The Snake Stone (8 page)

F
ROZEN
at an angle just wide enough to admit a visitor on foot, the carriage gates of the Polish ambassador’s residency rusted on their hinges, escutcheons peeling on the iron shield. They seemed, like Poland itself, to represent an idea: certainly they had not opened to receive a carriage since the eighteenth century, when Poland succumbed to the territorial ambitions of her greedy and more powerful neighbors. A Janissary guard had once been stationed at the gates, but the Janissaries had been brutally suppressed in 1826, and afterward nobody thought to replace the sentries. Visitors, in truth, were few and far between.

Turning in at the gate, Yashim was surprised to find himself silently challenged by a sentry, who stood with folded arms, blocking his way. He was small for the job, and had a dirty face; he held a stick across his chest and a look in his eye that brooked no opposition.

Yashim bowed politely. “My name is Yashim. Is His Excellency the Ambassador at home?”

The little sentry shouldered his arms, swung abruptly on his bare heel, and walked stiffly toward the front door, where he took up a position at the foot of the steps. Yashim passed him with a nod. At the top of the steps he pushed the door, which opened with a creak.

“Don’t bother knocking, confound you,” said a voice from the darkened hall. “Just push in, do.”

Yashim obeyed. Stanislaw Palewski, Polish ambassador to the Sublime Porte, was leaning on the banisters, waving an arm in ironic salute.

“Oh—it’s you, Yashim! That’s all right. Come inside. Ever since I lost the key I keep finding total strangers wandering around the house.”

“I thought you were being rather well guarded.”

“Guarded? I suppose you mean the Xanis. Ye-es. The little boy shows promise. More than I can say for his father. Come upstairs.”

Yashim followed his old friend to the sitting room, where they rang for tea. Yashim tucked his feet up in one of the ambassador’s leaky leather armchairs while Palewski fell to pacing between the untidy bookcases and the portrait of King Jan Sobieski. Marta arrived with a tray, and Palewski nodded distractedly. Yashim poured the tea.

When Marta had left, Palewski turned around and said: “What do you make of Marta, Yashim?”

Yashim raised an eyebrow. “Marta?”

“My housekeeper.”

“I know who Marta is, Palewski. I’ve known her for years.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. Well, I’m a bit worried about her.”

“You think she’s ill?”

“Ill? No, I don’t think so. It’s just that there’s something—she’s started—oh, I don’t know, Yashim, but she’s gone a bit odd. Dreamy, half the time. I come around a corner and she’s there, leaning on a broom, staring into space. And tears.”

“Tears?”

“She bursts into tears. I ask something, and she goes all red and darts away. Fact is, Yash, I’m beginning to think that she’s not happy.”

“I see.”

“Do you think that’s why she got the Xanis in?”

“The family in the coach house? Yes, for company. You might be right.”

Palewski looked dubious. “Can’t say they’re much by way of company. Mrs. Xani seems to spend the day inside sweeping the coach house, and the children muck about in the courtyard. The boy doesn’t talk, for some reason. I don’t think he’s dumb, just won’t talk. It’s rather odd. But Marta seems very fond of children, so I don’t complain. It was her idea to get them in the first place. Put a roof over their heads. The little girl likes to help her cook.”

“What about the father?”

“Xani? Moved in, all gratitude and smiles. Then he went and joined the watermen’s guild. He became a su yolu. So much for all those little repairs he was going to do.”

“Xani joined the watermen? I thought you had to be born into the job.”

Palewski shook his head. “As a rule, that’s true. But if a waterman dies without a successor, they let someone buy his way in. As long as he’s Albanian, that is. I suppose he had a cousin or someone to propose him. But look, enough about Xani,” he added, waving a hand. He seemed to have forgotten about Marta for the moment, so Yashim told him, instead, about Lefèvre’s mysterious arrival—and departure.

“And the forty piastres?” Palewski arched his brows. “I don’t suppose you’ll be seeing them again, either. Really, Yashim, you should have made that scoundrel pay up.”

Yashim sighed. “I did try.”

“But not very hard.”

“No. Not very hard.” How could he explain to his friend how the sight of Lefèvre’s pathetic satchel had changed everything between them? “I’ll think of it as a tax. The city is better off without a man like Lefèvre in it.”

Palewski nodded. “I wonder what he got away with this time,” he said.

Yashim turned his head and stared out the window. The sky was blue with a touch of heat. Wisteria leaves rustled against the window frame, and a little bird swung on a twig, grooming itself in hurried bursts. “He didn’t have anything, as far as I could tell,” he said quietly.

Palewski snorted. “That’s what you say. I’ve half a mind to go upstairs and check on the wretched heads. He probably got the caïque to drop him off somewhere. I wonder what he came for, anyway.”

“Mmm,” Yashim murmured. “Books, I suppose. Old manuscripts.”

“Old books? That would hardly explain his funk. I think he must have been angling for something bigger than that, and they set the heavies on him. What’s the matter?”

Yashim had looked around suddenly, frowning.

“One odd thing happened while I was coming over this morning. The captain of the
Ca d’Oro
, I saw him outside the fish market. I thought it was him. It was just a glimpse and I lost him in the crowd.”

“Sailing delayed?”

“No, I looked. The
Ca d’Oro
has gone.”

Palewski put his fingertips together. “Well, you know what Pera’s like these days. More Italians than an organ-grinder’s funeral. More everyone. Half of them foreign and the other half Greeks pretending to be.”

