The Bellini Card (6 page)

He whipped out a silk handkerchief and trumpeted into it, then tucked it back into his sleeve. “Every palazzo tells a tale, Signor Brett. But you must know where to begin. It is my pleasure. We will have a lovely day. And your accommodation, too. We will see to that. How long will you stay with us?”

Palewski was growing used to Ruggerio’s sudden changes of tack. “A few weeks. A month.”

Ruggerio closed his eyes and his hands swam before him in ecstasy. “A month!” He echoed, emphatically. “In La Serenissima, a month is like a day. But we can see everything,” he added hastily. “In a month, you will almost be a Venetian yourself.” He laughed. “And here we are—breakfast!”

The gondola glided in between poles sunk in the water. Ruggerio handed Palewski out onto the pontoon, then sprang up after him. He bent a little closer. “Signor Brett, a small tip to the gondolier if you think it would be appropriate—he has sung, and he would appreciate it. No, no, five is too much—I will give him three. Already you see I am able to offer you some service—to protect the innocent traveler, ha ha!”

He pushed his way eagerly into the market throng, Palewski in his wake. Now and then Ruggerio would turn around to check that his new American friend was following as they weaved between the stalls, dodging porters clattering their trolleys across the cobbles, slipping along the arcades until Ruggerio stopped outside a small café and bowed.

“My visitors are always happy here,” he assured Palewski. “Even the Duke of Naxos! Small, but very clean. Come.”

The café was nothing more than a wooden counter ranged with plates of fried fish, octopus, salami, and olives. There was nowhere to sit, but Ruggerio seized a few plates and bore them off to a high table, snapping his fingers for coffee.

“May I suggest a prosecco, also?
Allora, due vini, maestro!
” He took some bread from a large open basket on the counter and beamed at his
guest. “So—wine, good food, a little coffee, and the Rialto in Venice! Is not life good, my friend?”

Palewski had to agree with him. It had been many years since he had drunk wine among strangers, in open view. The sensation was agreeable, if peculiar at first, like the sight of unveiled women prodding the vegetables or drifting down the canal in a gondola. Many Europeans came to Venice because it offered them—in their imagination, at least—a glimpse of the Orient with none of the inconvenience: Byzantine domes and mosaics, strong colors, picturesque poverty, and an air of licentious freedom, comfortably offset by a familiar battery of French-speaking hoteliers, Catholic churches, and Renaissance art. These visitors, unlike the Polish ambassador, were often struck by seeing women who were, in fact, veiled according to a custom that went back to the days of Byzantine influence. But in Palewski’s world all women, even Christians, were veiled in the street; to him in Venice it seemed that any man could admire a woman’s features. Some of the women were very beautiful, he noticed.

Ruggerio caught his eye and winked. “In Venice we have the most beautiful women in the world. You think the husband is jealous? The father—yes. But after a woman is married—
altra storia!
She takes admirers! Why not? The husband—he, too, plays the game.”

When they had eaten, Ruggerio laid his hand on Palewski’s arm: “Twenty lire only will be enough. They all know Antonio Ruggerio. No cheating.” He shook his head. “It happens.”

The Venetian aristocrat’s gondola was not to be found at the landing stage. Ruggerio looked annoyed, but his spirits soon recovered. “No matter. We will take another.”

“But where?” Palewski asked. “Where are we going?”

The little Venetian amused him, he had to admit. Ruggerio was transparently a fraud, but he was engaging company and he was determined to show him around the city. He was a cicerone: a guide, a paid companion, and Palewski was not without means, with Yashim’s commission.

“Where we are going?” Ruggerio looked surprised. “We are going to find you somewhere to live, Signor Brett. Nobody,” he added, with emphasis, “nobody lives in a hotel in Venice for a month.”

T
WO
days later, gazing down upon the Grand Canal from the vestibule window of his apartment, a glass of prosecco in one hand and a telescope in the other, Palewski reflected that life, indeed, was good.

He owed his present sense of good fortune to Antonio Ruggerio, which offered little scope for complacency. Ruggerio was, in many ways, an absurd pest; contentment that rested on his infinitely mobile shoulders could scarcely be supposed secure. But there it was: he had spent a day with the able cicerone, reviewing apartments to rent for the month.

There had seemed no end to them, each one larger, darker, more dilapidated, and more expensive than the one before, each one entangled in some way with families of title—the titles, it seemed, growing longer and more sonorous and hollow, until Palewski had prodded his guide in the other direction and stipulated something modest.

And Ruggerio, finally swallowing the blow to pride, and pocket, had brought him to this perfectly serviceable little
casa
on the banks of the Grand Canal, not far from the ruined bulk of the Fondaco dei Turchi: an apartment on the second floor sandwiched between the pleasant Greek landlady and her Venetian husband above, and a renowned but aging opera singer below. The ground floor, lapped by the canal itself, was given over to a quiet and unfashionable café, where watermen sometimes ate their lunch and where Palewski was sure of a dish of rice and a bottle of black wine in the evening.

He wondered what Yashim would make of these risottos, which bore a family resemblance to pilaff, only the rice was thicker. Yashim believed Italians had learned to cook in Istanbul. And certainly the Venetians, who
had lived, fought, and traded so much in and around the fringes of the Ottoman world, ate very like the Turks. They had the same particular preferences, Palewski observed, for dozens of little dishes, like mezes, though the locals called them
cicchetti
instead, and they were as finicky as any Ottoman about the provenance of certain fruits and vegetables. In Istanbul, one ate cucumbers from Karaköy, or mussels from Therapia. In Venice, Ruggerio insisted that the bitter leaves called radicchio should come from Treviso, the artichokes from Chioggia, and the fresh beans from a little town called Lamon, on the mainland. Neither the Turks nor the Venetians seemed to value fish.

