The Snake Stone

by Jason Goodwin

  “Three men have died,” he said. “One was a bookseller. One was a moneylender. Your husband was the third.”

  Amélie flinched. “My husband,” she echoed. She drew her arms over her knees and rocked back and forth on the divan. “Tell me. Tell me who the others are.”

  Yashim sat down beside her, trailing his arms between his knees.

  “There was a bookseller,” he began. He told her about Goulandris.

  “So who killed him?”

  He let his head hang.

  “I thought—for a moment—it might have been your husband.”

  Amélie stood up. “Max?”

  “Please. Monsieur Lefèvre paid for information. The man he paid has disappeared. I think he’s dead. He owed money to a moneylender. Your husband paid him off: two hundred francs.”

  “You know so much,” Amélie said. She sounded bitter.

  “The moneylender I found last night,” Yashim pressed on. “After you came.”

  “So Max paid for information. What of that?”

  “The moneylender was dead.”

  Amélie went to the stove and leaned over it. She turned. “I don’t understand. Max—this bookseller, the moneylender. You didn’t like him? My husband.”

  Yashim blinked in surprise.

  “He wrote to me about you,” she said. “He thought that you were his friend.”

  “I thought—I thought that we were alike. In certain ways.”

  “You!” She snorted. “Max was many things, yes. But he was a man.”

  Yashim thought: she is alone, her husband dead. He gestured to the divan and she sat down where she had sat that first night, when they were friends.

  “I am sorry, monsieur. Please forgive me.”

  “I am making coffee,” Yashim said. “Will you have some?”

  She nodded, and Yashim turned gratefully to the stove.

  “A man came here,” she said. “He opened the door.”

  “Yes? Who?” Yashim measured the coffee into the copper pot.

  Amélie bit her lip. “I don’t know. He just sort of—stared.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “I tried French—then a little Greek. But he just backed away.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  Amélie pursed her lips. “He looked like a bandit, really. He opened the door with a knife.”

  Yashim felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck.

  “A knife?”

  Amélie laced her hands under her chin. “Forgive me. You and Max—you are alike, I think. He likes to find things out.” She paused, then corrected herself. “He liked to, I mean.”

  “Yes.” He dug the pot into the coals. “I only wish I knew what he’d been looking for.”

  He turned and looked at her. It was a question. Their eyes met; she shook her head and shrugged.

  They must have been a strange couple, Yashim thought. She seemed so—fresh, with a face that told him everything he wanted to know. How had Lefèvre found her? In their country, Yashim knew, people took their pick. What made her choose Lefèvre, then, with all his secrets? The assignations. The hints. And the hidden life, too: this Amélie. She was the most surprising secret of them all.

  “Your husband didn’t tell you why he had come?”

  “To meet some people he knew.” She looked uncomfortable.

  “People?” He had been under an impression that Lefèvre worked alone.

  “Some Greeks, I think. We were working on Samnos.” She hesitated. “You see, we had the money my father left me when he died. At least I thought it was so—but Max, he was unlucky on the Bourse, and of course, even a small archaeological dig can be expensive. So there was a problem for us. Max hoped he could find some people here, in Istanbul. To help.”

  The coffee bubbled. Yashim lifted the pot by its long handle and let the grounds subside. He poured two cups.

  “He saw Mavrogordato, the banker,” he said. Amélie said nothing. Yashim brought the coffee to the divan, passed her the cup, and took a seat. Lefèvre had raised some money; he just hadn’t taken it back to Samnos. Then something frightened him, and he tried to reach France.

  It would seem he’d been prepared to abandon his wife.

  Yashim frowned. Was it possible to believe that of Lefèvre? But if not, what else did he have planned when he stepped into the caïque, in the dark?

  That was always the starting place to which Yashim returned again and again: the walk through the deserted streets, the lights of the caïques glimmering on the Golden Horn, and the upraised hand, Lefèvre’s farewell. A brave departure: so he had come to believe. But with Lefèvre nothing was truly certain.

