The Snake Stone (22 page)

Y
ASHIM
found Amélie Lefèvre on his divan with a book in her hands.

She jumped up when he came in.

“Monsieur Yashim!”

“Madame!”

They both stared at each other. Then both began at once:

“I was curious—”

“I didn’t expect—”

Amélie was the first to recover.

“I felt lonely, Yashim efendi. The door was unlocked, and I found some books. French books.”

She held up a slim volume. He took it and read the title on the spine. De Laclos:
Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

“I’ve never read it,” she said.

“It’s unlucky,” Yashim replied.

“You believe that?”

Yashim slipped the book back into the shelves. “I read it once. I liked it very much.” He pushed against the spine with his thumb. “Six, seven people died.”

“And now?”

“Three men have died,” he said. “One was a bookseller. One was a moneylender. Your husband was the third.”

Amélie flinched. “My husband,” she echoed. She drew her arms over her knees and rocked back and forth on the divan. “Tell me. Tell me who the others are.”

Yashim sat down beside her, trailing his arms between his knees.

“There was a bookseller,” he began. He told her about Goulandris.

“So who killed him?”

He let his head hang.

“I thought—for a moment—it might have been your husband.”

Amélie stood up. “Max?”

“Please. Monsieur Lefèvre paid for information. The man he paid has disappeared. I think he’s dead. He owed money to a moneylender. Your husband paid him off: two hundred francs.”

“You know so much,” Amélie said. She sounded bitter.

“The moneylender I found last night,” Yashim pressed on. “After you came.”

“So Max paid for information. What of that?”

“The moneylender was dead.”

Amélie went to the stove and leaned over it. She turned. “I don’t understand. Max—this bookseller, the moneylender. You didn’t like him? My husband.”

Yashim blinked in surprise.

“He wrote to me about you,” she said. “He thought that you were his friend.”

“I thought—I thought that we were alike. In certain ways.”

“You!” She snorted. “Max was many things, yes. But he was a man.”

Yashim thought: she is alone, her husband dead. He gestured to the divan and she sat down where she had sat that first night, when they were friends.

“I am sorry, monsieur. Please forgive me.”

“I am making coffee,” Yashim said. “Will you have some?”

She nodded, and Yashim turned gratefully to the stove.

“A man came here,” she said. “He opened the door.”

“Yes? Who?” Yashim measured the coffee into the copper pot.

Amélie bit her lip. “I don’t know. He just sort of—stared.”

“Did he say anything?”

“I tried French—then a little Greek. But he just backed away.”

“How was he dressed?”

Amélie pursed her lips. “He looked like a bandit, really. He opened the door with a knife.”

Yashim felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck.

“A knife?”

Amélie laced her hands under her chin. “Forgive me. You and Max—you are alike, I think. He likes to find things out.” She paused, then corrected herself. “He liked to, I mean.”

“Yes.” He dug the pot into the coals. “I only wish I knew what he’d been looking for.”

He turned and looked at her. It was a question. Their eyes met; she shook her head and shrugged.

They must have been a strange couple, Yashim thought. She seemed so—fresh, with a face that told him everything he wanted to know. How had Lefèvre found her? In their country, Yashim knew, people took their pick. What made her choose Lefèvre, then, with all his secrets? The assignations. The hints. And the hidden life, too: this Amélie. She was the most surprising secret of them all.

“Your husband didn’t tell you why he had come?”

“To meet some people he knew.” She looked uncomfortable.

“People?” He had been under an impression that Lefèvre worked alone.

“Some Greeks, I think. We were working on Samnos.” She hesitated. “You see, we had the money my father left me when he died. At least I thought it was so—but Max, he was unlucky on the Bourse, and of course, even a small archaeological dig can be expensive. So there was a problem for us. Max hoped he could find some people here, in Istanbul. To help.”

The coffee bubbled. Yashim lifted the pot by its long handle and let the grounds subside. He poured two cups.

“He saw Mavrogordato, the banker,” he said. Amélie said nothing. Yashim brought the coffee to the divan, passed her the cup, and took a seat. Lefèvre had raised some money; he just hadn’t taken it back to Samnos. Then something frightened him, and he tried to reach France.

It would seem he’d been prepared to abandon his wife.

