The Bellini Card (13 page)

T
HE
Croat was getting worse: his moods, his withdrawals, were becoming more frequent. Even his products were less reliable. In a year or two, Popi considered, he might be useless to him.

He saw it finally: the shadowy figure of a man in a top hat standing at a window overlooking the Grand Canal.

Drawn obviously from life—what of it the Croat ever saw. Nobody had worn top hats in Canaletto’s day.

Popi brought his index finger up slowly so the Croat could see and pointed at the offending image.

“Change the hat,” he said. He did not think that after all this time he would need to say, or do, any more.

The Croat did not even glance at the picture. He simply stared at Popi with an expression of sullen disappointment.

“Change the hat,” Popi said slowly. “Then we varnish the pictures. And then, my friend, two bottles.” He held up two fingers.

The Croat looked at the fingers, then for the first time at the picture. It was agreed.

Popi’s jaw worked. Two bottles—if he kept his side of the bargain the Croat would be incapacitated for a week. But at least Popi would have something to sell the American. He couldn’t afford to wait.

“Take this one through to the studio,” Popi said.

The Croat lifted the painting down and carried it into the back room, where Popi kept his paints and varnishes.

Popi sat down at his desk and began to compose a letter to S. Brett, connoisseur. A meeting really ought to be arranged, perhaps—if Signor Brett thought it convenient—sometime next week.

Next week, when the varnish would have hardened on his Canalettos.

P
ALEWSKI
went home to change his shirt and spent a few minutes in front of the mirror with his elbows out and his hands by his chest, flexing his torso from side to side.

“Psha!” he exclaimed aloud. “You’re an idiot, Mr. Brett!”

There was a note on the table below the mirror. It was from Ruggerio, regretting that he was unable to accompany Signor Brett that day. He suggested various places he might like to visit on his own—none of them, Palewski noted with amusement, likely to involve much outlay of cash—and the possibility that they might visit the Murano glassworks together the following day.

“The Murano glassworks! Twenty percent commission and a decent lunch!”

But why should he be led everywhere by Ruggerio? Why shouldn’t he go on his own? A leisurely ride across the lagoon was no less than he deserved after his energetic bout with the Contessa d’Aspi d’Istria.

But as the gondola moved out onto the calm blue waters of the lagoon and Palewski turned his head for a better view of the city, he remembered something about an Armenian monastery and changed his mind. The gondolier looked doubtful. Murano had been decided on, and he was looking forward to visiting a café on the island while his padrone
toured the manufactories. When Palewski, mistaking the source of his indecision, promised to pay him ten lire more, he agreed to forgo the pleasures of Murano society and take his fare to San Lazzaro.

The truth was that Palewski, without quite realizing it, was suffering from homesickness. Many an evening he had spent with his friend Yashim, drinking bison-grass vodka and lamenting his lost homeland, ripped apart by the greed and brutality of its enemies. Yet Palewski’s desire for Poland, while genuine and deep, had an air of daydream about it. It was not visceral, as his feeling for Istanbul was turning out to be.

In another city—Paris, say, or even New York—the feeling might have been allayed by the excitement of novelty, but in Venice he was constantly running up against reminders of the city he called home. Venice, in the European mind, was a city half Oriental already, and certainly it made Palewski feel giddy, as though he were looking at a familiar scene down the wrong end of a telescope. Pacing the narrow alleys in Ruggerio’s wake, he would be struck by some grace note of Istanbul—in the effort of a cat, for instance, to catch a bat at dusk, or by a porphyry column no doubt looted from the same classical ruin that Constantine had looted for his city centuries before. Sometimes it occurred to him in the shape and dimness of a doorway, or it might be the sound of the Orthodox monks chanting in San Giorgio dei Greci. It was even a puzzle to decide whether Venice or Istanbul had more shoeshine boys, all ragged, all alike, squatting on the pavement behind their little wooden boxes.

In the Campo dei Mori he had seen a relief of a camel led by a man in a turban and almost burst into tears, without knowing why, and he had stared forlornly at the busted shell of the Fondaco dei Turchi, on the Grand Canal, for almost an hour, savoring its decline and its crumbling Byzantine fenestration. With its blocked-up arcades and bricked-in windows, the old palazzo of the Ottoman merchants looked like the survivor of some drawn-out siege.

To make matters worse, he inhabited the identity of a stranger, and an American to boot. He missed his embassy. Half overgrown with creepers, and in want of a new roof, it was still a comfortable sort of place for a man who enjoyed his own company and that of his books. He had now read Vasari three times and was beginning to feel a kind of mental restriction
from prolonged acquaintance with the author, as if he had eaten nothing but potatoes for a week. He missed his friends. Here in Venice he was hounded in the most polite and remorseless way by waiters and gondoliers and landladies demanding—well, money, certainly, but he had enough of that. What exhausted him were their demands for a decision. At home he had only to think of tea, or a brandy after dinner, and it was there, in his hand.

Marta would fetch it for him, before he had even asked for it sometimes.

He took off his top hat and let the breeze ruffle his hair.

Venice from the lagoon was too flat to look like Istanbul, though the shoulder of Santa Maria della Salute, its great white dome, recalled the domes of Istanbul, and the rooftops looked crowded and orange like the roofs of the houses that crowded the shores of the Golden Horn.

