The Snake Stone
Page 1
To Izaak
The king commands us, and the doctor quacks us,
The priest instructs, and so our life exhales.
—LORD BYRON, Don Juan
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
1
THE voice was low and rough and it came from behind as dusk fell.
“Hey, George.”
It was the hour of the evening prayer, when you could no longer distinguish between a black thread and a white one, in ordinary light. George pulled the paring knife from his belt and sliced it through the air as he turned. All over Istanbul, muezzins in their minarets threw back their heads and began to chant.
It was a good time to kick a man to death in the street.
The grainy ululations swept in sobbing waves across the Golden Horn, where the Greek oarsmen on the gliding caïques were lighting their lamps. The notes of prayer rolled over the European town at Pera, a few lights wavering against the black ridge of Pera Hill. They skimmed the Bosphorus to Üsküdar, a smudge of purple fading back into the blackness of the mountains; and from there, on the Asian side, the mosques on the waterline echoed them back.
A foot caught George in the small of his back. George’s arms went wide and he stumbled toward a man who had a long face as if he were sorrowing for something.
The sound swelled as muezzin after muezzin picked up the cry, weaving between the city’s minarets the shimmer of a chant that expressed in a thousand ways the infirmity of man and the oneness of God.
After that the knife wasn’t any good.
The call to prayer lasts about two and a half minutes, but for George it stopped sooner. The sad-faced man stooped and picked up the knife. It was very sharp, but its end was broken. It wasn’t a knife for a fight. He threw it into the shadows.
When the men had gone, a yellow dog came cautiously out of a nearby doorway. A second dog slunk forward on its belly and crouched close by, whining hopefully. Its tail thumped the ground. The first dog gave a low growl and showed its teeth.
2
MAXIMILIEN Lefèvre leaned over the rail and plugged his cheroot into the surf which seethed from the ship’s hull. Seraglio Point was developing on the port bow, its trees still black and massy in the early light. As the ship rounded the point, revealing the Galata Tower on the heights of Pera, Lefèvre pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve to wipe his hands; his skin was clammy from the salt air.
He looked up at the walls of the sultan’s palace, patting the back of his neck with the handkerchief. There was an ancient column in the Fourth Court of the seraglio, topped by a Corinthian capital, which was sometimes visible from the sea, between the trees. It was the lingering relic of an acropolis that had stood there many centuries ago, when Byzantium was nothing but a colony of the Greeks: before it became a second Rome, before it became the navel of the world. Most people didn’t know the column still existed; sometimes you saw it, sometimes not.
The ship heaved, and Lefèvre gave a grunt of satisfaction.
Slowly the Stamboul shore of the Golden Horn came into view, a procession of domes and minarets that surged forward, one by one, and then modestly retired. Below the domes, cascading down to the busy waterfront, the roofs of Istanbul were glowing red and orange in the first sunlight. This was the panorama that visitors always admired: Constantinople, Istanbul, city of patriarchs and sultans, the busy kaleidoscope of the gorgeous East, the pride of fifteen centuries.
The disappointment came later.
Lefèvre shrugged, lit another cheroot, and turned his attention to the deck. Four sailors in bare feet and dirty singlets were stooped by the anchor chain, awaiting their captain’s signal. Others were clawing up the sails overhead. The helmsman eased the ship to port, closing in on the shore and the countercurrent that would bring them to a stop. The captain raised his hand, the chain ran out with the sound of cannon fire, the anchor bit, and the ship heaved slowly back against the chain.
A boat was lowered, and Lefèvre descended into it after his trunk.
At the Pera landing stage, a young Greek sailor jumped ashore with a stick to push back the crowd of touts. With his other hand he gestured for a tip.
Lefèvre put a small coin into his hand and the young man spat.
“City moneys,” he said contemptu
ously. “City moneys very bad, Excellency.” He kept his hand out.
Lefèvre winked. “Piastres de Malta,” he said quietly.
“Oho!” The Greek squinted at the coin and his face brightened. “Ve-ery good.” He redoubled his efforts with the touts. “These is robbers. You wants I finds you porter? Hotel? Very clean, Excellency.”
“No, thank you.”
“Bad mans here. You is first times in the city, Excellency?”
“No.” Lefèvre shook his head.
The men on the landing stage fell silent. Some of them began to turn away. A man was approaching across the planked walk in green slippers. He was of medium build, with a head of snowy white hair. His eyes were piercingly blue. He wore baggy blue trousers, an open shirt of faded red cotton.
