The signora took one look and raised her hands. “In my house! He will bring disease to us all.”
Yashim said, “He isn’t ill. He’s starved. Bring me some hot water and a towel. I will wash him.”
To Palewski, it was an almost biblical scene: the smoky, blackened room, the emaciated figure on the pallet, and Yashim carefully wiping away the sweat and dirt.
“A little soup, signora, if you don’t mind. Not too hot.”
Palewski knelt to hold the man upright, while Yashim put the spoon to his lips. He swallowed, weakly.
“If it hadn’t been for that appointment-” Palewski frowned and shook his head. “What happened in that room, Yashim? Who is this man?”
He looked down, into his face. The eyes were closed; he was asleep already. He looked better clean: his hair in little golden tufts, his ears surprisingly delicate and small, with three little moles on the tip; you could see the veins in his forehead.
“Scrubbed up well, at least.”
Yashim rocked back on his heels. He took a small leather bag from his pocket and fished in it for a pinch of latakia tobacco, which he rolled up in a spill of rice paper. He touched the end to a brand and smoked it, in silence.
“As to that,” he said finally, blowing a perfect ring into the air, “I have few ideas. I don’t think he is the killer. It is possible that he painted the murder scene, in which case he may have more to tell us presently. If he recovers.”
He paused and glanced at his friend. “But if he’s not the killer,” he began, then shook his head. “I don’t like it, Palewski. It’s getting-very close.”
Palewski’s shoulders jerked. “Close-to what?”
Yashim pointed a finger. “To you. First Barbieri, then Eletro.”
“But Boschini-the man in the canal. I–I hadn’t had any contact with him.”
“No, you weren’t given the chance.” Yashim took a whiff of his tobacco.
“Do you think it’s time to call it quits? Get back to Istanbul. Admit defeat.” Palewski laid the man down gently on the pallet and drew Yashim’s cloak up to his chin. “That painting seemed such a simple solution to my troubles, once.”
Yashim nodded. “I think we should plan to stay a little longer,” he said. “Someone offered a Bellini for sale. The sultan got to hear of it, at least, so I assumed that the painting was available. But you haven’t heard a thing in ten days.”
“No. And everyone keeps getting killed.”
Yashim held up his hand. “How did the sultan pick up the rumor? Who told him?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Let’s say it was your friend Alfredo. He created the whole scenario in order to get somebody out here-and double-cross him.”
“So there never was a Bellini?”
Yashim looked puzzled. “I don’t know. Someone was supposed to come to Venice. But then-why are people being killed?”
“Why do people get killed? Over money, or women.”
“Or because they know too much.”
Palewski started.
“Alfredo knew where to find me,” he said slowly. “The day after we saw the painting he was waiting by Florian, in the piazza.”
“Go on.”
“I’d simply told Ruggerio to meet me there for lunch. He was there, too, at a table.”
“I see. So Ruggerio told Alfredo where he could find you.”
“Yes. Maybe. It might have been a coincidence.”
Yashim flicked the end of his cigarette into the fire. “Perhaps. But one of them seems to have guessed something else: that you were not Signor Brett. Why else would they take Maria to be questioned?”
“Maybe the gang just wanted to be sure who they were dealing with. To be sure I could come through with the money.”
“No. A courtesan deals in ducats, not thousands in silver. They took Maria because they wanted a confession. Something intimate. They already suspected who you really were.”
Yashim found himself examining his friend. He saw a perfectly plausible visitor to Venice, like any other: well dressed, acceptably a la mode. Signor Brett, connoisseur!
“Are you-” He blushed. “Are you circumcised, Palewski?”
“No.”
Yashim glanced away, baffled, and his eye fell on something on the floor beside Palewski’s chair.
He sighed heavily. “Let me see your hat.”
“My hat?”
“There.” Yashim held the hat by the brim and invited Palewski to look inside.