  “How long were you married, madame?”

  “Five years.” She pushed back her curls; her ear looked small and delicate, like a tender white fern. “I wanted to be an archaeologist, too.”

  Yashim saw it clearly: a clever young woman, a reader, a scholar—why not? Men of her own age would shrink from her, she wouldn’t encourage them. And then Lefèvre arrived: older, established, and talking of archaeology and Troy and the things she read; believing them, too. Believing what he read in books.

  For her—the life she wanted. For him, a loyal assistant. With an inheritance, even. Perhaps, Yashim thought, Amélie knew how to read a book better than a man’s character.

  “I’d always been fascinated by the ancient world. Max brought the Greeks back to life.”

  “The ancient Greeks, yes.” He thought of the Serpent Column, the three snakes intertwined in what—victory? “And he was interested in the later Greeks, too—the Byzantine Greeks.”

  Amélie pulled a face. “We used to argue about that. He said the Byzantines were degenerates. He called them—Asiatics.”

  Yashim smiled. “A word can’t hurt. What did you think?”

  “I said they were a spiritual people. You only have to study their mosaics, their icons, to appreciate that. Max wouldn’t agree, though. He said he’d had too many Greek friends to have any illusions about the Byzantines. The same people, he said. It made him sick to hear them talk, sometimes.”

  “He understood Greek, did he? Modern Greek?”

  “Oh yes. He spent years in Greece, in the twenties. That’s what turned him into an archaeologist.”

  Greece in the twenties: the revolutionary years. It was extraordinary, Yashim reflected, how many Franks had been drawn to that country. Millingen—and that English poet Palewski had mentioned, and now Lefèvre. Dreaming of the ancient Greeks, Millingen had said. Were all of them disillusioned, then? Discovering instead a race of—what, childish Asiatics?

  What did these people expect? A race of Socratics? The ancient Greeks had killed Socrates themselves, hadn’t they? Why should the modern Greeks be any better, or any worse? Or better or worse than other men? Everyone was new: every man, every woman, came innocent into this world.

  Yashim was an Ottoman. The Ottomans had always understood that men acted for good or ill not because they were Greek, or Serb, or peasants from Anatolia, but because they chose a path for themselves, selected the tools they wanted on their journey through life. Sometimes the choice was limited. But many a great pasha—many a grand vizier—stroking his beard in the Divan as he formulated some great policy of the state, had sprung from the humblest origins. Greeks, Bulgars, Serbs—you gave the right man good tools and he would make them work for him.

  To love Greece—and hate the Greeks: only a Frank, Yashim thought, could make such a ridiculous blunder.

  He thought of the man with the knife.

  “What will you do now?” he had to ask.

  “I will help you find the men who killed my husband,” she said. Exactly as he had expected.

  Just as he’d feared.

  “I have to go to the palace,” he explained. “Don’t go out.”

  69

  A girl came in, bearing mint tea and baklava on a tray. “It’s these girls I am sorry for,” the valide remarked. “They have so little to do
with everyone gone to Besiktas. But they know that I can’t go on forever, so. Eat these pastries, and tell me about the big city.”

  Yashim told her, sparing none of the details he knew she would enjoy. He told her about the gruesome murder near the Grande Rue, about Goulandris and his adventure in the caïque and the two men who had come to destroy his flat. The killing and the attempted assassination interested her; but she was transfixed by the details of the men’s bestial behavior in his apartment.

  “Quel sacrilège!” she murmured, quite horrified. “To think that there are men capable of such acts! It must make you proud.”

  “Proud, Valide?”

  “Mais, bien sûr. Only a milksop has no enemies. To be hated—that is a mark of character. Hold by your friends, take risks, and—écraser les autres à la merde!” She raised a delicate eyebrow. “I did not become valide as a reward for politesse, Yashim. But these days people are far too timid and polite. It’s good to hear you talk, even if the details are inappropriate for an old lady’s ears. Go on, have another pastry. I have no appetite.”

