The Bellini Card (3 page)

Yashim cast his eyes down. The valide, Mahmut’s French-born mother, was his oldest friend in the harem.

“My padishah is gracious,” he said.

“Hmm.” The sultan gave a little grunt. It was the same grunt as the old sultan’s, though higher pitched.

“Our ears have received a report that concerns the honor and memory of our house,” the sultan began, a little stiffly. Mahmut would have spoken the same words as if they came from his belly, not his head.

“Does Bellini mean anything to you?”

With a sultan one does not gape like a fish. The room, Yashim now noticed, was papered in the European fashion.

“No, my padishah. I regret—”

“Bellini was a painter.” The sultan waved a bony hand. “It was a long time ago, in the age of the Conqueror.”

Yashim cocked his head. He remembered now the man who had once designed a bridge across the Golden Horn: Leonardo. Leonardo da Vinci. A Florentine.

“From Italy, my padishah?”

“Bellini was the greatest painter of his age in Europe. The Conqueror summoned him to Istanbul. He made some drawings and paintings. Of—well, people. With colors from life.” The color seemed to have risen in the young sultan’s face as well. “He was a master of
portraiture.”
He pronounced the word well, with a French accent, Yashim noticed.

Yashim thought of the tulips he had rescued from the sledgehammer: they were very pure. But to paint people? No wonder the young man was embarrassed.

“The Conqueror desired that it should be so,” Abdülmecid added, his
blush subsiding as he spoke. “Bellini rested at the Conqueror’s court for two years. I am told that he decorated parts of the Topkapi Palace—fresco, it is called—with scenes that the sultan Bayezid later removed.”

Yashim nodded. Mehmet the Conqueror’s successor, Bayezid, was a very pious man. If this Bellini painted people, Sultan Bayezid would have been shocked. He would not have wanted such blasphemy in his palace.

The young sultan laid his bony hand on the papers on his desk.

“Bellini painted a portrait of the Conqueror,” he said.

Yashim blinked. A portrait? Mehmet the Conqueror had been only twenty-one years old when he plucked the Red Apple of Constantinople from the Christians in 1453. An Islamic hero, who became heir to the Byzantine Roman empire of the east. Master of the Orthodox Christian world, he made his empire stretch from the shores of the Black Sea to the crusted ridges of the Balkans, appointing Christian patriarchs with their staff of office, bringing the chief rabbi to the city destined, as all men said, to be the navel of the world.

And he had summoned an Italian painter to his court.

“The portrait, my padishah—it still exists?”

The sultan cocked his chin and stared steadily at Yashim. “I don’t know,” he said quietly.

There was a silence in the great room. As it lengthened, Yashim felt a shiver pass up his spine and ruffle the hairs on the back of his neck. Millions of people lived out their lives in the shadow of the padishah. From the deserts of Arabia to the desolate borders of the Russian steppe, touched or untouched by his commands, paying the taxes he levied, soldiering in the armies that he raised, dreaming—some of them—of a gilded monarch by the sea. Yashim had seen their paintings of the Bosphorus in Balkan manor houses and Crimean palaces; he had seen old men weep by river and mountain when the old sultan passed away.

He had spent ten minutes in the company of a youth who blushed like a girl, and dabbed his nose, and confessed to something he didn’t know. The padishah.

It was the padishah who spoke. “The painting, like the frescoes, disappeared after Mehmet’s death. It is said that my pious ancestor had
them sold in the bazaar. With that in mind, what Muslim would seek to buy what the sultan himself had pronounced forbidden?”

The word was
harem
. Yashim nodded.

“The portrait has never been seen since,” the sultan added. “But Bellini was a Venetian. The best painter in Venice, in his day.” His eyelids flickered; he brought the handkerchief to his face, but no sneeze came. “Now we have word that the painting has been seen.”

“In Venice, my padishah.”

The sultan tapped his fingers on the table and then, abruptly, clambered to his feet. “You speak Italian, of course?”

“Yes, my padishah. I speak Italian.”

