The Snake Stone Read online

  “Yes. Is George all right?”

  “Maybe. I don’t ask.”

  “But you’ll take over his pitch.”

  “Listen. This was between them and George. Keep us out of it. I’m talking to you because you was his friend.”

  “Who are they, then?”

  The man pushed his coffee away and stood up.

  “A little piece of everything, that’s all.” He bent down to pick something off the ground and Yashim heard him whisper: “The Hetira. I’d leave it, efendi.”

  He walked back to his stall, leaving Yashim staring at the shiny thick dregs in his coffee cup, wondering where he had heard that name before.

  5

  ISTANBUL was a city in which everyone, from sultan to beggar, belonged somewhere—to a guild, a district, a family, a church or a mosque. Where they lived, the work they did, how they were paid, married, born, or buried, the friends they kept, the place they worshiped—all these things were arranged for them, so to speak, long before they ever balled their tiny fists and sucked in their first blast of Istanbul air, an air freighted with muezzins, the smell of the sea, the scent of cypresses, spices, and drains.

  Newcomers—foreigners, especially—often complained that Istanbul life was a sequence of divisions: they noticed the harem arrangement of the houses, the blank street walls, the way tradesmen clung together in one street or a section of the bazaar. They frequently gave way to feelings of claustrophobia. Stambouliots, on the other hand, were used to the hugger-mugger atmosphere of warmth and gossip that surrounded them from the cradle and followed them to the grave. In the city of belonging, Yashim well knew, even the dead belonged somewhere.

  He ran his thumb along the table’s edge. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that of all Istanbul he might be the exception which proved the rule. Sometimes he felt more like a ghost than a man; his invisibility hurt him. Even beggars had a guild that promised to provide their burial at the end. The ordinary eunuchs of the empire, who served as chaperones, escorts, guardians—they were all, in that sense, members of a family: many belonged to the greatest family of all, and lived and died in the sultan’s service. Yashim, for a spell, had served in the sultan’s palace, too; but his gifts were too broad to be comfortably contained there, between the women of the harem and the secrets of the sultan’s inner sanctum. So Yashim had chosen between freedom and belonging; and a grateful sultan had bestowed that freedom on him.

  With freedom had come responsibilities, which Yashim worked hard to fulfill, but also loneliness. Neither his condition, nor his profession, such as it was, gave him the right to expect to see his own reflection in a pair of eyes. All he had were his friends.

  George was a friend. But what did he know about George? He didn’t know where he lived. He didn’t know where he’d met his accident. But wherever he was, alive or dead, someone in the city knew. Even the dead belong somewhere.

  “George? I never asked,” the Armenian stallholder said, scratching his head. “Yildiz? Dolmabahçe? Lives somewhere up the Bosphorus, I’m pretty sure—he walks up from the Eminönü wharf.”

  One of the Eminönü boatmen, resting his athletic body on the upright oar of his fragile caïque, recognized George from Yashim’s description. He took him up the Bosphorus most evenings, he said. Two nights ago a party of Greeks had spilled out onto the wharf and asked to be rowed up the Horn toward Eyüp; he had dithered for a while because he had not wanted to miss his regular fare. He remembered, too, that it must have been after dark because the lamps were lit and he had noticed the braziers firing on the Pera shore, where the mussel-sellers were preparing their evening snacks.

  Yashim offered him a tip, a pinch of silver, which the boatman palmed without a glance, politely suppressing a reflex that was second nature to most tradesmen in the city. Then Yashim retraced his steps toward the market, wondering if it was in one of these narrow streets that George had met with his accident.

  The sound of falling water drew his attention. Through a doorway, higher than the level of the street, he caught a glimpse of a courtyard with squares of dazzling linen laid out to dry on a rosemary bush. He noticed the scalloped edge of a fountain. The door swung shut. But then Yashim knew where George might most likely be found.

  Almost ten years after the sultan had told his people to dress alike, George stuck to the traditional blue, brimless cap and black slippers that defined him as a Greek. Once, when Yashim had asked him if he was going to adopt the fez, George had drawn himself up quite stiffly:

  “What? You thinks I dresses for sultans and pashas all of my life? Pah! Like these zucchini flowers, I wears what I wears because I ams what I ams!”

