by Harold Lamb
“Ilhamdillah," I said.
Osman smiled and touched his chest and forehead—probably surprised that an American should know how to thank him. That was the beginning. After that, when I wanted money changed I went back to Osman. I discovered he’d take out his exact commission each time, no more and never less.
“I’ve found,” I told Bailey, at the Club, “an honest man in the big bazaar.”
“No,” Bailey laughed. “It can’t be.”
The bazaar of Istanbul, he assured me, was not simple and Oriental, like the ones I’d known in Isfahan or Aleppo. It was the clearinghouse of the Near-East, peopled by all the descendants of the Forty Thieves, exiles of every nation, past masters of the art of beguiling the tourist and intriguing the unwary.
“No one’s ever been able to beat them,” he explained, “at their game. If your Osman’s really a Turk, he’s honest. But some day you’ll find that he’s a wolf in a sheep’s skin.”
Still, I kept on doing business with Osman. It was quicker than the bank, and more friendly. After all, the money changer was the world’s first banker. And nowadays, what with embargoes on gold, limitation on foreign exchange, not to mention occasional spasms of devaluation, the big banks shudder when they change any money for you. Not so Osman. He seemed to trust me. He couldn’t have known that I had come to Istanbul to stay a year or so, to copy some early Turkish manuscripts in the library of the Serai—that cluttered mass of manuscripts that even the Turks haven’t managed to sort out. I’d done the same thing in Persia, delving into the history of ancient Asia. All the consuls knew of me, and the Persian government had decided to decorate me.
But to Osman I was only an American, his friend. He insisted on taking me to his house one evening for dinner.
WE SAT together on a faded carpet that had been valuable once, in the ghost of a garden, out by the twisted cedars of the Ayoub cemetery. A woman draped in black came in, frightened, holding out flowers to me in both hands. She put the flowers down by my knees and vanished, to reappear with a bowl of pilauf. Then she produced a bottle of cheap wine, three cigarettes and a match. Osman made no mention of her, and after she had delivered herself of apricots and grapes and a jar of cool water, she vanished.
Osman would not touch the wine, or the cigarettes. They were for me, his guest, he explained. Only one thing troubled him, as he sat telling me stories in simple words that I could understand.
“My son,” he explained regretfully, “is away.”
And after a moment he added, “My son is not as I am. Ilhamdillah—the praise to Allah.”
I wondered, fleetingly, what his son would be like. Probably a stripling of the new generation, wearing a misfit European suit, and sitting in the cafés to listen to phonographs—a product of civilization.
Well, the next time I saw Osman was at my house. How he'd learned where I lived, I don’t know. He appeared unexpectedly, at night, bringing with him a young chap I’d never seen before, who wore a shirt without a collar.
“Eh, Osman,” I exclaimed, “what happens?” ,
“Calamity,” he said.
His brown face had a stony look. He would not sit down. He reached into his girdle and pulled out a wallet. From this wallet he took four twenty-dollar American bills.
As he handed these to me his dark eyes fastened on my face. “Tell the effendi,” he said to the boy. Evidently he didn't trust my Turkish enough to explain himself.
THE boy was voluble enough, in English. An American gentleman, he said, had changed these same bills at Osman’s stand that afternoon. Later, when Osman took the bills to the Ottoman Bank, the tellers said they were bad—no good.
“Counterfeit?” I asked.
“Bad money,” the boy explained.
I examined the twenties under a light. They looked all right, but they were almost new.
“You say the man was an American,” I observed. “Why does Osman think so?”
The man who changed the bills, it seemed, had taken a red American passport out, with his wallet. Moreover, he wore clothes that looked like mine.
Osman hadn’t even asked to examine the passport photo. He had thought the man was American, and that all American money was good money. What did I think?
“Wait,” I requested. And I rang up Bailey at the club. He was our oldest inhabitant of Istanbul, and he knew the answer to most of the riddles that bothered us newcomers.
