The Bellini Card (9 page)

Only the butchers, by the expensive nature of their trade, invariably expected payment for their sausages, their salami, their pigs’ feet and calves’ brains. In butchery there was no waste.

Ruggerio came away from the vegetable market with an armful of produce and spent several minutes carefully perusing the butchers’ stalls. They heard the lire jingling in his pocket and stood in respectful attendance, helping him make a selection.

“The lights are very good,” one of them remarked, pulling a thread of meat through his hand. “And with the grass turning, we give a good price.”

Ruggerio rounded off his expedition by buying some cornmeal for polenta.

He carefully packed his purchases into a flimsy wooden crate and carried them home.

“What’s happened?” His wife looked anxious. “Did he pay you off?”

“No,
cara
, no.” Ruggerio laid the box on the deal table by the open window. “I think he was tired. I will see him again tomorrow.”

“Pfui.”

“I work hard, Rosetta. I cannot be in his pocket night and day.”

“Why not? What does he want with his time that he cannot share it with you—or a woman, perhaps?” She cocked her head. “You know who I mean, Antonio.”

Ruggerio spread his hands out. “It’s difficult.”

“Difficult? What sort of a man is he?
Un Americano
. Don’t they have women in America?”

Ruggerio stuck out his lower lip. “I’m not sure that he is
un Americano.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Ruggerio began to unpack the box. “I don’t know exactly. But certain things—yes, some strange things …”

Rosetta moved to help her husband. “Strange things, Antonio?”

Ruggerio stood back and watched his wife put the greens on the table. She counted out five tomatoes. They were split, but fresh.

“A book he has. An old copy of Vasari.” He shrugged. “And then—I don’t know. His hat.”

“His hat?”

Ruggerio sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “I know the rich, Rosetta. How they like to eat, the pictures they like. It is my study, after all,” he added proudly. Had the Venetians not swum on the currents of trade for a thousand years, appraising, analyzing, supplying a want here, removing a glut there, matching men to their desires? “I know how they dress, Rosetta.”

“And so?”

“The rich buy their hats—and their shoes—in London. Maybe Paris if they are French, or young, or have business in the city. It takes time to make a rich man’s hat,
cara.”

“Fine. So where does your friend have his hats made? New York?”

“Constantinople.”

“I see.”

Rosetta, after all, was a Venetian, too.
Constantinople
was a rich word, full of associations: city of gold, city of lost fortune, the heathen image of Venice itself. Once the Venetians had held it in the palm of their hand. But that was long ago, before the Ruggerios and their kind had found their way to San Barnaba. Istanbul had been the enemy after that, cat playing mouse through the Aegean and the Adriatic: the city of sultans and viziers, of careful pacts and sudden wars.

It was not, in Rosetta’s imagination, primarily noted for its hats.

G
IANFRANCO
Barbieri ran his hands through his hair. He was about to knock when the door opened.

“Count Barbieri?” the American said. “Kind of you to come.”

The count smiled, showing his fine teeth. “I was delighted to receive your card, Signor Brett. You are settling in Venice comfortably, I hope?”

Brett bowed. “I’ve seen a dozen good churches, two dozen soldiers—and a body in a canal.” He stood back to let his guest enter the apartment.

Barbieri responded with an uncertain smile and advanced to the window, where he gazed out onto the Grand Canal as if it were for the first time.

“Champagne?”

A pop, a clink; wine fizzed and subsided in the wide, shallow bowls of two Murano glasses. To Barbieri it seemed as if the sounds of the canal had grown brighter, its colors and movement more vivid. It had been many months since he tasted real champagne.

Brett handed him a glass, and they toasted each other.

“I am sorry,” Barbieri said. “A tragedy—I even knew the man. Not well, you understand, but—” He sighed. “Yes, these things happen, even in Venice. I hope you will not allow such an unpleasantness to spoil your stay.”

“Nothing of the kind,” Brett assured him.

“I admire your choice of season, Signor Brett. I often think Venice is at her loveliest at this time of year. The warmth. The light. Carnevale? Far too cold.” He took a sip of champagne. It was very good. “But you will know that already, perhaps.”

“The Carnival? No. I was never in Venice before, I regret to say.”

“You are from New York?”

“Based in the city, yes.”

“In Venice we are a little crazy about the past.
Com’era, dov’era
—as it was, where it was. A very Venetian saying—and said rather too often, I think. I would like to visit your country one day. A young country. We tend to forget that Venice was once a series of muddy little islands, inhabited by refugees from the mainland.” He gestured to the window. “Like you today, Signor Brett, we had to build up all this, little by little.”

“I’d be proud if we made New York half as beautiful,” Brett said.

“Who knows, Signor Brett? It will be another kind of beauty, I imagine. The beauty of the machine age.”

“Founded on commerce.”