“Doctor Lefèvre? Follow me, please.” Over his shoulder he said: “Your trunk will be taken care of.”
Lefèvre gave a shrug. “À la prochaine.”
“Adio, m’sieur,” the Greek sailor replied slowly.
3
THAT same morning, in the Fener district of Istanbul, Yashim woke in a slab of warm spring sunshine and sat up, drowsily rubbing his hands through his curls. After a few moments he cast aside his Korassian blanket and slid from the divan, dropping his feet automatically into a pair of gray leather baluches. He dressed quickly and went downstairs, through the low Byzantine doorway of the widow’s house, and out into the alley. A few turns took him to his favorite café on the Kara Davut, where the man at the stove gave him a nod and put a small copper saucepan on the fire.
Yashim settled himself on the divan facing the street, beneath the projecting upper windows. He slipped his feet under his robe, and with that gesture he became, in a sense, invisible.
It was partly the way Yashim still dressed. It was several years since the sultan had begun to encourage his subjects to adopt Western dress; the results were mixed. Many men had swapped their turbans for the scarlet fez, and their loose robes for trousers and the stambouline, a curiously high-necked, swallow-tailed jacket, but few of them wore European lace-up boots. Some of Yashim’s neighbors on the divan resembled black beetles, in bare feet; all elbows and pointy knees. In a long cloak, somewhere between deep red and brown, and a saffron-colored robe, Yashim might have been a ruck in the carpet that covered the divan; only his turban was dazzlingly white.
But Yashim’s invisibility was also a quality in the man—if man was the proper word. There was a stillness about him: a steadiness in the gaze of his gray eyes, a soft fluidity to his movements, or an easiness of gesture that seemed to deflect attention rather than attract it. People saw him—but they did not quite notice him, either; and it was this absence of hard edges, this peculiar withdrawal of challenge or threat, that comprised his essential talent and made him, even in nineteenth-century Istanbul, unique.
Yashim did not challenge the men who met him; or the women. With his kind face, gray eyes, dark curls barely touched, at forty, by the passage of the years, Yashim was a listener; a quiet questioner; and not entirely a man. Yashim was a eunuch.
He took his coffee propped up on one elbow, and ate the çörek, brushing the crumbs from his mustache.
Deciding against having a pipe with his coffee, he left a silver piastre on the tray and walked down the street toward the Grand Bazaar.
At the corner he turned and glanced back, just in time to see the café owner pick up the coin and bite it. Yashim sighed. Bad money was like poison in the bowels, an irritant that Istanbul could never rid itself of. He hefted his purse and heard the dry rustle of his fortune susurrate between his fingertips: this was one of those times when currency seemed to melt like sugar in the hand. But sugar was sweet. The sultan was dying, and there was bitterness in the air.
In the Street of the Booksellers, Yashim stopped outside a little shop belonging to Goulandris, who dealt in old books and curiosities; sometimes he stocked the French novels that Yashim found hard to resist.
Goulandris fixed his visitor with his one good eye and ground his teeth. Goulandris was not one of your forward, pushy Greeks; his job as a bookseller was to watch, not speak. One of his eyes was filmed with cataracts; but the other did the work of two, recording the way a customer moved, the speed with which he selected a certain book, the expression on his face as he opened it and began to read. Old books, new books, Greek books, Turkish books—and precious few of those—books in Armenian and Hebrew and even, now and then, in French: Dmitri Goulandris stocked them as and when they came to him, pell-mell. Books did not interest him. But how to price a book—that was another matter. And so, with his one good eye, he watched the signs.
But the eunuch—he was good. Very good. Goulandris saw a wellset gentleman in early middle age, his black hair faintly touched with gray beneath a small turban, wearing a soft cloak of an indeterminate color. Goulandris believed that he could penetrate any of the ruses that people used to throw him off the scent—the feigned indifference, the casual addition, the artfully contrived and wholly careless impulse. He listened to what they said. He watched the way their hands moved, and the flicker of their eyes. Only the damned eunuch remained a constant puzzle.
“Are you looking for a book?”
