The Bellini Card (32 page)

“Buon appetito,”
he said with a bow, and stumbled into a pallet on which he was scarcely surprised to see the figure of the dying Christ.

“Please, Signor Brunelli,” the signora said magisterially. “Join us.”

Brunelli found himself squashed onto the end of a bench with a small child on one side and Yashim on the other, and knife, fork, plate, and red wine in front of him.

The only difference between this and other feasts he could imagine was that no one seemed actually to be eating.

His nostrils twitched, and his gaze returned to the table. It was covered with a clean cloth, and on it stood several plates. He saw a mound of rice, a dish of something with raw onion, a heap of curious green packages
about the size of eggs, and an earthenware dish containing something in a white sauce.

Around the table he noticed a lot of very suspicious faces.

The Brunelli name was not inscribed in the Golden Book, which had listed the aristocratic families entitled to enjoy the burdens and the rewards of government. But the blood of Venice flowed in Brunelli’s veins nonetheless, the blood of men who had eaten raw horsemeat with the riders of the Crimea, nibbled thousand-year-old eggs with the Great Khan in Cathay and spice-laden stews with the Bedouin of the Persian gulf—not to mention boiled cabbage in the halls of the Polish kings.

Brunelli stretched out his hands, inspired, and delivered a grace. It was a grace he had heard said in the Ghetto, many times.

“Blessed are you, our God, Lord of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.”

Palewski smiled and helped the signora to the pilaff.

Brunelli picked up the vine leaves and offered them to his neighbor. Yashim took one, Brunelli another. They passed the dish along. A small child helped himself to some pilaff. Maria’s father took a spoonful of liver and onions, while Maria picked up a vine-leaf parcel and bit into it. She gave a little cry of appreciation.

“It’s fish! Mamma, try one!”

In a matter of moments everyone was eating and talking all at once.

Brunelli leaned across the table.

“Signor Brett,” he began.

Signor Brett cut him off.

“I haven’t been straight with you, Commissario, I’m afraid. Not from the start. For which I’m sorry. This is Yashim.”

“Good,” the big man said. “I don’t like straight.” He took a sip of wine. “What are you both doing, exactly?”

Palewski looked over at Yashim. “What
are
we doing, anyway?”

“Looking for justice,” Yashim replied. “Justice, and a Bellini.”

Brunelli raised a single eyebrow.

“Both valuable, signore. Both rare.”

And Yashim smiled and told him everything they knew.

M
UCH
later, when Brunelli had gone home and the Contarini family had gone to bed, still drowsily exclaiming their surprise: Raw onion! Fish in a coat! Lasagna without pasta!—Yashim and Palewski drew closer to the fire.

“Tell me more about the contessa,” Yashim suggested.

Palewski shrugged. “I haven’t much to tell. Except that she’s very beautiful, she fights foil, and some ancestor of hers was with Morosini in the Peloponnese. She’s a surprise, Yashim. Something dangerous about her, maybe. She won’t marry either, I don’t know why.”

He repeated the details of the family tragedy that the old lady at the Ca’ d’Istria had given him.

“Her father was the last Venetian bailo in Istanbul. Hence the Koran. And she was born there, as it happens.”

Yashim raised an eyebrow. “And she won’t see you, you say?”

Palewski shook his head. “I’m not even sure she’s there. The last time I tried no one even came to the door.”

Yashim prodded the embers with a stick.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said slowly. “Venice is a theater, you say. Perhaps the time has come to take a more theatrical approach.”

“What do you mean?”

“Once, the doge married the sea.”

“Napoleon burned the
bucintoro,”
Palewski pointed out.

“Quite so. I wasn’t imagining a return of the doge. But I’ve been talking to Signor Contarini. The bargee.”

Palewski looked surprised. “What does Signor Contarini have to do with it?”

“Everything. Venice has been starved of entertainment for far too long. What I imagine,” said Yashim, sketching his plan in the smoke from the signora’s fire, “is a visit. A visit,” he added, yawning, “from a lost world.”

Palewski rubbed his hands across his face and stretched his feet to the fire. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll see.”

Y
ASHIM
was gone again the next morning when Palewski and Maria sat down to breakfast. Maria, too, had errands to perform, so Palewski spent the morning in the yard with the unemployed men, trying to penetrate their dialect and taking the occasional whiff of a very cheap cigar. An old man without teeth had been at the battle of Borodino. They shared their disappointments and capped each other’s reminiscences for the entertainment of the younger men, until the signora called him in for lunch.

Yashim returned a few minutes later and sat down to a thick lentil soup with evident enjoyment.

After lunch, Yashim spoke quietly to Maria and her mother; Palewski could not quite hear what they said, but the old lady looked thoroughly dubious. Finally she burst out laughing and flipped her apron over her head to hide her bad teeth. Palewski watched Yashim give the signora some money.

Yashim came out into the yard. Palewski threw him an inquiring look.

