Father Aristo raised his head and looked around, blinking. His beard was magnificent and white.
“Some visitors, Father.”
Father Aristo groped on the table for his spectacles and put them on carefully, tucking the arms behind his huge ears.
“I was having a nap.” He had a very deep voice and a sweet smile.
Still in Armenian, Yashim introduced them both. “We wished to look at the Koran, Father.”
“Ah yes, the Koran. By all means. It is very splendid. Would you like some tea?”
While the other monk went to fetch the tea, Father Aristo spread the papers in front of him.
“This is our dictionary,” he explained, looking fondly at the books around him, as if their presence were a pleasant surprise. “Between English and Armenian. I have reached the fourteenth letter of our alphabet.”
That left him with twenty-four to go, Yashim thought.
The monk returned with a tray and three glasses of sweet tea.
“It is a holy task, because the Armenian script is a holy script,” Father Aristo said. “It has come to us unchanged, down the centuries. The first letter is A, for Astvats: God. The last is K, for Kristos. Mashtots received these letters in a dream, after years of study. It was a very good dream, my friends. These letters,” he added, slowly, “have kept us together for fourteen hundred and thirty-five years.”
He rose to his feet, carefully lifting the chair from the floor.
“But you have come to see the Koran. I will show it to you.”
He disappeared into the gloom. He seemed to know his way around by touch, for in a few moments he returned with a large leather-bound book, which he placed on the table.
“The Muslims, too, respect their script as holy,” he said. He looked at Yashim. “Is it not so?”
Yashim bowed. He lifted the cover and saw that this was, indeed, a very fine Koran, of a quality that would suit a palace or a great mosque.
Inside the cover was a short inscription in Latin.
Palewski leaned over. “It says that Alvise d’Aspi presented this Koran to his friends at the Armenian Monastery of San Lazzaro in the year-”
He frowned. The roman numerals MCCLXIV made no sense. “Twelve sixty-four?”
Father Aristo smiled and patted his arm. “Of course. Count d’Aspi was a good friend to us. He used the Armenian calendar, which begins in A.D. 552 in your calendar.” He nodded. “There is a great deal to explain about the Armenian calendar, but you must come earlier in the day, no?” His eyes twinkled behind
his spectacles. “You would say, 1816.”
Yashim turned the pages. Each sura was brilliantly illuminated, according to a tradition that went back to the twelfth century, with stylized foliage crammed with animals and birds. There was no calligrapher’s signature; Yashim did not expect one.
The work itself was a signature; it bore the stamp of the man who had single-handedly worked to make this beautiful book. It must have taken months, if not years. The calligrapher was Metin Yamaluk.
The endpapers were very beautiful and carefully produced. Yashim paused over them, frowning. They showed a square, and between the corners and the midway point on each line of the square ran an endless knot, forming an eight-pointed star.
Palewski pointed to the diagram. “Seen that one before. It’s on the floor of the contessa’s salon, I think.”
“Is it?” Yashim murmured. He had seen it, too, weeks before in Yamaluk’s studio in Uskudar.
The Sand-Reckoner’s diagram.
Yamaluk’s Koran had been commissioned by Count d’Aspi. And Yamaluk himself had met the new sultan, to present him with an address.
“Printing!” Father Aristo sighed and gestured to the shelves. “I wonder, gentlemen, where Dante would have put the printers? Benefactors-or criminals?” He shook his head. “I hardly know.”
“I knew the man who made this Koran,” Yashim said.
They stood together in the candlelight, gazing down at the illuminated pages.
“Thank you, Father Aristo,” Yashim said. “You’ve shown me exactly what I needed to see.”
The old man nodded and rubbed his glasses with a fold of his soutane.
They left in the dark, with the old monk’s blessing.
The gondola was waiting at the gate. Palewski and Yashim climbed into the little cabin, where Yashim bent forward with a look of triumph.
“I’d like to meet your friend, the Contessa d’Aspi d’Istria,” he said.
