The Bellini card yte-3

by Jason Goodwin

  He pushed his way eagerly into the market throng, Palewski in his wake. Now and then Ruggerio would turn around to check that his new American friend was following as they weaved between the stalls, dodging porters clattering their trolleys across the cobbles, slipping along the arcades until Ruggerio stopped outside a small cafe and bowed.

  “My visitors are always happy here,” he assured Palewski. “Even the Duke of Naxos! Small, but very clean. Come.”

  The cafe was nothing more than a wooden counter ranged with plates of fried fish, octopus, salami, and olives. There was nowhere to sit, but Ruggerio seized a few plates and bore them off to a high table, snapping his fingers for coffee.

  “May I suggest a prosecco, also? Allora, due vini, maestro! ” He took some bread from a large open basket on the counter and beamed at his guest. “So-wine, good food, a little coffee, and the Rialto in Venice! Is not life good, my friend?”

  Palewski had to agree with him. It had been many years since he had drunk wine among strangers, in open view. The sensation was agreeable, if peculiar at first, like the sight of unveiled women prodding the vegetables or drifting down the canal in a gondola. Many Europeans came to Venice because it offered them-in their imagination, at least-a glimpse of the Orient with none of the inconvenience: Byzantine domes and mosaics, strong colors, picturesque poverty, and an air of licentious freedom, comfortably offset by a familiar battery of French-speaking hoteliers, Catholic churches, and Renaissance art. These visitors, unlike the Polish ambassador, were often struck by seeing women who were, in fact, veiled according to a custom that went back to the days of Byzantine influence. But in Palewski’s world all women, even Christians, were veiled in the street; to him in Venice it seemed that any man could admire a woman’s features. Some of the women were very beautiful, he noticed.

  Ruggerio caught his eye and winked. “In Venice we have the most beautiful women in the world. You think the husband is jealous? The father-yes. But after a woman is married- altra storia! She takes admirers! Why not? The husband-he, too, plays the game.”

  When they had eaten, Ruggerio laid his hand on Palewski’s arm: “Twenty lire only will be enough. They all know Antonio Ruggerio. No cheating.” He shook his head. “It happens.”

  The Venetian aristocrat’s gondola was not to be found at the landing stage. Ruggerio looked annoyed, but his spirits soon recovered. “No matter. We will take another.”

  “But where?” Palewski asked. “Where are we going?”

  The little Venetian amused him, he had to admit. Ruggerio was transparently a fraud, but he was engaging company and he was determined to show him around the city. He was a cicerone: a guide, a paid companion, and Palewski was not without means, with Yashim’s commission.

  “Where we are going?” Ruggerio looked surprised. “We are going to find you somewhere to live, Signor Brett. Nobody,” he added, with emphasis, “nobody lives in a hotel in Venice for a month.”

  11

  Two days later, gazing down upon the Grand Canal from the vestibule window of his apartment, a glass of prosecco in one hand and a telescope in the other, Palewski reflected that life, indeed, was good.

  He owed his present sense of good fortune to Antonio Ruggerio, which offered little scope for complacency. Ruggerio was, in many ways, an absurd pest; contentment that rested on his infinitely mobile shoulders could scarcely be supposed secure. But there it was: he had spent a day with the able cicerone, reviewing apartments to rent for the month.

  There had seemed no end to them, each one larger, darker, more dilapidated, and more expensive than the one before, each one entangled in some way with families of title-the titles, it seemed, growing longer and more sonorous and hollow, until Palewski had prodded his guide in the other direction and stipulated something modest.

  And Ruggerio, finally swallowing the blow to pride, and pocket, had brought him to this perfectly serviceable little casa on the banks of the Grand Canal, not far from the ruined bulk of the Fondaco dei Turchi: an apartment on the second floor sandwiched between the pleasant Greek landlady and her Venetian husband above, and a renowned but aging opera singer below. The ground floor, lapped by the canal itself, was given over to a quiet and unfashionable cafe, where watermen sometimes ate their lunch and where Palewski was sure of a dish of rice and a bottle of black wine in the evening.