“Quite,” Bailey assured me cheerfully. “There’s a lot of snide twenties coming into this part of the world.”
“What can I do?” I complained.
“Oh, pray that some spot in Gehenna’ll be reserved for the wise lads who bring bad money of the United States abroad. And watch out for it yourself, m’boy.”
Osman and the boy were watching me hopefully when I went back to them. I had to tell them that the money seemed to be counterfeit.
“But it’s American,” the boy continued to insist.
I felt like making it good to Osman. But eighty dollars was quite a bit to me then, and I started to explain, gruffly enough, that I couldn’t be responsible for counterfeit money of my nation.
Osman interrupted the boy as soon as he began to interpret. The old Turk took back the bills.
“He doesn’t want you to pay him,” the boy explained. “He thought the money was good—”
“Look here,” I broke in. “Tell me what that other American looked like.”
But Osman wasn’t much at description. The man had on a blue suit, and his face was shaved smooth, like other Americans. He had worn a straw hat and he had dark eyes.
“Hadn’t he some scar—something to mark him?”
Osman had not noticed anything of the kind. But he would know the man again when he saw him.
“He says,” the boy explained as Osman salaamed and started toward the door, “that his house is ruined.”
He meant that he was broke.
For a while I kept away from Osman’s stand at the bazaar. Somehow I felt guilty, and I didn’t want to see him, or have to talk about his loss. When I did go there, at last, I found someone else sitting in his place—a Greek in a derby.
And I couldn’t get Osman out of my mind. Finally I went to his house by the cemetery and knocked at the door. After a long delay it was opened by a woman who pulled a black veil across her face.
When I asked for Osman, she muttered that he was away from home. Then she closed the door. Not before I’d seen that the big rug was missing from the floor behind her.
THAT didn’t help me any. It was sheer chance that I saw Osman again. On the Galata bridge. He had the rug folded over one shoulder, and he was standing against the rail, watching the faces passing him. A cold wind was blowing in from the Black Sea, and Osman’s face was about the color of the rug.
“Eh, Osman,” I cried, “what is happening?”
“Nothing, effendi,” he answered, making his usual salutation.
His gray beard needed barbering. Otherwise he looked just as always.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
He thought this over a moment. "Effendi, every one must pass over this bridge. Every one in the world, even he who gave me the bad money. If not today, tomorrow.”
“Osman,” I said impulsively, “come and have a coffee.”
He touched his heart politely. No, he said, he must watch for that man’s face.
“Then will you sell me that rug?”
He wouldn’t do that. The rug, he explained, wasn’t good enough for me. And it gave him an excuse to stand on the bridge, pretending to sell it.
And daily thousands of men brushed by him. Broad Armenians, talkative Greeks, a scattering of bearded priests, beggars in crews, honking taxis and plodding donkeys, sailors going for a holiday on the Bosporus boats, all the jetsam of the Levant, and even a few real Turks like Osman. He was always there, with his rug, watching, when I passed.
I couldn’t help thinking about him. But I had other
things on my mind just then. Willis, for one.
I had met Willis at Tokatlian’s, when he showed me a bit of Byzantine ivory he had picked up in the great bazaar. Willis had all a globe-trotter’s enthusiasm for buying things. He was traveling alone, staying a week in Istanbul. I could see that he’d be fair game for the thieves of the bazaar. He carried a wallet stuffed with British five-pound notes.
So I warned him that most of the stuff in the bazaar was junk.
“No one’s ever been able to beat them,” I told him, “at their game. You have to be an expert to tell their fakes. And if you are an expert, they’ll know it, and sell you the real thing—at a fancy price.”
“I’ve seen one thing,” Willis laughed, “that isn’t a fake.”
“What?”
“An old Koran. I’m hardly an expert on manuscripts. Still, I know it’s real.”
Now I had a Koran or two—you can’t live in Istanbul a year without falling a victim to the lure of those hand-illumined scripts of a by-gone day.
