He speared an artichoke. “But if the sultan wasn’t masquerading as the Duke of Naxos, who was?”
“Resid Pasha.”
Palewski choked, so Yashim got up to fetch him another glass of water.
“That, of course, changes everything,” Palewski spluttered.
“Everything? No. The pattern doesn’t change. Carla thought she recognized the duke. And Ruggerio was watching-mistakenly-the professional guide, whose gift was to assess the people he met. I think something in the way Carla behaved alerted him, too.”
Palewski clouded his glass with water. “And he informed on them-to the Austrians.”
“The same pattern,” Yashim said. “I don’t know when Resid realized the mistake. He didn’t correct it. That was his conceit.”
“And the Duke of Naxos was taken to be the sultan.”
“Yes. Resid allowed people to believe the sultan had been to Venice.”
Yashim ate a slice of aubergine.
“Only when the sultan came to the throne did Carla get Metin Yamaluk to hint to the sultan about the painting. She wanted to be discreet, for her sake and his.”
“Giving him the opportunity to delicately ignore her, if he liked,” Palewski said.
Yashim spread his hands. “Instead, the sultan was intrigued. He had nothing to hide. He knew nothing about the contessa. He’d never been to Venice. He simply wanted to follow up on the hint. He wanted the painting.”
“And when he sent for you,” Palewski reasoned, “Resid had to make a move.”
“He moved fast. He stood me down.”
Palewski sucked in his cheeks. “He decided to trade on what the Austrians already believed, Yashim. And sent the Tatar to eliminate all witnesses. One of his people. Resid’s mother is a Tatar, too.”
Yashim nodded. “He was also meant to recover the incriminating love letters Resid had sent Carla.”
“Love letters? I thought we were dealing with gambling debts. A promissory note.”
“So did I, until Carla told me the truth. Or the half-truth. At the time we both believed the letters had been written by the sultan.”
“But-but they’re gone, aren’t they? With the painting?”
Yashim looked his friend in the eye. “Resid doesn’t know that. He thinks I have them.”
Palewski reached for the raki and poured them both another drink. “What will he do now?”
Yashim shook his head slowly. “I see no way out. We can only wait.”
Palewski blew out his cheeks.
“I’m sorry, Yash. Making you think of food at a time like this. I shouldn’t have come.”
He began to rub his wrists, unconsciously.
“We have to eat,” Yashim said. “How’s Marta, then?”
Palewski regarded the ceiling thoughtfully.
“I have some rather strange news, as it happens.”
“She’s getting married?”
“Married?” Palewski looked astonished. “Good God, Yashim. You are morbid. No, thank heavens, she’s not getting married. She’s back in the house.” He shook his head. “And she’s cleared up everything. Everything. She rearranged my books.”
“I saw that,” Yashim confessed. “I didn’t want to tell you.”
“No, well, I admit I was pretty aggrieved. I’d made a pile of books on the table in the hall. Folios, some of them-a church history by Foulbert. An interesting seventeenth-century survey of the Greek islands by a Dutchman, writing in Latin, not accurate but-well, anyway, that’s not important. Thing is, I’d been dropping books onto this table for weeks on my way in and out of the garden-you remember coming into the garden, when all this began? — and it’s a bit dim down there.”
“A bit dim. So?”
“When Marta started to shift the stack she found a letter stuck between two books. It must have been left on the table, and I didn’t see it.”
“A letter?”
“Propped on the mantelpiece when I got home. Arms on the fold in green ink, raised.”
“Palace?”
“Invitation, Yashim. He had been there all the time. An invitation to the sultan’s inaugural ball.” Palewski buried his face in his glass. “Half a mind to cut it, anyway,” he mumbled.
Yashim looked at him, unsmiling.
“Signor Brett would go,” he said. “Signor Brett has the proper garb.”
Palewski shrugged. “You know I hate that kind of thing.”
“Honor of the Poles,” Yashim said.
“Dishonor, more like. Bad champagne.”
“The Austrian ambassador will have spoken to Karolyi by then.”
“So?”
“Pappendorf’s face,” Yashim said.
They looked at each other over the rim of their glasses.
“Pappendorf’s face!” Palewski repeated happily. “Prosit! ”
120
The water slapped lazily at the green weed that fringed the pilings of the bridge.
There was no tide, only the perpetual current from the north, slipping under the movement of warm water from the sea, which set up whorls and currents that the boatmen knew.
Caught between these ceaseless, shifting eddies and countercurrents, the pasha who died young described a forgotten pattern. He moved like a dervish, his limbs open and relaxed. Beneath Byzantine domes, dilapidated palaces, and tethered boats, the pasha’s corpse twirled in the moonlight, unseen, his arms flung wide in a gesture of vacant resignation.
So he turned, around and around, as the moon sank behind the towers and domes.
When dawn broke, the first workmen returned to the bridge. The pasha’s body had scarcely moved from the place where he went in, yards away from the deep waters of the Bosphorus on which, in her days of glory, the city had made her fortune.
Overhead, the workmen stared down into the clear water.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Four decades after the events described in this book, Sir Henry Layard, distinguished explorer, archaeologist, and Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul, was dismissed from his office following a change of government in London.
The incoming government proposed taking a tough line with Turkey-in-Europe. Sir Henry Layard was considered to be too chummy with the Orientals.
In vexation, rather than returning to his ancestral halls (tricked out, needless to say, in Canalettos, not to mention the ruins and friezes of ancient Tyre), Sir Henry and his young wife moved to Venice, where they bought a palazzo, the Ca’ Cappello, not far, in my mind at least, from the Ca’ d’Aspi.
One afternoon in 1865, just as he was stepping into his gondola to return home, Sir Henry was approached by an elderly and evidently impoverished man who asked the milord to buy an old painting for five pounds.
Scarcely glancing at the painting, and determined not to be late, Sir Henry refused. He stepped into the gondola and was carried away.
On arriving home, he found the painting propped against his door.
He hung it in a special room, all on its own.
Lady Layard survived her husband by twenty-three years. She remained in Venice, very much upon her dignity as Sir Henry’s widow but fond of social life nonetheless. Younger residents like Henry James knew the Palazzo Layard as the Refrigerator.
In her will she left the painting of Mehmet II, by Bellini, to the National Gallery in London.
Details about the damage to the painting, probably inflicted when it was lifted from board to canvas, and about the heavy restoration work carried out in the nineteenth century, can be obtained from the gallery. Both were considered so extensive that curators have cautiously labeled the painting attributed to, rather than by, Gentile Bellini.
It continues to travel the world; it was recently in Venice, and before that, at the turn of the century, it drew enormous crowds when it was exhibited in Istanbul.
Oddly enough, as I was writing this book, Sotheby’s in London sold a smaller likeness of Mehmet II-much the same size as the picture Palewski saw at the Palazzo d’Istria-for almost half a million pounds.