The Snake Stone

by Jason Goodwin

  Yashim gave a dismal snort. “But Goulandris could barely read himself. He wouldn’t have understood anything in the book.”

  “Not many people would. But perhaps the killer didn’t know that. Didn’t know Goulandris, except that he sold books. Including this one.”

  Yashim stared at the book in his hands. “You told me it’s not even all that rare.”

  “Hmmm.” Palewski was enjoying himself. “An original copy of Gyllius? I’ve never come across one. But you’re right. Nonetheless,” he added, pointing, “that copy is quite unique. It’s a matter of provenance.”

  Palewski put his hands behind his head and lay back against the cushions. “Take an old book or an old painting. In fact, let’s take one of Lefèvre’s favorites, say a Bible. Illuminated. Thirteenth century. It’s Byzantine. Probably done in Georgia. All well and good—but what would its story be? How would it come to be sitting in the window of a shop in Saint Germain six hundred years later?”

  “Lefèvre would have stolen it, I suppose.”

  “Of course he’d have stolen it, but that’s immaterial,” Palewski said. “What matters to him—and his clients—is that this book has spent the last six hundred years, let’s say, in a scriptorium in Georgia. Better still: it formed part of the last Byzantine emperor’s own personal collection in Istanbul, and then was rescued by the Georgians after the Ottoman Conquest in 1453.”

  “Giving it a history.”

  “It is called provenance. Tells people it’s the genuine article. I mean, if the monks liked it, and hung on to it, it must be the real stuff. But also, of course, it’s the story of the piece. I wager that Lefèvre knew how to tell a story.”

  “It is the same with the House of Osman. Anyone could rule the empire—even I. But only the sultan has—this provenance.”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes, you’re right.” Palewski frowned. “I suppose when we—the Poles—began to elect our kings, we lost track of the story. Then we lost our country, too,” he added dejectedly.

  “You said this book was unique,” Yashim said quickly.

  Palewski rallied himself. “From what I’ve seen, I would say that it belonged to Delmonico.”

  Yashim shook his head.

  “About forty years after Gyllius came to Istanbul,” the ambassador explained, “an Italian called Delmonico wrote an account of the city himself. He’d been a page in the household of the sultan—the Grand Signor. Knew what he was talking about. But forty years later, Yashim. He was interested by Gyllius, because Gyllius saw the city as it had been.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Byzantine Constantinople.” Palewski frowned. “No, that’s not quite right. Gyllius is really writing about three cities, one above the other. The first—it’s classical Constantinople. Fifth century. Gyllius has got an old book, a description of the city as it stood in Justinian’s day. With this in his hand, he goes about trying to identify the old monuments, the old palaces—ruins, most of them. Interesting stuff.

  “But there’s another Constantinople he’s describing, too—the one he’s walking around in. It’s the city that rose up in the intervening centuries—during a thousand years of Greek religion, Roman law, Greek language. Of course it’s changing again, in front of his very eyes. The Ottomans have taken charge. So Gyllius collars old Greeks who can still remember how it was before the Conquest—the name of an old church, for instance, which has been demolished or turned into a mosque. He’s not so interested in all that himself—but we are.”

  “I see what you mean,” Yashim agreed. “And the third city?”

  Palewski clasped his hands together. “The third city, Yashim, is being built around him. Ottoman Istanbul.”

  Yashim took the book from the bed and turned it over in his hands.

  “It was a time of change, Yashim. Like today, I suppose. You and I watch Istanbul being made more Western every day. Gyllius recorded the opposite: the remaking of Istanbul along Muslim lines. By the time Delmonico, the Italian, arrived, the process was to all intents complete. The city we have today.”

  “And this man—Delmonico—examined Gyllius’s book.”

  “Of course. To learn what had changed.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I didn’t notice it until I started reading—he writes in the margin of the text. He used brown ink. I’ve got Delmonico’s own book, and there are pieces I recognize. General observations. No one else was so close to Istanbul, writing in Italian, at the right period. It has to be Delmonico. And that, Yashim, is provenance.”

  “You think Lefèvre would have spotted it?” But Yashim knew the answer already. Lefèvre would have known immediately, the moment he found the book in Goulandris’s little store. Goulandris would have had no idea.