  Yashim had not asked him about it again; nor did George ever remark on Yashim’s turban. It had become like a secret sign between them, a source of silent satisfaction and mutual recognition, as between them and the others who ignored the fez and went on dressing as before.

  The door on the street gave Yashim an idea. A church stood on the street parallel with the one he was strenuously climbing toward the market. A group of discreet buildings formed a complex around the church, where nuns lived in dormitories, ate in a refectory, and also ran a charitable dispensary and hospital for the incurably sick of their community. If his friend had been found on the street after his accident, it was to this door, without a shadow of doubt, that he would have been brought, thanks to his blue cap and his black Greek shoes.

  But the door remained closed, in spite of his knocking; and in the church, when he finally reached it, he had to overcome the suspicions of a young Papa who was doubtless bred up in undying hatred for everything Yashim might represent: the conqueror’s turban, the ascendancy of the crescent in the Holy City of Orthodox Christianity, and the right of interference. But when at last he passed beyond the reredos and through the vestry door, he met an old nun who nodded and said that a Greek had been delivered to their door just two nights past.

  “He is alive, by the will of God,” the nun said. “But he is very sick.”

  The wardroom was bathed in a cool green light and smelled of olive oil soap. There were four wooden cots for invalids and a wide divan; all the cots were occupied. Yashim instinctively put his sleeve to his mouth, but the nun touched his arm and told him not to worry, there was no contagion in the ward.

  George’s black slippers lay on the floor at the foot of his cot. His jaw and half his face were swathed in bandages, which continued down across his shoulders and around his barrel-shaped chest. One arm—his left—stuck out stiffly from the bedside, splinted and bound. His breathing sounded sticky. What Yashim could see of his face was nothing more than a swollen bruise, black and purple, and several dark clots where blood had dried around his wounds.

  “He has taken a little soup,” the nun whispered. “That is good. He will not speak for many days.”

  Yashim could hardly argue with her. Whoever had attacked his friend had done a thorough job. Their identity would remain a mystery, he thought, until George recovered enough to speak. The Hetira. What did it mean?

  While the nun led him out through the tiny courtyard, Yashim told her what he knew about his friend. He left her with a purse of silver and the address of the café on Kara Davut where he could be found when George regained consciousness.

  Only after the door had closed behind him did he think to warn her of the need for discretion, if not secrecy. But it was too late, and probably didn’t matter. For George, after all, the damage was already done.

  6

  MAXIMILIEN Lefèvre stepped lightly from the caïque and made his way up the narrow cobbled street, carefully avoiding the open gutter, which ran crookedly downhill in the middle of the road. Here and there his path was barred by a tangle of nets and creels, set out to mend; then he would vault over the gutter and carry on up the other side, sometimes stooping to pass beneath the jettied upper floors of the wooden houses, which tilted at crazy angles, as if they were being slowly dragged down by the weight of the washi
ng lines strung between them. Old women dressed from head to toe in black sat out on their steps, their laps full of broken nets; they regarded him curiously as he passed by.

  Ortaköy was one of a dozen or so Greek villages strung out along the Bosphorus between Pera and the summer houses of the European diplomats. They had been there two thousand years ago, and more—when Agamemnon had assembled fleets, as Homer sang. Greeks from the Bosphorus had manned the ships that sailed against Xerxes, four centuries before Christ; they had ferried Alexander the Great across to Asia, when he took his helots on their legendary campaigns in the East. An Ottoman pasha, Lefèvre recalled, had explained that God gave the land to the Turks—and to the Greeks He left the sea. How could it have been otherwise? Four hundred years after the Turkish Conquest, the Greeks still drew a living from the sea and the straits. They had been sailing these waters while the Turks were still shepherding flocks across the deserts of Asia.

  The thought made Lefèvre frown.