“I want you to find the painting, Yashim. I want you to buy it for me.”

Yashim bowed. “The painting is for sale, my padishah?”

The sultan looked surprised. “The Venetians are traders, Yashim. Everything in Venice is for sale.”

Y
ASHIM
took a caïque across the Horn, directing it to drop him farther around the shore, at Tophane. He did not want to see the broken fountain again, or to witness the felling of that magnificent old plane. He made his way uphill, through the narrow alleys of the port; at night, this place was dangerous, but in the afternoon sun it felt almost deserted. A cat slunk low on its belly and disappeared under a broken-down green gate; two dogs lay motionless in a patch of shade.

He found the steps and climbed briskly up the steep slopes of Pera toward the Polish residency.

Most of the European ambassadors had already decamped for the
summer. One by one they retreated from the heat of Pera, where the dust sifted invisibly and relentlessly off the unmade streets. They went to villa gardens up the Bosphorus, to conduct their intrigues and negotiations among the bougainvillea and the hyssop. Some of these summer palaces were said to be magnificent—the Russian and the British could be glimpsed, cool and white among the trees, from a caïque gliding down the Bosphorus. The French, the Prussians, the Swedes all had their summer palaces. Even the Sardinian consul took rooms in the Greek fishing village of Ortaköy.

Stanislaw Palewski, Polish Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, remained in town.

It wasn’t that Palewski felt the need to remain close to the court to which he was accredited. Far from it: the ordinary burdens of diplomatic life rested lightly on his shoulders. No frowning monarch or jingoistic assembly issued him daunting instructions; no labyrinthine negotiations were ever set afoot by the Polish Chancellery. Poland had no monarch and no assembly. There wasn’t, indeed, a Poland at all—except one of the heart, and to that Palewski was bound with every fiber of his body.

Palewski had arrived in Istanbul a quarter of a century before, to represent a country that did not, except in the Ottoman imagination, exist any longer. In 1795, Poland had been invaded and divided by Austria, Prussia, and Russia, putting an end to the ancient commonwealth that had once battled the Ottomans on the Dnieper and at the walls of Vienna.

“You must always try to forget what you have lost,” Palewski had once remarked to his friend Yashim. “And I must always remember.”

On a whim, because the day was so hot, Yashim went past the gates of the Polish residency and over the Grande Rue to the cluster of Greek coffeehouses that had sprung up by the entrance to an old burial ground. Far away across the Bosphorus, beyond Üsküdar, he could just make out the snowy slopes of Mount Olympos, shimmering in the heat.

Yashim bought a pound of Olympian ice, wrapped in paper.

He knocked several times on the peeling boards of the residency door. Eventually he pushed it open and spent a few minutes wandering alone through the ground floor of the dilapidated building. Out of curiosity he tried the dining room and found it as he had expected, almost impenetrably
dark behind the tangle of clematis at the windows; the dining table sagged in the middle, and the stuffed, hard chairs ranged against the walls were green with mildew.

He went through to the back of the house, wondering if Marta, Palewski’s Greek maid, was in the kitchen. She was not. Through the open window he spotted a familiar figure half hidden in the tall grass and waded out to meet his friend.

Palewski lay full-length on a magnificent old carpet. He was propped over a book, wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat and a pair of blue cotton trousers. His feet were bare. A glass and jug of what looked like lemonade stood at his elbow.

“I brought you some ice,” Yashim said. Palewski jumped. He sat up and pushed his hat to the back of his head.

“Ice? Good of you, Yashim.”

Yashim slipped off his shoes and sat down cross-legged on the carpet. Palewski glanced at it. “Marta laid it out here—she says the sun kills the moth.”

“But you’re in the shade.”

“Yes. It was too hot.”

A magnificent palace weave of vermilion semicircles on a black background, the design of the carpet echoed the patterns of the caftans worn by the sultans in the glory days of the Empire, when the Iznik tile makers were at their best. It must have been more than two hundred years old. The Poles had been at their best then, too, battling the Ottomans on the Dnieper and the Prut.

