The Bellini Card

5

Yashim had not seen the sultan for some years before his elevation to the throne. He remembered the skinny boy with feverish eyes who had stood pale and alert at his father’s side. He expected him to have grown and filled out, the way children do to their elders’ constant and naive astonishment, yet the young man seated on a French chair with his legs under a table did not, at a glance, appear to have changed at all. He was almost preternaturally thin and bony, with awkward shoulders and long wrists concealed-but not made elegant-by the arts of European tailors.

Yashim bowed deeply and approached the sultan. Only his brows, he noticed, had developed: heavy brows above bleary, anxious eyes.

The sultan screwed up his face and opened his mouth as if to scream, then whisked a handkerchief from the desk and sneezed into it loudly and unhappily.

Yashim blinked. In the Balkans, people said you sneezed whenever you told a lie.

“Our gracious parent always spoke highly of you, Yashim.” Yashim wondered if the compliment was hollow. Mahmut had been a tough old beast. “As our esteemed grandmother continues to do.”

Yashim cast his eyes down. The valide, Mahmut’s French-born mother, was his oldest friend in the harem.

“My padishah is gracious,” he said.

“Hmm.” The sultan gave a little grunt. It was the same grunt as the old sultan’s, though higher pitched.

“Our ears have received a report that concerns the honor and memory of our house,” the sultan began, a little stiffly. Mahmut would have spoken the same words as if they came from his belly, not his head.

“Does Bellini mean anything to you?”

With a sultan one does not gape like a fish. The room, Yashim now noticed, was papered in the European fashion.

“No, my padishah. I regret-”

“Bellini was a painter.” The sultan waved a bony hand. “It was a long time ago, in the age of the Conqueror.”

Yashim cocked his head. He remembered now the man who had once designed a bridge across the Golden Horn: Leonardo. Leonardo da Vinci. A Florentine.

“From Italy, my padishah?”

“Bellini was the greatest painter of his age in Europe. The Conqueror summoned him to Istanbul. He made some drawings and paintings. Of-well, people. With colors from life.” The color seemed to have risen in the young sultan’s face as well. “He was a master of portraiture.” He pronounced the word well, with a French accent, Yashim noticed.

Yashim thought of the tulips he had rescued from the sledgehammer: they were very pure. But to paint people? No wonder the young man was embarrassed.

“The Conqueror desired that it should be so,” Abdulmecid added, his blush subsiding as he spoke. “Bellini rested at the Conqueror’s court for two years. I am told that he decorated parts of the Topkapi Palace-fresco, it is called-with scenes that the sultan Bayezid later removed.”

Yashim nodded. Mehmet the Conqueror’s successor, Bayezid, was a very pious man. If this Bellini painted people, Sultan Bayezid would have been shocked. He would not have wanted such blasphemy in his palace.

The young sultan laid his bony hand on the papers on his desk.

“Bellini painted a portrait of the Conqueror,” he said.

Yashim blinked. A portrait? Mehmet the Conqueror had been only twenty-one years old when he plucked the Red Apple of Constantinople from the Christians in 1453. An Islamic hero, who became heir to the Byzantine Roman empire of the east. Master of the Orthodox Christian world, he made his empire stretch from the shores of the Black Sea to the crusted ridges of the Balkans, appointing Christian patriarchs with their staff of office, bringing the chief rabbi to the city destined, as all men said, to be the navel of the world.

And he had summoned an Italian painter to his court.

“The portrait, my padishah-it still exists?”

The sultan cocked his chin and stared steadily at Yashim. “I don’t know,” he said quietly.

There was a silence in the great room. As it lengthened, Yashim felt a shiver pass up his spine and ruffle the hairs on the back of his neck. Millions of people lived out their lives in the shadow of the padishah. From the deserts of Arabia to the desolate borders of the Russian steppe, touched or untouched by his commands, paying the taxes he levied, soldiering in the armies that he raised, dreaming-some of them-of a gilded monarch by the sea. Yashim had seen their paintings of the Bosphorus in Balkan manor houses and Crimean palaces; he had seen old men weep by river and mountain when the old sultan passed away.

He had spent ten minutes in the company of a youth who blushed like a girl, and dabbed his nose, and confessed to something he didn’t know. The padishah.

It was the padishah who spoke. “The painting, like the frescoes, disappeared after Mehmet’s death. It is said that my pious ancestor had them sold in the bazaar. With that in mind, what Muslim would seek to buy what the sultan himself had pronounced forbidden?”

The word was harem. Yashim nodded.

“The portrait has never been seen since,” the sultan added. “But Bellini was a Venetian. The best painter in Venice, in his day.” His eyelids flickered; he brought the handkerchief to his face, but no sneeze came. “Now we have word that the painting has been seen.”

“In Venice, my padishah.”

The sultan tapped his fingers on the table and then, abruptly, clambered to his feet. “You speak Italian, of course?”

“Yes, my padishah. I speak Italian.”

“I want you to find the painting, Yashim. I want you to buy it for me.”

Yashim bowed. “The painting is for sale, my padishah?”

The sultan looked surprised. “The Venetians are traders, Yashim. Everything in Venice is for sale.”