The Glassblower of Murano - Marina Fiorato [38]
I believed what I said ... then. I went on believing it right up until the moment that he leaned over and kissed me. Hard stubble, soft mouth, and afire I had forgotten about.
They walked in silence through the empty streets. San Marco was deserted, a yawning space like a roofless cathedral. Only the crystal stars formed the crossribs and bosses overhead. The night was chill but Leonora burned. The pigeons now roosted but her thoughts flew.
With an impulse she could not explain she turned perfect cartwheels across the square, stars wheeling over her feet, hair sweeping the stones. She could hear Alessandro laughing as she span. She did not know the meaning of the kiss, but she knew what she was feeling.
It feels too much like joy, senseless joy.
CHAPTER 10
Rendezvous
Corradino stared into his double mirror with satisfaction. It hung, in pride of place, on the back wall of the Cantina Do Mori. He knew he had done good work - the surface was smooth as the lagoon on a spring day and the bevel was perfect - even his eye could see no flaw. He averted his gaze before it could meet itself and sat at the couch beneath his mirror to wait. Corradino had never met his own eyes in a mirror. He barely knew his own image. He always looked at the glass - his vision stopped at the surface and looked no deeper to peruse his own visage. Perhaps he feared what he may find there, or perhaps he had no interest in his own features, but only those of the glass. He never asked himself these questions.
He only knew that Signor Baccia, the proprietario of the Do Mori, would be pleased with this mirror. He wondered though, why he had been summoned again - the walls of the Cantina were now completely clothed in paintings or mirrors. Such opulence reflected the prosperity of the place, a thriving watering hole for two centuries now. Baccia no doubt had more money to spend, and was about to overdo it. Corradino winced - more mirror work would throw off the beautiful lucent balance of his unique double mirror, shining in its twin loveliness - like Castor and Pollux - a constellation of perfection. Part of Corradino's disgust was reserved for this new brew, coffee, that he was sampling as he waited. He had never really formed a taste for it.
It rots my guts. Give me a good goblet of Valpolicella any day.
At length Signor Baccia emerged from the back of the busy cafe. Rotund and richly dressed in the latest Frenchstyle chemise, he stopped to talk to a group of gaudy Venetian matrons who were participating - a little self consciously - in this latest of fashions.
Baccia looks a little strange today.
Normally the proprietario was affable, avuncular, jolly. Today he was all of those things, but seemed nervous, as if today his demeanor was little more than an act. A heavy man, he nonetheless sweated too copiously for the cool of the day, and cast darting glances from side to side, as if followed. Corradino wondered if he had got himself into some kind of trouble with The Ten, and was under the eyes of an agent. Corradino had no such doubts about himself. He had the relaxed air of someone who knew he was constantly being followed.
He had seen eyes staring at him from masked darkness for years now. The man leaning at the traghetto stop. The bonbon trader in the street who looked a little too hard at him. The courtesan on the Ponte delle Tette with a warm smile but eyes of flint. A thousand different guises in a thousand different places. Always discreet, but over the years Corradino had learned to identify them in a moment. Each time his eyes fleetingly met those of these spies, whether tall or short, male or female, he had a sick fancy that each pair belonged to the same agent - the dark phantom that had followed him to the fornace all those years ago.
The man that murdered my family.