The Bellini Card (28 page)

“He was a pious old man. He died with a look of terror on his face.”

He told him, too, about Resid’s cryptic remarks. “He knew something was going on in Venice. Something dangerous.”

Palewski for his part explained about the contessa’s party, and the death of Barbieri, and how Alfredo had been his last hope.

Yashim bit his cheek. “Yes—and I wonder how this Alfredo knew what you were looking for.”

“Rumors, Yashim. Speculation was born on the Rialto.” His chair creaked. “Everyone knows something and is sure of nothing. Except that I miss my bed,” Palewski murmured, pulling the blanket up beneath his
chin. In a minute he was asleep, legs outstretched, his feet on the hearth like a soldier on campaign.

Yashim took longer to settle. Palewski had sketched for him a cast of characters: some were frauds, some were dead, and some, he was sure, knew more than they were letting on.

T
HE
signora was sweeping around his feet.

“You sleep like a child, signore—a big man, as you are!” she said, when Palewski opened an eye. “Well, Maria will be down presently.”

Her husband had gone out, taking Yashim with him. “He rows the barges at San Luca,” the signora explained. “Your friend the Moor said to tell you, signore, you should stay where you are.”

The importance of staying put was not lost on Palewski: the police might still be watching his flat, and he had no wish to run into Alfredo, either.

Maria came down, yawning and pretty in a bodice none too tightly buttoned. She and Palewski shared a dish of grilled polenta, while she told him in greater detail about her ordeal.

“They were Venetians, too!” she concluded in a tone of wonder. “My mother doesn’t understand it.”

Yashim returned half an hour later. He was carrying several of the signora’s string bags, crammed with provisions, as well as a change of linen for Palewski. He was also wearing a turban again, though nobody seemed to notice. Palewski remembered a gang of building workers he had recently seen near the Campo San Polo. They, too, had been wearing turbans—though theirs were noticeably less clean and white.

“The signora has agreed to let me cook tonight,” Yashim said happily,
biting into a slab of polenta. He took a yellow envelope out of his pocket. “In the meantime, you have an invitation, my old friend. I picked it up, too, from your apartment. Signor Eletro, today at twelve o’clock.”

Palewski folded his arms. “I’m supposed to be in hiding, not strolling about Venice with a character out of the Arabian Nights. Who’s Eletro?”

Yashim stood up. “Don’t you know?” He picked up Palewski’s hat and gave it to him. He presented Maria with a bow.
Arrivederci,”
he said with a smile.

“Be careful,” she said.

Yashim took his friend by the arm and steered him outside, through the yard.

Palewski pulled a surly face. “All right, Eletro’s one of the dealers Ruggerio told me to approach. I sent him a card.”

“What’s his line?”

“How would I know, Yashim? Probably a line in plausible talk. I don’t suppose he’s got a Bellini in his attic.”

“Probably not. But I’d like to get his measure, anyway. It might come in useful.”

They settled into a gondola.

Palewski blew out his cheeks. “Frankly, Yash, I almost wish you’d never turned up. I could be miles away by now. I liked the Bellini—and the sultan would have liked it, too.”

“Until he discovered it was a fake.”

“If it
was
a fake,” Palewski said moodily. “I didn’t know.
He
wouldn’t know. And the dealers, like Eletro or Barbieri, would probably think it was real, too.”

“But what if they guessed it was fake?”

“Oh, then they’d have a crack at selling him something in the same line, and back both pictures to the hilt. And why not, dammit? It’s a ridiculous affair, and everyone’s happy.”

Yashim frowned. “It would be false.”

“False? The whole game’s false. I have a picture of King Sobieski in my sitting room, Yashim. I like it. Man looks like a king.”

“I know the picture,” Yashim said.

“Of course you do. Fact is, it was painted twenty years after Sobieski died. It’s written on the back. And I don’t care!”

Yashim looked across at his old friend. They were sliding along a sequence of narrow green canals. As they burst out into the lagoon, the frail craft began to pitch.

Yashim put a hand to the gunwale.

“Lies beget lies,” he said. “Until, one day, someone needs the truth.”

Palewski stared out over the lagoon. “The truth.”

They were too close to the heart of it now: the ineluctable mystery of human affairs, the questions of faith, doubt, and proof.

“I wouldn’t want the sultan to have a fake,” Palewski said finally.

They were back now in the body of Venice, sifting through its veins and ventricles. The gondolier pulled up at a tiny
campo
.

“Wait for us,” Yashim said.

The
campo
was unusually deserted: it took Yashim a moment to realize that the entire left side was only an empty façade. Behind a half-opened door he saw piles of rubble and charred beams; a cat slipped by and disappeared. In the center of the narrow courtyard was a wellhead tinged with damp.

Palewski shivered beside him. “No wonder they torched it. Place looks like it never gets the sun,” he remarked. “Where’s Eletro?”

“It must be this side,” Yashim said. “There’s only one door.”

The door swung open at the first push. Inside, a narrow corridor disappeared toward the back around the foot of the stairs.

“Damp. Very.” Palewski pulled a face.

Yashim sniffed the air. “It’s not damp,” he said. “It’s drains. And by the way, you can introduce me to Eletro as the pasha’s servant.”

“The pasha’s servant?” Palewski echoed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Yashim shrugged. “Nothing at all. Come on, he’ll be waiting.”

