The naziry shrugged. “Even with a gift, a man must learn. Do you see the blood of a man-his liver-his lungs? A doctor sees a man this way, after many years’ experience. You see a city: you see its streets, its hills, its houses, its people. But you do not see as deeply as we can. We, who are members of a guild two hundred strong.”
“And what do you see, naziry?”
“Another city, Yashim efendi; like a maze. In parts it is older than memory.” He puffed thoughtfully on his pipe. “A dangerous place for a man without experience.”
Yashim leaned forward. “There was a man called Xani-”
“It is a maze,” the naziry repeated.
He raised his hand, and the servant stepped forward.
“I wish to sleep,” the naziry said. “Take these away.”
He put his hand to his chest and inclined his head very slightly toward Yashim. “As I say, a most dangerous place.”
He lay back on the carpet and closed his eyes.
Yashim sat watching him for several minutes, not moving.
The naziry began to snore.
102
Dr. Millingen came down the steps of his house and climbed into the sedan chair waiting for him in the road. The chairmen shouldered their burden and began to lope placidly through the crowd streaming downhill toward the Pera landing stage.
Dr. Millingen settled his hands on the clasp of his leather bag. Edinburgh, he thought, had prepared him for much, but nothing could ever quite reconcile him to a sedan chair. The sultan had ordered it, of course, so there was little point in refusing the apparent honor-and as a mode of transport it was certainly well suited to the steep and convoluted streets of modern Pera, where a horse might struggle through the crowd, or slip on the cobblestones going downhill. But Millingen always felt ridiculous, and exposed, like a cherry on an iced cake.
He breathed heavily and patted his bag. It was all in the mind. The thing to remember was that no one cared but him. He caught sight of his own reflection in the wide glass window of the Parisian patisserie, in his swaying litter, and smiled to himself. The cherry on the cake, indeed.
Nobody in Istanbul would give him so much as a second glance.
103
Palewski bit down on the eclair and wiped a squirt of creme anglaise from his cheek with his thumb. “Pera, these days. It’s not the patisseries I object to,” he mumbled. “Only the people.”
Yashim nodded, and took a sip of his tisane, watching the English doctor disappear, swaying, through the Pera crowds.
He reached into his coat and pulled out an envelope, which he smoothed flat on the little marble table. “The people,” Yashim echoed finally. “And when, do you think, they began to change?”
There was no mistaking the chairmen’s livery. Even without the gold edging, the waistcoats they were wearing were far too new and clean to rank them with the ordinary chairmen of the city. It was Besiktas, then, for the doctor. He could be gone for hours.
Palewski raised an eyebrow and sucked the end of his thumb. “For hundreds of years,” he said, “Istanbul’s people lived in peace together. That started to change after ’21,” he said thoughtfully.
“The rioting against the Greeks.”
“Riot. Massacre. Whatever, Yashim. Hanging the Patriarch.”
“Driving out the old Phanariot dynasties.”
Palewski frowned. “More than that, Yashim. Fear and mistrust. They hanged the Patriarch from the gate of his own church; then they got the Jews to cut his body down. They say the Jews cut it up to feed to the dogs. I doubt it, frankly. But that isn’t what matters. The Turks were afraid. They turned on the Greeks. The Greeks were afraid. Now they hate the Jews. Everything changed.”
Yashim nodded.
“Then the Janissary business five years afterward,” Palewski added. “End of a tradition.”
“It didn’t take long for the new men to appear, did it?” Yashim leaned forward. “Mavrogordato. Did he arrive here before, or after, the Janissary affair?”
Palewski picked up a napkin. “Before, I’d swear. He was in Istanbul by ’24, at the latest.”
“Mavrogordato couldn’t have known Meyer, then?”
Palewski considered the question. “Meyer was at Missilonghi in 1826, but Mavrogordato was here in Istanbul, getting rich and keeping his head down.”
“Hmmm. When Lefevre-Meyer-visited Mavrogordato the other day, he got an unsecured loan. Why not? French, archaeologist, very respectable. But whatever Lefevre told the banker, it upset Madame. It made her-curious. She called me in, remember?”
“You said she was confused.”
Yashim nodded. “Mavrogordato had never seen Meyer. Madame hadn’t seen Lefevre. She only had her husband’s account of their meeting-and his description of the man who came asking for money.”
“And?”
Yashim glanced out of the window. “She began to suspect.”
Palewski had picked up his eclair, but he set it down again. “Suspect? You mean-that Lefevre was a phony?”
“Lefevre said something that made Mavrogordato give him money. And Madame to wonder who Lefevre really was.”
“Go on.”
“She wondered if he might be Dr. Meyer.”
“Madame Mavrogordato? She knew Meyer?”
“Mavrogordato, you see, wasn’t at Missilonghi.” Yashim drained his cup. “She was.”
“And met Meyer?”
The door to the street opened with a jangle of bells, and a man with shiny whiskers and a black cane came in: it was just like Paris.
“Better than that,” Yashim said. “She married him.”
Palewski groaned and buried his face in his hands.
Yashim looked through the big glass window. Farther up the street, the door of Millingen’s house opened and closed again, and a man in the livery of a servant ran lightly down the steps with a basket in his hand. The crowd was very dense, and the servant lifted the basket and set it on his shoulder.
“Compston told me that Meyer seduced a Greek woman at Missilonghi,” Yashim explained. “Lord Byron made him marry her.”
Yashim followed the bobbing basket through the crowd: the man was going to the market.
Palewski shook his head. “That may be true. But it doesn’t mean that she was the woman we know as Madame Mavrogordato.” He frowned. “She couldn’t be-her son, Alexander, must be at least twenty years old.”
“If he is her son.”
“No-but! Yashim, you told me yourself, Alexander’s the spitting image of her.”
“She’s his aunt. Monsieur Mavrogordato is her brother.”
“Brother?”
Yashim stirred the envelope with a finger. “I got Compston to do a little research for me. He dug up the name of Meyer’s wife, and guess what?”
“It was Mavrogordato?”
“Christina Mavrogordato. She’s living with her brother and his son.”
Palewski sat hunched over his eclair. After a few moments he raised his head.
“But why?”
“I think what happened was this. Meyer escaped Missilonghi-and abandoned her. Somehow she survived the massacre and made her way to Istanbul, where her brother was already doing very well. He was a widower-he had a child, Alexander, living in Chios. Alexander needed a mother.”
“But she could still have declared that she was his sister,” Palewski objected. “No impropriety there.”
Yashim shook his head. “She knew what Meyer was like: he’d abandoned her to save his own skin, but there was no knowing whether he might try coming back. Her brother was a very rich man. And legally, she was Meyer’s wife.”
“She was afraid he’d claim her-and touch Mavrogordato for money, into the bargain?”
Yashim leaned forward. “She’s lived with that fear for the past thirteen years. The Orthodox church teaches that a woman belongs to her husband. Christina Mavrogordato was Meyer’s property. And she had had her fill of Meyer. Meyer seduced her. He abandoned her. But he liked money.”
Palewski put his fingers flat on the table. “An interesting sidelight on this situation,” he said slowly, “is that it proves Lefevre to have been not only a bounder, a coward, a bolter, a traitor, and a thoroughgoing shit, but a bigamist, as well. Unless-” A look of comical horror crossed his face. “You don’t think he had become a Muslim, too?”