The Bellini Card

7

The sun rose from the sea in a veil of mist so fine that in twenty minutes it would burn up and be gone.

Commissario Brunelli took the papers between his thumb and forefinger and dropped them into his satchel without a second glance. The aged pilot grunted and gave him a narrow, toothless smile.

“For the friends?”

“For the friends,” Brunelli agreed. What the Austrians made of them he had no idea. Nor did he much care. If they combed the passenger lists for foreign spies or political exiles, that was their affair: they could do the work, if it mattered to them so much. His own mind, he felt, was on higher things.

In particular on the sea bass that Luigi, at the docks, had promised him as the customary favor.

The ship creaked slightly in the current. Brunelli shook hands with the captain, a trim and stocky Greek with tight white curls he remembered having seen before, and went to the rail.

Scorlotti was waiting for him in the boat.

“Anything new, Commissario?”

“No, Scorlotti. Nothing new.” When would the boy learn? he wondered. This wasn’t Chioggia, this was Venice. Venice had seen it all before. “Drop me at the docks, will you?”

Scorlotti yawned and grinned. Then he took up the oars and began to row them across the smooth waters of the lagoon.

By the time Palewski reached the deck, Commissario Brunelli was nothing more than a speck of color laid, so it might have seemed, by the tip of a brush on the loveliest canvas ever painted by the hand of man.

“So this is Venice,” Palewski muttered, shading his eyes against the shards of sunlight bouncing off the sea. “How ghastly.”