The Bellini card yte-3

by Jason Goodwin

He carefully packed his purchases into a flimsy wooden crate and carried them home.

  “What’s happened?” His wife looked anxious. “Did he pay you off?”

  “No, cara, no.” Ruggerio laid the box on the deal table by the open window. “I think he was tired. I will see him again tomorrow.”

  “Pfui.”

  “I work hard, Rosetta. I cannot be in his pocket night and day.”

  “Why not? What does he want with his time that he cannot share it with you-or a woman, perhaps?” She cocked her head. “You know who I mean, Antonio.”

  Ruggerio spread his hands out. “It’s difficult.”

  “Difficult? What sort of a man is he? Un Americano. Don’t they have women in America?”

  Ruggerio stuck out his lower lip. “I’m not sure that he is un Americano.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Ruggerio began to unpack the box. “I don’t know exactly. But certain things-yes, some strange things…”

  Rosetta moved to help her husband. “Strange things, Antonio?”

  Ruggerio stood back and watched his wife put the greens on the table. She counted out five tomatoes. They were split, but fresh.

  “A book he has. An old copy of Vasari.” He shrugged. “And then-I don’t know. His hat.”

  “His hat?”

  Ruggerio sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “I know the rich, Rosetta. How they like to eat, the pictures they like. It is my study, after all,” he added proudly. Had the Venetians not swum on the currents of trade for a thousand years, appraising, analyzing, supplying a want here, removing a glut there, matching men to their desires? “I know how they dress, Rosetta.”

  “And so?”

  “The rich buy their hats-and their shoes-in London. Maybe Paris if they are French, or young, or have business in the city. It takes time to make a rich man’s hat, cara.”

  “Fine. So where does your friend have his hats made? New York?”

  “Constantinople.”

  “I see.”

  Rosetta, after all, was a Venetian, too. Constantinople was a rich word, full of associations: city of gold, city of lost fortune, the heathen image of Venice itself. Once the Venetians had held it in the palm of their hand. But that was long ago, before the Ruggerios and their kind had found their way to San Barnaba. Istanbul had been the enemy after that, cat playing mouse through the Aegean and the Adriatic: the city of sultans and viziers, of careful pacts and sudden wars.

  It was not, in Rosetta’s imagination, primarily noted for its hats.

  16

  Gianfranco Barbieri ran his hands through his hair. He was about to knock when the door opened.

  “Count Barbieri?” the American said. “Kind of you to come.”

  The count smiled, showing his fine teeth. “I was delighted to receive your card, Signor Brett. You are settling in Venice comfortably, I hope?”

  Brett bowed. “I’ve seen a dozen good churches, two dozen soldiers-and a body in a canal.” He stood back to let his guest enter the apartment.

  Barbieri responded with an uncertain smile and advanced to the window, where he gazed out onto the Grand Canal as if it were for the first time.

  “Champagne?”

  A pop, a clink; wine fizzed and subsided in the wide, shallow bowls of two Murano glasses. To Barbieri it seemed as if the sounds of the canal had grown brighter, its colors and movement more vivid. It had been many months since he tasted real champagne.

  Brett handed him a glass, and they toasted each other.

  “I am sorry,” Barbieri said. “A tragedy-I even knew the man. Not well, you understand, but-” He sighed. “Yes, these things happen, even in Venice. I hope you will not allow such an unpleasantness to spoil your stay.”

  “Nothing of the kind,” Brett assured him.

  “I admire your choice of season, Signor Brett. I often think Venice is at her loveliest at this time of year. The warmth. The light. Carnevale? Far too cold.” He took a sip of champagne. It was very good. “But you will know that already, perhaps.”

  “The Carnival? No. I was never in Venice before, I regret to say.”

  “You are from New York?”

  “Based in the city, yes.”

  “In Venice we are a little crazy about the past. Com’era, dov’era — as it was, where it was. A very Venetian saying-and said rather too often, I think. I would like to visit your country one day. A young country. We tend to forget that Venice was once a series of muddy little islands, inhabited by refugees from the mainland.” He gestured to the window. “Like you today, Signor Brett, we had to build up all this, little by little.”

  “I’d be proud if we made New York half as beautiful,” Brett said.

  “Who knows, Signor Brett? It will be another kind of beauty, I imagine. The beauty of the machine age.”

  “Founded on commerce.”

  “Of course.” Barbieri smiled. “Trade is a very pure expression of human energy. Modern Venice is listless and poor, and produces no art. Why? Because there’s no art without a patron. And one is not enough. It takes a wealthy and energetic commercial city to spawn rich men, who then vie with each other to call out what is beautiful.” He touched the scar on his lip with his tongue. “Are there rich men in New York?”

  “More every day,” Brett said.

  “So it was in Venice once. Spices, maybe, were your furs.” He laughed. “Forgive me, I have tumbled into my own trap-thinking, like any Venetian, of the past.”