  Foreigners seldom visited the Greek villages, in spite of their reputation for good fish; before long, Lefèvre found himself with a tail of curious small boys, who shouted after him and pushed and shoved one another while their grandmothers looked on. Some of the smaller boys imagined that Lefèvre was a Turk, and all of them guessed that he was rich, so when Lefèvre stopped and turned around they drew together, half curious and half afraid. They saw him pull a coin from his pocket and offer it with a smile to the smallest boy among them. The boy hung back, somebody bolder snatched the coin, and pandemonium erupted as the whole pack of children turned as one to chase after him down the street.

  Lefèvre took a turn onto an unpaved lane. Swarms of tiny flies rose from stagnant puddles as he approached; he swept them from his face and kept his mouth shut.

  The café door stood open. Lefèvre made his way rapidly to the back and took a seat on a small veranda that overlooked the pantiled roofs and the Bosphorus below. After a while another man joined him from the interior of the café.

  Lefèvre stared down at his hands. “I don’t like meeting here,” he said quietly in Greek.

  The other man passed his hand across his mustache. “This is a good place, signor. We are not likely to be disturbed.”

  Lefèvre was silent for a few moments. “Greeks,” he growled, “are nosy bastards.”

  The man chuckled. “But you, signor—you are a Frenchman, no?”

  Lefèvre raised his head and gave his companion a look of intense dislike. “Let’s talk,” he said.

  7

  IN the palace at Besiktas, with its seventy-three bedrooms and forty-seven flights of stairs, the Shadow of God on Earth, Sultan Mahmut II, lay dying of tuberculosis—and cirrhosis of the liver, brought about by a lifetime’s devotion to reforming his empire along more Western, modern lines, and bad champagne chased down with spirits.

  The sultan lay back on the pillows of an enormous tester bed hung with tasseled curtains, and gazed through red-rimmed eyes at the Bosphorus below his window, and the hills of Asia across the straits. He had, he dimly knew, a world at his command. The fleets of the Ottoman sultan cruised in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea; the prayers were read in his name at the Mosque in Jerusalem, in Mecca and Medina; his soldiers stood watch on the Danube by the Iron Gates, and in the mountains of Lebanon; he was lord of Egypt. He had wives, he had concubines, he had slaves at his beck and call, not to mention the pashas, the admirals, the seraskiers, voivodes, and hospodars who governed his far-flung empire in trembling or, at least, respectful obedience to his will.

  In his thirty years as sultan, Mahmut had presided over many changes to the Ottoman state. He had destroyed the power of the Janissaries, the overmighty regiment that opposed all change. He had adopted riding boots and French saddles. He had told his subjects to stop wearing the turban, if they were Muslims, and blue slippers, if they were Jews, and blue caps, if they were Greeks: he had meant all men to receive equal treatment, and to wear red fezzes, and the stambouline, a cutaway coat.

  The results were mixed. Many of his Muslim subjects now reviled him as the Infidel Sultan—and many of his Christian subjects had developed unrealistic expectations. Those Greeks in Athens—they had actually rebelled against him. After seven years of fighting, with European help, they had created their own, independent kingdom on the Aegean. The kingdom of Greece!

  As for the champagne and brandy, they had eased some of the anxiety that the sultan experienced in his efforts to update, and preserve, the empire of his forefathers.

  And now, at the age of fifty-four, he was dying of them.

  His hand moved slowly toward a silken cord whose tassels brushed against his pillows, then it fell again. He was dying, and he did not know whom he could ring for.

  The sun pulled slowly around, now slanting from the west. There were others he remembered, not just names, but the faces of men and women he had known. He saw the old general Bayraktar, with his furious mustaches, and the astonishment on his face when he burst into the old palace all those years ago and hoisted Mahmut out of a laundry basket to make him sultan. He saw his uncle Selim dead, in a kaftan stained with the blood of the House of Osman, and his favorite concubine, Fatima, alive: fat, cheerful, the one who rubbed his feet the way he liked and expected nothing. He remembered another general who had fallen to his death, and the faces of men he had seen in crowds: a sufi with a gentle smile, a student in the grip of loyalty, clutching the Banner of the Prophet; a Black Eunuch, down on his knees; a Janissary who had cocked his fingers at him, like a pistol, and winked; the pale whiskers of Calosso, the Piedmontese riding master, and the downcast eyes of Abdul Mecid, his son, who had a chest like a girl’s waist; and the beard of the Patriarch—what was his name?—who took the cross of office from his hands, and died twirling at the end of a rope in the hot sun.

