The Bellini Card (4 page)

“Very weak,” Palewski explained grimly, as Yashim choked. “Low-grade stuff, too. I wouldn’t use bison grass.” He lay on his side, his chin cupped in his hand. “Ask yourself: What if the Bellini does exist?”

Yashim shrugged. “I buy it for the sultan.”

Palewski was quiet for a moment. “Do you remember Lefèvre, the Frenchman? He stole old books.”

Yashim nodded. How could he forget?
^*

“I told you then about provenance. About how a book could become valuable if it had a story attached to it. Remember?”

Yashim remembered. Old books, guarded in some monkish scriptorium for generations, could accrue a value far beyond their worth as literature. Sometimes, it seemed, beyond the value of a human life.

“Bellini’s portrait of Mehmet could be worth a lot of money, Yash,” Palewski said. “A Bellini’s just the sort of thing some young milord would want to carry off in triumph to his big house. And a Bellini portrait of Mehmet the Conqueror—so much the better. Exotic. Story attached. Impresses his friends.”

Yashim’s chin sank onto his breast. He thought of the Iznik tiles he had rescued. To him they were priceless, irreplaceable. They were beautiful works of an artist’s skill and imagination—but in Istanbul they were treated like old bricks.

He took a sip of Polish lemonade.

“Imagine if some turbaned Ottoman dignitary arrives in Venice with instructions to buy the painting and a sultan’s purse at his disposal.”

Yashim’s nose prickled against the vodka. “I pay too much,” he said simply.

“You’re a sitting duck, Yashim. You’ll pay double for an artwork that many of Abdülmecid’s subjects will think is blasphemous. Mahmut left the Ottoman state almost bankrupt: it’s an open secret. Resid is right. This, Yashim, is a watery command.”

“But if I don’t go …” Yashim trailed off.

“Well, you’re in a fix, Yashim. If you don’t go, the sultan may resent it. If you do, Resid will never forgive you.”

Yashim snatched up Palewski’s atlas and bent his head over the map. Mountains on the atlas were shown as a scattering of tiny peaks, cities as small black dots. The edge of the land was represented by a pretty shading, in blue.

His first commission from the new regime—and already it was compromised!
Resid wanted him to stay and forget. The sultan wanted him to go. Resid was right: Palewski said so, but the sultan ruled.

Yashim laid a finger on the map. “You’re right. I can’t go.” He picked out the Latin inscriptions. Adriaticum. Ragusa. Venetia. “But you can. You can go and buy the sultan’s Bellini, my old friend.”

Palewski opened his mouth and shut it again in astonishment. “Me?” He sat up. “Yashim, you must have taken leave—”

“The grand tour—resumed,” Yashim interrupted. “And more important, the sultan’s gratitude.”

Palewski looked at him uncertainly.

“The Conqueror, restored by the Polish ambassador to the city he won? I think it’s worth an invitation to the inaugural ball.”

His friend looked up into the branches of the mulberry tree. “Yes, but—the Austrians, Yash. My position. All—this.” He waved a hand around the ill-kempt lawn. “What would Marta say?”

Yashim smiled. “Leave her to me. It’s summer, and all the ambassadors are away. As for the Austrians, well.” He paused. Palewski was scarcely regarded favorably by the Habsburgs. He’d been a thorn in their side ever since he arrived in Istanbul, a refugee from his own estates in southern Poland. The Habsburgs had sequestered his country, and they ruled over Venice, too.

“The answer, my friend, is that you will travel in disguise.” And seeing that Palewski was opening his mouth to protest, he added, “And I’ll have a drop more lemonade.”

T
HE
sun rose from the sea in a veil of mist so fine that in twenty minutes it would burn up and be gone.

Commissario Brunelli took the papers between his thumb and forefinger and dropped them into his satchel without a second glance. The aged pilot grunted and gave him a narrow, toothless smile.

“For the friends?”

“For the friends,” Brunelli agreed. What the Austrians made of them he had no idea. Nor did he much care. If they combed the passenger lists for foreign spies or political exiles, that was their affair: they could do the work, if it mattered to them so much. His own mind, he felt, was on higher things.

In particular on the sea bass that Luigi, at the docks, had promised him as the customary favor.

The ship creaked slightly in the current. Brunelli shook hands with the captain, a trim and stocky Greek with tight white curls he remembered having seen before, and went to the rail.

Scorlotti was waiting for him in the boat.

“Anything new, Commissario?”

“No, Scorlotti. Nothing new.” When would the boy learn? he wondered. This wasn’t Chioggia, this was Venice. Venice had seen it all before. “Drop me at the docks, will you?”

Scorlotti yawned and grinned. Then he took up the oars and began to row them across the smooth waters of the lagoon.

By the time Palewski reached the deck, Commissario Brunelli was
nothing more than a speck of color laid, so it might have seemed, by the tip of a brush on the loveliest canvas ever painted by the hand of man.

“So this is Venice,” Palewski muttered, shading his eyes against the shards of sunlight bouncing off the sea. “How ghastly.”

S
TANISLAW
Palewski’s words were not spoken with any animus against the Queen of Cities. The previous evening he had celebrated his impending arrival with Greek brandy, toasting the islands of the Dalmatian coast as they slid by and revealed their coves and whitewashed villages to him one by one. In the morning the rattling of the ship’s anchor chain through the davits, and the ship’s bell five minutes later, had woken him from a befuddled dream rather earlier than he was used to. Worse still, the ship’s cook no longer offered coffee to the paying passengers: they had arrived.