“Of course.” Barbieri smiled. “Trade is a very pure expression of human energy. Modern Venice is listless and poor, and produces no art. Why? Because there’s no art without a patron. And one is not enough. It takes a wealthy and energetic commercial city to spawn rich men, who then vie with each other to call out what is beautiful.” He touched the scar on his lip with his tongue. “Are there rich men in New York?”

“More every day,” Brett said.

“So it was in Venice once. Spices, maybe, were your furs.” He laughed. “Forgive me, I have tumbled into my own trap—thinking, like any Venetian, of the past.”

“I think about it, too,” Brett said.

“Of course.” Barbieri nodded his head seriously. “One could draw the
comparisons too close, and yet—” He put up his hands, as if he were grasping a balloon. “I do not think Venice would have become what it became without men like us.”

“Like us?”

He nodded. “We mined, in our time, the treasures that others had stored up. A lion from Patras, for the Arsenale. A column from Acre—to the Piazetta! Even the body of St. Mark—we took it from Alexandria. Go to the church of St. Mark’s, and what will you find? A gazetteer. A wild, encrusted guidebook to the cities of the ancient world. Precious marbles, enigmatic statues—and all embedded in a building that echoes the tossing of the waves. We hauled back the treasures of the East, and with them, slowly and cautiously, we forged our style.”

He gestured to the window.

“But we took it, mostly, from Istanbul. Constantinople, as it was. We sacked and scoured a city that had never been won by force of arms for eight hundred years.”

“You, at least, preserved what was carried off,” Brett said. “Lysippos’s bronze horses, for example.”

“And the bones of saints, and the reliquaries, and the gold. We took glass made in Antioch, and icons painted by the companions of Christ. Before we had been magpies, Signor Brett, snatching whatever was available, and beautiful, and bright. In 1204 we took a whole reference library.”

Brett nodded.

Barbieri smiled. “You, Signor Brett, are the Venetian now. And Venice, of course, is Istanbul.” He paused. “Tell me, how can I help you?”

Brett poured some more champagne.

“You’re a cynic at heart, Count Barbieri.”

“Not at all. Perhaps the Barbieri have at last produced an optimist.”

“A realist?”

Barbieri smiled. “It is the same thing.”

H
E
ordered the deaths without emotion. He had not known that they would die. Even when the killer arrived, unable to speak, handing him written instructions, he had pretended to himself that it would be something else.

But of course when Boschini was found in the canal, dead, he could no longer pretend.

He could adapt.

That’s how it had to be in this city. You adapt, or you die.

And the man was good at that. It’s what he did, the way he lived.

So he told himself that the people who died deserved to die.

P
ALEWSKI
twisted the wire, and the cork popped out into his hand.

“Brillat-Savarin,” Count Barbieri said.

Palewski knew exactly what the count meant.

Brillat-Savarin, the French gastronome, had established a sensational fact, which flew in the face of all recognized wisdom.

After the battle of Waterloo, British regiments stationed around Champagne had plundered the wineries. Bottles were popped, quaffed, and tossed into the hedges; old vintages vanished indiscriminately with the latest crop. When order was restored, the champagne houses were left with shattered cellars.

“The champagne makers thought the British had ruined them,” Palewski began. “Until every club in London—”

“Ordered another twelve dozen cases!” Barbieri beamed. “The champagne houses made their fortune.”

“You truly are an optimist, Count Barbieri.”

“A realist, Signor Brett.”

Palewski clasped his hands under his chin.

“I am looking for a Bellini,” he said.

Gianfranco Barbieri came from a long line of Venetian aristocrats who had been trained, like aristocrats everywhere, not to reveal his feelings easily. He opened his eyes wide and gave a whistle.

“Bellini! No. Bassano, yes. Longhi, Ricci. Guardi—it would not be too much of a problem. But Bellini? That would be a miracle.” He blew on his fingertips and laughed. “You would have to steal it,” he added.

“It is what America wants,” Palewski explained. “Something utterly first class. Better one work by a master like Bellini than a whole gallery of lesser paintings.”

“No, no. You must begin slowly. Like us.”

Palewski knelt on the window seat and contemplated the Grand Canal.

“Count Barbieri,” he began, “I wonder—if, by some stroke of fortune, someone in Venice was in a position to offer a Bellini on the market—it’s a hypothetical suggestion—you would know about it, I suppose?”

The count shrugged. “If it were to be offered through the usual channels, then yes, I would know of it. But for such a painting—well. This is Venice, Signor Brett. Not all traffic passes down the Grand Canal.”

“I understand,” the American said.

Barbieri set down his glass. “I am expected at the opera, Signor Brett. There’s no reason to be disappointed. If a Bellini should suddenly appear … In the meantime, I can show you at least three works that would
delight you. They would cause a stir if they were exhibited in London or Paris. A fourth, I think, would interest you also.”

They shook hands at the door. “Your neighbor is an old friend of mine. Carla d’Aspi d’Istria. She’s having a little gathering tomorrow night. Do drop her your card, I’m sure she’d be delighted to meet you.”