The Snake Stone (14 page)

Y
ASHIM
left the palace gate and crossed to the fountain of Sultan Ahmed. In spite of himself he veered left, passing the domed baths that the great architect Sinan had built for Roxelana, the wife of Suleyman the Magnificent. One of the baths was being used as a store. Weeds, even a little crooked tree, sprouted from the cracked lead roofs.

He went out into the Hippodrome.

There was nothing overbearing in the Serpent Column’s height, nothing to draw the eye, but once your eye was drawn, Yashim had found, it was always hard to look away again. Its very littleness mocked the pretensions of the greater monuments. Denuded of their plaques, speaking a lost language, they only gestured helplessly at vanished glory.

Three snakes, symmetrically entwined, raised themselves high above the ground. Simple yet intricate. Yashim wondered what Lefèvre’s little book had to say about it:
The Edifices and Antiquities of Constantinople
. It would say, presumably, that it had come from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the seat of oracular wisdom in the ancient world. But what of the author himself? Would the author have been frightened by those glaring heads?

He would have stood where Yashim was standing now: a scholar, no doubt, learned and dispassionate. He would have gazed on that column, as a marvel from the ancient world; the same way that Yashim looked back across the years to the age of Suleyman—where among the Janissaries and tents, the standards of defeated armies, and the milling crowds, he saw the author carefully taking notes.

He shrugged and turned away. He walked back to the Fener and took a seat outside the café he liked on the Kara Davut, where he slowly turned the pages of Lefèvre’s book, looking for pictures.

When he next glanced up, Preen was coming down the street; he recognized her walk, although her head, he noticed with amusement, was covered by a modest charshaf.

She caught sight of him and waggled her fingers; then she strode up, sat down, and flung back her scarf. A number of old men nearby creaked on their chairs, and stared. Yashim smiled. He signaled to the proprietor, who nodded and shrugged.

“The Academy boy,” Yashim prompted.

“Alexander. The picnic set, of course. Caïques up the Golden Horn to the Sweet Waters. Music, wine, and an interest in the Ypsilanti girl, I gather.”

“Decorous,” Yashim murmured.

“So far.” Preen nodded. “But he enjoys a night life, too.”

“Not so decorous?”

“It’s hard for me to say. He’s known at various taverns on the waterfront. Kumkapi, a bit, but mostly on the Pera side. Tophane, for instance. Some of those places are pretty low, Yashim.”

Yashim nodded. Tophane, the cannon foundry, had a rough reputation.

“He hasn’t been seen much recently, apparently. Someone said he might be smoking.”

“You mean opium?”

“It could happen.”

“It was liquor I smelled on his breath the other day.”

“Opium would explain why he hasn’t been seen around too much, though. The dens of Tophane.”

“Do you know them?”

Preen arched an eyebrow. “What do you take me for, Yashim?”

“I’d like to go down to Tophane. There’s a piece of information I’d like to have.”

“People go to Tophane to forget, Yashim. They don’t like questions.”

But Yashim wasn’t listening.

“We can go tonight,” he said.

F
OR
centuries, Ottoman navies had been refitted and supplied by the arsenal, close to Tophane, which exceeded in size and scope any naval yard east of Venice’s own forbidden Arsenale. By day, the district was an inferno of blazing kilns and molten metals, of sailors struggling to unload the ships that came down from the Black Sea with their cargoes of timber and hemp, the mastic boats from Chios, Egyptian flax, Anatolian copper, iron ore from the Adriatic ports: the raw materials of the empire which served to keep its navy afloat—if no longer formidable.

By night Tophane drew in upon itself. The foundry fell silent; the views across the Bosphorus to the hills of Asia bled into darkness; the cargo ships creaked wearily at their moorings. No lamps were lit in the twisting alleyways, where sailors and brothel keepers, loafers and thieves jostled and cursed one another in the darkness; only flickering lanterns were hung in small windows, or at the low lintels of a doorway, guiding men to their taverns and drinking holes, to rum and raki and tired couplings on straw pallets and the sweet, cloying smell of the pipe.

