The Snake Stone

by Jason Goodwin

  She ran her hands over the sculpted marble. “It’s about suspending time. Freezing it.”

  She put her hands on the top of the plinth and began stirring the water with her feet. “They’re here. I know it. The relics are here.”

  “I don’t think so, Amélie.”

  She didn’t answer, but moved slowly round the plinth, feeling the ground with her feet.

  “It’s too cold! I can’t feel anything. Yashim, for God’s sake, help me.”

  Yashim didn’t move.

  “We can do this for Max. We must do it, can’t you see? After this there’ll never be another chance.”

  He thought she was going to wring her hands. Instead, she waded through the water and put her arms around his neck.

  She drew him down and kissed him with her cold lips.

  “Not for Max, Yashim. Do it for me.”

  He felt her thigh pressing against his. She kissed him again.

  She broke away slowly and sank down into the water, kneeling. Her skirts billowed around her like the scalloped edge of a fountain.

  She gathered them toward her, then plunged her hands into the water, groping around the base of the plinth.

  Yashim closed his eyes. For a moment he saw Maximilien Lefèvre on his knees, in Yashim’s apartment, tipping the contents of his bag onto the floor.

  He stepped up to the plinth and began to circle its base, scudding his icy feet across the floor of the underground lake. They met on the far side, in the shadow, and when Yashim raised her up she came up dripping and shaking.

  “Ça suffit,” he said. It’s enough. “We have to think now, how to get out of here.”

  Her teeth were chattering now too hard for her to speak. She tried to pull away, but Yashim had her by the waist and she was shaking. He picked up the lamp.

  Halfway across the lake, Amélie fainted in his arms.

  Her head dropped back and her weight fell on his arm. His other arm shot up to keep his balance and the lamp flew from his hand. For a moment it blazed in an arc above the sunken cistern, throwing its light across the hall of columns, across the black water, before it cracked audibly against a plinth and vanished.

  Yashim watched it go.

  He stood for a few moments in the dark.

  And a sound he had not heard for what seemed like a very long time broke the impenetrable silence of the cistern.

  It was weak and shaky, but it was, after all, his own.

  Yashim’s laugh.

  118

  THERE was nothing for it, Yashim thought as he ran his hands around the tunnel’s mouth.

  He turned and groped for Amélie’s arms. He put his hands under her armpits and began to drag her back into the tunnel. The angle was awkward, his back bent and protesting. Every few yards he stopped to catch his breath, the sweat now rolling down his face. To make things worse, the cut on his hand had begun to run again, where the bandage had slid off.

  He had no real idea of what to do next. Even if he did manage to drag Amélie a hundred, five hundred yards along the tunnel, his chances of finding the right way out in the dark were slim. Amélie’s thread had disappeared—probably the naziry had gathered it up as he followed.

  He gritted his teeth and pulled his burden for another few yards. He felt dizzy and sick, weak with the cold and the loss of blood. He put out a hand to steady himself and almost toppled sideways.

  He felt a step beneath his fingers. Presumably, he thought, the steps where the naziry had found him. It seemed long ago.

  He wondered if he should leave Amélie here, on the steps, while he groped for a way out. But even if he did get out, what then? How would he get back? What help could he possibly call on out there—he could hardly expect the watermen to come running. And in the meantime Amélie might wake up and find herself alone, in the dark, buried alive.

  He dragged her onto the lower step and laid her head down gently on the stone. Stepping over her with exaggerated care, he began to mount the steps.

  The stairs took several right-angled turns before Yashim found himself in what felt like a narrow corridor, in which he could stand upright. The walls were straight, and he ran his fingers along them until he reached another set of steps at the far end. The entrance to these steps was festooned with hanging cloths that crumbled at his touch and stuck to his fingers.

