The Bellini Card (10 page)

Later, Signor Brett did take a few steps along the alley to a large green door, where he delivered his card to his neighbor.

On his way back he looked into the café. He was hungry; something smelled good. He ordered wine and a dish of rice. To his astonishment it arrived looking black as if it had been burned.

“Risotto al nero de seppia,”
the girl explained. Palewski ate it all; it was delicious. But it was very black, and he could not quite escape the impression that he had been offered death on a plate.

M
ARTA
served Yashim tea in the ambassador’s drawing room. She had kept the windows closed, she explained, because of the dust. The room was warm, and two flies batted sleepily against the windowpanes.

Yashim dropped into his usual chair by the empty grate and looked around. He was accustomed to seeing a jumble of Palewski’s books and papers spread out in haphazard order over the tables, armchairs, and even across the floor. Now Palewski’s pince-nez reading glasses sat primly on an open book on the desk.

“I wonder how he is getting on, in the
Dar al-Hab,”
Yashim said, when he had thanked her for the tea.

Marta pursed her lips and nodded. “The lord has sent me a note,” she said.

“A note?” Yashim turned in the chair.

A curious, almost wary, expression passed across Marta’s serious face. She began to dust the window ledges, humming to herself.

“He is in Venice, efendi. It must be very beautiful.”

‘So I understand.” He paused. He noticed Marta’s hand slip surreptitiously to her breast. “Is that what he writes about, Marta, in his note?”

She caught his eye, then looked away. “The writing is very small, efendi.”

Yashim nodded. “Yes, of course. I’m quite used to his small writing. What if I try to read what it says?”

He could almost read the conflict in Marta’s mind. At last she nodded and fished the note out of her jacket.

It was written in Palewski’s best classical Greek script and illustrated with little ink drawings: Palewski sitting in his window seat with a bottle of wine, a cheerfully waving gondolier, Palewski with one foot on the quay and the other improbably far apart on a gondola, and a man swimming with a top hat. It was an affectionate and amusing letter, and ended with an exhortation to Marta to look after Yashim. Yashim read it aloud, laughing at Palewski’s jokes; even Marta allowed herself a smile.

It made no mention of the Bellini and gave no indication of when the ambassador would return. But it ended with the suggestion that Marta might be lonely in the empty house.

Marta took the letter back and scanned it, as if committing its meaning to memory. Then she tucked it back into her jacket.

“Yashim efendi,” she said. “Do you think the lord would be unhappy if I went home until he writes to say he is coming back? I could still come in, every day or two, but I am afraid that without him, there is—there is not much for me to do.”

“I’m sure your mother and father would like to see you.”

Marta nodded and looked pleased. Her family lived up the Bosphorus, in the Greek village of Karaköy. Yashim had met them, and her brothers. She had six, and they were devoted to her.

“Thank you, efendi. I will go this afternoon.”

Yashim walked slowly back to the Golden Horn, taking the steep and crooked steps that led from the Galata Tower. Halfway down he became aware of an unfamiliar murmuring from the shoreline below.

From the lower steps he gazed out over a crowd gathered around the gigantic plane tree. Its branches cast a deep pool of shade over the bank of the Golden Horn, where the caïque rowers liked to sit on a sweltering day, waiting for fares. The lower branches of the tree were festooned with rags. Each rag marked an event, or a wish—the birth of a child, perhaps, a successful journey, or a convalescence—a habit the Greeks had doubtless picked up from the Turks, and which satisfied everyone but the fiercest mullahs.

Yashim heard the distinct rasp of a saw; he realized that there were men in the tree. There was a sharp crack, and one of the branches subsided to the ground; the crowd gave a low groan. He scanned the faces turned toward the plane: Greeks, Turks, Armenians, all workingmen, watching the slow execution with sullen despair; some had tears running down their cheeks.

Two swarthy men in red shirts started to attack the fallen branch with axes, stripping away the smaller growth: Yashim recognized them as gypsies from the Belgrade woods. They worked swiftly, ignoring the crowd around them. Out of the corner of his eye, Yashim caught a sparkle of sunlight on metal: a detachment of mounted troops was drawn up beyond the tree. Perhaps the authorities had expected trouble.

He looked more carefully at the crowd. Most of them, he guessed, were watermen for whom the felling of the tree was a harbinger of bad times to come. What would become of them, when people could walk dry-foot between Pera and old Istanbul? But the tree was an old friend, too, which had sheltered them from the heat and the rain, accepted their donations, brought them luck, sinking its roots deeper and deeper with the passing decades into the rich black ooze. No one had turned up to witness the destruction of the fountain: that, in the end, was only a work of man. But the plane was a living gift from God.

A second branch, thirty feet long or more, fell with a crack and a snapping of twigs, and the crowd groaned again. For a moment it seemed as though it would surge forward: Yashim saw fists raised and heard a shout. Someone stepped forward and spoke to the woodmen, still hacking at the first branch. They listened patiently, staring down at the tangle of twigs and branches at their feet; one of them made a gesture and both
men resumed their work. The man who had interrupted them turned back and pushed his way out of the crowd.

Yashim watched him: a Greek waterman, who stumped away to his caïque drawn up on the muddy shoreline and stood there, looking up at the sky.

Yashim followed him down the steps.

“Will you take me across to Fener, my friend?”

