The Thief Lord

"I could offer you Prosper's air bed," Ida replied.

Victor accepted.

They were all very tired, but none of them fell asleep quickly. And even when they did, the bad dreams were already lurking underneath their pillows. Only Bo slept as peacefully as an angel, as if all his worries had come to an end that night.

43 The Conte

Prosper and Scipio woke up with the sound of someone opening the door of the stable. Daylight flooded the room. For a moment they didn't know where they were. The girl leaning on the stable door, however, quickly brought it all back.

"Buongiorno, gentlemen," she said, holding back the mastiffs as they tried to run inside. "I would have left you in here for a little while longer, but my brother insists on seeing you."

"Brother?" Scipio whispered to Prosper as they stepped into the open. The big house looked even more run-down in the light of the morning than it had at night.

The girl impatiently waved them up the steps, and hurried them past the stone angels with the lost faces. They stopped between the pillars in front of the main entrance. They felt the cold, musty air wafting toward them as the girl opened the door. The mastiffs pushed past them and vanished inside the house.

The height of the entrance hall made Prosper dizzy. He craned his head back and looked up at the ceiling. It was painted with beautiful pictures. They were darkened with soot and the colors had faded, but you could see how magnificent they had once been. There were horses rearing up and angels in flight in a summer-blue sky.

"Move!" the girl said. "You were in a such a rush yesterday -- in there!"

She pointed at an open door at the opposite end of the hall. The dogs stormed ahead, their paws slipping on the stone floor. Scipio and Prosper followed them cautiously, walking over colorful mosaics of unicorns and mermaids.

The room into which the dogs had disappeared was dark, despite the daylight that came in through the tall windows. A fire was burning in a hearth shaped like the gaping mouth of a lion. The dogs had settled down in front of it. Toys lay between their paws. The whole floor was covered with toys: bowling pins, balls, swords, a whole herd of rocking horses, dolls in every shape and size lying around with their arms and legs twisted. Scattered among them were armies of tin soldiers, steam engines, and sailing ships with carved sailors -- and in the middle of this chaos sat a boy. He looked rather bored as he put a tin soldier on a tiny horse.

"Here they are, Renzo," the girl said as she pushed Prosper and Scipio through the open door. "They smell of pigeon poop, but as you can see the rats didn't get to them."

The boy lifted his head. His black hair was closely cropped and his clothes looked even more old-fashioned than Scipio's jacket.

"The Thief Lord!" he confirmed. "Indeed, dear sister, you were right." He carelessly dropped the tin soldier to the floor, got up, and walked toward Prosper and Scipio.

"You were also in the Basilica, weren't you?" he said to Prosper. I apologize for the phoney money. It was Barbarossa's idea. I wouldn't have been able to pay you otherwise. You have probably noticed," he pointed at the crumbling plaster on the walls, "that I am not actually very rich, even though I do live in this palace."

"Renzo!" the girl said impatiently. "What are we going to do with them?"

The boy kicked aside a doll with his shoe.

"Just look how the two of them are staring at me!" he said to Morosina. "Are you wondering how I know all this? Have you forgotten our meeting in the confessional? Or our nighttime rendezvous in the Sacca della Misericordia?"

Prosper backed away. Next to him he heard Scipio breathe in sharply.

"The merry-go-round works!" Scipio whispered. "You are the Conte?"

Renzo bowed with a smile. "At your service, Thief Lord," he said. "Thanks to your help. Without the lion's wing it would have been just a merry-go-round, but now ..."

"Ask them who told them about the merry-go-round." His sister was leaning against the wall, her arms folded. "Spit it out! Was it Barbarossa? I've always told Renzo, the redbeard cannot be trusted."

"No!" Scipio exchanged a confused look with Prosper. "No, Barbarossa had nothing to do with us being here. Ida Spavento, the lady who had the wing before, told us about the merry-go-round. But that's quite a long story ..."

"Does she know you're here?" Morosina snapped. "Does anyone know you're here?"

Scipio was about to answer, but Prosper got in first.

"Yes," he said. "Our friends know, and a detective too. And they're going to come looking for us if we don't go back."

Morosina flashed a dark glance at her brother.

"Did you hear that?" she asked. "What are we going to do now? Why are you talking to them? How could you tell them about our secret? We could have lied to them and ..."

Renzo bent down and picked up a mask from among the toy soldiers. "They gave me the wing," he said, "and I didn't pay them. That's why I'm going to let them take a ride." He looked at Prosper and Scipio.

"It spins quite slowly at first," he said quietly, "and you hardly feel a thing. But then it goes faster and faster. I nearly got off too late, but this" -- he looked down at himself -- "is just how I wanted it. I got back what had been stolen from me all those years ago. While the children of the Valaresso played with all this" -- he pointed at the rocking horses and the toy soldiers -- "Morosina and I were forced to scrape the pigeon excrement from the dovecotes. We had to weed and hack the moss from the faces of those stone angels in the garden, scrub the floors, and polish the door handles. We got up before the master and went to bed when everybody else was fast asleep. But now the Valaresso are gone and Morosina and I are still here." He paused. "And now I find playing with all this quite boring. Strange, isn't it?"

"So you only called yourself Conte," said Scipio. "You're not a Valaresso."

"No, he isn't," Morosina answered for her brother. "But you," she looked at Scipio appraisingly, "you're from a noble family, aren't you? I can tell from the way you talk, even the way you walk. Do you have a girl to pick up your dirty pants when you throw them on the floor? Someone to polish your boots and make your bed? Someone barely older than you? You can't possibly have any reason for wanting to ride the merry-go-round, so what are you doing here? If it's the money you want, we haven't got it."

Scipio hung his head. He traced the patterns on the floor with the tip of his boot.

"You're right, there is someone who picks up my things," he said without lifting his head. "And I do have my clothes laid out for me in the morning. But I hate it. My parents treat me like I'm too stupid to put my own pants on. Scipio, wash your hands after you've touched the cat. Scipio, don't step into puddles. For goodness sake, Scipio, do you have to be quite so clumsy all the time? Scipio, just shut up, you don't know anything about it, you little flea, you useless weed."

Scipio now looked Morosina in the eye. "We read the story of Peter Pan at school. D'you know what? He's a stupid boy, and you and your brother are just like him. Turning yourselves into children so that adults can push you around and laugh at you again! Yes, I do want to take a ride. That's why I came to this island. But I want to ride it in the other direction. I want to be grown-up. Grown-up! Grown-up!" Scipio stamped his foot so forcefully that he crushed one of the little soldiers. "Sorry!" he muttered, staring at the broken thing as if he had just done something truly terrible.