The Teleportation Accident (43 page)

‘Turn back.’

‘Not yet.’

‘I told you to turn back, Frenchman.’

‘Or what?’ said Sauvage. ‘You’ll peck me to death with your beak?’

And then Sauvage was flat on the ground with the gondolier kneeling on his back and a blade of some kind pressed against the side of his neck. ‘De Gorge sent you, didn’t he?’ shouted the gondolier.

‘No! De Gorge is my enemy!’

‘How many others does he have in Venice? Tell me or I’ll kill you.’

‘My name is Bernard Sauvage, son of Nicolas Sauvage.’

‘I think I’ll just kill you either way.’

But at that moment the air itself seemed to shuffle, faster than Sauvage could follow, like a card-sharp setting up a crooked game of
bonneteau
, and at the same time there was a sound of cogs turning and pulleys running, and then there was a bright doorway in front of him where before there had only been darkness and empty space. If the option to inhale had at that moment been available to Sauvage, which it wasn’t, he would definitely still have been rendered breathless.

‘Let him go, Melchiorre.’

The order wasn’t much more than a croak. But the gondolier did as he was told. Sauvage got to his feet, rubbing a bruised shoulder. Probably, he thought, it was only his cheap
bauta
that had saved him from a broken nose when he was knocked forward.

The room beyond the doorway was lit by oil lamps, and far bigger than it had any right to be. In the centre of the room was a bed, and in the bed lay a man in a mask. The wooden frame of the bed was hinged in the middle so that the man could sit up in it, and a draughtsman’s table was suspended by a complicated skeletonic sort of crane at an angle in front of the man so that he could work without changing his position. At the edges of the room were workbenches cluttered with tools and brushes and paint and twine and cloth and metal.

‘Come inside, boy, and sit down,’ said the man in the bed, gesturing to a stool. As he entered the room, Sauvage reached instinctively to take off his
bauta
out of respect, but the man stopped him. ‘No, keep your mask on,’ he said. ‘It’s Carnival. I intend to die in mine.’

‘The Théâtre des Encornets,’ said Sauvage softly as he came closer.

‘You recognise it?’

‘Of course. I lived in Paris until the year it was destroyed.’

The man’s mask was a gilded replica of the grand front of the opera house as it had stood until 1679. The density of detail was astonishing, a hundred times more exquisite than any doll’s house or architective ornament Sauvage had ever seen, so that you could see every nipple on every nude on every marble frieze; and yet the mask was not quite mimetic, because the façade had been artfully distorted to imply the shape of a human face; and not just a general human face, but the face of a man who had visited Sauvage’s childhood home in Paris several times before Sauvage’s father’s death.

‘Was it difficult to find me?’ said Lavicini.

‘Very,’ said Sauvage.

‘So you know the lengths to which I’ve gone to hide myself. And yet you didn’t care who you brought with you?’

Sauvage glanced at Melchiorre. ‘He told me that he hadn’t been to Vignole for months. But he hopped over that loose plank in the jetty without even looking down. I knew he was lying.’

‘Yes, Melchiorre has been very loyal.’

‘When did you build this place?’

‘Eleven years ago. A few seasons after I left Paris.’

‘Why build a false church? Why not just a false cottage? A false barn?’

‘No one ever looks at a chapel and wonders what it’s hiding.’

‘And the bats?’

‘Melchiorre, show him a bat,’ said Lavicini. The gondolier duly retrieved an object from one of the workbenches and then came back to show it to Sauvage. The bat had an iron skeleton, black velvet wings, and no face or feet. ‘They hang on a frame, and after Melchiorre winds the spring, they move in their sleep all night.’

‘And that wolf?’

‘The wolves are real.’ Lavicini coughed as if his lungs were brimming with hot tallow, and Sauvage was glad of his mask because he couldn’t help but wince. ‘Is it common knowledge that I am alive?’

‘De Gorge knows, of course, but not many others. It took me a long time to be sure.’

