The Bellini Card (11 page)

“So, Brunelli, it looks like your man was killed by a common thug. A robbery gone wrong. Is that also your conclusion?”

Brunelli considered this surprising assessment. “A common thug, Stadtmeister?”

Finkel leaned across his desk with a pained look on his face. “Let us not delude ourselves, Commissario,” he began, using the phrase that had become a standing joke at the Procuratie. “Venice may not be a city associated with violence, but there is a low and persistent level of insolence, insubordination, whatever, that left unchecked can all too easily lead in this sort of direction. I’m afraid that people are very like children,” he added.

Brunelli nodded. The stadtmeister had just two years to go before he retired to the muddy Mitteleuropaisch spa town in which he had chosen to spend his declining years. If the art dealer’s murder could be linked vaguely to the affront to an officer outside La Fenice, and various similar incidents, then his final report—which would never, in all probability, be read—could be filed and forgotten.

“Like children,” the stadtmeister repeated. “And let us not delude ourselves, these things are more likely to happen late at night, are they not? Well?”

“You mean in the dark? I suppose that’s true, Stadtmeister.”

“Yes, of course. Take last night—an ugly scene outside the opera. I shall have to report it, I’m afraid. If I had my way, I would get everyone into their own homes by ten o’clock. Then we’d see little more of this tiresome behavior.”

Even murder, Brunelli reflected, could be swallowed if it was ground down small.

“You are going to recommend a curfew, Stadtmeister?”

“We shall see,” the Austrian returned cautiously. “In the meantime, is there anyone you actively suspect of killing your man?”

“Not yet.”

“Hmmph. You should check the port register. See if any boats have sailed in the past day or so. It could so easily have been a sailor, you know.”

Brunelli said nothing. The port, like the low-level rebelliousness of the people, was one of Finkel’s treasured explanations for almost anything untoward—blithely disregarding the fact that Venice, these days, scarcely was a port at all. Austrian harbor dues and import duties, along with the neglect of the channels, had seen to that.

“Will that be all, Stadtmeister?”

The Austrian glanced involuntarily at the clock. “That will be all for now, thank you, Commissario,” he said. He opened a big ledger on his desk and bent his head over it, gripping his whiskers in either hand.

Brunelli bowed and retreated. The ledger did not fool him much. In five minutes Stadtmeister Finkel would be going down the corridor to his gondola, and lunch.

Y
ASHIM
took the knife from the table and hefted it in the palm of his hand. Years of sharpening had taken the blade down a fraction of an inch. He had asked the sharpener to take out the slight bell where the curve met the straight, and the knife weighed equably between his fingers. The grip, he supposed, was new.

He had known what he wanted to do the moment he saw the artichokes in George’s stall. The appearance of the first tiny artichokes always made up, he felt, for the disappearance of asparagus.

“Is summer!” George waved a bunch of the greeny-purple artichokes under his nose. “Not more to wait, Yashim efendi. You wants?”

Yashim, who felt he’d been waiting weeks already if not for summer then at least for Palewski to come home, seized a dozen. He bought broad beans, fresh onions, lemons, and a fistful of dill and parsley.

At home, he halved a lemon and squeezed the juice of both halves into a bowl of water. He set an onion on the board and chopped down on its spiraled top, wondering how many hands had held this knife, and how many times it had been asked to perform the same simple function in Damascus, or Cairo.

Smiling, almost dancing around the blade, he sliced the onion in half. He sliced each half lengthways and sideways, watching his fingers while he admired the fineness of the blade.

He set a pan on the coals, slopped in a gurgle of oil, and dropped in the finely chopped onion. He reached into a crock for two handfuls of rice. He cut the herbs small and scraped them into the rice with the blade.
He threw in a pinch of sugar and a cup of water. The water hissed; he stirred the pan with a wooden spoon. The water boiled. He clapped on a lid and slid the pan to one side.

He began to trim the artichokes.

Summer was good. The knife was even better.

He smiled as he slid the blade smoothly across the tough tips of the leaves; inside was the choke, which he lifted with a spoon. One by one he dropped the artichokes into the lemony water.

He thought of Malakian, waiting for that chess set to appear one day. At least he could make him supper in exchange for the knife.

The rice still had bite, and he took it off the heat. As it cooled he ran his thumb down the soft fur inside the bean pods, trying to remember his first meeting with the old calligrapher.

Metin Yamaluk had been working on a beautiful Koran. It was probably the old sultan’s gift to the Victory Mosque, built as a thanksgiving for his deliverance from the Janissaries sixteen years ago. Like all Ottomans, Yashim had a respect that bordered on reverence for the bookmaker’s art, but it was dying all the same. For many years, the ulema and the scribes together had successfully resisted printing. First the Greeks and then the Jews had set up presses, and now the sultan himself had ordered certain scientific works to be printed in Arabic. One day, Yashim supposed, they would print the Koran, too.

