The Snake Stone (5 page)

A
RAM
Malakian fished out a bunch of keys in his long, slender fingers and fitted one to the lock.

“Patience, patience,” he muttered with a smile. The lock broke and the metal gates of his shop swung back.

“Enter, my friend. You must look and touch—and I have some new treasures I would like to show you. I do not ask you to buy them—today we will not speak of such a thing—but only to look and admire what workmanship existed in the past. Sit down, please. We will have a tea together, Yashim efendi.”

Aram snapped his fingers and a little boy ran up to take his order.

“No, no. Please let us not look there—this is for the people who know nothing at all. Blessed are the ignorant! I have some pieces which are interesting.”

He picked up a linen pouch and slipped several coins onto the low table.

“The English physician, Dr. Millingen, is a great collector of coinage. I think he will want these.”

Yashim sighed. “Incredible. All the collectors come through your shop, don’t they?”

The old Armenian wagged his head, neither yes nor no.

“Lefèvre, for instance. A Frenchman.”

“Monsieur Lefèvre. I know him, yes. He is an archaeologist of great erudition.”

“What sort of things interest him?”

Malakian picked up a sunflower seed and split it between his teeth. “Byzantine work. Silverware, mosaic, jewelry. Old icons. Incunabula and illuminated manuscripts.”

“Incunabula?”

“The first printed books. These things are of course very rare—unless one knows where to look. That is the first step.”

Yashim waited for him to go on. “And then?”

“Yashim efendi, what shall I say? I am not a hunter. I sit and I wait, and if treasure makes its way to me now and then, I am content. Whereas Lefèvre—he is an archaeologist.”

“He digs at sites, yes.”

“I think he digs, but not always with a spade.” Malakian tugged at his earlobe. “I have a cousin, Yashim efendi. He is a monk in Erzerum. A Frenchman visited his monastery a few years ago, to study—they have a famous scriptorum. Many, many rare old books—and many ignorant old priests. The Frenchman showed the librarian some books which were badly damaged. Out of gratitude for their help in his work, he offered to have these books repaired.”

“In Istanbul?”

Malakian turned his head this way and that, like an elderly tortoise.

“Tchah! Where is that tea? In Istanbul, yes. But later he wrote to the librarian, explaining that the best bookbinder for the job was in France—in Dijon. That was almost three years ago.”

Yashim arched his eyebrows. Malakian put up a hand.

“In fact, the books came back. This year, I think. It was a long time—but they were well bound, and the librarian was pleased. I am sorry to say, his pleasure was short-lived. Some of the original illustrated pages were missing. The binder in Dijon—was he careless or perhaps dishonest? It is hard to say. Lefèvre has stopped answering letters. Do you see? I do not think this was an isolated case. Lefèvre seems to be a clever man, well informed. He is a good judge of quality—better than the poor monks he works on. But he has been lucky, also.”

“Lucky? You mean he sometimes finds what he wants by chance? Surely all antiquarians have that experience.”

“No, efendi. That is not the luck I mean.” He gazed sadly at Yashim. “Three days ago I sold a counterfeit coin to a dragoman at the Russian embassy. I got a very good price.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, you are shocked. I see it. Perhaps, you are thinking, I will not buy anything from Aram Malakian again. So, what is lost?”

“My trust, perhaps.”

Malakian smiled and nodded. “But you see, efendi, both of us knew this coin was a counterfeit. Because it was made in the same era as the real coin, it is a collector’s item. Now, like this”—he snapped his tapering fingers—“your trust is restored, I hope.”

Before Yashim could answer, the tea boy suddenly reappeared, flinging himself against the folded gates.

“The night watch!” he gasped. “In the book bazaar. They say there’s blood everywhere. I’m going to see!”

Malakian turned slowly. “Blood?”

The boy darted off, his empty tray swinging madly from his fingers.

“Tomfoolery,” Malakian muttered. He looked anxious. He began to shovel the coins back into the linen bag, and Yashim noticed that his hands were trembling. “I was speaking of trust. A few words and—puff! Trust is gone.” He dropped the bag into a drawer and locked it.

Yashim nodded slowly.

“Sometimes I think Lefèvre must have forgotten that ignorant monks, cloistered from the world, still have powerful friends and protectors. We Armenians are a small people and do not choose to make enemies. But the Greeks? I am surprised that Lefèvre has come back to Istanbul. I think maybe he pushes his luck too far.”

