The Snake Stone

by Jason Goodwin

  Pilaf in bianco, Yashim mused, had been just the thing. Pilaf, and a good night’s sleep.

  “A tot of cherry brandy,” Palewski said, rising from his armchair. “Honestly, Yash, we should be celebrating that fellow’s departure, not fretting about him. What do you say?”

  “You’re right,” Yashim replied. “I’ll have just the one.”

  Which he did, forcing Palewski, as he said reproachfully, to drink for both of them.

  24

  YASHIM walked slowly across the Hippodrome, toward the obelisk that the emperor Constantine had brought from Egypt fifteen hundred years ago. A gift to his mistress, Byzantium, Lefèvre would have said. He wondered what they meant, those hieroglyphic birds, those unwinking eyes, the hands and feet incised with unearthly precision on the gleaming stone.

  He stopped for a moment in the pencil of the obelisk’s shade, and touched its base. Trajan’s column stood fifty yards beyond, a slender bole of rugged stone, weathered and clamped with great bronze staples, carved with a Roman emperor’s Balkan triumphs, helmeted legionnaires crammed together with their short swords drawn; the stamp of horses, the abasement of chieftains and kings, the flinging of bridges across rivers, and the lament of women. The scenes were hard to decipher, too; the stone had been softer.

  Beneath it, Arab traders had pitched a wide green tent on poles. A string of mules went by, and as Yashim lowered his gaze to watch them pass, his eye was caught by the twining stalk of the Serpent Column, hollow and broken like a reed: a twist of ancient verdigris no bigger than a withered palm tree, set in a triumphal axis between the obelisk and the column.

  It had been made over two thousand years before, a miracle of craftsmanship to celebrate the miracle of Greek victory over the Persians at Plataia, with three fearsome snakes’ heads supporting a great bronze cauldron. It had stood for centuries at the oracle of Delphi, until Constantine seized it and dragged it here to beautify his new capital. The centuries since had been unkind to it. The cauldron was long gone; the heads, more recently, had disappeared.

  Yashim had known the Serpent Column for years before he first saw the bronze heads in Palewski’s wardrobe. He had imagined them to look like real snakes, with broad jaws and small, reptilian eyes, so he had been shocked by the monsters whose cruel masks he had explored by candlelight that evening. They were creatures of myth and nightmare, fanged, blank-eyed, seeking to terrorize and devour their prey. Malevolence seeped from them like blood.

  Yashim leaned over the railing, to peer down into the pit from which the Serpent Column sprang. The other columns stood on level ground. Was it because the snakes emerged from somewhere deeper, some dark, submerged region in the mind? He shuddered, with an instinctive horror of everything cultish and pagan. From above, the coiling snakes looked like a drill, a screw digging deeper and deeper into the fabric of the city, penetrating its layers one by one.

  If you turned it so that the coils bit deeper into the ground, if you traced the sinuous curves of the serpents’ bodies from the tail up, you would bring the fanged monsters closer. And eventually you would find yourself staring into those pitiless hollow eyes and the gaping mouth, into the dark side of myths and dreams: terrorized, and then devoured. Yashim glanced back at the Egyptian obelisk. It seemed cold and reserved, careless of its fate. The Roman column was nothing but a platitude: empires decay.

  But between them, the green-black coils of the brazen serpents referred to a dark enigma, like a blemish in the human soul.

  25

  ALEXANDER Mavrogordato glanced automatically down the street and then rapped on the door with the knob of his cane. After a while he heard the shuffle of feet inside. He knocked again.

  The door opened.

  “Yashim efendi,” he said.

  The old woman nodded. “He just came in, I think, efendi. Please, mind your head.”

  Alexander Mavrogordato ducked, though not quite deeply enough, and stepped down into the little hall, rubbing his head. “Where do I find him?”

  The old woman pointed up the stairs. Mavrogordato climbed heavily. On the landing he paused, then pushed open the door.

  Yashim looked up in surprise.

  “You mind if I come in?” The young man’s tone was aggrieved, as if he expected a rebuff.

