The Snake Stone (6 page)

W
IDOW
Matalya’s brow furrowed and uncreased as she made her count. She champed her toothless gums together, and the hairs trembled on a large black mole on her cheek. Now and again her fingers twitched. Widow Matalya did not mind, because she was asleep.

She dreamed, as usual, about chickens. There were forty of them, leghorns and bantams, scratching about in the dust of the Anatolian village where she had been born more than seventy years ago, and the chickens in her dream were exactly the same as the chickens she had tended as a young woman, when Sipahi Matalya had ridden through her yard and sent them all squawking and flapping onto the roof of their own coop. Sipahi Matalya had taken her to Istanbul, of course, because he was only a summer sipahi, and they had shared a very happy marriage until he died; but now that her children were grown she thought very often of those forty birds. Awake, she wondered who had eaten them. Asleep, she checked that they were all safe. It was good to be young again, with all that ahead of one.

Twenty-nine. Thirty. She scattered a little more grain and watched them pecking in the dirt. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Or had she gone wrong? The noise of the chickens’ beaks hitting the earth was confusing her.
Bam! Bam!
Thirty-two, thirty-three.

The lips stopped moving. Widow Matalya’s eyes opened. With a sigh she levered herself ponderously off the sofa, adjusted her headscarf, and went to the door.

“Who is it?”

“It is Yashim, hanum,” a voice called. “I have no water.”

Widow Matalya opened the door. “This is because the spigot in the yard is blocked, Yashim efendi. Someone is coming. We must be patient.”

“I have my bowl,” Yashim said, holding it up. “I’ll go and find a soujee in the street. Can I get some water for you, hanum?”

Yashim was gone for half an hour, and he came back looking exasperated.

“You needn’t worry about the standpipe. It’s the whole street,” he said. “Plenty of water beyond the Kara Davut. Here, I filled your bowl.”

“Thank you, Yashim efendi. I will send the man away if he comes. They will fix the pipes, and tomorrow we shall have water again, inshallah.”

“Inshallah, hanum,” Yashim replied.

He was a good man, the widow Matalya reflected as she closed the door.

H
E
ate the lüfer simply grilled, with a squeeze of lemon and the bread he had picked up from the Libyan baker on his way back from the hammam. Yashim dropped the remains out of the window for the dogs, made a pot of tea, and retired to his divan with the oil lamp and a French novel he had been lent by a friend at the palace. He enjoyed Balzac, relishing the light he shone into the secret heart of Paris, a city he had often visited in his imagination, with all its deceit and greed.

He opened the book and smoothed out its pages. As the night air flooded into the city he could hear the building crack as it cooled, easing its wooden joints inch by inch. Down in the street a dog began to bark, with deep, hoarse repeated barks; then a casement squealed and the dog was quiet. Yashim put out a hand to tug at the shawl that lay beside him on the divan, and heaped it around his shoulders. The lamp threw a steady yellow oval of light around the gleaming pages of his book. He bent his head and started to read.

He read the first few lines quickly, eagerly: he had already glanced at them earlier, savoring the promise of new faces and unfamiliar names, and the casual-sounding opening phrase on which Balzac had lavished so much consideration in order to create between him and his reader that sense of enjoyable complicity. But when he reached the end of the paragraph, he found he had remembered nothing.

He scratched his thigh and stared absently at the page. Like the old building itself, he seemed to be finding it hard to settle. Odd cracks and reports still sounded through the floorboards; the stairs creaked. He’d been reading too fast.

What did it mean, he wondered, to remember nothing? Like George: thinking of something else, thinking about the Hetira, perhaps. Digesting the blow to his pride, puzzling out his attitude to fear.

Yashim, too, was thinking about the Hetira. Malakian had recognized the name: it was something Greek, he’d said.

Yashim rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He was letting this business run away with him. Hadn’t he already done his best by George? Bringing him food. Checking on his condition, as a friend should. Goulandris’s death was shocking, certainly; but it wasn’t his affair.

