The snake stone yte-2

by Jason Goodwin

  “And that’s the origin of Russia?”

  “Broadly speaking, yes. The origins of Russian Orthodoxy. Once they’d got them friendly and half civilized, the Byzantines used them as an imperial guard, the Varangian guard. All six foot ten and Viking to their hairy toes. Just about the only thing that kept the Greeks safe in Constantinople.”

  Yashim started. “The Varangian guard protected the Greeks? And used this barbaric style of execution?”

  Palewski pulled a dubious face. “Well, I don’t know that they still used it then. Perhaps they’d dropped it, along with all their pagan gods. I don’t know. But here’s a curiosity for you, if you like. The spread eagle was the symbol of the Byzantine emperors. And after their fall, the Russians began to use it themselves. To demonstrate their kinship. You know, claims to the throne of Byzantium, Protectors of the Orthodox, all that.”

  He paused and rubbed his hands.

  “History lesson over. I don’t know that it’s been any good. Sun’s gone. Let’s have a drink.”

  He picked his way past the table and opened the door.

  “Marta!” he bellowed. “Vodka, glasses, and ice!”

  Yashim smiled.

  “I always shout these days,” Palewski remarked affably, from the door. “Saves me having to say please. Marta’s become rather a stickler for the niceties, I can’t think why. Anyway, the bell’s broken.”

  46

  It was already dark when Yashim reached the landing stage at Karakoy. Istanbul across the Golden Horn looked strangely unfamiliar, the outline of its hills concealed in the darkness, false heights picked out by the lamps that burned on minarets and domes. For a moment it was possible to believe that the city had been replaced by mountains, their peaks and slopes dotted here and there by charcoal burners’ huts.

  He closed his eyes, swaying slightly, and when he opened them again he had the impression of looking across a vast expanse of black water, toward the lamps of distant ships riding an invisible horizon that seemed high up and far away.

  He took the first boat that offered itself, aware that a caique was not a craft for a man who had drunk too much. Its thin, light hull was at best a flimsy wrapper to protect two men from the water, which lapped up almost to the vessel’s rim. He reclined automatically on the red cushion, shifting his weight to his left elbow to help trim the elegant dark hull. Now he could see the bulk of the city as he usually did, and the warm, low lamplight of the landing stage, where the caiques were moored.

  The rower fixed a weak lantern to the prow and took up the sculls, pushing the caique away from the landing stage with a practiced sweep of his arm. Like an arrow, the lacquered vessel hissed through the water. Yashim let his eyelids sink shut.

  The air was warm. Across the water, murmurs and snatches of conversation drifted lazily from the landing stage. The dogs barking on Galata Point sounded close by. Yashim felt the rhythmic tug of the sculls; the water trickled on the hull beneath his head. The rower spoke, but not to him, and there was a faint lurch, a stillness, an absence of the familiar sound. A ripple caught the caique and rolled it minutely. Yashim opened his eyes.

  The caique had stopped moving. Very dimly against the lantern light the rower could be seen, his shoulders still: he seemed to be resting on his sculls. The lights of the city traveled slowly around behind his head, like the lights of a fairy carousel. Yashim liked that explanation. For the moment, he could not think of another.

  He blinked a few times. The silent boatman, he reasoned, was waiting for him to speak.

  A light on the shore snuffed out. When it reappeared on the other side of the boatman’s black silhouette, it dawned on Yashim that Istanbul was not spinning; rather the caique itself was turning gradually with the current.

  “What’s the matter?” he finally said.

  The rower didn’t move. Instead another voice close by replied: “Nothing is the matter, efendi. In a moment, if you likes, you continues with your journey. You are good man, I am sure.”

  Yashim felt the hairs on his neck prickle. “What do you want?”

  “Yes, yes. A good man.” The caique trembled slightly. In the dark, Yashim realized, another caique had pulled alongside. “You do not like to have some things what belongs to other mans, no?”

