The Bellini Card (7 page)

Popi stumped along, looking neither left nor right. Something in his manner made the women working in their doorways draw in their feet as he approached; the men shrank to the wall as he passed. It was not that Popi looked official: when the Austrians sent patrols through the streets the people just watched them go, sullen and unmoving. It was, perhaps, that he came from the other Venice, a Venice that festered beneath the golden afternoon light and the fine tracery of a Byzantine façade, a Venice unimaginative visitors would never penetrate, no matter how much poverty or wretchedness they passed by, trailing their fingertips in the water until their solicitous gondolier hinted that it would be better, perhaps, to keep their hands folded on their laps. How could they, when even the more engaged, more lively minded visitors to the city allowed themselves to be seduced so readily by the prettiness of its whores and the cheapness of its
appartamenti
?

The people of the Ghetto shrank from Popi as a man of thalers and kreuzers, and of little accounts kept rigorously in black books that had the power to ruin lives.

Popi stopped to stick a cigar in his mouth and lit it with a match, then
carried on up the narrow
calle
like a steam tug. After several turns that he executed without stopping, he ducked into a low doorway, crossed a small dark hallway, and found the stairs. He began to climb, slowly, to the top.

The stairs were dark. At each landing, narrow passages radiated into a deeper blackness relieved occasionally by a tiny opening, without glass, which gave onto a narrow well of light. On the lower floors the light was blocked by the accumulated rubbish of many centuries—moldering feathers, desiccated rats, pigeon droppings. Reaching the fifth floor, Popi ignored the stairs and pressed on down a corridor barely wide enough to let him pass. Stooping, he fumbled his way until his outstretched hands encountered another set of stairs, running up and back the way he had come. He took the cigar from his mouth and stood leaning against the wall, waiting for breath. Then he began to climb again.

Pressed into their narrow space, the Jews had built their houses higher than anyone else in the world.

Now, when he leaned against the wall for breath, Popi could feel it flex against his weight; another piece of plaster crumbled and fell to the floor.

At last, holding the stub of cigar at eye level, he perceived a door. He hit it with the heel of his hand, and it swung open, drenching him in sunlight.

Popi blinked, tears starting to his eyes. The cold reek of cabbage and drains that had followed him up through the warren of stairs and passages was swept aside by an overpowering sweet smell of alcohol and decay, wafted out on a raft of summer heat.

He coughed and stepped through the narrow doorway.

The first thing Popi noticed were the flies. They crowded the skylights and crawled across the sloping ceiling, buzzing and falling, swirling in the dust on their wings. With an exclamation of disgust he lunged at the nearest skylight.

The room was in disarray: tangled bedding, empty bottles, lumps of bread were strewn across the floor. The easel that normally stood beneath the window was overturned. Only the box of paints and the jar of brushes were in place. In the middle of the room, naked on a high stool, sat the Croat himself: waxy, immobile, his eyes staring on vacancy. His thin shoulders were flung back. His back was straight.

Popi’s first thought was that he must be dead.

He stepped closer. The Croat continued to stare. Only when Popi was close enough to smell the man’s skin did he realize that his lips were moving, minutely, horribly, like hairless caterpillars.

Popi took a step back: the Croat, alive, repelled him more than the notion of the Croat dead.

Popi was not unimaginative. He could tell, for instance, that the Croat was somewhere where Popi and the drink and the stench and poverty of his life could not reach him. He sat like a prince upon his throne, issuing soundless orders, perhaps, to the invisible minions who flitted before his glassy stare.

But Popi was unsympathetic.

He snapped his fingers in front of the unseeing eyes.

Nothing happened.

“I’ll bring you around,” he muttered. He took a drag on his cigar, lowered the glowing tip until it reached the level of the Croat’s naked belly, and stubbed it out.

Way below, in the street, some people thought they heard a high-pitched scream, but the gulls were wheeling overhead, too, and they couldn’t be sure.

Y
ASHIM
was reading the latest novel from Paris, a rather improbable account of the life of Ali Pasha of Janina lent to him by his old friend the valide, the new sultan’s grandmother. The subject matter had taken him by surprise. Yashim was used to discovering Parisian life. Reading
Ali Pasha
, he felt, was rather like peering through a keyhole, only to see an eye looking at you from the other side.

“I find this Monsieur Dumas
sympathique
,” the valide had told him. “His father was a French marquis. His mother came from Santo Domingo.”

Yashim nodded. The valide herself was born on another Caribbean island, Martinique. The extraordinary story of her arrival in the harem of the Ottoman sultan, and of her inexorable rise to the position of valide, or queen mother, would have challenged the imagination of Monsieur Dumas himself.
^*

“The novel is a bagatelle, Yashim,” the valide added. “I’m afraid it kept me up all night.”

Yashim found the novel riddled with falsifications but also surprisingly energetic. It was certainly unlike anything he had read before. He wanted to discuss it with the valide, but a visit was out of the question. Even though she did not live in the palace of the sultan, his presence was sure to be noted. The sultan expected him to be in Venice, on the track of the Bellini.

Resid was right to hint that the sultan’s infatuation with a painting he had never seen would pass as he grew into the responsibilities of office. Yet the deception bothered him. Not merely the disloyalty, if it was such. What mattered more was the complicity he shared with Resid Pasha and the vagueness of Resid’s support.

What if, after all, Resid believed he had gone to Venice?