  “Not at all,” Yashim replied pleasantly. “You are almost in already.”

  “My mother told me where to find you,” Alexander Mavrogordato said, advancing into the room. He looked around and went over without stopping to the stove, putting his hands on the table, fingering the pots. Then he wheeled around and came over to the books, absently running his hands across their spines.

  “Mother says your job’s done.” He reached into his pocket and drew out a purse. “Here.”

  He threw it across to Yashim, who was sitting on the divan, watching the performance with interest. Yashim put up an arm and closed his fingers on the purse. A Phanariot purse: heavy and musical.

  “Your mother is too kind,” he said. “What exactly is she paying me for?”

  The young man whipped round. “It doesn’t matter. She thinks she overreacted.”

  Yashim lobbed the purse back. Mavrogordato was taken by surprise, but he caught it. Then he fumbled the catch and the money fell onto the floor.

  “In which case, there’s no fee.”

  Mavrogordato stirred the purse with his foot. “I don’t think you get it, do you? My mother doesn’t want to know about—about anything.”

  “I see. We never talked. She never scolded me for being late, or asked why I didn’t wear a fez, or told me not to smoke.”

  “That’s right,” the young man replied guardedly.

  “Oddly enough, do you know the only thing she really never did? She never discussed a fee with me. Now take your money, Monsieur Mavrogordato, before I start remembering that you were ever here.”

  Yashim didn’t move from the divan. The young man kicked viciously at the purse, so that it thudded against the wall.

  Then he flung out of the door, slamming it behind him.

  The trouble with children who were told exactly what and what not to do, Yashim reflected, is that they grow up unable to think for themselves.

  26

  THE night watchman who patrolled the streets of Pera was used to the barking of the dogs. As he approached in the faint gleam of his own swaying lamp, the mangy animals would raise themselves from the shadows, from the doorways and the curbs, and their ritual protest carried on long after he had passed by. It was a matter of form, without moment: an unthinking ceremony that had long ago ceased to have any meaning for either the dogs or the watchman.

  So it was that as he turned into the road which led past the French embassy, he was surprised by silence. For a few moments he stood still, scratching his head, while the lantern bobbed about at the end of a stick and swung a feeble yellow gleam this way and that across the unpaved road.

  Then, through the silence, he heard a soft sucking and tearing sound. He hoisted his lantern and peered forward into the dark.

  27

  ISTANBUL was not an early-rising city; only the devout, stirred by their muezzins, noticed the dawn as it began to creep from the mountains behind Üsküdar. Dr. Millingen, who was about to be summoned by the French embassy, was asleep, breathing heavily and dreaming of Athens. Nearby, in the Polish residency, Stanislaw Palewski snored among his pillows, dressed in a voluminous old dressing gown. Along the Bosphorus the sultan slept, his cheek flattened against the breast of a Circassian odalisque; she was stolidly resisting the temptation to fall asleep because, if she had a single fault, it was in snoring with her mouth open. Up the Golden Horn, Madame Mavrogordato was also awake, making an effort to interpret her husband’s night fidgets. Yashim slept silently, half dressed, covered in an old cloak. Malakian was asleep; George the costermonger drifting somewhere between the two states.

  Auguste Boyer, chargé d’affaires at the French embassy, was awake, dressed, and leaning from a ground-floor wi
ndow into the courtyard, wiping a trail of vomit off his chin with a lace-edged handkerchief. The vomit was thin and smelled of bile and coffee. He retched again; his stomach turned over, and a silver thread of drool sank from his lips onto the dry cobbles below the window.

  “Put back the sheet,” he said faintly. There was a sound of the sheet being drawn up, and Boyer turned with the handkerchief to his mouth. “Send for Dr. Millingen. And you may bring—bring the bag to my office.”

  Keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the door and the handkerchief in place, he staggered from the room. The middle-aged orderly glanced down once at the bloodstained sheet, watching the stains become shiny again from contact with the dead man’s wounds, then bent down stiffly and picked up the leather bag. That Boyer was only a kid, he was thinking. He should have been there with the emperor, at Waterloo. La Gloire! Not glory, no. But an acquaintance with the dead.

