The Snake Stone (38 page)

“I thought it was you,” Yashim said. “At first.”

He heard the ticking of the clocks, the rustle of Madame Mavrogordato’s silks, the chink of her spoon on the saucer as she laid it down very slowly.

“It should have been me,” she said. “Revenge is a dish—”

“Eaten better when cold, yes. I’ve heard that phrase. I don’t believe in it, either.”

Madame Mavrogordato narrowed her eyes and glared at Yashim. “When I heard that he had died—that he had been killed in the street? I didn’t believe it. That was not how it would happen—to him. He had more lives than a cat.”

More skins than a snake, Yashim thought.

Madame Mavrogordato leaned forward. “But they said it was him. Why?”

Yashim put his fingers together. “He was carrying Lefèvre’s bag. The dogs had got to him—there was very little left. Except that he had perfect teeth. I wondered about that. Lefèvre spoke with a lisp. Later, I learned that he had lost two teeth in a brawl—at Missilonghi.”

Some expression Yashim could not catch passed across the godlike face.

“Then what happened? Who was he?”

Yashim shrugged. “A man Millingen sent to fetch Lefèvre off the ship. Millingen wanted Lefèvre out of harm’s way, so he had him confined in a house somewhere down by the docks.” He hesitated, wondering whether he should say what he suspected: that her supposed son, the impatient Alexander, had been his jailer.

“Someone else was supposed to bring Lefèvre’s bag to the doctor’s house,” he said finally. “A servant. He was unlucky: the killers tracked him down. But they got the wrong man.”

Madame Mavrogordato nodded slightly. “And Millingen? Why did he want Lefèvre hidden?”

Yashim shifted slightly in his seat and sighed. “Dr. Millingen learned that Lefèvre’s life had been threatened. He, too, believed that axiom about revenge.”

“So he thought I had ordered his death?”

“They were friends, once. And Millingen, of course, was interested in the relics. He expected Lefèvre to tell him what he knew, in return for saving his life. The
Ca d’Oro
is one of your ships, isn’t it?”

Madame Mavrogordato gave a brief nod.

“When Millingen’s man was killed,” Yashim went on, “and identified as Lefèvre, Millingen decided to say nothing about it. At first, I suppose, he thought he had diverted you. But later, when other people died, he realized what I had guessed—that it wasn’t you at all.”

Madame Mavrogordato’s lips moved into a thin smile. “But when it happened, when it really did happen, it was a woman. It would take a woman, Yashim efendi: Max Meyer was not a man just anyone could kill.”

“Four men died first, on his account.”

Madame Mavrogordato drew back her head. “Four men, efendi? You think—only four?”

She turned her head to fix him with her dark eyes, and he met them with a jolt of recognition.

“You can believe what you want to,” she almost spat. “Millingen—what an English gentleman! A bad show, he thinks, Dr. Meyer cutting loose like that. Leaving his young wife behind, as well. Shocking behavior! I don’t think Millingen would recommend him to his London club.”

She was almost shaking. Yashim couldn’t tell if it was with anger or contempt.

“But I knew that man. You should have heard what he said to me, the promises he made, the innocence he tore apart with his bare hands like a veil in front of my eyes. He bared me to the world, then spat upon me and turned away.” She lowered her voice, and two tears ran down her cheeks. “The man who could betray me like that—he could betray anyone. The Turks caught him, I’m sure of that. And he sold them Missilonghi, in return for his own miserable life. He sold us all, Yashim efendi. And you talk of four men dead. Four men!”

She stood up and went to the windows, wiping her hands across her cheeks.

“I’m so glad she killed him, Yashim efendi. I am so very, very grateful.”

She put out a hand, to touch the curtains. Yashim heard a knock at the door of the apartment.

Madame Mavrogordato’s fist balled around the silk. “She must have hated him very much,” she said.

The knock came again, louder. The woman at the window turned her head. “Come!”

The footman entered the apartment and bowed. He glanced at Yashim.

“Hanum,” he faltered. “The sultan is dead.”

Madame Mavrogordato turned her face away. “Have the shutters drawn at the front of the house, Dmitri.”

“Yes, hanum.”

“The groom will know to put crepe on the carriage. Also the horses’ bridles. Ask the cook to see that there is enough for tomorrow, before the markets close. Monsieur Mavrogordato will eat at home. That is all.”

“I will see to it, hanum.”

When the footman had gone, neither of them spoke for several minutes.

“The sultan is dead,” Madame Mavrogordato said at last. “Long live the sultan.”

Yashim stared at his hands. He caught the irony in her tone, but he was thinking of someone else.

He got to his feet. Madame Mavrogordato had closed her eyes and between clenched teeth she gave out a strangled moan.

A
CROSS
the Golden Horn, in a dilapidated mansion close to the Grande Rue, a man stood listening at an open window.

“So that’s that,” he said at last, so quietly that the girl in the room could only imagine he had spoken. She set the tray down carefully on the desk.

