The snake stone yte-2

by Jason Goodwin

  Yashim paused, listening, then squeezed feetfirst through the opening. Once through, he stood brushing the dust from his cloak while his eyes adjusted to the darkness. There were some steps, and a door on a catch, but the door was not close-fitting. In a moment Yashim had slipped his knife between the door and the jamb and was stealing out into the corridor.

  Millingen’s study lay just across the hall. Yashim whipped in, leaving the door open, and looked around. The green-and-gold-striped wallpaper hung with sporting prints, the mantelpiece with an ornamented clock over an English grate, the big walnut desk with its black leather top, and a set of shelves set into an alcove, full of books: neat, methodical, and prosperous.

  He tried the drawers of the desk. Notepaper, sealing wax, a box of steel nibs. In a lower drawer, some papers. Yashim riffled through them. They were written in English, in an illegible scrawl. He closed the drawer and went over to the bookshelves.

  The lower shelves contained a series of leather-bound boxes, which at first glance resembled books. Yashim squatted down. For the most part the boxes contained more papers: accounts, copies of the doctor’s bills, notes about patients written in English, and in the same difficult hand. But one also contained a series of letters, written in Greek, between Millingen and a certain Dr. Stephanitzes in Athens.

  Yashim was about to lift the box to the desk when a sound from the corridor-light footsteps, perhaps, and a peculiar swishing noise-made him freeze. He was about to turn around when he heard the door click and the sound of a key turning in the lock.

  He sprang for the handle. At the last moment he decided against rattling the handle and knocked on the wooden panel, instead: if the servant had returned, he might think the doctor had absentmindedly left the door ajar. But no one came. Yashim knocked again, much louder.

  There were no sounds of retreating footsteps; he had certainly not heard the front door open or close. He pressed his ear to the panel. For a moment he had a sense that somebody was standing on the other side of the door.

  He looked around the room. The window was hung with muslin curtains, against the street, and barred like the windows at the back of the house. He looked at the empty grate and sighed. Everything that made this room in Pera solid and English made it also a perfect prison.

  He crouched down, with a faint hope that he might be able to retrieve the key from the keyhole on the other side. But the key was no longer in the lock.

  Whoever had locked the door had done so deliberately, knowing that Yashim was inside.

  The idea made Yashim frown. He went back and squatted down by the bookshelves, from where Millingen’s desk almost hid him from the door. To see him, someone would have had to lean in at the door. They would have had to approach along the corridor very quietly-as if they already knew he was there.

  In which case, someone must have seen him going in. Not Millingen: he had gone out. But the servant-could he have doubled back while Yashim was coming through the coal chute?

  But then-why wait so long to lock the door?

  Yashim bit his lip. He lifted the box of papers onto the desk and bent over it.

  He’d come to do a job, and now, it seemed, he was being afforded the leisure to complete it.

  105

  Several hours passed before Yashim, sitting in the doctor’s chair, heard the sound of the doctor coming back.

  The manservant had returned long before, making his way noisily down the passage to the back of the house. He had let the servant go by: he wanted to see Millingen, after all. He closed his eyes and set about concocting an imaginary supper.

  In his mind’s eye he had already set the meze down when he heard the sound of the key grating in the lock and Dr. Millingen came in, holding his hat like a tray. He was followed by the manservant, scowling fiercely.

  “You!”

  Yashim slid out of the chair and bowed.

  Millingen glared at the box on the table. “This is an outrage!” He said. “I am a doctor. My practice depends on the bond of confidentiality. This study is where I keep my patients’ notes.”

  “But I’m not interested in your medical records, Dr. Millingen,” Yashim said.

  “I suppose I must take your word for that! The assurances of a mere housebreaker.” Dr. Millingen sneered. “Perhaps you would be so kind as to explain what does interest you before I turn you over to the watch.”

  “Of course, forgive me. I came here on account of your coin collection.”

  “My coins? The devil you did.”

  Yashim spread his hands in a calming gesture. “I admit that I have no particular interest in coins. But I am intrigued by the collecting process, Dr. Millingen. Your method of acquiring specimens. Malakian, for instance-you described him as an excellent source.”

