The Bellini Card

116

“Where yous been, efendi? You have a yali now, I thinks, like some big pasha, hey?”

Yashim smiled and shook his head. “I’ve been away, George.”

George scratched his chest. “Is too hot here, Yashim efendi.”

George grabbed a bucket and roved from piles of spinach to pyramids of tiny cucumbers, sprinkling them with cold water. When he was finished he rubbed his wet hands across his face.

“Today, you is not busy, efendi.”

He caught a dozen or so tiny artichokes, one by one, and placed them on his scales. They were no bigger than his thumb.

“Some tomatoes. Some garlic. Aubergine-here.” He took four long green aubergines and weighed them, too. He carefully placed everything in the basket with his huge hands and crammed a fistful of herbs-parsley, dill, rosemary-on top.

He puffed up, waved his arms, and subsided with a gesture of calm. “You cooks in the heat and eats in the cool,” he bellowed, miming to suit. “Dolma. A raki. No meat.”

Yashim paused on the way home to buy bread, yogurt, and olives. When he got back, the little apartment was like an oven. He threw back the windows and left the door slightly ajar to encourage a breeze.

It was only when he picked up the basket again that he noticed a small parcel by the door.

He undid the string.

Inside was his knife.

With it came a letter.

My dearest Yashim, I wished to send you a souvenir of Venice, but really, there is nothing. So I sent Antonio to find your knife, in the courtyard of the fondaco.

You saved my life, which was not important until now. Before, I had no feeling-I lost it, I suppose, when my brother died, and then my mother. Until now I knew neither joy nor tenderness, but only pain, in the way you know about. With Nikola there is pain, but it is another kind, and it is very mixed with something else. Of course I wish-but what do I wish? For nothing. I commune with an angel. Father Andrea is very good.

I am sorry to have lost the painting, because it would have been good for us to have money. About the letters, I will let the fish read them. I know-and you know-that they did exist. Which is enough.

Your loving friend,

Carla A-I

He put the letter aside and examined the knife. The binding on the grip had come loose, but the steel itself was bright and sharp. He weighed it in his hand.

“You have traveled a long way,” he said aloud, “since Ammar made you.”

He wiped the blade with a cloth, glad that the knife was clean.

“Ammar made you to chop vegetables,” he said.

He took a board and set to work. With the knife he prepared the tiny artichokes, trimming their leaves. He chopped the tomatoes, slit the aubergines, crushed and salted the garlic cloves. The room filled with the scent of herbs.

The Tatar had been dispatched to expunge every trace of the sultan’s dishonor. To kill, leaving no witnesses.

Palewski had said something on the ship, before the porpoises broke the cover of the sea, something he had put from his mind.

Resid had sent a killer and not him.

I could have done it, Yashim thought, without killing anyone. I might have retrieved the letters-and the painting, too. That is my job.

He stuffed the aubergines with tomatoes, onion, a little parsley and garlic, carefully gathering the last fragments from the board.

If the Austrians already knew about the sultan’s visit, killing the witnesses was a waste. A waste of life, above all, but also a risk.

With sticky fingers he set the aubergines into a dish.

He filled an earthenware with the artichokes, drizzled them with oil, a splash of water, and a sprinkling of lemon juice.

When it was done he stuck his head out of the window and shouted, “Elvan! Elvan! Come!”

A boy levered himself out of a patch of shade and stood up, stretching.

“I am here, Yashim efendi,” he called.

Upstairs, he took the dishes from Yashim and carried them down the street to the baker’s shop, where the baker put them in his oven.

Yashim went to the hammam.

An attendant took his clothes and led him through to the steam room, where he spread out a towel for him on the hot slab.

Yashim lay down. The heat seeped through his limbs. His muscles relaxed.

Only his mind remained tense.

He stared upward, at the light shining through the domed ceiling, and remembered the Tatar at the top of the stairs, framed in the dawn breaking through the Byzantine windows.

Resid’s assassin.

He wiped the sweat from his eyes with two hands. He went over his conversation with the valide in his mind.

He did not protest when the hammam attendant slopped over in his pattens to lead him from the slab.

He let himself be seated by the spigot of hot water and began to mechanically sluice himself from head to foot.

Seeing nothing. Hearing no one.

Until a bare foot prodded him in the ribs.

He glanced around then, surprised, through a film of steam.

For a moment he didn’t recognize the young man with slicked-down hair who sat beside him on the marble floor.

“You have disobeyed me, Yashim. I find that-interesting. And unfortunate. We were getting along so well.”

Yashim recognized the voice. It was Resid Pasha.