“Probably,” I suggested, reminiscently, “they told you it was the personal Koran of some Sultan. Or Mohammed’s own.”
“No, they didn’t. They didn’t have to. It’s the finest thing of the kind I’ve ever seen.”
We argued a while, and I began to be curious. The bazaar trader was bringing up that Koran for Willis to look over at his hotel—a wise move on his part. In the end I suggested that he have the Koran brought to my house that evening. Then he could compare it with mine.
SO WILLIS dined with me, and after dinner we found the bazaar thief waiting with his prize, wrapped up carefully in old newspapers. When I saw it, I felt a little chill up the spine.
Have you ever unwrapped something like the Koh-i-noor diamond in your dining room? That was how I felt.
The Koran was the largest I’d seen, all in beautiful Kufic characters—every page decorated by hand in deep blue and gold. The title was a blaze of glory. The paper was silk paper, the kind they made in Samarkand ages ago.
I didn’t say a word, while Willis turned the leaves reverently. His eyes glowed. It was like coming on a Gutenberg Bible of Asia. I didn’t bring out my little Korans, to set beside that.
“Where did it come from?” I wondered.
They had told Willis how some distinguished Turkish family had had to sell its possessions. Those Korans were the last to go, and the family didn’t want them sold to public dealers. They wanted them taken out of Istanbul quietly.
I had a queer feeling, then. As if I’d seen this Koran before, in another life —or had heard the story before.
“Do you mean,” I asked, “that they have others like this?”
“So he says.” Willis was intent on the pages under his fingers.
I looked the dealer over. He resembled a hundred thousand other Levantines, and he said in bad French that his name was Yussuf. Which meant Joseph, and nothing at all. But he didn't have to say much, with that Koran before our eyes.
And I thought I knew Yussuf’s game. Probably he’d seen Willis flourishing English banknotes in the bazaar, and he'd decided I was no expert to be feared. So he had brought us one treasure, to be examined at our leisure. (Although he wouldn’t leave it with us overnight). Then, I thought, he’d bring us some inferior Korans on the morrow, hoping to sell the lot on the strength of our enthusiasm for the first one.
That’s what I told Willis. “You never can tell,” he said.
AND I was wrong. Yussuf arrived promptly at my house the next evening, just after the offices were closed. He brought another man with him—a superior individual who wore a collar and spoke some English, and answered to the name of Monsieur Rudebar. He also brought three Korans just as fine as our treasure of the night before. Four pieces fit to be honored in any museum.
One was a miniature affair, wrought with fairy-like tracery. Another bore the name of Suleiman the Magnificent. All four were more than four centuries old, and—we forgot to eat dinner while we looked them over.
“We need money,” Rudebar explained. “We sell for twelve thousand dollar Yamrican.”
American dollars, he meant. That wasn’t too much. Those Korans were unique. You see, calligraphy like that is a lost art today. They could never be duplicated, and—unlike rare printed books—facsimiles could never be printed. Probably there weren’t two dozen others as fine in the museums or private collections of the world.
“Four thousand,” said Willis, “for the four.”
Monsieur Rudebar and Yussuf began to gather up the books indignantly and to carry them out. I didn’t look at them, but I listened, and when I heard them muttering at the door I breathed again.
It was Yussuf who came back, acting like an innocent dragged into the den of usurers.
“Messieurs,” he cried reproachfully, “six mille dollar.”
My pulse went up a notch. I thought Willis would get his Korans. And if he did—I began to wonder how I could persuade him to part with one, the little one, to me. And how I could borrow about a thousand—
Whatever else he didn’t know, Willis understood bargaining. He held out against Yussuf’s pleading and Rudebar’s arguments until, after an hour, they gave in and agreed to take forty-six hundred and fifty for the lot. And I knocked out my pipe with fingers that shook.
There was only one hitch. The fools expected to be paid off, then and there, in American dollars. Willis offered them all the cash he had on him—twenty English five-pound notes—and explained that they’d have to wait for the balance until the next day, when he could draw on his letter of credit at the bank. But they turned sullen, the way Orientals often do at some trivial thing. Said Willis had told them to bring the Korans here, to the effendi’s house, and why wasn’t he prepared to pay for them?