From the windows she heard the distant muezzins calling the prayer for the dead.

Palewski turned. The bottle on the tray was old and squat. Many years ago, a Polish nobleman had ordered it among a few dozen such from one of the best Cognac houses in France, to lay down in the cellars on his estate. That man was Palewski’s father. “It’s good Martell,” he’d say. “If in doubt, dump the paintings but hang on to the brandy.”

Palewski pulled out a penknife and slit the wax around the neck. He pulled the cork and poured a measure into each glass.

Gently he picked up both glasses by the stem.

Marta blushed. “Lord—I cannot—I—”

Palewski shook his head. “It’s to remember him by,” he said. “He ruled this empire for as long as I’ve known Istanbul. All your life, Marta.”

He held the glass to the light. “To Mahmut!”

“To Mahmut,” Marta echoed, smiling.

I
T
was the noise that startled him, even before he saw the crowd: a murmur of voices like the sea. The halberdiers stood to attention in the gate, and in the First Court of the seraglio, where only a few days before he had walked in absolute stillness, Yashim found himself jostled and surrounded on all sides.

Sultan Mahmut was dead. In the faces that surrounded him Yashim saw expressions of anguish and despair; he read fear in one man’s eyes, and in the next, expectancy; he heard the murmur of the sutras, and laughter, and the cry of the corncob seller calling his wares. A distinguished pasha walked by in a swirl of cloak and leather, with his horse, a gray, curvetting at the groom’s hand on the bridle. An elderly man, bareheaded, lay spread-eagled facedown on the ground, as if he had fallen from the sky. A phalanx of small children stood silently against the wall. A yellow dog heaved itself up from the shade of a plane tree and stalked stiffly away, as if disgusted to have its sleep disturbed, while a man in a fez, with an enormous belly, wept openly on the shoulder of another man, dressed like a servant. Many people—Muslim, Armenian—counted their beads, and watched.

The sultan had died at Besiktas, like the jewel in a box; but here to Topkapi, to the ancient palace of the sultans, to the great old court of the people of the empire, the people came with their hopes and their regrets.

Yashim advanced through the crowd to the second gate. The halberdiers did not recognize him at first and lowered their pikes, but the key holder saw him and nodded him through. They walked in silence to the little door to the harem, with so much and so little to say.

He found Hyacinth sobbing in a little chamber off the corridor.

“Who’s with the valide, then?” he demanded.

Hyacinth raised his little red-rimmed eyes to his. “Oh, Yashim! We are all so very sad!”

“So I see,” Yashim said.

He found her alone and fully dressed, seated on the edge of the sofa with her hands in her lap.

“I hoped it would be you, Yashim. I see that you, too, refrain from weeping.”

Yashim said nothing.

“I’ve sent the rest of them away. I can’t bear to see their faces all crumpled up, the runny noses. Pure chicanery. They have no idea what will happen to me, so they are sorry for themselves. They have hearts like walnuts.”

Yashim suppressed a smile. “The First Court is full of people, Valide. It reminds me of the old days.”

“Yes?” The valide raised her head, as if to listen. Her silver earrings chinked together softly.

“It’s a strange thing, Yashim,” she said, in a surprisingly small voice. “I do nothing at all from day to day but grow old—yet I find that today of all days, I have nothing to do. I can only sit.”

Yashim rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Then he knelt at the valide’s side. “I have an idea,” he said.

T
HE
crowd in the First Court was denser than before, and it was only a sufi, with hands upraised and one eye on the second gate, who noticed two figures emerging from the sanctity of the inner court. Perhaps, if the sufi had stopped to think, he might have guessed the identity of the veiled woman who walked slowly, with a stick, supported by her undistinguished companion; but the sufi had deliberately emptied his mind of all thoughts, the better to concentrate on the ninety-nine names of God.

Yashim felt the valide’s grip tighten on his arm as they advanced toward the crowd, and took it as a good sign. It was impossible for them to speak over the shouts and murmurs of the mourners thronging that vast space, but he noticed the valide’s head turning to and fro as she observed the faces of the men who surrounded them, and now and then she stopped, for a better look. In this way the valide betrayed her particular interest in little children, boiled corn, the traditional ululations of Arab women, and the rather scrawny mount of a long-legged Albanian cavalryman in French trousers.

Yashim wondered, as they walked slowly along, whether they should go as far as the Topkapi gate. He had a daydream in which he led the valide through the gate and out into the square; by the fountain they would pick up a carriage and rattle down the streets to the Eminönü wharf, where he would hand the elderly Frenchwoman into a French ship and send her off to enjoy herself in Paris. It was a daydream he had sometimes indulged on his own account, but he startled himself now, as if he had committed a treasonable act. He began to wonder where, indeed, he should lead the valide. She showed no sign of wishing to go back, yet her weight on his arm was growing and she was evidently beginning to tire.

