第48章 The Thirteenth Vase

They returned to Venice at dusk, and the city was waiting for them with a letter. It was not from the palace and it was not from Rosalba. It was from the office of the Royal Glassworks, and it was signed by Friedrich von Altdorf, and it said, in the smooth polished language of a man who has spent his life choosing which names belong on which plinths, that in light of the recent unveiling and the questions surrounding certain pieces in the royal collection, the Director had ordered a full provenance audit of the twenty-four vases and of all works currently attributed to the Moretti collective, past and present. "Isabella," Marco said, "he is trying to take the year back." "Yes," she said. "He is. And the only way to stop him is to give him something he cannot audit." She looked at the letter, and then she looked at the pomegranate on her workbench, and then she said, "The thirteenth vase is in the palace." "How do you know?" "Because Rosalba told me it was taken by the man my grandfather trusted most, and because my grandfather only trusted one man enough to let him into the hidden workshop, and because that man — his brother, Matteo Moretti — went to the palace the year our grandfather died the first time, and never came back." She stood. "It has been in the palace for nineteen years, Marco. Probably on a pedestal, probably under a name that is not ours. And Altdorf's audit is not about the twenty-four. It is about finding the thirteenth before I do, so that the second kingdom can be given a false name too." The palace allowed her in because she asked, and because the palace, after the unveiling, had learned that it could not keep the Moretti name out of its halls. She did not go to the great hall. She asked, instead, for the private curator of the royal collection, the woman who had kept the palace's glass for twenty years, a name she had been given in the hidden workshop, carved beside her grandfather's drawing like a second signature: Elena Moretti. The curator's office was small and white and filled with light, and the woman who rose from behind the desk was fifty, with grey-streaked dark hair and a face that had spent a lifetime learning to show nothing. She looked at Isabella for a long moment. Then she said, "You have his hands." "You know who I am," Isabella said. "I know whose name you carry. I have been carrying it too, in a different way, for twenty years." Elena Moretti gestured to a chair. "Sit down, cousin. You have found the hidden workshop, or you would not know to look for me, and if you have found the hidden workshop, you have found the empty plinth, and if you have found the empty plinth, you have come to ask me what happened to the thirteenth vase." "Is it here?" Isabella asked. "It is here," Elena said. "It has always been here. My grandfather — your grandfather's brother, Matteo — brought it to the palace in the year Emilio died, and he was not stealing it, Signorina. He was hiding it." She leaned forward, and her face, for the first time, showed something. "The thirteenth vase is the last thing my grandfather's brother ever made, and Matteo believed — he was not always right, but he believed — that the palace was the only place the court could never take it. He trusted the wrong building, cousin. The palace is not a safe. It is a showcase. And for nineteen years I have been the one who dusts it, and the one who keeps others from reading its signature, and the one who has been waiting for the day when someone with the Moretti hands would come to ask," she said, "not what it is worth, but what it is for." Isabella stood very still. "Can I see it?" "I can do better," Elena said. She opened a drawer in her desk and took out a photograph — small, worn, the kind a curator keeps in a drawer for the same reason a maker keeps a mold: because it is the shape of something true. It showed a vase, tall and dark, a December that had never been made, standing in a shaft of light in an empty room. "I have been photographing it for twenty years, cousin. I could not protect it openly, so I have been protecting its image, so that if it were ever taken — if a false name were ever put beside it, the way a false name was put beside Otto Brandt's work — there would be a record of what it was before the court got its hands on it." She slid the photograph across the desk. "The man who took the twelve from your grandfather in 2006 was Friedrich von Altdorf. But there was a man before Altdorf, the man who taught him how to take, and that man is still alive, and that man is the reason the thirteenth was hidden here in the first place. My grandfather was not keeping the vase safe from the court, cousin. He was keeping it safe from a man in the court — a man who has been waiting nineteen years for the second kingdom to be found, so that he can take its last piece whole." Elena's voice had dropped to a whisper. "His name is not on the palace rolls anymore. He has been retired for years, and the King's father trusted him with everything, and he still walks the corridors on the palace's business because no one has ever had the courage to tell him no. He ordered the first vases, cousin. The ones Emilio made before you were born, the ones that were stolen in 2006, the ones before the ones. He is the first taker. And the thirteenth —" she looked at the photograph, "— he has never held it. And he will never rest until he does." Somewhere beyond the white walls of the curator's office, in the deep corridors of a palace that had been built to display the truth and had spent four hundred years hiding it, the first taker was walking — a small, patient, polished man who had outlived two kings and one conscience, and who knew, with the absolute certainty of a man who has never once doubted that the world belongs to him, that the second kingdom was about to be found, and that its last vase was going to be his.