The Snake Stone (32 page)

S
EVERAL
hours passed before Yashim, sitting in the doctor’s chair, heard the sound of the doctor coming back.

The manservant had returned long before, making his way noisily down the passage to the back of the house. He had let the servant go by: he wanted to see Millingen, after all. He closed his eyes and set about concocting an imaginary supper.

In his mind’s eye he had already set the meze down when he heard the sound of the key grating in the lock and Dr. Millingen came in, holding his hat like a tray. He was followed by the manservant, scowling fiercely.

“You!”

Yashim slid out of the chair and bowed.

Millingen glared at the box on the table. “This is an outrage!” He said. “I am a doctor. My practice depends on the bond of confidentiality. This study is where I keep my patients’ notes.”

“But I’m not interested in your medical records, Dr. Millingen,” Yashim said.

“I suppose I must take your word for that! The assurances of a mere housebreaker.” Dr. Millingen sneered. “Perhaps you would be so kind as to explain what does interest you before I turn you over to the watch.”

“Of course, forgive me. I came here on account of your coin collection.”

“My coins? The devil you did.”

Yashim spread his hands in a calming gesture. “I admit that I have no particular interest in coins. But I am intrigued by the collecting process, Dr. Millingen. Your method of acquiring specimens. Malakian, for instance—you described him as an excellent source.”

Millingen put his hat on the desk and picked up the box. “What of it?”

“Malakian is here in Istanbul. Athens might be a better place to look, if your specialty is the coinage of the Morean despots. I imagine that hoards of these coins are discovered there, buried in the ground or hidden in old buildings, or whatever. Is that so?”

“It happens,” Millingen said. He glanced at the label on the box, and set it down slowly. “Mostly in my dreams.”

“I wondered—your Athenian friend, who sends you coins? You said he was a doctor. Perhaps you were at Missilonghi together?”

“I have made no secret of my presence at Missilonghi, Yashim efendi. Dr. Stephanitzes was a colleague.”

“Of course. Now he writes books. He’s a firm advocate of what the Greeks call the Great Idea, isn’t he? I was curious about your correspondence.”

“Well, well. I wasn’t aware that even in Turkey curiosity was a warrant for entering a man’s house and rifling his private papers.” Dr. Millingen’s expression hardened. “I suppose you will tell me what conclusions you were able to draw?”

“Very few—I merely confirmed some ideas of mine. That, for example, the traffic between you and Dr. Stephanitzes was not all one way. In return for his coins, you were able to put him in the way of expanding his own collection.”

“I see. Well, go on.”

Yashim reached forward and opened the lid of the box of papers.

“Here, in his most recent letter, Dr. Stephanitzes refers to a former member of the collectors’ club. You’ve mentioned him surfacing in Istanbul with a potentially devastating offer. Stephanitzes remembers him leaving the club without paying his dues.”

“That’s correct,” Millingen said. “Ours is a very small world.”

“Yes, isn’t it? Yashim said pleasantly. “Dr. Stephanitzes confesses to being highly interested in the former club member’s offer. A late Byzantine hoard—no, forgive me, the very last Byzantine hoard. But I expect you remember all that.

“He urges you to inspect the hoard personally. I’d say your Dr. Stephanitzes is a skeptic: he doesn’t seem to trust the ex-member very far. But if the hoard proves to be genuine, he thinks that it could be exchanged for a considerable collection of valuable Greek coinage.”

“But what of that, Yashim efendi?” Dr. Millingen took a pipe from the rack on his desk. He opened a drawer and scrabbled with his fingers for the tobacco. “It strikes me that you have had a very dull afternoon here. You, after all, are not a collector. What would you know of our curious passions? You’d be surprised by the jealousies and satisfactions we experience in our little world. The intensity of our feelings. Even the level of our mutual mistrust.”

He sat down and tamped the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. “Malakian—through your good offices—completed the set for me. I was elated for a day or two. But now? Rather depressed. I think I shall donate the collection to the British Museum.”

Yashim cocked his head. “I’d rather you explained about Lefèvre’s hoard,” he said.