  The voice was coming from somewhere behind his head. Yashim was awake now, his mind working fast to construct a picture of his situation. He saw it, as it were, from above: if his rower was leaning on the oars, still spread above the water, the other caique must have come in beside him, unless its oars were shipped. He had a feeling that the anonymous voice in the dark was too close for that. Which made it likely that the two boats were stern-to-stern: he had only to reach out and he would encounter-what? The speaker’s hand on the rim of his caique. The knuckles bent over the gunwale.

  “Whassat? What’ya talking about?” He hoped he sounded drunk.

  “I talks about a book, mister. Is little. Black. Is not belong to you, you understand? But we make it all right. Give me the book, and go your ways.”

  Yashim’s hand went to his chest. Lefevre’s book was not there.

  “Who are you?” he said thickly.

  “Please. The book, only.”

  The caique gave a little lurch, and there was a metallic click. Something winked momentarily in the darkness.

  “What worth your life, efendi?”

  It would be very soon. There was little time.

  Yashim sat up. He put his hand out for support and brushed against the man’s fingers where they clutched the rim of his caique.

  When one is getting into a caique held firmly against a fixed landing stage or piling by the oarsman, it is possible to stand up for a few seconds.

  In open water, when there is nothing to steady the boat and the oarsman is unprepared, you do not have seconds. You have maybe one.

  Yashim stood up.

  He stepped forward and stamped down, hard.

  There was a crack, and the caiques dipped together. As the hull of his caique flipped upward, Yashim took a step back and kicked himself off into the water.

  He flicked the water out of his eyes and released his cloak, letting it float. He brushed the white turban from his head: it could catch the faint light, and he let it go. With his head above the water, he concentrated on staying afloat as silently as possible while three men floundered, cursing, close at hand. Yashim took the hem of his cloak in his teeth and paddled gently backward; the cloak would protect him and give him warning if someone tried to grab him in the dark.

  He could hear the men more clearly now. One of them was cursing: perhaps the man whose hand he had trodden on. Another was lamenting the loss of his oars. Someone eventually told him to shut up.

  With their caiques gone, the men would have to strike out for the shore. The Pera side was slightly closer; they would probably swim that way. Yashim went on quietly paddling until he heard them splashing, and then he released the cloak and turned onto his front. He swam breast stroke, not trying to fight the current that was bearing him slowly down toward the Bosphorus.

  About twenty minutes later, a pair of barefooted chairmen enjoying a quiet smoke outside the New Mosque were surprised to be hailed by a man who squelched toward them out of the darkness. It was a shame the man was so wet, but he doubled their usual fare to the Fener baths. Business had been pretty quiet all evening.

  47

  The curtains of muslin and silk brushed together, stirred like a breath by the night air. Sometimes he could see a tiny diadem of stars through a chink close up by the rail, and it came and went, came and went, the way people did when you were dying, looking in to observe the progress of death, to render a report on the invisible struggle; all that was left. The sultan wondered if this was the way all men died, alone, in doubt, troubled by memories.

  He listened to the breath in the room, the woman’s breathing, the shush of the muslin against the silk. This would, of course, go on: the world would breathe without him. His own breath w
as less; it made no sound; he barely moved. Now that a great sleep was drawing close, he no longer needed sleep. The rehearsals were over.

  Out on the water, something splashed. The Bosphorus was full of fish. He imagined himself gliding with them, their cool, metallic bodies holding level, the moonlight refracted through the surface of the water, cold and silvery, and the fish glinting like the stars.

  He swam with them easily, borne along by the current and an effort that was minute, imperceptible. Hadn’t they always been there, too? Waiting for him-or perhaps not him, especially: for anyone who was ready to come, that night, any night.

  He looked ahead; it seemed that his eye skimmed like a shearwater across the dark ripples, zigzagging between the headlands where the hill ridges dropped to the water’s edge.

  On to where the straits opened out into the restless sea.

