The Snake Stone (7 page)

T
HE
archaeologist was still sprawled out on the divan when Yashim returned home. He raised his head weakly when the door opened, but he seemed to have lost some of the nervous energy of the night before. Yashim set about making coffee while he explained the arrangements he had made.

“Tonight? That is very soon.
Ca d’Oro
—I don’t know her. Does she go to France?”

“Palermo.”

“Palermo?” Lefèvre frowned. “It’s certainly not France.”

“No. There was a French ship, but she wasn’t leaving until Monday.”

“Monday. Perhaps the French ship would have been better. I might spend a fortune waiting in Sicily.”

“Well, you owe me forty piastres for the berth. You must pay the same again to the captain.”

“But how much was the berth in the French ship?”

“I didn’t ask. More expensive, for sure.”

“You say that,” said Lefèvre, sitting up and picking his teeth with a fingernail. “There’s something wrong with the
Ca d’Oro
?”

“Nothing at all. She’s smaller. But she’s leaving tomorrow. You wanted to get out, that’s what you said.”

“Of course, of course. But
enfin
, Palermo.” Lefèvre sucked the air through his lips. “You should have woken me.”

Yashim banged the coffeepot on the edge of the table to settle the grounds.

“I’m confused,” he confessed. “Last night I thought you were afraid of someone. Or something.” He reached for the cups, and found the question that was on his mind. “Is it the Hetira?”

Lefèvre said nothing. Yashim poured the coffee slowly into two cups. “But if you like, we will change our plans. You are my guest.”

There was a silence while he handed the cup to Lefèvre. All of a sudden the Frenchman’s hands were shaking so much he could hardly hold the cup without spilling the tiny amount of oily liquid it contained. He crammed it to his lips and drank it in little sips.

“Hetira?” His laugh was high-pitched. “Why Hetira?”

Yashim sipped his coffee. It was good coffee, from Brazil, twice as expensive as the Arabian he drank in the cafés. He bought it in small quantities for the rare occasions that he made coffee at home. Sometimes he took down the jar and simply sniffed the aroma.

“Because I have an eye for Greek antiquities?” Lefèvre’s eyes narrowed. “I ensure their survival. I have sometimes rescued an object from imminent disintegration. You’d be surprised. Unique pieces, which nobody recognizes—what happens to them? They may be broken or torn or lost, they get damp, they are nibbled by rats, destroyed by fire. And I cannot look after all these beautiful things myself, can I? Of course not. But I find them—what shall I say—guardians. People who can look after them. And how do I know that they will do so?”

“How?”

Lefèvre smiled. It was not a broad smile. “Because they pay,” he explained, rubbing his fingertips together. “I turn valueless clutter into something like money—and people, I find, are careful with money. Don’t you agree?”

“I’ve noticed it,” Yashim said.

“Some people do get the wrong idea. They think of me as a grave robber.
Quelle bêtise.
I bring lost treasures to light. I bring them back to life. Perhaps, if it is not too much to say so, I can sometimes restore their power to inspire men, and challenge their view of the world.”

Is that right? Yashim wondered. Or could it be that Lefèvre—and men like him—simply chipped away at the foundations of a people’s culture, scattering the best of it to the four winds?

“You understand me now a little better, monsieur.” Again that smile. “But all the same, I will do as you suggest. Tonight, after dark, I shall go aboard the
Ca d’Oro.
”

A
RMED
with a black malacca cane and a pair of Piccadilly boots, Dr. Millingen locked his door carefully and went down the few short steps into the street. During his medical studies at Edinburgh he had taken to rambling with other long-haired youths through moorland and mountains. They had declaimed poetry together, admired the awe-inspiring scenery, and ruminated on Adam Smith, Goethe, the tyranny of princes, and the long-term effects of the French Revolution. These days, in spite of the protests of his Turkish friends and clients, he walked half an hour at most, believing that mild exercise improved his circulation and shook up his liver.

The Turks, as a rule, avoided exercise. One of his clients had once observed that he had others to exercise for him: a household of servants to bring the pipes, the coffee, or the evening meal. He had even hinted, as delicately as he could, that Dr. Millingen was committing an injustice, intruding in another’s sphere by attempting any physical effort for himself. As for taking a strenuous walk, it led to the risk of being jostled in the street, or of apoplexy; and because an Ottoman gentleman could hardly be expected to appear in the streets without his retinue, the annoyance would be shared by his household. Short of taking a second wife, this gentleman liked to insist, there was no easier way of sowing disharmony and vexation through a man’s home than by following the doctor’s curious prescription.

The doctor himself did not throw himself into these walks with unalloyed enthusiasm, either. Though often steep and even staired, the streets of Pera were not the Lammermuir Hills; the gloomy alleys of the port could hardly be compared to the dark aisles of his beloved pinewoods; and where the corncrake skimmed across the fields at dusk, or the roebuck barked imperiously across the wild glens, the fauna of Pera, like that of Istanbul itself across the Horn, was lazy, underfoot, and had fleas.

Dr. Millingen faced the street, flexed his stick, and began to walk.

Nobody ever could say how, or even why, the dogs had come to Istanbul. Some people supposed that they had been there always, even in the time of the Greeks; others, that they invaded the city at the time of the Conquest, dropping down from the Balkans to prowl through the blasted streets and the ruins in the fields, where they formed into packs and carved out territories for themselves that still held good to the present day. But nobody really knew. Nobody, Dr. Millingen had realized long ago, much cared.