Ruggerio had given him a whirlwind tour of the city’s treasures and marvels simply, as he said, to help Signor Brett familiarize himself with the disposition of the city, its churches, palazzi, and artworks, although Palewski had begun to suspect that the cicerone was disappointed in him and was looking for more valuable
clienti
. Some days Ruggerio arrived late; once, not at all; other times he often seemed distracted.

The idea that Ruggerio might, at last, begin to leave him alone was a relief to Palewski. It contributed to his sense of well-being as he trained his telescope on the landing stage opposite and watched a gondolier handing up a large packet of a woman onto dry land, along with her tiny dog.

He laid the telescope aside with a smile and took a printed card from his pocket.

Mr. S. B
RETT
DE
N
EW
Y
ORK
connoisseur

For the first time since his arrival in Venice, he felt he was being useful to Yashim.

Ruggerio would deliver the cards to various dealers and collectors he knew, expressing the hope that they would call on Signor Brett to discuss his own collection and theirs. Ruggerio would have preferred to present the American connoisseur to the dealers in person, but Signor Brett had been firm on the point. In a society as small as Venice a man would be
judged by the company he kept. Ruggerio, foppish, quaint, and ingratiating, was not the man to present an American dealer to Venetian art circles. Palewski was fishing for a Bellini. Whatever the bait, the hook had to be clean, sharp—and expensive. A man like Ruggerio would merely foul it, like weed.

Quite what the bait would be, Stanislaw Palewski had no idea. It was unlikely that the Bellini was on open sale. Discretion would be required, not least because the Austrians, by all accounts, watched the market jealously.

He stood up, stretched, and went to his bedroom, where he found his battered leather-bound copy of Vasari’s
Lives of the Painters
.

He read it again at the open window, listening to the shouts of the gondoliers and the backwash of the boats and skiffs below, locating in his mind’s eye Vasari’s comments about churches and paintings in the city. He was not a true connoisseur of painting, but by the time he had finished the chapter about the Bellinis, and his bottle, he knew what he needed to know.

He sensed that Mehmet II, the Conqueror of Istanbul, had created a little revolution in Venice.

S
IGNOR
Brett’s card, too, created a minor stir in the city.

Gianfranco Barbieri stood for a long time at the great arched window on the piano nobile of his Zattere palazzo, looking out across the canal to Giudecca. He tapped the card against his perfect teeth, wondering who Brett was and whom he worked for. What kind of a man came from New York? A financial man, no doubt: Gianfranco always seemed to be reading about another American banking scandal, another astonishing
default. People got burned lending to Americans. But they got rich, too—why else would they go on lending?

He would have to be careful.

He touched his fingertip to the small scar on his lip. The scar was not unattractive, and it gave him a mildly quizzical, amused expression, as though he were smiling at something only he could see.

Gianfranco liked to think of himself as a very careful man.

Across the city, close to the Arsenale, another man was pondering the arrival of Brett’s card.

“Popi” Eletro rubbed the ink with a heavy thumb, then ran the lettering beneath a nail that looked hard and yellow. The card itself was unfamiliar: plenty of rag, but not Venetian. Not French, either. He would have said Turkish, but it was probably American, like the man. He grunted and stared up at a Canaletto on the wall. Canaletto in the land of bears and Indians?

There was money in furs.

His eyes slid from the first Canaletto to another three hanging beside it. Big pictures. Worth money, as soon as the glaze dried. What a shame this Brett couldn’t buy them all! Four matchless Canalettos. All of them, unfortunately, identical.

Popi levered himself from the swiveling leather chair and reached for his hat.

It was time, he thought, to visit the Croat.

He’d have had his drink by now; he’d be ready to work again. If not, well, sometimes you needed to be cruel to be kind.

Popi walked, scowling, from the Arsenale toward the Ghetto. It was a long, difficult route: as late as 1840, few of the canals had been provided with pavements and the fashion for filling them in had not yet begun. Districts were still preserved as the islands they had always been, clustered around their church, their
campo
, and their well, speaking a dialect that marked them out from other islanders in the city.

Popi did not ponder the irony that a man who made his living from canals should detest them, but it was so. They were sluices of gossip, in his opinion—gondoliers to recall the address you visited, boatmen to note
your passing. Beggars and idlers hung about the bridges, and in the dankest, dirtiest dark bends of a canal the inevitable old crone was forever craning her neck from some upstairs room for a better view. You took a gondola only if you wanted to be noticed—visiting a rich American art collector, for instance. Otherwise you used the pavement and walked the long way around.

In the Ghetto he found firmer footing, where the Jews had been crowded up behind their gates. The air was filled with floating goose down, like a gentle snow, for the people here used goose fat where other Venetians used pork, and it reeked of more than the sewage that offended visitors to Venice elsewhere in the city. It stank of old fish and rags, and the sourness of confined spaces. Napoleon had had the gates demolished, but everyone knew that they still existed in the Venetian mind. A few rich Jews had moved away, and a few—a very few—impoverished gentiles had taken rooms in the Ghetto, but otherwise little had changed in forty years.