Yashim let Preen lead the way.

It was in the third tavern they tried that a Maltese sailor, reddened with drink, abruptly explained to Preen his plans for the evening. Those plans included her. When Preen demurred, the Maltese smashed a bottle on the floor and went for her face with the jagged edge.

Yashim blocked the blow with his forearm, which earned him the attention of a party of Maltese sailors who were still apparently upset by the massacre of innocent men, women, and children on the island of Chios by Ottoman irregular troops sixteen years before.

“He hit me! The bastard!”

“Baby killer! You murderer!”

Yashim didn’t know what they were talking about.

They backed out of the door together.

Preen began to walk very fast downhill. The lane led away from the city and toward the waterfront. Before Yashim could call her back, the tavern door flew open and the Maltese party spilled out onto the lane.

They decided they would cut Yashim up for his part in a massacre at which none of them had been present. Some of them flicked knives open. They began to run downhill.

Yashim heard them coming.

He needed to get Preen ahead of the Maltese by one corner, a few seconds to hide.

He grabbed her arm.

At the first turning he glanced at the walls: in the dark they seemed smooth, not even offering a doorway. There was an alley running downhill again, a few yards farther on: they had to make that corner before the Maltese saw them. He spun Preen to the right.

“Baby killer! We’ll cut you!”

The alley dropped away; there were steps, of a kind. Preen and Yashim took them three at a time. They were close to the shore.

At the bottom of the steps Yashim bore around to the right: he had a vague idea that they could follow the shoreline and cut back up later.

“There he is! Get him!”

The Maltese were on the steps.

Preen stumbled and screamed.

Yashim caught her by the arm again and wrenched her around the corner.

The wall on their left dropped away: they were on the quay. Ahead he could see the upright poles of the landing stage, with a single caïque resting between them.

If they could just make it to the boat—

A man came out from an alley to the right and walked toward the caïque.

“Wait!” Yashim bellowed.

The man did not look around. He stepped into the caïque. The rower put his hand to the oar.

Yashim and Preen were twenty yards off. The caïque started forward with a lurch.

“Wait! Help!” Yashim shouted. “Help me!” he shouted in Greek.

He flung an arm around the mooring pole. The caïque was ten feet out. The rower looked at Yashim, then back along the quay to where the Maltese had just appeared.

The man in the caïque glanced around. He nodded to the rower and the caïque slid back. Preen and Yashim rolled aboard.

As the caïque shot forward again, the Maltese slowed. They jogged along the waterfront, shaking their fists.

“Baby killer!”

Yashim looked up to thank the man, and to apologize.

“We need to get a watchman here,” he said.

The man shrugged.

It was Alexander Mavrogordato.

“T
HANK
you for stopping.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I was looking for some people,” Yashim said.

Mavrogordato glanced back at the quay. “You found them, it would seem.”

“They were the wrong people.” Yashim rubbed his forehead and took a breath. “You took me off the case.”

The young man shrugged. “Mother did.”

In the dark it was hard to tell if he was lying.

“Lefèvre was already dead,” Yashim said. “You couldn’t have known that, could you?”

“Why should I care? A man like Lefèvre.”

Yashim heard water dripping from the scull. “It was a coincidence, then?”

“You are in my caïque,” the young man pointed out. “That looks like a coincidence, doesn’t it?”

“Perhaps. But then—I was looking for you, too.”

“You—you followed me?”

“No. But I heard that you came down here sometimes.”

“That’s not true. Who said so?”

“It’s true tonight, isn’t it?”

Alexander Mavrogordato did not reply. If he’d been smoking, Yashim thought, he sounded calm.

“Who owns the
Ca d’Oro
?”

The fragile boat rocked as it crossed the wake of a fisherman’s boat.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Is it one of your father’s boats?”

“Listen, friend.” Alexander leaned forward. “I don’t know the old man’s business. In six months I will be out of here, God willing.”

“Out of here? Why?”

