. . the righteousness of Christ will suffice to make us righteous, and sons of grace without any of our good works, which cannot be good if, before we do them, we are not first made good and righteous by faith.
Calvin’s heresy, justificatio sola fide. Words that came from a world now far away. Gomez said, “Il Beneficio di Cristo. Do you know it?”
“Of course. It’s the most famous heretical text of our times.”
“It was we who printed and distributed it, to sow discord among the papists.”
“ ‘We,’ who?” I asked him. Meanwhile I was mulling over a phrase I had heard a moment before.
When I knew him his name was Ludovico, to others he was Tiziano.
“The Nasi family paid the typographers. A bookseller by the name of Perna worked in the field, and with him a great expert in the field of troublemaking. Someone who knew how by spreading certain ideas you can throw things off balance. And that was the old man whose return everyone is talking about.”
When I knew him his name was Ludovico, to others he was Tiziano. My mouth had dried up. When I joined the Consigliere’s secret service, the older agents still spoke of a heretic, a mysterious character who, years before, had passed through northern Italy, practicing blasphemous baptisms and driving the inquisitors mad. His name was often associated with the Beneficio di Cristo.
“Are you telling me that Ismail al-Mokhawi is Tiziano the Anabaptist?”
“The very same. Then events gathered speed, the Inquisition began to tighten its grip, and Ismail escaped from Venice along with Gracia. Yossef, Samuel and I attended to some unfinished business, then joined them here. Ismail loved Gracia, but he soon realized that he was different from her, from the Nasis, from all of us. The fate of the Jews is to defend one another against the perils of the world. Often we are obliged by circumstances to befriend powerful men, but Ismail is a wanderer by choice, and for all of his life he has tried to bring the powerful down.”
I had never heard David Gomez talking at such length. That day, everything was going in the opposite direction. I looked at Takiyuddin’s clock. I was reassured to see the hands turning clockwise, as they always did.
19
Following a sedan chair along the byways of Constantinople is an easy business. The narrow, muddy streets force the vehicles to adopt a slow, uneven pace. And anyway, people who use them don’t do it to go faster, but rather to shelter their heads from inclement weather and keep their shoes clean — two advantages that I couldn’t help envying as I walked along, drenched by the storm. In the morning, when I left the palace, a tepid sun was shining. Shrubs and bushes were putting out their first flowers, and the scent of jasmine sweetened the air, like a drop of honey in a spicy brew. Then all of a sudden the wind had risen, and while Ashkenazi lurked in the bailiff’s rooms, a curtain of clouds had covered the blue.
The sedan chair passed down along rivers of mud until it reached the coast at Galata, where I lost sight of it in the crowd. Boatmen harried by the rain called out the price of a crossing to the opposite shore. Pickpockets, thanking the precipitation, robbed the passengers distracted by the cries. Taking care not to be among their victims, I boarded a parema and had myself ferried to the peninsula, sure that Ashkenazi would have done the same. And indeed, I found him at the Fishmonger’s Gate, ready to climb into a new chair.
We left the warehouses and fish stalls behind us, crossed the Imperial Road, and came back down toward the district of Kadirga, on the shore of the White Sea, the site of one of the city’s three arsenals.
The sedan chair passed through the entrance to a big building set into the city wall, revealing still more gates and courtyards above a sequence of three terraces. From without, the structure’s appearance was imposing but plain, typical of Ottoman seraglios, which surprise visitors with the contrast between their simple facades and elaborate interiors. I sheltered from the rain beneath the closed balcony of a house and asked a passer-by who owned the residence in front of me. Sadrazam Mehmet Pasha, was the reply.
The Grand Vizier Sokollu.
Over the next few days I pondered this discovery, until I realized that I hadn’t resolved a thing. From Solomon’s journey I could deduce that the bailiff’s letters very swiftly ended up in front of the eyes of Sokollu. But I had no proof of their transit, and besides, I didn’t need any. My aim was to work out how those letters reached Venice, and I was sure that the Grand Vizier was not the courier I was looking for. Too reckless, for him, to act as a direct go-between in this correspondence. It was one thing to read the enemy’s messages, quite another to help them reach their destination.
Don Yossef had talked to me for a long time about Ashkenazi’s dealings. The doctor’s properties were on the island of Crete. Vines, olives and lemons. His ships regularly came and went from Candia. Nothing better than a Venetian colony to deliver the bailiff’s letters to the right people. If my idea was correct, I had to work out who would bring them to the island, and when.
I plunged into the depths of Galata like a pearl fisher, hoping to come back up with the treasure in my hands. I lingered in the taverns till late; I unloaded bales of silk on the planks of the jetty. I spoke Turkish, Dalmatian, Italian, Ladino. I won the words of gamblers at dice, I bought them from merchants, I forced open the silence of drifters. I lent an ear to whispers and tall tales, to the conversations of barbers and cries in the street, to the gossip and secrets of the port. I reacquired the taste for an activity congenial to me. I felt gratified.
In the end I got hold of three names, all commercial agents working for Solomon Ashkenazi.
The first was a Greek. I managed to meet him in a tavern during a shadow play, and without too much difficulty I got him drunk on raki and mulled wine. He told me his life story, listed the lovers he had had, and finished off by accusing himself of several murders. I couldn’t imagine Ashkenazi entrusting such a man with the task of passing on secret messages.
The second came from the Crimea. A silent, discreet character, rather more suited to the task. Still, obeying an old instinct from my days on the lagoon, I paid more particular attention to the third candidate, who looked the least likely.
His name was Bernardo Traverso, and his ship was due to set sail at the end of the month. He was Genoese, his every fiber filled with hatred of Venice. I had met him before on several occasions, at the kahvehane on the Golden Horn, the one I frequented with David Gomez. He said he had been to Goa and Brazil and that always, in every corner of the world, he had met a galuscio Venetian who was ready to squeeze his cuggie. He even complained that the Venetians who lived in Istanbul lived in a district that had been built, stone by stone, by the Genoese before they surrendered it to the Sultan. I was struck by his resentment, because that, ostentatiously displayed, might act better than anything as a screen for secret activities in favor of Venice.
I became convinced that he was the pearl I was diving for.
20
Bernardo Traverso wasn’t one of those Europeans who live confined in Galata, as if it were an Italian or French city, eating the same food that they would eat at home, not learning a word of Turkish and despising all Ottoman practices, even the most pleasing and wholesome.
Instead, he went often to the Old City, where he applauded the acrobats in the local markets, played dice, bet on the ram fights and greyhound races at the hippodrome. He was an equally assiduous visitor to the nearby baths at the Seraglio, so much so that some people wondered whether cleanliness was the only reason for this deep attachment.