Palewski shrugged. “Maybe.” He paused. “I tried to see her, too, twice. Three times. She wasn’t receiving visitors. Not after Barbieri was killed.”
Yashim was silent for a while. The water gurgled softly against the hull of the gondola.
“I think I know where we might find the painting, Palewski,” Yashim said. “If we’re not too late.”
81
Yashim sliced three onions, fine; they were red and crisp and he spread the rings onto a large white plate.
He took a big lamb’s liver and prepared it carefully, removing the arteries and the tough membrane. He sliced it into strips and tossed it in the flour and kirmizi biber.
In the frying pan he sauteed garlic and cumin seeds. The oil was hot; before the garlic could catch he dropped in the sliced liver and turned it quickly with a wooden spoon. The meat tightened and browned; he spooned the slices out and laid them on the onion rings. He chopped some dill and parsley and sprinkled them over the dish, and then, hungry, he took a piece of liver with an onion ring and popped them into his mouth.
Venetians would have cooked the onion until it was very soft. Delicious, in its way, and sweet, but lacking the boldness of the Ottoman original, Yashim thought, as the textures and flavors burst in his mouth. His arnavut cigeri looked better, too.
A shame that he had found no yogurt. He sliced a lemon and laid the wedges around the plate.
He drained the chickpeas. He would cook them with onion, rice, and the remainder of the signora’s delicious stock.
He made a marinade with the nigella seeds he had found at the e picier. They had been labeled black cumin, but Yashim knew better. He mixed them with lemon juice, crushed garlic, salt, pepper, and oregano. Into a bowl, weeping, he grated two onions. He mixed the pulp with a spoonful of salt.
He cleaned his knife and used it to slice three swordfish steaks into chunks, which he turned into the marinade. He took out a stack of vine leaves he had stripped, without much guilt, from a tendril blown over a high garden wall on his way home that morning. He washed them, softened them in the chickpea water in bunches of two or three, and dropped them into a bowl of cold water.
He squeezed the onion pulp between his hands and trickled the juice over the fish.
The signora used a long flat knife with a rounded end to smooth her polenta. Wondering if it were sacrilege he decided to use it as a skewer for the fish.
When he had wrapped each piece of fish in its vine-leaf coat, he found that the polenta knife was too blunt-ended to get through the leaves. Patiently he stuck each packet with Malakian’s little knife, widened the hole, and slipped it onto the broad blade.
He drizzled what was left of the marinade over the fish and set the skewer over the embers of the fire.
He prepared the rice. When it was covered with a cloth, and steaming gently, he went outside to the well and carefully washed his hands, his face, his ears, and nose.
“When you are ready, we can eat,” he announced.
82
Commissario Brunelli liked to think he’d seen everything in Venice, but when Maria brought him into her mother’s kitchen he changed his mind.
“My name, signora, is Brunelli. Vittorio Brunelli.” He took a deep sniff, and his chest rose. “I hope I am not disturbing you.”
The candlelight, at first, made the hairs prickle at the nape of his neck. He felt it all-the light, the smells, the shadows on the faces-long before he realized what it was.
It was a feast among
the poor.
He saw the turban. He saw Palewski’s lean, pale face. He saw Maria, doubtful, with her jet-black hair. He saw children, shaved headed, staring at him with their big eyes, and their father, smiling, and the shadows and the black beams and the embers of the dying fire.
He advanced, unsteadily, into the room.
“Buon appetito,” he said with a bow, and stumbled into a pallet on which he was scarcely surprised to see the figure of the dying Christ.
“Please, Signor Brunelli,” the signora said magisterially. “Join us.”
Brunelli found himself squashed onto the end of a bench with a small child on one side and Yashim on the other, and knife, fork, plate, and red wine in front of him.
The only difference between this and other feasts he could imagine was that no one seemed actually to be eating.
His nostrils twitched, and his gaze returned to the table. It was covered with a clean cloth, and on it stood several plates. He saw a mound of rice, a dish of something with raw onion, a heap of curious green packages about the size of eggs, and an earthenware dish containing something in a white sauce.