  He closed the door, crossed himself with a reflex movement, and went to find the footman.

  28

  A pair of white cotton gloves slapped down onto the table, setting the coffee cup ringing. Yashim put out a hand and glanced up to see Palewski standing over him.

  “My dear friend! Have a seat.” Yashim beckoned to the café proprietor. “A coffee. Make it two.” He frowned at Palewski. “Are you ill?”

  “I’ve felt better,” the ambassador said in a low voice that was almost a whisper. “Are both these coffees mine? Good.”

  It would be an exaggeration to say that the color returned to Palewski’s cheeks as he drank his coffee, for they were bloodless at any time; but when he next spoke his voice was firmer.

  “Odd news, Yashim. I’ve just come from the French embassy. The night watch found a body last night, almost on their doorstep. It’s one of theirs.”

  “How extraordinary.”

  Palewski turned his head and made a signal to the café owner. “I—I’m afraid you won’t like this. It’s Lefèvre.”

  Yashim stared at him blankly. “It couldn’t be.”

  Palewski shrugged. “I’m afraid so. The embassy need your help in dealing with the Porte,” he said. “Lefèvre was a French citizen, so he’s technically their responsibility. But the authorities have to be informed, and the ambassador’s concerned that none of the embassy dragomen know the ropes. He doesn’t want too many people involved, either. The body is a mess, apparently.”

  “I saw Lefèvre leave,” Yashim insisted.

  Palewski ignored him. “Dr. Millingen will be holding an inquest, I expect. Who he saw, where he went, that sort of thing. They’ll want you there for that. Maybe you’re the last person who saw him alive.”

  “He took a caïque straight to the ship,” Yashim said.

  Palewski shrugged. “Nothing was very straight about Lefèvre. The French ambassador thinks I know my way about. He called me over at some unearthly hour this morning for advice. I suggested you.”

  Yashim said slowly: “I owe Lefèvre something. He was weak, but—”

  Palewski nodded. “He trusted you. I’m sorry, Yash.”

  29

  AUGUSTE Boyer’s impression that the Turks were an impassive race was confirmed by Yashim’s stony inspection of what remained of Lefèvre’s body. The face had been washed, and now presented a more terrible sight than it had at first, covered with blood and gobbets of torn flesh. The Turk, Boyer noticed, studied it with a patience that was almost obscene; at one point he seized the head by the ears and turned it so that the horribly exposed eyeballs fixed on Boyer himself, over a grinning row of bloodstained teeth. When Boyer turned back, Yashim was examining the body’s hands and feet, which seemed lifelike compared to the ravaged corpse to which they had been attached. It was the orderly, by a gesture, who suggested that Yashim might like to view the entire corpse. Even then, examining the appalling carnage of the wound, he only pursed his lips.

  “The good doctor—” Yashim suggested, straightening.

  “Dr. Millingen will be here shortly,” Boyer said quickly. And not, he thought, a moment too soon: he wanted urgently to put the horror in the hands of a competent professional.

  “Strange, the way the dogs go for the face,” Yashim mused. “Too well exposed, I imagine. Nose gone, chin torn away, yet they haven’t touched the ears at all.”

  Boyer felt the nausea returning. Yashim followed him out of the room, standing aside when he realized that Boyer was silently retching into his handkerchief.

  “I don’t quite understand why the body was brought into the embassy,” Yashim said, after a suitable pause.

  Boyer pointed wretchedly to a leather satchel. “The watchmen found that with—with the body. As I said, the bulk of his remains were underneath some planks and beams, on a building site around the corner from here. The dogs…” He trailed off again. “The stuff in the bag was scattered around. I suppose the murderer was looking for money. Anyway, the watchman recognized the foreign script. He couldn’t have known it was in French, of course. I suppose he thinks we’re all the same, really, and we were closest.”

  “Yes,” Yashim said. “I suppose. It was a coincidence, all the same.” He voiced the thought that had been nagging him ever since the café. “You weren’t expecting him here, were you?”