  He wondered what Yashim would make of these risottos, which bore a family resemblance to pilaff, only the rice was thicker. Yashim believed Italians had learned to cook in Istanbul. And certainly the Venetians, who had lived, fought, and traded so much in and around the fringes of the Ottoman world, ate very like the Turks. They had the same particular preferences, Palewski observed, for dozens of little dishes, like mezes, though the locals called them cicchetti instead, and they were as finicky as any Ottoman about the provenance of certain fruits and vegetables. In Istanbul, one ate cucumbers from Karakoy, or mussels from Therapia. In Venice, Ruggerio insisted that the bitter leaves called radicchio should come from Treviso, the artichokes from Chioggia, and the fresh beans from a little town called Lamon, on the mainland. Neither the Turks nor the Venetians seemed to value fish.

  Ruggerio had given him a whirlwind tour of the city’s treasures and marvels simply, as he said, to help Signor Brett familiarize himself with the disposition of the city, its churches, palazzi, and artworks, although Palewski had begun to suspect that the cicerone was disappointed in him and was looking for more valuable clienti. Some days Ruggerio arrived late; once, not at all; other times he often seemed distracted.

  The idea that Ruggerio might, at last, begin to leave him alone was a relief to Palewski. It contributed to his sense of well-being as he trained his telescope on the landing stage opposite and watched a gondolier handing up a large packet of a woman onto dry land, along with her tiny dog.

  He laid the telescope aside with a smile and took a printed card from his pocket.

  Mr. S. BRETT DE NEW YORK connoisseur

  For the first time since his arrival in Venice, he felt he was being useful to Yashim.

  Ruggerio would deliver the cards to various dealers and collectors he knew, expressing the hope that they would call on Signor Brett to discuss his own collection and theirs. Ruggerio would have preferred to present the American connoisseur to the dealers in person, but Signor Brett had been firm on the point. In a society as small as Venice a man would be judged by the company he kept. Ruggerio, foppish, quaint, and ingratiating, was not the man to present an American dealer to Venetian art circles. Palewski was fishing for a Bellini. Whatever the bait, the hook had to be clean, sharp-and expensive. A man like Ruggerio would merely foul it, like weed.

  Quite what the bait would be, Stanislaw Palewski had no idea. It was unlikely that the Bellini was on open sale. Discretion would be required, not least because the Austrians, by all accounts, watched the market jealously.

  He stood up, stretched, and went to his bedroom, where he found his battered leather-bound copy of Vasari’s Lives of the Painters.

  He read it again at the open window, listening to the shouts of the gondoliers and the backwash of the boats and skiffs below, locating in his mind’s eye Vasari’s comments about churches and paintings in the city. He was not a true connoisseur of painting, but by the time he had finished the chapter about the Bellinis, and his bottle, he knew what he needed to know.

  He sensed that Mehmet II, the Conqueror of Istanbul, had created a little revolution in Venice.

  12

  Signor Brett’s card, too, created a minor stir in the city.

  Gianfranco Barbieri stood for a long time at the great arched window on the piano nobile of his Zattere palazzo, looking out across the canal to Giudecca. He tapped the card against his perfect teeth, wondering who Brett was and whom he worked for. What kind of a man came from New York? A financial man, no doubt: Gianfranco always seemed to be reading about another American banking scandal, another astonishing default. People got burned lending to Americans. But they got ri
ch, too-why else would they go on lending?

  He would have to be careful.

  He touched his fingertip to the small scar on his lip. The scar was not unattractive, and it gave him a mildly quizzical, amused expression, as though he were smiling at something only he could see.

  Gianfranco liked to think of himself as a very careful man.

  Across the city, close to the Arsenale, another man was pondering the arrival of Brett’s card.

  “Popi” Eletro rubbed the ink with a heavy thumb, then ran the lettering beneath a nail that looked hard and yellow. The card itself was unfamiliar: plenty of rag, but not Venetian. Not French, either. He would have said Turkish, but it was probably American, like the man. He grunted and stared up at a Canaletto on the wall. Canaletto in the land of bears and Indians?

