almost carried her forward, but she checked her flight before she stepped out of the influence of the
Sphère
. Bastone still stood in the window looking out, and would see her if she crossed the street. Though her every instinct urged her toward Vincent, she also knew his limits—better than he did—and knew that nothing worse would come of this than him becoming a little damp from the rain and the puddled water on the street. Still, it took an effort to steel her resolve and step back. She slid out of the
Sphère
and behind the column.

As she did, the puppet player was emerging from his booth. Signor Zancani motioned her back. “I will tend to him. Lest they see.”

Biting the inside of her lip, Jane waited behind the pillar. It chafed to do nothing, but the puppet player was quite correct. The rain was a mere drizzle, and the overcast sky left more than enough light to see by, so she would be visible if she crossed the street now. Zancani darted across as though running for the door of the building next to the palazzo to escape the rain, but as soon as he was against the wall, and could trust it to hide him, he doubled back to Vincent.

Her husband was already stirring. With immeasurable relief, Jane watched Vincent accept a hand from the puppet player. The men made their way up the street, staying close by the wall. As they walked, Vincent seemed to recover his strength and rely less on the puppet player to steady him.

Jane forced her attention away from them and back to the window. Bastone was speaking to someone in the room, and seemed to have lost interest in the glamour. Had he been able to discern the spiral before they got it untwisted? It was similar enough to a
bouclé torsadée
that he might have recognised that someone was spying on them.

Signor Zancani paused at the corner and said something to Vincent. Her husband nodded and glanced at Jane, pointing at the puppet booth. She nodded in return as the men turned the corner away from her, guessing that they would circle through the streets to return to the booth and meet her there. Jane reached into the ether and undid the
Sphère Obscurcie
, taking care that the knot did not fray and call attention to itself. Keeping to the shadows deep under the colonnade, Jane made her way to the puppet booth and waited by it.

She divided her attention between the palazzo and the street. None of the men were visible in the window now, but she was as worried about the door, in case any of them should depart. More than that, her concern was for Vincent. In spite of her consciousness that his dizziness had been largely because he had tried to quiet his breathing after such an exertion, she would not rest easy until he was with her again.

It took some five minutes for Vincent and Signor Zancani to reappear at the far end of the colonnade. They had their heads close together as they walked, and were deep in conversation. At first, Jane caught only scattered words: “… need more than…” and “… you certain?”

As they reached the booth, Zancani nodded. “Of course.” He pulled aside the brightly striped fabric of the back and motioned them inside. “It is not as elegant as your method of hiding, but the screen offers a good view of the street.”

Jane followed Vincent into the little booth. It was dimmer than the exterior, though not so dark as she had expected. The gaily painted scenery had been done on a piece of thick netting. From the front, it showed a painting of a street in Venice, but they could see through it with perfect ease.

A trunk stood under one wall with a small sewing kit and a puppet upon it. The devil from the show lay with its wooden head tilted to the side so that a burn on the cloth body was visible. “Flash-paper accident,” Zancani said, and scooped up the puppet and the kit and tucked them inside the trunk. He gestured to it. “Please, Signora.”

“Thank you.”

“And you, Vincent.” The puppet player pointed to the trunk. “I know I said that you would make more money if you fainted, but I meant for an audience.”

Vincent chuckled and seated himself beside Jane. “Zancani has agreed to help us.”

“Help us do what?”

Vincent looked confused for a moment. “Regain our possessions, of course.”

“Have you a proposal for how to do that?”

Her husband nodded, a slow light building in his gaze. “I have been thinking … They obviously do not have the wrong glass spheres. I think the
Verre Obscurci
will not work because of the rain.”

“Ah.” Of course. It had taken Jane and Vincent some time to discover that the
Verre
required full daylight to work. It was only chance, really, that led to their first trial being outside on a sunny day, in such a way that made their use clear. If Sanut—if Spada had watched their experiments with the glass sphere at Ca’ Sanuto and not understood that they required sun, then of course she could well imagine how it might seem that the glass had broken in transit. “How were you thinking to use this information? Shall we tell the
capo di polizia
or write to Mr. Hobhouse? We have names for them now, at least: Coppa, Bastone, Spada, and—”

“Denaro?” The puppet player shook his head. “Those aren’t names. Those are the suits in the tarot deck.”

“The what?”

Signor Zancani crouched by a small bag resting against the wall of the booth and pulled out a rectangular bundle wrapped in cloth. Unfolding the cloth, he exposed an elegant deck of cards. “I’m not above doing some fortune-telling from time to time, if that is what the audience wants. Here.” He went through the cards and pulled out four. “Wands, Swords, Coins, and Cups.”

Snorting, Vincent shook his head. “They are titles. Wands, or Bastone … for Biasio, who is clearly their glamourist.”

“The pirate captain … Coppa, Cups.” Jane leaned her head back, remembering the little clerk in the port office. “Coins. Denaro is the clerk.”

“And Sanuto, their leader … Spada, Swords. That puts his sword cane in a new light, eh?” Vincent ran his hand through his hair. “Well … in any event, I have in mind something more personal than that.”

The rain dripping on the street gave a false sense of tranquillity inside the close confines of the puppet booth. Jane tapped her finger against her knee, considering Vincent’s words. “You are thinking to beat Spada at his own game.”

“Muse. For the past three months, I have thought of nothing else.”

Jane slipped her hand into his. The prospect of regaining their possessions, of beating Spada, was deeply appealing, but the memory of how easily they had been fooled stayed with her. More precisely, the part that she had played in delivering them to him by being so trusting and not looking beyond the surface of any action. “As have I, but he is well funded and we are without resources. Then, too, he has a
polizia
in his employ. Clearly, he is prepared for us—look at the way in which Gallo behaved. The discovery might be something he had planned. I cannot help but think of how easy it was to spy on them and wonder if we are somehow playing into their hands again.”

Vincent drew his head back and opened his mouth as though to retort. Then he closed it and shook his head, glancing toward Zancani. “You understand.”

The puppet player raised his hands and took a step backwards. “Do not ask me to intervene. I will be outside.” He ducked under the curtain before either could say anything. Jane was just as glad to see him go, though she knew he could hear them well enough. She paused and let her vision expand to her second sight, looking for any sign that someone was listening with less worldly means, but she saw no threads of glamour.

Running his hand through his hair, Vincent wet his lips. “Jane … We have an advantage, in that they cannot make the spheres work.”

“So we overheard.”

“But what reason would they have had to return to Murano? If their plan is to coax me into helping them resolve this, then they need me because the spheres do not work. If the spheres do work, then why would they need me?”

“Why did the pirates need to attack our ship? We did not understand the real reasons for that at the time, either.”

He waved that aside. “It is not the same.”

“We do not know that. All we know for certain is that Spada and his men are here. And how do we know that? Because you just happened to see one of them go to Querini’s. Might that not have been their plan?”

“If he had passed through the square where I perform, yes. Absolutely, yes.” Vincent’s excitement drove him to stand, but there was nowhere for him to pace in the small booth. “But I was shopping—shopping at a
grocer’s
. How could they possibly have expected me to be doing that?”

“A child watching the door of our apartment could easily report where you were going. Or perhaps the bait was intended for me.”

Vincent shook his head firmly. “At a time when you are always at the convent? No. Look at the palazzo. I think they have been here for some days already. And who knows how long they will remain? We must act, and act quickly.”