  “Lefèvre? I wouldn’t think so, monsieur.”

  “Because it was night?”

  “Because—” Boyer hesitated. “Well, we wouldn’t expect to see him. And in the night, of course.”

  “But Monsieur Lefèvre was not quite comme il faut?”

  Boyer took a deep breath through his nose. “He was a French citizen,” he said.

  Yashim looked at the satchel again. He remembered Lefèvre tearing it open three nights ago, scattering its contents across his floor. Once again he felt the unbidden affinity with the dead man, the burden of a special duty. He had not liked him. But Maximilien Lefèvre had feared for his life, and had trusted Yashim to save it. That, in Yashim’s mind, had become the obligation of hospitality: a task he’d failed, by a grotesque margin.

  The satchel still contained the books Lefèvre had shown him, along with an unbound copy of Le Père Goriot by Balzac; its spine was rough and the stitching was beginning to come apart. There was also the shirt he had worn two nights ago; it was dirty around the cuffs and collar and smelled of the dead man’s sweat. Some underwear. Yashim returned the books to the satchel, with the dirty laundry. He wiped his hands on his cloak.

  “Nothing else? Just the bag?”

  “That was all the watchmen brought in.”

  A footman walked downstairs and murmured something into Boyer’s ear.

  “We can go up to the ambassador now, monsieur.”

  30

  THE French ambassador glanced up from his desk. “I understand you knew this Lefèvre.”

  “Only slightly, Your Excellency. Monsieur Palewski brought him to dinner one evening at my home.”

  “It’s not much of an acquaintance,” the ambassador agreed.

  Yashim hesitated. “Some days later, though, he reappeared at my door. He was frightened and confused, but he asked me to find a ship for Europe, as soon as possible. The next day, when I had done so, his spirits seemed to have improved.”

  The ambassador raised a finger. “Ask Boyer to come in,” he said. “You were not friends?”

  “No. I merely tried to help him,” Yashim explained. “He seemed anxious. Almost a little crazy. The ship was to have sailed yesterday morning. The Ca d’Oro, of Palermo. How he came to be here, in Pera, I have no idea.”

  “And you saw him to the ship?”

  “I saw him off on a caïque from Fener the night before last. I assumed he had left Istanbul.”

  Boyer came in with a secretary. The secretary laid a paper on the desk, and the ambassador framed the paper with his fingers and squared it up with the edge of the desk.

  “Enfin. As the chief representative of the kingdom of France, it is my duty to see that justice is accorded to French citizens who fall under my jurisdictio
n in this empire. A man is found where he is not supposed to be, slaughtered in a bizarre and barbaric way. We must make an account of his movements, of course. Dr. Millingen has made a preliminary inspection. He says Lefèvre must have been killed the night before last. En effet, the night you saw him to the caïque.”

  “Can he be sure?” Yashim asked.

  “Frankly, I do not know. The doctor has his methods, I imagine. Taking the doctor’s opinion in the matter, and from what you say, Monsieur Yashim, it could appear that the unfortunate archaeologist spent the last twenty-four hours of his life in your apartment.”

  Yashim opened his mouth to speak, but the ambassador pressed on.

  “To conclude, monsieur, only three people might have known where Monsieur Lefèvre was likely to be that night. Including, of course, Lefèvre himself,” he added with an ironic drawl. “And a ship’s captain—selected almost at random from the port—who is unlikely to have known Lefèvre.”

  The ambassador half turned in his chair to exchange a glance with Boyer, who coughed slightly. The ambassador flicked the corner of the sheet of paper up and down with his thumb on his desk, not looking up.

  “As you say, the Ca d’Oro sailed yesterday. This is confirmed. In a month or two, if he returns, we may learn something from its captain.

  “In the meantime, Monsieur Yashim, you say you did not know the archaeologist well. You say, euh, he was afraid. But he trusted you, evidently. Why?” The ambassador looked up slowly from his desk. Yashim had a feeling that he was only an observer, as if he were watching this interview from somewhere else. He heard himself say: