The Bellini Card (45 page)
“So?”
“Pappendorf’s face,” Yashim said.
They looked at each other over the rim of their glasses.
“Pappendorf’s face!” Palewski repeated happily.
“Prosit!
”
T
HE
water slapped lazily at the green weed that fringed the pilings of the bridge.
There was no tide, only the perpetual current from the north, slipping under the movement of warm water from the sea, which set up whorls and currents that the boatmen knew.
Caught between these ceaseless, shifting eddies and countercurrents,
the pasha who died young described a forgotten pattern. He moved like a dervish, his limbs open and relaxed. Beneath Byzantine domes, dilapidated palaces, and tethered boats, the pasha’s corpse twirled in the moonlight, unseen, his arms flung wide in a gesture of vacant resignation.
So he turned, around and around, as the moon sank behind the towers and domes.
When dawn broke, the first workmen returned to the bridge. The pasha’s body had scarcely moved from the place where he went in, yards away from the deep waters of the Bosphorus on which, in her days of glory, the city had made her fortune.
Overhead, the workmen stared down into the clear water.
Four decades after the events described in this book, Sir Henry Layard, distinguished explorer, archaeologist, and Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul, was dismissed from his office following a change of government in London.
The incoming government proposed taking a tough line with Turkey-in-Europe. Sir Henry Layard was considered to be too chummy with the Orientals.
In vexation, rather than returning to his ancestral halls (tricked out, needless to say, in Canalettos, not to mention the ruins and friezes of ancient Tyre), Sir Henry and his young wife moved to Venice, where they bought a palazzo, the Ca’ Cappello, not far, in my mind at least, from the Ca’ d’Aspi.
One afternoon in 1865, just as he was stepping into his gondola to return home, Sir Henry was approached by an elderly and evidently impoverished man who asked the milord to buy an old painting for five pounds.
Scarcely glancing at the painting, and determined not to be late, Sir Henry refused. He stepped into the gondola and was carried away.
On arriving home, he found the painting propped against his door.
He hung it in a special room, all on its own.
Lady Layard survived her husband by twenty-three years. She remained in Venice, very much upon her dignity as Sir Henry’s widow but fond of social life nonetheless. Younger residents like Henry James knew the Palazzo Layard as the Refrigerator.
In her will she left the painting of Mehmet II, by Bellini, to the National Gallery in London.
Details about the damage to the painting, probably inflicted when it was lifted from board to canvas, and about the heavy restoration work carried out in the nineteenth century, can be obtained from the gallery. Both were considered so extensive that curators have cautiously labeled the painting
attributed to
, rather than
by
, Gentile Bellini.
It continues to travel the world; it was recently in Venice, and before that, at the turn of the century, it drew enormous crowds when it was exhibited in Istanbul.
Oddly enough, as I was writing this book, Sotheby’s in London sold a smaller likeness of Mehmet II—much the same size as the picture Palewski saw at the Palazzo d’Istria—for almost half a million pounds.
It was, supposedly, a later copy of the Bellini portrait.
As for the album of his father’s drawings that Gentile Bellini presented to Sultan Mehmet in 1480, there were, in fact, two. One on paper, bought from a market in Smyrna in 1823, is in the British Museum; the other, finer, album on parchment is in the Louvre.
It was discovered in the attic of a house in Guyenne, France, in 1886.
The Fondaco dei Turchi remained a ruin of sorts until 1860, when it was bought by the municipality and restored to its present condition. Following the restorers’ motto,
com’era, dov’era
, every effort was made to remodel the building as a Byzantine palace of the twelfth century. Consequently, all traces of its former grandeur, as well as its decay, were efficiently erased. Clad in gray marble sheeting, and remodeled within, it is now perhaps the ugliest building on the Grand Canal.
I am indebted to the enthusiasm and encouragement of my publishers around the world, and to the efforts of translators to render Yashim intellible in, I think, thirty-eight languages. To Ottar Samuelson and the team at Dinamo:
Skål!
And a special thanks to Marina Fabbri, of the Cour-mayeur Noir Festival.
Yashim himself could not have traveled so far, for an Ottoman investigator, without Sarah Chalfant and Charles Buchan at the Wylie Agency. Thanks to Richard Goodwin for making Yashim the Movie, now showing at
www.jasongoodwin.net
, a website created by my son Izaak. Emma Clark, from the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, helped me out over women calligraphers; Carlo Pescatori had us in Venice; Amr Ben Halim was responsible for a memorable recent trip to Istanbul; and Jim Perry acted as my fight coordinator. Thank you all.
I like to think of Venice as an aspect of Istanbul; part of its fabric, and much of wealth that built it, came directly from the shores of the Bosphorus. Sending Yashim there always seemed like a good idea.
My own explorations of Venice have been made with my family. Together we have tramped the streets, visited the chill reconstruction of the Fondaco dei Turchi, eaten at Florian’s (though not much; the prices are steeper than in Palewski’s time), chosen ice cream on the Zattere (like Maria), admired the horses, and shopped at the Rialto market.
