He covered the pan with a smaller plate, to weight the artichokes down, and settled the earthenware onto the coals. He set the rice crock on top of the plate. It would be done in an hour or less. He and Malakian would eat it later, cold.
Perhaps he would go to Uskudar later, after all. Take a caique, enjoy the cool breezes on the Bosphorus, maybe stop for tea in one of the cafes that lined the waterfront. He liked to go there: it was a little Asian village, really, scarcely a town, in spite of its magnificent mosques. And Yamaluk, and his treasures-why not?
Perhaps, somehow, the Bellini book would help.
22
If Istanbul was a city of dogs, then Venice-from the lofty symbol of St. Mark to the lowest denizen of boatyard and alleyway-was a city of cats. The winged lion stood only wherever the Austrian authorities had found it inexpedient to remove it, but the ordinary cats of the city still prowled by night through the campi, the gardens, and the ruins of Venice, in search of food.
By long tradition, the pigeons on St. Mark’s Square, like the impoverished nobility of San Barnaba, were fed by the state. The cats fended for themselves. Mostly they preyed on the rats who had long since colonized the city, breeding easily in the damp, crumbling foundations of Venetian houses, beneath rotting vegetation in the little landlocked gardens of the well-to-do, and in empty attics.
A she-cat, when her litter is due, looks for a dry and quiet place where she can raise her kittens undisturbed for the first few weeks. An empty building makes an ideal shelter even if, after years of abandonment and decay, it is not perfectly secure. The Fondaco dei Turchi was such a building. Grand, forlorn, shuttered, and rotting, it fronted the Grand Canal not a hundred yards from Palewski’s own snug billet, a perpetual reminder to the Venetians of the decay of trade and the passing of the heyday of their commercial power. The Turks, who once used it as their caravanserai, filling it with muslins and silks, gems and precious metals, had found no further use for it once the Republic was dead; rumor had it that the fondaco-which rivaled the fondaco of the Germans, not far off-had been sold to a Venetian speculator.
The cat was not interested in the rumor, nor did she appreciate the Byzantine architecture of the old palace, built in the twelfth century in the fashionable Eastern style. What interested her, as she prowled the dark stairs and investigated the empty rooms, were ratholes and rubbish heaps, scraps of wood, paper, and old fabric that cluttered the corners, areas of greenish damp and fallen plaster, and above all the distance between her nest and another, composed of a candle end, a cloak, a pitcher, and a plate on which the cat found some scraps of bread.
She wolfed them hungrily, and fled.
23
Popi Eletro stood in his studio with his back to the light, gripping his lapels with his stubby fingers, his head cocked to one side.
It was amazing, he thought, what human beings could endure.
He bent closer to the canvas.
Good. Very, very good. Even without the varnish-a triumph.
His expression didn’t change. “The other one,” he said gruffly.
The Croat tenderly lifted the canvas from the easel and set it down against the wall. He picked up another and removed its blue paper wrapper. Popi saw him hesitate for a moment before he set it on the easel.
Popi gave a grim little smile and started to look for the flaw. It was only a matter of scrutiny. Ever since he had found the Croat silent and imbecile in a little church on the Dalmatian coast, he had perfectly understood the Croat’s cravings.
Soon after he had learned to recognize his pathetic evasions, too.
It had been five years since Popi had learned that a sojourn on the Istrian islands would be good for his health. The diagnosis was not made by a doctor, but so it had proved. One day, crazed with boredom, he had walked the long mile to the hilltop church and found the Croat drawing pictures with a stick of charcoal on the marble steps.
He had been astonished. Popi Eletro had not, until that moment, given much consideration to art, but it was a Venetian consideration. He watched shapes and figures flow from the man’s hand like water. So when the Croat proudly led him to the parish priest, and the priest showed him what the Croat could draw and paint on paper, Popi had discovered an interest in the full commercial sense of the term.
Art, Popi reasoned, could make him money.
“It is a gift from God,” the priest would say. “The only one he has-but a gift to make him happy!”
Now Popi bent close to the picture. A perfect Canaletto-with a flaw.
In the end it had been so easy. One night he led the Croat to a bar in town and got him drunk, and by morning they were miles from the wretched little church and its pious priest. The Croat was dubious but also excited: Popi gave him paper and pencils, and he sketched his way easily to Venice.
Popi took the room in the Ghetto. They had lived there together for six months.
Popi had learned then what made the Croat tick. His simple pleasures.
And the seagulls cried in just the same way.
24
Palewski had scarcely finished his breakfast when the maid introduced a liveried servant, asking if he would care to drink coffee with the Contessa d’Aspi d’Istria.
“What, now?”
The footman bowed. “If it is convenient, signore. The Palazzo d’Aspi is just next door.”
The Ca’ d’Aspi had been built by the contessa’s sixteenth-century forebear, the hero of a naval engagement with the Ottoman fleet who had become very rich importing mastic from the island of Chios. It was a medium-sized palazzo, with five exuberant Gothic windows on each floor and a liberal sprinkling of colored marble embedded, like nuts in nougat, in the facade. It contained a great deal of martial trompe l’oeil decoration, a ceiling by a pupil of Tiepolo and, beyond the grand piano nobile apartments where the contessa entertained, barely a stick of furniture.
The contessa had inherited, along with the palazzo, almost a thousand acres of farmland on the mainland and a Palladian villa near Padua, but the land had not recovered from successive invasions of French and Austrian troops, who slaughtered the livestock and allowed the complex system of dikes and sluices to collapse. The villa lacked a roof.
The footman led Palewski up the stairs into a small vestibule decorated with frescoes of cupids pouring cornucopias of fruit into the laps of languid women.
“I shall inform the contessa of your arrival, Signor Brett.”
He was forestalled by the arrival of the contessa herself, flinging back the door.
Palewski’s first impression was of a Tiepolo sprung to life, Beauty herself, perhaps, descending from her cloud. She was wearing a brown riding skirt, a well-fitted white blouse, and a man’s jacket. Her feet were bare and her hand was on her hip. In her hand she held a foil. She was breathing hard.
“Signor Brett?” She saluted him with the foil and smiled. “Carla d’Aspi d’Istria. How kind of you to come.”
Palewski stammered a greeting.
The contessa was tall and slim shouldered, even in a man’s jacket; her waist was slender. She had the soft complexion of a much younger woman, beneath a heap of long blond curls for which, one summer after another, she had sat on the roof with her hair drenched in lemon juice and a brim to keep the sun off her skin. This morning she wore her hair tied back with a black ribbon, but some stray curls had escaped, and one was plastered damply to her forehead. She looked flushed, and her blue eyes sparkled beneath dark lids. Although her fair hair and blue eyes belonged to the classic canon of Venetian beauty, she had the straight, well-defined nose, and the full upper lip, of a Greek, reminding Palewski of certain lovely women produced by the Phanariots of Istanbul, the old Greek aristocracy. Only her mouth was perhaps too wide: it suggested-well, Palewski wasn’t sure what it suggested. And when she smiled, he thought, it was perfect.