  “I think about it, too,” Brett said.

  “Of course.” Barbieri nodded his head seriously. “One could draw the comparisons too close, and yet-” He put up his hands, as if he were grasping a balloon. “I do not think Venice would have become what it became without men like us.”

  “Like us?”

  He nodded. “We mined, in our time, the treasures that others had stored up. A lion from Patras, for the Arsenale. A column from Acre-to the Piazetta! Even the body of St. Mark-we took it from Alexandria. Go to the church of St. Mark’s, and what will you find? A gazetteer. A wild, encrusted guidebook to the cities of the ancient world. Precious marbles, enigmatic statues-and all embedded in a building that echoes the tossing of the waves. We hauled back the treasures of the East, and with them, slowly and cautiously, we forged our style.”

  He gestured to the window.

  “But we took it, mostly, from Istanbul. Constantinople, as it was. We sacked and scoured a city that had never been won by force of arms for eight hundred years.”

  “You, at least, preserved what was carried off,” Brett said. “Lysippos’s bronze horses, for example.”

  “And the bones of saints, and the reliquaries, and the gold. We took glass made in Antioch, and icons painted by the companions of Christ. Before we had been magpies, Signor Brett, snatching whatever was available, and beautiful, and bright. In 1204 we took a whole reference library.”

  Brett nodded.

  Barbieri smiled. “You, Signor Brett, are the Venetian now. And Venice, of course, is Istanbul.” He paused. “Tell me, how can I help you?”

  Brett poured some more champagne.

  “You’re a cynic at heart, Count Barbieri.”

  “Not at all. Perhaps the Barbieri have at last produced an optimist.”

  “A realist?”

  Barbieri smiled. “It is the same thing.”

  17

  He ordered the deaths without emotion. He had not known that they would die. Even when the killer arrived, unable to speak, handing him written instructions, he had pretended to himself that it would be something else.

  But of course when Boschini was found in the canal, dead, he could no longer pretend.

  He could adapt.

  That’s how it had to be in this city. You adapt, or you die.

  And the man was good at that. It’s what he did, the way he lived.

  So he told himself that the people who died deserved to die.

  18

  Palewski twisted the wi
re, and the cork popped out into his hand.

  “Brillat-Savarin,” Count Barbieri said.

  Palewski knew exactly what the count meant.

  Brillat-Savarin, the French gastronome, had established a sensational fact, which flew in the face of all recognized wisdom.

  After the battle of Waterloo, British regiments stationed around Champagne had plundered the wineries. Bottles were popped, quaffed, and tossed into the hedges; old vintages vanished indiscriminately with the latest crop. When order was restored, the champagne houses were left with shattered cellars.

  “The champagne makers thought the British had ruined them,” Palewski began. “Until every club in London-”

  “Ordered another twelve dozen cases!” Barbieri beamed. “The champagne houses made their fortune.”

  “You truly are an optimist, Count Barbieri.”

  “A realist, Signor Brett.”

  Palewski clasped his hands under his chin.

  “I am looking for a Bellini,” he said.

  Gianfranco Barbieri came from a long line of Venetian aristocrats who had been trained, like aristocrats everywhere, not to reveal his feelings easily. He opened his eyes wide and gave a whistle.

  “Bellini! No. Bassano, yes. Longhi, Ricci. Guardi-it would not be too much of a problem. But Bellini? That would be a miracle.” He blew on his fingertips and laughed. “You would have to steal it,” he added.

  “It is what America wants,” Palewski explained. “Something utterly first class. Better one work by a master like Bellini than a whole gallery of lesser paintings.”

  “No, no. You must begin slowly. Like us.”

  Palewski knelt on the window seat and contemplated the Grand Canal.

  “Count Barbieri,” he began, “I wonder-if, by some stroke of fortune, someone in Venice was in a position to offer a Bellini on the market-it’s a hypothetical suggestion-you would know about it, I suppose?”

  The count shrugged. “If it were to be offered through the usual channels, then yes, I would know of it. But for such a painting-well. This is Venice, Signor Brett. Not all traffic passes down the Grand Canal.”

  “I understand,” the American said.

  Barbieri set down his glass. “I am expected at the opera, Signor Brett. There’s no reason to be disappointed. If a Bellini should suddenly appear… In the meantime, I can show you at least three works that would delight you. They would cause a stir if they were exhibited in London or Paris. A fourth, I think, would interest you also.”

  They shook hands at the door. “Your neighbor is an old friend of mine. Carla d’Aspi d’Istria. She’s having a little gathering tomorrow night. Do drop her your card, I’m sure she’d be delighted to meet you.”

  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 cafe. 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.

  19

  Marta 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 Karakoy. 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 caique 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 caique 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 caique 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 caiques got within hailing distance, Resid Pasha leaned forward and signaled to his boatmen. The caiques 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.”