The Bellini Card

16

Gianfranco Barbieri ran his hands through his hair. He was about to knock when the door opened.

“Count Barbieri?” the American said. “Kind of you to come.”

The count smiled, showing his fine teeth. “I was delighted to receive your card, Signor Brett. You are settling in Venice comfortably, I hope?”

Brett bowed. “I’ve seen a dozen good churches, two dozen soldiers-and a body in a canal.” He stood back to let his guest enter the apartment.

Barbieri responded with an uncertain smile and advanced to the window, where he gazed out onto the Grand Canal as if it were for the first time.

“Champagne?”

A pop, a clink; wine fizzed and subsided in the wide, shallow bowls of two Murano glasses. To Barbieri it seemed as if the sounds of the canal had grown brighter, its colors and movement more vivid. It had been many months since he tasted real champagne.

Brett handed him a glass, and they toasted each other.

“I am sorry,” Barbieri said. “A tragedy-I even knew the man. Not well, you understand, but-” He sighed. “Yes, these things happen, even in Venice. I hope you will not allow such an unpleasantness to spoil your stay.”

“Nothing of the kind,” Brett assured him.

“I admire your choice of season, Signor Brett. I often think Venice is at her loveliest at this time of year. The warmth. The light. Carnevale? Far too cold.” He took a sip of champagne. It was very good. “But you will know that already, perhaps.”

“The Carnival? No. I was never in Venice before, I regret to say.”

“You are from New York?”

“Based in the city, yes.”

“In Venice we are a little crazy about the past. Com’era, dov’era — as it was, where it was. A very Venetian saying-and said rather too often, I think. I would like to visit your country one day. A young country. We tend to forget that Venice was once a series of muddy little islands, inhabited by refugees from the mainland.” He gestured to the window. “Like you today, Signor Brett, we had to build up all this, little by little.”

“I’d be proud if we made New York half as beautiful,” Brett said.

“Who knows, Signor Brett? It will be another kind of beauty, I imagine. The beauty of the machine age.”

“Founded on commerce.”

“Of course.” Barbieri smiled. “Trade is a very pure expression of human energy. Modern Venice is listless and poor, and produces no art. Why? Because there’s no art without a patron. And one is not enough. It takes a wealthy and energetic commercial city to spawn rich men, who then vie with each other to call out what is beautiful.” He touched the scar on his lip with his tongue. “Are there rich men in New York?”

“More every day,” Brett said.

“So it was in Venice once. Spices, maybe, were your furs.” He laughed. “Forgive me, I have tumbled into my own trap-thinking, like any Venetian, of the past.”

“I think about it, too,” Brett said.

“Of course.” Barbieri nodded his head seriously. “One could draw the comparisons too close, and yet-” He put up his hands, as if he were grasping a balloon. “I do not think Venice would have become what it became without men like us.”

“Like us?”

He nodded. “We mined, in our time, the treasures that others had stored up. A lion from Patras, for the Arsenale. A column from Acre-to the Piazetta! Even the body of St. Mark-we took it from Alexandria. Go to the church of St. Mark’s, and what will you find? A gazetteer. A wild, encrusted guidebook to the cities of the ancient world. Precious marbles, enigmatic statues-and all embedded in a building that echoes the tossing of the waves. We hauled back the treasures of the East, and with them, slowly and cautiously, we forged our style.”

He gestured to the window.

“But we took it, mostly, from Istanbul. Constantinople, as it was. We sacked and scoured a city that had never been won by force of arms for eight hundred years.”

“You, at least, preserved what was carried off,” Brett said. “Lysippos’s bronze horses, for example.”

“And the bones of saints, and the reliquaries, and the gold. We took glass made in Antioch, and icons painted by the companions of Christ. Before we had been magpies, Signor Brett, snatching whatever was available, and beautiful, and bright. In 1204 we took a whole reference library.”

Brett nodded.

Barbieri smiled. “You, Signor Brett, are the Venetian now. And Venice, of course, is Istanbul.” He paused. “Tell me, how can I help you?”

Brett poured some more champagne.

“You’re a cynic at heart, Count Barbieri.”

“Not at all. Perhaps the Barbieri have at last produced an optimist.”

“A realist?”

Barbieri smiled. “It is the same thing.”