The eye slid away. Nothing.
“The Hetira?”
But his friend had rung down the shutter on his one good eye. His swollen face was incapable of expression.
George was a proud man. Tough and proud enough to take a beating—and too proud to speak, as well.
Or too afraid.
Yashim had a question for the nun as he left.
“Only his wife, efendi. She’s been coming here every day. She always talks. He is a good man. He listens to his wife.”
“And does she think—that he had an accident?”
The nun lowered her eyes and answered demurely. “We do not judge our people, efendi. We try only to heal.”
She glanced at him then, and Yashim turned his head away. Muttering a farewell, he found his own way out into the street, and heard her bolt the door at his back.
16
WIDOW Matalya’s brow furrowed and uncreased as she made her count. She champed her toothless gums together, and the hairs trembled on a large black mole on her cheek. Now and again her fingers twitched. Widow Matalya did not mind, because she was asleep.
She dreamed, as usual, about chickens. There were forty of them, leghorns and bantams, scratching about in the dust of the Anatolian village where she had been born more than seventy years ago, and the chickens in her dream were exactly the same as the chickens she had tended as a young woman, when Sipahi Matalya had ridden through her yard and sent them all squawking and flapping onto the roof of their own coop. Sipahi Matalya had taken her to Istanbul, of course, because he was only a summer sipahi, and they had shared a very happy marriage until he died; but now that her children were grown she thought very often of those forty birds. Awake, she wondered who had eaten them. Asleep, she checked that they were all safe. It was good to be young again, with all that ahead of one.
Twenty-nine. Thirty. She scattered a little more grain and watched them pecking in the dirt. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Or had she gone wrong? The noise of the chickens’ beaks hitting the earth was confusing her. Bam! Bam! Thirty-two, thirty-three.
The lips stopped moving. Widow Matalya’s eyes opened. With a sigh she levered herself ponderously off the sofa, adjusted her headscarf, and went to the door.
“Who is it?”
“It is Yashim, hanum,” a voice called. “I have no water.”
Widow Matalya opened the door. “This is because the spigot in the yard is blocked, Yashim efendi. Someone is coming. We must be patient.”
“I have my bowl,” Yashim said, holding it up. “I’ll go and find a soujee in the street. Can I get some water for you, hanum?”
Yashim was gone for half an hour, and he came back looking exasperated.
“You needn’t worry about the standpipe. It’s the whole street,” he said. “Plenty of water beyond the Kara Davut. Here, I filled your bowl.”
“Thank you, Yashim efendi. I will send the man away if he comes. They will fix the pipes, and tomorrow we shall have water again, inshallah.”
“Inshallah, hanum,” Yashim replied.
He was a good man, the widow Matalya reflected as she closed the door.
17
HE ate the lüfer simply grilled, with a squeeze of lemon and the bread he had picked up from the Libyan baker on his way back from the hammam. Yashim dropped the remains out of the window for the dogs, made a pot of tea, and retired to his divan with the oil lamp and a French novel he had been lent by a friend at the palace. He enjoyed Balzac, relishing the light he shone into the secret heart of Paris, a city he had often visited in his imagination, with all its deceit and greed.
He opened the book and smoothed out its pages. As the night air flooded into the city he could hear the building crack as it cooled, easing its wooden joints inch by inch. Down in the street a dog began to bark, with deep, hoarse repeated barks; then a casement squealed and the dog was quiet. Yashim put out a hand to tug at the shawl that lay beside him on the divan, and heaped it around his shoulders. The lamp threw a steady yellow oval of light around the gleaming pages of his book. He bent his head and started to read.
He read the first few lines quickly, eagerly: he had already glanced at them earlier, savoring the promise of new faces and unfamiliar names, and the casual-sounding opening phrase on which Balzac had lavished so much consideration in order to create between him and his reader that sense of enjoyable complicity. But when he reached the end of the paragraph, he found he had remembered nothing.
He scratched his thigh and stared absently at the page. Like the old building itself, he seemed to be finding it hard to settle. Odd cracks and reports still sounded through the floorboards; the stairs creaked. He’d been reading too fast.
What did it mean, he wondered, to remember nothing? Like George: thinking of something else, thinking about the Hetira, perhaps. Digesting the blow to his pride, puzzling out his attitude to fear.
Yashim, too, was thinking about the Hetira. Malakian had recognized the name: it was something Greek, he’d said.
Yashim rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He was letting this business run away with him. Hadn’t he already done his best by George? Bringing him food. Checking on his condition, as a friend should. Goulandris’s death was shocking, certainly; but it wasn’t his affair.
He pressed his hand down on the Balzac and stared at the first page, listening to the sound of warm wood cracking as it shrank in the evening air.
He thought of the sultan: fading like the light. It was months since he had been summoned to the sultan’s palace. And George, or Goulandris—were they simply victims of the same unease? Like a creak in the rafters as the sunlight drained away.
Yashim raised his head abruptly and listened. That crack on the stairs outside had sounded unusually loud. But everything was quiet. And then he heard, distinctly, a soft rasping that seemed to come from close to his door.
Yashim slipped the shawl from his shoulders with his left hand and swirled it swiftly around his fist. His other hand closed on a knife that lay on the shelf, a plain straight-shafted blade that Yashim sometimes used to cut tobacco. Slowly he uncoiled himself from the divan and stood up, tensing his legs.
As he did so, there came a scratch on the door. Yashim stepped forward, took the handle in his left hand and wrenched it back, slipping behind the door as it opened wide.
For a few moments, nothing happened. Yashim rubbed his thumb against the knife’s hilt and straightened his back to the wall, looking sideways. He heard a moan, which sounded almost like a plea, and a man stumbled across the threshold, dragging a leather satchel into the room behind him.
18
THE man took a few steps toward the lamp and then peered around wildly until he caught sight of Yashim, watching him in astonishment from beside the opened door. For a second he seemed to cringe.
“Monsieur Yashim!” he breathed. “Shut the door, I beg you.”
As Yashim closed the door, the man clawed at the air and stumbled backward onto the divan, where he sat twitching and running his hand through his hair. Had it not been for the hair, Yashim would have found it hard to recognize Lefèvre: he seemed shrunken and incredibly aged, his black eyes darting nervously from side to side, his face the color of a peeled almond under a new growth of beard.
Yashim laid the dagger aside. Lefèvre trembled on the divan; every now and then he was racked by a convulsion, his teeth chattering. He hardly seemed to know where he was.
Yashim poured him a glass of cold water, as a remedy for shock, and Lefèvre seized it in both hands, hugging it to his chest as if it might stop his trembling. He drank it down, his teeth chattering against the rim.