“In Rome, in 1560.”
The valide gave Yashim a long look. “There is something going on between you and your friend Palewski, n’est-ce pas?”
“Valide?”
She tut-tutted and wagged a finger. “Tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk. Palewski is a well-educated man, and he was brought up in a Catholic country. A cold country, where it is easy to learn Latin, among other things. I think his Latin would be better than mine. Why do you not consult him? He is your friend.”
Yashim looked away. “Monsieur Palewski has put me in an awkward situation,” he said stiffly.
“I see. It was his intention to do so?”
Yashim shook his head. “No.”
The valide cocked her head to one side. “Friendship is an opportunity, Yashim, and our lives are short. Have you spoken to him?”
“I have not.”
“ Flute! Don’t be such a fool, young man. Take this book to your friend.” She smoothed the shawl around her shoulders. “Now I am tired.”
She closed her eyes and let out a great sigh.
“Latin!”
41
Yashim left the palace gate and crossed to the fountain of Sultan Ahmed. In spite of himself he veered left, passing the domed baths that the great architect Sinan had built for Roxelana, the wife of Suleyman the Magnificent. One of the baths was being used as a store. Weeds, even a little crooked tree, sprouted from the cracked lead roofs.
He went out into the Hippodrome.
There was nothing overbearing in the Serpent Column’s height, nothing to draw the eye, but once your eye was drawn, Yashim had found, it was always hard to look away again. Its very littleness mocked the pretensions of the greater monuments. Denuded of their plaques, speaking a lost language, they only gestured helplessly at vanished glory.
Three snakes, symmetrically entwined, raised themselves high above the ground. Simple yet intricate. Yashim wondered what Lefevre’s little book had to say about it: The Edifices and Antiquities of Constantinople. It would say, presumably, that it had come from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the seat of oracular wisdom in the ancient world. But what of the author himself? Would the author have been frightened by those glaring heads?
He would have stood where Yashim was standing now: a scholar, no doubt, learned and dispassionate. He would have gazed on that column, as a marvel from the ancient world; the same way that Yashim looked back across the years to the age of Suleyman-where among the Janissaries and tents, the standards of defeated armies, and the milling crowds, he saw the author carefully taking notes.
He shrugged and turned away. He walked back to the Fener and took a seat outside the cafe he liked on the Kara Davut, where he slowly turned the pages of Lefevre’s book, looking for pictures.
When he next glanced up, Preen was coming down the street; he recognized her walk, although her head, he noticed with amusement, was covered by a modest charshaf.
She caught sight of him and waggled her fingers; then she strode up, sat down, and flung back her scarf. A number of old men nearby creaked on their chairs, and stared. Yashim smiled. He signaled to the proprietor, who nodded and shrugged.
“The Academy boy,” Yashim prompted.
“Alexander. The picnic set, of course. Caiques up the Golden Horn to the Sweet Waters. Music, wine, and an interest in the Ypsilanti girl, I gather.”
“Decorous,” Yashim murmured.
“So far.” Preen nodded. “But he enjoys a night life, too.”
“Not so decorous?”
“It’s hard for me to say. He’s known at various taverns on the waterfront. Kumkapi, a bit, but mostly on the Pera side. Tophane, for instance. Some of those places are pretty low, Yashim.”
Yashim nodded. Tophane, the cannon foundry, had a rough reputation.
“He hasn’t been seen much recently, apparently. Someone said he might be smoking.”
“You mean opium?”
“It could happen.”
“It was liquor I smelled on his breath the other day.”
“Opium would explain why he hasn’t been seen around too much, though. The dens of Tophane.”
“Do you know them?”
Preen arched an eyebrow. “What do you take me for, Yashim?”
“I’d like to go down to Tophane. There’s a piece of information I’d like to have.”
“People go to Tophane to forget, Yashim. They don’t like questions.”
But Yashim wasn’t listening.
“We can go tonight,” he said.
42
For centuries, Ottoman navies had been refitted and supplied by the arsenal, close to Tophane, which exceeded in size and scope any naval yard east of Venice’s own forbidden Arsenale. By day, the district was an inferno of blazing kilns and molten metals, of sailors struggling to unload the ships that came down from the Black Sea with their cargoes of timber and hemp, the mastic boats from Chios, Egyptian flax, Anatolian copper, iron ore from the Adriatic ports: the raw materials of the empire which served to keep its navy afloat-if no longer formidable.
By night Tophane drew in upon itself. The foundry fell silent; the views across the Bosphorus to the hills of Asia bled into darkness; the cargo ships creaked wearily at their moorings. No lamps were lit in the twisting alleyways, where sailors and brothel keepers, loafers and thieves jostled and cursed one another in the darkness; only flickering lanterns were hung in small windows, or at the low lintels of a doorway, guiding men to their taverns and drinking holes, to rum and raki and tired couplings on straw pallets and the sweet, cloying smell of the pipe.
Yashim let Preen lead the way.
It was in the third tavern they tried that a Maltese sailor, reddened with drink, abruptly explained to Preen his plans for the evening. Those plans included her. When Preen demurred, the Maltese smashed a bottle on the floor and went for her face with the jagged edge.
Yashim blocked the blow with his forearm, which earned him the attention of a party of Maltese sailors who were still apparently upset by the massacre of innocent men, women, and children on the island of Chios by Ottoman irregular troops sixteen years before.
“He hit me! The bastard!”
“Baby killer! You murderer!”
Yashim didn’t know what they were talking about.
They backed out of the door together.
Preen began to walk very fast downhill. The lane led away from the city and toward the waterfront. Before Yashim could call her back, the tavern door flew open and the Maltese party spilled out onto the lane.
They decided they would cut Yashim up for his part in a massacre at which none of them had been present. Some of them flicked knives open. They began to run downhill.
Yashim heard them coming.
He needed to get Preen ahead of the Maltese by one corner, a few seconds to hide.
He grabbed her arm.
At the first turning he glanced at the walls: in the dark they seemed smooth, not even offering a doorway. There was an alley running downhill again, a few yards farther on: they had to make that corner before the Maltese saw them. He spun Preen to the right.
“Baby killer! We’ll cut you!”
The alley dropped away; there were steps, of a kind. Preen and Yashim took them three at a time. They were close to the shore.
At the bottom of the steps Yashim bore around to the right: he had a vague idea that they could follow the shoreline and cut back up later.
“There he is! Get him!”
The Maltese were on the steps.
Preen stumbled and screamed.
Yashim caught her by the arm again and wrenched her around the corner.
The wall on their left dropped away: they were on the quay. Ahead he could see the upright poles of the landing stage, with a single caique resting between them.