The Bellini Card (18 page)

“It is, I think I may say without fear of contradiction, a degenerate mind. Here and there one finds representatives of the old type, but they are unfortunately rare.” He placed his fingertips together and contemplated the ceiling.

“In the aim of understanding the representative characteristics of a people, what are the preliminary indices that must be established, Herr Vosper?”

“I beg your pardon, Stadtmeister,” Vosper replied, shuffling his feet. “I am afraid I don’t understand the question.”

The stadtmeister sighed. “What is the most important influence?”

“Climate, sir.”

“Because people from the north are tall and fair, like birch trees, yes.
They work hard, in teams. Ice demands unremitting teamwork. People from the south are dark and short. They are more indolent, also.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We can observe this phenomenon operating both on the large and the small scale, Herr Vosper. The Nordic type and the Mediterranean type. On a smaller scale, it is true to a lesser degree that the southern Italian peninsula is chiefly associated with indolence and dishonesty, while the northerly regions—of which Venice is a member—are more hardworking and upright. Do you follow?”

Vosper nodded. He could have given the speech himself.

“But we must allow for the interplay between large and small scale, as between the movement of men and history. We must—and do—allow for this!”

He leaned forward. His face was growing red.

“This is what the anticlimatic idiots will not try to understand! Science is a subtle system, Herr Vosper. Subtle but irrefutable, when the evidence is allowed.” He balled his fists and pressed them together over his leather-topped desk. “Interplay is a crucial element in the system. How else can men change?”

He paused to consider his own rhetorical question.

“For as long as Venetians represented the northern type within their own, smaller world, they were unmatched for acumen and fair dealing. But for several centuries they have been drawn farther into the orbit of the great northern landmass that is Europe. They have become, in this sense, southerners. Am I correct?”

“Quite correct, Stadtmeister.”

“So one observes the corruption of the Venetian mind as a matter of course. We cannot entirely blame them for this, although I believe that the Venetians must also have married too many southerners for their own good. Observe, Vosper, how the traits degenerate. What was once commercial acumen has become mere slyness. The bold trading initiative of the medieval Republic—has it disappeared? Not exactly. It has merely degenerated, on the one hand into a capacity for petty jealousy, on the other into an addiction to bright and pretty things. We see the Venetians of
today like children, Herr Vosper. They appreciate pageantry and glitter and pretty women. Hrrmph. Once the Venetians were famous for their forethought, but now? Let us not delude ourselves, Herr Vosper. They think of the next hour, at most the next day!”

“Quite so, Stadtmeister. And you once mentioned that someone was the representative of the old type, I forget his name, Farinelli?”

“Falier. A doge.”

“But the new Venetian was Casanova.”

“I may have said so, Herr Vosper, yes,” the stadtmeister said testily. Could it be possible that Vosper was laughing at him? Casanova was the only Venetian literature he had read, many years before, in a translation eagerly passed around the officers’ mess.

But Vosper’s empty blue eyes revealed nothing. He was a good man, Finkel thought, good Alpine stock. German-speaking, too. A degree of altitude of course tempered the general climatic theory.

“You mark my words, Herr Vosper,” he said, jabbing a finger across the desk. “This will be a crime of passion.
Cherchez la femme,”
he added and then, seeing a look of incomprehension on his subordinate’s face: “Look for the woman. After that, we can uncover the dead man’s rival, and all will be plain.” He sat upright and sucked in his stomach. “As I say, it is necessary to understand the Venetian mind. As it now is.”

Vosper looked uncertain. “Isn’t this Signor Brunelli’s department, Stadtmeister?”

“Herr Vosper, let us understand each other. You work for me. Through me, for the Kaiser.” He paused, to relish the happy juxtaposition. “We do not question our orders.”

“Of course not, Stadtmeister.”

“Very good.”

When Vosper had gone, Stadtmeister Finkel let himself relax in his chair. He had nothing against Brunelli. A good officer, no doubt, and less prone than others of his class and nation to let the soft haze of the lagoon penetrate his mind; but there it was. Vosper was, like him, an outsider—and Brunelli?
Na und
, a man was the product of his climate.

He took up a scrap of paper from his desk and squinted at it, puzzled.
The writing was very small and it was written in a language that Gustav Finkel, Stadtmeister von Venedig, rather imperfectly understood.

It contained, as far as he could judge, nothing new, nothing he was entitled to do anything about.

Someone was afraid and wanted help.

He tore the paper into little pieces and tipped them into the waste-paper basket.

S
HE
looked at him curiously. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you?” she said.

“Trouble? I’m all right, Maria, thanks to you.”

“That’s what I mean, silly. You’d have let yourself be copped for that murder if I hadn’t spoken up. What did you mean by that? I was here all night. And now,” she added, “it’s a different story.”

Palewski had blushed, insofar as he was capable of blushing. “Not your affair, Maria. I didn’t want the commissario to get you into trouble.” He paused, and the girl shot him a droll look as if to say: you couldn’t get me into trouble. “What do you mean, a different story?”

“Well, I’d wondered. I thought, perhaps, you were saving your reputation, Signor Brett. But from what I gathered last night, Signor Brett hasn’t got a reputation to lose.”

Palewski unfolded himself and rose from his chair. “I see.”