He ran his hands through his hair and groaned softly, squinting at the view.

Gorgeous it was, with its domes aflame in the morning light and a soft mist dispersing around its pilings and water stairs, yet Venice in 1840 was not quite the Adriatic queen of former times. Once, with her islands and her ports scattered across the eastern Mediterranean, she had considered herself sovereign of a quarter and an eighth of the Mediterranean. Each year her doge, with his ring, renewed his marriage to the sea; each year it cast back treasures on her shore—silks and spices, furs and precious stones, which the Venetian merchants sold shrewdly in the north. But with each passing year, too, her grip had loosened: the Ottomans had
gained; the current of trade and wealth had ebbed toward the Atlantic. In a whirlwind of partygoing, the Venetians had pavaned insensibly toward Nemesis. Napoleon had come and had been what he predicted: an Attila to the Venetian Republic.

The Austrians took over what Napoleon could not hold for long, and for thirty years the old port had decayed under the indifference of the Habsburgs, who preferred Trieste.

Palewski found the view consoling, all the same. Venice in the flesh was remarkably like the Canalettos that hung in the British ambassador’s residency, only much larger—a full panorama of drabs and browns, blotched here and there by puffs of iridescent pastel; close in, a drunken regiment of masts and spars; far off, the campaniles of the city’s thirty-two churches; shimmering blue water beneath his feet and overhead the clear summer sky. He thrust his hands into his pockets and felt the jingle of silver coins there for the first time in years.

Palewski had grumbled at the tailor who fitted him in Istanbul, and at Yashim, too, but in his heart, where every man carries at least an ounce of vanity, he was rather pleased. He had always been elegantly, if a little shabbily, dressed, but now he wore a waisted coat over a deep-fronted waistcoat, stovepipe trousers of the latest cut, and shiny black shoes pointed at the toes. His mustache was neatly, even tightly, trimmed, while his hat—blacker and more lustrous than the one he habitually wore around Istanbul—was also three inches taller. He sensed that he carried the air of a man of the world, one whom the world was unlikely to fool but who looked on it with kindly interest.

Did he look like a citizen of the United States? As Yashim had pointed out, the beauty of being an American was that no one really knew what an American ought to look like.

“Have my bags sent on to the Pensione Inghilterra,” he told the purser as a boat drew up alongside.

It was a gondola. To Palewski, used to the graceful open caïques of Istanbul, it suggested something more sinister, with its beaky prow and tight little black cabin in the middle. As the stocky gondolier helped him from the ladder, Palewski doubled up and stepped down into the cabin, removing his hat. It was organized like a barouche. He found a seat and
sat down; the bench opposite was of tattered leather and the air smelt musty and damp. When he drew back the curtains and dropped a window, he was surprised to find himself already moving at some speed along the Riva dei Schiavoni.

With a jolt he recognized that the coloring, the little stone windows with pointed arches, even the disjointed roofline, reminded him of Cracow. “Why,” he exclaimed aloud, “this isn’t a Mediterranean town at all!”

He identified the Doges’ Palace, and the two pillars that stood beside it at the water’s edge: he had seen them in the Canalettos. The palace seemed to be upside down, all the lightness expressed in an arcade of slender columns was at the bottom, with the bulk of the building pressing down from above. He craned his neck for a glimpse of its reflection in the water, but he couldn’t see beyond the legs of his gondolier, and at that moment the great white church of Santa Maria della Salute reared up on his left-hand side, ushering them into the Grand Canal.

The traffic thickened. Black gondolas swept past them in the opposite direction, their curtains drawn, though now and then from their dark interiors Palewski caught sight of a white-gloved hand or a set of mustaches. Slow, deep barges carrying vegetables or dressed stone or sacks were being worked forward by men leaning on long oars. The oarsmen exchanged shouts with one another, especially when their barges were moving empty. A
traghetto
carrying a parcel of nuns shot out from a landing stage. Palewski’s gondolier braked with a whoosh and unloosed a rich slice of impenetrable dialect, which seemed to be returned: fists were shaken; the nuns looked away. Palewski smiled. The nuns in their habits reminded him of ladies at home, ladies in Istanbul.

He was aware now of something he had already sensed but not understood: the almost total absence of any sound beyond the shouts of boatmen and the liquid notes of water dropping from oars or hissing at the foaming prow of the boats. But as the gondolier pressed down on his sweep, they swung abruptly into a side canal, and sound and sunlight were blotted out.

Palewski started back, as if the bricks were about to strike his face. Twisting in his seat, he stared upward: they were passing down a slimy passage between tall buildings. The windows overhead were framed in stone, with rusty iron bars; patches of fallen plaster revealed an expanse of
narrow brick. Here and there, laundry hung limply on lines stretched across the canal. Palewski wondered how it could ever dry. He pulled his coat across his chest and turned to the little window at his back.

“Brrr. Pensione Inghilterra?”

“Sì,
sì
. Pensione.” The gondolier jerked his chin.

“Inghilterra?” A doubt had lodged in Palewski’s mind. “Pensione Inghilterra?”

But Palewski’s question was destined to go unanswered, for at that moment the gondolier stumbled, staring into the water.

“Sacramento!
” he growled. “A man!”