“Well, I’m-! But I made no secret of the fact that I’d been in Istanbul.”
“That’s right-but casual visitors don’t get their hats in Istanbul. I wouldn’t buy my pantaloons in Venice, either. It isn’t conclusive, of course, but it would have raised Ruggerio’s suspicions.”
“Suspicions of what, Yashim? I don’t understand.”
“That you were the man from Istanbul.”
“The man from Istanbul,” Palewski echoed.
“Why would it matter so much to Ruggerio that you came from Istanbul?” Yashim tapped the hat against his palm. “There could be two possibilities. Either he was expecting someone from Istanbul-and couldn’t be sure if you were the one. He might have expected someone like me. Or-pah.” He shook his head and murmured, “Olmaz.”
“Impossible?” Palewski echoed.
Yashim’s eyes narrowed. “No. Ruggerio could also have been confused because he didn’t expect anyone from Istanbul.”
Palewski wrinkled his nose. “It’s been a trying day so far, Yashim. You’re getting tangled up in a double negative, or whatever. I mean to say, you can’t not expect someone to come from Istanbul. It may be unlikely, but that’s not the same thing, is it? Why shouldn’t Ruggerio expect someone to come from Istanbul?”
Yashim nodded and pinched his lip.
“Only one reason that I can see,” he said. “Because that someone was already here.”
Palewski folded his arms.
Yashim stared absently at his friend.
“In the painting. The man with the red arms. Did you notice anything else about him? Something odd?”
“Odd? I don’t think so. It’s very small.”
Yashim was on his feet. He dragged the painting from the wall.
“When I first saw it, I had the impression that the killer was a foreigner. Not Venetian, I mean.” Yashim squatted and squinted at the tiny figures. “I think I was right. Look.”
Palewski frowned at the painting. “Not much to him, is there? Except, well…”
“Well?”
“He’s shaven-headed, isn’t he? Except for the sort of topknot.”
“The topknot, exactly. And if I’m right, and he came from Istanbul?”
“In Istanbul,” Palewski said thoughtfully, “I’d take him for a Tatar.”
The Tatars were consummate horsemen from the steppe and for centuries they had been the Ottomans’ closest allies. But the Russians had seized their Crimean homeland. Since then many had fled the rule of the infidel czar, settling instead in the Ottoman Empire across the sea.
“He could be one of those Crimean exiles you see around,” Palewski continued. “Most of them come from the Black Sea coast, nowadays. It could be that-or a loose brushstroke.”
“Our painter is nothing if not precise.”
“But Venice is hardly awash with Tatars, Yashim. He’d stick out a mile.” He looked at his friend. “Unless he wore a hat.”
“Another hat.”
Palewski stood by the fire, his hands tucked behind his back.
“Why didn’t the Tatar see the man who painted him? He must have been in the same apartment.”
Yashim glanced at the sleeping figure on the mattress. “But we didn’t see him, either, did we?”
76
The name: now the time had come. He had come for the last name.
The man shivered in the sunlight.
It was about to end. They would take their little walk again, for the last time.
The assassin a few paces behind him, like a respectful bride.
Or like a hunter, stalking its prey.
Their last walk.
The last name.
The last death.
The man blew out his lips and told himself to think of the payment. They had promised him-enough. Like Venetians they had weighed, assessed, and judged him, as though they knew his price.
The fear of death, and the hope of gold.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and began to walk.
77
Apart from the cauldron, and the copper she had used for polenta the night before, Signora Contarini had an iron frying pan, a milk pan, and two earthenware pots-one was tall, with a narrow mouth, the other a broad dish, as in the fable of the stork and the fox.
Yashim decided to avoid the copper: it was too much the signora’s own, an altar to a household god.
He also decided, partly for the same reason, not to use her knife. The small kitchen knife that Malakian had given him, the damascene blade infernally bright even in the dim light of the signora’s kitchen, felt eager and balanced. It was a link to his world, too, away from this strange city of unbelievers and canals. Yashim had spent several days in Venice, and he had been confused, much of the time, by the mix of what was familiar and what was foreign.
