with both hands. Having watched it for a few moments, she went to the table and began to sift through her stores. She shook out a bunch of parsley, folded it, and chopped it finely into a wooden bowl. She cracked a clove from a bulb of garlic, peeled it swiftly, and with little movements of her forefinger sliced it first one way and then the next, before slipping it over and paring it into fragments.
She lifted the lid of a clay jar and fished out a few capers, which she added to the sauce. From another jar she speared a pickled cucumber on the point of her knife and sliced that, too, as she had chopped the garlic.
She put her thumb over the neck of a small green bottle and shook a few drops of vinegar into the bowl. A pinch of salt, a round of pepper, and then she began to stir the mixture, adding a thin thread of oil from an earthenware flask until the sauce felt right.
“There must be something I can do to help,” Yashim said. “Perhaps I could stir the polenta?”
With her eye on the sauce the signora gave an amused grunt: the Moor, stir her polenta?
“I make it come la seta,” she said. Like silk.
She poured a jug of water into the copper standing beside the fire.
“Talk to your friend, signore.”
Yashim moved away politely: he had no wish to put the eye on his hostess’s polenta. Maria was sitting by the window, stitching her torn dress. She was wearing the blue bodice and patched gray skirt she had put on before she knew they would be having company.
Yashim glanced back to see the signora threading an endless stream of yellow maize from one hand. The other worked a wooden spoon in slow, firm circles. He smiled and turned his back: in Trabzon, where he was born, the women made kuymak in the same way.
Perhaps they worshipped the same gods, these women, as they performed the daily miracle of transforming the baser elements into silk, the rarest luxury the world could afford.
Maria raised her head from her sewing. “Some days,” she said in a near whisper, “we hang an anchovy on a string, above the table. Then we each rub the anchovy on the polenta-and it tastes so good!”
Her mother leaned over the copper and examined her work. She had finished pouring the maize but she continued to stir, slowly, with her free hand on the rim of the pot as the polenta gradually stiffened.
“Maria! Fetch the board.”
Maria set aside her sewing and jumped up. She took what looked like a little bench down from two pegs in the wall and set it before the fire.
Yashim watched, in spite of himself: the signora’s face was rapt as she tilted the pan and the polenta glided out across the board, as smooth as yellow silk.
Maria was putting plates and forks around the table.
“Maria!” Her mother hissed and nodded to the wooden chest. There followed angry words in a thick dialect that neither Yashim nor Palewski could properly understand.
Maria blushed and cleared the table again. Then she fetched a fresh cloth from the chest and shook it out over the table.
Yashim smiled at the signora and she eyed him back, one eyebrow faintly raised. Yes, he thought, we understand each other, Moor and Venetian, in the simple duties of ceremony and propriety. The table had needed to be dressed.
The cloth sparkled, and it seemed as though the room were not the mean, low-ceilinged hovel it had been but brighter, orderly, hospitable. Even the food smelled richer.
Maria set the table. Her mother skimmed the stock.
Maria’s father, a whippet-thin man who worked on the boats and had been enjoying a puff of cigar smoke with his friends in the yard, joined them with handshakes and curt welcomes.
They ate the beef sliced, on a mattress of polenta swimming with good stock, with spoonfuls of the salsa verde, in silence and appreciation. Maria’s little brothers and sisters sat with uncanny stillness, having been bawled in from the neighboring alleys. Except for the oldest boy, a good-looking lad with Maria’s tangle of black hair and rolled shirtsleeves, they had shaved heads and huge round eyes, which they turned on Palewski and Yashim, but particularly Yashim, as they silently spooned up their polenta.
Finally a little girl, more wriggly than the rest-she could scarcely have been more than seven, Yashim supposed-broke the silence to ask him if it was true that in Moor-land nobody had to go to church.
“I think that God would be sad,” Yashim said thoughtfully, “if nobody went to thank him, now and then. For food like this, and children like yourselves, and a sunny day like today.”
“Is he sad in your country, when nobody goes?”
“Not at all, signorina. Because some people do go to church, and others go to mosque, and some people go to the synagogue. So he hears people thanking him in lots of different voices, like yours, and mine, and your mother’s, and our friend Palewski’s here, and that makes him four times as happy.”
She looked at him again, a little dubiously, and didn’t reply.
And much later, when everyone else was asleep, and the two friends sat together by the embers of the fire, Yashim spoke about the calligrapher, Metin Yamaluk, and the missing book of Bellini drawings, and how his instinct had warned him that there was something wrong.
“He was a pious old man. He died with a look of terror on his face.”
He told him, too, about Resid’s cryptic remarks. “He knew something was going on in Venice. Something dangerous.”
Palewski for his part explained about the contessa’s party, and the death of Barbieri, and how Alfredo had been his last hope.
Yashim bit his cheek. “Yes-and I wonder how this Alfredo knew what you were looking for.”
“Rumors, Yashim. Speculation was born on the Rialto.” His chair creaked. “Everyone knows something and is sure of nothing. Except that I miss my bed,” Palewski murmured, pulling the blanket up beneath his chin. In a minute he was asleep, legs outstretched, his feet on the hearth like a soldier on campaign.
Yashim took longer to settle. Palewski had sketched for him a cast of characters: some were frauds, some were dead, and some, he was sure, knew more than they were letting on.
71
The signora was sweeping around his feet.
“You sleep like a child, signore-a big man, as you are!” she said, when Palewski opened an eye. “Well, Maria will be down presently.”
Her husband had gone out, taking Yashim with him. “He rows the barges at San Luca,” the signora explained. “Your friend the Moor said to tell you, signore, you should stay where you are.”
The importance of staying put was not lost on Palewski: the police might still be watching his flat, and he had no wish to run into Alfredo, either.
Maria came down, yawning and pretty in a bodice none too tightly buttoned. She and Palewski shared a dish of grilled polenta, while she told him in greater detail about her ordeal.
“They were Venetians, too!” she concluded in a tone of wonder. “My mother doesn’t understand it.”
Yashim returned half an hour later. He was carrying several of the signora’s string bags, crammed with provisions, as well as a change of linen for Palewski. He was also wearing a turban again, though nobody seemed to notice. Palewski remembered a gang of building workers he had recently seen near the Campo San Polo. They, too, had been wearing turbans-though theirs were noticeably less clean and white.
“The signora has agreed to let me cook tonight,” Yashim said happily, biting into a slab of polenta. He took a yellow envelope out of his pocket. “In the meantime, you have an invitation, my old friend. I picked it up, too, from your apartment. Signor Eletro, today at twelve o’clock.”
Palewski folded his arms. “I’m supposed to be in hiding, not strolling about Venice with a character out of the Arabian Nights. Who’s Eletro?”
Yashim stood up. “Don’t you know?” He picked up Palewski’s hat and gave it to him. He presented Maria with a bow. Arrivederci,” he said with a smile.
“Be careful,” she said.
