The Bellini Card (14 page)

“There is a type of clam, also,” the young man was saying, “that is unique to the lagoon. It exists only here and, so I understand, at the mouth of the Canton River, in China.”

“Perhaps Marco Polo—” Palewski began, then stopped. A wave of exhaustion swept over him. He fought for a moment to stay on his feet and pressed the cold glass against his cheek.

“Signor Brett, I believe you have already met Count Barbieri?”

Palewski turned. The room was spinning. He murmured a greeting and shook hands.

“Signor Brett was telling me such interesting things about his country,” Barbieri said.

The contessa smiled. “Tell me,
amico!
Tell us—what is it about America you love?”

Palewski focused on her lips.

“Many things,” he said cautiously. “A wonderful country.”

He was aware that a hush had fallen on the company.

“It is a very big country,” he began. What had he said yesterday? “We are a people of independent education. Who know how to eat well.” He
saw someone raise a finger and wag it at the crowd. “Just like here, in Venice!”

It was his finger. He snapped it shut and put his fist behind his back.

“We have great cities, too, like Venice,” he added, remembering. “New Orleans is like Venice. Boston is like Venice. New York is like Venice.” That surely wasn’t true, he thought. He rocked on his toes and peered around at the assembled guests, hanging on his every word.

“Like Venice—but no canals.”

“And art?”

“Quite. Instead of canals, the American people have a desire for art.”

The contessa looked surprised. She took his arm and steered him to one side. “I’m afraid we are plaguing you with our foolish questions. Forgive me.”

“No, no—it’s just …” Palewski felt her squeeze his arm. “A touch of sun, Contessa. Day on the lagoon.” He shook his head. “I think I rather need a rest.”

“But no, Signor Brett, we must apologize. I will send Antonio to see you home. When you feel better, please come to visit me again.”

Palewski inclined his head. “That would be delightful,” he murmured. Right now, he wanted only to lie down.

Outside on the stairs he felt a little calmer. Antonio, the footman, held his coat over his arm and walked him back downstairs and out into the street. At the door of his building Palewski fumbled for his key, and found some change.

“No, signore.
Grazie a voi,”
Antonio said with a rich smile, backing away.

The ambassador tottered into the hall and leaned heavily for a moment against the wall, rubbing his forehead, before taking the stairs slowly, keeling like a drunken man. He should have stayed in bed, of course—but then he would not have met the contessa again. What a charming person! And he had been complaining that everyone in Venice wanted something from him!

He turned the key in the lock of his apartment, but the door was fast; he turned it again, and it swung open.

He kicked off his shoes and made his way groggily across the room, shedding clothes as he went.

Stanislaw Palewski, Polish ambassador to the Sublime Porte, alias S. Brett, connoisseur, flung back the covers and collapsed into his bed, stark naked.

Just like the woman he discovered there.

“Ah!
Mio caro,”
she said, putting out her dimpled arms. “I thought I would have to wait too, too long.”

It seemed to Palewski that the introductions had been peremptory, at best.

He gave a groan, and before his head hit the pillow he was fast asleep.

S
CARCELY
one hundred yards from where a baffled courtesan was sitting up in Palewski’s bed, arms folded and a frown on her pretty face, Count Barbieri was taking leave of the contessa.

“I regret, Carla, that I have some matters to arrange.”

“Some matters? How mysterious you are, Barbieri.”

He did not miss the absence of a smile. He was about to reply but thought better of it; instead, he kissed her hand. “I wish you fortune,” he said, glancing at the tables that the footmen had already set up.

“We will see you next time, then,” she replied, turning from him.

Downstairs, he made for the water gate, where his gondola was waiting; the jetty creaked and for a moment he paused, looking up at the stars. Brushing the slender mooring pole with one hand, he stepped lightly into the fragile craft and sat down, leaning back against the cushions. He’d been right to leave while the night was still beautiful, before he lost money.

Barbieri raised his head and contemplated the stars. He felt the gentle dip of the boat as the gondolier took his place on the deck behind him.

Upstairs, the contessa was leading her guests to the gaming tables.

The gondola moved forward from its mooring with a soft sigh. The light from the contessa’s windows purled on the inky surface of the canal; overhead, the stars hung brightly in a moonless sky. In no other city in the world, the count was thinking, could one so well appreciate the heavens.

It was a suitable reflection for a man who was about to die.

For rowing a gondola is not easy, and the count’s throat presented an unblemished target.

The killer let the oar slide soundlessly into the water and unsheathed his knife.

I
STANBUL
, where Palewski had lived for so many years, was widely considered to be a healthful city: a wind that blew from the Dardanelles, even in summer, agitated and purified the air, while the swift current of the Bosphorus, running down from the Black Sea, acted as perpetual sluice.