He shaded his eyes and gazed ahead to a spire and a low red wall topped with greenery rising almost miraculously from the lagoon. The gondola advanced with a thudding swiftness while Palewski gazed almost blindly on the rosy apparition, lost in thought.

An hour later he wondered why he had come at all. The brightness of the lagoon had given him a headache. Now he strained his eyes to see the treasures that the gentle Armenian priest was lovingly laying out for his inspection in the dim scriptorium. At first, the thousands of ancient volumes in their shelves had heartened him, but, after all, they were all written in Armenian, except for a rather beautiful Koran. It was a gift to the monastery from the Aspi family, he noticed, its pages decorated with tendrils and lilies, and on the frontispiece a rendition of the pattern on the contessa’s floor. Palewski saw his hands were trembling.

He asked for a glass of water, which momentarily broke the flow of the priest’s gentle speech. He went out into the monastery garden to drink it and sat for a few moments beneath a tree in the shade.

“Come, signore,” the priest said softly. “I will take you to Father Aristo, who is doing a wonderful work. Our first Armenian-English dictionary. The great poet Lord Byron asked that this should be done. Peace to his memory. He studied here, for almost a year.”

“I’m afraid I’m not feeling very well,” Palewski said. Then, not to sound rude, he added, “Byron studied here?”

“Every week, efendi. He wanted to learn Armenian, for the good of his mind.” He paused, smiled. “I am afraid he was not a very diligent student.”

Palewski stood up. He felt light-headed. “Can you tell me where to find my gondolier?”

The priest nodded, disappointed. “I will take you to him, if you prefer.”

“Thank you.” Palewski reached into his pocket and brought out some banknotes. “You have been very kind.”

They went through a gate to the landing stage. In the gondola Palewski relaxed and closed his eyes. He unbuttoned his coat to feel the breeze and lay back against the cushions. The next time he opened his eyes he found himself in the Grand Canal again: he must have slept. His hands were cold.

Back in the apartment he paused only to pick up a card from beneath the mirror in the vestibule and to remove his shoes before he tumbled headlong onto his bed. He read the card at an angle: it was from the Contessa d’Aspi d’Istria, repeating her invitation to a reception that evening. After a few minutes he reached out and flicked up the counterpane, and in a moment he was asleep.

O
N
the piano nobile of the Ca’ d’Aspi crystal goblets sparkled in the light of hundreds of candles set into candelabra of old glass, all reflected in the mottled mirrors that lined the walls. Down the center of the great room heavily embroidered linen hung in folds from the table, as though carved from pure stone. The curtains were not drawn. As the evening wore on, the glass of the tall windows, too, came to reflect the brightness of the room; from outside, on the Grand Canal, it looked as though the whole palazzo was aflame.

Stadtmeister Finkel, passing in a gondola on his way back to his fat blond wife, saw the lights and sighed. One thing was for sure: neither the stadtmeister, nor his superior, nor any member of the Austrian administration would ever attend a Venetian party, thrown by a Venetian. Only the year before, at Carnivale, the stadtmeister had inaugurated a ball at the Procuratie that not a single native had deigned to attend. The elegant officers had stood in their white gloves and immaculate uniforms like mustachioed wallflowers while the band played mazurkas and the candles burned low in their sockets.

Very faintly now he heard the strains of a quartet floating through an open window.

“Der Teufel!
” he grunted, turning his thick neck to address the gondolier. “What are we dawdling for?”

Having given the band the signal to play, the contessa threw back a window and stood there for a moment, looking out.

She turned from the window with a radiant welcome for the man who had just entered the room.

“Dottore—I’m so glad it is you. If I am lucky I will have you to myself for a few minutes, at least. Somehow at these occasions one never manages to talk to the people one wants to talk to. Come, sit at the window here with me. In Venice,” she added, with a sudden change of tone, “we need never tire of the view.”

The professor, a small, barrel-chested man with a beautiful head of wavy gray hair, lifted a glass from a liveried attendant. He spoke in low tones to the contessa, who now and then wrung her hands. “Idiots!” she murmured. “It is barbarism!”

The professor spread his hands ruefully. “What to do? The Austrians have never been refused. In Prague, in Cracow, they can take what they want. Destroy what they like. And the emperor will act like a new Napoleon. I do not think he was happy when the horses of St. Mark returned from Paris.”

The contessa clenched her fists. “We shall see the Bandieras this evening, Dottore. Attilio and his brother are not afraid to act. But money, yes.” She wrung her hands.

The room was filling up. Out of the corner of her eye the contessa noticed
a man standing uncertainly in the doorway. He was tall, pale, and good-looking; his clothes were immaculate. The contessa swiveled and held out her hands with a charming smile.

“Signor Brett! But how wonderful you could come. You see, Tommaseo, we are neighbors now! But yes—Signor Brett has come all the way from America to share my view. Is it not so?” She laughed, and light played in her eyes.

Palewski smiled. “Had I known I might share a view with you, madame, I would have left America sooner,” he said.

“Basta
, signore.” The contessa raised a hand, but she looked pleased.

The contessa touched his arm. “Let me introduce you to Tommaseo Zen—he is a recluse, but for this evening we have dragged him out. He lives on Burano.”

She snapped her fingers, and a glass of prosecco appeared in front of Palewski. Before he knew it, he was talking to a quiet young man about the flora and fauna of the lagoon, and his glass was empty. A footman materialized with a bottle.