The Bellini Card Read Free

east. Master of the Orthodox Christian world, he made his empire stretch from the shores of the Black Sea to the crusted ridges of the Balkans, appointing Christian patriarchs with their staff of office, bringing the chief rabbi to the city destined, as all men said, to be the navel of the world.
    And he had summoned an Italian painter to his court.
    “The portrait, my padishah—it still exists?”
    The sultan cocked his chin and stared steadily at Yashim. “I don’t know,” he said quietly.
    There was a silence in the great room. As it lengthened, Yashim felt a shiver pass up his spine and ruffle the hairs on the back of his neck. Millions of people lived out their lives in the shadow of the padishah. From the deserts of Arabia to the desolate borders of the Russian steppe, touched or untouched by his commands, paying the taxes he levied, soldiering in the armies that he raised, dreaming—some of them—of a gilded monarch by the sea. Yashim had seen their paintings of the Bosphorus in Balkan manor houses and Crimean palaces; he had seen old men weep by river and mountain when the old sultan passed away.
    He had spent ten minutes in the company of a youth who blushed like a girl, and dabbed his nose, and confessed to something he didn’t know. The padishah.
    It was the padishah who spoke. “The painting, like the frescoes, disappeared after Mehmet’s death. It is said that my pious ancestor hadthem sold in the bazaar. With that in mind, what Muslim would seek to buy what the sultan himself had pronounced forbidden?”
    The word was
harem
. Yashim nodded.
    “The portrait has never been seen since,” the sultan added. “But Bellini was a Venetian. The best painter in Venice, in his day.” His eyelids flickered; he brought the handkerchief to his face, but no sneeze came. “Now we have word that the painting has been seen.”
    “In Venice, my padishah.”
    The sultan tapped his fingers on the table and then, abruptly, clambered to his feet. “You speak Italian, of course?”
    “Yes, my padishah. I speak Italian.”
    “I want you to find the painting, Yashim. I want you to buy it for me.”
    Yashim bowed. “The painting is for sale, my padishah?”
    The sultan looked surprised. “The Venetians are traders, Yashim. Everything in Venice is for sale.”

 
    Y ASHIM took a caïque across the Horn, directing it to drop him farther around the shore, at Tophane. He did not want to see the broken fountain again, or to witness the felling of that magnificent old plane. He made his way uphill, through the narrow alleys of the port; at night, this place was dangerous, but in the afternoon sun it felt almost deserted. A cat slunk low on its belly and disappeared under a broken-down green gate; two dogs lay motionless in a patch of shade.
    He found the steps and climbed briskly up the steep slopes of Pera toward the Polish residency.
    Most of the European ambassadors had already decamped for thesummer. One by one they retreated from the heat of Pera, where the dust sifted invisibly and relentlessly off the unmade streets. They went to villa gardens up the Bosphorus, to conduct their intrigues and negotiations among the bougainvillea and the hyssop. Some of these summer palaces were said to be magnificent—the Russian and the British could be glimpsed, cool and white among the trees, from a caïque gliding down the Bosphorus. The French, the Prussians, the Swedes all had their summer palaces. Even the Sardinian consul took rooms in the Greek fishing village of Ortaköy.
    Stanislaw Palewski, Polish Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, remained in town.
    It wasn’t that Palewski felt the need to remain close to the court to which he was accredited. Far from it: the ordinary burdens of diplomatic life rested lightly on his shoulders. No frowning monarch or jingoistic assembly issued him daunting instructions; no labyrinthine negotiations were ever set afoot by the Polish Chancellery. Poland had no monarch and no assembly. There