  The second flight of steps were spiral, and they went on turning and turning until Yashim felt bewildered. Several times he slipped and fell; climbing stairs hurt his calf. His final fall came when he walked straight into a wall and recoiled, blood dripping from his nose. The wall was built across the stairs. Yashim ran his hands over it and over the surrounding walls, uncertain what he was looking for but deeply unwilling to admit that the whole exercise had been futile. But so it was: if there had once been an entrance to the tunnels from this spot, it had long ago been blocked. If Amélie’s cistern was the same one Gyllius had seen, it must lie beneath the Hippodrome; except for the open space, much had changed in that district since olden times. Ibrahim’s palace. Ahmed I’s Blue Mosque. The lovely baths that Sinan built for Hürrem Sultan, Suleyman’s Russian wife, close by the entrance to Topkapi Palace and Aya Sofia. Monumental buildings.

  He laid his head against the wall and screwed his eyes tight. He felt sick and dizzy; everything he touched felt as though it were toppling, sliding, moving about. He wondered how long he had been away from Amélie: perhaps even now she was awake, blundering about and crying in the dark…

  He raised his head and turned, eyes closed, feeling for the outside wall of the stairs, where the steps were widest. He set his back against the curve and began to descend. A festoon of cobwebs brushed his hair, so old and dusty that they hung in strands, like the matted hair of a dervish. He jerked his head away.

  For a few moments he stared back, incapable of believing what he was seeing. Understanding that he could see.

  He glanced up the steps. At the top, where the wall ran across the stairs, a thin vertical bar of light had opened in the angle of the two walls.

  Yashim scrambled back down the spiral stairs. Amélie was still lying where he had left her. Her breathing was shallow and her skin felt like ice. He took her in his arms and sat her upright, then slapped her cheeks.

  After a while she began to moan.

  He dragged her to her feet, holding her arm around his shoulders, his other hand encircling her waist, and began to half drag, half carry her up the steps. The movement seemed to bring her around. He felt her stumbling on the last few steps, and when they entered the corridor he was able to take the lead, holding her firmly by the arm and murmuring encouragement.

  “We’re almost there, a few more steps. There’s a way out, you’ll see the light soon.”

  He got behind her as they reached the spiral staircase and helped her climb. Her movements were slow and heavy, and he remembered how hard it had been for him to move when he crawled out of Xani’s pit, when every muscle had weighed a ton and all he had wanted to do was fall asleep. Sometimes Amélie did seem to drift away, and he had to brace himself and catch her as she slid back on top of him. But at last he saw the darkness starting to dissolve.

  She sat quiet while he put his shoulder to the stone. A little grunting noise gradually changed into a low growl as the stone began to move and the bar of light widened inch by inch.

  Before it was six inches wide, Yashim paused and put his eye to the crack.

  He was looking across an expanse of cracked and polished marble toward a vast barred window, about fifteen yards away. The light hurt his eyes. Looking up, he saw a domed ceiling. Something about the scale of the building and the dusty blackness of its walls reminded him of someplace, but for a moment he could not imagine where he was.

  He pushed again. The wall, he saw, was mounted on a pivot, so that as one end swung out the other swung inward. Soon he was able to squeeze himself into the gap and use his back and legs to turn the stone, and it was then that it rushed in upon him.

&nb
sp; They had found a way into Aya Sofia.

  Not on the ground floor, and nowhere near the old high altar. The spiral stairs had been built inside one of the vast pillars that supported the great dome, and they were emerging much higher up, in the deserted gallery that stretched out beneath the quarter domes of the greatest building of the ancient world.

  119

  FAISAL al-Mehmed ran his eyes along the low shelves that surrounded him in his booth outside the Great Mosque, and shook his head. So many shoes! In weather like this, everyone wanted to go into the mosque; nobody wanted to come out. But as soon as the rain stopped they would rush upon him, demanding to have their shoes again, causing confusion.

  Faisal al-Mehmed abhorred confusion, in a holy precinct above all.

  A movement in the crowd made him look around. A man and a woman he didn’t remember seeing before were emerging from the doorway, into the torrential rain, and already, he noticed, they were soaking wet. The woman could barely walk: the man had one arm around her, and in the other he held her hand.

