The Bellini Card (Investigator Yashim) - Softcover

Goodwin, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312429355 ISBN 13: 9780312429355

Verlag: St. Martin's Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Investigator Yashim travels to Venice in the latest installment of the Edgar® Award-winning author Jason Goodwin's captivating historical mystery series

Jason Goodwin's first Yashim mystery, The Janissary Tree, brought home the Edgar® Award for Best Novel. His follow-up, The Snake Stone, more than lived up to expectations and was hailed by Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times Book Review as "a magic carpet ride to the most exotic place on earth." Now, in The Bellini Card, Jason Goodwin takes us back into his "intelligent, gorgeous and evocative" (The Independent on Sunday) world, as dazzling as a hall of mirrors and utterly compelling.

Istanbul, 1840: the new sultan, Abdülmecid, has heard a rumor that Bellini's vanished masterpiece, a portrait of Mehmet the Conqueror, may have resurfaced in Venice. Yashim, our eunuch detective, is promptly asked to investigate, but -- aware that the sultan's advisers are against any extravagant repurchase of the painting -- decides to deploy his disempowered Polish ambassador friend, Palewski, to visit Venice in his stead. Palewski arrives in disguise in down-and-out Venice, where a killer is at large as dealers, faded aristocrats, and other unknown factions seek to uncover the whereabouts of the missing Bellini.

But is it the Bellini itself that endangers all, or something associated with its original loss? And why is it that all the killer's victims are somehow tied to the alluring Contessa d'Aspi d'Istria? Will the Austrians unmask Palewski, or will the killer find him first? Only Yashim can uncover the truth behind the manifold mysteries.

The Paperback Edition Includes an Author Interview, Bonus Inspector Yashim Recipe, and an Excerpt from the Next Inspector Yashim Mystery, An Evil Eye

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jason Goodwin

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Bellini Card

A NovelBy Jason Goodwin

Picador

Copyright © 2010 Jason Goodwin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312429355

Com’era, dov’era

As it was, where it was

Venetian motto

 

§

 

Never judge a painting or a woman by candlelight

Venetian proverb

 

I

He sank slowly through the dark water, arms out, feet pointed: like a Christ, or a dervish, casting a benediction on the sea.

The stone at his feet hit the mud with a soft explosion, his knees buckled, and in a moment he was bowing gracefully with the tide. He had always been graceful; pliant, too, when fixing a price; a man who traded and left something in the deal for the other fellow.

Overhead, the killer turned his head from side to side, alert to the slightest motion in the darkness, feeling the rain on his face. He stood for a few minutes, waiting and watching, before he blinked, turned, and padded softly from the bridge, to be swallowed up by the night and the alleyways of the sleeping city.

The tide ebbed. The water sucked at the green weed that lined the walls, gurgled around old pilings, and slipped and receded from worn stone steps. It sank, nudging the trader closer to the sea on which, in her days of glory, the city had made her fortune. Beneath Byzantine domes, dilapidated palaces and tethered boats the corpse was hustled noiselessly towards the sea, arms still flung wide in a gesture of vacant welcome.

Yet some obstruction, a block of stone or loop of rotten rope, must have checked his passage for a time; for when dawn broke, and the tide slackened, the trader was still yards away from the deep waters of the Riva dei Schiavoni into which he would have otherwise sunk without further trace.

 

II

The sultan gave a high-pitched sneeze and patted his face with a silk handkerchief.

‘The Queen of England has one,’ he said petulantly.

Resid Pasha bowed his head. King William was dead, like Sultan Mahmut: now, he thought, England and the Ottoman Empire were being ruled by little girls.

‘As the sultan says, may his days be lengthened.’

‘The Hapsburgs have several galleries, I understand. In their dominions in Italy, whole palaces are stuffed with pictures.’ The sultan dabbed at his nose. ‘The Emperor of Austria knows what his grandfather’s grandfather was like by looking at his picture, Resid Pasha.’

The young pasha folded his slender hands. What the sultan said was true, but perfectly ridiculous: the Hapsburgs were notoriously ugly, notoriously alike. They married their close relations, and the chins got bigger every generation. Whereas an Ottoman prince had none but lovely and accomplished women to share his bed.

