Chapter 28 The Waterman

Nico was not a tall man, and he looked exactly like the water he worked in—grey, patient, and older than he had any right to be. He sat on the edge of his boat under the Rialto with a net across his knees, mending it with the slow, certain hands of a man who had spent sixty years pulling the city's secrets out of the lagoon, and when Tommaso spoke his name he looked up without surprise, as if he had been expecting them for years. "Master Dolfin," he said. "You bring company." "I bring the Moretti," Tommaso said. "The granddaughter. The one who rebuilt the furnace." Nico looked at Isabella for a long moment, and then he set down the net and crossed himself, quickly, the way Beppe had crossed himself at the sight of the sealed door. "I knew your grandfather," he said. "He paid me once, years ago, to find a mold that had gone into the water by accident. He paid me double because I found it. He said a man who values the lost things is a man who can be trusted." He looked down at his hands. "I hope that is still true." They sat on the edge of the boat, and Nico told them what he had seen. On the night of the fire, he had been working the lagoon late, as he always worked it, because the night was when the city threw away what it did not want. He had seen the orange bloom of the fire against the sky, and he had been pulling toward the island to help when a small boat had come out of the dark, from the direction of the factory, moving fast. "A man alone," he said. "Not young. Dressed in a dark coat. He stopped in the channel, just past the factory, and he did something strange. He lifted something heavy over the side and let it go. There was a splash, and then he was gone, back toward the city. I thought it was loot, the way men loot when a building burns. I thought he had taken something from the fire and lost his nerve and thrown it away." He had gone to the place afterward, when the fire crews were there and everyone's eyes were on the flames. He had dragged the bottom with his net and come up with three pieces of red glass, deep red, the color of a pomegranate in the heart of it, one of them the size of a man's arm. He had kept them wrapped in canvas at the bottom of his boat for a week, not knowing what to do with them, and then a man from Mestre had found him, a dealer named Sartori, who had heard that Nico had salvaged something from the night of the fire. "He paid me well," Nico said. "And he paid me to forget. I have been forgetting for a year. But forgetting is not the same as not knowing, and I have watched this city burn the things it loved before, and I have seen enough to know that the red glass in that canal did not fall there by accident." "Did you see his face?" Marco asked. "The man in the boat." Nico shook his head. "It was dark, and he was far, and I was watching the fire. But I have been on this water for sixty years, and I know the way a man moves when he has been on a boat all his life. This man was not a sailor. He moved the way a man moves who has spent his years at a bench, with his hands low and careful, the way a man carries a thing he is afraid to drop." He looked at Marco. "He moved the way you move, master. He was a glassblower." The words hung in the air over the water, heavy and strange. A glassblower, in a boat, dropping pieces of the destroyed chandelier into the canal on the night of the fire. Isabella thought of the dark coat she had seen at the end of the alley, of the figure that had watched her and Marco from the shadows, of the night Filippo had seen a man leave the yard at midnight. She had built the whole story around Serra. And now the water was telling her a different story, or a fuller one, and she did not know which. "Where do we find this Sartori?" she said. Nico wrote the name on a scrap of paper with a pencil that had no point left, and he handed it to her, and she held it the way you hold a thing that might burn you. "He is in Mestre," he said. "He has a shop on the quay, near the ferry. He buys and sells things that other men would rather not explain. If you ask him about the red glass, he will tell you where it came from, because he is a man who believes that everything has a price, and he has never met a truth he would not sell." Tommaso took the oars, and they rowed back across the lagoon in the long light of the afternoon, and Isabella sat in the stern with the paper in her hand and the fragment in its wooden case at her feet, thinking about the man in the boat, moving the way Marco moved, with the hands of a glassblower. In the evening, when the light had gone copper and the city was beginning to glitter, Marco and Isabella went out on the water alone, in a small sandolo that had been Beppe's when he was young, and they drifted under the bridges and said nothing. The city rose around them in the dusk, windows lighting one by one like a furnace being stoked, and Isabella lay back against the hull and looked up at the sky going violet, and the day's questions went quiet. "You're thinking about the man in the boat," Marco said. "I'm thinking about all of it," she said. "The fire, the fragment, the dealer in Mestre. And I'm thinking about how strange it is that the past keeps arriving, one piece at a time, the way a gather of glass comes together on the end of a pipe. You can't see what it will become until it's already hot." Marco was quiet for a long moment. "Emilio used to say that Venice keeps its history in the water because it is the only place where nothing can be thrown away for good. Everything comes back. Every lost thing, every secret, every piece of a story that someone tried to end." He reached across the boat and took her hand. "Whatever we find in Mestre, we find it together. That is the only rule that matters now." They drifted for another hour, and the stars came out over the lagoon, and Isabella held the paper with the dealer's name and felt the shape of the future forming in her hands, the way glass forms before you see what it will be. In the morning they went to Mestre. ---