Yashim took the gift. On his way up the hill he thought: George left his garden for a week, and now he is back.
The sound of the muezzins caught him halfway up the hill. The sun was fading in the west behind him; ahead, darkness had already fallen.
Across the Horn, Yashim considered, the French ambassador would soon be writing his report.
At his door, at the top of the stairs, he paused and listened.
There was no sound: no rustle of pages being turned, no sigh. No Amélie.
Yashim pushed the door cautiously, gently, and peered into the gloom. Everything was in its place.
He went in slowly and fumbled for the lamp; and when it was lit he sat for a long time on the edge of the sofa with only his shadow for company.
Amélie had gone, leaving nothing behind. Only a sense of her absence.
After a while Yashim leaned forward, his eye drawn to his shelves.
Something else, he noticed, had changed. The Gyllius, too, was gone.
110
AUGUSTE Boyer, chargé d’affaires to the ambassador, had not been sleeping well. Drifting off to sleep, he would remember with a start of shame his own appearance at the courtyard window, drooling onto the cobbles: the ambassador could easily have seen him. Asleep, he dreamed of faceless men and wild dogs.
Yashim’s arrival shortly after Boyer had dressed, and before he had drunk his bowl of coffee, collided unhappily in the attaché’s mind with the memory of Lefèvre’s bloodless corpse.
“The ambassador cannot possibly be disturbed,” he said vehemently.
“He’s asleep?”
“Certainly not,” Boyer retorted. “Already he is settling various affairs, in discussion with embassy staff.” Like the chef, he thought: there was a luncheon planned. Provided, of course, the ambassador was awake. Boyer’s tummy began to rumble; he pulled out a small handkerchief and coughed.
“Do you happen to know if the ambassador has completed his report into the death of the unfortunate Monsieur Lefèvre?”
Boyer regarded the eunuch with some distaste. “I have no idea,” he said.
Yashim still entertained a small hope of delay. “And the testimony of Madame Lefèvre? Did that prove useful?”
Boyer looked at him blankly. “Madame Lefèvre?”
“Amélie Lefèvre. His wife,” Yashim explained. “She came here the evening before last.”
Auguste Boyer thought of his bowl of coffee, growing cold.
“Of Monsieur Lefèvre,” he said, drawing himself up, “the embassy is aware. But as for Madame—no, monsieur, I am afraid that you are utterly mistaken.”
Yashim rocked slowly on his heels.
“Madame Lefèvre came here to the embassy. She had been in Samnos, and she needed help to get home. To France.”
Boyer seized on Yashim’s change of tack. The ambassador’s report was beyond his jurisdiction, but this was easy.
“You are quite mistaken. This Madame Lefèvre, whoever she may be, has not been seen at the embassy,” he said crisply, mentally connecting himself with his coffee and a warm croissant. “Good day, monsieur.”
He turned on his heel and strode off across the hall, leaving Yashim staring after him, a puzzled frown on his face.
Either the little diplomat was lying—or Amélie had gone somewhere else, after all. She had disappeared into the great city as suddenly as she had come, taking her little bag and a head full of dangerous new ideas. Determined, she had said, to find out who had killed her husband.
Yashim’s frown deepened. Ideas were dangerous, certainly; but men could be deadly.
111
AMÉLIE Lefèvre shivered as the door swung shut behind her.
She set her lantern on a low shelf, opened the glass pane, and lit the wick with a trembling hand. The air was very cold.
She held the lantern over her head, gathered up the hem of her skirts with her free hand, and began to slowly descend the spiral of water basins leading down to the mouth of the tunnel.
At the bottom she stepped into the shallow water. Drops of condensation on the lantern threw whirling freckles of light deep into the tunnel, skimming across the rough brick walls to vanish suddenly in the black wings of her own shadow on the roof.
She reached into her pocket and took out a small ball of white wax and a reel of black cotton thread. She softened the wax against the lantern and used it to fasten an end of thread to the opening of the tunnel, an inch or so above the waterline. She stood up and tucked up her skirts. Loosely holding the cotton reel in the crook of her fingers, she entered the tunnel, paying out the thread behind her.
At the first fork she veered to the right, without hesitation, but about five yards in she stopped to listen. The water sluiced softly around her feet. Instinctively she glanced back: the pressing darkness took her by surprise, and she swung the lantern nervously over her shoulder. A drip from the roof landed on the tip of her nose, and she jerked back.
Calm yourself, she murmured, wading on. Concentrate on the detail. Roman bricks. A later repair, using cruder materials; perhaps builders had crashed through the roof in some remote age. The Turks seemed to have rediscovered the secret of Roman cement, she thought. The walls were bare; nothing could grow down here.
Amélie Lefèvre. An archaeologist. Like my husband.
She began to count her steps.
She counted a hundred, two hundred. At five hundred paces she began to feel the weight of the city pressing down on her, slowly sealing off the distant mouth of the tunnel. She stopped counting.
This is the Snake, she told herself. It has stood firm for a thousand years, a lost feat of Byzantine engineering.
I’m in good hands: Byzantine workmen, a Renaissance scholar—and Maximilien Lefèvre.
She had read it all in Yashim’s book; the book her husband had hidden in his apartment. The book that Max had always meant her to find.
The reel snagged in her hand. She looked down and took another out of her pocket. She tied the ends of the thread together, curved her fingers over the new reel, and went on.
112
A thought, a memory, was stirring in Yashim’s mind. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, oblivious to the people passing in the street.
Amélie had vanished into thin air. The only clue to her plans lay in the book she had taken with her. Gyllius must have identified to Amélie—and perhaps, before that, Lefèvre—the location of the Byzantine relics.
Amélie believed in their existence. They lay, she had said, in a hollow space beneath the former church of Aya Sofia. A crypt.
The way to the crypt lay through a network of tunnels that ran beneath the city. Most of them were no bigger than rabbit burrows, but some were big enough to admit the passage of a man. One, at least, seemed to run from the siphon in Balat to the church of St. Irene on the grounds of the Topkapi Palace, where Yashim had seen its mouth. Close to where Gyllius claimed to have gone down beneath a man’s house and flitted through a cavernous cistern in the dark. A hollow hippodrome, as Delmonico had said: the Atmeydan, where the Serpent Column had stood for fifteen hundred years.
Between Topkapi Palace, Gyllius’s cistern, and the Sulëymaniye Mosque stood one ancient building more famous than the others. Aya Sofia, the Great Church of the Byzantines.
Yashim held his eyes shut tight.
The waterpipe must lead to the Hippodrome.
Gyllius would have realized that three hundred years ago: he must have guessed where the relics were to be found.
And then he had left the city to go with the Ottoman armies to Persia. As if someone, or something, had frightened him away. Just as Lefèvre had been frightened, three centuries later.