  48

  Marta half turned with the tray in her hands and nudged the door open with a sway of her hip. Inside, the room was almost dark, and only a thin crack of light between the shutters showed that the morning was well advanced. Palewski’s room smelled strongly of candle wax and brandy, a smell that Marta associated with her employer and which she had never learned to properly dislike. The table, she knew, would be piled with books and glasses, so she set the tray down on the floorboards and went to open the shutters she had closed on Palewski and his studies the night before.

  Daylight poured into the room, and the bedclothes stirred and groaned.

  Marta tugged at the window frame and succeeded in opening it about two inches at the top. For a few moments she stood looking out into the yard. Suela, the Xanis’ daughter, was sweeping the ground with a little besom broom; Shpetin, her brother, played silently in the dirt, rolling a ball to and fro. Marta sighed.

  She cleared a space on the chair by the bed, moved the tray to it, and set about collecting the bottles and glasses, returning the candlesticks to the mantelpiece. She was very careful not to disturb any of the books scattered around the bed. The ambassador was a magnificent scholar, after all. Night after night he wearied himself looking into those books of his, and she knew better than to let her carelessness spoil his work. What made his work all the harder was that he possessed so many books, more than anyone had ever seen in their life, so that finding the thing he needed was a real chore.

  “A Greek came round earlier,” she said, passing a cup of tea to the hand which had emerged from beneath the bedclothes. Marta, who was Greek herself, invested the word with powerful contempt. “I told him that you did not admit callers, but he could write and make an appointment.”

  Palewski swam up from the duvet and sipped weakly on his tea. “Very good,” he mumbled. “Probably some sort of swindle.”

  Marta nodded. That was it, exactly. The man had looked like a swindler.

  “The water is weak again today,” she said.

  “Tea’s all right, though.” Palewski put out his cup, and she filled it from the pot. “Thank you, Marta. I can manage now.”

  Marta curtsied. Inwardly, she could not resist a smile. The ambassador was a clever man, to be sure; but to manage-no. Beyond his books he was simply a big child.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said.

  “Thank you, Marta.”

  When Marta had gone, Palewski leaned from the bed and groped around on the floor. One of Lefevre’s handwritten notes had fluttered out of the book as he lay reading the night before. He had read it twice before he understood what it was; then he had very quickly snuffed out the candles and rolled up in bed.

  Now he opened the book again, and in the cooler light of day he reread the paper. Serp. Column. Mehmet II hurled mace-broke off one jaw. Patriarch of H.S. aghast. “This ancient and illustrious talisman was erected here for the purpose of driving serpents from Constantinople and, in the event of its destruction, it is most probable that the city will be destroyed by an invasion of serpents.” Sultan desists. Heads broken off c. 1700; Polish noble.??? query. The word serpents was underlined. Palewski’s legs stirred uneasily beneath the featherbed.

  49

  “Permission to enter?” Yashim stood at the gates, peering around at the children in the yard. The little girl-what was her name? — looked up and gave him a brief smile, but Shpetin tucked his chin into his chest and stared sullenly at the ground.

  “Don’t shoot-it’s only me,” Yashim said brightly as he crossed the yard.

  He found Palewski in bed, balancing a cup of tea on his knees.

  “I see your sentry’s been withdrawn,” he said.

  “What? You mean the little boy. Well, I don’t know. His father’s gone off somewhere without telling and everyone’s feeling the pinch. Mrs. Xani is gloomy enough at the best of times, but it’s Marta I worry about. Again. She’s quite upset for the little boy.”

  Yashim nodded. “Children like a routine,” he said.

  “Hmmm. They’d been going out together recently, Xani and his boy. A sort of apprenticeship. Then the boy came back rather late one evening, on his own.”

  Yashim nodded. Marta, the little boy: it was obviously a difficult morning for Palewski. He wanted to talk about Lefevre’s book.

  “I was attacked last night,” he said.

  “My dear fellow!” The ambassador looked shocked. “The whole place is going to the dogs.”

  Yashim told him about the caiques and his unexpected dip. “They wanted that book.”