  Millingen put his hat on the desk and picked up the box. “What of it?”

  “Malakian is here in Istanbul. Athens might be a better place to look, if your specialty is the coinage of the Morean despots. I imagine that hoards of these coins are discovered there, buried in the ground or hidden in old buildings, or whatever. Is that so?”

  “It happens,” Millingen said. He glanced at the label on the box, and set it down slowly. “Mostly in my dreams.”

  “I wondered-your Athenian friend, who sends you coins? You said he was a doctor. Perhaps you were at Missilonghi together?”

  “I have made no secret of my presence at Missilonghi, Yashim efendi. Dr. Stephanitzes was a colleague.”

  “Of course. Now he writes books. He’s a firm advocate of what the Greeks call the Great Idea, isn’t he? I was curious about your correspondence.”

  “Well, well. I wasn’t aware that even in Turkey curiosity was a warrant for entering a man’s house and rifling his private papers.” Dr. Millingen’s expression hardened. “I suppose you will tell me what conclusions you were able to draw?”

  “Very few-I merely confirmed some ideas of mine. That, for example, the traffic between you and Dr. Stephanitzes was not all one way. In return for his coins, you were able to put him in the way of expanding his own collection.”

  “I see. Well, go on.”

  Yashim reached forward and opened the lid of the box of papers.

  “Here, in his most recent letter, Dr. Stephanitzes refers to a former member of the collectors’ club. You’ve mentioned him surfacing in Istanbul with a potentially devastating offer. Stephanitzes remembers him leaving the club without paying his dues.”

  “That’s correct,” Millingen said. “Ours is a very small world.”

  “Yes, isn’t it? Yashim said pleasantly. “Dr. Stephanitzes confesses to being highly interested in the former club member’s offer. A late Byzantine hoard-no, forgive me, the very last Byzantine hoard. But I expect you remember all that.

  “He urges you to inspect the hoard personally. I’d say your Dr. Stephanitzes is a skeptic: he doesn’t seem to trust the ex-member very far. But if the hoard proves to be genuine, he thinks that it could be exchanged for a considerable collection of valuable Greek coinage.”

  “But what of that, Yashim efendi?” Dr. Millingen took a pipe from the rack on his desk. He opened a drawer and scrabbled with his fingers for the tobacco. “It strikes me that you have had a very dull afternoon here. You, after all, are not a collector. What would you know of our curious passions? You’d be surprised by the jealousies and satisfactions we experience in our little world. The intensity of our feelings. Even the level of our mutual mistrust.”

  He sat down and tamped the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. “Malakian-through your good offices-completed the set for me. I was elated for a day or two. But now? Rather depressed. I think I shall donate the collection to the British Museum.”

  Yashim cocked his head. “I’d rather you explained about Lefevre’s hoard,” he said.

  Dr. Millingen leaned back in his chair and gave a chuckle. “Well, well.” He sucked on his unlit pipe. “You’ve guessed, then. I did see the unfortunate Dr. Lefevre. And yes, we discussed a hoar
d. Unfortunately I was never able to inspect it, as my friend advised, so I don’t suppose we will ever really know what it was he was offering to exchange. Poor fellow. He had so many irons in the fire.”

  “Another buyer, maybe?”

  “Yes, that, too.”

  Yashim frowned. “But you and Stephanitzes, you could trump all buyers, couldn’t you? If you wanted what he offered badly enough.”

  Millingen hesitated. “You are forgetting, Yashim efendi, that Lefevre was only offering an idea. A promise, if you will. Why would I trust him?”

  “Because he’d been your friend.”

  “Lefevre my friend? I never knew Lefevre.”

  Yashim shrugged. “Strictly speaking, no. But you did know Meyer. The Swiss doctor at Missilonghi. You shared a cause.”

  He expected Millingen to jump, but the Englishman merely reached for a match and frowned. “Meyer?” He struck the match and it flared between his fingers. “He was a Savoyard, in fact.”

  “A Savoyard?”

  “French Swiss. Swiss when it suits, and French when it doesn’t.” He paused to light his pipe. “We shared a cause, as you say. It seemed a cause to fight for, when I was young.”