Not a breed, but all alike, these rough-coated yellow dogs with short legs, large jaws, and feathery, curving tails spent most of the day slumped in all the alleys, gateways, thoroughfares, and backstreets of the ancient city, with one eye closed and the other lazily absorbing the activities of the people around them. It took a visitor to see them properly, and a relatively recent resident like Dr. Millingen, trained in habits of scientific observation, to see them with a forensic eye; to everyone else they were so much a part of the fabric of the city, so perfectly integrated into their own mental map of a district, that had all the dogs simply vanished from the streets one night, people would have had only the uneasy impression that something had changed; and nine out of ten Stambouliots would have been hard pressed to say what. The dogs did not impinge. They almost never bit a child, ran amok in the market, or stole the butcher’s sausages. You stepped over a dog sleeping in a doorway; you skirted a muddle of dogs sprawled in a patch of sunlight in the middle of the road; you tossed in bed when the howling and barking of the dogs at night grew more than usually intolerable; and you never noticed that they existed at all.

Now and then, perhaps once in a hundred years, the authorities woke up to the omnipresent nuisance of the dogs and attempted to round them up: they were carted off into the country, dumped on islands, driven—surprisingly meek—into the Belgrade woods or out of the Edirne gate. But either they all came back or they simply grew again, like the lizard’s tail or moss in the masonry, the same yellow, rangy, ribs-sticking-out mangy curs, with fleabites and battle scars and their own distinct parishes. And nobody minded them, either. Like puddles after rain, or shadow, or the blazing sun at noon, they were simply there; and they scavenged the city streets and kept them clean.

A soiled crust, a dead bird, a heap of vegetable refuse, old bones, peelings, scraps, rinds, rotten fruit: they missed nothing and wasted nothing. They could eat anything—even shoes. But they rarely tasted fresh meat.

Dr. Millingen had once suggested, in the course of a consultation with the sultan himself, that with five hundred oka of the cheapest horseflesh and five ounces of arsenic, the sultan could rid his metropolitan subjects of an interminable nuisance, the whole race of mangy dogs—dogs, as he understood it, whom Muslims regarded as unclean animals; and the sultan, cocking his head sharply to register his surprise, had replied that he supposed the dogs, too, were a part of God’s creation. “You would think it very barbaric, would you not, if I were to order all the English doctors in Istanbul rounded up and fed with poisoned meat? It is the same with the dogs.”

Dr. Millingen could think of several arguments in reply, but he could not argue with the sultan’s tone.

Advancing at a brisk pace along the street, he swung his cane from side to side and glared suspiciously at the yellow dogs; while they merely yawned, or scratched their fleas, and pretended not to notice Dr. Millingen.

V
ENICE
and Istanbul: the client and the source. For centuries, the two cities were locked together in trade and war, jockeying for advantage in the eastern Mediterranean. Istanbul had many faces, but one, like Venice’s, was turned to the sea. Like Venice, too, the greatest thoroughfares of Istanbul were waterways; people were forever passing from the city to Üsküdar, from Üsküdar to Pera, and from Pera to the city again, across the Golden Horn. The famous gondolas of Venice were no more central to life in the lagoon than caïques to the people of Istanbul, and while the Venetian gondola had its champions, most people would have agreed that the caïque was superior in point of elegance and speed. Even after dark, the caïques swarmed around the landing stages like water beetles.

“Forget the ship’s boat,” Lefèvre said quietly. “It’s better that I leave from here unnoticed. Galata is all eyes.”

They left Yashim’s lodging after dark, moving quietly on foot through the deserted streets. Lefèvre shouldered the satchel, which apparently contained everything he possessed. The narrow streets of the Fener were silent and dark, but Yashim led his companion through them by instinct, now and again pausing to feel for a corner stone or to put his hand gently on the other man’s shoulder. Once, a big dog growled out of the darkness, but it wasn’t until they reached the landing stage that they met with any other sign of life: the city could have been uninhabited.

Down by the stage, Pera twinkled out across the black water of the Golden Horn. Lamps bobbed gently on the stems of the caïques drawn up against the quay, where a handful of Greek boatmen sat among the coils of rope, the creels and nets, murmuring together and smoking pipes that glowed red in the dark. Lower down the Horn a few ships rode at anchor, with lanterns at their prows. The water slapped darkly against the pilings where the caïques were moored.

A boatman uncoiled himself with catlike ease and stepped forward.

“The
Ca d’Oro
? I know the ship. She’s moored off the point. Both of you?”

Yashim explained it was just one passenger, and fixed a price. He shook hands with Lefèvre and watched him settle himself into the bottom of the caïque, the satchel on his knees. Then the boatman tapped out his pipe, stepped into the caïque’s stern, and pushed off with a practiced flick of the wrist, which sent the frail craft skimming out into the darkness.

Yashim raised a hand in farewell, certain that the Frenchman would see him framed against the low lights of the landing stage. He thought of his friend Palewski: he’d be pleased by the story. Better pleased by the reflection that neither of them would ever have to see Lefèvre again.

He smiled to himself. The light of the caïque had blended into the darkness, so he dropped his hand and turned and went home.