The Bellini Card (41 page)

“Palewski was right,” Yashim murmured. “Venice is exactly like a theater.”

“Palewski?” the contessa said. “Who is Palewski?”

Yashim smiled. “Count Palewski is the man I sent to Venice to find the Bellini. You know him as Signor Brett.”

The contessa put a hand to her throat. “The lancer.”

“The lancer?” Palewski was Yashim’s oldest friend, but there were still things they had never discussed. “He is the Polish ambassador in Istanbul.”

She nodded, beginning to understand. “Then he, too, is one of us. One of the dispossessed.” She wrapped her hand around her fist. “I have been a fool.”

He could hear them now on the stairs.

“I thought, at first, that he was the killer.”

“Palewski? But that’s—”

“Ridiculous? But he came for the Bellini, too.”

“I sent him, instead of me.”

Carla frowned. “You? You didn’t tell him about the pattern.”

“I didn’t know,” Yashim admitted. “It was to be a signal, wasn’t it? That the palace had received your offer.”

Before she could answer, Palewski and Brunelli were shown into the room.

“Commissario. Count Palewski.” Carla greeted them with a slight bow.

Palewski leaped a few inches and peered at Yashim. “Not Signor Brett, eh?”

“Your Ottoman friend was very clever,” the contessa said. “And I have been very foolish. I should have guessed: the Polish Legion.”

Palewski inclined his head. “The lancers, Contessa. In Italy under Dabrowski. Later, the Vistula Uhlans. Lance and saber.” He shrugged. “Out of fashion now, as you said.”

The contessa laughed. “Only the saber. Handsome men never go out of fashion.”

“Things have changed since yesterday,” Yashim said. “I caught up with an assassin.”

He told them of the night’s events. He explained how he had broken through the dam, and how the Tatar had been swept away in a torrent of surging foam.

“This,” Brunelli said wistfully, “I wish I had seen.”

“He was a professional assassin. He killed three people here.”

“And found them how?”

“As to that, I think somebody showed him. Somebody who signed his own death warrant as soon as the last name was released.”

“Ruggerio,” Brunelli said.

“He’s dead?”

Brunelli nodded. “He played a foolish game, Yashim Pasha.”

Yashim was silent for a while. It was Ruggerio, of course.

“He served the Duke of Naxos,” Carla said.

“That’s how they knew of him, perhaps. But Ruggerio and the Tatar, how did they come together? Here, in Venice.”

Brunelli shrugged. “Perhaps we’ll never really know.”

“Perhaps not.” Yashim looked thoughtful. “Perhaps not.”

The contessa took a deep breath.

“I have something to give you, Yashim. Commissario, would you mind? It’s not heavy, but it’s a little far to reach.”

They went out together, and Palewski told Yashim about Maria’s priest and the way the man had recognized him.

“Yashim,” he said, “you’re not listening.”

“I have an instinct,” Yashim said slowly, “that something is going wrong.”

Brunelli entered with a heavy tread. Behind him came Carla. She looked very pale.

“The painting,” she said in a tone of dazed wonder. “It’s gone!”

B
EHIND
the curtain, where the Bellini had hung, the slim gold frame was empty.

Yashim glanced at Carla.

She gave him a look of scorn. “So you think I’m playing with you, now? No, Yashim, you’re wrong. It was mine—and now it is gone.”

“We saw it here last night.”

“Yes, but the Tatar! He took it, before he attacked!”

“The Tatar—” A sudden hope flickered in Yashim’s breast. “In that case, it must still be here. Search the room. Look under the bed.”

Brunelli and Palewski sprang to obey, but Carla didn’t move. “Here in the room?” She sounded puzzled. “He took it with him, I’d imagine.”

“I fought him, Carla.” Yashim sounded surprised. “I’d have noticed him carrying a two-foot panel under his coat.”

She sank down onto the bed.

“A two-foot panel?”

“The Bellini, Carla.”

She had closed her eyes.

“I see. You were expecting a painting on wood.”

Palewski nodded. “Gentile used it.”

“It—it wasn’t on panel anymore.”

The room was still.

“I had it lifted fifteen years ago.”

“Lifted? What do you mean?”

“Oh God.” Carla put her hands over her face. When she pulled them down she was looking at Yashim.

“I had it transferred to canvas.”

“Canvas?” Yashim echoed. “Why? How?”

“Old board doesn’t last,” she said wearily. “Especially not in Venice, with the damp. It warps and cracks, and the paint begins to deteriorate. Eventually there’s nothing left.”

“But how do you put it onto canvas?” Palewski asked. He was kneeling by the bed, and he sounded genuinely interested.

Carla waved a hand. “It’s a process. Very new. Barbieri told me about it. Oh, he didn’t know I had the painting. Maybe he knew, I’m not sure anymore. I took it to Florence, and they did the work. I think,” she went on, sounding very controlled and looking at the ceiling, “that they glue the face to canvas, then chisel away at the panel until they get to the paint from the wrong side. Then they flip it over.”

“Good God!” Palewski sounded appalled.

The contessa gave a shaky smile. “It doesn’t sound good, does it? But it works. They touch it up a bit afterward, I suppose. But then it lasts.”

She glanced up at Yashim, aware of the irony in her last words.

But Yashim wasn’t looking at her.

He was staring at the empty space inside the frame. What he saw was not the damask that lined the walls but two men, fighting in the mud, tearing at each other’s clothes, slippery as eels.

