The Bellini card yte-3

by Jason Goodwin

  He poured the water over his head.

  “In Venice, it’s Carnevale. Parties, drinking, gambling. Everyone is in disguise. The Duke of Naxos arrives. The name is cleverly chosen. It sounds faintly familiar to the Venetians-remember? But it means so little, except to the man himself. Perhaps he’s thinking of Joseph Nasi, the last man to genuinely hold the title. An influential adviser to Suleyman, in his old age, and then to Selim, his son. No friend to Venice, either.”

  “Go on.”

  “The Contessa d’Aspi d’Istria draws her own conclusions. The imperious young visitor writes her a letter. Carla is a snob-she imagines that the Duke of Naxos is Abdulmecid. She’s quite charmed. So, apparently, is his cicerone.

  “Later on, when someone discreetly offers the Bellini portrait to the sultan through the calligrapher Metin Yamaluk, this envoy suspects it is her. He’s grander now. A pasha. He has farther to fall, so he needs someone he can trust. Someone in the family. He sends a Tatar to Yamaluk, to make sure, but the calligrapher is an old man with a weak heart, and the Tatar kills him. Maybe that was an accident-I think it was.”

  “You only think so? Why so uncertain now, Yashim lala?”

  “There’s no evidence either way. But I think it was an accident because it was so ill omened. For you.”

  “For me?”

  Yashim sighed. “You were the Duke of Naxos, Resid.”

  “And you think the omens were proved?” Resid gave a tight little laugh. “It’s not over yet, Yashim lala. Go on.”

  Yashim shrugged. “Why bother? You know as well as I do that you were afraid. You were afraid that if the contessa started to negotiate with the sultan, the truth would come out. So you decided to kill her, and everyone else associated with that game of cards.”

  Resid gave a strange smile. “So, the contessa is dead. Thank you for that, Yashim.”

  Yashim cocked his head to one side. “No, Resid. She didn’t die, because I stopped the killer.”

  “I see.” Resid blinked. “The indefatigable Yashim.”

  “No, no. I’m very tired, Resid.”

  Resid leaned forward. He brought his sweating face to within a few inches of Yashim’s.

  “It’s a new regime, Yashim lala,” he hissed. “New men. The sultan’s young, like me-but I have experience he needs. A new regime. And, Yashim, just between ourselves, I control it.”

  Yashim said nothing.

  “Fetch me the letter,” Resid burst out. “Fetch it and save your skin. Or go away and die, if you prefer.” He leaned back against the marble wall. “Barbieri died. So did Eletro, and Boschini. Maybe the contessa’s next, after all. And do you know? Nobody cares.”

  Yashim stood up. “You’re right, of course. It’s only Pappendorf who’ll be surprised. I suppose the Austrian ambassador thought you were delivering him the sultan.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ruggerio was an informer. He told the Austrians that the Duke of Naxos was Abdulmecid, so Pappendorf came to you, didn’t he? With a threat to expose the sultan-and an offer of cooperation. He expected you to manage it, I suppose. Blackmail at a high level. You went along with it, of course, to avoid suspicion falling on you. You and the Austrians, together, could eradicate the evidence against the Duke of Naxos. No one would ever know he’d been to Venice at all. The Austrians would help by giving your assassin a free hand, but in return they expected to own the sultan. How surprised they’ll be to discover that all they own is you.”

  “I control affairs,” Resid said grimly.

  “For how long, Resid?” Yashim asked. “Viziers come and go, don’t they? Sometimes they go gracefully, with blessings, to retirement and old age. But you’re too young to retire safely. You’d live too long and know too much.”

  “I control affairs.” His voice shook.

  “The Austrians might not think so, Resid. They bought a sultan. You have delivered-who? A man who bungles a simple killing even when everyone’s straining to look the other way.”

  Yashim got to his knees. His face was set. “The palace is a little world,” he said. “You wouldn’t be the first vizier to forget that the people, too, have a voice. I saw them, Resid, when they gathered around the great tree. It wouldn’t take much, I think, when the people learn that you sold your sultan’s name to protect your own.”

