The Bellini Card

22

If Istanbul was a city of dogs, then Venice-from the lofty symbol of St. Mark to the lowest denizen of boatyard and alleyway-was a city of cats. The winged lion stood only wherever the Austrian authorities had found it inexpedient to remove it, but the ordinary cats of the city still prowled by night through the campi, the gardens, and the ruins of Venice, in search of food.

By long tradition, the pigeons on St. Mark’s Square, like the impoverished nobility of San Barnaba, were fed by the state. The cats fended for themselves. Mostly they preyed on the rats who had long since colonized the city, breeding easily in the damp, crumbling foundations of Venetian houses, beneath rotting vegetation in the little landlocked gardens of the well-to-do, and in empty attics.

A she-cat, when her litter is due, looks for a dry and quiet place where she can raise her kittens undisturbed for the first few weeks. An empty building makes an ideal shelter even if, after years of abandonment and decay, it is not perfectly secure. The Fondaco dei Turchi was such a building. Grand, forlorn, shuttered, and rotting, it fronted the Grand Canal not a hundred yards from Palewski’s own snug billet, a perpetual reminder to the Venetians of the decay of trade and the passing of the heyday of their commercial power. The Turks, who once used it as their caravanserai, filling it with muslins and silks, gems and precious metals, had found no further use for it once the Republic was dead; rumor had it that the fondaco-which rivaled the fondaco of the Germans, not far off-had been sold to a Venetian speculator.

The cat was not interested in the rumor, nor did she appreciate the Byzantine architecture of the old palace, built in the twelfth century in the fashionable Eastern style. What interested her, as she prowled the dark stairs and investigated the empty rooms, were ratholes and rubbish heaps, scraps of wood, paper, and old fabric that cluttered the corners, areas of greenish damp and fallen plaster, and above all the distance between her nest and another, composed of a candle end, a cloak, a pitcher, and a plate on which the cat found some scraps of bread.

She wolfed them hungrily, and fled.