The Bellini Card (16 page)

When he lifted his head again he noticed the imam sitting by the screen, reading a Koran.

The imam nodded at him.

“The inscription—it’s by Yamaluk efendi?”

“Indeed so, efendi. A light gone from our world.”

“I have met his honorable daughter, imam. She said that he died—strangely.”

The imam pursed his lips. “Yamaluk efendi did not fear death.”

“But?”

“But the fear of God was in his face when he died.” He placed his finger in the book. “I am sorry for his daughter. Her father must have died after she left him one evening. In the morning he was already cold. He had apoplexy, I suppose. Well, it was quick. God is merciful, efendi.”

“God is indeed merciful, imam,” Yashim replied uneasily.

P
ALEWSKI
heard the knock on his door and clambered out of bed. It would be Ruggerio, he supposed, as he drew on his dressing gown. Ruggerio pressing the rich American to take him to lunch again.

It took Palewski a moment to place the heavyset man with the crumpled face in his memory.

“Come in, Commissario,” he said, suppressing a guilty start by wrenching the door wide. A wave of yesterday’s unhappiness washed over him: he felt like a hunted and friendless fugitive.

The commissario walked over to the window and stared out at the Grand Canal.

It struck Palewski that Barbieri, too, had been unable to take his eyes off the canal. One might have thought that the novelty would wear off.

“Can I help you, Commissario?”

Brunelli grunted. “For a man who has been in Venice only a few short days you seem to be making quite an impression, Signor Brett.” He turned. “I’m not sure it’s altogether the impression you wanted.”

Palewski frowned and said nothing.

“The other night,” Brunelli continued, “you thought I had come to establish your bona fides. I told you that was why I had been sent but not why I had come. Do you remember?”

“You had a body in the canal. I had seen it pulled out. Wasn’t much help, I’m afraid.”

“It’s not a problem, Signor Brett. Except that now, you see, I have another one.”

“Another one,” Palewski echoed, baffled. It was the commissario’s
job, he supposed, to deal with bodies in canals. Why should he come to him?

“This second man, I think, you had already met. Count Barbieri.”

Palewski’s hand flew to his mouth. “Good God—what is the time? I completely forgot—I’m supposed to be seeing him at eleven.”

Brunelli looked into his eyes and slowly shook his head. “Not Barbieri, signore. And, I should add, it is already almost noon.”

If Brett was a liar, he thought, he was very good.

A simpler man—the stadtmeister, for example—might have drawn the obvious conclusion that Signor Brett was not to be trusted. “Let us not delude ourselves,” the stadtmeister might say, “mud sticks for good reason.”

But Brunelli, unlike his boss, was not a simple man. He had spent too many years considering his own motivation to assume that he always understood what motivated other people. He was a Venetian patriot, born and raised on these tightly packed islands, and he believed that Venice in all her grandeur and decay, in all her moods, in both her sweetness and her wickedness, offered him a solid and sufficient stage. Torcello, say, or Burano, or the farther reaches of the lagoon, were in the wings; the mainland was scarcely in the same theater.

He was a Venetian patriot who had taken a vow of allegiance to the Habsburg emperor. The paradox infuriated his son, as he had admitted to the contessa: but Paolo was still simple, because he was young and had not faced choices. Paolo had not taken decisions.

Brunelli took one now.

“Count Barbieri was killed last night, as he left the contessa’s party,” he said. “He was attacked on his gondola, and his head was cut off with a knife.”

Palewski sat down on a chair against the wall. “How perfectly horrible.”

“Barbieri’s head was discovered this morning by a sacristan in the church of San Paolo, not far from here. The sacristan found it on the altar, on a communion plate.”

Palewski stared at the commissario. “On a plate? Like John the Baptist?”

Brunelli grunted. “Yes. I had not thought of it that way.”

“But what could it mean?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

Brunelli took the window seat and he and Palewski leaned forward on their elbows, looking at one another. After a pause they both spoke together:

“You think I—?”

“I don’t think you—”

Palewski was the first to recover. “I didn’t kill Count Barbieri, Commissario. On the contrary, I was hoping to do some business with him.”

“I am thinking of my report,” Brunelli said candidly. “You saw Barbieri at the contessa’s party, then you left, early. Some people—a magistrate, for example—might wonder where you went.”

“I came back here. I felt ill—a touch of sun, I think.”

“Hmmm.” The commissario looked troubled. “I don’t suppose that anyone saw you later?”

“Later? No.” Palewski hesitated. He had a code, and he sensed he should stick to it even when he was in trouble.

