The Bellini Card

34

Stanislaw Palewski closed the door on the amiable commissario and turned back to his other uninvited guest. She looked very pretty with the light in her hair.

“I am in your debt, Maria,” he said. “I’m afraid this sounds like a terrible business.”

Maria nodded with a smile. The first rule, she had been told, was to keep her gentleman in good spirits. Until the policeman came she had been doing rather well, she thought.

“We could take a little walk,” she suggested.

They walked south, arm in arm toward the Zattere. The canals were broader in these parts; the pavements were more even. Here and there rampant roses spilled out overhead from walled gardens. Beggars sat in doorways in the sun, mumbling for alms. Through open windows came the sounds of people eating, the bright clank of crockery and knives, somebody somewhere playing a flute.

Palewski had spent almost half his life in Istanbul, and now the pressure of a woman’s arm on his, the rhythm of her smaller steps-first awkward and then agreeable-the musical sound of her prattle (it was, when one stopped to listen, scarcely more), drew him unexpectedly back to another country, long ago.

He felt her hand on the small of his back.

“Are you all right, mio caro?”

Palewski squeezed his eyes at the bridge of his nose. In a blinding moment he had seen another woman in his mind’s eye and felt the pressure of her arm on his.

“Forgive me, Maria.”

“Come. We’re there,” Maria said. They turned the corner and there was the Zattere, with the long, low silhouette of the Giudecca across the water, the church of San Giorgio, and the barges’ brown sails hanging in the summer air.

“Tell me, Maria,” Palewski said. “Where are you from?”

She squeezed his arm. “From Venice, silly.”

“But last night-how did you come?”

Maria nodded. “It was la Signora Ruggerio. She said I should.”

Palewski laughed weakly. Ruggerio, of course.

“I’m glad you did,” he said.

Maria squeezed his arm. “Can we have an ice cream?” she said brightly.