“That’s my business,” Alexander retorted. “You wouldn’t understand. The Fener. The Bosphorus. The bazaar—you think it’s the world, don’t you? You all do. And just because the sultan makes a few changes here and there, you think you’re living in the most modern place on earth. Rubbish. Constantinople’s a backwater. You’d be surprised, efendi. The rest of the world—they laugh at us. Paris. Saint Petersburg. Why, in Athens they even have gas lighting in the streets! A lot of the streets. They have—politics, philosophy, everything. Concert halls. Newspapers. You can buy a newspaper and sit and read it in a café, and nobody looks twice. Just like the rest of Europe. People have opinions there.”

“And they read newspapers which have the same opinions?”

“Amazing, isn’t it? I’m going there, friend. I’ll be married, and—I’ll go.”

“Your wife—are you sure she’ll want to go?”

“My wife? She’ll do what I want, of course. I’ll give her fashionable clothes, and we’ll have dinners and go to the opera, and such like. We’ll be completely free. You wouldn’t understand.”

Yashim shook his head. The boy was right: if freedom meant taking your opinions out of newspapers and dressing up like everyone else, then it was certainly something he would never understand. A pleasure, perhaps, he would never be entitled to enjoy.

“Thank you for stopping,” he said. “You can drop us wherever you like.”

Alexander growled something that Yashim didn’t catch. Probably, he thought, it was better that way.

B
Y
day, from the water, Pera resembled a huge crustacean drawn from the sea. On the Stamboul side, there were minarets and trees; but over the Golden Horn, Galata Hill was gray and dry, encrusted with roofs, the windows of buildings overlapping as they dropped to the water’s edge. Patches of greenery still lingered, where weeds and creepers had reclaimed areas cleared out by the fire that had swept through the town four years before; but they would not linger long. Rents were on the rise; fortunes had to be made; new buildings were going up every day, and the Perotes had no use, it seemed, for trees or gardens.

Yashim walked slowly up the Grande Rue. If Pera was a sea creature, the Grande Rue was its spiny ridge, all the way from the top of the steps that led up from the waterfront to the great water tank that gave its name, Taksim, to the district beyond. It was the thoroughfare on which the foreign embassies were built; in the past decade it had become as cosmopolitan as Paris or Trieste. Yashim saw classical stone façades and big glass windows; shops here sold hats and gloves, liquor, patisseries, umbrellas, English boots. Everywhere he looked, new buildings were plundering the styles of vanished empires and lost civilizations—Egyptian motifs and Roman caryatids. It was rootless—for money has no roots—and it was profuse, eye-watering, ugly, and exciting, too, by turns.

The giddy mix of styles was echoed in the street below. In the crowd that swirled up and down the Grande Rue were men and women of every nationality, and none: all the races of the Mediterranean, Arabs and Frenchmen, men in burnooses, men in hats, ladies in heels, broad-shouldered Slavs, punctilious Englishmen, Genoese sailors, Belgian tailors, black Nubians, olive-skinned Druze from the heights of Lebanon, pale Russians with fair beards, hawkers, loafers, actors, vagabonds, pimps, water carriers. Two dozen wandering street sellers cried their wares. A monkey jumped on a barrel organ. Even a bear shuffled its feet and looked around at the company with a pleasant grin.

Yesterday he had wondered where the great parade had gone, when it vanished from the court at Topkapi. Not to Besiktas, where a sultan lay dying in his European bed.

He pulled the bell of a large gray stone building set back slightly from the street, and a gray-faced flunky in immaculate tails answered the door.

“Monsieur Mavrogordato is at his correspondence. He won’t be seeing anyone before eleven.”

“Would you inform your master that I am a friend of the Frenchman Lefèvre? I want to see him very urgently, on private business.”

The clerk pursed his lips and frowned. The Turk at the door was dressed in the old style, but he was dressed well. Had he been wearing the fez, like any man of business, he would have been easier to dismiss; but his turban lent him a sense of mystery, combined with that air of confidence that clerks were quick to detect. The combination might mean money. Private business, now. Certainly, his master liked to deal with his correspondence undisturbed. But he was not a man to relish missing an opportunity. Private business. Well, private business could mean many things.

