The Bellini Card (22 page)

“Be careful, Signor Brett. The floor is wet and we don’t want you to fall in.”

Palewski accepted the hand and stepped up onto the pavement. In spite of the warning he almost skidded: only Alfredo’s surprisingly strong arm prevented him from falling backward.

“Thank you, my friend.” He smiled.

“The palazzo is divided, as I said.” Alfredo’s voice was little more than a whisper. “I do not think anyone uses this entrance so much.”

“So how do we get in?” Palewski, too, was whispering. It’s like a bloody dungeon, he thought: the Rescue of Mehmet the Conqueror!

Even as he spoke he saw a flickering light growing beneath the ratholes of the moldy door, and in a moment someone was drawing back bolts and the ancient hinges were creaking on their rusty pins.

“This is Mario,” Alfredo whispered. “He works for my patron also. We can go quietly, I think.”

They stepped through the door and into a narrow passageway faced with well-dressed stone. Mario nodded at Palewski. He was a sturdy man with very short-cropped hair and wide, Slavic cheekbones, and he held a candelabra with three candles that guttered in the draft.

“Signor Brett very kindly agreed to come tonight,” Alfredo explained. “So, we are expected?”

Later, it was this curiously stilted introduction that Palewski would remember, the moment when he should have wondered who, exactly, was in charge.

Mario now leaned forward and spoke to Alfredo, but either he spoke in a thick dialect or he had something wrong with his speech, because Palewski could not understand him.

“I see. But he has left us to go in?”

Mario nodded.

“It is nothing.” Alfredo turned to Palewski and put a hand lightly on his arm. “The owner wanted to be here to meet you, but in fact he has been called away. We can go on. You see how he trusts us,” he added.

At the end of the passage, at the foot of the broad marble stairs, Mario produced a key and inserted it into the lock of a side door, which presently swung open.

They entered, Mario leading the procession with his candles, rather like a chaplain with his acolytes, Palewski reckoned, or a tomb robber.

It was an enormous, low-ceilinged room, bare of furnishings. Two long windows, shuttered on the outside, gave onto what Palewski presumed would be the alley at the front. He supposed that another door at the back of the room opened into a storeroom on the canal side of the building.

And at the far end of the room, lit by Mario with his candelabra, stood a table draped in green velvet. Against the folds, like an egg in its nest, lay a small painting.

“Signor Brett.” Alfredo’s face was serious.
“The Conqueror
, by Gentile Bellini.” He made a motion with his hand. “Please.”

Palewski stepped slowly, almost reverently, across the room toward the little painting, his hands involuntarily clasped behind his back.

And there it was. It was unframed—no one would expect to buy a painting without having it first removed from its frame. It was very dark, and the glaze was crackled with age. Even in the uncertain light of Mario’s candelabra, the form and composition were unmistakable.

Stanislaw Palewski, who knew what a sultan looked like, found himself looking at one now.

Coolly returning his gaze, instantly bridging the gap between the fifteenth century and the nineteenth, was Mehmet the Conqueror himself, the young genius upon whose shoulders centuries of Ottoman dominion, and Ottoman civilization, had been built.

Then there was a commotion at the farther door, and Palewski’s gaze was arrested, instead, by the figure of a man without a coat who burst through, glaring, with a long-nosed pistol in his hand.

Everybody froze.

The man raked the pistol around the room, taking them in. He was a tall, well-built young man with a shock of yellow hair and sideburns, but his face was suffused with blood and from the way he moved Palewski could tell that he’d been drinking. For a few seconds his mouth worked in silent fury, and then his eye fell on the Bellini.

“I knew it! By the Mother of God! What’s this—you pack of thieves, creeping into my house like snakes? Where is my brother?”

He made a rush at the table and with his free hand he snatched up a corner of the velvet and tossed it furiously over the painting. Mario backed away, lowering the candelabra, and the stranger’s shadow leaped to the ceiling.

“Mother of God! He would sell it—of course, under my nose, beneath my own feet!” Spittle flew from his lips. “That bastard! I could kill him now.”

“Signore—” Palewski began.

“You? What are you—a thief?” He wheeled and went down on one leg in a half crouch, pointing the pistol with both hands at Palewski’s face. “You signore me, do you!” He was snarling now. “You signore me? In my house, in front of my Bellini? Yes, I’ll give you signore!”

There was a click as he drew the safety catch.

“You think I’m crazy, hah? The crazy little brother? Crazy,
pazzo inde-moniato
, when my brother steals from me and hasn’t the nerve to tell me to my face? Maybe, yes—maybe I am a little bit crazy.” He drew himself upright and cocked his head first to one side, then the other, like a marionette.
His eyes were wild. “Does it frighten you, signore? Are you afraid now, you and your thieves, to meet a man who is half crazy because his brother wants to steal from him? Are you afraid, hah?”

Palewski stood perfectly still, his face an expressionless mask. “Put the gun down,” he said quietly. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mario inching forward.

