The Bellini Card

77

Apart from the cauldron, and the copper she had used for polenta the night before, Signora Contarini had an iron frying pan, a milk pan, and two earthenware pots-one was tall, with a narrow mouth, the other a broad dish, as in the fable of the stork and the fox.

Yashim decided to avoid the copper: it was too much the signora’s own, an altar to a household god.

He also decided, partly for the same reason, not to use her knife. The small kitchen knife that Malakian had given him, the damascene blade infernally bright even in the dim light of the signora’s kitchen, felt eager and balanced. It was a link to his world, too, away from this strange city of unbelievers and canals. Yashim had spent several days in Venice, and he had been confused, much of the time, by the mix of what was familiar and what was foreign.

He poured a few handfuls of chickpeas into the tall pot, covered them in water, and pushed the pot to the back of the fireplace.

Palewski seemed to have read his thoughts. “I never told you, Yash, but Venice made me ill for a day or so.”

“Ill?” Should he use the polenta board to chop onions? He thought not.

“Giddy. Dropped me off the map. When I got here I thought-Cracow. Rynek Glowny. Colors, shape of the windows, carved stone doors. Baby Gothic, I don’t know-we had it more grown up. And all these churches. Nuns-even in gondolas!” He laughed. “And then-then it tilted the other way, and everything I looked at felt like Istanbul. Sliding about on the water, and Armenians and Greeks, and sometimes the domes, too, with their lead and their curves. So the next time I saw those nuns-they reminded me of girls in chadors, taking a caique up the Golden Horn.”

Yashim’s eye fell on the table. The signora, he noticed, scrubbed it every day with lye and ashes. The signora might not notice if he used it-carefully-as a chopping board.

“Giddy,” Palewski said again, as if the word pleased him. “I was looking at a beautiful Koran, in the Armenian monastery, and I felt-giddy. Only legible book in the place, as far as I could see. They got it from my old neighbor’s family-the Aspis.”

The man on the pallet turned his head and Yashim saw his eyes were open wide. His skin was drawn tight against the skull, but his eyes were big and dark and unafraid.

Yashim smiled. “Palewski, our friend needs water, and some soup.”

He turned to his baskets. Palewski held a glass to the young man’s lips and heard him drink.

The onion was green; Yashim took off its top and tail, then chopped it into halves. He sliced the halves.

“I don’t know how you can think of food,” Palewski remarked. “After this morning.”

Yashim shrugged. He dropped a lump of butter into the cauldron and pushed it up against the fire. For a few moments he handled the cooking irons, trying to work out which did what, before he tipped the onion into the cauldron and lifted the handle onto a notch in the bar.

He admired the arrangement of irons, adding them to his stock of dreams. Yashim had always dreamed of a yali by the Bosphorus, with water reflected on his ceiling. Better water than here, he thought: Venice, at least in summer, stank.

He glanced across to where Palewski was feeding the man who looked like an emaciated child.

But the man will live, he thought. He knows who killed Eletro.

And I know, too.

He paused, touching the rim of the cauldron.

Not his name. Not his whereabouts. But I know what he is.

He stirred the onion with a spoon and frowned.

What I don’t know yet is: Why?