The Bellini Card

83

Much later, when Brunelli had gone home and the Contarini family had gone to bed, still drowsily exclaiming their surprise: Raw onion! Fish in a coat! Lasagna without pasta! — Yashim and Palewski drew closer to the fire.

“Tell me more about the contessa,” Yashim suggested.

Palewski shrugged. “I haven’t much to tell. Except that she’s very beautiful, she fights foil, and some ancestor of hers was with Morosini in the Peloponnese. She’s a surprise, Yashim. Something dangerous about her, maybe. She won’t marry either, I don’t know why.”

He repeated the details of the family tragedy that the old lady at the Ca’ d’Istria had given him.

“Her father was the last Venetian bailo in Istanbul. Hence the Koran. And she was born there, as it happens.”

Yashim raised an eyebrow. “And she won’t see you, you say?”

Palewski shook his head. “I’m not even sure she’s there. The last time I tried no one even came to the door.”

Yashim prodded the embers with a stick.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said slowly. “Venice is a theater, you say. Perhaps the time has come to take a more theatrical approach.”

“What do you mean?”

“Once, the doge married the sea.”

“Napoleon burned the bucintoro,” Palewski pointed out.

“Quite so. I wasn’t imagining a return of the doge. But I’ve been talking to Signor Contarini. The bargee.”

Palewski looked surprised. “What does Signor Contarini have to do with it?”

“Everything. Venice has been starved of entertainment for far too long. What I imagine,” said Yashim, sketching his plan in the smoke from the signora’s fire, “is a visit. A visit,” he added, yawning, “from a lost world.”

Palewski rubbed his hands across his face and stretched his feet to the fire. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll see.”