“Put the gun down,”
the drunken brother mimicked in a nasty, childish voice.
“Run away and play! We’ve only come to steal your wealth!
So—fuck you for the bastard of a leper!”

Mario sprang. The last thing Palewski saw before the candles spun away and went out, plunging the room into darkness, was the crazy brother swinging around with his pistol in the air.

The two men went down with a crash; Palewski dropped to a crouch, arms in front of his face. There was nothing he could do. The man still held a loaded pistol and the smaller a target he could make of himself, the better. He could hear them grunting and scuffling on the flagstones, and then someone cannoned into him and sent him sprawling backward.

A furious grunt, a crack as if someone had struck his head on the stone, and then a thunderclap as the pistol fired and a man screamed.

“Mario!” It was Alfredo, calling out from the doorway.

The scream descended to a bubbling groan. Palewski heard someone drag himself across the flags, panting.

“Here.” It was Mario’s voice.

A groan from the dark.

Palewski’s hair stood on end. “Lights, quick!” he commanded.

“Don’t be a fool!” Alfredo’s voice spat out in the dark. “Let’s go, now!”

“And leave this man?” Palewski asked.

Alfredo must have found him by his voice, because a hand fell on his arm and a voice hissed, “Don’t be stupid. If he dies, he dies. But if he lives—he’ll say that you shot him.”

“Why me?”

“He was drunk. You’re the one he’ll remember. Come on.” He pulled Palewski toward the door: he was surprisingly strong. “The police will come—a shot, like that! Mario, get the door.”

The door swung open and its faint outline appeared in the darkness. Alfredo rushed Palewski toward it, and they passed through into the hall.

“We can’t leave by the street—it’s too dangerous,” Alfredo said.

Palewski allowed himself to be led along the corridor, but when they had wrenched open the moldy door at the end, Mario swore.

“Madre!
The gondola—it’s gone!”

“M
ARIO
—check the front door!”

The man reappeared in half a minute. Palewski heard his boots ringing on the stone floor of the passageway.

He whispered something urgently to Alfredo, who gripped Palewski’s arm.

It was as if no one could quite bring himself to contemplate the obvious. They stood together on the slippery ledge, and Palewski could hear them all breathing hard.

He started to remove his shoes. He took off his jacket, then his trousers, tied the laces of his boots together and slung them around his neck. He held his clothes in a bundle and sat down on the cold stone, his feet in the water.

“Come on,” he urged—and then he was in the water, gasping with shock, thrashing out toward the low mouth of the water gate.

T
HEY
gave her water, though not before they had amused themselves by trickling it anywhere but on her lips.

When the strong man saw her bend her head, trying to lick the water from the muslin of her own dress, he laughed excitedly.

The scar-faced man looked at him with disgust. Perhaps that was what made him decide to reach around and cut the cord that bound Maria’s wrists.

“She’s not going anywhere,” he said.

Even with her arms free, Maria had to have the jug held to her mouth: her hands were swollen and the muscles in her arms could not obey her.

“Changed your mind yet?” The scar-faced man held her by the chin. Maria closed her eyes, waiting for the sting.

Instead, he pushed her away. “We’ll see you again, pretty one. Don’t you worry. We’ll be back.”

They left her in the darkness. She heard the bolts ram home through the thick door, and she folded her fingers over the raw skin on her wrists and wept.

W
HENEVER
Palewski closed his eyes he was plunged back into darkness. The sound of that bestial cry would lift him from the pillows, grinding his teeth. He had seen and heard men die. Sometimes they died silently like Ranieri in the snow. Sometimes they raved. But too often he had heard that cry of an animal in fright or pain.

What am I? he asked himself once. He did not think he was a coward. But he had saved himself, certainly. Saved himself for what? For Poland? He sneered at the thought. Was it true that everything he did was purely for the motherland? Then why bother with Bellini and a sultan’s ball at all? Why not take the money and set it to work? Perhaps that was what a braver man would do.

Hours passed, drifting between sleep and wakefulness. He saw the dawn gather at his window; he had forgotten to close the shutters. For some the dawn brings hope, but for Palewski it was as if the sun were spying through the glass on a man who was no longer young, half sick with brandy and sour dreams, primping and petting on tyrants and courtesans.

A man who let another die alone.

A man too frightened to strike a match in the darkness.

Then the sun slipped from his window again and he lay immobile on the pillows, seeing the window through a tangle of black lashes, until he finally noticed Yashim near the foot of his bed.

“I’ve failed,” he murmured, feeling no surprise. Yashim only smiled.

Palewski felt no desire to open his eyes. In his dream he was running across snow, like a hare on the thin crust, and the surface of the snow was pockmarked by the little holes into which his friends had sunk, one by
one. He ran hither and thither across the snow, whining and wringing his hands, knowing that if he tried to crack through the crust to save them then he, too, would slide through it like a hot coal.