  “I expect he bought it cheap,” Palewski said.

  Yashim nodded slowly. “Somebody writes a book—Gyllius. Another man comes along and scribbles a few thoughts in the margin. Delmonico. Why does Lefèvre think it’s so important?”

  Palewski threw up his hands. “As to that, Yashim, I’ve no idea. He could have sold it for a little more, I suppose, by playing up the Delmonico angle. But it wasn’t going to make him rich.”

  Yashim thought of the Frenchman, with his neat hands and veiled threats. “I’m quite sure that Lefèvre smelled money in that book. Did you say you had a French translation?”

  “I found it last night.”

  Yashim stared down at the book in his hands. “Lefèvre died because he acted on something he believed in,” he said. “You reminded me that he believed everything he read in books.”

  He stood up. “Whatever it was, maybe Gyllius believed it, too.” Yashim scratched his head. “Didn’t you say that there was something odd about Gyllius? His going to war?”

  “He went east with Suleyman, to fight the Persians. It does seem an odd thing to do, for an antiquarian.”

  “Why would Suleyman want him along, anyway?”

  “Oh, as to that, I think Suleyman had no objection to foreigners witnessing his triumphs. Let me fetch you the French edition.”

  50

  “YASHIM efendi. Excuse me, please.”

  Yashim looked around. Marta was standing in the shadows below the stairs, knotting her apron between her fingers.

  “Marta!” He took a step closer.

  “Enver Xani, efendi. He is disappeared!”

  “I heard, Marta. But you mustn’t worry. There are any number of reasons why he might have had to stay out.”

  He tried to think of one. A catastrophic leak, perhaps? A crumbling reservoir? He wondered how far the watermen’s guild communicated with the families involved: if Xani was being kept on overnight, someone should have sent a message. So perhaps it was really a night out with the lads instead, in the taverns of the port.

  Marta put a knuckle to her lips.

  “I do not want to trouble the lord ambassador,” she said. “But perhaps you will help? You are his friend, and a good man.”

  Yashim inclined his head. Marta had done him kindness in the past, he would not refuse her.

  “Mrs. Xani says they must pay the moneylender tomorrow. Forty piastres. She has very little money.” She lifted a small red leather purse, which hung from the belt slung around her hips. “I have twenty-seven piastres. It is my money. If they do not pay, the debt will grow worse.”

  Yashim frowned. He tried to remember Mrs. Xani, but his impression was indistinct: a woman in red skirts, a broom in her hand. Was Marta right to give her savings to this woman? Twenty-seven piastres: it was quite a lot of money.

  “Can’t Mrs. Xani ask for time, until her husband gets back? Maybe he can pay off the debt.”

  Marta shook her head. “You don’t understand, efendi. Forty piastres is the interest. Every month they pay.”

  Yashim pursed his lips together and blew out. “Forty a month! I don’t believe it. How much does Xani owe?”

  “Six hundred,” said Marta, lowering her voice. “Mrs. Xan
i, she is afraid for the children, if they cannot pay the money.”

  Yashim knew nothing of the Xanis, but any fool could recognize Marta’s gullible good nature. Marta was fond of the children, Palewski had said. He wondered if it had all been planned: an estimate of Marta’s resources, Xani staying away to provide a pretext for this approach. My children, Marta! Oh, I am so afraid! Just forty piastres…

  “Marta,” Yashim said firmly. “Xani is a poor man. Where would he borrow six hundred piastres? Why would he ever need so much money?”

  Marta almost jumped in surprise. “Oh no, efendi! Xani is a good man. And a waterman, too. But he needed this money to pay the guild. An entrance fee, you understand, to buy the position.”

  Yashim scratched his head. That, he admitted, made more sense. The guild would expect a payment—Xani was a kind of apprentice.

  “But now he’s not here to pay? It’s convenient, Marta.”

  “His wife is afraid, when he does not return. Maybe—”

  She made a frightened little gesture, sketching a possibility she didn’t want to shape aloud.

  Yashim tapped his foot angrily on the ground. He folded his arms and looked away.