  Resid was staring at him, his mouth open.

  “The trouble with advisers is that they get things wrong. Even Joseph Nasi, I recall, got it wrong from time to time. The good thing about them is that they’re dispensable.

  “You, Resid, promised everyone your loyalty and your good faith. The people, with your pieties. The sultan, with loyalty. The Austrians, with a leash on the sultan. There’s a diagram we both know, where the background changes as you move. But com’era, dov’era: you’ve disappointed even me.”

  A memory flashed into Yashim’s mind, something Carla had said. “When it’s all gone, Resid, honor is all we have left.”

  He stood up and walked out without looking back.

  118

  Yashim returned to his apartment. Elvan had brought the dishes back from the baker’s.

  He peeled and chopped the cucumbers. He sprinkled them with salt, crushed two cloves of garlic, chopped them fine, and put them in a bowl with some yogurt. After a while he squeezed the water from the cucumbers and mixed them into the yogurt.

  Then he washed his hands and sat silently on his divan, looking out across the rooftops of Istanbul.

  119

  “I brought raki,” Palewski said, taking the bottle from his bag. “I wanted to feel properly home.”

  Yashim fetched two painted glasses and a jug of water. He set some olives on the table. He put some of the artichokes on a dish, with the aubergines, sliced. He cut the bread and left it on the board, which he put on the table with the yogurt.

  Palewski poured an inch of raki into each glass and turned it milky with the water.

  He handed one to Yashim. “Prosit! ”

  When they had drunk, he sat tossing an olive in his hand and looking expectantly at Yashim.

  Yashim shook his head. “How’s Marta?”

  “I’ll tell you about Marta later,” Palewski said. “I want to know if you’ve heard anything from Resid.”

  Yashim lifted an artichoke to his mouth. It tasted very good.

  “Yashim.”

  “I saw him this afternoon, at the hammam.”

  “So he doesn’t know about Venice, then?”

  “He knew when I told him.”

  Palewski stared. “That’s a death warrant. For you and the contessa, too. Who’s to say he wasn’t just doing his duty, protecting the sultan’s honor?”

  Yashim took a sip of raki. “Me,” he said. “And he knew it, too.”

  Palewski frowned. “You against him?”

  Yashim wiped his hands on a napkin and laid it on the table. “Remember the Duke of Naxos? Carla said that the title would have reverted to the sultan on Joseph Nasi’s death.”

  “Which is why Abdulmecid used it.”

  “No, Palewski. Abdulmecid wasn’t the sultan then. He was only the crown prince.”

  “Hairsplitting, Yashim.”

  “Maybe. But fakery is endemic in Venice,” Yashim said. “How do we know that the Duke of Naxos who came to Venice in Carnivale really was the sultan?”

  Palewski gave an impatient shrug. “Carla recognized him, Yashim. And then-the Tatar. The murders. Covering up a youthful indiscretion.”

  “An indiscretion, yes,” Yashim echoed. “It was committed by a man nobody really knew. He wore a mask and called himself the Duke of Naxos. It hurt me to think that the sultan could have gone drinking and gambling in Venice, Palewski.” He bit his lip. “There’s something else. I saw the valide today. Abdulmecid has set her up in the Baghdad Kiosk.”

  “Good for him.”

  Yashim nodded. “She mentioned how innocent he was of life, too. But that’s not it. Good for him, you say? Yes. Abdulmecid might
kick over the traces once in his life, but he was brought up well. An Ottoman gentleman, however young, does not pay visits in the character of an enemy. And Nasi was an implacable enemy of Venice.”

  Palewski was still. “You’re right, Yashim. I hadn’t thought of that. Whatever sultans have been in their time, they have always had, what? Form. Even Mahmut, poor fellow. He was a great bear, but you couldn’t fault his manners.”