Yashim began to steer the valide toward the great doors of the old church of St. Irene, at the far end of the Great Court. As they moved into the shade of the portico she patted his arm, as if she approved of his decision; he tried the little door and—to his surprise—it swung open.

They stepped inside; and as the door shut behind them with a click, the noise of the crowd was abruptly hushed, giving way to an ethereal silence, the silence, Yashim thought, of every consecrated place. Hadn’t Lefèvre said that St. Irene had never been deconsecrated, never turned into a mosque?

The ancient weapons glinted on the walls.

He found a stone bench under a window, and the valide settled gratefully onto it. She lifted her veil.

“Thank you, Yashim,” she said, smiling. “I have always wanted to do that. The way the old sultans did—moving amongst their people, in disguise.”

“Selim himself met a baker so wise he raised him next day to the position of grand vizier,” Yashim said.

“
Alors
, Yashim, I’m not sure I saw anyone quite so exceptional.” She closed her eyes.

Yashim watched her. He folded his arms and leaned against a pillar. He wondered if she was asleep.

“My son told me an interesting thing, Yashim, just before he died,” the valide said quietly. Yashim jumped. “It was a secret, passed down the generations from one sultan to the next, and he told it to me because his own son would not come to listen. Do you know why that was?”

“No, Valide.”

“Because the boy was afraid. But why should a boy be afraid of death?”

Yashim had no answer. The valide glanced at him. “The crown prince, Yashim. No longer a boy, perhaps.”

“Abdul Mecid is our sultan now,” Yashim said.

“Yes.” She paused. “
Enfin
, he likes you.”

Yashim lowered his eyes. “He can barely know me.”

“Come, come. A boy talks to his grandmother. I think you’ll find he knows you better than you think.”

Yashim blinked, but the valide did not wait for her remark to sink in. “At the time of the Conquest,” she continued, “when the Turks took Istanbul, a priest was saying mass in the Great Church. He was using the holiest relics of the Byzantine church, the cup and the plate used at the Last Supper, but when the Turks broke in, he disappeared.”

“I’ve heard that legend myself,” Yashim admitted.

“Legend, Yashim?” The valide looked at him. “It is what the sultan told me before he died.”

Yashim inclined his head.

“Mehmed the Conqueror,” the valide continued, “had taken the city from the Greeks. But afterward he needed their support, of course. The Greek Patriarch agreed to treat the sultan as his overlord. But as for the relics, neither of them could accept that the other should possess them. Do you understand?”

“They found a compromise, didn’t they? A third party who would safeguard the relics forever, beyond control of the church or the Ottoman sultans.”

“Very good, Yashim. I wanted to unburden myself of this secret because—
eh bien
, I am not a church or a line of rulers myself. Someone needs to tell the crown prince, if I cannot.” She opened her eyes and glanced mischievously at Yashim. “But I suppose you already know who was found to hold the ring?”

“A guild, Valide. Without this guild, the sultan would not rule and the Patriarch would have no flock. For Istanbul could not otherwise exist.” He caught the valide’s approving glance. “It couldn’t have been hard,” he went on. “As far as I know, the cup and plate were already hidden in the cisterns, somewhere beneath the Great Church. They were already, in that sense, in the keeping of the watermen.”

“Bravo! The watermen’s guild, yes. They were always Albanians. You know what that means. Some Catholic, some Orthodox. And some, in time, were Muslims, too. But the first religion of the Albanian, as they say, is Albania. They call themselves Sons of the Eagle.”

“And this has been their secret,” Yashim murmured. A secret for which men were bound to die, linked by a fatal indiscretion. Monsieur Lefèvre had always been too much the salesman.

He went across the apse to a wooden cupboard hanging on the wall. It was crudely made, its door fastened with a wooden catch. Inside he found a battered-looking copper goblet and a wooden plate, which had split and been repaired with thin iron staples. He’d seen them both before. Water and salt: cup and plate. This much, at least, even Grigor could not have guessed. He remembered the relief in Grigor’s voice:
for old times’ sake
.

“I spent a week with some people who thought they knew exactly where the relics were,” he said, turning to the valide. “They put it together out of old books.”

And Grigor had believed them, hadn’t he? Raised the alarm. Condemned men to death.

The valide sniffed. “When we get back to the apartments, I think I shall ask you to read to me a little. Monsieur Stendhal.” She put out her stick and got to her feet. “It’s cold in here.”

He took her arm, and they went slowly out of the old church. In the shade of the portico, the valide put up her hands to adjust her veil.

“Your friends—I suppose they were very disappointed,
non
?”

Yashim cocked his head. “Disappointed? I think you could say that. One of them, in fact, wound up dead.”

“Well, well, Yashim. I’m sure you will want to talk about it. It just goes to show that you can’t believe everything that you read in books,
n’est-ce pas
?”

She dropped her veil, and they passed out together from the shade into the sun, leaning close together like old friends.