  “And Mrs. Xani has no money?”

  “No, efendi. She does not. And the lord ambassador is very kind, but—Mrs. Xani does not want him to know. You understand, Yashim efendi?”

  “Tchah!” Yashim exclaimed. “Very well. Who is this moneylender?”

  “A Jew. He is called Baradossa. He lives in Balat, but Mrs. Xani does not know where.”

  “Then how does she plan to get the money to him?”

  Marta looked down and stirred the ground with her foot. “Yashim efendi, I thought—maybe, as a favor—maybe you could take him the money. You could find out where he lives. Please?”

  Yashim stamped his foot, and said angrily: “Baradossa. Balat, forty piastres. Very well, Marta—no, you can keep your money. I’ll show you I can be a bigger fool than you or your master. And when Xani gets back, he can deal with me.”

  Marta began to protest, holding out her little purse, but he waved her away.

  Going out, he almost slammed the door, but not quite. Just in time, he had remembered that he should have left ten minutes before.

  “Bloody Albanians!” he said under his breath. “Balat!”

  51

  BEFORE heading across the Golden Horn to Balat, Yashim made a stop at the kebab shop at Sishane. At times when he didn’t feel the need or urge to cook, he often searched out something simple: a bean stew, perhaps, or a tripe soup recommended by his old acquaintance the soup master, whose strictures on simplicity were, if anything, more fierce than his own. Yashim was suspicious of elaboration in a public restaurant: like his sauces, the best results were achieved by cleaving to tradition, and using nothing but good judgment and the best ingredients. So many lifetimes had been devoted to the perfection of bean piyaz or tarator; Yashim had only one. It was a shame to waste an opportunity.

  Poor Lefèvre: it had been a mistake to expect the man to know anything. The Turks had been testing and refining dishes when the Franks chewed meat off bones held in their two hands!

  The kebab shop was open to the street, where sliced hearts of lettuces were set out on a marble slab, beside sheep heads and feet, bowls of yogurt and clotted cream, some toorshan, or pickles, and a small array of simple meze. A waiter was flicking away the flies with a clean cloth; he nodded at Yashim. Inside, china pots, plates, and glasses sparkled on the shelves; a small fountain played in a corner. There was a glazed screen where a man with long mustaches ruled over a small empire of vases containing syrups and preserved fruits; on the other side the grills smoked against the wall, a half tunnel of brick and clay lined with small coals. Various cuts of meat were on a spit; little skewers sizzled and popped above the flames; now and then the bare-armed cook slapped another pide on the hot bricks and peeled it away as it began to crisp at the edges.

  Yashim was led to a seat in the gallery, from where he could look down on the cooks. He saw the cook swing a spicy köfte kebab from the coals and wipe the meat from the skewer onto a fresh pide. Yashim felt hungry: he and the waiter put their heads together and decided what Yashim would eat. As he sipped his turnip juice, Yashim looked about him. It was a working crowd, he noticed: people who came to eat, not to loaf about with a pipe and a coffee. The sight of a small, stocky man with a shaved head across the restaurant reminded Yashim of an old friend, Murad Eslek. He was a supplier for markets across Istanbul, a cheerful, honest young man who had helped Yashim in a week when it sometimes looked as if the whole city were about to explode with fear, anger—and a sense of loss. Help was hardly the word: Eslek had once saved his life.

  It wasn’t Murad Eslek, of course, who touched his kebab to the red pepper flakes on his plate and bent forward to eat, just someone who looked a bit like him. But from now on Yashim looked up when anyone walked in. These images didn’t arise by accident, Yashim was sure of that. Eslek the marketeer: he’d be a good man to talk to right now.

  Yashim could smell the lamb on the coals, and the clean, singeing smell of the coals themselves. He had nothing against Xani. He would be like the quiet, hardworking men eating around him, a man with a wife, two children, the usual ambitions. Given a chance to escape the grind of poverty, he had seized it with both hands. A man to be congratulated, perhaps.

