“Is it Venetian?”
“You don’t recognize it?”
Palewski shook his head. “It’s very beautiful.”
“Yes.” She rang a bell, for coffee. “And also a grappa, Antonio, for Signor Brett.”
She smiled. “I always imagine that hussars drink grappa-but there, Signor Brett, I’m making you cross.” She half lowered her eyelids. “Forgive me.”
“The hussars-are boors,” he explained. “I hope you don’t find me too boorish.”
She gave a peal of laughter and covered her mouth with her hand. “I was being-complimentary. Don’t the hussars say that they always make the people run-the men away, and the women into their arms?”
Palewski gave a weak smile. “Whatever they say, madame, it was true only of the lancers.”
She gave him an almost tender look. “The lancers.”
“You were telling me about the pattern on the floor,” he said uncomfortably.
“The Sand-Reckoner’s diagram,” Carla said. “It has other names-this one, from Archimedes’ effort to calculate the size of the universe.” She smiled. “Now you know-and here’s your coffee.”
Palewski took the grappa, downed it, and replaced the glass on the tray. He drank the coffee standing, as she did. There was barely a stick of furniture in the salon.
“Barbieri told me you were hunting in Venice for something rare.”
I found you, Palewski thought. Aloud he said, “Yes. I mentioned Bellini, and he laughed at me, just about. Said we’d have to steal it.”
“Steal it? A respectable man like Count Barbieri?”
“It sounded like a joke.”
She gave a wan smile. “I didn’t know the count was capable of a joke where money was involved. But Bellini? I admire your ambition, signore-but I doubt you will succeed.”
“Perhaps not. It was just a rumor. I was acting on impulse.”
“Yes, Signor Brett. That I can believe.”
“You divined as much from my fencing, madame.”
“Perhaps before. It was the way you accepted my challenge. After all, you came here expecting to have coffee with an old lady,” she added with a laugh. “I’m glad you gave me a bout. It was-gallant of you. I hope you will come back. I practice every morning, at this time.”
Palewski bowed.
“But come tonight, as well,” she said, holding out her hand. Palewski brought it to his lips. “Seven o’clock. And Count Barbieri will be here. You never know, signore, he may have stolen you a Bellini already.”
25
The 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.
26
Palewski 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 cafe 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.