The Bellini Card (31 page)

He scraped the meat into the flat earthenware, covered it with layers of aubergine, and poured the sauce on top.

With the moussaka ready, he rinsed off the frying pan and oiled it. When it was very hot he crushed into it a few dried peppers between the palms of his hands and cooked them until the flakes were almost black. He spooned the homemade
kirmizi biber
into a cup of flour.

“The Armenian monastery.”

He spoke so quietly that Palewski, chasing flies on the windowpane with a handkerchief, couldn’t be sure he’d heard properly.

“The monastery?”

“You said you were giddy. You were in the library, looking at a Koran.”

“That’s right. Felt peculiar.”

“An old Koran?”

“No, no. Quite recent—very lovely, too.”

“From the Aspi family, you said? Did you see who made it?”

“I just wanted to go home and sleep, Yashim.”

“I’d like to see it,” Yashim said.

“Now?”

“I think that would be best,” Yashim agreed. “Wrap up. It could be cold on the water.”

I
T
took them almost an hour to reach the island. The channel was marked with stakes, gaunt as gibbets in the dusk. The water was still and oily.

Palewski pulled the bell rope and they heard it jangle in the porter’s lodge. After a few minutes a little window was thrust back and a face appeared.

“Who are you? It’s late.”

The monk spoke in Italian; Yashim answered in Armenian. “I apologize, Father. Signor Brett visited the monastery a few days ago, but he was unable to speak to Father Aristo.”

“Father Aristo,” the monk echoed. “He will be in the scriptorium.”

He undid the bolts and let them in. When he had locked the door again he put his hands in his sleeves. “Please, follow me.”

They crossed a courtyard and entered a wide passage. The sconces had just been lit. The monk opened a door softly, without knocking, and Yashim inhaled a rich and pleasantly familiar smell of old books, ink, and wood. The scriptorium was lined with shelves, lost in the gloom; a candle guttered on the broad oak table that ran down the middle of the room.

The table was bare, except where it erupted into a confusion of papers and books close to the candle, reminding Yashim of the Polish ambassador’s study in Istanbul. Father Aristo’s conical black hat stood on a pile of dictionaries, and Father Aristo’s bald head lay on the papers. He appeared to be asleep.

The monk smiled. “Father Aristo works so hard,” he whispered. Then, a little louder: “Father. Father Aristo.”

“We came to see the Koran, especially,” Yashim said quietly. “Perhaps we should let Father Aristo sleep?”

The monk shook his head. “He would be disappointed.”

He touched the old monk’s arm.

Father Aristo raised his head and looked around, blinking. His beard was magnificent and white.

“Some visitors, Father.”

Father Aristo groped on the table for his spectacles and put them on carefully, tucking the arms behind his huge ears.

“I was having a nap.” He had a very deep voice and a sweet smile.

Still in Armenian, Yashim introduced them both. “We wished to look at the Koran, Father.”

“Ah yes, the Koran. By all means. It is very splendid. Would you like some tea?”

While the other monk went to fetch the tea, Father Aristo spread the papers in front of him.

“This is our dictionary,” he explained, looking fondly at the books around him, as if their presence were a pleasant surprise. “Between English and Armenian. I have reached the fourteenth letter of our alphabet.”

That left him with twenty-four to go, Yashim thought.

The monk returned with a tray and three glasses of sweet tea.

“It is a holy task, because the Armenian script is a holy script,” Father Aristo said. “It has come to us unchanged, down the centuries. The first letter is
A
, for Astvats: God. The last is
K
, for Kristos. Mashtots received these letters in a dream, after years of study. It was a very good dream, my friends. These letters,” he added, slowly, “have kept us together for fourteen hundred and thirty-five years.”

He rose to his feet, carefully lifting the chair from the floor.

“But you have come to see the Koran. I will show it to you.”

He disappeared into the gloom. He seemed to know his way around by touch, for in a few moments he returned with a large leather-bound book, which he placed on the table.

“The Muslims, too, respect their script as holy,” he said. He looked at Yashim. “Is it not so?”

Yashim bowed. He lifted the cover and saw that this was, indeed, a very fine Koran, of a quality that would suit a palace or a great mosque.

Inside the cover was a short inscription in Latin.

Palewski leaned over. “It says that Alvise d’Aspi presented this Koran to his friends at the Armenian Monastery of San Lazzaro in the year—”

He frowned. The roman numerals MCCLXIV made no sense. “Twelve sixty-four?”

Father Aristo smiled and patted his arm. “Of course. Count d’Aspi was a good friend to us. He used the Armenian calendar, which begins in A.D. 552 in your calendar.” He nodded. “There is a great deal to explain about the Armenian calendar, but you must come earlier in the day, no?” His eyes twinkled behind his spectacles. “You would say, 1816.”

Yashim turned the pages. Each sura was brilliantly illuminated, according to a tradition that went back to the twelfth century, with stylized foliage crammed with animals and birds. There was no calligrapher’s signature; Yashim did not expect one.