“I haven’t seen this one before,” Yashim murmured. He ran his hand across the fine nap and winced.

“Rolled up in the attic. In canvas, too.” Palewski stood up. “Fluttering little bastards. Where’s that ice?”

He took it to the kitchen, where Yashim heard him banging around. He returned with a glass and the ice shattered in a bowl. Yashim gestured to the book on the carpet.

“Are you thinking of traveling?”

“I drag out the atlas now and then,” Palewski said. “My grand tour, suspended.”

Yashim nodded. Many rich young Europeans traveled through Italy and Greece when they came of age. Sometimes they came on to Istanbul, confusing the locals with their attempts to order coffee in ancient Greek.

Something moved at the back of Yashim’s mind. “When you say—suspended?”

Palewski busied himself with the ice and the jug, murmuring something Yashim could not quite catch. “Half thinking of going away for a while, Yashim.”

Yashim blinked. “Up the Bosphorus?” He found it hard to imagine Istanbul without Stanislaw Palewski.

“Farther. I don’t know.” Palewski pulled a face. “Not that I have a crowd of options. A felon in my dismembered country. Wanted by half the despots in Europe for upholding Poland’s dignity in a foreign court.” He shook his head. “Paris? Rome? London’s safest, I suppose.” He groaned. “Boiled beef and gin.”

Yashim smiled. “Pera’s pretty horrible in summer.”

Palewski scratched his ear. “I mean it, Yash,” he said gloomily. “The inaugural ball.”

Yashim laughed. “You have six weeks to get ready.” It was common knowledge that the young sultan would mark his accession by throwing a ball for dignitaries foreign and domestic on their return to the city. “I expect you’ve still got that glorious coat you wore last time—unless the moths have got it, too?”

“It’s not about moth, Yashim.” Palewski looked grave. “It’s the new sultan.”

“I’ve just met him,” Yashim said. “He has a cold.”

“Fascinating stuff, Yashim. Maybe I could take a caïque up to the British embassy and cadge an evening in the gardens on the strength of it.” The ambassador picked moodily at the grass. “Sultan Mahmut may have been a reformer, but he had a proper sense of his own power. He waited almost twenty years to achieve it, but by the time he was big enough to do what he liked, I was a sort of fixture. He liked the way it broke the Russians’ hearts to have me turn up at his functions.”

“He liked you,” Yashim said.

“That doesn’t count in politics. Anyway, he’s gone.”

“And Abdülmecid?” Yashim watched his friend in silence for a moment. He saw the way his friend was thinking. “He won’t drop you.”

“I can’t agree,” Palewski said stiffly. “Mahmut was old and fierce. He was pleased to think that the Ottomans were the only people in Europe who still recognized the Polish Republic. Abdülmecid is young and probably nervous of stepping out of line. The assembled
corps diplomatique
are watching to see if he drinks champagne from the wrong sort of glass.”

Yashim frowned. “Are you guessing, or has someone spoken to you about it?”

Palewski dismissed the question with a wave. “Of course not. No one ever will. In case you’re wondering, they haven’t stopped my stipend yet, either. It doesn’t mean a thing. They’ll probably go on paying that until I drop down dead. It’s the Ottoman way, Yashim. Polite and indirect. You know that.”

Yashim had been tracing a pattern in the carpet with his finger. “I could try to speak to someone, if you like.”

Palewski blew out his cheeks. “Decent of you, Yashim. Just don’t think it would sway the balance.”

Yashim drew a long breath. “I could find out if you’re invited?”

“It’s a bit late, actually. I saw the Sardinian consul yesterday in the street. Grinning like an organ grinder and all ready to move up to his hovel in Karaköy. Had the wretched invitation in his pocket. The Sardinian consul, Yash! Wouldn’t surprise me if the sultan asked that French tailor in Pera to come along. It’s not an exclusive affair.”

Yashim sighed.

“I’m in a difficult position at the palace, too.”

He told Palewski about Resid’s warning and the sultan’s interest in an old painting.

When he had finished he took a sip of lemonade.