Resid Pasha tensed his shoulders. ‘The Austrian dogs always piss on the same spot,’ he said, with a jocular grunt. ‘Who would want to see that?’

Even as he spoke, he knew he had made a mistake. Sultan Mahmut would have grinned at the remark; but Mahmut was dead.

The sultan frowned. ‘We are not speaking of dogs now.’

‘You are right, my padishah.’ Resid Pasha hung his head.

‘I speak of the Conqueror,’ Abdulmecid said loftily. ‘Of the blood in these veins.’ He held out his wrists, and the young counsellor bowed, abashed.

‘If the picture exists, I wish for it,’ the sultan continued. ‘I want to see it. Do you desire, Rasid Pasha, that the likeness of the Conqueror should be exposed to the infidel gaze—or that an unbeliever should possess it?’

Resid Pasha sighed. ‘And yet, my sultan, we do not know where the painting might be. If, indeed, it exists at all.’

The young Padishah sneezed again. While he examined his handkerchief, the Pasha pressed on: ‘For more than three centuries, nobody ever saw or heard about this— picture. Today we have a rumor, nothing more. Let us be cautious, my padishah. What does it matter if we wait another month? Another year? Truth is like musk, whose grateful odour can never be concealed.’

The sultan nodded, but not in agreement. ‘There is a faster way,’ he said, in a voice treacled with mucus.

‘Send for Yashim.’

 

III

Close to the shoreline of the Golden Horn, on the Pera side, stood a fountain set up by an Ottoman princess as an act of generosity, on a spot where the boatmen used to linger and drop their fares. Hundreds of fountains existed in the streets and squares of Istanbul; but this one was particularly old and lovely, and Yashim had admired it many times as he passed. Sometimes, in hot weather, he would rinse his face in the trickle of clear water that splashed down onto the tiled basin.

It was those tiles which now stopped him on the street, where he stood unnoticed and aghast in the stream of traffic passing along the shore: muleteers with their trains, porters under enormous sacks, two fully-veiled women attended by a black eunuch, a bashi-bazouk on horseback, his sash stuffed with pistols and swords. Neither Yashim, nor the ruined fountain, attracted anyone’s attention: the crowd flowed round him, a man standing alone in a brown cloak, a white turban on his head, watching stricken as a trio of workmen in overalls and dirty turbans attacked the fountain with their hammers.

It was not that Yashim lacked presence. His only lack was of something more definite; but he was used to passing unnoticed. It was as though his presence were a quality he could chose to display, or to conceal; a quality which certain people would be unaware of until they found themselves mesmerised by his grey eyes, his low, musical voice, or by the truths he spoke. Until then, though, he might be almost invisible.

The workmen did not look up as he approached; only when he spoke did one of them glance round, surprised.

‘It’s the bridge, efendi. Once this has gone, then the tree, there’ll be a way through here, see? Got to have a way through, efendi.’

Yashim’s heart sank. A bridge linking Pera to the main city of Istanbul had been talked about for years. Centuries, even: in the sultan’s archives in Topkapi Palace Yashim had once seen a sepia design for such a bridge, executed by an Italian engineer who wrote his letters back-to-front, as if they were written in a mirror. Now, it seemed, a bridge was about to be built: the new sultan’s gift to a grateful populace.

‘Can’t this fountain just be moved aside?’

The workman straightened his back and leaned on his sledgehammer. ‘What, this?’ He shrugged. ‘Too old. New one’d be better.’ His eyes slid along the shore. ‘Not but what it’s a shame about the tree.’

The tree was a colossus, and a welcome patch of shade and shelter on the Pera shore. It had stood for centuries: in days it would be gone.

Yashim winced as a sledgehammer cracked down hard into the basin of the fountain. A chunk of stone broke away, and Yashim put out a hand.

‘Please. A tile or two…’

He carried them away carefully, feeling the old mortar dry and brittle in his palm. The boatman who took him gliding across the Horn by caique spat on the water....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St. Martin's Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312429355
• ISBN 13: 9780312429355
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 322
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland