The Bellini Card (30 page)

“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?”

T
HE
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.

A
PART
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 caïque 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?

B
RUNELLI
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.

I
N
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.