The Bellini Card

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.