‘Yes. No one should ever have been able to find out. But after everything went wrong, I started to be careless. I didn’t bother to take all the precautions I’d planned.’

‘What do you mean, “everything went wrong”?’

‘You still haven’t worked out what happened at the Théâtre des Encornets?’

‘I know most of it, I think. I know you planned it all. But there’s one thing I’ve never been able to understand.’

‘What?’

Sauvage hesitated. ‘You were a friend of my father’s. He thought you were a good man. I can’t believe you would have let two dozen men and women die like that. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘I did not let two dozen men and women die.’

‘I watched them dig out the bodies the next morning.’

‘You’ve seen my bats, and you still believe that?’

‘So no one died that night?’ said Sauvage.

The other man shook his head. ‘That is not quite correct either.’

The circumflex of reflected candlelight in the drop of almond syrup that oozed slowly down the pale dough of the choux bun at the creamy summit of the chocolate
croquembouche
that was served one summer night in 1677 in the patisserie belonging to the only real Parisian pastry chef in Venice: that had been Lavicini as he sat opposite the ninth of de Gorge’s deep-pocketed emissaries to visit him since he left his job at the Arsenal to become a designer for the opera. He, too, hung in that drop of syrup, quite ready, if it was licked up by this fat Frenchman, to be licked up with it. Every previous offer from de Gorge he had rejected out of hand. He didn’t want to work for a monster like that. But the day after Pentecost the only woman Lavicini had ever really loved had told him that God wanted her to go back to her husband. His friend Foscolo, the playwright, had drowned himself in the Lagoon last year after a courtesan broke his heart, but Lavicini wasn’t seriously considering suicide. All the same, he couldn’t bear to go on living in the same city as his Wormwood, his star who had made the waters bitter. He didn’t care any more where he was, or what he had to do, as long as he would never again have to worry about catching sight of her by accident as he hurried across the Rialto Bridge. So he waited for the Frenchman facing him to take his first bite of the
croquembouche
, and then announced that this time he was ready to take de Gorge’s job. The lackey guffawed in triumph, spraying flecks of cream across the table, and shouted for brandy. Two weeks later, without ever having quite sobered up, Lavicini arrived in Paris.

He’d been at the Théâtre des Encornets nearly a year before his Wormwood wrote to him. She said she’d been arguing with God night and day ever since he left. And God simply would not back down. He still wanted her to be faithful. But she didn’t care so much what God wanted any more. God could hang. If Lavicini would come back to Venice, and forgive her for her indecision, then they could be together again.

He nearly jumped on a horse there and then. But he had another nine years left on his contract, and he knew de Gorge defended his contracts like other men defended their virgin daughters. He might get away for a few weeks, but eventually he would be hunted down, beaten, and brought back to Paris. The only way out of the contract was death.

And it was around this time that his friend Villayer disappeared. Lavicini guessed straight away that Louis had ordered the assassination, but it wasn’t until a few weeks afterwards that he discovered it was his own employer who had actually paid the assassin. There was often business in Paris with which Louis didn’t wish to dirty his soft hands even from the safe distance of Versailles, so de Gorge was sometimes called upon to make arrangements on his behalf, and in return Louis kept on attending the Théâtre des Encornets, ensuring that it would remain the most fashionable venue in the capital. Lavicini wanted to avenge his friend, but much more formidable men than he had gone against de Gorge and ended up dining on their own noses and ears. Also, he had no appetite for violence. Instead, he decided that he would have to find a way of staging his own death that would not just utterly dupe de Gorge, but also utterly destroy de Gorge’s livelihood. And some months later, when Nicolas Sauvage died in the same circumstances as Villayer, it redoubled his determination.