“I don’t speak English, so I couldn’t understand what the boys were saying exactly. But Tibor—he was my choice, quite good-looking he was—said a few things in French, and I understand that a fair bit.”

Palewski felt weary. “And what, Maria, did you understand?”

Maria pressed her lips together, humorously. “I don’t know who
Signor Brett is, but you’re a Polish count. You’re the Polish ambassador in Istanbul. Go on, I know it’s true.”

Palewski stood a long time at the window, looking out.

“I don’t know how it looks to you,” he said at last. “A long time ago, before you were even born, there was a country wrapped around a river. The Vistula. It had, what? Cities, towns, villages, little farms. Hills and mountains, too, but mostly plains, and marshes, and big, deep forests where you’d be afraid to go at night, Maria. There could be wolves in there. But foresters, too, and men burning charcoal all night long. And when it snowed, there were people all wrapped up in fur, whizzing along in the dark on sleighs, laughing and telling stories. And they spoke the language I learned to speak, the people in the towns, and the foresters, and the people rushing through the dark, too.”

Maria shivered deliciously.

“It wasn’t quite like Venice, Maria, when they came and took it all away. Venice is one city, and you can’t change that. You can go from the Arsenale to the Dorsoduro with the same joke, and everyone will laugh except the Austrians. But the Austrians took a part of my country, and the Prussians took another, and the Russians took the most because they are big and fierce like bears in the wood. Venice can disappear only if it sinks into the lagoon. But Poland will vanish if people forget. It needs anyone it can get. Even me, maybe, being its ambassador in Istanbul.”

He rubbed his chin.

“The fact is, Maria, I came here only to do a favor for a friend. If you turn me in to the authorities, I’d be sorry. Not for me—that’s all right. For the people I think of in the woods, and in the towns, and in the sleighs at night.”

He turned, and to his surprise he saw tears on her cheeks.

“Mio caro,”
she said sadly, rising to slide her arms around his chest. “With you, it is like an evening at La Fenice.” She pressed her cheek against his shoulder. “I will never betray you!”

Thank God for opera, Palewski thought, patting the girl on her pretty bare shoulder.

T
HE
contessa, according to Antonio the footman, was indisposed. Palewski had expected as much. Barbieri’s death—well, his murder—would have upset her.

Palewski took lunch at an outdoor table in one of the little restaurants off the Rialto, from where he could look across the Grand Canal to the row of palazzi that lined the opposite bank.

On the whole, he felt, it was a pretty but unsatisfactory view, in which the eye was invited to glide, like a gondola, along a single plane, a view that lacked depth. Even the water served only to reflect the wall of pretty color overhead.

He was used to the dynamic jumble of the Istanbul streets, where covered balconies jutted out over the street and whole buildings were jettied forward on the upper floors; sometimes, whole rows of masonry were made to fold in and out like a concertina. In Venice, builders gave their attention to the windows, carving them into extraordinary shapes, and to the surfacing of the walls, but indentation was a mere suggestion, a sort of trick of the light.

Venice was theater in so many ways: even its buildings looked like painted flats.

He sipped his prosecco and tried, for the twentieth time, to make sense of his position. He had made no progress whatever on the Bellini hunt. If the sultan’s information was correct, and the painting really had reappeared in Venice, it was a very slow sale. Barbieri had seemed to hint at the possibility of theft, but he never mentioned the portrait of Mehmet II.

If Barbieri knew of anyone trying to sell the portrait, he would presumably have offered to negotiate—on commission—for Palewski to buy it. But he hadn’t offered; therefore, he knew nothing about it. And now, bizarrely, he was dead—just like the art dealer whose corpse Palewski had seen floating in the canal on the morning of his arrival.

It was a coincidence that two art dealers should die, in curious circumstances, within a week of each other.

At the back of his mind lay one uncomfortable thought: Was it possible that the coincidence extended to his own arrival in Venice?

The waiter delivered a plate of
frutti di mare:
oysters, clams, prawns, and a half lobster. Palewski downed the oysters hurriedly, relishing the tang of the sea and hoping they would help clear his mind.

He would have liked to speak to someone, thrash it out. He thought of Yashim, drumming his heels in Istanbul: how he wished Yashim were here now with him! It had all seemed pretty simple when they said goodbye. The Brett plan—the printed cards, the expeditions to tailors and hatters and bootmakers on La Grande Rue de Pera. Outwitting the Habsburg bureaucracy had seemed like the easiest, most satisfactory thing in the world. A few weeks in Venice; a few introductions; a deal, or not, as it might turn out—and
basta!
as the Italians say: home again.

Instead of which he’d had murders, the police, Compston and his friends, a bout of fever …

And, he thought, something else, too: a sense of being not quite in command of his own destiny. Like an actor in a play, speaking lines that were not, really, his own.

He grabbed the lobster and stabbed it with a fork to pull away the succulent white tail.

He had known nothing about the fellow in the canal: the man was already dead when he arrived.

He squeezed a wedge of lemon over the cold lobster.

As for Barbieri, they had met once, twice, allowing for the brief encounter at the contessa’s palazzo. If someone, for whatever reason, had tried to prevent Palewski from learning about the Bellini—well, that made no sense. Barbieri truly knew nothing, and who would want to keep
him from making an offer on the painting? A painting that, he was increasingly certain, did not exist.