He poured a few handfuls of chickpeas into the tall pot, covered them in water, and pushed the pot to the back of the fireplace.
Palewski seemed to have read his thoughts. “I never told you, Yash, but Venice made me ill for a day or so.”
“Ill?” Should he use the polenta board to chop onions? He thought not.
“Giddy. Dropped me off the map. When I got here I thought-Cracow. Rynek Glowny. Colors, shape of the windows, carved stone doors. Baby Gothic, I don’t know-we had it more grown up. And all these churches. Nuns-even in gondolas!” He laughed. “And then-then it tilted the other way, and everything I looked at felt like Istanbul. Sliding about on the water, and Armenians and Greeks, and sometimes the domes, too, with their lead and their curves. So the next time I saw those nuns-they reminded me of girls in chadors, taking a caique up the Golden Horn.”
Yashim’s eye fell on the table. The signora, he noticed, scrubbed it every day with lye and ashes. The signora might not notice if he used it-carefully-as a chopping board.
“Giddy,” Palewski said again, as if the word pleased him. “I was looking at a beautiful Koran, in the Armenian monastery, and I felt-giddy. Only legible book in the place, as far as I could see. They got it from my old neighbor’s family-the Aspis.”
The man on the pallet turned his head and Yashim saw his eyes were open wide. His skin was drawn tight against the skull, but his eyes were big and dark and unafraid.
Yashim smiled. “Palewski, our friend needs water, and some soup.”
He turned to his baskets. Palewski held a glass to the young man’s lips and heard him drink.
The onion was green; Yashim took off its top and tail, then chopped it into halves. He sliced the halves.
“I don’t know how you can think of food,” Palewski remarked. “After this morning.”
Yashim shrugged. He dropped a lump of butter into the cauldron and pushed it up against the fire. For a few moments he handled the cooking irons, trying to work out which did what, before he tipped the onion into the cauldron and lifted the handle onto a notch in the bar.
He admired the arrangement of irons, adding them to his stock of dreams. Yashim had always dreamed of a yali by the Bosphorus, with water reflected on his ceiling. Better water than here, he thought: Venice, at least in summer, stank.
He glanced across to where Palewski was feeding the man who looked like an emaciated child.
But the man will live, he thought. He knows who killed Eletro.
And I know, too.
He paused, touching the rim of the cauldron.
Not his name. Not his whereabouts. But I know what he is.
He stirred the onion with a spoon and frowned.
What I don’t know yet is: Why?
78
Brunelli waited much of the afternoon for Vosper’s Ottoman servant, but when he did not appear at four o’clock he decided to take another walk.
The beggar must have followed his instructions. Certainly the American had disappeared.
Giving his apartment over to a pasha’s servant.
Brunelli knew one thing the stadtmeister and Vosper did not know: that Signor Brett claimed to have been in Istanbul before he arrived in Venice.
Brunelli walked on, taking turns as random as his thoughts.
He found himself on the Rialto bridge.
There was a link, he knew, between the two events: the pasha and the mysterious American.
But the American seemed to have vanished into thin air. He might have left Venice altogether. And as Signor Brett took his leave, a pasha’s servant made his appearance-in exactly the same place.
Vosper, of course, had never met Brett. He couldn’t identify the man he was looking for, on such an absurd charge, by sight at all.
But even Vosper, surely, couldn’t have believed that Brett was a pasha’s servant?
He turned a corner and reached the Zattere, with its long view of the Giudecca and the decayed wharfs, dilapidated houses, and old churches lining the waterfront.
Vosper, obviously, was capable of believing anything, but why would Brett spin him such an extraordinary story?
Brunelli stopped. He burst out laughing.