  “I hope I haven’t spoiled it,” Yashim said.

  The valide cast him a mischievous look. “Not at all. Perhaps you have restored it. What are you reading? But of course, your collection is destroyed, and you have come to me for a book.”

  “No. It’s something else I want, Valide.” He saw the corners of her mouth harden. “For the sake of the archaeologist, your compatriot,” he began, sweetening the story with a little lie, “I’d like to consult with the master of the watermen’s guild.”

  That “consult,” he thought, was a good touch.

  “Et alors?” The valide gave a little shrug. “I am so out of touch, my friend.”

  It was Yashim’s turn to use the mischievous look. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  The valide suppressed the beginning of a smile. “Enfin, I may be able to write a note. The sultan’s bostanci could help, I think; he deals with the watermen all the time. He’s an old friend, though he goes by some other title these days. Commissioner of Works, or nonsense of that sort.”

  She knows his new title perfectly well, Yashim thought. She sits here, in a palace half deserted, and not a thing that goes on here or in Besiktas escapes her notice.

  The valide rang a little silver bell. “Notepaper, and a pen,” she told the girl who answered. “In the meantime, Yashim, you may read to me a little from this book. I don’t understand it, and I don’t think I like it. But it also makes me laugh. So don’t be afraid—I shan’t be laughing at your accent.”

  And with this whisper of a challenge, the faintest tinkling of her spurs beneath the raillery, she held out a copy of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noire.

  70

  “TELL me,” Yashim said. “Tell me about the ancient Greeks.”

  Amélie was lying facedown on the divan, her head in the sunlight, resting her chin on her hands. Yashim heard her giggle.

  “I could talk for days,” she said. She moved her head so that her cheek was resting on her fingers, and she looked at him. “Let’s do a swap,” she suggested. “I’ll tell you about the finest hour of ancient Greece, and you tell me about your people. The Ottomans. Their greatest moment.”

  Yashim cocked his head. “Agreed,” he said. He crossed his legs and sat by her in the window. “A time of war? Or a time of peace?”

  Amélie smiled. “War first,” she said.

  “Ah, war.” Yashim straightened his back. “The sultan Suleyman, then. Suleyman, the Giver of Laws. In French—the Magnificent. He is twenty-two when he leads our armies to Belgrade. The White City—impregnable, lying between two rivers, the Sava and the Danube, defended by the hosts of Christendom. It is a long and a weary march…”

  He told of Suleyman’s victory at Belgrade, and his conquest of Rhodes two years later, of his prowling the borders of Austria, and humbling Buda.

  “You look different when you talk like that.”

  “Different?”

  “Fierce. Like Suleyman.” She nestled her cheek against her palm, and her hips moved against the carpeted divan. “Tell me about peace.”

  “I’ll tell you about a poet,” Yashim said. “In time of poetry—with a sultan who surrounds himself with poets. Every night they hold a Divan of poetry, each man trying to outdo the other with the beauty of his words. Rhyme, meter the highest expressions of love and sadness and remorse. But the sultan is better than them all.”

  He heard Amélie give a little snort. He glanced down. Her eyes were closed, and a light skein of her brown hair had fallen across her cheek. She was smiling.

  “Ah, but he was,” Yashim insisted. “He was a poet of love—because of all our sultans, he was the one who loved one woman most. He had hundreds of women—the most beautiful girls from Circassia and the Balkans—but one he loved beyond all the rest. She had red hair and pale white skin, and dark, dark soulful eyes. She was—they say she was a Russian. Roxelana. He married her.”

  He bent forward and softly recited the lines he knew by heart.

  Amélie lay still for a few moments. “What was his name? The poet-sultan?”

  “Suleyman. Suleyman the Magnificent.”

  She opened her eyes and sought him out. He was very close.

  “The same sultan,” she murmured. She arched her back and raised her head, until she was looking at Yashim.

  Slowly, hesitantly, she moved closer to him. Her eyes flickered from his eyes to his lips.

  Yashim felt himself weightless, like a feather in the wind.