He sighed and dipped a finger into the rice. He took an artichoke out of the water, shook it dry, and stuffed it, scooping up the rice in his fingers and pressing it in. As each one was finished with a little mound of rice, he put it upright in an earthenware crock.

When the crock was full he sprinkled the artichokes with the beans and a few chopped carrots. He drizzled them with oil, around and around, then threw in a splash of water and the rest of the dill and parsley, roughly chopped. Over the top he squeezed another lemon.

He covered the pan with a smaller plate, to weight the artichokes down, and settled the earthenware onto the coals. He set the rice crock on top of the plate. It would be done in an hour or less. He and Malakian would eat it later, cold.

Perhaps he would go to Üsküdar later, after all. Take a caïque, enjoy the cool breezes on the Bosphorus, maybe stop for tea in one of the cafés that lined the waterfront. He liked to go there: it was a little Asian village, really, scarcely a town, in spite of its magnificent mosques. And Yamaluk, and his treasures—why not?

Perhaps, somehow, the Bellini book would help.

I
F
Istanbul was a city of dogs, then Venice—from the lofty symbol of St. Mark to the lowest denizen of boatyard and alleyway—was a city of cats. The winged lion stood only wherever the Austrian authorities had found it inexpedient to remove it, but the ordinary cats of the city still prowled by night through the
campi
, the gardens, and the ruins of Venice, in search of food.

By long tradition, the pigeons on St. Mark’s Square, like the impoverished nobility of San Barnaba, were fed by the state. The cats fended for themselves. Mostly they preyed on the rats who had long since colonized the city, breeding easily in the damp, crumbling foundations of Venetian houses, beneath rotting vegetation in the little landlocked gardens of the well-to-do, and in empty attics.

A she-cat, when her litter is due, looks for a dry and quiet place where she can raise her kittens undisturbed for the first few weeks. An empty building makes an ideal shelter even if, after years of abandonment and decay, it is not perfectly secure. The Fondaco dei Turchi was such a building. Grand, forlorn, shuttered, and rotting, it fronted the Grand Canal not a hundred yards from Palewski’s own snug billet, a perpetual reminder to the Venetians of the decay of trade and the passing of the heyday of their commercial power. The Turks, who once used it as their
caravanserai, filling it with muslins and silks, gems and precious metals, had found no further use for it once the Republic was dead; rumor had it that the fondaco—which rivaled the fondaco of the Germans, not far off—had been sold to a Venetian speculator.

The cat was not interested in the rumor, nor did she appreciate the Byzantine architecture of the old palace, built in the twelfth century in the fashionable Eastern style. What interested her, as she prowled the dark stairs and investigated the empty rooms, were ratholes and rubbish heaps, scraps of wood, paper, and old fabric that cluttered the corners, areas of greenish damp and fallen plaster, and above all the distance between her nest and another, composed of a candle end, a cloak, a pitcher, and a plate on which the cat found some scraps of bread.

She wolfed them hungrily, and fled.

P
OPI
Eletro stood in his studio with his back to the light, gripping his lapels with his stubby fingers, his head cocked to one side.

It was amazing, he thought, what human beings could endure.

He bent closer to the canvas.

Good. Very, very good. Even without the varnish—a triumph.

His expression didn’t change. “The other one,” he said gruffly.

The Croat tenderly lifted the canvas from the easel and set it down against the wall. He picked up another and removed its blue paper wrapper. Popi saw him hesitate for a moment before he set it on the easel.

Popi gave a grim little smile and started to look for the flaw. It was only a matter of scrutiny. Ever since he had found the Croat silent and imbecile in a little church on the Dalmatian coast, he had perfectly understood the Croat’s cravings.

Soon after he had learned to recognize his pathetic evasions, too.

It had been five years since Popi had learned that a sojourn on the Istrian islands would be good for his health. The diagnosis was not made by a doctor, but so it had proved. One day, crazed with boredom, he had walked the long mile to the hilltop church and found the Croat drawing pictures with a stick of charcoal on the marble steps.

He had been astonished. Popi Eletro had not, until that moment, given much consideration to art, but it was a Venetian consideration. He watched shapes and figures flow from the man’s hand like water. So when the Croat proudly led him to the parish priest, and the priest showed him what the Croat could draw and paint on paper, Popi had discovered an interest in the full commercial sense of the term.

Art, Popi reasoned, could make him money.

“It is a gift from God,” the priest would say. “The only one he has—but a gift to make him happy!”

Now Popi bent close to the picture. A perfect Canaletto—with a flaw.

In the end it had been so easy. One night he led the Croat to a bar in town and got him drunk, and by morning they were miles from the wretched little church and its pious priest. The Croat was dubious but also excited: Popi gave him paper and pencils, and he sketched his way easily to Venice.