“How interesting.” The Frenchman pinched his lower lip. “I was about to suggest that one day we will uncover the ruins of the city that Agamemnon sacked.”
“You believe it exists?”
Lefèvre laughed softly. “More than that. I think it will be found exactly where legend has always placed it. Scarcely a hundred kilometers from where we sit—in the Troad.”
“Are you to dig for it yourself?”
“I would, if I could get permission here. But for that—and everything else—one needs money.” He smiled pleasantly and spread his hands.
A breath of air stirred the curtains, and a ring chinked softly on the rail.
“Of course,” Lefèvre continued, “sometimes these things may just drop into your lap, if you read carefully and learn where to look.”
He took a sip of champagne. Palewski got up and opened the second bottle with a pop.
“I’m afraid you must find us very careless with the past,” Yashim said. “We don’t always look after things as we should.”
“Yes and no, monsieur. I do not complain. Carelessness of that sort may be a godsend to the archaeologist. One has only to go to your Atmeydan—the ancient Hippodrome of the Byzantines—to see that all its monuments remain intact. With the exception of the Serpent Column, of course. The column has lost its heads, which is no fault of the Turks.”
Palewski suddenly picked up his glass and drained it.
“Nobody remembers anymore, I shouldn’t think,” Lefèvre went on. “But the bronze heads were wrenched off the column little more than a century ago. To think what their eyes had witnessed, in the centuries since they stood beside the Delphic oracle!” He half turned toward Palewski. “It was foreign vandalism, Excellency.”
“Disgraceful,” Palewski murmured.
“Yes.” He frowned and leaned forward, pointing at Palewski. “Do you know, I recall a story that it was perpetrated by compatriots of yours! Young bloods in the Polish diplomatic, a century ago. I am sure I am right. Still, as I say, you never know what may drop into your lap unexpectedly. And profitably, too, for all concerned.” He paused. “I think it so often pays to believe what you read.”
In the silence that followed this remark, Yashim produced his main dish, a succulent agro dolce stew of lamb and prunes, followed by a buttery pilaf. Lefèvre rubbed his hands together and pronounced it excellent. He had seen—and smelled—it cooking on the brazier. They drank off the second bottle while he outlined his plans to leave Istanbul and make a tour through the Greek monasteries in the east. “Trabzon, Erzerum. Wonderful men, ignorant men,” he told them, shaking his head.
‘I must say, Excellency, this has been a delightful evening. They say a visitor is starved for good company in Istanbul these days, but I see no sign of it. No sign at all.”
He left shortly afterward, when all the champagne was gone, insisting that he could see himself home. Yashim took him down to the alleyway, led him to the Kara Davut, and found him a chair.
“One of these days—” Lefèvre called out with a wave; and then the chairmen hoisted him onto their backs and trotted away, and Yashim didn’t catch the end of his farewell.
He turned and made his way back up the alley, thinking over the evening’s conversation. For a moment he had the impression that something had moved at the top of the alley, where a small votive candle burned in a niche; but when he turned the corner the alley was dark, and he heard only the sound of his own footsteps. Once, before he reached his door, he turned his head involuntarily and glanced back.
Palewski whipped the door open as Yashim reached the top of the stairs. He had the vodka bottle by the neck.
“It wasn’t the first time he mentioned those serpents’ heads, Yashim. He was like that when we met.” Palewski seemed struck by a thought. “Do you know, if he ever asks to see me again, I’ll say no. I certainly won’t let him out of my sight,” he added paradoxically, uncapping the bottle.
Long ago, in a moment of exuberance, Palewski had led Yashim to a vast armoire that stood at the head of the stairs in the Polish residency. Turning the key in the lock, he had swung back the doors to reveal two of the three bronze heads that had once adorned the Serpent Column on the Atmeydan. They had goggled at them in horror for a few minutes before Palewski abruptly closed the door and said: “There. It’s been eating me up for years. But now you know, and I’m glad.”
“Even Lefèvre isn’t going to look into that big cupboard for the serpents’ heads, my friend.”
Palewski jerked at the bottle so fast that a splash of vodka landed on his wrist. “For God’s sake, Yash!” He glanced wildly at the door. “That Frenchman would be through it like a dose of salts.” He licked his wrist. “Profitable for all concerned, my eye. He smells them, and I’ve got no idea how.” He poured two shots and knocked his back. “Ah. Better. Cleans out the system, you know. It’s my guess that the man’s some sort of thief, Yashim. He knows too much. I’m sorry I brought him. I just couldn’t shake him off.”
“My dear old friend, we need never see him again.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Palewski said.
And he did.
9
“YOU are not what I had expected,” Madame Mavrogordato said. It was not a reproach. It was a statement of fact.
She sat bolt upright in a carved wooden chair, her jet-black hair piled up and stuck with pins. She had the face of a Cappadocian god, with straight black brows and chiseled lips. Yashim blinked and swayed a little on his feet. Madame Mavrogordato was not what he had expected, either.
On balance that was a good thing, but today the balance was fine. Yashim’s temples throbbed. His mouth was dry. Palewski was probably right, and the sultan was really dying from that champagne. He wished he had ignored the note and gone to the hammam first—he should at least have eaten some soup. Tripe soup, best. Palewski, having gone off cautiously down the stairs in the middle of the night, would still be comfortably asleep in bed.
The note had been delivered by hand, very early. While men consulted Yashim about money in one way or another, and sometimes about death, women summoned him more rarely. Women were usually worried about their husbands, their servants—or a mixture of the two; and sometimes they wanted nothing more than to satisfy a curiosity about Yashim. He was attached to the palace; he lived in the city; so they invented little troubles and called him in to brighten up their day. In normal circumstances, even the Christian women would have thought twice about summoning a man to their apartments; but Yashim was above suspicion. They called him, politely, lala, or guardian. In a city of a million people only a handful of men deserved the title, and most of those worked in the women’s apartments in the sultan’s palaces.
Madame Mavrogordato did not call him lala. She would never have servant trouble.
The Mavrogordato mansion stood alone behind high and fire-blackened walls in the Fener district of Istanbul, halfway up the Golden Horn. Yashim lived in the Fener, too, but that hardly made them neighbors: his home was a small tenement apartment above an alley. During the Greek riots eighteen years ago, the district had been ravaged by a fire; beyond the blackened walls, the mansion itself was entirely new. So, too, were the Mavrogordatos.
Quite how new, it was hard to say. Certain old Greek families of the Fener had for centuries provided the Ottoman state with dragomen, governors, priests, and bankers; but many had been linked to the Greek independence movement, and after the riots this so-called Phanariot aristocracy all but disappeared. The Mavrogordatos belonged to a circle of wealthy families who did the same sort of business the Fener aristocracy had done, and even their name seemed quite familiar. But it was not quite the same name, and they were not the same people.