The Bellini Card

78

Brunelli waited much of the afternoon for Vosper’s Ottoman servant, but when he did not appear at four o’clock he decided to take another walk.

The beggar must have followed his instructions. Certainly the American had disappeared.

Giving his apartment over to a pasha’s servant.

Brunelli knew one thing the stadtmeister and Vosper did not know: that Signor Brett claimed to have been in Istanbul before he arrived in Venice.

Brunelli walked on, taking turns as random as his thoughts.

He found himself on the Rialto bridge.

There was a link, he knew, between the two events: the pasha and the mysterious American.

But the American seemed to have vanished into thin air. He might have left Venice altogether. And as Signor Brett took his leave, a pasha’s servant made his appearance-in exactly the same place.

Vosper, of course, had never met Brett. He couldn’t identify the man he was looking for, on such an absurd charge, by sight at all.

But even Vosper, surely, couldn’t have believed that Brett was a pasha’s servant?

He turned a corner and reached the Zattere, with its long view of the Giudecca and the decayed wharfs, dilapidated houses, and old churches lining the waterfront.

Vosper, obviously, was capable of believing anything, but why would Brett spin him such an extraordinary story?

Brunelli stopped. He burst out laughing.

If Brett wanted to shake Vosper off his tail, what better than a lie so huge, so wildly inspired, that Vosper would be forced to swallow it whole?

If Brunelli had thought for a moment that Vosper and the stadtmeister were right, and that Brett was a suspect, he would have had no hesitation in joining them in the hunt.

But he had met the man, and he trusted his own intuition perfectly. That dimpled trollop Maria had backed him, too. Brett was crooked, somehow, but he wasn’t a killer.

He had given Vosper the slip. He’d convinced the stadtmeister that the bureaucracy his paymasters were so famous for had finally become unhinged, and the sky was falling on his head.

Brunelli grinned.

He liked Brett, and he’d like to talk to him for a while.

He thought he knew where to find him, too.