The Glasshouse

Chapter One: The Weeping Inheritance

The spice-broker Aldo Ghiro had been dead two days, and his house smelled of cloves, lilies, and money.

Remo Valli stood in the cool of the entrance hall with his hat in his hands and let the smell tell him things. Cloves meant the warehouses on the third terrace were still full, which meant the estate was solvent, which meant the family would pay. Lilies meant somebody had sent to the lake gardens at short notice and not asked the price. Money had no smell of its own, but it changed the smell of everything else, the way heat changes the smell of stone.

Behind him his company arranged itself on the steps in the order they had used for eleven years. Six criers in grey, hoods back, throats loose. Two drummers with their skins slackened for the low tones, because a tight drum at a funeral sounds like a wedding. Nella Grasso at the left rail, already breathing shallow, warming up the faint she would deliver at the exact moment the coffin lid came down — a slow, boneless, beautiful faint that made half the mourners forget whatever they had been about to say to each other and the other half remember they were being watched.

"Terrace four," said Nino Bocca at his elbow. "They've got a lock on the counting-room door that opens with a look."

"Don't look at it," said Remo.

"I already did."

"Then don't look at it twice." Remo turned. Nino was seventeen and built like a whip handle, and this morning he had been scrubbed until his ears were pink, put in a jacket two seasons out of fashion, and given the haircut of a boy raised in the country by a woman with no husband and no money. The effect was exactly right. He looked like an accusation that had learned to walk. "Let me see your face."

Nino let his jaw go slack. His eyes filled. It was astonishing. The water came up from somewhere inside him the way water comes up in a well when the rope goes down, and then it spilled, and his mouth went crooked as if he were fighting it, and that was the part that finished people. Nobody believes a man who cries. Everybody believes a boy who is trying not to.

"Good," Remo said. "Not until the second psalm."

"Not until the second psalm," Nino agreed, and the tears switched off like a tap.

They went in.

Vallenza buries its dead high. The city sits in the bowl of a dead volcano, nine terraces of ochre stone stepping down and down to a hot green lake that steams at its edges in winter and smells faintly of eggs and coins, and the rule everyone obeys without ever having been told is that the dead go upward and the living come down. So the Ghiro funeral had been arranged in the family chapel on the eighth terrace, where the ropeways creak overhead all day and the air is thin enough to make old men wheeze. Remo liked the eighth terrace. Grief up there had a shortness of breath in it that flattered his drummers.

He set his people in their places and then did what he was paid a great deal less for and made a great deal more from: he walked the house.

A house on its worst day is an open book with the spine broken. Every door that is usually locked stands open, because the servants are carrying chairs. Every ledger that is usually in a strongbox is on a desk, because the lawyer came at dawn. Nobody counts the spoons. Nobody asks why the man in grey with the mourning band is standing in the corridor by the study; they assume he is waiting to be told when to begin, and they are half right.

By the time the first psalm was underway Remo knew four things. The counting-room lock was a Bazzoli three-ward, old and proud and openable with a bent spoon. The Ghiro warehouses were mortgaged to a bank on the second terrace, and the mortgage had been signed nine weeks ago. Aldo Ghiro had owed a debt to a house nobody in the family wanted named aloud, because when the lawyer said the word *keeping* the widow's hand had closed on her sleeve.

And there was a boy of about nine in the kitchen yard with a face like the dead man's, eating bread with his back to the wall, who nobody had thought to dress in black.

Remo went and found Nino and said, "There's a real one."

Nino blinked. "A real bastard?"

"In the kitchen yard."

"Then what do they need me for?"

"Because they know about him," Remo said. "He's fed and housed and he's been that way for years. Nobody's frightened of a boy they're already feeding. They'll be frightened of a second one." He straightened Nino's collar, which did not need straightening. "Go at the second psalm. Cry first. Talk after. When the widow looks at you, look at the floor."

He watched from the side aisle.

The chapel had a low dome painted with a fresco of the lake as it had been before the city, a smooth green eye in a ring of fire, and the paint had gone brown with two centuries of candle smoke so that the whole ceiling looked like a bruise. The six criers began, low, and the drums came under them, and then Nella Grasso started the shaking in her shoulders that would travel down over the next twenty minutes until it took her legs. The family wept at the correct volume. That was what they hired for, though none of them would have said it that way: they hired sound, the way you hire musicians, so that the silence would not get in and show them what they actually felt.