Yashim frowned. Was it possible to believe that of Lefèvre? But if not, what else did he have planned when he stepped into the caïque, in the dark?

That was always the starting place to which Yashim returned again and again: the walk through the deserted streets, the lights of the caïques glimmering on the Golden Horn, and the upraised hand, Lefèvre’s farewell. A brave departure: so he had come to believe. But with Lefèvre nothing was truly certain.

“How long were you married, madame?”

“Five years.” She pushed back her curls; her ear looked small and delicate, like a tender white fern. “I wanted to be an archaeologist, too.”

Yashim saw it clearly: a clever young woman, a reader, a scholar—why not? Men of her own age would shrink from her, she wouldn’t encourage them. And then Lefèvre arrived: older, established, and talking of archaeology and Troy and the things she read; believing them, too. Believing what he read in books.

For her—the life she wanted. For him, a loyal assistant. With an inheritance, even. Perhaps, Yashim thought, Amélie knew how to read a book better than a man’s character.

“I’d always been fascinated by the ancient world. Max brought the Greeks back to life.”

“The ancient Greeks, yes.” He thought of the Serpent Column, the three snakes intertwined in what—victory? “And he was interested in the later Greeks, too—the Byzantine Greeks.”

Amélie pulled a face. “We used to argue about that. He said the Byzantines were degenerates. He called them—Asiatics.”

Yashim smiled. “A word can’t hurt. What did you think?”

“I said they were a spiritual people. You only have to study their mosaics, their icons, to appreciate that. Max wouldn’t agree, though. He said he’d had too many Greek friends to have any illusions about the Byzantines. The same people, he said. It made him sick to hear them talk, sometimes.”

“He understood Greek, did he? Modern Greek?”

“Oh yes. He spent years in Greece, in the twenties. That’s what turned him into an archaeologist.”

Greece in the twenties: the revolutionary years. It was extraordinary, Yashim reflected, how many Franks had been drawn to that country. Millingen—and that English poet Palewski had mentioned, and now Lefèvre. Dreaming of the ancient Greeks, Millingen had said. Were all of them disillusioned, then? Discovering instead a race of—what, childish Asiatics?

What did these people expect? A race of Socratics? The ancient Greeks had killed Socrates themselves, hadn’t they? Why should the modern Greeks be any better, or any worse? Or better or worse than other men? Everyone was new: every man, every woman, came innocent into this world.

Yashim was an Ottoman. The Ottomans had always understood that men acted for good or ill not because they were Greek, or Serb, or peasants from Anatolia, but because they chose a path for themselves, selected the tools they wanted on their journey through life. Sometimes the choice was limited. But many a great pasha—many a grand vizier—stroking his beard in the Divan as he formulated some great policy of the state, had sprung from the humblest origins. Greeks, Bulgars, Serbs—you gave the right man good tools and he would make them work for him.

To love Greece—and hate the Greeks: only a Frank, Yashim thought, could make such a ridiculous blunder.

He thought of the man with the knife.

“What will you do now?” he had to ask.

“I will help you find the men who killed my husband,” she said. Exactly as he had expected.

Just as he’d feared.

“I have to go to the palace,” he explained. “Don’t go out.”

A girl came in, bearing mint tea and baklava on a tray. “It’s these girls I am sorry for,” the valide remarked. “They have so little to do with everyone gone to Besiktas. But they know that I can’t go on forever, so. Eat these pastries, and tell me about the big city.”

Yashim told her, sparing none of the details he knew she would enjoy. He told her about the gruesome murder near the Grande Rue, about Goulandris and his adventure in the caïque and the two men who had come to destroy his flat. The killing and the attempted assassination interested her; but she was transfixed by the details of the men’s bestial behavior in his apartment.

“Quel sacrilège!”
she murmured, quite horrified. “To think that there are men capable of such acts! It must make you proud.”

“Proud, Valide?”

“
Mais, bien sûr
. Only a milksop has no enemies. To be hated—that is a mark of character. Hold by your friends, take risks, and—
écraser les autres à la merde!
” She raised a delicate eyebrow. “I did not become valide as a reward for
politesse
, Yashim. But these days people are far too timid and polite. It’s good to hear you talk, even if the details are inappropriate for an old lady’s ears. Go on, have another pastry. I have no appetite.”

“I hope I haven’t spoiled it,” Yashim said.