Around the table he noticed a lot of very suspicious faces.
The Brunelli name was not inscribed in the Golden Book, which had listed the aristocratic families entitled to enjoy the burdens and the rewards of government. But the blood of Venice flowed in Brunelli’s veins nonetheless, the blood of men who had eaten raw horsemeat with the riders of the Crimea, nibbled thousand-year-old eggs with the Great Khan in Cathay and spice-laden stews with the Bedouin of the Persian gulf-not to mention boiled cabbage in the halls of the Polish kings.
Brunelli stretched out his hands, inspired, and delivered a grace. It was a grace he had heard said in the Ghetto, many times.
“Blessed are you, our God, Lord of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.”
Palewski smiled and helped the signora to the pilaff.
Brunelli picked up the vine leaves and offered them to his neighbor. Yashim took one, Brunelli another. They passed the dish along. A small child helped himself to some pilaff. Maria’s father took a spoonful of liver and onions, while Maria picked up a vine-leaf parcel and bit into it. She gave a little cry of appreciation.
“It’s fish! Mamma, try one!”
In a matter of moments everyone was eating and talking all at once.
Brunelli leaned across the table.
“Signor Brett,” he began.
Signor Brett cut him off.
“I haven’t been straight with you, Commissario, I’m afraid. Not from the start. For which I’m sorry. This is Yashim.”
“Good,” the big man said. “I don’t like straight.” He took a sip of wine. “What are you both doing, exactly?”
Palewski looked over at Yashim. “What are we doing, anyway?”
“Looking for justice,” Yashim replied. “Justice, and a Bellini.”
Brunelli raised a single eyebrow.
“Both valuable, signore. Both rare.”
And Yashim smiled and told him everything they knew.
83
Much later, when Brunelli had gone home and the Contarini family had gone to bed, still drowsily exclaiming their surprise: Raw onion! Fish in a coat! Lasagna without pasta! — Yashim and Palewski drew closer to the fire.
“Tell me more about the contessa,” Yashim suggested.
Palewski shrugged. “I haven’t much to tell. Except that she’s very beautiful, she fights foil, and some ancestor of hers was with Morosini in the Peloponnese. She’s a surprise, Yashim. Something dangerous about her, maybe. She won’t marry either, I don’t know why.”
He repeated the details of the family tragedy that the old lady at the Ca’ d’Istria had given him.
“Her father was the last Venetian bailo in Istanbul. Hence the Koran. And she was born there, as it happens.”
Yashim raised an eyebrow. “And she won’t see you, you say?”
Palewski shook his head. “I’m not even sure she’s there. The last time I tried no one even came to the door.”
Yashim prodded the embers with a stick.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said slowly. “Venice is a theater, you say. Perhaps the time has come to take a more theatrical approach.”
“What do you mean?”
“Once, the doge married the sea.”
“Napoleon burned the bucintoro,” Palewski pointed out.
“Quite so. I wasn’t imagining a return of the doge. But I’ve been talking to Signor Contarini. The bargee.”
Palewski looked surprised. “What does Signor Contarini have to do with it?”
“Everything. Venice has been starved of entertainment for far too long. What I imagine,” said Yashim, sketching his plan in the smoke from the signora’s fire, “is a visit. A visit,” he added, yawning, “from a lost world.”
Palewski rubbed his hands across his face and stretched his feet to the fire. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll see.”
84
Yashim was gone again the next morning when Palewski and Maria sat down to breakfast. Maria, too, had errands to perform, so Palewski spent the morning in the yard with the unemployed men, trying to penetrate their dialect and taking the occasional whiff of a very cheap cigar. An old man without teeth had been at the battle of Borodino. They shared their disappointments and capped each other’s reminiscences for the entertainment of the younger men, until the signora called him in for lunch.
Yashim returned a few minutes later and sat down to a thick lentil soup with evident enjoyment.