  There was another face, too…His hand moved out, his fingers groped for the tassel.

  But when the slave arrived, bowing, not looking up, Sultan Mahmut could not remember who it was he had wanted to see.

  “A glass…the medicine…there, that’s it,” he said.

  “Dr. Millingen—” the slave began.

  “—is my doctor. But I am sultan. Pour!”

  8

  “TAKE care on these stairs, monsieur. They are very worn—I’ve slipped on them myself.”

  “But only on the way down, Excellency! I’m sure of that.”

  Stanislaw Palewski, Polish ambassador to the Sublime Porte, frowned and carried on up the stairs to Yashim’s apartment. Was the Frenchman implying that he got drunk?

  He put a hand to his cravat, as if the touch would reassure him: impeccably starched and properly tied, the cravat was not, he was vaguely aware, in the latest fashion; like his coat, like his boots, like his own diplomatic position, it belonged to another age, before Poland had been wiped from the map by the hostile maneuverings of Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Palewski had arrived in Istanbul twenty-five years before, as the representative of a vanished country. Elsewhere, in other capitals of Europe, the Polish ambassador was only a diplomatic memory; but the Turks, the old enemy, had received him with good grace.

  Which was, he thought with a frown, in the days before Istanbul became positively overrun with mountebanks, schemers, and dealers of every nationality, and none. Before visiting Frenchmen buttonholed you and invited themselves along to dinner.

  But also before he had come to know Yashim.

  How they had become friends was still a matter of debate, for Yashim’s memory of the event differed in emphasis from Palewski’s; it involved more broken glass, and less enunciated French. But they had been firm friends ever since. “Together,” Palewski had once declared, weeping over a blade of pickled bison grass, “we make a man, you and I. For you are a man without balls, and I am a man without a country.”

  It was an appeal of friendship that Palewski now threw Yashim as Lefèvre advanced past him into the room, flinging out his hand.

  “Enchanté, m’sieur,�
�� he said. “It’s most kind of you to have us! Something smells good.”

  It was not Yashim’s habit to shake hands, but he took Lefèvre’s and squeezed it politely. Palewski opened his mouth to speak when the Frenchman added:

  “I was quite unprepared for such a generous invitation.”

  He was a small, stoop-shouldered man, delicately built, with a few days’ growth of white stubble and a voice that was soft and sibilant, close to lisping.

  “But I am delighted, monsieur—”

  “Lefèvre,” Palewski cut in finally. “Dr. Lefèvre is an archaeologist, Yashim. He’s French. I—I felt sure you wouldn’t mind.”

  “But no, of course not. It’s an honor.” Yashim’s eyes lit up. A Frenchman for dinner! Now that was a decent challenge.

  Palewski set his portmanteau on the table and clicked it open. “Champagne,” he announced, drawing out two green bottles. “It comes from the Belgian at Pera. He assures me that it belongs to a consignment originally destined for Sultan Mahmut’s table, so it’s probably filth.”

  “I am sure it will be excellent.” Lefèvre smirked at Yashim.

  The ambassador looked at him coolly. “I rather think the sultan’s illness speaks for itself, Lefèvre. It defeats all the best doctors.”

  “Ah, yes. The Englishman, Dr. Millingen.” Lefèvre’s hands fluttered toward his head. “Whom I consulted recently. Headache.”

  “Cured?”

  Lefèvre raised his eyebrows. “One lives in hope,” he said sadly.

  Palewski nodded. “Millingen’s not too bad for a doctor. Though he killed Byron, of course.”

  Yashim said: “Byron?”

  “Lord Byron, Yash. A celebrated English poet.” He reached into his bag. “If the champagne’s no good, I have this,” he added, drawing out a slimmer and paler bottle, which Yashim immediately recognized. “Byron was an enthusiast for Greek independence,” he went on. “Never lived to fire a gun in anger, as far as I know. He died trying to organize the Greek rebels in ’24, at the siege of Missilonghi. Caught a fever. Millingen was his doctor.”