Perhaps that was why, in 1204, the aged and blind Doge Enrico Dan-dolo had proposed moving the entire enterprise of Venice, lock, stock, and barrel, to the shores of the Golden Horn. He had just conquered Constantinople with Crusader help, and the chance would not come again. His proposal was rejected.

Venice, according to the wisdom of the day, was a sickly place. Miasmas, which carried the risk of disease, rose from sluggish canals choked, as they usually were, with rotting garbage and raw excrement. The passage of a gondola stirred the depths of these little open sewers and occasionally raised a stench; everyone knew that bad smells, if inhaled, were dangerous.

It was also a plague city, or had been, when it traded with the Eastern ports. In those days, Venice had been famous for San Lazzaro, the island on which new arrivals could be confined for forty days—
la quarantena
. Now, with the decline of trade, and in the face of official indifference, quarantine laws had been suspended. So few ships bothered to pay the Austrian harbor dues to enter the lagoon in the uncertain hope of trading with an impoverished population that the stern regulations of a vigorous Republic had been allowed to lapse. It remained a city of rats—those soft plops that Palewski sometimes heard beneath his windows at night were proof of that. But plague—the bubonic plague of medieval Europe—had not, in fact, broken out in Venice for many years. Only cholera remained a recurrent problem.

Cholera! When Palewski woke the next morning to a bright blue sky and stomach cramps, he groaned, and sweated, and half supposed that he was going to die, a friendless stranger in a strange city. He would pass from the record unremembered, laid beneath a stone—if anyone gave him one—inscribed with a fictitious name. If he lived, he thought, he might at least have been able to scrape together an acquaintance with the contessa, even, perhaps, to become a friend. But she would cut him when he died, for sure.

Such thoughts—the heat, his tangled sheets, the shouts of healthy men passing on the canal outside—served to oppress his spirits. He was unaccountably plagued by a dim and dreamlike memory of finding a strange woman in his bed, too, which worried him. Was he losing his reason, as well?

His hand fluttered to his head.

Then the door opened and that very woman seemed to come in, neatly dressed, carrying a steaming bowl of chicken soup.

“Ecco!”
she said. Behold!

Palewski scrambled up beneath his covers, revived by the smell of the broth. The woman who brought it in was plump and dark; she had little hands and a face as sweet as a Madonna’s, with liquid brown eyes, a pert nose, and a dimple in the middle of her chin. She drew up a chair to the bed and sat down.

He looked at her. She dipped the spoon into the soup. He made a
weak effort to reach for the spoon, but she swept it back and tut-tutted so that he lay back against the pillows and let her bring the spoon to his lips.

If the smell of soup had revived him, the soup itself perfected the cure.

A touch of sun! A headache, perhaps a chill: nothing more. Of course—that ridiculous expedition to the Armenians, across the lagoon in the heat of the day! No wonder he had been out of sorts. And then fizzy wine on an empty stomach. He’d woken up hungry, that was all.

And now this wonderful girl had cured him. He turned his head.

“I don’t know your name?”

“Maria,” she replied with a smile.

Palewski reached out and put his hand on her knee. “Maria,” he croaked. “What a lovely name! And do you know, Maria? I feel much, much better now.”

W
HAT
would I tell you?” She stood by the window, where only the night before she had sat with the dottore, speaking of stone lions. “To me, Commissario, this is my house. These are my friends.”

Brunelli felt the heat flush in his cheeks.

“I might point out that one of your friends has been killed,” he growled.

His eye fell on a monstrous display of barbaric weaponry above the fireplace. Pikes, cutlasses, sabers—all of it, no doubt, stripped from the corpses of fallen Turks on some godforsaken battlefield far away. It was unlikely, he thought, that whichever scion of the house of Aspi had fought that day had killed them personally. That would have been a job for the ordinary men, the common soldiers, the Venetians who fought and who went down unrecorded.

“What you think of me, or the work I do, is of no consequence,” he added. “I hear the same from my son.”

The contessa flung him a glance of contempt. “Even your son.”

“My son is young. He does not, I think, understand what death means. He does not understand about justice.”

The contessa said nothing, merely wrapped her arms tighter about her body and stared through the window.

“Justice,” he repeated heavily. Brunelli could guess what she was thinking. They were all the same, weren’t they, these aristocrats? Supposing that the law was for little people, people like himself. Still dreaming of the days when they controlled the Republic—except that they gave it up, too, at the first shot. “I believe the count himself would have wanted that much.”

The contessa put the heel of her hand to her mouth. Brunelli saw her shoulders heave. After a while she wiped her eyes with her fingers. “The gondolier, Commissario?”

“Mostly bruised. Remembers nothing,” Brunelli said brusquely. “Were your doors locked?”

There was a pause. Eventually the contessa said, “It was not necessary. Antonio was downstairs to receive my guests.”