The smell was stronger on the stairs, and on the first floor landing Palewski gagged and put a handkerchief to his nose.

“Smells like gangrene,” he mumbled. “Look at that.”

He was pointing to a door whose jambs were black with thickly clustered flies. A fat bluebottle buzzed lazily past them and crashed into the landing window.

Yashim pulled the folds of his cloak together and approached the door: a buzzing swarm of flies rose to the ceiling and made a rush for the window. Palewski had to close his eyes as they went by, batting against his face and hat; Yashim, half twisted toward him, put his hand on the doorknob.

Yashim felt flies crawling onto his wrist.

He gave the knob a savage twist and shoved back the door to release a bar of sunshine and a thick hot guff of decay.

A swarm of flies moved in the opposite direction.

Yashim ducked instinctively, dragging his cloak over his eyes and mouth. The high, sweet reek of rotten meat caught in his throat and he stepped back onto the landing.

Palewski was at the window, rattling the knob, and then both of them were leaning out into the shade of the
campo
, choking for lungfuls of clear air.

After a few minutes Yashim covered his nose and mouth again and went back to the doorway. He strode into Popi’s flat and crossed to the opposite window, which he opened.

This time it was not only the stench that made him retch.

The walls, the floor, the table, and the chairs were all caked with patches of dried blood, over which crawled thousands of glittering blue flies. Between him and the door lay only vaguely the shape of a man, so bloated and rotten had it become in the heat of the sun. Beneath its coating of flies the body was both swollen and deliquescent, melting over the floorboards as if its skin could no longer contain its molten putrefaction.

Palewski came to the door.

He threw up in the hall. He felt better, until he saw the flies crawling over his vomit.

He stood in the doorway again and gestured clumsily to the heaving corpse.

“Where’s his skin?” His voice was a croak.

Yashim glanced again, gagged, averted his face, and tried to concentrate on the room. It was the room of a workingman, a tradesman. Even without the blood it needed a fresh coat of paint. A small oilcloth lay under the deal table, and a board sat on the table with something fuzzy on it, probably an old cheese. Next to it was a knife. The knife was not bloody. At the other end of the table stood a chair, paper, and a pen. The paper was spattered with blood, but it was the same paper as the letter. Nothing was written on the paper. A bottle of wine stood beneath the chair, with the cork stuck in.

Several paintings hung on the walls.

A slight breeze had set in, blowing between the sunny window in the flat and the shaded window on the stairs. Palewski crossed the room with his handkerchief to his nose and joined Yashim at the window.

“Could be Canalettos,” he gasped, turning to the sunlight.

“Canalettos?”

“Those paintings. Fashionable. Last century. Painted Venetian—what,
vedute
. Pretty scenes.” He coughed into his handkerchief. “He did them by the yard—fabulous technique. Seen one, seen them all.”

“You mean—they look the same?” Yashim stared at the paintings for a while. “These ones are, in fact, identical.”

Palewski turned to look. “So they are,” he murmured. “How very extraordinary. Why, the old swindler! So that was his racket.”

He turned and opened the other door, cautiously, with his face buried in the crook of his arm.

The window in here was already open. There was a smell of turpentine and oil.

“This is where he must have done them. Look.”

Yashim followed him in, noticing the paints spread out on a little table daubed with slicks of green and yellow. A large canvas lay against the wall; another stood on an easel. In the corner of the room was a dirty unmade bed.

Yashim studied the canvas on the easel.

Palewski glanced at it. “Another Canaletto,” he remarked carelessly.

“But not by Canaletto,” Yashim reminded him. He peered at the painting, mesmerized. It was a busy picture, replete with the sights of
canal life in Venice in the 1760s. Gondolas slipped across the rippled water; matrons hung out of balconies, drawing up their shopping on a string; a periwigged grandee lectured his ladies on the classical orders in front of Santa Maria della Salute; a dog barked at a beggar; a woman sat at her window, reading a letter with a happy smile.

Unlike Palewski, Yashim had never before seen such attention to detail. It was more than a realistic rendering of light in paint. It was like looking through a window. He almost believed he could jump in and come out wet, floundering in the Grand Canal.

“It makes no difference,” Palewski was saying. “This man Eletro must have had a sort of brilliance—but it’s all reflected. And why not? Canaletto held a mirror up to this city and painted the reflection. Very clever. Medal of honor. Eletro holds a mirror up to Canaletto. Clever, too. Medal of honor, second class.”

Yashim straightened up. “Is that Eletro on the floor next door, do you think?”

“I assumed so. I don’t know, now you mention it.”

“No, I think it’s him, too.” Yashim gestured to the tangled sheets and blankets. “This is where he lived. And where he was left dead.” He returned his gaze to the canvas, fascinated by the depth of perspective, the animation of the tiny figures who looked solid and real in the foreground and then dwindled into mere brushstrokes as the distance lengthened.

He moved his head back and forth, screwing up his eyes.

“It wasn’t Eletro who painted this picture,” he said finally. “It wasn’t your Canaletto, either. But whoever it was, he did hold a mirror up to Venice. Look.”

He was pointing at the canvas—not touching it. The paint was still fresh.

Palewski bent his head and looked.

“Good God!”

Yashim wasn’t pointing to the foreground. He was pointing, instead, to a tiny window in a row of windows almost lost in the shade of the great church. There, in a darkened room, a man with red arms and a curious topknot could be seen grappling with a pair of bloody legs.