It was also an irksome restriction: he felt in a sort of limbo in his own city. He read, he went to the hammam, he cooked and ate, but in his heart he knew he was simply marking time. Two Thursdays came and went without the customary dinner he was used to preparing for his friend Palewski; the second time he went out to a
locanta
in Pera and found himself ordering an old palace dish,
ek
ili köfte
, meatballs in a sauce of egg and lemon. Several times, too, he found himself outside the Polish Residency, and on these occasions he unfailingly went up the crumbling steps and knocked on the door, to see if Marta had any news.

Only his visit to Malakian, in the Grand Bazaar, had eased his sense of idleness. He found the old Armenian cross-legged, as always, outside
the tiny cubicle that held his queer and fascinating collection of antiques, impassively watching the crowds that swirled down the covered lane.

“You are well, Malakian efendi?”

“I did not expect to see you, Yashim efendi. I am well, thank you.” He patted an empty stool. “I have something for you. You will have coffee?”

When Yashim was sitting down, Malakian clapped his hands and sent a little boy running through the crowds.

Life was returning to the bazaar, Yashim noticed. The sultan’s death had cast a pall over the city, like an echo of the days when the death of a sultan stopped time in its tracks and the city waited to learn which of the sultan’s sons had won his way to the throne of Osman. But that was long ago, when the sons of sultans were trained to govern and to fight. This time there had been no contest.

The boy returned, a tray in his hands. Malakian took the coffee and handed a cup to Yashim. For a few minutes they talked about business.

“It dried up,” Malakian agreed. “Many of the caravans delayed their departure. But the bazaar, too, was empty, so I could neither buy nor sell.” He shrugged. “It was good to have a little quiet. But now they are come again.”

“The caravans?”

“You understand how it is, efendi. I have only this small shop—I do not have caravans at my command. But the drivers, they will pick up some little thing and bring it to me. Look. Two French pistols.” He opened a wooden box and brought out the guns. “From Egypt, I believe.”

Yashim turned them over in his hands. “Good quality. But old now.”

Malakian sighed. “Some things get better as they grow old. But guns? You are right. We make always newer ways to kill.”

He replaced the pistols in their box. “I will sell them to a Frenchman, so that he can say his father was with Napoleon. For you I found this.”

It was a small knife with a four-inch blade and a wooden handle bound with cord.

“A cook’s knife,” Yashim murmured. “Very comfortable.”

Malakian bent forward and pointed to the mottled blade. “Like me, you think it is not interesting. But then I saw this.”

Yashim turned the blade and noticed a faint inscription along the flat edge.

“Ammar made me
,” he read slowly, squinting. The Arabic was worn, almost smooth. “What’s this?”

Malakian wagged his head. “Damascus steel.”

“That’s unusual,” Yashim admitted.

“Unusual? Here is the soft steel—here, and here—to protect the edge. It rusts, of course. On either side, the soft steel—and between them, the true blade. You see how it shines? Even now bright. Such a plain knife, for cooking. Do you like it?”

Yashim grinned. The best steel in the world. A blade fit for a warrior—in the kitchen. Of course he liked it.

“It must have been made for a sultan’s kitchen,” he said.

“Of course. I hear you like to cook, so I make it a present. You can give me one asper.”

“One asper?”

“We say, Yashim efendi, that you cannot give a knife. But if you pay me a little coin, it is all right.”

Yashim dipped into his pocket. Everyone had his superstitions. “Thank you, Malakian efendi. I shall treasure it.”

“You should use it,” Malakian remarked. “Have it sharpened.”

Yashim nodded, touched by the old shopkeeper’s generosity. But then Aram Malakian was an extraordinary man. So much slid between his fingers—so much knowledge was stored in that enormous head.

“Do you know anything about an Italian painter, efendi? His name was Bellini. Centuries ago, he came to Istanbul and painted a portrait of the Conqueror.”

“Bellini, hmmm.” Malakian frowned and tugged at one of his enormous earlobes. “I hear of this name before. Bellini. I remember.”

“Four hundred years ago,” Yashim added.

Malakian gave a dry smile. “I do not remember this Bellini personally, Yashim efendi. But there is something I recall.” He gazed at the ceiling. “Metin Yamaluk.”

“The calligrapher?”

Malakian nodded. “And his father and grandfather before him, also,
and their fathers, to the time of Sultan Ahmet, I believe, who built the Blue Mosque. The family came from Smyrna.”

Yashim could vaguely recall meeting Yamaluk in the Topkapi Palace, where he worked in the copying room. But that was years ago, and the calligrapher had been an old man already.

“Metin Yamaluk is still alive?”

“If God wills. He retired years ago, it is true, but he still works. His hand is more elegant than ever, in fact. I remember he had a book he sometimes liked to look at. He said it gave him refreshment—but he was also ashamed, because it was a pagan book, of pictures, very well drawn. It came from Topkapi, Yashim efendi.”

Yashim frowned. “Stolen, you mean?”

Malakian paused and stared at Yashim. “Stolen!” He spat. “This knife. I give to you. You think—stolen? We give it back to—who, efendi? The Sultan of Rum? The Caliph Harun al Rasid? The son of a son of a cook?”

“No, of course, I didn’t mean—”

“Yashim efendi.” Malakian put his broad hands on his knees and rested his weight there. “When I was a boy, I played chess with my godfather. He was a merchant. He traded to Baku, Astrakhan, and up the Volga. He would tell me about the chess set he had been given by his father. The white pieces carved from camel bone, the black from Indian ebony. It came from, I don’t know, maybe Samarkand or old Kiev. He said that every piece contained inside it, like in a little cage, a tiny image of itself. A king inside a king. A pawn in a pawn. You could see it, and hear it rattle, but there was no way into it.”