  There was money in furs.

  His eyes slid from the first Canaletto to another three hanging beside it. Big pictures. Worth money, as soon as the glaze dried. What a shame this Brett couldn’t buy them all! Four matchless Canalettos. All of them, unfortunately, identical.

  Popi levered himself from the swiveling leather chair and reached for his hat.

  It was time, he thought, to visit the Croat.

  He’d have had his drink by now; he’d be ready to work again. If not, well, sometimes you needed to be cruel to be kind.

  Popi walked, scowling, from the Arsenale toward the Ghetto. It was a long, difficult route: as late as 1840, few of the canals had been provided with pavements and the fashion for filling them in had not yet begun. Districts were still preserved as the islands they had always been, clustered around their church, their campo, and their well, speaking a dialect that marked them out from other islanders in the city.

  Popi did not ponder the irony that a man who made his living from canals should detest them, but it was so. They were sluices of gossip, in his opinion-gondoliers to recall the address you visited, boatmen to note your passing. Beggars and idlers hung about the bridges, and in the dankest, dirtiest dark bends of a canal the inevitable old crone was forever craning her neck from some upstairs room for a better view. You took a gondola only if you wanted to be noticed-visiting a rich American art collector, for instance. Otherwise you used the pavement and walked the long way around.

  In the Ghetto he found firmer footing, where the Jews had been crowded up behind their gates. The air was filled with floating goose down, like a gentle snow, for the people here used goose fat where other Venetians used pork, and it reeked of more than the sewage that offended visitors to Venice elsewhere in the city. It stank of old fish and rags, and the sourness of confined spaces. Napoleon had had the gates demolished, but everyone knew that they still existed in the Venetian mind. A few rich Jews had moved away, and a few-a very few-impoverished gentiles had taken rooms in the Ghetto, but otherwise little had changed in forty years.

  Popi stumped along, looking neither left nor right. Something in his manner made the women working in their doorways draw in their feet as he approached; the men shrank to the wall as he passed. It was not that Popi looked official: when the Austrians sent patrols through the streets the people just watched them go, sullen and unmoving. It was, perhaps, that he came from the other Venice, a Venice that festered beneath the golden afternoon light and the fine tracery of a Byzantine facade, a Venice unimaginative visitors would never penetrate, no matter how much poverty or wretchedness they passed by, trailing their fingertips in the water until their solicitous gondolier hinted that it would be better, perhaps, to keep their hands folded on their laps. How could they, when even the more engaged, more lively minded visitors to the city allowed themselves to be seduced so readily by the prettiness of its whores and the cheapness of its appartamenti?

  The people of the Ghetto shrank from Popi as a man of thalers and kreuzers, and of little accounts kept rigorously in black books that had the power to ruin lives.

  Popi stopped to stick a cigar in his mouth and lit it with a match, then carried on up the narrow calle like a steam tug. After several turns that he executed without stopping, he ducked into a low doorway, crossed a small dark hallway, and found the stairs. He began to climb, slowly, to the top.

  The stairs were dark. At each landing, narrow passages radiated into a deeper blackness relieved occasionally by a tiny opening, without glass, which gave onto a narrow well of light. On the lower floors the light was blocked by the accumulated rubbish of many centuries-moldering feathers, desiccated rats, pigeon droppings. Reaching the fifth floor, Popi ignored the stairs and pressed on down a corridor barely wide enough to let him pass. Stooping, he fumbled his way until his outstretched hands encountered another set of stairs, running up and back the way he had come. He took the cigar from his mouth and stood leaning against the wall, waiting for breath. Then he began to climb again.

  Pressed into their narrow space, the Jews had built their houses higher than anyone else in the world.

  Now, when he leaned against the wall for breath, Popi could feel it flex against his weight; another piece of plaster crumbled and fell to the floor.

  At last, holding the stub of cigar at eye level, he perceived a door. He hit it with the heel of his hand, and it swung open, drenching him in sunlight.