Yashim lifted his head from the page he was reading and looked around. For a moment he was puzzled; he had been far away with Benjamin Constant, a French writer whose single slim novella laid bare the agonies of love unfulfilled. Adjusting his gaze, Yashim found himself in the familiar cubbyhole in the Grand Bazaar, with the walls lined with books from floor to ceiling, the dim lamp and Goulandris himself, the bookseller, in a dirty gray fez, cross-legged on his stool behind a Frankish desk. Yashim smiled. He was not going to buy this book, Adolphe. He closed it softly and slid it back into its place on the shelf.
Yashim bowed, one hand to his chest. He liked this place, this little cave of books: you never knew what you might find. Goulandris, he suspected, had no idea himself: he doubted if he could do more than read and write in Greek. And today, hugger-mugger with the Frankish textbooks on ballistics, the old imperial scrolls bearing a sultan’s beautiful calligraphic tugra, the impenetrable Greek religious tracts, the smattering of French novels Yashim so enjoyed—there, bizarre as it was, a treasure that caught his eye. It had not been there last month. It might not be there the next.
Half smiling to himself, Yashim slid the book out; then he carefully reached up and took down Adolphe again. He hesitated a little over his third choice, choosing—at random—something French, all the while feeling Goulandris’s eye fixed firmly on his movements. Slightly too casually, he hoped, he slipped it to the bottom of the pile as he placed the books on the desk.
Goulandris sucked his lips. He did not haggle or offer arguments. He suggested prices. Yashim failed to suppress a flicker of disappointment as Goulandris solemnly priced the third book just a shade beyond his reach. Left with two, he put out a hand and picked up Adolphe. The bookseller glanced suspiciously from the book in Yashim’s hand to the book on the desk.
The book on the desk was fatter. It had more writing in it. But the thin book was in the eunuch’s hand.
“Twelve piastres,” Goulandris growled, placing a stubby finger on the book in front of him.
Yashim delved into his purse. He put Adolphe back on the shelf and, with a nod to the old man in his dirty fez, stepped out into the Street of the Booksellers, hugging to his chest volume 1 of Carême’s L’Art de la Cuisine Française au 19 me Siècle.
At the bottom of the hill he turned toward the market.
Yashim saw the fishmonger staring stonily at his scales as he weighed out a bass for an elderly matriarch. Two men were haggling over a bunch of carrots. Bad money bred suspicion, Yashim thought. And then he smiled again, thinking of George at his vegetable stall. George always had good ideas for supper. George had no truck with suspicion. George was a cussed old Greek and he would simply growl and say the money was shit.
He looked ahead. George wasn’t there.
; “He’s not coming in no more, efendi,” an Armenian grocer explained. “Some kind of accident’s what I heard.”
“Accident?” Yashim thought of the vegetable seller, with his big hands.
The grocer turned his head and spat. “They come up yesterday, said George wouldn’t be here no more. One of the Constantinedes brothers to get his pitch, they says.”
Yashim frowned. The Constantinedes brothers wore identical pencil mustaches and were forever on the move behind their piles of vegetables, like dancers. Yashim had always stuck with George.
“Efendi! What can we do for you today?” One of the brothers bent forward and began to arrange a pile of eggplants with quick flicks of his wrist. “Fasulye today at last year’s price! One day only!”
Yashim began to assemble his ingredients. Constantinedes weighed out two oka of potatoes and tumbled them into Yashim’s basket, replacing the scoop on the scales with a flourish.
“Four piastres, twenty—twenty—twenty—eighty-five the potatoes—five-oh-five—and anything else, efendi?”
“What’s happened to George?”
“Beans today—yesterday’s prices!”
“They say you’re going to take over his pitch.”
“Five-oh-five, efendi.”
“An oka of zucchinis, please.”
The man picked the zucchinis into his scoop.
“I heard he had an accident. How did it happen?”
“The zucchinis.” As Constantinedes tilted the scoop over Yashim’s basket, Yashim gripped it by the edge and gently raised it level again.
“I’m a friend of his. If he’s had an accident, I may be able to help.”
Constantinedes pursed his lips thoughtfully.
“I can ask the kadi,” Yashim said, and let go of the scoop. The kadi was the official who regulated the market. The zucchinis rained down into the basket. “Keep the change.”
The man hesitated, then scooped up the two coins without looking at them and dropped them into the canvas pouch at his waist.
“Five minutes,” he said quietly.
4
YASHIM stirred his coffee and waited for the grounds to settle. Constantinedes tilted the cup against his lips. “We all got a choice. We don’t want aggravation, see?”