canal.
The door was stuck fast, so he groped his way through the ground-floor rooms until he reached a low opening onto the courtyard. He swung his legs over the sill and dropped down into an open arcade, heaped with broken tea chests, rotting bales, empty crates and barrels-the detritus of an abandoned trade.
He wondered where the Tatar was. He hoped he was somewhere overhead, perhaps where the contessa and her friends had played, in rooms overlooking the Grand Canal.
Cautiously he began to pick his way along the arcade, keeping to the darker shadows and using whatever cover the rubbish strewn around it could provide. At the end of the arcade he had to move into the open to reach the portico that he imagined would lead to the stairs.
He stooped and ran, swinging quickly through the archway, sliding with his back to the wall to the foot of the stairs, where he stopped to listen.
He crossed to the farther wall and began to climb the stairs, his eyes straining in the half-light.
He tried not to think that he might have got it all wrong. He concentrated instead on his instincts, telling him the assassin was waiting overhead, behind the door to the great room where the sultan himself had played cards.
He stopped and listened again.
Something the contessa had said came into his mind, but then it was gone as he reached the turn of the stairs and found himself by a row of empty windows divided by slender columns. They had stopped here, the sultan and his friends, to look at the lights in the courtyard.
There were no lights now as Yashim inched to a window, but through the trees and weeds the breaking dawn revealed bands of lighter stone across the dark paving of the court, spelling out the pattern he already knew so well.
He pulled back his head. The dark mass of the doorway lay above, but it was impossible to see whether the door was open or closed. Yashim hovered, uncertain whether to go forward or back. The door must be closed, he thought; otherwise it would be backlit, however dimly, by the gathering light on the Grand Canal.
It was a cat or, as it seemed momentarily to Yashim, the ghost of a cat, that saved his life, for as it materialized dimly and inexplicably in the doorway, Yashim finally remembered what the contessa had said.
What looked in the half-light like a closed door at the top of the stairs was only a curtain hanging in the doorway.
Yashim dropped to the floor, rolled once, and sprawled against the stairs just as the doorway erupted with a bright flash. Then he was squirming on his elbows headfirst down the stairs.
Behind him he heard the sound of a pistol being cocked.
When he twisted around the Tatar was already there, silhouetted against the breaking light, coolly looking down into the dark with the pistol in his hand.
Yashim’s hand closed on something small and hard that was lying beside him on the step. It was a glass jar, big enough to hold a candle.
He threw it, and it tinkled to pieces at the Tatar’s feet. Yashim pressed himself against the stairs.
The Tatar jumped back and fired again, blindly.
Two barrels, both shot.
Yashim said, “It’s over now. The killing stops.”
He took his knife by the point of the blade, protected by the darkness at his back, and began inching farther upright.
The Tatar cocked his head. “Resid told you that?”
“It’s only the truth, my friend.”
The Tatar considered this in silence.
“I was told, one more,” he said at length. “I do not need to make it two.”
Still the Tatar did not move. “Let me tell you something, efendi. In the old days, when my people made war, we rode west, for days and weeks, behind our chief. We rode fast, touching nothing, stopping for nothing. Seeing everything.”
“I know how the Tatars fought,” Yashim said, moving slowly. “I know your khan.” He was almost ready.
The Tatar turned his head and spat. “Before,” he said, “we had a khan. When we had ridden a long, long way, but only at the time he chose, we turned our horses east, toward home.”
Yes, Yashim thought, and then the pillage began. The looted, burning villages, the piles of dead, the roped convoys of slaves.
“We were moderate,” the Tatar said. “We had seen what we wanted, we took it, and we rode for home. Nothing more.”
He was backing away now, moving out of the light.
“So you see, efendi,” the Tatar said. “I was sent to Venice, and soon I, too, am going home.”
The Tatar had gone.
Yashim sprang for the stairs. It would take the Tatar only a few moments to reload.
At the top he whipped back the curtain.
It was a huge room, empty except for a small square table and a broken chair leaning drunkenly against the back wall. It was lit by a colonnade running the whole width of the building-almost. At the farther end was an empty doorway set into a wall of planks and bulging plaster: perhaps the assassin had ducked in there. Perhaps he was already loaded, cocked, and waiting for Yashim to step inside.
As he hesitated, Yashim heard something scrape at the window, or beyond it. He glanced up. Already the first barges were making their way down the canal. Flinging himself forward, he scrambled feetfirst through the nearest window and dropped into the loggia.
Under the balcony was a lean-to, covered in broken tiles.
Beyond it was the canal.
Yashim craned forward, searching the surface of the water. A few hundred yards away, where the canal curved, he recognized the outline of the Ca’ d’Aspi.
Ten minutes away. Ten minutes, running through the maze of the Venetian streets.
But for a powerful swimmer less, far less. Three hundred yards, in a direct line.
And the Tatar had a head start.
He swung himself over the balustrade, holding onto a slender column.
Beneath him was a barge stacked with firewood. It was rowed by two men, with another at the tiller, and it was moving fast.
As Yashim dropped down onto the mass of broken tiles, they began to slide.
104
He fell awkwardly, wrenching his leg as he rolled across the cords of wood.
The tillerman gave a shout of surprise.
Yashim snatched himself upright and turned to the man who was staring at him, dumbfounded.
“It’s me!” Yashim cried. “The pasha!”
A look of consternation swept across the tillerman’s face.
“Tell them to keep rowing!”
The tillerman glanced at the men forward. “Row on! Row on!” he barked. “You, you don’t look like the pasha,” he objected simply.
Yashim scrambled to the front of the barge. His eyes swept the water. It was flat, oily, gleaming in the half dawn.
He had the advantage now, surely? The barge was moving faster than a man could swim, and it was three hundred yards to the Palazzo d’Aspi.
He peered at the shoreline, where the buildings dropped into the water. The buildings were clear, but there were freestanding mooring posts, too. Was the Tatar hiding somewhere among them?
If he were hiding, then he must have seen Yashim jump.