Malakian paused and looked around his cubicle. “I’m sorry, efendi, but one can’t be too careful. The boy talks of death, and blood. It could be the work of thieves, to make us frightened. We leave our shops to look and—paff, they get in. You understand?”

Yashim was on his feet. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll go and see.”

T
HE
market was in an uproar: Malakian was not the only trader to be hurriedly securing his goods, ringing down the shutters, while anxious shoppers streamed for the gates. Following on the tea boy’s footsteps, Yashim had expected an increasing hubbub as he approached the book bazaar; instead the atmosphere grew tense and frozen, and in the alley itself there was hardly a sound to be heard.

A crowd of silent men blocked his view.

“Palace,” he murmured. The men stood aside automatically, barely sparing him a glance. He stepped forward, one hand raised, and received a salute from a pale man in the red uniform of a market guard.

“Palace,” Yashim repeated tersely. “A man dead?”

“That’s right, efendi.” The guard swallowed. “We’re still trying to find the kadi.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“The door was shut, efendi. That’s all. It might have been shut all night, and it looked like it was locked. I mean, the bar was across, and everything.”

“You noticed that on the night watch?”

The guard stirred nervously. “Well, efendi, not exactly. I—I don’t recall. It was just this morning, about half an hour ago, that we see the bar still up, and the padlock—it was only hanging there. You don’t see that much in the dark, efendi.”

“But by daylight—you thought it looked strange?”

“All the traders had come in already. Talak—that’s my companion—he says we ought to take a look. I knocked on the door with my stick then. Sounds a bit stupid, doesn’t it? What with the door half locked on the outside.”

“No, but I understand,” Yashim said. He’d seen it before, the way that sudden death made a nonsense of the things people did and said. Murder, above all, overturned the natural order of God’s creation: it was only to be expected that unreason and absurdity should crackle in its wake. “Nobody came—and you opened the door?”

The guard nodded. “It was dark. We had put out the lanterns, and I didn’t see anything to worry about, not at first. I touched something with my foot, and when I bent down I saw it was some scroll. It was stuck to the floor. Then I felt that my boots were also sticking to the floor. I looked behind the desk, and—” He shuddered. “Goulandris.”

“The bookseller? Show me.”

The guard looked doubtful. He glanced at the crowd. “I must stay outside,” he explained. “When Talak brings the kadi…” He trailed off.

“I won’t be long,” Yashim said. He stepped past the guard and pushed the green door to Goulandris’s cubbyhole. Inside it was stuffy and dark, with a metallic smell. He moved away from the door to give himself light, and glanced quickly around. He knew this room. Goulandris had dealt in many kinds of books—works in classical and modern Greek, Jewish religious books, imperial scrolls—but the old man could have been selling apples or slippers for all he knew about books. He priced his stock, as far as Yashim could tell, by reading the expression in his clients’ faces, a gruff and shrewd old dealer.

Bending forward to look behind the Frankish desk, Yashim saw that Goulandris had priced his last book.

He was wedged in between the desk and a stool, pressed up against the wall, his thin arms raised above his head, wrist to wrist, his head jammed against his bended knees. There was an astonishing amount of tacky dark blood staining the floor, as the guard had first noticed, but the nape of his neck gleamed almost white in the dim light. Yashim felt the man’s arms: they were quite cold. He took hold of the gray hair on Goulandris’s scalp with a tremor of reluctance, and tugged back his head; as it slipped between his arms they shifted stiffly forward, checked by the rigor of death. Yashim peered down and grunted; then he fastidiously drew out a handkerchief, swirled it into a ball, and dabbed at the man’s throat. He tried not to look into his one glittering eye.

The handkerchief came up clean.

But there was a lot of blood on the floor.

Yashim stood still for a moment. The light failed, and there was a man at the door. “The kadi is on his way, efendi.”

“That’s good. This—is his province. He will know what measures need to be taken.”

“But you, efendi—”

“No, my friend. I’m going to the palace. Don’t worry,” he added when he saw the guard step back a pace, “you have done everything well. And everything you could.”

They saluted each other, one hand to the chest.

M
ALAKIAN
was standing uncertainly in front of his shop, a padlock in his hands.

“Goulandris? Incredible. Who would want to kill him? He was a very old man.”

“He knew very little about books.”

“Very little? You say so, efendi. But yes, stubborn. A stubborn old Greek. It is terrible.”

Yashim shook his head. He was reminded of another stubborn old Greek, his friend George, beaten and left for dead in the street. Like Goulandris he, too, was a trader. “What do you know about the Hetira, Malakian?”