  “And now?”

  Millingen tossed the match into the grate and put his hand around the bowl of his pipe. “I don’t know if you heard what happened at Missilonghi, Yashim efendi. The daily bombardments. The daily toll of disease. All the world knows Byron came to Missilonghi and died, and half of them think he was leading a cavalry charge at the time, with Suliotes in scarves and fustanellas brandishing pistols at his side. They think he was glorious because he was a poet, and that his death was glorious. But it wasn’t so. Missilonghi was just a trap, and Byron died just like most of them died, of fever, or cramp, or dysentery, or cholera. Sometimes people died when a shell landed on them in the street, out of the blue. Good for a doctor, eh? Plenty of cases to puzzle over. Plenty of widows and orphaned children to doctor and send to their graves. And that, my friend, was our revolutionary war.”

  Millingen clamped the pipe between his teeth and stood up.

  “I told you before, I don’t like postmortems. And I said why, too. I doctor to the living, not the dead. It’s my job to preserve life.”

  Yashim nodded. What Millingen said sounded true. It also sounded like a speech.

  “I was wondering about Meyer.”

  Millingen scowled. “I see. What about him?”

  “Well, if Byron disliked him, I suppose he didn’t attend the poet-as a doctor, I mean.”

  “No.”

  “So he was lucky, in that sense.” Yashim sounded embarrassed.

  Millingen’s scowl darkened. “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing, I mean-but after all, the poet died. In spite of-everything. Everything you could do.”

  “For God’s sake!” Millingen swore, in English. “You think we killed Byron? Rubbish! Cuppings. Purges. We took out pints of blood-all by the book. Don’t think Meyer could have done any better!” Millingen’s tone was incredulous; spots of color had appeared on his cheeks.

  “No, forgive me.” Yashim put out his hands in a soothing gesture. “I only meant-I’d heard-how Meyer was lost, when the rest of you got away. You joined the breakout, and it worked. The lucky two thousand. It must have been a scene of dreadful confusion. A crowd of terrified people, groping their way through the Turkish lines in the dark. Losing each other. Unable to raise their voices. People taking different routes into the hills. Is that how it was?”

  Millingen’s lips were tight. “Something like that.”

  “Yet Meyer stayed behind. Trying-and failing-to protect his wife, perhaps.”

  Millingen flexed his fingers. He was breathing hard.

  “He had a wife to think of, didn’t he?” Yashim said.

  Millingen rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, and when he opened them again, they looked pink and tired. “Maybe Missilonghi ended just as you say. Meyer wasn’t in the breakout-that much is true. But he didn’t stay behind, either.”

  Yashim looked puzzled. “But then-”

  “He’d already gone.” Millingen tinkled the fire irons with the toe of his boot. “The breakout was our only hope, but everyone knew how risky it was. Ten thousand people, trying to escape through the enemy lines. In a body, all together, some of us stood a chance.”

  “But Meyer?”

  “Didn’t wait to find out. He cleared off the night before we’d planned to escape. I don’t know that I blame him all that much: he stood a far better chance of getting out alone. But he didn’t say a word to anyone-least of all his wife.”

  “I see. He abandoned her?”

  “He abandoned all of us. You might say, monsieur, that he jeopardized the whole plan. If the Egyptians had caught him-well, you can imagine. I suppose he did what he felt he had to do to save his own neck. We had an uncomfortable day of it, once we’d found him gone. We couldn’t be sure the Egyptians didn’t know we were coming.” He straightened up and took a breath.

  “But Meyer wasn’t caught by the Egyptians.”

  “No,” Millingen said slowly. “He wasn’t caught.”

  Yashim stood very still. His eyes traveled slowly over the figure of the man in a frock coat leaning against the fireplace, over the two chairs, then over the ornate rug on the wooden floor.

  “And Chronica Hellenica? Do you still subscribe?”

  “ Chronica — ?” Dr. Millingen frowned. “No one subscribes to the Chronica these days. It folded years ago.”

