The Bellini Card by Jason Goodwin Read Free Book Online Page A

dust on their wings. With an exclamation of disgust he lunged at the nearest skylight.
    The room was in disarray: tangled bedding, empty bottles, lumps of bread were strewn across the floor. The easel that normally stood beneath the window was overturned. Only the box of paints and the jar of brushes were in place. In the middle of the room, naked on a high stool, sat the Croat himself: waxy, immobile, his eyes staring on vacancy. His thin shoulders were flung back. His back was straight.
    Popi’s first thought was that he must be dead.
    He stepped closer. The Croat continued to stare. Only when Popi was close enough to smell the man’s skin did he realize that his lips were moving, minutely, horribly, like hairless caterpillars.
    Popi took a step back: the Croat, alive, repelled him more than the notion of the Croat dead.
    Popi was not unimaginative. He could tell, for instance, that the Croat was somewhere where Popi and the drink and the stench and poverty of his life could not reach him. He sat like a prince upon his throne, issuing soundless orders, perhaps, to the invisible minions who flitted before his glassy stare.
    But Popi was unsympathetic.
    He snapped his fingers in front of the unseeing eyes.
    Nothing happened.
    “I’ll bring you around,” he muttered. He took a drag on his cigar, lowered the glowing tip until it reached the level of the Croat’s naked belly, and stubbed it out.
    Way below, in the street, some people thought they heard a high-pitched scream, but the gulls were wheeling overhead, too, and they couldn’t be sure.

 
    Y ASHIM was reading the latest novel from Paris, a rather improbable account of the life of Ali Pasha of Janina lent to him by his old friend the valide, the new sultan’s grandmother. The subject matter had taken him by surprise. Yashim was used to discovering Parisian life. Reading
Ali Pasha
, he felt, was rather like peering through a keyhole, only to see an eye looking at you from the other side.
    “I find this Monsieur Dumas
sympathique
,” the valide had told him. “His father was a French marquis. His mother came from Santo Domingo.”
    Yashim nodded. The valide herself was born on another Caribbean island, Martinique. The extraordinary story of her arrival in the harem of the Ottoman sultan, and of her inexorable rise to the position of valide, or queen mother, would have challenged the imagination of Monsieur Dumas himself. *
    “The novel is a bagatelle, Yashim,” the valide added. “I’m afraid it kept me up all night.”
    Yashim found the novel riddled with falsifications but also surprisingly energetic. It was certainly unlike anything he had read before. He wanted to discuss it with the valide, but a visit was out of the question. Even though she did not live in the palace of the sultan, his presence was sure to be noted. The sultan expected him to be in Venice, on the track of the Bellini.
    Resid was right to hint that the sultan’s infatuation with a painting he had never seen would pass as he grew into the responsibilities of office. Yet the deception bothered him. Not merely the disloyalty, if it was such. What mattered more was the complicity he shared with Resid Pasha and the vagueness of Resid’s support.
    What if, after all, Resid believed he had gone to Venice?
    It was also an irksome restriction: he felt in a sort of limbo in his own city. He read, he went to the hammam, he cooked and ate, but in his heart he knew he was simply marking time. Two Thursdays came and went without the customary dinner he was used to preparing for his friend Palewski; the second time he went out to a
locanta
in Pera and found himself ordering an old palace dish,
ekili köfte
, meatballs in a sauce of egg and lemon. Several times, too, he found himself outside the Polish Residency, and on these occasions he unfailingly went up the crumbling steps and knocked on the door, to see if Marta had any news.
    Only his visit to Malakian, in the Grand Bazaar, had eased his