The Snake Stone (34 page)

A
UGUSTE
Boyer, chargé d’affaires to the ambassador, had not been sleeping well. Drifting off to sleep, he would remember with a start of shame his own appearance at the courtyard window, drooling onto the cobbles: the ambassador could easily have seen him. Asleep, he dreamed of faceless men and wild dogs.

Yashim’s arrival shortly after Boyer had dressed, and before he had drunk his bowl of coffee, collided unhappily in the attaché’s mind with the memory of Lefèvre’s bloodless corpse.

“The ambassador cannot possibly be disturbed,” he said vehemently.

“He’s asleep?”

“Certainly not,” Boyer retorted. “Already he is settling various affairs, in discussion with embassy staff.” Like the chef, he thought: there was a luncheon planned. Provided, of course, the ambassador was awake. Boyer’s tummy began to rumble; he pulled out a small handkerchief and coughed.

“Do you happen to know if the ambassador has completed his report into the death of the unfortunate Monsieur Lefèvre?”

Boyer regarded the eunuch with some distaste. “I have no idea,” he said.

Yashim still entertained a small hope of delay. “And the testimony of Madame Lefèvre? Did that prove useful?”

Boyer looked at him blankly. “Madame Lefèvre?”

“Amélie Lefèvre. His wife,” Yashim explained. “She came here the evening before last.”

Auguste Boyer thought of his bowl of coffee, growing cold.

“Of Monsieur Lefèvre,” he said, drawing himself up, “the embassy is aware. But as for Madame—no, monsieur, I am afraid that you are utterly mistaken.”

Yashim rocked slowly on his heels.

“Madame Lefèvre came here to the embassy. She had been in Samnos, and she needed help to get home. To France.”

Boyer seized on Yashim’s change of tack. The ambassador’s report was beyond his jurisdiction, but this was easy.

“You are quite mistaken. This Madame Lefèvre, whoever she may be, has not been seen at the embassy,” he said crisply, mentally connecting himself with his coffee and a warm croissant. “Good day, monsieur.”

He turned on his heel and strode off across the hall, leaving Yashim staring after him, a puzzled frown on his face.

Either the little diplomat was lying—or Amélie had gone somewhere else, after all. She had disappeared into the great city as suddenly as she had come, taking her little bag and a head full of dangerous new ideas. Determined, she had said, to find out who had killed her husband.

Yashim’s frown deepened. Ideas were dangerous, certainly; but men could be deadly.

A
MÉLIE
Lefèvre shivered as the door swung shut behind her.

She set her lantern on a low shelf, opened the glass pane, and lit the wick with a trembling hand. The air was very cold.

She held the lantern over her head, gathered up the hem of her skirts with her free hand, and began to slowly descend the spiral of water basins leading down to the mouth of the tunnel.

At the bottom she stepped into the shallow water. Drops of condensation on the lantern threw whirling freckles of light deep into the tunnel, skimming across the rough brick walls to vanish suddenly in the black wings of her own shadow on the roof.

She reached into her pocket and took out a small ball of white wax and a reel of black cotton thread. She softened the wax against the lantern and used it to fasten an end of thread to the opening of the tunnel, an inch or so above the waterline. She stood up and tucked up her skirts. Loosely holding the cotton reel in the crook of her fingers, she entered the tunnel, paying out the thread behind her.

At the first fork she veered to the right, without hesitation, but about five yards in she stopped to listen. The water sluiced softly around her feet. Instinctively she glanced back: the pressing darkness took her by surprise, and she swung the lantern nervously over her shoulder. A drip from the roof landed on the tip of her nose, and she jerked back.

Calm yourself, she murmured, wading on. Concentrate on the detail. Roman bricks. A later repair, using cruder materials; perhaps builders had crashed through the roof in some remote age. The Turks seemed to have rediscovered the secret of Roman cement, she thought. The walls were bare; nothing could grow down here.

Amélie Lefèvre. An archaeologist. Like my husband.

She began to count her steps.

She counted a hundred, two hundred. At five hundred paces she began to feel the weight of the city pressing down on her, slowly sealing off the distant mouth of the tunnel. She stopped counting.

This is the Snake, she told herself. It has stood firm for a thousand years, a lost feat of Byzantine engineering.

I’m in good hands: Byzantine workmen, a Renaissance scholar—and Maximilien Lefèvre.

She had read it all in Yashim’s book; the book her husband had hidden in his apartment. The book that Max had always meant her to find.

The reel snagged in her hand. She looked down and took another out of her pocket. She tied the ends of the thread together, curved her fingers over the new reel, and went on.

A thought, a memory, was stirring in Yashim’s mind. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, oblivious to the people passing in the street.

Amélie had vanished into thin air. The only clue to her plans lay in the book she had taken with her. Gyllius must have identified to Amélie—and perhaps, before that, Lefèvre—the location of the Byzantine relics.

Amélie believed in their existence. They lay, she had said, in a hollow space beneath the former church of Aya Sofia. A crypt.

The way to the crypt lay through a network of tunnels that ran beneath the city. Most of them were no bigger than rabbit burrows, but some were big enough to admit the passage of a man. One, at least, seemed to run from the siphon in Balat to the church of St. Irene on the grounds of the Topkapi Palace, where Yashim had seen its mouth. Close to where Gyllius claimed to have gone down beneath a man’s house and flitted through a cavernous cistern in the dark. A hollow hippodrome, as Delmonico had said: the Atmeydan, where the Serpent Column had stood for fifteen hundred years.

Between Topkapi Palace, Gyllius’s cistern, and the Sulëymaniye Mosque stood one ancient building more famous than the others. Aya Sofia, the Great Church of the Byzantines.

Yashim held his eyes shut tight.

The waterpipe must lead to the Hippodrome.

Gyllius would have realized that three hundred years ago: he must have guessed where the relics were to be found.

And then he had left the city to go with the Ottoman armies to Persia. As if someone, or something, had frightened him away. Just as Lefèvre had been frightened, three centuries later.

Men do not live for three hundred years, but ideas do. Memories do. Traditions do.

The sou naziry had made the point himself.

Yashim flung himself from the wall and began to run.

A
MÉLIE
stood at the lip of the tunnel with her lantern raised. Her eyes were shining.

Gyllius had been telling the truth.

She was standing a few feet above a vast underground lake. From its glittering black surface huge columns of porphyry and stone reared upward from their massive plinths, glinting in the lamplight until they were lost in the darkness overhead.

Slowly she descended the steps until she reached the level of the water.

She shivered involuntarily in the silent forest: columns as far as she could see, beautifully made, the pride of pagan temples from all across the Roman world. The Byzantine emperors had plundered them for this, the greatest cistern ever built, lost to the world and buried beneath the ground.

She took another step, and the icy water closed around her ankles. She felt for the next step with her foot; the water reached her knees. There were no more steps. She let out a gasp of relief.

She set the cotton reel on the step behind her. Gritting her teeth, she began to wade through the inky water.

The relics were here, she knew it.

Somewhere, among the frozen columns of antiquity, she would find the sign.

O
NE
hand outstretched, the other coiled loosely around the thread in which he had placed his faith, Yashim scuttled forward in the dark.

Somewhere up ahead, linked to him by the slenderest filament of cotton, a woman was advancing to her death. Whether she was brave or ignorant, Yashim could not judge, but the penalty would be the same.

Grigor had talked about the city’s boundaries. Between faith and faith; between one district and the next; between the present and the past.

But the watermen patrolled another boundary few people in Istanbul were even aware of: the frontier between light and dark. Beneath the streets, hidden from view, the pulsing arteries of Istanbul.

The dead, cold, dark world that gave the city life.

And the watermen were prepared to kill to preserve their unique knowledge of that world.

Yashim’s turban brushed against the low roof, dislodging a shower of mortar. Amélie had a lamp, he was sure of that, any moment he would see it.

He glanced over his shoulder. For a moment he was confused, disoriented. Had he somehow doubled back—moving away from her lamp? For there it was: a dim brightening that came and went behind him.

He shook his head. His eyes, in that darkness, were playing tricks.

He kept going.