Dr. Millingen leaned back in his chair and gave a chuckle. “Well, well.” He sucked on his unlit pipe. “You’ve guessed, then. I did see the unfortunate Dr. Lefèvre. And yes, we discussed a hoard. Unfortunately I was never able to inspect it, as my friend advised, so I don’t suppose we will ever really know what it was he was offering to exchange. Poor fellow. He had so many irons in the fire.”

“Another buyer, maybe?”

“Yes, that, too.”

Yashim frowned. “But you and Stephanitzes, you could trump all buyers, couldn’t you? If you wanted what he offered badly enough.”

Millingen hesitated. “You are forgetting, Yashim efendi, that Lefèvre was only offering an idea. A promise, if you will. Why would I trust him?”

“Because he’d been your friend.”

“Lefèvre my friend? I never knew Lefèvre.”

Yashim shrugged. “Strictly speaking, no. But you did know Meyer. The Swiss doctor at Missilonghi. You shared a cause.”

He expected Millingen to jump, but the Englishman merely reached for a match and frowned. “Meyer?” He struck the match and it flared between his fingers. “He was a Savoyard, in fact.”

“A Savoyard?”

“French Swiss. Swiss when it suits, and French when it doesn’t.” He paused to light his pipe. “We shared a cause, as you say. It seemed a cause to fight for, when I was young.”

“And now?”

Millingen tossed the match into the grate and put his hand around the bowl of his pipe. “I don’t know if you heard what happened at Missilonghi, Yashim efendi. The daily bombardments. The daily toll of disease. All the world knows Byron came to Missilonghi and died, and half of them think he was leading a cavalry charge at the time, with Suliotes in scarves and fustanellas brandishing pistols at his side. They think he was glorious because he was a poet, and that his death was glorious. But it wasn’t so. Missilonghi was just a trap, and Byron died just like most of them died, of fever, or cramp, or dysentery, or cholera. Sometimes people died when a shell landed on them in the street, out of the blue. Good for a doctor, eh? Plenty of cases to puzzle over. Plenty of widows and orphaned children to doctor and send to their graves. And that, my friend, was our revolutionary war.”

Millingen clamped the pipe between his teeth and stood up.

“I told you before, I don’t like postmortems. And I said why, too. I doctor to the living, not the dead. It’s my job to preserve life.”

Yashim nodded. What Millingen said sounded true. It also sounded like a speech.

“I was wondering about Meyer.”

Millingen scowled. “I see. What about him?”

“Well, if Byron disliked him, I suppose he didn’t attend the poet—as a doctor, I mean.”

“No.”

“So he was lucky, in that sense.” Yashim sounded embarrassed.

Millingen’s scowl darkened. “What are you saying?”

“Nothing, I mean—but after all, the poet died. In spite of—everything. Everything you could do.”

“For God’s sake!” Millingen swore, in English. “You think we killed Byron? Rubbish! Cuppings. Purges. We took out pints of blood—all by the book. Don’t think Meyer could have done any better!” Millingen’s tone was incredulous; spots of color had appeared on his cheeks.

“No, forgive me.” Yashim put out his hands in a soothing gesture. “I only meant—I’d heard—how Meyer was lost, when the rest of you got away. You joined the breakout, and it worked. The lucky two thousand. It must have been a scene of dreadful confusion. A crowd of terrified people, groping their way through the Turkish lines in the dark. Losing each other. Unable to raise their voices. People taking different routes into the hills. Is that how it was?”

Millingen’s lips were tight. “Something like that.”

“Yet Meyer stayed behind. Trying—and failing—to protect his wife, perhaps.”

Millingen flexed his fingers. He was breathing hard.

“He had a wife to think of, didn’t he?” Yashim said.

Millingen rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, and when he opened them again, they looked pink and tired. “Maybe Missilonghi ended just as you say. Meyer wasn’t in the breakout—that much is true. But he didn’t stay behind, either.”

Yashim looked puzzled. “But then—”

“He’d already gone.” Millingen tinkled the fire irons with the toe of his boot. “The breakout was our only hope, but everyone knew how risky it was. Ten thousand people, trying to escape through the enemy lines. In a body, all together, some of us stood a chance.”

“But Meyer?”

“Didn’t wait to find out. He cleared off the night before we’d planned to escape. I don’t know that I blame him all that much: he stood a far better chance of getting out alone. But he didn’t say a word to anyone—least of all his wife.”