If Brett wanted to shake Vosper off his tail, what better than a lie so huge, so wildly inspired, that Vosper would be forced to swallow it whole?
If Brunelli had thought for a moment that Vosper and the stadtmeister were right, and that Brett was a suspect, he would have had no hesitation in joining them in the hunt.
But he had met the man, and he trusted his own intuition perfectly. That dimpled trollop Maria had backed him, too. Brett was crooked, somehow, but he wasn’t a killer.
He had given Vosper the slip. He’d convinced the stadtmeister that the bureaucracy his paymasters were so famous for had finally become unhinged, and the sky was falling on his head.
Brunelli grinned.
He liked Brett, and he’d like to talk to him for a while.
He thought he knew where to find him, too.
79
In the signora’s frying pan Yashim fried slices of aubergine in oil. When they were brown, he took them out and laid them on a plate. He chopped tomatoes roughly and put them into the pan with a pinch of salt and sugar, stirring them from time to time.
He peeled and chopped a few cloves of garlic, which followed the onions into the cauldron. When the onions were soft, he stirred in a couple of pounds of minced lamb. The lamb had been expensive; he had to try several butchers before he found it.
The meat browned. He threw in a big pinch of cinnamon, a bunch of torn basil, and the tomatoes.
In the milk pan he melted butter and flour to make a thick roux. He added milk slowly, keeping the pan at the edge of the fire. When he had the sauce, he sprinkled it with salt and a pinch of grated nutmeg.
He scraped the meat into the flat earthenware, covered it with layers of aubergine, and poured the sauce on top.
With the moussaka ready, he rinsed off the frying pan and oiled it. When it was very hot he crushed into it a few dried peppers between the palms of his hands and cooked them until the flakes were almost black. He spooned the homemade kirmizi biber into a cup of flour.
“The Armenian monastery.”
He spoke so quietly that Palewski, chasing flies on the windowpane with a handkerchief, couldn’t be sure he’d heard properly.
“The monastery?”
“You said you were giddy. You were in the library, looking at a Koran.”
“That’s right. Felt peculiar.”
“An old Koran?”
“No, no. Quite recent-very lovely, too.”
“From the Aspi family, you said? Did
you see who made it?”
“I just wanted to go home and sleep, Yashim.”
“I’d like to see it,” Yashim said.
“Now?”
“I think that would be best,” Yashim agreed. “Wrap up. It could be cold on the water.”
80
It took them almost an hour to reach the island. The channel was marked with stakes, gaunt as gibbets in the dusk. The water was still and oily.
Palewski pulled the bell rope and they heard it jangle in the porter’s lodge. After a few minutes a little window was thrust back and a face appeared.
“Who are you? It’s late.”
The monk spoke in Italian; Yashim answered in Armenian. “I apologize, Father. Signor Brett visited the monastery a few days ago, but he was unable to speak to Father Aristo.”
“Father Aristo,” the monk echoed. “He will be in the scriptorium.”
He undid the bolts and let them in. When he had locked the door again he put his hands in his sleeves. “Please, follow me.”
They crossed a courtyard and entered a wide passage. The sconces had just been lit. The monk opened a door softly, without knocking, and Yashim inhaled a rich and pleasantly familiar smell of old books, ink, and wood. The scriptorium was lined with shelves, lost in the gloom; a candle guttered on the broad oak table that ran down the middle of the room.
The table was bare, except where it erupted into a confusion of papers and books close to the candle, reminding Yashim of the Polish ambassador’s study in Istanbul. Father Aristo’s conical black hat stood on a pile of dictionaries, and Father Aristo’s bald head lay on the papers. He appeared to be asleep.
The monk smiled. “Father Aristo works so hard,” he whispered. Then, a little louder: “Father. Father Aristo.”
“We came to see the Koran, especially,” Yashim said quietly. “Perhaps we should let Father Aristo sleep?”
The monk shook his head. “He would be disappointed.”
He touched the old monk’s arm.
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