unruffled surface of the Horn.
“Soon, I hope, the time will be favorable for me to visit the esteemed pasha once again?” He wanted to know how long Resid planned to keep him under wraps. He wanted to visit the valide.
The young pasha nodded. “I will send for you, Yashim. Two weeks from now, I imagine, would be auspicious for us both. I shall be very pleased to see you.”
He waved a hand at the boatmen, who dipped their oars. “Seeing you, my friend, has given me great pleasure.” He gave a nod, and the caique pulled away.
Yashim watched them go. Two more weeks! He gave a signal to his boatman. To his surprise the man was looking at him with something like anger.
“You should have told him about us, efendi,” he said bitterly. He glanced over Yashim’s shoulder. “You should at least have asked him to save the tree.”
“Do you think it would have made a difference?”
The boatman looked at Yashim in his plain brown cloak, then up the Horn at the crimson caique.
“Nothing surprises Spyro anymore,” he said.
20
Commissario Brunelli left his house in Dorsoduro early and walked to the traghetto, where he stopped for a caffe corretto. On days like these, when his son was more than usually difficult and rebellious over breakfast, the cafe between home and the Procuratie was his single guilty pleasure. That morning he had been presented with a scowling boy, muttering darkly under his breath, all thanks to a spot of unpleasantness at La Fenice the night before.
He sighed and leaned his elbows on the counter. La Fenice was the only public place in the city where the barrier between Austrians and Venetians was regularly breached. Austrians occupied the boxes and Venetians pointedly arranged themselves in the stalls, but at least for a few hours the two sides shared the same space and applauded the same artists. Trouble, when it began, generally occurred afterward as the opera lovers streamed out of the tiny theater onto the constricted quay.
Last night’s affair, if Paolo was to be believed, had involved an Austrian officer commandeering a gondola reserved by a Venetian family. An altercation had arisen, in which the gondoliers themselves had joined, before the officer, according to Paolo’s story, had been driven off with his lady friend, to the universal hissing of the Venetian crowd. No doubt there was another side to the story, as Brunelli had attempted to explain to his son. Even Austrian officers could make a mistake.
He stirred two sugars into his little cup. Paolo pretended to see all Austrians as pigheaded triumphalists, riding roughshod over the sentiments of the people. At the same time he imbued them with complete omniscience, as if any slight must be carefully and brilliantly contrived.
“The boy is not rational!” he had appealed to his wife, after Paolo had heard him out in glowering silence across the table.
His wife had ruffled his hair. “He is a boy,” she had remarked.
“Well, I’m off,” Brunelli had said, scraping back his chair. “I have some oppression to carry out.”
To make matters worse, Finkel would be in a bad mood today.
Brunelli took as long over his coffee as he dared, then crammed his hat onto his head and went out to find a gondola.
Twenty minutes later he entered the Procuratie beneath the gilded double eagle of his ultimate employer, the Emperor Francis II. Under the eagle, as he reminded himself, lay a lion of St. Mark, patron saint of the city of Venice, carved in stone.
Stadtmeister Gustav Finkel arrived fifteen minutes later than Brunelli. He was a short man with a big paunch, a red face, and white mutton-chop whiskers. He marched down the corridor to his office and shut the door heavily behind him. Half an hour later, as usual, he put the last of his papers aside and called for the commissarios’ reports.
Later in the day, an hour at most before lunch, he might call someone in for a review. He liked to keep these sessions short.
“So, Brunelli, it looks like your man was killed by a common thug. A robbery gone wrong. Is that also your conclusion?”
Brunelli considered this surprising assessment. “A common thug, Stadtmeister?”
Finkel leaned across his desk with a pained look on his face. “Let us not delude ourselves, Commissario,” he began, using the phrase that had become a standing joke at the Procuratie. “Venice may not be a city associated with violence, but there is a low and persistent level of insolence, insubordination, whatever, that left unchecked can all too easily lead in this sort of direction. I’m afraid that people are very like children,” he added.
Brunelli nodded. The stadtmeister had just two years to go before he retired to the muddy Mitteleuropaisch spa town in which he had chosen to spend his declining years. If the art dealer’s murder could be linked vaguely to the affront to an officer outside La Fenice, and various similar incidents, then his final report-which would never, in all probability, be read-could be filed and forgotten.
“Like children,” the stadtmeister repeated. “And let us not delude ourselves, these things are more likely to happen late at night, are they not? Well?”
“You mean in the dark? I suppose that’s true, Stadtmeister.”
“Yes, of course. Take last night-an ugly scene outside the opera. I shall have to report it, I’m afraid. If I had my way, I would get everyone into their own homes by ten o’clock. Then we’d see little more of this tiresome behavior.”
Even murder, Brunelli reflected, could be swallowed if it was ground down small.
“You are going to recommend a curfew, Stadtmeister?”
“We shall see,” the Austrian returned cautiously. “In the meantime, is there anyone you actively suspect of killing your man?”
“Not yet.”
“Hmmph. You should check the port register. See if any boats have sailed in the past day or so. It could so easily have been a sailor, you know.”
Brunelli said nothing. The port, like the low-level rebelliousness of the people, was one of Finkel’s treasured explanations for almost anything untoward-blithely disregarding the fact that Venice, these days, scarcely was a port at all. Austrian harbor dues and import duties, along with the neglect of the channels, had seen to that.
“Will that be all, Stadtmeister?”
The Austrian glanced involuntarily at the clock. “That will be all for now, thank you, Commissario,” he said. He opened a big ledger on his desk and bent his head over it, gripping his whiskers in either hand.
Brunelli bowed and retreated. The ledger did not fool him much. In five minutes Stadtmeister Finkel would be going down the corridor to his gondola, and lunch.
21
Yashim took the knife from the table and hefted it in the palm of his hand. Years of sharpening had taken the blade down a fraction of an inch. He had asked the sharpener to take out the slight bell where the curve met the straight, and the knife weighed equably between his fingers. The grip, he supposed, was new.
He had known what he wanted to do the moment he saw the artichokes in George’s stall. The appearance of the first tiny artichokes always made up, he felt, for the disappearance of asparagus.
“Is summer!” George waved a bunch of the greeny-purple artichokes under his nose. “Not more to wait, Yashim efendi. You wants?”
Yashim, who felt he’d been waiting weeks already if not for summer then at least for Palewski to come home, seized a dozen. He bought broad beans, fresh onions, lemons, and a fistful of dill and parsley.