The valide cast him a mischievous look. “Not at all. Perhaps you have restored it. What are you reading? But of course, your collection is destroyed, and you have come to me for a book.”

“No. It’s something else I want, Valide.” He saw the corners of her mouth harden. “For the sake of the archaeologist, your compatriot,” he began, sweetening the story with a little lie, “I’d like to consult with the master of the watermen’s guild.”

That “consult,” he thought, was a good touch.

“Et alors?”
The valide gave a little shrug. “I am so out of touch, my friend.”

It was Yashim’s turn to use the mischievous look. “I don’t think so,” he said.

The valide suppressed the beginning of a smile. “
Enfin
, I may be able to write a note. The sultan’s bostanci could help, I think; he deals with the watermen all the time. He’s an old friend, though he goes by some other title these days. Commissioner of Works, or nonsense of that sort.”

She knows his new title perfectly well, Yashim thought. She sits here, in a palace half deserted, and not a thing that goes on here or in Besiktas escapes her notice.

The valide rang a little silver bell. “Notepaper, and a pen,” she told the girl who answered. “In the meantime, Yashim, you may read to me a little from this book. I don’t understand it, and I don’t think I like it. But it also makes me laugh. So don’t be afraid—I shan’t be laughing at your accent.”

And with this whisper of a challenge, the faintest tinkling of her spurs beneath the raillery, she held out a copy of Stendhal’s
Le Rouge et le noire
.

“T
ELL
me,” Yashim said. “Tell me about the ancient Greeks.”

Amélie was lying facedown on the divan, her head in the sunlight, resting her chin on her hands. Yashim heard her giggle.

“I could talk for days,” she said. She moved her head so that her cheek was resting on her fingers, and she looked at him. “Let’s do a swap,” she suggested. “I’ll tell you about the finest hour of ancient Greece, and you tell me about your people. The Ottomans. Their greatest moment.”

Yashim cocked his head. “Agreed,” he said. He crossed his legs and sat by her in the window. “A time of war? Or a time of peace?”

Amélie smiled. “War first,” she said.

“Ah, war.” Yashim straightened his back. “The sultan Suleyman, then. Suleyman, the Giver of Laws. In French—the Magnificent. He is twenty-two when he leads our armies to Belgrade. The White City—impregnable, lying between two rivers, the Sava and the Danube, defended by the hosts of Christendom. It is a long and a weary march…”

He told of Suleyman’s victory at Belgrade, and his conquest of Rhodes two years later, of his prowling the borders of Austria, and humbling Buda.

“You look different when you talk like that.”

“Different?”

“Fierce. Like Suleyman.” She nestled her cheek against her palm, and her hips moved against the carpeted divan. “Tell me about peace.”

“I’ll tell you about a poet,” Yashim said. “In time of poetry—with a sultan who surrounds himself with poets. Every night they hold a Divan of poetry, each man trying to outdo the other with the beauty of his words. Rhyme, meter the highest expressions of love and sadness and remorse. But the sultan is better than them all.”

He heard Amélie give a little snort. He glanced down. Her eyes were closed, and a light skein of her brown hair had fallen across her cheek. She was smiling.

“Ah, but he was,” Yashim insisted. “He was a poet of love—because of all our sultans, he was the one who loved one woman most. He had hundreds of women—the most beautiful girls from Circassia and the Balkans—but one he loved beyond all the rest. She had red hair and pale white skin, and dark, dark soulful eyes. She was—they say she was a Russian. Roxelana. He married her.”

He bent forward and softly recited the lines he knew by heart.

Amélie lay still for a few moments. “What was his name? The poet-sultan?”

“Suleyman. Suleyman the Magnificent.”

She opened her eyes and sought him out. He was very close.

“The same sultan,” she murmured. She arched her back and raised her head, until she was looking at Yashim.

Slowly, hesitantly, she moved closer to him. Her eyes flickered from his eyes to his lips.

Yashim felt himself weightless, like a feather in the wind.

Their lips touched.

Her arm slipped around his neck. He put out a hand and touched the curve of her hip.

It was a long time before either of them could speak.

“You were going to tell me about the Greeks,” Yashim said.

Amélie smiled and touched a finger to the tip of his nose.

“Right now,” she said, “I’m more interested in Ottomans.”