  “My God! You were lucky. Have a look at this.”

  He passed across the copy of Gyllius. On the back page, stamped in green ink, was an oval containing the words in Greek: “Dmitri Goulandris, Bookseller.”

  Yashim gave a dismal snort. “But Goulandris could barely read himself. He wouldn’t have understood anything in the book.”

  “Not many people would. But perhaps the killer didn’t know that. Didn’t know Goulandris, except that he sold books. Including this one.”

  Yashim stared at the book in his hands. “You told me it’s not even all that rare.”

  “Hmmm.” Palewski was enjoying himself. “An original copy of Gyllius? I’ve never come across one. But you’re right. Nonetheless,” he added, pointing, “that copy is quite unique. It’s a matter of provenance.”

  Palewski put his hands behind his head and lay back against the cushions. “Take an old book or an old painting. In fact, let’s take one of Lefevre’s favorites, say a Bible. Illuminated. Thirteenth century. It’s Byzantine. Probably done in Georgia. All well and good-but what would its story be? How would it come to be sitting in the window of a shop in Saint Germain six hundred years later?”

  “Lefevre would have stolen it, I suppose.”

  “Of course he’d have stolen it, but that’s immaterial,” Palewski said. “What matters to him-and his clients-is that this book has spent the last six hundred years, let’s say, in a scriptorium in Georgia. Better still: it formed part of the last Byzantine emperor’s own personal collection in Istanbul, and then was rescued by the Georgians after the Ottoman Conquest in 1453.”

  “Giving it a history.”

  “It is called provenance. Tells people it’s the genuine article. I mean, if the monks liked it, and hung on to it, it must be the real stuff. But also, of course, it’s the story of the piece. I wager that Lefevre knew how to tell a story.”

  “It is the same with the House of Osman. Anyone could rule the empire-even I. But only the sultan has-this provenance.”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes, you’re right.” Palewski frowned. “I suppose when we-the Poles-began to elect our kings, we lost track of the story. Then we lost our country, too,” he added dejectedly.

  “You said this book was unique,” Yashim said quickly.

  Palewski rallied himself. “From what I’ve seen, I would say that it belonged to Delmonico.”

  Yashim shook his head.

  “About forty years after Gyllius came to Istanbul,” the ambassador explained, “an Italian called Delmonico wrote an account of the city himself.
He’d been a page in the household of the sultan-the Grand Signor. Knew what he was talking about. But forty years later, Yashim. He was interested by Gyllius, because Gyllius saw the city as it had been.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Byzantine Constantinople.” Palewski frowned. “No, that’s not quite right. Gyllius is really writing about three cities, one above the other. The first-it’s classical Constantinople. Fifth century. Gyllius has got an old book, a description of the city as it stood in Justinian’s day. With this in his hand, he goes about trying to identify the old monuments, the old palaces-ruins, most of them. Interesting stuff.

  “But there’s another Constantinople he’s describing, too-the one he’s walking around in. It’s the city that rose up in the intervening centuries-during a thousand years of Greek religion, Roman law, Greek language. Of course it’s changing again, in front of his very eyes. The Ottomans have taken charge. So Gyllius collars old Greeks who can still remember how it was before the Conquest-the name of an old church, for instance, which has been demolished or turned into a mosque. He’s not so interested in all that himself-but we are.”

  “I see what you mean,” Yashim agreed. “And the third city?”

  Palewski clasped his hands together. “The third city, Yashim, is being built around him. Ottoman Istanbul.”

  Yashim took the book from the bed and turned it over in his hands.

  “It was a time of change, Yashim. Like today, I suppose. You and I watch Istanbul being made more Western every day. Gyllius recorded the opposite: the remaking of Istanbul along Muslim lines. By the time Delmonico, the Italian, arrived, the process was to all intents complete. The city we have today.”

  “And this man-Delmonico-examined Gyllius’s book.”

  “Of course. To learn what had changed.”