He pressed his hand down on the Balzac and stared at the first page, listening to the sound of warm wood cracking as it shrank in the evening air.

He thought of the sultan: fading like the light. It was months since he had been summoned to the sultan’s palace. And George, or Goulandris—were they simply victims of the same unease? Like a creak in the rafters as the sunlight drained away.

Yashim raised his head abruptly and listened. That crack on the stairs outside had sounded unusually loud. But everything was quiet. And then he heard, distinctly, a soft rasping that seemed to come from close to his door.

Yashim slipped the shawl from his shoulders with his left hand and swirled it swiftly around his fist. His other hand closed on a knife that lay on the shelf, a plain straight-shafted blade that Yashim sometimes used to cut tobacco. Slowly he uncoiled himself from the divan and stood up, tensing his legs.

As he did so, there came a scratch on the door. Yashim stepped forward, took the handle in his left hand and wrenched it back, slipping behind the door as it opened wide.

For a few moments, nothing happened. Yashim rubbed his thumb against the knife’s hilt and straightened his back to the wall, looking sideways. He heard a moan, which sounded almost like a plea, and a man stumbled across the threshold, dragging a leather satchel into the room behind him.

T
HE
man took a few steps toward the lamp and then peered around wildly until he caught sight of Yashim, watching him in astonishment from beside the opened door. For a second he seemed to cringe.

“Monsieur Yashim!” he breathed. “Shut the door, I beg you.”

As Yashim closed the door, the man clawed at the air and stumbled backward onto the divan, where he sat twitching and running his hand through his hair. Had it not been for the hair, Yashim would have found it hard to recognize Lefèvre: he seemed shrunken and incredibly aged, his black eyes darting nervously from side to side, his face the color of a peeled almond under a new growth of beard.

Yashim laid the dagger aside. Lefèvre trembled on the divan; every now and then he was racked by a convulsion, his teeth chattering. He hardly seemed to know where he was.

Yashim poured him a glass of cold water, as a remedy for shock, and Lefèvre seized it in both hands, hugging it to his chest as if it might stop his trembling. He drank it down, his teeth chattering against the rim.

“Ils me connaissent,”
he muttered. “They know me. They know me. I have nowhere else to go.”

Yashim glanced at the satchel. It might contain anything—food, clothes, a reliquary, a woven rug. He wondered what books were in it—whether, in fact, it contained nothing but ancient Bibles, illuminated tracts, commentaries written on vellum filched from ignorant monks, venal priests, the greedy and the gullible.

“You are quite safe here,” Yashim said quietly. “Quite safe.”

Lefèvre glanced up and swung his head around the room like a frightened animal.

“Are you ill?”

The word seemed to strike Lefèvre to the quick. He froze, staring into space. Then he was staring at Yashim.

“To get out. Get away. You’ll help me? A foreign ship—not Greek.” He shuddered and groaned and pressed his hand to his face. “No one to trust. I trust you! But they’re watching. They know me. It’s so dark. And wet. Nobody knows them. Please, you must help me!”

He slid from the divan and stretched out his hands. Yashim raised his chin: it was horrible to see the man groveling, feverish, prey to his terrors. “Who are they? Who do you mean?”

Lefèvre squeezed his hands together, and his mouth became a rictus of despair.

“What have you done?”

Lefèvre’s eyes flickered toward the satchel, then back at Yashim’s face. “You think—? My God, no. No. No.”

He shuffled on his knees toward the satchel and tore at its straps with shaking hands. Out spilled a collection of old clothes, a leather flask, a few printed books. Lefèvre picked at them, spreading them around. “No, monsieur. You will trust me. Help me, yes. I have nothing. No one.”

Yashim turned his head away. After what Malakian had told him about Lefèvre’s methods, he was not ashamed of his suspicions. But he was ashamed for this man who now knelt muttering among his meager belongings strewn across the floor.

“Please,” he began awkwardly. “Please don’t think that I accuse you of anything. I will help you, of course. You are my guest.”

He surprised himself with his own assurance. But as he later reminded himself, there was something rather terrible about being a stranger in a city where even the dead belonged. Perhaps they were not quite so different, he and this Frenchman he didn’t like.

Lefèvre clutched at his words with weary gratitude. “I don’t know what to say. They know who I am, you see, but you—you can find me the ship?”

“Of course. You must stay here, and in the morning I shall find you a way out.” There was a bond between them now. It couldn’t be helped. He must act with grace. “You must eat first, and sleep. Then all things will seem better.”

Yashim turned to his little kitchen and with rice, saffron and butter created a pilaf
in bianco,
as the Italians would say; a soothing pilaf.

Later, Lefèvre dropped off to sleep cross-legged. Yashim eased him into a recumbent position and then, for want of anywhere better, lay down on the sofa beside him. Twice in the night, Lefèvre had bad dreams; he twitched and ran his hands excitedly across his face.

Yashim was not superstitious, but the sight made him shudder.

E
ARLY
the next morning, leaving the Frenchman sleeping on the divan, Yashim walked down to the Horn and took a caïque over to Galata, the center of foreign commerce. In the harbormaster’s office he asked for the shipping list and scanned it for a suitable vessel. There was a French 400-tonner,
La Réunion,
leaving for Valetta and Marseilles with a mixed cargo in four days’ time; but there was a Neapolitan vessel, too,
Ca d’Oro
out of Palermo, which had already been issued with bills of lading. The Italian ship would certainly be cheaper; if Lefèvre was going back to France, he’d easily pick up another berth in Palermo, so the voyage might not be that much longer—and there was the undeniable advantage that the
Ca d’Oro
might leave the very next day. Yashim had no desire to prolong the Frenchman’s agony of mind a moment longer than was necessary.

He found the
Ca d’Oro
’s captain in a little café overlooking the Bosphorus. He had heavy eyebrows that met above his nose, and wore a plain summer cutaway coat, which looked as if it had been rigged up by the sailmaker. The coat was dirty, but the man’s fingernails were very clean when he offered Yashim a pipe. Yashim declined the offer but accepted coffee.
Certo
, the
Ca d’Oro
would leave on the morning tide, God willing;
sì
, there were berths. The gentleman could come aboard directly; or tonight if he preferred, it was all the same, the ship’s boat would be running back and forth from the dockside all day with returning crew and last-minute purchases. Or one of the caïques might bring him out.

He handed Yashim a spyglass and encouraged him to look out for the ship.

“You’ll see her close in to shore, signor. Two-masted brig, high in the poop. Old?
Sì
, but she knows her duty, ha ha! She could find her own way to Palermo after all these years, maybe.”

Yashim squinted down the telescope and found the ship, low in the water, with a couple of sailors standing in the waist and the white and gold of Naples hanging limply from her stern. Rather old, for sure, and fairly small—but there, she was the vessel he’d have taken himself, if he was in a hurry. Lefèvre seemed to be in a hurry.

The captain spread out a few papers on the table. “Half in advance, forty piastres, it’s normal.” He made some notes on a worn sheet of paper. “Your friend’s name?”

Yashim’s mind went momentarily blank. “Lefèvre,” he stammered finally.

The captain glanced up. “
Francese, bene.
He has all his papers, of course—passport, quarantine certificate?”

Yashim said yes, he had all the right documents. He hoped it was true; at least Lefèfvre would be on board and under way before anything was known about it. Lefèvre wasn’t an innocent: he’d take care of himself.

The captain wrote the name down on his sheet and put the folded papers away in his coat. Yashim dug out the purse from his belt and counted out forty piastres in silver onto the table. The captain picked two coins at random, bit them, and returned them to the pile with a grunt. “It’ll pass,” he said.

They shook hands. “What are you carrying?”

The Italian grimaced. “You name it. Rice. Egyptian cotton. Pepper. Bees. Eighty pieces of Ottoman silver, I hope, and a Frenchman!”

They both laughed, meaninglessly.