The Snake Stone (31 page)

D
R.
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.

P
ALEWSKI
bit down on the éclair and wiped a squirt of crème 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 Lefèvre—Meyer—visited Mavrogordato the other day, he got an unsecured loan. Why not? French, archaeologist, very respectable. But whatever Lefèvre 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 Lefèvre. 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 éclair, but he set it down again. “Suspect? You mean—that Lefèvre was a phony?”

“Lefèvre said something that made Mavrogordato give him money. And Madame to wonder who Lefèvre 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 éclair. 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 Lefèvre 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?”

Yashim flashed him a look of mild rebuke.

“A joke, Yashim. Sorry.” He folded his arms. “So Madame Mavrogordato had Lefèvre killed, then.”

“I thought so, once.” Yashim got to his feet. “I haven’t got much time, and there’s something I still need to find out.”

“From whom?”

“Dr. Millingen—indirectly. I’m going into his house. Do you want to come?”

“No doctors for me, Yashim.”

“But he won’t be there.”

Palewski narrowed his eyes. “I’m not sure that makes it any better. I’m still the ambassador, you know. And I am planning on enjoying this éclair.”

Y
ASHIM
crossed the street, mounted the steps, and rapped smartly on the knocker to Dr. Millingen’s house. When nobody answered, he launched himself into the crowd. Twenty yards down the street he entered a bakery. He walked past the counter with a nod to the baker, past the loaves, through the kitchens, and out of the shop at the back, into a small yard surrounded by a low wall. Yashim heaved himself up onto it and jumped lightly down the other side, just managing to avoid crushing a clump of horseradish growing in Dr. Millingen’s tiny physic garden.

From a door in the far wall a cinder path led directly through the garden to the back door. Yashim moved closer to the house. The windows on the ground floor were barred, the back door locked with a patent American mechanism, but there was a coal hopper at the end of the house, which suggested possibilities. Yashim went to work on the padlock, and after a few minutes he saw it click open. He lifted the doors and lowered himself into the chute.

Some loose coal was pressed up against a sliding panel at the bottom of the chute. Yashim lifted the larger lumps aside, working his fingers into the grit to find the lower edge of the panel. It slid upward with a sound of falling coal.

Yashim paused, listening, then squeezed feetfirst through the opening. Once through, he stood brushing the dust from his cloak while his eyes adjusted to the darkness. There were some steps, and a door on a catch, but the door was not close-fitting. In a moment Yashim had slipped his knife between the door and the jamb and was stealing out into the corridor.

Millingen’s study lay just across the hall. Yashim whipped in, leaving the door open, and looked around. The green-and-gold-striped wallpaper hung with sporting prints, the mantelpiece with an ornamented clock over an English grate, the big walnut desk with its black leather top, and a set of shelves set into an alcove, full of books: neat, methodical, and prosperous.

He tried the drawers of the desk. Notepaper, sealing wax, a box of steel nibs. In a lower drawer, some papers. Yashim riffled through them. They were written in English, in an illegible scrawl. He closed the drawer and went over to the bookshelves.

The lower shelves contained a series of leather-bound boxes, which at first glance resembled books. Yashim squatted down. For the most part the boxes contained more papers: accounts, copies of the doctor’s bills, notes about patients written in English, and in the same difficult hand. But one also contained a series of letters, written in Greek, between Millingen and a certain Dr. Stephanitzes in Athens.

Yashim was about to lift the box to the desk when a sound from the corridor—light footsteps, perhaps, and a peculiar swishing noise—made him freeze. He was about to turn around when he heard the door click and the sound of a key turning in the lock.

He sprang for the handle. At the last moment he decided against rattling the handle and knocked on the wooden panel, instead: if the servant had returned, he might think the doctor had absentmindedly left the door ajar. But no one came. Yashim knocked again, much louder.

There were no sounds of retreating footsteps; he had certainly not heard the front door open or close. He pressed his ear to the panel. For a moment he had a sense that somebody was standing on the other side of the door.

He looked around the room. The window was hung with muslin curtains, against the street, and barred like the windows at the back of the house. He looked at the empty grate and sighed. Everything that made this room in Pera solid and English made it also a perfect prison.

He crouched down, with a faint hope that he might be able to retrieve the key from the keyhole on the other side. But the key was no longer in the lock.

Whoever had locked the door had done so deliberately, knowing that Yashim was inside.

The idea made Yashim frown. He went back and squatted down by the bookshelves, from where Millingen’s desk almost hid him from the door. To see him, someone would have had to lean in at the door. They would have had to approach along the corridor very quietly—as if they already knew he was there.

In which case, someone must have seen him going in. Not Millingen: he had gone out. But the servant—could he have doubled back while Yashim was coming through the coal chute?

But then—why wait so long to lock the door?

Yashim bit his lip. He lifted the box of papers onto the desk and bent over it.

He’d come to do a job, and now, it seemed, he was being afforded the leisure to complete it.