And the canvas, wrapped about the Tatar’s body.

He saw the Tatar swimming back. The Tatar scrambling over the dam like an otter.

There hadn’t been time to think. No time to wonder why the Tatar had chosen to go that way.

He’d simply assumed he was going back for the contessa. To murder Carla as he had murdered the others.

To finish his job.

And now in his mind’s eye he saw the caisson spring, and the Tatar groping for a painting in the mud, then his look of blank incomprehension as he was swept away in a bounding deluge of timber and foaming water.

He sat down on the bed beside Carla and put his arm around her shoulders.

“The painting’s gone,” he said.

Brunelli blew out his cheeks in sympathy.

Carla put her hand to her head and began either to laugh or to cry; Yashim couldn’t tell which. Probably both.

She turned and buried her head in Yashim’s shoulder. Palewski raised an eyebrow at Brunelli.

They went out silently together, closing the door behind them.

Yashim never knew how long they sat together, rocking gently to and fro. He held his arms around her lovely waist, his face buried in her soft fair hair; she breathed on his chest with one slender arm flung around his neck.

It felt as though they might never move apart.

Yashim’s thoughts revolved. He remembered Palewski talking to him in the salon.

He’d been talking about a priest.

Palewski. Yashim remembered something else he’d said, long before, about a picture he had hanging in his drawing room in Istanbul—the room Yashim had always loved, with its books, and the shabby escritoire and leaking armchairs, and the portrait of John Sobieski, King of Poland, over the sideboard.

“Carla,” he murmured. “You took the duke’s note of hand, didn’t you? It was you.”

She snuggled her head upward and he felt her blow gently onto his neck.

“I must know, Carla. Was it you?”

“I told you,” she murmured. “I didn’t play.”

He felt her sigh against his skin.

“It wasn’t a note of hand, Yashim.”

He brushed back her fair curls to reveal one perfect ear, tender as a mouse’s, with three little moles along the tip.

He stooped and brushed them with his lips.

“A love letter from the duke?”

He felt the muscles of her face move against his skin. She must have smiled.

“And you stuck it to the back of the picture.”

“The Aspis—and the house of Osman,” she whispered softly. “That letter was a final link.”

“You wanted to be remembered?”

“Remembered. Honored, perhaps. Eight hundred years, Yashim, thirty generations. And now, today, there is nothing left.” She moved her head back to look into his eyes. “The Republic is dead. The Aspi d’Istrias die with me.
Com’era, dov’era
. It isn’t true.”

“It never was.”

Yashim, of all people, knew it was never true. You could never go back. You went on, shouldering the burdens of your past, and the world changed.

He brushed his lips to the perfect ear, remembering clearly what he had heard Palewski say, when he heard nothing at all.

The burdens of your past.

“Tell me, Carla, when you went to Istria to see the nuns again, looking for your son, did you have a way of recognizing him? Some mark?”

He felt her stiffen. “How did you know?”

“Three little moles,” he said quietly.

She raised her head. She looked wary.

“If you want,” he began slowly, “if you can, then there is something left for you, after all.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Your son.”

Carla jerked her head back as if she had been bitten.

“I think your son is in Venice.”

She slipped from his arms, sinking to her knees. At the side of the bed her hands went out, almost in prayer, toward Yashim.

“If you are playing with me,” she said, her face contorted and in a voice that rose from her throat, “I will kill you.”

Yashim shook his head. “Your son,” he said, “would not hurt a fly. You will find him—” He paused. “Not
com’era, dov’era
. Not what he was, but as he is. And I can show you where.”

M
ARIA
slipped her arm through Palewski’s.

“I hope you get back to your wolves and sleighs,” she said.

“One day, perhaps.” Palewski squeezed her arm.

A light breeze ruffled the waters of the Giudecca.

“I’ll write,” he said.

She shook her head. “Don’t. I’ll think of you as—as the wind. You won’t be back, will you?”

“No.” He coughed. “I won’t be back. But I’m glad I came, Maria. I met a beautiful Venetian girl who was very brave and very generous.”

He tilted back her bonnet and kissed her.

“I shan’t forget.” He put a little box between her hands. In it was a diamond brooch and a note from a bank in Trieste. “For your trousseau, Maria.” He turned and walked up the gangplank. Yashim was waiting on the deck.

Together they leaned over the rail. The shoremen cast off. The foresail banged in the wind before the sailors aloft made it fast. Then it went taut, the ship creaked, and they began to move away from the dock.

As the gap widened, they saluted their friends. Carla was standing by Father Andrea, who had Nikola by the hand. Commissario Brunelli stood a little apart, but as they watched he offered Maria his arm; her bonnet barely reached his shoulder.

A cloud slid from the sun’s face, lighting the polychrome walls of the Doges’ Palace, the marble columns of the piazza. The Clock Tower across the square glowed.

Palewski raised his hand, and the dwindling figures on the
riva
waved back.

“Final curtain,” he announced. The ship heeled around. They saw the mouth of the Grand Canal and the calm bulk of Santa Maria della Salute, and the wind from the mainland was in their face.

“Will you miss it?” Yashim asked at last, as the great church of San Giorgio slipped past on the starboard bow.

“Miss it?” Palewski was silent for a while. “Regret it, perhaps, a little. The way one regrets one’s youth and what’s passed. For a moment Venice brought it back.”

He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair.

“I missed tea,” he said. “And our Thursday dinners, Yash. I missed the muezzins, too. Venice would be better with muezzins.”