“I’m sure you could find a dozen Italians who look like your captain, roaming the streets here at this very minute,” Palewski was saying. “It’s either that, or the shipowners had to replace him at the last minute.”
“That’s unlikely-the ship’s registered in Palermo, so the owners-” Yashim paused. He had been going to say that the shipowners would be far away in Sardinia or Naples or Sicily.
“Probably some local Greek firm,” Palewski observed placidly. “Neapolitan colors, extraterritorial rights, the whole shebang. Switched the captains over for some reason or another.”
The thread of anxiety that had been running through Yashim’s mind ever since he caught sight of the Italian at the fish market went taut. He pressed his lips together.
“Cheer up, Yash, it’s not your funeral.” Palewski said. “Anyway, the Greeks are born to the sea. They’ll get our unsavory friend back in one piece.”
“The Greeks-yes,” Yashim said slowly. Lefevre had wanted any foreign ship, any ship at all-just as long as it wasn’t Greek. But that had been in the evening, when he had seemed more dead than alive. The next day he’d been quite snappish about the whole thing. He must have been simply overtired, overwrought.
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, Lefevre 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.