“I see. He abandoned her?”

“He abandoned all of us. You might say, monsieur, that he jeopardized the whole plan. If the Egyptians had caught him—well, you can imagine. I suppose he did what he felt he had to do to save his own neck. We had an uncomfortable day of it, once we’d found him gone. We couldn’t be sure the Egyptians didn’t know we were coming.” He straightened up and took a breath.

“But Meyer wasn’t caught by the Egyptians.”

“No,” Millingen said slowly. “He wasn’t caught.”

Yashim stood very still. His eyes traveled slowly over the figure of the man in a frock coat leaning against the fireplace, over the two chairs, then over the ornate rug on the wooden floor.

“And
Chronica Hellenica
? Do you still subscribe?”

“
Chronica
—?” Dr. Millingen frowned. “No one subscribes to the
Chronica
these days. It folded years ago.”

Yashim tilted his head back. “I’ve been wondering if he taught you that trick with the coin? Was that how Dr. Meyer whiled away his time? Or was he too busy with the Hetira? Was that formed at Missilonghi, too?”

The question hung in the air.

“I thought—at first—that the Hetira was like a secret army,” Yashim continued when Millingen did not reply. “Taking control of the Greeks in the city—raising money from them, terrorizing them, punishing them for stepping out of line. Preparing, perhaps, for an uprising. These are delicate times. I thought that the Hetira were killers.”

Millingen sighed. “I told you once what the Hetira was. A boys’ club. A learned society.
Chronica Hellenica
—edited by Meyer—was our society journal. Our aim has always been to preserve Greek culture. We raise money for the maintenance of churches, here and throughout the Ottoman Empire. We sponsor schools. It’s nothing so very sinister.”

“Then why the secrecy?”

“Partly for amusement. Partly because, when we founded the society, we thought of ourselves as rebels. And partly for the sake of prudence. You might call it a matter of tact. Not everyone in the Ottoman Empire takes kindly to the idea of Greek cultural unity. But perhaps we have pushed the secrecy too far.”

Yashim looked doubtful. “But Dr. Stephanitzes’s book is inflammatory, isn’t it?”

“Dr. Stephanitzes has a mystical turn of mind, Yashim efendi. And he is something of a scholar. You might take that book as a statement of intent, I don’t know. For Stephanitzes, it is simply an exercise in tracing the development of the restoration legend over the centuries. He’s a Greek, of course: he wants to show that the Greeks are different. It really matters to him that the Greeks developed a cultural resistance to Ottoman rule—otherwise, they would simply be Ottomans in Greek costume. And then what do you have left? Only politics. And politics, as I have no doubt said before, is the Greeks’ national vice.”

Millingen paused to relight his pipe. “That,” he said, puffing, “is what Missilonghi taught us. And it’s why we established the Hetira. Secret, cultural—and essentially unpolitical.”

“If that’s true,” Yashim said dejectedly, “you have wasted a great deal of my time.”

A skein of blue smoke edged upward from Millingen’s pipe.

“When you saw Lefèvre,” Yashim said slowly, “did he mention the possibility of other buyers?”

Millingen shrugged. “A man like Lefèvre,” he began. “If you were trying to sell something, wouldn’t you try to create an auction?”

“But no one could trust him.”

“No. But don’t forget, I was instructed to buy on sight. We wanted Lefèvre to find his—” He paused, looking for the right words. “His Byzantine relics. But other people might have wanted them—not to be found. It’s only an idea.”

Yashim was silent for a moment.

“Do you think the Mavrogordatos had him killed?” he asked at length.

“Why—what makes you say that?”

“You know the answer to that, doctor. Madame Mavrogordato.”

“What rubbish,” Millingen retorted, rising to his feet.

“Lefèvre was married to Madame Mavrogordato. At Missilonghi—until he ran away.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Millingen said furiously. “Petros!” He got up quickly and bellowed at the door. “Petros!”

There was a sound of rushing feet outside. To Yashim, it sounded as if someone were going up the stairs—and again, that curious swishing noise he’d heard before. But then Petros appeared, looking alarmed.

“This gentleman is leaving,” Millingen said crisply. “Show him the door, Petros.”