The Snake Stone (4 page)

“My dear old friend, we need never see him again.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Palewski said.

And he did.

“Y
OU
are not what I had expected,” Madame Mavrogordato said. It was not a reproach. It was a statement of fact.

She sat bolt upright in a carved wooden chair, her jet-black hair piled up and stuck with pins. She had the face of a Cappadocian god, with straight black brows and chiseled lips. Yashim blinked and swayed a little on his feet. Madame Mavrogordato was not what he had expected, either.

On balance that was a good thing, but today the balance was fine. Yashim’s temples throbbed. His mouth was dry. Palewski was probably right, and the sultan was really dying from that champagne. He wished he had ignored the note and gone to the hammam first—he should at least have eaten some soup. Tripe soup, best. Palewski, having gone off cautiously down the stairs in the middle of the night, would still be comfortably asleep in bed.

The note had been delivered by hand, very early. While men consulted Yashim about money in one way or another, and sometimes about death, women summoned him more rarely. Women were usually worried about their husbands, their servants—or a mixture of the two; and sometimes they wanted nothing more than to satisfy a curiosity about Yashim. He was attached to the palace; he lived in the city; so they invented little troubles and called him in to brighten up their day. In normal circumstances, even the Christian women would have thought twice about summoning a man to their apartments; but Yashim was above suspicion. They called him, politely,
lala
, or guardian. In a city of a million people only a handful of men deserved the title, and most of those worked in the women’s apartments in the sultan’s palaces.

Madame Mavrogordato did not call him
lala
. She would never have servant trouble.

The Mavrogordato mansion stood alone behind high and fire-blackened walls in the Fener district of Istanbul, halfway up the Golden Horn. Yashim lived in the Fener, too, but that hardly made them neighbors: his home was a small tenement apartment above an alley. During the Greek riots eighteen years ago, the district had been ravaged by a fire; beyond the blackened walls, the mansion itself was entirely new. So, too, were the Mavrogordatos.

Quite how new, it was hard to say. Certain old Greek families of the Fener had for centuries provided the Ottoman state with dragomen, governors, priests, and bankers; but many had been linked to the Greek independence movement, and after the riots this so-called Phanariot aristocracy all but disappeared. The Mavrogordatos belonged to a circle of wealthy families who did the same sort of business the Fener aristocracy had done, and even their name seemed quite familiar. But it was not quite the same name, and they were not the same people.

Yashim bowed. Madame Mavrogordato’s black eyes flickered toward an enormous German grandfather clock, which stood against the wall of the dark apartment.

“You are late,” she said.

Yashim glanced at the clock. Beyond it, another clock stood on an inlay side table. Behind Madame Mavrogordato an American clock hung on the wall, with a little glass panel through which you could see the pendulum rhythmically reflecting back the subdued light in the big, closely shuttered room. Between the windows stood another grandfather clock. Its hands showed a little after ten.

“Why don’t you wear the fez?”

“I am not a government employee, hanum. I am almost forty years old and I believe I am old enough to choose what I find comfortable. Just as I like to choose who I work for,” he added coolly.

“Meaning what?”

“I live modestly, hanum. I would rather be busy than idle, but I can be idle, too.”

Madame Mavrogordato picked up a silver bell at her elbow and shook it. An attendant appeared noiselessly at the door. “Coffee.” She glared at Yashim for a moment. “I do not permit smoking in these rooms.”

She indicated a stiff French chair. The attendant returned with coffee, in a silence measured out by the ticking of Madame Mavrogordato’s four clocks. Yashim took a sip. It was good coffee.

“It may or may not surprise you to learn that I, too, have lived modestly in my life,” Madame Mavrogordato began. She picked up a string of beads from her lap and began to thread them through her slender white fingers. “That time, I hope, is past. Monsieur Mavrogordato and I have worked hard and—we have sometimes had the good fortune that others lacked. I am quite sure you understand what I mean—as when I say that I will not allow anything to jeopardize that good fortune.” The beads slipped through her fingers one by one. “You may have heard that Monsieur Mavrogordato is a Bulgar. It is not true. He comes from an ecclesiastical family, formerly in Varna. I am related to the Mavrogordato family by blood, and Monsieur Mavrogordato by his marriage to me. Early on, I recognized his talent for finance. He is good at figures. He enjoys them. But he is not a bold man.”

She looked Yashim squarely in the eye. Yashim nodded. Monsieur Mavrogordato obviously was a Bulgar. Yashim didn’t mind. Left to his own devices, he supposed, Monsieur Mavrogordato might yet be totting up the church accounts in some provincial viyalet. Instead, he had become a merchant prince in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, steered by the woman whose slender claim on the Mavrogordato legacy had provided the necessary leverage. A woman whose boldness was scarcely in doubt.

“My husband is a moderate man of thoroughly regular habits. It falls to me to maintain a household that is quiet, orderly, and appropriate. Anything that disturbs Monsieur Mavrogordato in his work also disturbs us here.”

Madame Mavrogordato, Yashim noticed, had not touched her coffee.

“I know very little about business,” Yashim said.

“It is not necessary that you should. What I require is a certain—intelligence. And discretion.” She paused. Yashim said nothing. “Well?”

“I hope, hanum, that I am discreet.”

Her lips tightened. “Yashim efendi, my husband was visited yesterday by a Frenchman. He asked for a small loan. In the course of the discussion, the man made certain offers which were in some sense disquieting to my husband. Later, I was able to detect his agitation.”

Yashim blinked. “Offers, hanum?”

“Offers. Promises. It is hard for me to say.”

“You think that your husband was being blackmailed?”

Madame Mavrogordato’s face remained impassive, but she twisted the string of beads in her hands so tightly that Yashim half expected them to break. “I do not think so. My husband has nothing to be afraid of. I believe that the Frenchman was proposing to sell him something.”

“You believe—but you’re not sure?”

“My husband keeps nothing from me, but he found it hard to recall exactly what the man said. If, indeed, he said anything at all. It was more a question of—of the tone. As if he were hinting at something.”

“Maximilien Lefèvre,” Yashim said.

Madame Mavrogordato looked at him sharply. “That’s right. What else do you know?”

Yashim spread his hands wide. “Very little. Lefèvre is an archaeologist.”

“Very well. I—that is, my husband and I—would like you to find out a little more. If possible, I would like you to encourage Monsieur Lefèvre to conduct his—research—elsewhere. I resent disturbance.”

Yashim put out his lower lip. “I can try to find out something about Lefèvre. But I should speak to your husband.”

Madame Mavrogordato’s eyes were iron black. “It is enough that you have spoken to me.”

She picked up the bell and tinkled it. A servant appeared, and Yashim rose to leave.

“One thing,” he added as he reached the door. “Did your husband give him that loan?”

Madame Mavrogordato worked her jaw and glared. “That—” she began, and with that hesitation Yashim realized that she was far younger than he had originally thought; not yet forty. “I—I never asked.”

A
S
Yashim followed the footman down to the hall a door opened and a young man stepped forward.

“One moment, you,” he said. “Go along, Dmitri. I’ll see the fellow out.”

The young man was in his early twenties. He had a thick mop of black hair and was strongly built, with broad shoulders and a big jaw that hadn’t lost its puppy fat. He was dressed in a well-cut stambouline, a starched collar with a silk cravat, black stovepipe trousers and a pair of slim black leather pumps. He was almost as handsome as his mother—the resemblance was very striking—but his eyes were smaller, harder, and there was a contrasting softness around his mouth that Yashim liked rather less.

“Good morning,” he said politely.

The young man scowled and stared at Yashim. “I saw you come in. You were talking to Mother.”

Yashim raised an eyebrow and made no reply.

“Did you talk about me?” the young man asked abruptly.

“I don’t know. Who are you?”

“My name’s Alexander. Mavrogordato,” he added bullishly, as if he half expected Yashim to deny it.

Yashim thought for a moment. “No. No, we didn’t discuss you at all. Should we have?”

The young Mavrogordato gave him a suspicious look. “Are you being clever?”

“I hope so, Monsieur Mavrogordato. But now, if you will excuse me—”

The young man reached out and grabbed Yashim’s sleeve. “Why are you here, then?”

Yashim looked down slowly at the hand on his sleeve and frowned. There was a pause, then Mavrogordato let go. Yashim brushed a hand across his sleeve.

“Perhaps you might wish to discuss it with your mother. Please don’t detain me again.”

He stepped around the young man. As he passed, he felt his breath on his face, sour like a tavern.

H
OLDING
the lamp in one hand, Goulandris surveyed the shelves that lined his little cubbyhole in the Grand Bazaar. Now and then he reached out to knock the books into line and close the gaps. Satisfied, he returned to his stool, set the lamp on the desk, and blew out the flame.

A shadow fell across the desk. Goulandris glanced up, without enthusiasm.

“The shop is closed,” he said. He moved his head to see better, but the figure in the doorway stood against the light. “Come back tomorrow.”

He turned his head again, hoping to identify the man at the door. If he came tomorrow, it would show that he was eager: Goulandris wanted to be able to recognize him again.

“There was a book,” the man said slowly.

The bookseller sighed. He opened the drawer and dropped the little account book into it. He closed the drawer with both hands.

“There are many books,” he said querulously. “Tomorrow.”

The shadows deepened: it was Goulandris’s impression that the man had taken a step closer, into the room. For him, with one eye, it was always hard to tell.

But yes, the voice seemed closer now.

“Not many books. Just one. A Latin book, no? I am sure you can remember.”

Goulandris swallowed. He leaned away from the desk, allowing his hand to move toward a little bell that stood on a low shelf behind his stool.

“Not now,” he said. “I am going home.”

The man was near the desk. “Please, Monsieur Goulandris, don’t touch that bell.”

Goulandris checked himself. He began to rise from his stool, leaning both hands on the desk.

But the stranger, it seemed, didn’t want Goulandris to stand up ever again.