The contessa, according to Antonio the footman, was indisposed. Palewski had expected as much. Barbieri’s death-well, his murder-would have upset her.
Palewski took lunch at an outdoor table in one of the little restaurants off the Rialto, from where he could look across the Grand Canal to the row of palazzi that lined the opposite bank.
On the whole, he felt, it was a pretty but unsatisfactory view, in which the eye was invited to glide, like a gondola, along a single plane, a view that lacked depth. Even the water served only to reflect the wall of pretty color overhead.
He was used to the dynamic jumble of the Istanbul streets, where covered balconies jutted out over the street and whole buildings were jettied forward on the upper floors; sometimes, whole rows of masonry were made to fold in and out like a concertina. In Venice, builders gave their attention to the windows, carving them into extraordinary shapes, and to the surfacing of the walls, but indentation was a mere suggestion, a sort of trick of the light.
Venice was theater in so many ways: even its buildings looked like painted flats.
He sipped his prosecco and tried, for the twentieth time, to make sense of his position. He had made no progress whatever on the Bellini hunt. If the sultan’s information was correct, and the painting really had reappeared in Venice, it was a very slow sale. Barbieri had seemed to hint at the possibility of theft, but he never mentioned the portrait of Mehmet II.
If Barbieri knew of anyone trying to sell the portrait, he would presumably have offered to negotiate-on commission-for Palewski to buy it. But he hadn’t offered; therefore, he knew nothing about it. And now, bizarrely, he was dead-just like the art dealer whose corpse Palewski had seen floating in the canal on the morning of his arrival.
It was a coincidence that two art dealers should die, in curious circumstances, within a week of each other.
At the back of his mind lay one uncomfortable thought: Was it possible that the coincidence extended to his own arrival in Venice?
The waiter delivered a plate of frutti di mare: oysters, clams, prawns, and a half lobster. Palewski downed the oysters hurriedly, relishing the tang of the sea and hoping they would help clear his mind.
He would have liked to speak to someone, thrash it out. He thought of Yashim, drumming his heels in Istanbul: how he wished Yashim were here now with him! It had all seemed pretty simple when they said goodbye. The Brett plan-the printed cards, the expeditions to tailors and hatters and bootmakers on La Grande Rue de Pera. Outwitting the Habsburg bureaucracy had seemed like the easiest, most satisfactory thing in the world. A few weeks in Venice; a few introductions; a deal, or not, as it might turn out-and basta! as the Italians say: home again.
Instead of which he’d had murders, the police, Compston and his friends, a bout of fever…
And, he thought, something else, too: a sense of being not quite in command of his own destiny. Like an actor in a play, speaking lines that were not, really, his own.
He grabbed the lobster and stabbed it with a fork to pull away the succulent white tail.
He had known nothing about the fellow in the canal: the man was already dead when he arrived.
He squeezed a wedge of lemon over the cold lobster.
As for Barbieri, they had met once, twice, allowing for the brief encounter at the contessa’s palazzo. If someone, for whatever reason, had tried to prevent Palewski from learning about the Bellini-well, that made no sense. Barbieri truly knew nothing, and who would want to keep him from making an offer on the painting? A painting that, he was increasingly certain, did not exist.
Which brought him back to his own position in the city. The boys from the Istanbul embassies were safe on the high seas. It would be a week, at least, before any of them could report to the Austrians in Istanbul, and another week before the information would reach the Austrian authorities in Venice. Maria and her courtesans he would simply have to trust. As for that commissario, Brunelli, it was hard to judge if-and of what quite-he was suspicious.
Two more weeks: he owed Yashim that much, at any rate. After that, it would be dangerous to remain in Venice. And if, by then, he had failed to turn up anything on Bellini, it might be said that the picture was not available or did not exist.
A man Palewski had never seen before dropped suddenly into a chair beside him.
“Signor Brett,” the stranger said. “I understand you are looking for a Bellini.”
Palewski started. “As a matter of fact, I am,” he said.
“In which case, signore, I may be able to help.”