At the second psalm a boy nobody knew came up the side aisle, crying and trying not to.

He did not say much. That was the art of it. He got as far as *I only wanted to see him once* before his voice broke, and a cousin took his arm, and then the widow turned around.

Remo counted. The number he wanted was somewhere between three hundred and five hundred crowns, depending on how much the mortgage frightened her. She was quick. She did not shout, and she did not let the lawyer speak. She crossed the chapel with her black skirts hissing on the stone and took Nino by the wrist and drew him out through the vestry door with a hand on his shoulder that from six feet away looked like kindness.

Four hundred, Remo thought, and she'll want the boy out of the city.

It was four hundred. It came to him in the vestry in a soft leather purse, counted out by a woman who did not look at him while she counted, and a promise extracted that the boy would be on a mule road by evening. Remo gave his word, which was worth nothing, and his hand, which she did not take.

And then he made his mistake, which was to look at her.

He had seen her twice already that morning and had catalogued her as the second wife: young, thirty at the outside, brown-haired, handsome in the particular way that gets a woman of no family married to a spice-broker of sixty-two. She stood now with her head down and the coins' weight still in her fingers, and the vestry window threw a hard slab of light across her jaw, and in that light Remo saw the seam.

It ran from the corner of her ear down under the angle of her jaw and along beneath her chin, a line so fine it was less a line than a change of mind in the light. The skin above it belonged to a woman of thirty. The skin below it, in the shadow of her collar, belonged to a woman of fifty-five.

It happens to perhaps one person in a hundred thousand that their reflection is sold and spent and ground down to powder while they are still alive, and it had happened to Remo Valli when he was eleven years old. Mirrors showed him nothing. Water showed him nothing. He had shaved by feel for twenty-two years. And what he had instead of a face in the glass was this: he could see the seam. He could see, on any borrowed face in Vallenza, the exact stitch-line where somebody else's youth had been laid over the truth, the way a man who has been robbed of his hearing learns to read the little movements of a mouth.

So he knew, standing in the vestry with four hundred crowns in his coat, that Donna Celina Ghiro had not been thirty for twenty-five years, and that the face she had worn to her husband's funeral — the face she had almost certainly worn to her wedding — had been rented from the undercroft of Kiln Island for the night, like a coat, like a carriage.

That by itself would not have stopped his breath. Half the great houses of Vallenza went about in other people's faces, and Remo had made a study of it the way a pickpocket makes a study of buttons.

What stopped his breath was the small white scar through the left eyebrow, where a girl of six had gone over the wall of a cistern yard chasing a cat and come up laughing with her face open.

Remo had held the cloth to it. He remembered that the blood had been very warm and that she had been furious at him for crying.

"Signora," he said. His voice came out level, which surprised him. "Forgive me. Your face."

Her hand went up to it at once — not to the seam, which she could not see, but to her cheek, the way a woman touches something she is proud of and afraid of.

"It's mine for the day," she said coolly. "It is perfectly legal."

"Of course. May I ask where it was got?"

"You may not."

"Then may I ask," Remo said, "whether they told you the name of the woman it came off?"

Celina Ghiro looked at him for the first time properly, and whatever she saw in a man with no reflection made her take one step back toward the door and the lawyer and the safe warm noise of the mourning.

"They don't give names," she said. "That would be vulgar."

Out in the chapel the drums went down into the tone they used for the closing of the lid, and Nella Grasso fainted, beautifully, on time.

Remo stood in the vestry and did arithmetic.

Twelve years. Fiora had been seventeen when the Glasshouse took her in off the terrace steps and he had been twenty-one and too poor and too stupid to stop it, and for twelve years he had done the sum the way everyone in the Rope Quarter did it. Three years from your glass and you forget rooms. Five and you forget names. Eight and there is nobody left inside to forget anything, and the Lake Watch pulls you out of a stairwell in the spring, thin as paper, smiling at the wall.

He had mourned her professionally, which is to say expertly, which is to say he had put her away.

And her face had just walked past him wearing somebody else's fifty-five-year-old neck.