Yashim smiled. Twenty-five years before, when Palewski first arrived to take up his post, foreigners were rare even in Pera. Nowadays the streets were full of them—sailors, tailors, storekeepers, hatters, forwarding agents, old soldiers, and even Protestant priests. Being a foreigner didn’t mean much anymore. Many of them were the dregs of every Mediterranean port, too, men whose past didn’t bear much scrutiny: they fetched up here to practice their dodges and deceptions without the slightest fear of getting caught. The Mediterranean was like a purse, and Pera the seam at the bottom where the dust and fluff collected.

Centuries ago the Ottomans had allowed foreign ambassadors to judge and sentence their own nationals—an errant sailor, a thieving valet—in the intelligent belief that the foreigners understood one another better than they could hope to do; they didn’t want foreign miscreants clogging the wheels of Ottoman justice, either. Now that there were so many foreigners in the city the situation had grown out of hand. Many of the people claiming extraterritorial rights were scarcely foreigners at all—Greek-born Englishmen, for instance, whose papers were in order but who had never been closer to England than the Istanbul docks; Corfiotes who could claim protection from the French ambassador, without speaking a word of French; island Greeks who flew the colors of the Netherlands on ships that never sailed beyond the Adriatic. Half the native shipping in Ottoman waters was formally beyond Ottoman jurisdiction. And it was almost pointless to expect the British ambassador to sit in judgment over some Maltese cutthroat who waved his naturalization papers in the face of the Ottoman police: the British didn’t even maintain a jail in their embassy grounds.

“I’m sure you could find a dozen Italians who look like your captain, roaming the streets here at this very minute,” Palewski was saying. “It’s either that, or the shipowners had to replace him at the last minute.”

“That’s unlikely—the ship’s registered in Palermo, so the owners—” Yashim paused. He had been going to say that the shipowners would be far away in Sardinia or Naples or Sicily.

“Probably some local Greek firm,” Palewski observed placidly. “Neapolitan colors, extraterritorial rights, the whole shebang. Switched the captains over for some reason or another.”

The thread of anxiety that had been running through Yashim’s mind ever since he caught sight of the Italian at the fish market went taut. He pressed his lips together.

“Cheer up, Yash, it’s not your funeral.” Palewski said. “Anyway, the Greeks are born to the sea. They’ll get our unsavory friend back in one piece.”

“The Greeks—yes,” Yashim said slowly. Lefèvre had wanted any foreign ship, any ship at all—just as long as it wasn’t Greek. But that had been in the evening, when he had seemed more dead than alive. The next day he’d been quite snappish about the whole thing. He must have been simply overtired, overwrought.

Pilaf
in bianco
, Yashim mused, had been just the thing. Pilaf, and a good night’s sleep.

“A tot of cherry brandy,” Palewski said, rising from his armchair. “Honestly, Yash, we should be celebrating that fellow’s departure, not fretting about him. What do you say?”

“You’re right,” Yashim replied. “I’ll have just the one.”

Which he did, forcing Palewski, as he said reproachfully, to drink for both of them.

Y
ASHIM
walked slowly across the Hippodrome, toward the obelisk that the emperor Constantine had brought from Egypt fifteen hundred years ago. A gift to his mistress, Byzantium, Lefèvre would have said. He wondered what they meant, those hieroglyphic birds, those unwinking eyes, the hands and feet incised with unearthly precision on the gleaming stone.

He stopped for a moment in the pencil of the obelisk’s shade, and touched its base. Trajan’s column stood fifty yards beyond, a slender bole of rugged stone, weathered and clamped with great bronze staples, carved with a Roman emperor’s Balkan triumphs, helmeted legionnaires crammed together with their short swords drawn; the stamp of horses, the abasement of chieftains and kings, the flinging of bridges across rivers, and the lament of women. The scenes were hard to decipher, too; the stone had been softer.

Beneath it, Arab traders had pitched a wide green tent on poles. A string of mules went by, and as Yashim lowered his gaze to watch them pass, his eye was caught by the twining stalk of the Serpent Column, hollow and broken like a reed: a twist of ancient verdigris no bigger than a withered palm tree, set in a triumphal axis between the obelisk and the column.

It had been made over two thousand years before, a miracle of craftsmanship to celebrate the miracle of Greek victory over the Persians at Plataia, with three fearsome snakes’ heads supporting a great bronze cauldron. It had stood for centuries at the oracle of Delphi, until Constantine seized it and dragged it here to beautify his new capital. The centuries since had been unkind to it. The cauldron was long gone; the heads, more recently, had disappeared.

Yashim had known the Serpent Column for years before he first saw the bronze heads in Palewski’s wardrobe. He had imagined them to look like real snakes, with broad jaws and small, reptilian eyes, so he had been shocked by the monsters whose cruel masks he had explored by candlelight that evening. They were creatures of myth and nightmare, fanged, blank-eyed, seeking to terrorize and devour their prey. Malevolence seeped from them like blood.

Yashim leaned over the railing, to peer down into the pit from which the Serpent Column sprang. The other columns stood on level ground. Was it because the snakes emerged from somewhere deeper, some dark, submerged region in the mind? He shuddered, with an instinctive horror of everything cultish and pagan. From above, the coiling snakes looked like a drill, a screw digging deeper and deeper into the fabric of the city, penetrating its layers one by one.

If you turned it so that the coils bit deeper into the ground, if you traced the sinuous curves of the serpents’ bodies from the tail up, you would bring the fanged monsters closer. And eventually you would find yourself staring into those pitiless hollow eyes and the gaping mouth, into the dark side of myths and dreams: terrorized, and then devoured. Yashim glanced back at the Egyptian obelisk. It seemed cold and reserved, careless of its fate. The Roman column was nothing but a platitude: empires decay.

But between them, the green-black coils of the brazen serpents referred to a dark enigma, like a blemish in the human soul.