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.”
6
Yashim took a caique 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 the summer. 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 caique 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 Ortakoy.