  He speared an artichoke. “But if the sultan wasn’t masquerading as the Duke of Naxos, who was?”

  “Resid Pasha.”

  Palewski choked, so Yashim got up to fetch him another glass of water.

  “That, of course, changes everything,” Palewski spluttered.

  “Everything? No. The pattern doesn’t change. Carla thought she recognized the duke. And Ruggerio was watching-mistakenly-the professional guide, whose gift was to assess the people he met. I think something in the way Carla behaved alerted him, too.”

  Palewski clouded his glass with water. “And he informed on them-to the Austrians.”

  “The same pattern,” Yashim said. “I don’t know when Resid realized the mistake. He didn’t correct it. That was his conceit.”

  “And the Duke of Naxos was taken to be the sultan.”

  “Yes. Resid allowed people to believe the sultan had been to Venice.”

  Yashim ate a slice of aubergine.

  “Only when the sultan came to the throne did Carla get Metin Yamaluk to hint to the sultan about the painting. She wanted to be discreet, for her sake and his.”

  “Giving him the opportunity to delicately ignore her, if he liked,” Palewski said.

  Yashim spread his hands. “Instead, the sultan was intrigued. He had nothing to hide. He knew nothing about the contessa. He’d never been to Venice. He simply wanted to follow up on the hint. He wanted the painting.”

  “And when he sent for you,” Palewski reasoned, “Resid had to make a move.”

  “He moved fast. He stood me down.”

  Palewski sucked in his cheeks. “He decided to trade on what the Austrians already believed, Yashim. And sent the Tatar to eliminate all witnesses. One of his people. Resid’s mother is a Tatar, too.”

  Yashim nodded. “He was also meant to recover the incriminating love letters Resid had sent Carla.”

  “Love letters? I thought we were dealing with gambling debts. A promissory note.”

  “So did I, until Carla told me the truth. Or the half-truth. At the time we both believed the letters had been written by the sultan.”

  “But-but they’re gone, aren’t they? With the painting?”

  Yashim looked his friend in the eye. “Resid doesn’t know that. He thinks I have them.”

  Palewski reached for the raki and poured them both another drink. “What will he do now?”

  Yashim shook his head slowly. “I see no way out. We can only wait.”

  Palewski blew out his cheeks.

  “I’m sorry, Yash. Making you think of food at a time like this. I shouldn’t have come.”

  He began to rub his wrists, unconsciously.

  “We have to eat,” Yashim said. “How’s Marta, then?”

  Palewski regarded the ceiling thoughtfully.

  “I have some rather strange news, as it happens.”

  “She’s getting married?”

  “Married?” Palewski looked astonished. “Good God, Yashim. You are morbid. No, thank heavens, she’s not getting married. She’s back in the house.” He shook his head. “And she’s cleared up everything. Everything. She rearranged my books.”

  “I saw that,” Yashim confessed. “I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “No, well, I admit I was pretty aggrieved. I’d made a pile of books on the table in the hall. Folios, some of them-a church history by Foulbert. An interesting seventeenth-century survey of the Greek islands by a Dutchman, writing in Latin, not accurate but-well, anyway, that’s not important. Thing is, I’d been dropping books onto this table for weeks on my way in and out of the garden-you remember coming into the garden, when all this began? — and it’s a bit dim down there.”

  “A bit dim. So?”

  “When Marta started to shift the stack she found a letter stuck between two books. It must have been left on the table, and I didn’t see it.”

  “A letter?”

  “Propped on the mantelpiece when I got home. Arms on the fold in green ink, raised.”

  “Palace?”

  “Invitation, Yashim. He had been there all the time. An invitation to the sultan’s inaugural ball.” Palewski buried his face in his glass. “Half a mind to cut it, anyway,” he mumbled.

  Yashim looked at him, unsmiling.

  “Signor Brett would go,” he said. “Signor Brett has the proper garb.”

  Palewski shrugged. “You know I hate that kind of thing.”

  “Honor of the Poles,” Yashim said.

  “Dishonor, more like. Bad champagne.”

  “The Austrian ambassador will have spoken to Karolyi by then.”

  “So?”

  “Pappendorf’s face,” Yashim said.

  They looked at each other over the rim of their glasses.

  “Pappendorf’s face!” Palewski repeated happily. “Prosit! ”

  120

  The water slapped lazily at the green weed that fringed the pilings of the bridge.

  There was no tide, only the perpetual current from the north, slipping under the movement of warm water from the sea, which set up whorls and currents that the boatmen knew.

  Caught between these ceaseless, shifting eddies and countercurrents, the pasha who died young described a forgotten pattern. He moved like a dervish, his limbs open and relaxed. Beneath Byzantine domes, dilapidated palaces, and tethered boats, the pasha’s corpse twirled in the moonlight, unseen, his arms flung wide in a gesture of vacant resignation.

  So he turned, around and around, as the moon sank behind the towers and domes.

  When dawn broke, the first workmen returned to the bridge. The pasha’s body had scarcely moved from the place where he went in, yards away from the deep waters of the Bosphorus on which, in her days of glory, the city had made her fortune.

  Overhead, the workmen stared down into the clear water.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Four decades after the events described in this book, Sir Henry Layard, distinguished explorer, archaeologist, and Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul, was dismissed from his office following a change of government in London.

  The incoming government proposed taking a tough line with Turkey-in-Europe. Sir Henry Layard was considered to be too chummy with the Orientals.

  In vexation, rather than returning to his ancestral halls (tricked out, needless to say, in Canalettos, not to mention the ruins and friezes of ancient Tyre), Sir Henry and his young wife moved to Venice, where they bought a palazzo, the Ca’ Cappello, not far, in my mind at least, from the Ca’ d’Aspi.

  One afternoon in 1865, just as he was stepping into his gondola to return home, Sir Henry was approached by an elderly and evidently impoverished man who asked the milord to buy an old painting for five pounds.

  Scarcely glancing at the painting, and determined not to be late, Sir Henry refused. He stepped into the gondola and was carried away.

  On arriving home, he found the painting propped against his door.

  He hung it in a special room, all on its own.

  Lady Layard survived her husband by twenty-three years. She remained in Venice, very much upon her dignity as Sir Henry’s widow but fond of social life nonetheless. Younger residents like Henry James knew the Palazzo Layard as the Refrigerator.

  In her will she left the painting of Mehmet II, by Bellini, to the National Gallery in London.

  Details about the damage to the painting, probably inflicted when it was lifted from board to canvas, and about the heavy restoration work carried out in the nineteenth century, can be obtained from the gallery. Both were considered so
extensive that curators have cautiously labeled the painting attributed to, rather than by, Gentile Bellini.

  It continues to travel the world; it was recently in Venice, and before that, at the turn of the century, it drew enormous crowds when it was exhibited in Istanbul.

  Oddly enough, as I was writing this book, Sotheby’s in London sold a smaller likeness of Mehmet II-much the same size as the picture Palewski saw at the Palazzo d’Istria-for almost half a million pounds.

  It was, supposedly, a later copy of the Bellini portrait.

  As for the album of his father’s drawings that Gentile Bellini presented to Sultan Mehmet in 1480, there were, in fact, two. One on paper, bought from a market in Smyrna in 1823, is in the British Museum; the other, finer, album on parchment is in the Louvre.

  It was discovered in the attic of a house in Guyenne, France, in 1886.

  The Fondaco dei Turchi remained a ruin of sorts until 1860, when it was bought by the municipality and restored to its present condition. Following the restorers’ motto, com’era, dov’era, every effort was made to remodel the building as a Byzantine palace of the twelfth century. Consequently, all traces of its former grandeur, as well as its decay, were efficiently erased. Clad in gray marble sheeting, and remodeled within, it is now perhaps the ugliest building on the Grand Canal.

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