“A few moments, efendi,” he said, with a greater show of politeness. “If you will step inside, I will carry your message in to Monsieur Mavrogordato.”

The hall was narrow and dark; there was nowhere to sit. Yashim stared out at the street through the glass panes of the door. The sunlit crowd flowed by at a steady rate; someone might stop or dawdle for a few moments, but the movement was strong and eventually picked the person up again, to vanish in the stream.

Yashim thought of the book that Grigor had shown him, with its sleeping emperors and ancient prophecies. How futile it seemed, this Great Idea! How shallow, against the deep drift of time and events. Byzantium was long gone. He remembered the old lines the Conqueror had murmured as he surveyed the ruins of the imperial palace. “The spider weaves a curtain in the Caesar’s palace: the owl hoots in the towers of Afrasiab.”

“Monsieur Mavrogordato will see you, efendi.”

Mavrogordato was small and square with dark hair and a carefully trimmed mustache. He sat with his jacket on the back of his chair, sleeves rolled, his thin white hairy forearms resting on a desk covered in papers, like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a raft. It was hard to guess his age: fifty, maybe. Older than his wife. And Yashim had been right: the boy, Alexander, took after her.

“How do you do? Coffee? Stefan, coffee.” His voice had a rasp to it, and an accent that Yashim could not quite place. When Stefan had left the room he leaned forward, blinking.

“You have some business interest, ah”—he glanced down at a card on his desk—“Yashim efendi.”

“The name means something to you?” Yashim asked, cocking his head. The banker looked apologetically blank. “I thought—perhaps your wife…”

Mavrogordato startled. “My wife?”

There was a moment’s pause. Yashim fluttered his hands.

“Forgive me, I should explain. Maximilien Lefèvre. The archaeologist.”

Mavrogordato frowned. “Lefèvre,” he repeated. Then, in a somber tone, he added: “You haven’t heard?”

“I knew him slightly,” Yashim said slowly.

Mavrogordato gave a grunt. “Knew him. Hmm.” He began to tap his fingers absently on the table.

“I’m investigating his death. Trying to establish some facts.”

“I know nothing about that,” the banker said.

“I didn’t mean to suggest—” Yashim raised his hands. Even in this office he could still hear the murmur of the crowd outside, the faint ringing of little bells, the rattling of carriages on the cobbles. “You had met him, too?”

“I—he came here once. He wished to borrow some money.”

He paused. Yashim said nothing.

“I lent him the money,” the banker continued. “A small amount.” Mavrogordato paused, as if remembering, then levered himself briskly away from the desk. “Very unfortunate. But business must go on.”

“Of course, efendi. If I might just ask—did you talk together? He was an interesting man.”

Mavrogordato looked surprised. “I’m afraid I have no interest in archaeology. Dull of me, I am sure, but I am a man of business. You understand.”

Yashim cocked his head. “How much did he borrow?”

The banker blew out his cheeks. “If you ask me, I believe it was two hundred francs.”

“Ah. French money.”

“You know, these days…One can’t lend piastres.”

“Because…?”

“The value, it’s too unsettled.” Mavrogordato waved a podgy hand. “These are financial things, efendi.”

“About which I know so little,” Yashim agreed. “Is that why he came to you, do you think?”

Mavrogordato gave a deprecating shrug and picked up a paper on his desk. “I couldn’t say, efendi. I wish you luck.”

“Thank you so much for your time.” Yashim paused, with his hand on the doorknob. “One final thing I forgot to ask—what kind of security did Lefèvre give you?”

For a moment Mavrogordato’s eyes searched the room. He gestured with the paper in his hand. “He was a Frenchman. It was only a small loan.”

“Yes, of course. He gave you nothing.”

As he closed the door, he saw that Mavrogordato was still watching him, blinking.