Especially, perhaps, when he was in trouble. What good was the code otherwise?

“I’m afraid I can’t prove that I was here,” he said stiffly.

Brunelli sighed. “It’s a shame, Signor Brett.”

Their eyes met. The door to the bedroom opened and a young woman stepped out. She fastened a pin in her hair.

“But I know, Commissario, that this gentleman was here.” She smiled sweetly. “I was with him the whole night.”

S
TANISLAW
Palewski closed the door on the amiable commissario and turned back to his other uninvited guest. She looked very pretty with the light in her hair.

“I am in your debt, Maria,” he said. “I’m afraid this sounds like a terrible business.”

Maria nodded with a smile. The first rule, she had been told, was to keep her gentleman in good spirits. Until the policeman came she had been doing rather well, she thought.

“We could take a little walk,” she suggested.

They walked south, arm in arm toward the Zattere. The canals were broader in these parts; the pavements were more even. Here and there rampant roses spilled out overhead from walled gardens. Beggars sat in doorways in the sun, mumbling for alms. Through open windows came the sounds of people eating, the bright clank of crockery and knives, somebody somewhere playing a flute.

Palewski had spent almost half his life in Istanbul, and now the pressure of a woman’s arm on his, the rhythm of her smaller steps—first awkward and then agreeable—the musical sound of her prattle (it was, when one stopped to listen, scarcely more), drew him unexpectedly back to another country, long ago.

He felt her hand on the small of his back.

“Are you all right,
mio caro?”

Palewski squeezed his eyes at the bridge of his nose. In a blinding moment he had seen another woman in his mind’s eye and felt the pressure of her arm on his.

“Forgive me, Maria.”

“Come. We’re there,” Maria said. They turned the corner and there was the Zattere, with the long, low silhouette of the Giudecca across the water, the church of San Giorgio, and the barges’ brown sails hanging in the summer air.

“Tell me, Maria,” Palewski said. “Where are you from?”

She squeezed his arm. “From Venice, silly.”

“But last night—how did you come?”

Maria nodded. “It was la Signora Ruggerio. She said I should.”

Palewski laughed weakly. Ruggerio, of course.

“I’m glad you did,” he said.

Maria squeezed his arm. “Can we have an ice cream?” she said brightly.

L
IKE
many Venetians, Brunelli believed that Venetians ate better than anyone else in the world. And like many Venetians, too, he believed that he ate better than anyone in Venice, thanks to his wife.

That morning, before he knew anything of the unfortunate Count Barbieri, his wife had announced her intention of cooking
seppia con nero
for lunch. She knew that Brunelli was unhappy about their son.
Seppia con nero
was a favorite with them both and she hoped that their differences would untangle across a bowl of steaming squid.

“You’re late, Papa,” Paolo said when Brunelli arrived.

Carla glanced at her husband. He smiled.

“If I am late, Paolo, it is because I have been working. Not lounging about in the piazza, talking and smoking cheroots.”

“But Papa, your work is all talk, too. It’s the same as mine.”

“Hmmph.” Brunelli sat down at the table and closed his eyes. “I smell it. I smell
seppia con nero.”
He sighed.

I
N
the days of the Republic, affairs of state were debated by members of the Senate, drawn from the noble families eligible for service. No other Venetians had any influence over the Republic’s policy.

Real authority was vested in a Council of Ten, elected from members of the Great Council. The ten governed in the name of the doge.

And behind the Ten, pulling the levers of absolute power, without appeal, stood a Council of Three.

All this, a system of absolute rule by a secret cabal, was swept away by the Napoleonic intervention. In 1797 a departing honor guard of Croat infantry had fired a farewell salute; the senators, in panic, instantly voted themselves out of existence and fled the chamber.

But a relic of the old government still survived.

While the contessa’s friend lamented the loss of the old stone lions of St. Mark, there was one, at least, whose future seemed assured, even under the Habsburgs. At the back of the Doges’ Palace, in a narrow alley with blank windowless sides, a stone head of a lion was fixed to the wall, its eyes staring, its mouth agape.

And into this mouth, the
bocca di leone
, ordinary citizens had always been encouraged to post information that would be of use to the Council of Three. The information, anonymously supplied, would be investigated and, if it proved interesting, could be used immediately—or simply filed away in dossiers that the Venetian state kept on all its more prominent
citizens. A whiff of treachery, a sharp commercial practice, a breach of contract, a marital infidelity—hidden knowledge was the tool by which the Venetians governed their state. Knowledge of the world at large had made them rich; knowledge of themselves, they hoped, would keep them safe.