第19章 The Fire

They should have seen it coming. They had seen it in every threat, every broken lock, every word scrawled on the wall. And still, when the fire came, it took them by the throat. It started in the old room, where the furnace had been burning all day for the final firing of the chandelier. Beppe smelled it first, the wrong sweet smell of oil where oil should not be, and by the time he raised the alarm the stairwell was full of smoke and the hidden workshop was a furnace of its own. Isabella was at her apartment, two streets away, when Filippo's call came. She ran through the night in her bare feet, over the bridge, through the alley, and the sky above the factory was orange. She had never run so fast in her life. Her feet found the cobbles and the bridges and the alleys without her, and her lungs burned, and all she could think was that the fire had taken the old room, and the old room was where Marco would be. He would not run. He would stand against the flames with a crowbar until the building came down on him, because that was the kind of man he was, the kind who stayed. The workshop was already lost. The flames had taken the racks and the molds and the years of work in the cooling room, and they were reaching for the old furnace where the chandelier hung in its heat, the sunset she had made, the whole of her grandfather's eleven years and her own, about to be swallowed. Marco was at the door of the old room, forcing it against the fire with a crowbar, his face black with soot. "It's still in there," he shouted over the roar. "The chandelier. The furnace is still holding, but if the heat reaches it..." "Marco, you can't." "Stay back." He wrenched the door open and the fire breathed out at him, and she saw him brace against it, and she knew in that instant, with a certainty that stopped her heart, that he was going to die in there. She went in after him. The heat was a wall. The smoke was a hand around her throat. She found him by the furnace, coughing, trying to reach the chains that held the chandelier, and she grabbed his arm and pulled, and he turned and saw her and for one terrible second his eyes were full of fury and fear. "Get out," he said. "Get out, Isabella." "Not without you." The chandelier came down in a crash of glass, the ruby shattering against the stone, and the sound of it was the sound of her heart breaking. But Marco was alive, and he was coming toward her, and the fire was all around them, and they ran. They came out into the yard and kept running until the wall of heat fell away, and then they stood in the cold, hands on knees, coughing black into the grass. Marco's face was a mask of soot, and his eyes were wild. "You came in there," he said. "You came in after me. What were you thinking, Isabella. What were you thinking." And then he pulled her against him, hard, and held her so tightly she could not breathe, and she did not want to breathe. She wanted to stay exactly there, in the cold, with his heart hammering against hers. They came out together into the yard, into the cold night, and the fire crews were arriving, and the old workshop burned behind them with a roar like the sea. Isabella sank to her knees in the mud, coughing, shaking, and Marco held her, and neither of them could speak. The fire burned through the night. By dawn it was out, and the factory stood blackened and gutted, the old furnace cracked open like an egg, the workshop a hollow shell. The chandelier was gone. The ruby discs were gone. The years of work were ashes, and the note was still due at the end of the year. But the notebook was safe. It had been in her apartment all along. And in the yard, under the first gray light, the fire marshal found a can of accelerant with the mark of Serra's company painted on the side, and a witness: Filippo, who had seen a man in a dark coat leave the yard at midnight, a man he had seen before, standing at the end of an alley, watching. They arrested Luca Serra that afternoon. He denied everything, and the lawyers did what lawyers do, but the can was real, and Filippo's voice did not shake when he told the police what he had seen, and the injunction against the exhibition collapsed like the walls of the old room. They released him on bail the same day, because he was rich and the evidence was circumstantial and that was how these things worked, and Isabella understood that the war was not over. But the injunction had fallen, and the foundation had called to confirm that the exhibition would open as planned, and the men of the island had begun to gather in the yard with hammers and saws and the quiet, furious goodwill of people who had been told their city was dying and had decided otherwise. Isabella stood in the ashes of the workshop with Marco beside her, and she was crying, and she did not care. "It's gone," she said. "Everything we made. Everything he made. It's all gone." Marco took her face in his soot-stained hands. "No," he said. "It's not gone. The formula is in your apartment. The furnace can be rebuilt. The glass can be made again. And you're alive, and I'm alive, and we're standing here in the middle of the ashes, and that means we won." "I love you," she said. "I love you," he said. "And we are going to rebuild this place so high that the whole of Venice will see it from the lagoon. Your grandfather will see it. She looked at the ruined workshop and thought of the green ledger, the hidden room, the letter in her grandfather's careful hand. She thought of all the men who had kept this place alive across the years, and she understood at last that she was not standing in the ashes of a failure. She was standing on the first ground of a beginning, the way every furnace in Venice had begun, in fire and loss and the stubborn refusal to be finished." The sun rose over the ruined factory, and two people stood in the ashes and held each other, and it was not an ending. It was the beginning. ---