The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

him—potting men from the catwalk as if they were unfeeling targets, murdering the helpless fellows through the mirror, and now this awful slaughter in the kitchens—and he had done it all so easily, so
capably
, as if he were a seasoned killer—as if he were Cardinal Chang. But he was not Chang—he was not a killer—already his hands were shaking and face slick with cold sweat. He stopped, leaning heavily against the wall, his mind suddenly assailed by the image of the poor man’s hand, pinned like a paleflipping fish. Doctor Svenson’s throat rose and he looked about him for an urn, a pot, a plant, found nothing, and forced his gorge down by strength of will, the taste of bile sharp in his mouth. He could not go on, careening from collision to collision, with no longer the slightest idea of what he sought. He needed to sit, to rest, to weep—any respite, however brief. All around him were the sounds of guests and preparations, music, footsteps—he must be very near the ballroom. With a grateful groan he spied a door, small, plain, unlocked, prayed with all his bankrupt faith that the room was empty, and slipped inside.
    He stepped into darkness, closed the door and immediately barked his shin, tripped, and set off an echoing clatter that seemed to take minutes to die. He froze, waiting … breathed in the silent dark … there were no other noises from within the room … and nothing from the hallway. He exhaled slowly. The clatter was wooden, wooden poles … mops, brooms … he was in a maids’ closet.
    Doctor Svenson carefully set down the satchel and groped around him to either side. He felt shelves—one of which he’d kicked—and his hands moved cautiously, not wanting to knock anything else to the floor. His fingers sought quickly, moving from shelf to shelf until his right hand slipped over and then into a wooden box, full of slick, tubular objects … candles. He plucked one from the box and then continued his search for a box of matches—surely they would be in the same place. In fact, the box was on the next shelf down, and crouching, Svenson carefully struck a match by feel—how often had he done the same in the darkness of a ship at night?—in a stroke transforming his little chamber of mystery into a mundane catalog of house management: soap, towels, brass polish, buckets, mops, brushes, brooms, dusters, pans, smocks, vinegar, wax, candles … and, he blessed the thoughtful maid who put it there, a tiny stool. He shifted his body and turned, sitting so he faced the door. A
very
thoughtful maid … for stuck into the wall near the door was a small loop of chain on anail, made to slip around the knob and serve as a lock—but only usable from
within
the closet. Svenson made the chain fast and saw, near the box of matches, a cleared foot of shelf marked with melted wax—the place for occupants to place their candles. He’d ducked into someone’s sanctuary, and made it his own. Doctor Svenson shut his eyes and allowed his fatigue to slump his shoulders. If only the maid had left a stash of tobacco.
    It would be terribly simple to fall asleep, and he knew it was a real possibility. With a grimace he forced himself to sit up straight, and then—why did it keep slipping his mind?—he remembered the satchel, fetching it onto his lap. He untied the clasp and fished out the contents, a thick sheaf of parchment, densely covered with finely written notes. He leafed through the stack … angling the pages so they caught more candlelight.
    He read, quickly, his eyes skimming from line to line, and then from that page to the next, and to the next again. It was a massive narrative of acquisition and subterfuge, and clearly from the pen of Robert Vandaariff. At first Svenson recognized just enough of the names and places to follow the geographical path of finance—money houses in Florence and Venice, goods brokers in Vienna, in Berlin, fur merchants in Stockholm, then diamond traders in Antwerp. But the closer he read—and the more he flipped back and forward between the pages to re-sort out the facts (and which initials stood for institutions—“RLS” being Rosamonde Lacquer-Sforza not, as he’d first suspected, Rotterdam Liability Services, a major insurer of overseas shipping)—the more he understood it was a narrative with two conjoined threads: a steady campaign of leverage and acquisition, and a trail of unlikely individuals, like islands in a stream, determining each in their way how