“Tomorrow,” said Willis, his eyes hardening.
Rudebar fairly snarled. Tomorrow wouldn’t do—the bank wouldn’t do! Evidently he had counted on getting the money in his hands that night. I knew the Korans were probably stolen, and suspected that Rudebar had some good reason for keeping away from the bank.
But I was past caring. It’s the craze that comes over a collector when he holds a rare treasure in his hands. When he’d bankrupt himself, or steal, to get it. My only fear was that Willis wouldn’t let me have the miniature Koran.
Then I had an idea. There was only one place in Istanbul where we could get that amount of cash that night, the Bible House. The missionary chaps would let me have the money overnight, and Monsieur Rudebar wouldn’t have to go near the bank the next day when Willis drew on his letter of credit.
Rudebar and Yussuf agreed to go with us to the Bibblkhana, as they called it. They even let me take the four Korans, and lock them up in my wall cabinet.
WHILE the four of us got into a taxi and started off for the Bible House, I kept thinking about that miniature Koran I’d held in my hands—
A shouting brought me out of my studying.
“Hai—effendi. Hai!"
The taxi was crawling across the Galata bridge, and old Osman was scrambling along beside it, holding on to the door. He was peering in at me, shouting as if he’d gone mad. The driver, accustomed to beggars, paid no attention—until Osman ran to the front of the car, and wrapped his arms around the radiator ornament. He couldn’t stop the car, of course, but the driver stopped, to avoid killing him.
Osman wouldn’t move. He pointed into the taxi, calling out something about the man. The taxi driver snarled at him, but Osman bristled like an angry eagle.
“Effendi,” he shrilled, “it is the one. I have found him.”
And then, of course, I remembered. The one who had done Osman out of eighty bucks. I looked at Monsieur Rudebar. He had a smooth face, and dark eyes, and just then a muscle twitched in his jaw.
“The thief!” Osman trumpeted.
The driver turned to peer in at us. The usual crowd had collected, and I knew that in a moment some police officer woul
d come up. So I got out of the taxi and went up to Osman.
Rudebar might be a thief, but—there were those four Korans locked away in my cabinet. I didn’t want a scene on the bridge that evening.
Osman touched his heart, his beard bristling with triumph as I stepped up to him.
“Eh, effendi,” he crowed. “At last, it is the one.”
I tried to whisper to him. He might be mistaken—probably was. I’d pay him his eighty dollars if he’d shut up. I’d come to the bridge tomorrow and explain. Only, he’d have to go away now. (At that moment I could have knocked him down, to get away myself.)
Osman didn’t understand at first. When he did grasp my meaning, he looked as if I’d knifed him. His face set.
“Yok, effendi,” he muttered. “No, it is the one.”
And he kept his grip on the radiator, while a crowd began to collect, and Willis yelled out to me to know what the matter was. Almost anything might have happened. What did happen was that a boy without a collar came running through the crowd with a Turk in uniform at his heels. Not a policeman, however. He wore the faded tunic of an Anatolian regiment, and the tabs of a major.
Osman seemed glad to see him. And the major went up to him and kissed his shoulder, while the old Turk chattered like a machine gun. The major looked us all over thoughtfully, then motioned me back into the taxi.
He climbed in with Osman, beside the driver. “The house,” he ordered, “of the effendi.”
And the driver began to turn the car. When a Turkish major gives an order, it is usually obeyed. Our officer looked amiable enough, but he had a sabre with a scimitar hilt at his belt, and a revolver holster.
“What’s all this about?” Willis demanded, his voice rising.
I told him the story of Osman and the counterfeit bills, and our friend Rudebar let out a hiss. The major glanced back, as if he found us interesting, but no one said anything more until the taxi pulled up in front of my gate. We all had plenty to think about.