He climbed over the barrier and peered into the gloom. The usual weak light burned at the farther end of the alley. Yashim squatted and thought he could just make out the outline of muddy footprints.
At the corner he paused to scan the ground, but the footprints were by now invisible. There were at least three directions the Tatar could have taken.
Yashim leaned against the wall and tried to think.
Somewhere in this city the assassin had a safe place. Somewhere he could sleep, and eat, and leave at will, sure of attracting no attention.
He would have gone there now. Wounded and disarmed, he needed somewhere to change his clothes, wash his wounds. The Tatars were not punctilious about washing, unlike the Turks, but they would clean a bleeding cut.
Yet Venice was a poor city: and the poor are many, and have eyes.
They would see a stranger, even a careful one. Yashim had spent time in the Crimea, the Tatars’ homeland. He knew how they lived in the saddle on a handful of dried meat, but the Tatar would have to draw his water from a well, out in the campo. That was the way Venice was built. Some cities clustered around a citadel, but Venice shaped itself around its wells.
Unless…
The Tatar could have found one place to draw water, unseen.
Somewhere with its own supply.
Somewhere people had lived almost isolated lives-secure, secluded, and magnificent, too.
Yashim turned to the right, and began loping back toward the Grand Canal.
102
The cat watched the man washing his face. He took a rag and dipped it into the water, then washed his leg.
When he was done, he took a piece of cloth and tore it into strips.
The cat tensed, arching her back. Beneath her, a covey of blind kittens groped for the warm milk.
The man tied the cloth around his leg. The cat could smell his blood.
When the man stood up, he winced but made no sound.
He stood silent, immobile, watching the window.
Watching for the dawn to break.
103
Gingerly Yashim pushed at the door.
He felt the hinges protest against his weight, but they made no sound.
As the door swung back, Yashim stepped inside and flattened himself against the wall.
If he was wrong about the fondaco…
He had left the contessa tied up on her own bed.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw the first glimmer of dawn through a chink in a broken door.
After a few moments he crossed the hall, half crouching, knife in hand, making no sound in the dust on the floor.
He had been here before. The hammam where Maria had been imprisoned was on the ground floor to his left, in the back corner of the huge old building. Here the ceiling was sagging, broken laths spilling downward; the floor above was probably unsound. But the contessa had gone upstairs to Eletro’s party.
Through a gap in the door he looked up at the sky. Carla had mentioned a central court, and if it was not typical of a Venetian palazzo it was just what Yashim would have expected of an Ottoman han. The courtyard, as far as he could see, was choked with a riot of plants-a few trees, a massive fig, and a tangle of brambles that had grown up through the paving stones. It would be surrounded by lockups, where the merchants’ goods were stored, damp and very dark. The Fondaco dei Turchi was almost entirely windowless. At ground level, no windows at all. Above, only one or two small openings on either side. The Ottomans had wanted a safe cocoon-safe from thieves, safe from infidel eyes.
A perfect place to hide.
He closed his eyes and tried to picture the front of the fondaco, as he had seen it from the contessa’s window. On the canal, a small quay, half built over; behind it, eight or so columned arches forming an arcade. A row of shorter columns above formed a loggia that, like the arcade beneath, ran almost the whole length of the facade, though on either side, on both floors, three or four arches had been blocked up like bastions that had lost their turrets.
In the room, or rooms, behind the loggia there would be light, but anyone in them would be invisible from the 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.”