The work itself was a signature; it bore the stamp of the man who had single-handedly worked to make this beautiful book. It must have taken months, if not years. The calligrapher was Metin Yamaluk.

The endpapers were very beautiful and carefully produced. Yashim paused over them, frowning. They showed a square, and between the corners and the midway point on each line of the square ran an endless knot, forming an eight-pointed star.

Palewski pointed to the diagram. “Seen that one before. It’s on the floor of the contessa’s salon, I think.”

“Is it?” Yashim murmured. He had seen it, too, weeks before in Yamaluk’s studio in Üsküdar.

The Sand-Reckoner’s diagram.

Yamaluk’s Koran had been commissioned by Count d’Aspi. And Yamaluk himself had met the new sultan, to present him with an address.

“Printing!” Father Aristo sighed and gestured to the shelves. “I wonder, gentlemen, where Dante would have put the printers? Benefactors—or criminals?” He shook his head. “I hardly know.”

“I knew the man who made this Koran,” Yashim said.

They stood together in the candlelight, gazing down at the illuminated pages.

“Thank you, Father Aristo,” Yashim said. “You’ve shown me exactly what I needed to see.”

The old man nodded and rubbed his glasses with a fold of his soutane.

They left in the dark, with the old monk’s blessing.

The gondola was waiting at the gate. Palewski and Yashim climbed into the little cabin, where Yashim bent forward with a look of triumph.

“I’d like to meet your friend, the Contessa d’Aspi d’Istria,” he said.

Palewski shrugged. “Maybe.” He paused. “I tried to see her, too, twice. Three times. She wasn’t receiving visitors. Not after Barbieri was killed.”

Yashim was silent for a while. The water gurgled softly against the hull of the gondola.

“I think I know where we might find the painting, Palewski,” Yashim said. “If we’re not too late.”

Y
ASHIM
sliced three onions, fine; they were red and crisp and he spread the rings onto a large white plate.

He took a big lamb’s liver and prepared it carefully, removing the arteries and the tough membrane. He sliced it into strips and tossed it in the flour and
kirmizi biber
.

In the frying pan he sautéed garlic and cumin seeds. The oil was hot; before the garlic could catch he dropped in the sliced liver and turned it quickly with a wooden spoon. The meat tightened and browned; he spooned the slices out and laid them on the onion rings. He chopped some dill and parsley and sprinkled them over the dish, and then, hungry, he took a piece of liver with an onion ring and popped them into his mouth.

Venetians would have cooked the onion until it was very soft. Delicious, in its way, and sweet, but lacking the boldness of the Ottoman original, Yashim thought, as the textures and flavors burst in his mouth. His
arnavut cigeri
looked better, too.

A shame that he had found no yogurt. He sliced a lemon and laid the wedges around the plate.

He drained the chickpeas. He would cook them with onion, rice, and the remainder of the signora’s delicious stock.

He made a marinade with the nigella seeds he had found at the é
picier
. They had been labeled black cumin, but Yashim knew better. He mixed them with lemon juice, crushed garlic, salt, pepper, and oregano. Into a bowl, weeping, he grated two onions. He mixed the pulp with a spoonful of salt.

He cleaned his knife and used it to slice three swordfish steaks into chunks, which he turned into the marinade. He took out a stack of vine leaves he had stripped, without much guilt, from a tendril blown over a high garden wall on his way home that morning. He washed them, softened them in the chickpea water in bunches of two or three, and dropped them into a bowl of cold water.

He squeezed the onion pulp between his hands and trickled the juice over the fish.

The signora used a long flat knife with a rounded end to smooth her polenta. Wondering if it were sacrilege he decided to use it as a skewer for the fish.

When he had wrapped each piece of fish in its vine-leaf coat, he found that the polenta knife was too blunt-ended to get through the leaves. Patiently he stuck each packet with Malakian’s little knife, widened the hole, and slipped it onto the broad blade.

He drizzled what was left of the marinade over the fish and set the skewer over the embers of the fire.

He prepared the rice. When it was covered with a cloth, and steaming gently, he went outside to the well and carefully washed his hands, his face, his ears, and nose.

“When you are ready, we can eat,” he announced.

C
OMMISSARIO
Brunelli liked to think he’d seen everything in Venice, but when Maria brought him into her mother’s kitchen he changed his mind.

“My name, signora, is Brunelli. Vittorio Brunelli.” He took a deep sniff, and his chest rose. “I hope I am not disturbing you.”

The candlelight, at first, made the hairs prickle at the nape of his neck. He felt it all—the light, the smells, the shadows on the faces—long before he realized what it was.

It was a feast among the poor.

He saw the turban. He saw Palewski’s lean, pale face. He saw Maria, doubtful, with her jet-black hair. He saw children, shaved headed, staring at him with their big eyes, and their father, smiling, and the shadows and the black beams and the embers of the dying fire.

He advanced, unsteadily, into the room.