The Bellini Card (38 page)

Y
ASHIM
inched himself gingerly along the wall: the mud was over his feet, mixed with chunks of broken bricks and stones. It churned over at every step, releasing a noxious belch of putrefaction. It occurred to Yashim that the whole city was built on rot. Sodden pilings, rotten brick, the submerged miasma of the lagoon’s decay.

The canal bed was lower in the middle, a shallow V that sloped up toward the buildings on either side. It was scarcely twelve feet wide.
Overhead were the doorways that gave access to the water, too high, as Yashim judged, to reach, the walls below smooth with accumulated slime.

He placed his weight against the wall. His hand skimmed across the slippery algae and he overbalanced, clawing for a moment at the stones before he slithered down into the base of the trench.

The mud was thicker here, the water up to his knees. The effort of raising one foot only drove the other deeper into the cloying ooze. Yashim swayed, hands outstretched, surprised by the clutch of the mud around his ankles.

The Tatar struck like a crocodile in the swamp, slithering upward from the water-lined trench.

He swarmed up Yashim’s legs from behind, judging it well, scarcely pressing his feet to the canal floor. As Yashim sprawled the Tatar was on top of him, his hard fingers grasping for Yashim’s neck, his whole weight pressing Yashim’s shoulders down into the stinking trench.

Yashim barely had time to grab a lungful of air before he was facedown in the mud, his knees pressed into the thick slime. He fought an impulse to choke.

Dimly, he thought that the mud had caught him, more dimly still, that the mud might save him.

Thrusting against the splayed weight of his left leg, Yashim rifled to break the Tatar’s hold. His arms swung free. He thrust himself up for air and when he splashed back into the water he took the Tatar’s knees in his hands and shot himself backward, barreling like a rifle bullet between the Tatar’s legs.

For centuries, the Ottoman Turks had practiced a unique form of wrestling in which two men, oiled from head to toe, grapple with each other under a blazing sun. Fierce as these contests are, they are generally friendly. Punching is not allowed.

But in Venice, in the mud, Yashim and the Tatar fought beneath a cold moon.

Yashim took the man’s topknot in his fist, but as it slithered from his grasp he raised his knee sharply and drove it against his throat. The Tatar gave a gurgle, and Yashim thrashed back again, scrambling in the watery trench for purchase.

The Tatar was up to his waist in the water, kneeling: a figure of clay. Yashim reached for his knife, blessing the ignorant cook who had once bound the handle with a spiral of cord. Even in this slime his grip was sure.

The Tatar lurched to his right, trying to scramble out of the trench and up the side of the canal.

Yashim put his thumb over the top of the handle, like a stopper, and staggered toward his prey.

Sometimes the Tatar slipped and slithered back, sometimes Yashim. Once, he almost had the Tatar in his grasp, one hand around his ankle, the other stabbing blindly into the mud; then the Tatar kicked down savagely and both men skittered backward. The Tatar stopped short of the trench. He was on all fours, clambering higher, while Yashim thrashed out of the water below him.

The Tatar saw the rope first. Perhaps he had known it was there all along, a possibility of escape, hanging down in a lazy swag from a doorway high overhead.

Before Yashim could squirm out of the trench, the Tatar had made a grab for the rope. His hand slipped off, he staggered. But he regained his balance in a moment, and this time he managed to worm his forearm over the rope, using his elbow as a fulcrum, maintaining his hold by taking his other hand in a butcher’s grip.

Yashim approached warily: his fixed hold gave the Tatar an advantage.

The Tatar swung from the rope like an ape, and his foot caught Yashim in the belly—not a winding blow, but enough to knock him down.

When he struggled to his feet, the Tatar was already cradling the rope, and then he was upright against the wall, standing precariously in the loop, his hands groping overhead for the lintel of the doorway.

Perhaps Yashim could have flung his knife, in the hope that it would strike its mark. Perhaps he could have struggled up the bank again, made a lunge for the assassin, forced him back into the mud, to start the whole weary, heavy, uncertain process of execution over again.

But Yashim was tired. He was weighted with mud: wet, wounded. His ear was bleeding.

By the time he reached the rope himself, the Tatar had vanished.

Y
ASHIM
found himself at the mouth of a narrow alley, barred by a few planks to stop pedestrians from falling into the dredged canal.

He climbed over the barrier and peered into the gloom. The usual weak light burned at the farther end of the alley. Yashim squatted and thought he could just make out the outline of muddy footprints.

At the corner he paused to scan the ground, but the footprints were by now invisible. There were at least three directions the Tatar could have taken.

Yashim leaned against the wall and tried to think.

Somewhere in this city the assassin had a safe place. Somewhere he could sleep, and eat, and leave at will, sure of attracting no attention.