  Popi blinked, tears starting to his eyes. The cold reek of cabbage and drains that had followed him up through the warren of stairs and passages was swept aside by an overpowering sweet smell of alcohol and decay, wafted out on a raft of summer heat.

  He coughed and stepped through the narrow doorway.

  The first thing Popi noticed were the flies. They crowded the skylights and crawled across the sloping ceiling, buzzing and falling, swirling in the dust on their wings. With an exclamation of disgust he lunged at the nearest skylight.

  The room was in disarray: tangled bedding, empty bottles, lumps of bread were strewn across the floor. The easel that normally stood beneath the window was overturned. Only the box of paints and the jar of brushes were in place. In the middle of the room, naked on a high stool, sat the Croat himself: waxy, immobile, his eyes staring on vacancy. His thin shoulders were flung back. His back was straight.

  Popi’s first thought was that he must be dead.

  He stepped closer. The Croat continued to stare. Only when Popi was close enough to smell the man’s skin did he realize that his lips were moving, minutely, horribly, like hairless caterpillars.

  Popi took a step back: the Croat, alive, repelled him more than the notion of the Croat dead.

  Popi was not unimaginative. He could tell, for instance, that the Croat was somewhere where Popi and the drink and the stench and poverty of his life could not reach him. He sat like a prince upon his throne, issuing soundless orders, perhaps, to the invisible minions who flitted before his glassy stare.

  But Popi was unsympathetic.

  He snapped his fingers in front of the unseeing eyes.

  Nothing happened.

  “I’ll bring you around,” he muttered. He took a drag on his cigar, lowered the glowing tip until it reached the level of the Croat’s naked belly, and stubbed it out.

  Way below, in the street, some people thought they heard a high-pitched scream, but the gulls were wheeling overhead, too, and they couldn’t be sure.

  13

  Yashim was reading the latest novel from Paris, a rather improbable account of the life of Ali Pasha of Janina lent to him by his old friend the valide, the new sultan’s grandmother. The subject matter had taken him by surprise. Yashim was used to discovering Parisian life. Reading Ali Pasha, he felt, was rather like peering through a keyhole, only to see an eye looking at you from the other side.

  “I find this Monsieur Dumas sympathique,” the valide had told him. “His father was a French marquis. His mother came from Santo Domingo.”

  Yashim nodded. The valide herself was born on another Caribbean island, Martinique. The extraordinary story of her arrival in the harem of the Ottoman sultan, and of her inexorable rise to the position of valide, or queen mother,
would have challenged the imagination of Monsieur Dumas himself. ^*

  “The novel is a bagatelle, Yashim,” the valide added. “I’m afraid it kept me up all night.”

  Yashim found the novel riddled with falsifications but also surprisingly energetic. It was certainly unlike anything he had read before. He wanted to discuss it with the valide, but a visit was out of the question. Even though she did not live in the palace of the sultan, his presence was sure to be noted. The sultan expected him to be in Venice, on the track of the Bellini.

  Resid was right to hint that the sultan’s infatuation with a painting he had never seen would pass as he grew into the responsibilities of office. Yet the deception bothered him. Not merely the disloyalty, if it was such. What mattered more was the complicity he shared with Resid Pasha and the vagueness of Resid’s support.

  What if, after all, Resid believed he had gone to Venice?

  It was also an irksome restriction: he felt in a sort of limbo in his own city. He read, he went to the hammam, he cooked and ate, but in his heart he knew he was simply marking time. Two Thursdays came and went without the customary dinner he was used to preparing for his friend Palewski; the second time he went out to a locanta in Pera and found himself ordering an old palace dish, ek ili kofte, meatballs in a sauce of egg and lemon. Several times, too, he found himself outside the Polish Residency, and on these occasions he unfailingly went up the crumbling steps and knocked on the door, to see if Marta had any news.

  Only his visit to Malakian, in the Grand Bazaar, had eased his sense of idleness. He found the old Armenian cross-legged, as always, outside the tiny cubicle that held his queer and fascinating collection of antiques, impassively watching the crowds that swirled down the covered lane.