Yashim grinned. Preen’s sense of time had always been elastic, stretching or shrinking according to her mood; but she lived in a world that was more vivid and extravagant than his, where the boundaries between reality and make-believe were fluid. Long ago, as a boy, Preen had been trained as a kocek dancer, as sultry and provocative as any of the kocek “girls” who danced at weddings and parties and reunions in the great city of Istanbul. No one knew exactly how or when the kocek traditions had evolved: perhaps they had danced for the emperors of Byzantium, perhaps they had come with the Turks from the steppe; but they were, like the dogs or the gypsies, as much a part of the city as the sunshine or the damp.
Preen had not lost her zest, nor her sense of humor, when she set aside her wigs and bustiers in favor of a bristled scalp and loose pajamas. There was gray in the bristle now, and her face bore no trace of makeup beyond a little rouge, some antimony, and a touch of the eyebrow pencil and the kohl. She was wearing an embroidered scarlet waistcoat. Two of the fingers of her right hand were permanently crooked, the result of an accident involving an assassin and a tricky flight of stairs.
“Months, Preen? More like a week.”
“A week for me-it’s a month! I don’t have time to sleep, Yashim, honestly.” Her fingers fluttered to her eyes. “Do I look tired?” She sounded chirpy, but Yashim was familiar with Preen’s methods, her underlying anxieties.
“Tired? You’re crackling with energy, I can feel it. You look like a new-”
“I am a new woman, Yashim.”
They both laughed.
“It’s true-that accident was the best thing that could have happened to me. It made me think. Face it, Yashim, I was getting too old to dance every night.”
“You were dancing as well as ever.”
Preen smiled. “I’ve seen too many dancers grow old, Yashim. The theater will be something different.” She pronounced it tay-atre, the French way Yashim had used when he first explained the idea. “I’ve got jobs for three of the older girls when we open, selling tickets and sherbet and coffee.”
Yashim had been astonished by Preen’s talent for organization. Gone was the dancer who worked for tips from clients, who fretted about her vanishing good looks, who slept and danced and whiled away whole days in the hammam. As soon as she had grasped the idea of a theater she had set about it with enthusiasm. She tracked down good premises in Pera, found a team of builders and bent them to her will, planned the bill and organized the decor-all in the space of a few months. Preen had an unexpected streak of steel. She took no nonsense, brooked no contradictions. But she lavished praise where it was due.
She lavished it on him, of course. Yashim only hoped that he was right: that Pera could support a theater. It would be something between an English music hall and a Parisian revue; he had read about such places. Many people would disapprove. Yashim, if he were honest, disapproved slightly himself. But for Preen’s sake-and the sake of all her tribe-he hoped it would work.
“I came into a little extra money,” he said, holding out Alexander Mavrogordato’s purse. “Can you use it?”
Preen turned her head away. “We despise it, Yashim. You know that.” Her arm snaked out and he dropped the purse into her hand.
“Thanks. Do you want a coffee?”
“No. But I’ve got a favor to ask.”
“You surprise me. Shall we not despise the money, after all?”
“Better not. A wealthy boy, Preen. Greek, rather good-looking.”
“Mmmm.” Preen arched a delicate eyebrow. “Sash, skirts, and hairy legs, too?”
“More like lace-ups and a stambouline, I’m afraid. And whiskey breath.”
Preen turned her head and traced a pattern idly on her scalp. “Academy boy?”
“That’s my guess.” Since Greek independence ten years before, many rich Greeks had been sending their sons to be educated in Athens. “Alexander Mavrogordato. The bankers.”
“Ah, those Mavrogordatos,” Preen said roguishly, as if there were any others. Then her expression changed. “We might need the purse, at that.”
37
Yashim laid the basket on the floor and fished out three onions and a handful of zucchinis. He pulled down the chopping board and set it on the little high table where he kept his salt, rice, and dried spices. He took a sharp knife from the box beside him and honed it on an English steel that Palewski had given him once, as a surprise. Cookery wasn’t about fire: it was about a sharp blade.
He ripped the outer skin from the onion using the blunt edge of the knife. He halved it and laid the halved pairs face down, curves touching. The knife rose and fell on its point. The board gave a momentary lurch and rocked to one side; Yashim continued chopping. He swept the slices to the edge of the board. The board rocked back again. Yashim raised one edge and swept his hand beneath it, dislodging a grain of rice.
For a few moments he stared at the tiny grain, frowning slightly. Then he glanced up and poked his finger into the spaces between the rice crock and the salt cellar and the spice jars at the back of the table. A few grains of rice stuck to his fingers. He moved the crocks and jars to one side, and found several more.
Yashim rubbed the tips of his fingers together, opened the lid of the rice crock, and looked inside. It was almost full, the little scoop buried in the grain to its hilt.
He looked around the room. Everything was in order, everything left as the widow would have left it after she’d been in to clean, the shawls folded, the clothes bags dangling on a row of hooks, the jug of water standing in the bowl.
But someone else had been in here.
Searching. Looking for something small enough to be hidden in a crock of rice.
Yashim picked up a folded shawl and spread it out across the divan beneath the window. He picked up the rice jar and tipped it forward, spilling the grain onto the shawl. Nothing but a mound of rice. He looked inside the jar. It was empty.
He put the rice back into the crock with his two hands at first, and then with the little scoop. He brushed a few grains of rice off the rim and replaced the lid.
The Frenchman, Lefevre. How long had he left him on his own? Two hours, three. So he’d woken up and wanted to make something to eat.
Lefevre didn’t cook. Didn’t know olives from sheep droppings.
I believe everything I read in books.
Yashim frowned.
He went to his bookcase and looked along the shelves. The books were in no particular order, which told him nothing. Perhaps they had been disarranged, perhaps not. He tried one or two at random, and they slid out easily.
He pushed the jars back to the wall and carried on chopping the onions.
He sluiced olive oil across the base of an earthenware dish.
He halved a lemon and squeezed its juice into the oil. He dried his hands on a cloth.
He went to the bookcase and ran his finger along the middle shelf until he found the book.
It had been a gift from the sultan’s mother, the valide. She’d received it unbound, no doubt, in a thick manila wrapper. Before she passed it on she’d had it bound in imperial green leather, with the colophon of the House of Osman, an egret’s feather, worked onto the spine in gold leaf. Title and author, stamped on the spine in gold.
GORIOT-BALZAC. It was a rare gift.
At the embassy Lefevre’s satchel had contained half a dozen books. They were the very books the terrified man had spilled out apologetically across the floor, before he died. Except for one, Yashim remembered. There had been a paperbound copy of Goriot, slightly tatty around the spine, which he hadn’t seen before.
He pulled the Balzac from the shelf and opened the leather cover.
Lefevre, at least, had found a hiding place.
You hide jewels on a woman’s neck. A man can lose himself in a crowd.
Yashim sighed: the valide’s gift was ruined beyond repair.