Malakian rubbed the edge of one of his enormous flat ears between his forefinger and thumb. “Ask a Greek, efendi. This is something Greek. I would not know.”

“But the word means something to you.”

Malakian frowned. “This is my shop, Yashim efendi, in the bazaar, like always. It is cheap here, yes. In Pera you will find many new shops—but Pera is expensive.”

Yashim shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“I am stubborn man, like Goulandris. But I am not Greek. So.”

“Why would the Hetira want to drive out Greeks?”

Malakian said nothing, but he shrugged slowly.

Y
ASHIM
stopped by the fish market on the Golden Horn. Still smarting from the Frenchman’s indifference to the dolma he had so lovingly prepared, he chose two lüfer, the bluefish that all Istanbul took as the standard for excellence. He watched the fishmonger slit their bellies and remove the entrails with a twist of his thumb.

Yashim was proud of Istanbul—proud of its markets, the cornucopia of perfect fruits and vegetables that poured into them every day, proud of the fat-tailed sheep from Anatolia, which sometimes came skittering and bleating through the narrow streets. What other city in the world could produce fish to match the freshness or the variety offered by the Bosphorus, a finny highway running straight through the heart of Istanbul? Why, at any season of the year you could practically walk to Üsküdar on the torrent of fish that passed along the straits—

“Don’t wash it,” he said quickly. A fish would begin to deteriorate from the moment it lost its slimy protective coat.

“Bah, we have too little water,” the fishmonger grunted. “The supply is weak again.”

But it flowed: that was what mattered. Sometimes, standing on Pera Hill and looking back across the Golden Horn to the familiar skyline of the city, marked by the great domes of Sinan’s mosques; or passing the jumble of buildings—mosques, houses, caravanserai, churches, covered markets, shops—which lined the Stamboul shore of the Horn, it seemed incredible to Yashim that the city should function from one day to the next and not simply explode, or tear itself apart, or at the very least subside into a confusion of bleating sheep, rotting vegetables, and men gesticulating and thundering in twenty languages, unable to progress or retreat through the overcrowded streets.

Yet whenever Yashim looked more closely, at the level of a particular street, say, he was struck by the air of invisible good order that kept everything and everyone flowing smoothly along, like water in the pipes and aqueducts: so that when a man was murdered, and another attacked, both traders, both Greeks, they seemed inevitably to belong to some hidden economy in the city, a single channel of a commerce freighted with menace and brutality.

Yashim delivered one of the bluefish to the nuns at the hospital.

“Perhaps he can manage a little of this?” he asked tentatively.

The nun smiled. “It will do him good.”

“And perhaps—then, if he can eat, he can speak—a little?”

She laughed with her eyes. “Very well, efendi. If he is not asleep, you may have a moment. Not more, please.”

Yashim bowed.

George looked worse than when he had first seen him in the filtered subaqueous light of the wardroom, for the bruising on the side of his head had come up. He was still bandaged, with one eye covered; the other peered with difficulty through swollen, bulging lids. His breathing, however, seemed normal now.

Yashim squatted by the bed. “They’ll be giving you some fish today. Lüfer.”

“Too much soup,” said George finally. His voice was a croak.

“You’re a big man, George. Fish is just the start of it. We’ll get you onto some proper meat in a few days.”

George made a faint whistling sound between his lips. It appeared to be a laugh. “Tough to shit,” he croaked.

“Yes, well, perhaps that’s right.” Yashim frowned. “The nuns will know.”

George closed his one eye in agreement. Yashim bent closer. “What happened, George?”

“I forgets,” he whispered back.

“Try to remember. You were attacked.”

The eye opened a crack. “I slips, falls over.”

Yashim rocked back on his haunches. “George. You were badly beaten up. You were almost killed.”

“No beating, efendi. Is accident. I falls on stairs.”

“So you remember that, do you?”

George’s eye swiveled toward him.

“Who pushed you, George?”

The eye slid away. Nothing.

“The Hetira?”

But his friend had rung down the shutter on his one good eye. His swollen face was incapable of expression.

George was a proud man. Tough and proud enough to take a beating—and too proud to speak, as well.

Or too afraid.

Yashim had a question for the nun as he left.

“Only his wife, efendi. She’s been coming here every day. She always talks. He is a good man. He listens to his wife.”

“And does she think—that he had an accident?”

The nun lowered her eyes and answered demurely. “We do not judge our people, efendi. We try only to heal.”

She glanced at him then, and Yashim turned his head away. Muttering a farewell, he found his own way out into the street, and heard her bolt the door at his back.