If they could just make it to the boat-
A man came out from an alley to the right and walked toward the caique.
“Wait!” Yashim bellowed.
The man did not look around. He stepped into the caique. The rower put his hand to the oar.
Yashim and Preen were twenty yards off. The caique started forward with a lurch.
“Wait! Help!” Yashim shouted. “Help me!” he shouted in Greek.
He flung an arm around the mooring pole. The caique was ten feet out. The rower looked at Yashim, then back along the quay to where the Maltese had just appeared.
The man in the caique glanced around. He nodded to the rower and the caique slid back. Preen and Yashim rolled aboard.
As the caique shot forward again, the Maltese slowed. They jogged along the waterfront, shaking their fists.
“Baby killer!”
Yashim looked up to thank the man, and to apologize.
“We need to get a watchman here,” he said.
The man shrugged.
It was Alexander Mavrogordato.
43
“Thank you for stopping.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was looking for some people,” Yashim said.
Mavrogordato glanced back at the quay. “You found them, it would seem.”
“They were the wrong people.” Yashim rubbed his forehead and took a breath. “You took me off the case.”
The young man shrugged. “Mother did.”
In the dark it was hard to tell if he was lying.
“Lefevre was already dead,” Yashim said. “You couldn’t have known that, could you?”
“Why should I care? A man like Lefevre.”
Yashim heard water dripping from the scull. “It was a coincidence, then?”
“You are in my caique,” the young man pointed out. “That looks like a coincidence, doesn’t it?”
“Perhaps. But then-I was looking for you, too.”
“You-you followed me?”
“No. But I heard that you came down here sometimes.”
“That’s not true. Who said so?”
“It’s true tonight, isn’t it?”
Alexander Mavrogordato did not reply. If he’d been smoking, Yashim thought, he sounded calm.
“Who owns the Ca d’Oro?”
The fragile boat rocked as it crossed the wake of a fisherman’s boat.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Is it one of your father’s boats?”
“Listen, friend.” Alexander leaned forward. “I don’t know the old man’s business. In six months I will be out of here, God willing.”
“Out of here? Why?”
“That’s my business,” Alexander retorted. “You wouldn’t understand. The Fener. The Bosphorus. The bazaar-you think it’s the world, don’t you? You all do. And just because the sultan makes a few changes here and there, you think you’re living in the most modern place on earth. Rubbish. Constantinople’s a backwater. You’d be surprised, efendi. The rest of the world-they laugh at us. Paris. Saint Petersburg. Why, in Athens they even have gas lighting in the streets! A lot of the streets. They have-politics, philosophy, everything. Concert halls. Newspapers. You can buy a newspaper and sit and read it in a cafe, and nobody looks twice. Just like the rest of Europe. People have opinions there.”
“And they read newspapers which have the same opinions?”
“Amazing, isn’t it? I’m going there, friend. I’ll be married, and-I’ll go.”
“Your wife-are you sure she’ll want to go?”
“My wife? She’ll do what I want, of course. I’ll give her fashionable clothes, and we’ll have dinners and go to the opera, and such like. We’ll be completely free. You wouldn’t understand.”
Yashim shook his head. The boy was right: if freedom meant taking your opinions out of newspapers and dressing up like everyone else, then it was certainly something he would never understand. A pleasure, perhaps, he would never be entitled to enjoy.
“Thank you for stopping,” he said. “You can drop us wherever you like.”
Alexander growled something that Yashim didn’t catch. Probably, he thought, it was better that way.
44
By day, from the water, Pera resembled a huge crustacean drawn from the sea. On the Stamboul side, there were minarets and trees; but over the Golden Horn, Galata Hill was gray and dry, encrusted with roofs, the windows of buildings overlapping as they dropped to the water’s edge. Patches of greenery still lingered, where weeds and creepers had reclaimed areas cleared out by the fire that had swept through the town four years before; but they would not linger long. Rents were on the rise; fortunes had to be made; new buildings were going up every day, and the Perotes had no use, it seemed, for trees or gardens.
Yashim walked slowly up the Grande Rue. If Pera was a sea creature, the Grande Rue was its spiny ridge, all the way from the top of the steps that led up from the waterfront to the great water tank that gave its name, Taksim, to the district beyond. It was the thoroughfare on which the foreign embassies were built; in the past decade it had become as cosmopolitan as Paris or Trieste. Yashim saw classical stone facades and big glass windows; shops here sold hats and gloves, liquor, patisseries, umbrellas, English boots. Everywhere he looked, new buildings were plundering the styles of vanished empires and lost civilizations-Egyptian motifs and Roman caryatids. It was rootless-for money has no roots-and it was profuse, eye-watering, ugly, and exciting, too, by turns.
The giddy mix of styles was echoed in the street below. In the crowd that swirled up and down the Grande Rue were men and women of every nationality, and none: all the races of the Mediterranean, Arabs and Frenchmen, men in burnooses, men in hats, ladies in heels, broad-shouldered Slavs, punctilious Englishmen, Genoese sailors, Belgian tailors, black Nubians, olive-skinned Druze from the heights of Lebanon, pale Russians with fair beards, hawkers, loafers, actors, vagabonds, pimps, water carriers. Two dozen wandering street sellers cried their wares. A monkey jumped on a barrel organ. Even a bear shuffled its feet and looked around at the company with a pleasant grin.
Yesterday he had wondered where the great parade had gone, when it vanished from the court at Topkapi. Not to Besiktas, where a sultan lay dying in his European bed.
He pulled the bell of a large gray stone building set back slightly from the street, and a gray-faced flunky in immaculate tails answered the door.
“Monsieur Mavrogordato is at his correspondence. He won’t be seeing anyone before eleven.”
“Would you inform your master that I am a friend of the Frenchman Lefevre? I want to see him very urgently, on private business.”
The clerk pursed his lips and frowned. The Turk at the door was dressed in the old style, but he was dressed well. Had he been wearing the fez, like any man of business, he would have been easier to dismiss; but his turban lent him a sense of mystery, combined with that air of confidence that clerks were quick to detect. The combination might mean money. Private business, now. Certainly, his master liked to deal with his correspondence undisturbed. But he was not a man to relish missing an opportunity. Private business. Well, private business could mean many things.
“A few moments, efendi,” he said, with a greater show of politeness. “If you will step inside, I will carry your message in to Monsieur Mavrogordato.”
The hall was narrow and dark; there was nowhere to sit. Yashim stared out at the street through the glass panes of the door. The sunlit crowd flowed by at a steady rate; someone might stop or dawdle for a few moments, but the movement was strong and eventually picked the person up again, to vanish in the stream.
Yashim thought of the book that Grigor had shown him, with its sleeping emperors and ancient prophecies. How futile it seemed, this Great Idea! How shallow, against the deep drift of time and events. Byzantium was long gone. He remembered the old lines the Conqueror had murmured as he surveyed the ruins of the imperial palace. “The spider weaves a curtain in the Caesar’s palace: the owl hoots in the towers of Afrasiab.”