The Bellini Card

29

Istanbul, where Palewski had lived for so many years, was widely considered to be a healthful city: a wind that blew from the Dardanelles, even in summer, agitated and purified the air, while the swift current of the Bosphorus, running down from the Black Sea, acted as perpetual sluice.

Perhaps that was why, in 1204, the aged and blind Doge Enrico Dan-dolo had proposed moving the entire enterprise of Venice, lock, stock, and barrel, to the shores of the Golden Horn. He had just conquered Constantinople with Crusader help, and the chance would not come again. His proposal was rejected.

Venice, according to the wisdom of the day, was a sickly place. Miasmas, which carried the risk of disease, rose from sluggish canals choked, as they usually were, with rotting garbage and raw excrement. The passage of a gondola stirred the depths of these little open sewers and occasionally raised a stench; everyone knew that bad smells, if inhaled, were dangerous.

It was also a plague city, or had been, when it traded with the Eastern ports. In those days, Venice had been famous for San Lazzaro, the island on which new arrivals could be confined for forty days- la quarantena. Now, with the decline of trade, and in the face of official indifference, quarantine laws had been suspended. So few ships bothered to pay the Austrian harbor dues to enter the lagoon in the uncertain hope of trading with an impoverished population that the stern regulations of a vigorous Republic had been allowed to lapse. It remained a city of rats-those soft plops that Palewski sometimes heard beneath his windows at night were proof of that. But plague-the bubonic plague of medieval Europe-had not, in fact, broken out in Venice for many years. Only cholera remained a recurrent problem.

Cholera! When Palewski woke the next morning to a bright blue sky and stomach cramps, he groaned, and sweated, and half supposed that he was going to die, a friendless stranger in a strange city. He would pass from the record unremembered, laid beneath a stone-if anyone gave him one-inscribed with a fictitious name. If he lived, he thought, he might at least have been able to scrape together an acquaintance with the contessa, even, perhaps, to become a friend. But she would cut him when he died, for sure.

Such thoughts-the heat, his tangled sheets, the shouts of healthy men passing on the canal outside-served to oppress his spirits. He was unaccountably plagued by a dim and dreamlike memory of finding a strange woman in his bed, too, which worried him. Was he losing his reason, as well?

His hand fluttered to his head.

Then the door opened and that very woman seemed to come in, neatly dressed, carrying a steaming bowl of chicken soup.

“Ecco!” she said. Behold!

Palewski scrambled up beneath his covers, revived by the smell of the broth. The woman who brought it in was plump and dark; she had little hands and a face as sweet as a Madonna’s, with liquid brown eyes, a pert nose, and a dimple in the middle of her chin. She drew up a chair to the bed and sat down.

He looked at her. She dipped the spoon into the soup. He made a weak effort to reach for the spoon, but she swept it back and tut-tutted so that he lay back against the pillows and let her bring the spoon to his lips.

If the smell of soup had revived him, the soup itself perfected the cure.

A touch of sun! A headache, perhaps a chill: nothing more. Of course-that ridiculous expedition to the Armenians, across the lagoon in the heat of the day! No wonder he had been out of sorts. And then fizzy wine on an empty stomach. He’d woken up hungry, that was all.

And now this wonderful girl had cured him. He turned his head.

“I don’t know your name?”

“Maria,” she replied with a smile.

Palewski reached out and put his hand on her knee. “Maria,” he croaked. “What a lovely name! And do you know, Maria? I feel much, much better now.”