  Debt, it was true, was dangerous ground. Yashim’s own were debts of honor: to those like Eslek, who had saved his life; to friends who helped him live it; and to others, innumerable, who gave him what he needed because they were good people. But at least Xani’s had not been the wasting indebtedness of the poor, the shabby contrivance that leads to penury and the betrayal of one’s loves and beliefs. A chance had come. The calculation was sound: with a proper job, the capital could be repaid. It was a shame that Xani had been driven to borrow from a stranger. Perhaps there hadn’t been time to make the necessary tour of his homeland somewhere in the Albanian hills.

  Yashim’s kebab arrived. He took a piece of smoking lamb between the fingers and recognized its texture: this was good. He put it into his mouth, and with the same hand he broke off a piece of pide. He wondered that he had never eaten here before; he would like to come again.

  He glanced down into the restaurant. There was the kebab cook, riddling a grill; another man ladling sweet syrup from a jar for a cooling khoshab: guild members, every one. The waiter had said the water came from the Khorosan spring, and Yashim had a comfortable sense of everything being done well, unhurriedly, according to the proper formula. Xani had taken that step himself, hadn’t he—from a common porter, to membership of a noble guild!

  Istanbul was a city of water, of course: but saltwater. Salt on three sides—and half a million people who needed to wash and drink fresh water every day. Paris had the Seine; London the Thames; half the cities of the Ottoman Empire were watered by the mighty Danube; but Istanbul—however perfect its setting—had only the Sweet Waters. A pretty name for the measly springs that bubbled up at the head of the Golden Horn. Water for a village.

  Pipes and channels, siphons and aqueducts: for fifteen hundred years the city had leached its water from the eastern hills, where streams ran through the stands of oak and beech in the Belgrade Forest. Istanbul itself was a city of trees, of course. The old Janissary Tree that stood at its center, in the Hippodrome, was like a sturdy root from which the others sprang: the cypresses and the planes, even the great gnarled oak, which sprawled out over the water at Galata. But the Belgrade Forest was a wilderness.

  It had been twenty years since Yashim had gone up there—he was surprised it had been so long. In the time of Grigor and his barbs, when he struggled to stay sane because he was not whole, he would sometimes take a cart ride to the hills and walk all day under the shade of the trees. Odd people lived there, he remembered: the scent in the kebab shop reminded him of the charcoal burners with their conical huts, and of gypsies with sunburned faces, men who talked c
heerfully in impenetrable languages. There were descendants of the Serbs who Mehmed the Conqueror had settled in the hills, and who gave the woods a name. The watermen would have been there, too, though he had never seen them: only the lovely reservoirs they tended, where the water slid out in thin sheets across marble slabs, and frogs had mocked him, coupling incessantly among the reeds.

  Yashim knew that Istanbul drew its water from the forest, but he had only a vague idea how the water arrived at his standpipe in the yard. Heirs to the traditions of the Roman Empire, whose aqueducts they copied and repaired, the Albanian watermen practiced an art so vital and arcane that its secrets were handed down from father to son. And the thousands who drank and washed and cooked and refreshed their tired eyes and ears in the music of the fountains thought no more about it than about the dogs, or the gulls, or the paving underfoot.

  That, then, was the secret that Xani had offered to learn. Six hundred piastres, Yashim thought: it was not, after all, so very much.

  He rubbed his hands with a wedge of lemon and dipped his fingers in the bowl.

  Murad Eslek had not yet appeared. It was a just matter of time, Yashim decided happily, as he touched the napkin to his lips.

  52

  JUST yards from the Balat landing stage the alleyways closed in. Yashim was funneled between old houses rotten at their bases, green with mildew, stepping past mounds of rubbish that spilled out into the passageway, negotiating stones and holes and ducking the laundry strung at head height. The lanes of Balat were all but impassable in winter; at the height of summer some were wet and squelchy underfoot, the mud green with algae, the stench of rot sweet and pervasive. A few children, whose shaven heads exposed the red sores of ringworm, tagged him up the alleyways. Women with loose turbans covering their hair and their ears watched him from the doorways of their houses; the alleys were so narrow he felt his cloak brush against them as he passed. From time to time he stopped to ask the way: a rabbi in a long robe, a clean-shaven young man with a yarmulke, an olive-skinned dandy in tight European trousers who lounged by a recess in the wall.