Chapter 15 The Sabotage

They woke to a window broken and the smell of destruction in the air. Beppe found them at dawn, his face gray. The cooling room was a ruin. Racks had been pulled over, and the best of the workshop's finished pieces lay in shards across the stone floor, a harvest of broken color, blue and gold and green glittering like scattered jewelry. On the wall, in letters painted with something dark and tarry, a message: "Leave Venice, Signorina." Isabella stood in the middle of it and felt the world go very quiet. Marco moved past her, checking the furnace first, and his face went tight. "They loosened the gas valve," he said. "Whoever did this knew exactly where it was and what it would do. If Beppe hadn't come down early, this place would have gone up like a torch." "Signore," Filippo called from the door, and his voice cracked. "The old room. The door is open." They ran. The hidden door stood ajar, and for one terrible moment Isabella thought everything was gone. But the racks were intact, the discs untouched, the notebook still on the desk where she had left it. Whoever had come down the stairs had stopped at the doorway and turned back. The only thing missing was the photograph of the three men. "They took Gianni," Marco said. "They came for proof, not glass." "Or they came to see if the secret was real," Beppe said from the stairs. He was old and shaken, but his eyes were hard. "This is how they worked before your grandfather, signorina. Threats, then more threats, then a fire that looks like an accident. Emilio survived two of those fires. He was lucky. We may not be. The police came that afternoon and took statements and photographs, and the officer in charge, a tired man named Fontana, told her what she already suspected. "This has the shape of a warning, Signorina. They break what they can and leave a message for what they can't. If you know who might want to frighten you, it would help us to know." Isabella looked at the shards of blue and gold on the floor and thought of Serra's flat, patient eyes. "I know," she said. "And I'm not leaving."" "The first fire was in the winter of '89," Beppe said, settling onto an upturned crate. "A shipment of wood in the yard, soaked in oil, burning by dawn. Emilio put it out himself with the canal water and never spoke of it again. The second was two years later, after he refused the consortium's offer. That one took the roof of the drying room, and we rebuilt it. He stood in the ashes and said they would keep trying, because they thought the fire would teach him fear. It only taught him which men to trust. He was right about both." That evening, with the workshop swept and the message scrubbed from the wall, Marco told her the truth about the night Emilio died. He had been in Murano, delivering a commission, and the fog had kept him late. When he came back across the lagoon, past midnight, there had been a light in the yard and a car idling by the canal. Emilio was in his chair in the office, his glasses still on, a book open in his lap. The doctor said his heart had simply stopped. "Serra was there," Marco said. "He said he had come to check on an old friend, that he found him like that and called for help. He was very calm. He was very helpful. He stayed until the police came and then he left, and I have never in my life been so certain that a man was lying." "You never told anyone." "I told the doctor. He said an old man with a bad heart can die of a loud noise, a bad dream, a surprise. He said there was no way to prove otherwise." Marco's hands were shaking, and she saw for the first time how young he looked under the weariness. "I have carried it for two years, Isabella. I have carried the knowing and the not-knowing, and I have carried the guilt that I was not here when he needed me." She took his hands and held them until they were still. "It wasn't your fault." "Then why do I feel like I buried him twice? Once in the ground and once in my own silence?" She could not answer that. She could only hold him, there in the dark workshop, while the furnace muttered in its sleep. And when he kissed her, it was different from the kisses of the past weeks, desperate and honest and full of grief and love all tangled together. "I'm not leaving," she said against his mouth. "Not tomorrow, not when the note comes due, not ever. He gave me this place, and he gave me you, and I'm going to keep both." "We could take the notebook to the police," he said. "The formula is Emilio's. Serra has no claim." "And then he walks away free, and the factory still owes him money, and Gianni's photograph is in his pocket. No." She shook her head. "We're not hiding. We're making something. He can threaten and he can break glass, but he cannot break what we're building." They moved the notebook and the best of the ruby discs to her apartment that night, wrapped in cloth and carried through the streets like a child. She did not sleep well, but she slept, and that felt like a victory of its own. In the morning the message was gone from the wall, the broken glass was swept, and the workshop smelled of soap and ash and the stubborn sweetness of the furnace, which was already burning again, as if the night had never happened. And when the door was locked and the windows checked and the city dark, Isabella lay awake beside Marco in her narrow bed, listening to his breathing, and she did not feel afraid. She felt, for the first time in her life, exactly where she was supposed to be. In the darkness she made a plan, the way her grandfather must have planned in the small hours of his own long war. The chandelier would be finished by Christmas. It would be shown at the foundation, and it would be sold for what it was worth, and the note would be paid, and Serra would watch his twenty-year wait come to nothing. She had never been a fighter. She had been an artist, which the world had taught her was the same as being a guest. But she had stopped being a guest the moment she had chosen to stay, and the choice felt, in the dark, like armor. ---