This book is dedicated to my son Walter, who loves Venice, drawing, jokes, and Venetian ice cream—passions matched at home by his Byzantine efforts to get onto my computer and substitute for Yashim’s world others more ignoble and remote.
Jason Goodwin fell under the spell of Istanbul while studying Byzantine history at Cambridge University. Following the success of his book
A Time for Tea: Travels Through China and India in Search of Tea
, he made a six-month pilgrimage across Eastern Europe to reach Istanbul for the first time, a journey recounted in
On Foot to the Golden Horn: A Walk to Istanbul
.
He later wrote
Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire
, described as “a work of dazzling scholarship” in
The New York Times Book Review
. His books featuring Investigator Yashim have been translated into thirty-eight languages; the first,
The Janissary Tree
, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel in 2007. He lives with his wife and their four children in Dorset, England.
The Janissary Tree
Winner of the Edgar® Award for Best Novel
This first book in the investigator Yashim series is a richly entertaining tale, full of exotic history and intrigue.
It is 1836. Europe is modernizing, and the Ottoman Empire must follow suit. But just before the Sultan announces sweeping changes, a wave of murders threatens the fragile balance of power in his court. Who is behind them? Only one intelligence agent can be trusted to find out: Yashim, a man both brilliant and near-invisible in this world, an investigator who can walk with ease in the great halls of the empire, in its streets, and even within its harems—because, of course, Yashim is a eunuch. His investigation points to the Janissaries, who, for four hundred years, were the empire’s elite soldiers. Crushed by the sultan, could they now be staging a brutal comeback? And can they be stopped without throwing Istanbul into political chaos?
To read an excerpt, and for more information, click here
www.picadorusa.com/thejanissarytree
The Snake Stone
Detective, polyglot, chef, eunuch: Investigator Yashim returns in this evocative Edgar® Award-winning series set in Istanbul at the end of the Ottoman Empire.
Istanbul, 1838. In his palace on the Bosphorus, Sultan Mahmud II is dying and the city swirls with rumors and alarms. The unexpected arrival of a French archaeologist determined to track down lost Byzantine treasures throws the Greek community into confusion. Yashim Togalu is once again enlisted to investigate. But when the archaeologist’s mutilated body is discovered outside the French embassy, it turns out there is only one suspect: Yashim himself. As the body count starts to rise, Yashim must uncover the startling truth behind a shadowy society dedicated to the revival of the Byzantine Empire, encountering along the way such vibrant characters as Lord Byron’s doctor and the Sultan’s West Indies-born mother, the Valide. With striking wit and irresistible flair, Jason Goodwin takes us into a world where the stakes are high, betrayal is death—and the pleasure to the reader is immense.
To read an excerpt, and for more information, click here
www.picadorusa.com/thesnakestone
The Bellini Card
Detective, polyglot, chef, eunuch: Investigator Yashim returns in this Edgar® Award-winning series…
Istanbul, 1840. The young sultan Abdülmecid believes that Gentile Bellini’s vanished masterpiece, a portrait of Mehmet the Conqueror, may have resurfaced in Venice. But it’s not Yashim, our eunuch detective, who takes a ship across the Mediterranean. Instead, it’s his Polish ambassador friend, Palewski, disguised as an American art dealer.
What begins as a simple inquiry soon turns into a murderous game of deception and suspense, played out among the faded palazzi and sluggish canals of the decaying city. Dealers, forgers, and aristocrats become fatally involved, as the search for the Bellini portrait uncovers a threat to the stability of the Ottoman throne, and the peace of Europe.
To read an excerpt, and for more information, click here
www.picadorusa.com/thebellinicard
An Evil Eye
From the Edgar Award–winning author of
The Janissary Tree
,
The Snake Stone
, and
The Bellini Card
comes the fourth adventure of the famous investigator Yashim.
When the admiral of the Ottoman fleet defects to the Egyptians, Yashim attempts to uncover the man’s motives. But Fevzi Pasha is no stranger to Yashim: it was Pasha, in fact, who taught the investigator his craft years ago. He is the only man whom Yashim has ever truly feared: ruthless, cruel, and unswervingly loyal to the sultan. What dark secret has led his former mentor to betray the Ottoman Empire?
While unraveling Pasha’s curious history, Yashim is drawn ever deeper into the closed world of the sultan’s seraglio, an intimate household populated by the young ruler’s women, children, slaves, and eunuchs. It is a well-appointed world dominated by fear, ambition, and deep-seated superstitions—a lap of luxury where talented girls hold sway in the ladies’ orchestra.
But as the women of that orchestra inexplicably grow ill and die, Yashim discovers that his investigations into the admiral’s defection have their roots in the torturous strictures of the sultan’s harem, where every secret is sacred: a place where the normal rules are suspended and where women can simply disappear.
To read an excerpt, and for more information, click here