After lunch, Yashim spoke quietly to Maria and her mother; Palewski could not quite hear what they said, but the old lady looked thoroughly dubious. Finally she burst out laughing and flipped her apron over her head to hide her bad teeth. Palewski watched Yashim give the signora some money.
Yashim came out into the yard. Palewski threw him an inquiring look.
“The signora,” Yashim explained, “has agreed to spend the afternoon baking. Along with a dozen of her friends.”
“Buns?”
“Buns are traditional in Istanbul. I imagine they’ll be equally appreciated in Venice.”
“Yashim, I’m completely confused.”
“In which case,” Yashim replied, smiling, “my plan is more likely to succeed.”
85
It was a Canaletto morning in Venice. The sun shone, the sky was blue, and a wind that could raise a flag was blowing in from the lagoon as a barge carrying an Austrian military band began its slow ascent of the Grand Canal. At its stern the imperial white and gold of the Habsburg empire; at its prow a small green ensign with a silver crescent moon.
A flotilla of gondolas moved in its wake, three abreast. Beneath the cover of their black felze they were almost all empty. They represented absent dignitaries of the Habsburg empire.
The Venetians were out in force. Since dawn they had been spreading from the slums of Dorsoduro, moving through the alleyways on foot, revealing the news to bakers stoking their ovens, vegetable sellers setting up their displays, lamplighters on their morning rounds. Mothers coming in for bread decided to keep their children out of school; men on their way to work stopped and discussed the business with their friends at the cafe door.
From Dorsoduro the news washed over San Polo and Santa Croce; by morning it had crossed the Rialto bridge into San Marco and Castello. Venice buzzed with anticipation and curiosity. At ten o’clock the balconies were full. Shutters unopened for twenty years were creaking back, and for a nominal fee people were allowed into mothballed palazzis and untenanted apartments. Rugs and hangings dangled from windows. Ladies whose last procession on the Grand Canal had been Josephine’s, in 1799, smiled at the memories it evoked. Young men drawn to the windows by the possibility of sighting, all at once, the hidden beauties of the Grand Canal, twirled their whiskers and leaned out, while girls of barely marriageable age raced to the balconies to be seen.
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br /> Behind the flotilla of gondolas came a barge, low in the water and heaped with flowers whose colors, massed in florets of red and gold, recalled the colors of the Venetian flag. A cheer went up from the crowd jostling for position on the first pontoon.
Behind it, the Ottoman barge hove into view, tricked out with hoops of greenery. Between the hoops acrobats and fire-eaters juggled with sugar buns, scorched them, then tossed them to the delighted crowds.
In an open gondola of imperial carmine, gracefully acknowledging the hoots and clamor of the crowds, followed the Ottoman pasha himself, in a swathe of red silk and under an enormous and dazzling turban.
The crowd threw their hats in the air and roared.
The procession carried on up the canal. Shortly before eleven it passed beneath the Rialto bridge, where a crowd of onlookers and market vendors laughed and blew kisses as the Venetian colors passed below.
For forty years Venetians had been fed a diet of poverty and degradation. Sullen to the last, they had watched the arrival of French troops, or Austrian generals, while the spirit of Carnevale withered. But this cavalcade was ballooning into a full-blown regatta. A cheerful retinue of skiffs and hired gondolas, passenger wherries, and rowboats milled around the pasha’s slender gondola; fishermen were selling space in their heavy barche; children were running up the alleys near the canal, popping out at each pontoon. The people afloat waved to the people on land.
In years to come, old pickpockets and cutpurses would shake their heads when they recalled that morning.
The cavalcade came to a stop when it reached the Ca’ d’Aspi. Only the men who rowed the leading barge, which carried the military band, pressed on, and soon the brassy strains of oom-pah-pah faded away.
Nobody moved. The cheering stopped. It was said that you could hear the water slap against the foundations of the palazzo.
On the piano nobile one solitary window was open, where the Contessa d’Aspi d’Istria stood leaning on her hands, pale and impassive. Now and then the breeze caught a strand of her fair hair and played with it, lifting it into the air, brushing it across her face, but she made no move to push it back.
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