“The signora,” Yashim explained, “has agreed to spend the afternoon baking. Along with a dozen of her friends.”

“Buns?”

“Buns are traditional in Istanbul. I imagine they’ll be equally appreciated in Venice.”

“Yashim, I’m completely confused.”

“In which case,” Yashim replied, smiling, “my plan is more likely to succeed.”

I
T
was a Canaletto morning in Venice. The sun shone, the sky was blue, and a wind that could raise a flag was blowing in from the lagoon as a barge carrying an Austrian military band began its slow ascent of the Grand Canal. At its stern the imperial white and gold of the Habsburg empire; at its prow a small green ensign with a silver crescent moon.

A flotilla of gondolas moved in its wake, three abreast. Beneath the cover of their black felze they were almost all empty. They represented absent dignitaries of the Habsburg empire.

The Venetians were out in force. Since dawn they had been spreading from the slums of Dorsoduro, moving through the alleyways on foot, revealing the news to bakers stoking their ovens, vegetable sellers setting up their displays, lamplighters on their morning rounds. Mothers coming in for bread decided to keep their children out of school; men on their way to work stopped and discussed the business with their friends at the café door.

From Dorsoduro the news washed over San Polo and Santa Croce; by morning it had crossed the Rialto bridge into San Marco and Castello. Venice buzzed with anticipation and curiosity. At ten o’clock the balconies were full. Shutters unopened for twenty years were creaking back, and for a nominal fee people were allowed into mothballed palazzis and untenanted apartments. Rugs and hangings dangled from windows.
Ladies whose last procession on the Grand Canal had been Josephine’s, in 1799, smiled at the memories it evoked. Young men drawn to the windows by the possibility of sighting, all at once, the hidden beauties of the Grand Canal, twirled their whiskers and leaned out, while girls of barely marriageable age raced to the balconies to be seen.

Behind the flotilla of gondolas came a barge, low in the water and heaped with flowers whose colors, massed in florets of red and gold, recalled the colors of the Venetian flag. A cheer went up from the crowd jostling for position on the first pontoon.

Behind it, the Ottoman barge hove into view, tricked out with hoops of greenery. Between the hoops acrobats and fire-eaters juggled with sugar buns, scorched them, then tossed them to the delighted crowds.

In an open gondola of imperial carmine, gracefully acknowledging the hoots and clamor of the crowds, followed the Ottoman pasha himself, in a swathe of red silk and under an enormous and dazzling turban.

The crowd threw their hats in the air and roared.

The procession carried on up the canal. Shortly before eleven it passed beneath the Rialto bridge, where a crowd of onlookers and market vendors laughed and blew kisses as the Venetian colors passed below.

For forty years Venetians had been fed a diet of poverty and degradation. Sullen to the last, they had watched the arrival of French troops, or Austrian generals, while the spirit of Carnevale withered. But this cavalcade was ballooning into a full-blown regatta. A cheerful retinue of skiffs and hired gondolas, passenger wherries, and rowboats milled around the pasha’s slender gondola; fishermen were selling space in their heavy barche; children were running up the alleys near the canal, popping out at each pontoon. The people afloat waved to the people on land.

In years to come, old pickpockets and cutpurses would shake their heads when they recalled that morning.

The cavalcade came to a stop when it reached the Ca’ d’Aspi. Only the men who rowed the leading barge, which carried the military band, pressed on, and soon the brassy strains of oom-pah-pah faded away.

Nobody moved. The cheering stopped. It was said that you could hear the water slap against the foundations of the palazzo.

On the piano nobile one solitary window was open, where the Contessa
d’Aspi d’Istria stood leaning on her hands, pale and impassive. Now and then the breeze caught a strand of her fair hair and played with it, lifting it into the air, brushing it across her face, but she made no move to push it back.

Some of the gondoliers, looking up, seemed transfixed. They would have a song before the month was out, about the love of a woman for an infidel, and her years of torment, and how in the end he had come to woo her in spite of the Austrians and their cannons.

The crimson gondola slipped from the center of the procession and with a sweep of his oar the gondolier brought the boat up against the landing stage.

The pasha stood up, carrying a small box wrapped in gold paper.

The unnatural silence broke at once. Wild conjectures circulated among the crowd, which were embroidered and improved as the day wore on. Some were to say that the pasha had brought her a sultan’s diadem; others that it was a gossamer handkerchief that the sultan bestowed, each night, upon the concubine destined to share his bed. It was said that the Aspis, in their days of power, had rendered the sultan a service so great he had found no way of repaying it until now, when the Aspis groaned like the rest beneath the heel of Austria. Some said it was money. Some said it was jewels. Some said it was a holy relic that the Venetians had missed when they sacked Constantinople in 1204.

A wag said it was a box of Turkish delight.

What no one could possibly have guessed was the truth, which Yashim confessed to the contessa when Antonio had shown him upstairs.