  Their lips touched.

  Her arm slipped around his neck. He put out a hand and touched the curve of her hip.

  It was a long time before either of them could speak.

  “You were going to tell me about the Greeks,” Yashim said.

  Amélie smiled and touched a finger to the tip of his nose.

  “Right now,” she said, “I’m more interested in Ottomans.”

  71

  SUNLIGHT slid across the divan as the afternoon wore on.

  He broke away from her once: from her interest. She had understood. She soothed him back to her with little cries, like a bird. She had put her fingers to his lips.

  “Max never kissed me like that,” she said finally.

  He left her reading the Gyllius; it was the least he could do.

  “Remember, Gyllius is writing about a vanished world. Perhaps something in this will spark a memory.”

  He caught a last glimpse of her on the divan: her hair in the sun, a finger on her chin, and the curve of her hip like a wave that could drown him.

  72

  PALEWSKI was not at home; Marta said he’d gone for a walk and invited Yashim inside to wait.

  “I’ll sit out here,” Yashim said.

  He wanted the light—he needed air. He had walked all the way, hoping to drive the agonizing tedium from his limbs, breath into his constricted lungs. It was no good: Amélie that afternoon had invaded him, opening the space in his mind that he always kept closed.

  He sat at the top of the steps with his back to the wall, in the sun, watching the little boy playing in the yard. He was kneeling by the front wall and digging in the earth with a stick.

  The little boy didn’t look up when Yashim came and squatted down beside him.

  He carved the stick into the dirt again, then laid it flat and began to polish the sides of the trench he had dug, a short, shallow trench that sloped gently from one end to the other.

  At the lower end the boy had dug a small hole in the ground. He laid the stick aside and began to smooth the sides of the hole.

  When it was done to his satisfaction he sat back on his heels and surveyed his work. Yashim gave him a smile but he did not receive it.

  The little boy stood up and walked away.

  Yashim stared at the figure on the ground, puzzled.

  The little boy was gone a few minutes. He came back carrying a jar and a ball. The ball was made of tin and had a big dent in it. T
he boy placed the ball in the trench, with the dent uppermost. Very carefully he stood the jar on its base and began to tip water from the jar into the trench. The ball floated a short way, then rolled over slowly and came to rest on its dented side.

  The boy sighed. He looked up at Yashim for the first time and there were tears in his eyes.

  “It’s only because the ball’s got a dent in it,” Yashim said quietly.

  The boy looked down, but made no effort to touch the ball.

  “I can get you another one, just like it,” Yashim said.

  The boy didn’t move.

  “Where did you get this one? From your daddy?”

  The boy looked up, and his head seemed to shrink into his shoulders. He doesn’t speak, Yashim thought: his words are soundless shapes inside his head.

  Yashim stood up and held out his hand. “Show me,” he said.

  73

  AMÉLIE lay on the divan, fiddling with a lock of her hair, her attention focused on the old book her husband had left behind in Yashim’s flat.

  She read quickly, sometimes skipping whole pages, sometimes turning the book in her hands the better to read the tiny brown scrawls that decorated the lines and margins of the text. Yashim was right: hers was an expressive face, and so as she read her expression changed. She frowned and bit her lip; she smiled; and once, holding the book with one finger between the pages to mark her place, she got up and walked around the little apartment with an anxious glance at the window.

  When she had finished examining the book she sat up, quite still, with her hands in her lap and a deep, faraway expression in her clear brown eyes.

  74

  THE boy walked fast, without turning his head. When they struck the crowds, Yashim stumbled against a porter too tired and overburdened to complain as the boy darted through a cloud of women in charshafs ambling, ample-hipped, along the waterfront.

  Yashim dodged around them instead, craning his neck to keep his eyes on the boy’s shaved head. A willowy girl with a shawl across her head and face stepped between them, and for a moment he lost sight of him. But no, there he was again, his shoulders stooped against the sea of people coming down the Horn, stubbornly making his way through without a backward glance as if he were afraid a spell would break.