On the night of the premiere of
The Lizard Prince
, twenty-five costumed automata sat fidgeting in private audience boxes. Lavicini had been obliged to buy them all tickets at full price under false names. Many years earlier, when Louis XIV was still a child, a toymaker called Camus had reportedly designed for him a little carriage complete with mechanical horses, mechanical coachman, mechanical page, and mechanical lady passenger, but Lavicini’s own creations were so far advanced that he did not believe even such experienced eyes as the Sun King’s would recognise them for what they really were. Hidden in the ceiling above the automata, packed into crates along with two tons of broken ice, were twenty-five corpses that Lavicini had purchased from a porter at a failing anatomy school, explaining that he was an upholsterer who had received a very elaborate and unusual request from an aristocratic English client. And in place all throughout the Théâtre des Encornets were the contrivances that would be required to give the appearance that it was the devil himself who had destroyed part of the Théâtre des Encornets when he came to claim the soul of Adriano Lavicini, the Sorceror of Venice, while leaving no identifiable trace of the automata.

Towards the end of the second act, Lavicini poked his head hastily into every room backstage to make sure they were empty, and then slipped out of the theatre by a side door. Some superstitious instinct prevented him from turning back to watch as an apocalyptic rumble rose within the building behind him. Instead, he hurried on towards the convent of the Filles du Calvaire, opposite which there was a cold vacant room above a butcher’s shop where he intended to spend his last night in Paris.

So it wasn’t until the next morning, when he returned in disguise to the ruins of the Théâtre des Encornets, that he heard about the dead ballerina. He moved through the crowd of onlookers, listening to conversations, needing to be certain that the truth was not suspected. And indeed no one knew that Lavicini was still alive. But everyone knew that a dancer called Marguerite was dead. He had to wander a long time before he could complete the story: she had fainted at her first sight of the Extraordinary Mechanism, and had then been carried backstage and deposited on a couch, where she was still lying when the opera house collapsed. Lavicini remembered then that the couch faced away from the door to that dressing room. That was why he hadn’t noticed her on his final backstage inspection. He’d never spoken to Marguerite, but he remembered her face, because Montand always seemed to pay special attention to her during the rehearsals.

Lavicini knew then that he could never see his Wormwood again. He’d planned to live with her in Venice under a false name until her husband died, and then they’d run away to some exotic place where no one had ever heard the name Lavicini. But now, if he returned to her, he would have to confess that a girl had died to help bring them back together, as if sacrificed to their love, a proxy for the suicide that Lavicini himself hadn’t had the conviction to commit. Adultery was one thing, but the guilt of being party to a murder would drive his Wormwood out of her senses. She couldn’t ever find out. But he couldn’t keep back the truth if he was with her. He decided it was better if, like the rest of the world, she never found out that he’d survived the destruction of the Théâtre des Encornets.

Nevertheless, he went back to Venice. If he couldn’t have his Wormwood, he would at least have his home. Out on Vignole, he could live out his penance in a sort of exile, while still in sight of the Arsenal, where he’d worked as a younger, happier man. And during the months of Carnival he could wander the city, like Hephaestus returned to Olympus, in the masks he built and painted like tiny stage sets the rest of the year. Even if he jostled past his Wormwood a dozen times in a day, it wouldn’t matter, because he would never have to know it was her.

‘All the way to Paris, and all the way back, because of a woman?’ said Sauvage when Lavicini had finished his story.

‘Because of two women, really.’ Lavicini coughed again for a long time. ‘Why have you come here?’

Sauvage gathered his resolve. ‘I’ve written a play,’ he said, ‘and I want you to design the set. I had to find you because no one else can do it.’

‘I have many talented successors in Paris.’

‘No. The play is set two and a half centuries in the future. I don’t believe there is another man alive who could make that seem real. It’s about a young man whose friends are about to be murdered by a tyrant just like the Sun King. But instead of trying to save them, he runs away to a colony in the New World.’

‘What happens to him?’

‘He meets a man who has become very wealthy from the sale of currycombs, who sends him to find an inventor who is trying to build an Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place. But not a stage device like yours – a real one. A sort of reproducible miracle. The hero does find the inventor, but he also encounters an agent of the Ottoman Empire who wants to take the inventor back to Constantinople.’