The Greek hitched his waistband and spat. “I will take you to Fener, or beyond.”

As they pulled away, Yashim turned his head. Two more branches had fallen, and the tree looked misshapen. He could hear the rasp of the saw and the
toc-toc
of the woodman’s axe. A team of horses was dragging away the first bare branches.

The rower pulled on his oars, muttering to himself.

A hundred yards out, Yashim noticed a crimson four-oared caïque cutting up the Golden Horn at an angle that would soon bring them close together. A young man sat in the cushions, and Yashim recognized Resid Pasha. Normally he would have directed his rower to avoid the imperial craft, but this time was different: it would be better if Resid did see him. He wondered if the vizier would salute him.

Sure enough, as the two caïques got within hailing distance, Resid Pasha leaned forward and signaled to his boatmen. The caïques drew level, and the boatmen rested on their oars.

Yashim touched his fingertips respectfully to his forehead and his chest, while Resid’s hand fluttered briefly to his scarlet fez.

“How glad I am, Yashim efendi, to see you in our pleasant city!” The young man inclined his head and winked. “Summer is such a
healthy
season to be here, I think.”

“I followed the counsel of someone experienced, Resid Pasha,” Yashim responded politely.

The young man smiled pleasantly. “Very well, Yashim. It will suit you, in the long run. Indeed,” he added, clearly enjoying the little joke, “I have heard that certain other cities are positively dangerous to the health at this time of year.”

“None, I would hope, that are under the mantle of God’s protection,
both in this world and the next,” Yashim replied. He was fairly sure that neither rower could understand a conversation spoken in the pompous language of the Ottoman court.

“No, no, certainly not. Here all is serene. But one hears a great deal about death in, say, Venice.”

“In Venice?” Yashim echoed.

“Well, well, it shall not spread. Inshallah.”

“Inshallah,” Yashim returned automatically. A covey of shearwaters skimmed past, almost touching the unruffled surface of the Horn.

“Soon, I hope, the time will be favorable for me to visit the esteemed pasha once again?” He wanted to know how long Resid planned to keep him under wraps. He wanted to visit the valide.

The young pasha nodded. “I will send for you, Yashim. Two weeks from now, I imagine, would be auspicious for us both. I shall be very pleased to see you.”

He waved a hand at the boatmen, who dipped their oars. “Seeing you, my friend, has given me great pleasure.” He gave a nod, and the caïque pulled away.

Yashim watched them go. Two more weeks! He gave a signal to his boatman. To his surprise the man was looking at him with something like anger.

“You should have told him about us, efendi,” he said bitterly. He glanced over Yashim’s shoulder. “You should at least have asked him to save the tree.”

“Do you think it would have made a difference?”

The boatman looked at Yashim in his plain brown cloak, then up the Horn at the crimson caïque.

“Nothing surprises Spyro anymore,” he said.

C
OMMISSARIO
Brunelli left his house in Dorsoduro early and walked to the
traghetto
, where he stopped for a
caffè
corretto
. On days like these, when his son was more than usually difficult and rebellious over breakfast, the café between home and the Procuratie was his single guilty pleasure. That morning he had been presented with a scowling boy, muttering darkly under his breath, all thanks to a spot of unpleasantness at La Fenice the night before.

He sighed and leaned his elbows on the counter. La Fenice was the only public place in the city where the barrier between Austrians and Venetians was regularly breached. Austrians occupied the boxes and Venetians pointedly arranged themselves in the stalls, but at least for a few hours the two sides shared the same space and applauded the same artists. Trouble, when it began, generally occurred afterward as the opera lovers streamed out of the tiny theater onto the constricted quay.

Last night’s affair, if Paolo was to be believed, had involved an Austrian officer commandeering a gondola reserved by a Venetian family. An altercation had arisen, in which the gondoliers themselves had joined, before the officer, according to Paolo’s story, had been driven off with his lady friend, to the universal hissing of the Venetian crowd. No doubt there was another side to the story, as Brunelli had attempted to explain to his son. Even Austrian officers could make a mistake.

He stirred two sugars into his little cup. Paolo pretended to see all Austrians as pigheaded triumphalists, riding roughshod over the sentiments of the people. At the same time he imbued them with complete omniscience, as if any slight must be carefully and brilliantly contrived.

“The boy is not rational!” he had appealed to his wife, after Paolo had heard him out in glowering silence across the table.

His wife had ruffled his hair. “He is a boy,” she had remarked.

“Well, I’m off,” Brunelli had said, scraping back his chair. “I have some oppression to carry out.”

To make matters worse, Finkel would be in a bad mood today.

Brunelli took as long over his coffee as he dared, then crammed his hat onto his head and went out to find a gondola.

Twenty minutes later he entered the Procuratie beneath the gilded double eagle of his ultimate employer, the Emperor Francis II. Under the eagle, as he reminded himself, lay a lion of St. Mark, patron saint of the city of Venice, carved in stone.

Stadtmeister Gustav Finkel arrived fifteen minutes later than Brunelli. He was a short man with a big paunch, a red face, and white mutton-chop whiskers. He marched down the corridor to his office and shut the door heavily behind him. Half an hour later, as usual, he put the last of his papers aside and called for the commissarios’ reports.

Later in the day, an hour at most before lunch, he might call someone in for a review. He liked to keep these sessions short.