He would have gone there now. Wounded and disarmed, he needed somewhere to change his clothes, wash his wounds. The Tatars were not punctilious about washing, unlike the Turks, but they would clean a bleeding cut.

Yet Venice was a poor city: and the poor are many, and have eyes.

They would see a stranger, even a careful one. Yashim had spent time in the Crimea, the Tatars’ homeland. He knew how they lived in the saddle on a handful of dried meat, but the Tatar would have to draw his water from a well, out in the
campo
. That was the way Venice was built. Some cities clustered around a citadel, but Venice shaped itself around its wells.

Unless …

The Tatar could have found one place to draw water, unseen.

Somewhere with its own supply.

Somewhere people had lived almost isolated lives—secure, secluded, and magnificent, too.

Yashim turned to the right, and began loping back toward the Grand Canal.

T
HE
cat watched the man washing his face. He took a rag and dipped it into the water, then washed his leg.

When he was done, he took a piece of cloth and tore it into strips.

The cat tensed, arching her back. Beneath her, a covey of blind kittens groped for the warm milk.

The man tied the cloth around his leg. The cat could smell his blood.

When the man stood up, he winced but made no sound.

He stood silent, immobile, watching the window.

Watching for the dawn to break.

G
INGERLY
Yashim pushed at the door.

He felt the hinges protest against his weight, but they made no sound.

As the door swung back, Yashim stepped inside and flattened himself against the wall.

If he was wrong about the fondaco …

He had left the contessa tied up on her own bed.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw the first glimmer of dawn through a chink in a broken door.

After a few moments he crossed the hall, half crouching, knife in hand, making no sound in the dust on the floor.

He had been here before. The hammam where Maria had been imprisoned was on the ground floor to his left, in the back corner of the huge old building. Here the ceiling was sagging, broken laths spilling downward; the floor above was probably unsound. But the contessa had gone upstairs to Eletro’s party.

Through a gap in the door he looked up at the sky. Carla had mentioned a central court, and if it was not typical of a Venetian palazzo it was just what Yashim would have expected of an Ottoman
han
. The courtyard, as far as he could see, was choked with a riot of plants—a few trees, a massive fig, and a tangle of brambles that had grown up through the paving stones. It would be surrounded by lockups, where the merchants’ goods were stored, damp and very dark. The Fondaco dei Turchi was almost entirely windowless. At ground level, no windows at all. Above, only one or two small openings on either side. The Ottomans had wanted a safe cocoon—safe from thieves, safe from infidel eyes.

A perfect place to hide.

He closed his eyes and tried to picture the front of the fondaco, as he had seen it from the contessa’s window. On the canal, a small quay, half built over; behind it, eight or so columned arches forming an arcade. A row of shorter columns above formed a loggia that, like the arcade beneath, ran almost the whole length of the facade, though on either side, on both floors, three or four arches had been blocked up like bastions that had lost their turrets.

In the room, or rooms, behind the loggia there would be light, but anyone in them would be invisible from the canal.

The door was stuck fast, so he groped his way through the ground-floor rooms until he reached a low opening onto the courtyard. He swung his legs over the sill and dropped down into an open arcade, heaped with broken tea chests, rotting bales, empty crates and barrels—the detritus of an abandoned trade.

He wondered where the Tatar was. He hoped he was somewhere overhead, perhaps where the contessa and her friends had played, in rooms overlooking the Grand Canal.

Cautiously he began to pick his way along the arcade, keeping to the darker shadows and using whatever cover the rubbish strewn around it could provide. At the end of the arcade he had to move into the open to reach the portico that he imagined would lead to the stairs.

He stooped and ran, swinging quickly through the archway, sliding with his back to the wall to the foot of the stairs, where he stopped to listen.

He crossed to the farther wall and began to climb the stairs, his eyes straining in the half-light.

He tried not to think that he might have got it all wrong. He concentrated instead on his instincts, telling him the assassin was waiting overhead, behind the door to the great room where the sultan himself had played cards.

He stopped and listened again.

Something the contessa had said came into his mind, but then it was gone as he reached the turn of the stairs and found himself by a row of empty windows divided by slender columns. They had stopped here, the sultan and his friends, to look at the lights in the courtyard.

There were no lights now as Yashim inched to a window, but through the trees and weeds the breaking dawn revealed bands of lighter stone across the dark paving of the court, spelling out the pattern he already knew so well.

He pulled back his head. The dark mass of the doorway lay above, but it was impossible to see whether the door was open or closed. Yashim hovered, uncertain whether to go forward or back. The door must be closed, he thought; otherwise it would be backlit, however dimly, by the gathering light on the Grand Canal.