  Yashim tilted his head back. “I’ve been wondering if he taught you that trick with the coin? Was that how Dr. Meyer whiled away his time? Or was he too busy with the Hetira? Was that formed at Missilonghi, too?”

  The question hung in the air.

  “I thought-at first-that the Hetira was like a secret army,” Yashim continued when Millingen did not reply. “Taking control of the Greeks in the city-raising money from them, terrorizing them, punishing them for stepping out of line. Preparing, perhaps, for an uprising. These are delicate times. I thought that the Hetira were killers.”

  Millingen sighed. “I told you once what the Hetira was. A boys’ club. A learned society. Chronica Hellenica — edited by Meyer-was our society journal. Our aim has always been to preserve Greek culture. We raise money for the maintenance of churches, here and throughout the Ottoman Empire. We sponsor schools. It’s nothing so very sinister.”

  “Then why the secrecy?”

  “Partly for amusement. Partly because, when we founded the society, we thought of ourselves as rebels. And partly for the sake of prudence. You might call it a matter of tact. Not everyone in the Ottoman Empire takes kindly to the idea of Greek cultural unity. But perhaps we have pushed the secrecy too far.”

  Yashim looked doubtful. “But Dr. Stephanitzes’s book is inflammatory, isn’t it?”

  “Dr. Stephanitzes has a mystical turn of mind, Yashim efendi. And he is something of a scholar. You might take that book as a statement of intent, I don’t know. For Stephanitzes, it is simply an exercise in tracing the development of the restoration legend over the centuries. He’s a Greek, of course: he wants to show that the Greeks are different. It really matters to him that the Greeks developed a cultural resistance to Ottoman rule-otherwise, they would simply be Ottomans in Greek costume. And then what do you have left? Only politics. And politics, as I have no doubt said before, is the Greeks’ national vice.”

  Millingen paused to relight his pipe. “That,” he said, puffing, “is what Missilonghi taught us. And it’s why we established the Hetira. Secret, cultural-and essentially unpolitical.”

  “If that’s true,” Yashim said dejectedly, “you have wasted a great deal of my time.”

  A skein of blue smoke edged upward from Millingen’s pipe.

  “When you saw Lefevre,” Yashim said slowly, “did he mention the possibility of other buyers?”

  Millingen shrugged. “A man like Lefevre,” he began. “If you
were trying to sell something, wouldn’t you try to create an auction?”

  “But no one could trust him.”

  “No. But don’t forget, I was instructed to buy on sight. We wanted Lefevre to find his-” He paused, looking for the right words. “His Byzantine relics. But other people might have wanted them-not to be found. It’s only an idea.”

  Yashim was silent for a moment.

  “Do you think the Mavrogordatos had him killed?” he asked at length.

  “Why-what makes you say that?”

  “You know the answer to that, doctor. Madame Mavrogordato.”

  “What rubbish,” Millingen retorted, rising to his feet.

  “Lefevre was married to Madame Mavrogordato. At Missilonghi-until he ran away.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Millingen said furiously. “Petros!” He got up quickly and bellowed at the door. “Petros!”

  There was a sound of rushing feet outside. To Yashim, it sounded as if someone were going up the stairs-and again, that curious swishing noise he’d heard before. But then Petros appeared, looking alarmed.

  “This gentleman is leaving,” Millingen said crisply. “Show him the door, Petros.”

  106

  The Suleymaniye Mosque stands on the third hill of Istanbul, overlooking the Golden Horn. Built by Sinan, the master architect, for his patron, Suleyman the Magnificent, in 1557, it reflects all the piety and grandeur of its age. Some of the foremost scholars of Islam toiled in its medresse or consulted its well-stocked library; its kitchens fed over a thousand mouths a day, in charity; and its central fountain, in the Great Court, gladdened the hearts of the faithful and cooled the hands and faces of shoppers emerging from the Grand Bazaar nearby.

  When, in the course of the morning, the spurting jets of the fountain declined to a mere dribble, it aroused irritation-and some anxiety. Some of the faithful objected that the water could not be very fresh; some of the more superstitious wondered if the unspoken crisis was approaching, and asked for news of the sultan’s health.