  Faisal ran a hand down his beard and nodded. So many people came to this mosque without a pious thought—merely, even, to shelter from the rain. Where was the piety, in using a mosque as shelter? True piety was oblivious to rain.

  Faisal smiled a benediction on the couple, for in his heart he understood that they possessed Enthusiasm.

  120

  WHEN Yashim woke it was late. The thunderstorms had cleared away as if they had never been, and a hot afternoon sun was already tracing a pattern of slanting shadows across the room.

  He got up slowly, feeling light and hungry. There was a loaf of bread that was no longer fresh; he broke off a piece and chewed at it, and then in self-disgust he put the bread down and riddled the stove. He blew on the embers and fed their glow with trickles of charcoal from his fingers, listening to its dry rustle, feeling its insubstantial weight, wondering as he watched the glow spread how something so light could generate so much heat. He placed his hand flat above the stove and savored the burning heat on his palm.

  He looked into his vegetable basket. In an earthenware dish, under a domed lid, lay a slab of crumbly white cheese, beyaz peynir.

  He skinned two onions and chopped them roughly, then sprinkled them with salt. He sliced the tops off two tomatoes and chopped them, with peppers, garlic, and a bunch of wilted parsley. He mashed the cheese with a fork.

  He split the stale loaf lengthways and rubbed the insides with a cut tomato and a garlic clove. He drizzled them with oil and set them at an angle over the heat.

  He dipped the onions into a bowl of water to remove the salt, and tossed them into a bowl along with the peppers, the tomatoes, and the parsley. A drop of oil fell onto the coals with a hiss. He sprinkled the salad with the crumbled cheese and a big pinch of kirmizi biber, which he had bought after the desecration of the apartment—usually he made it himself, with a big bunch of dried chili peppers crushed in a mortar, rubbed with oil and roasted black in a heavy pan on the coals.

  He poured a generous lick of olive oil over the salad, added salt, and pounded peppercorns in the mortar. Clink-clink-clink.

  He stirred the salad with a spoon.

  He took the toasted bread from the fire and set it on a plate. He washed his hands and mouth.

  He ate cross-legged on the sofa, the sun on his left hand, thinking about the dark burrows under the city, the huge cistern like a temple, and the wavering light that had pursued him through his dreams. The light he’d seen in Amélie’s eyes.

  I am doing this for Max, she’d said. Fulfilling his desires. Following his instructions as if he were still alive; as if, like Byzantium itself, he still had the power to direct and to control the actions of people in the living world.

  Yashim spooned up some of the vegetables with a chunk of toasted bread. I am doing this for Max.

  For Max: for the man whose grossly mutilated corpse both he and Dr. Millingen had examined days ago. A body without a face, but good teeth.

  121

  “IT’S you.” Dr. Millingen leaned forward and turned up the wick; a warm, soft light spilled across the room.

  Yashim placed a bag on the floor beside him. “Madame Lefèvre?”

  “Very weak, after her ordeal. But she is a fighter, Yashim efendi. I am sure you know that.”

  He leaned forward and picked up a coin that lay dully on the leather desktop.

  “A survivor? Yes. Like her husband. Your old friend Meyer.”

  Dr. Millingen frowned and glanced at the door. “I have already arranged for Madame Lefèvre to be repatriated,” he said, holding the coin to the light. “She leaves tomorrow, for France.”

  “A French ship?”

  “L’Ulysse. She’s berthed at Tophane, on the quay.” He leaned back, bringing the coin with him. “My man will be seeing her aboard. No more accidents, Yashim efendi.”

  Yashim said coldly: “Accidents? But it wasn’t my idea to send her into the cisterns, Dr. Millingen.”

  The coin began to run through Dr. Millingen’s fingers.

  “I suppose you know she found nothing,” Yashim said.

  “So she told me.”

  Yashim stepped forward and spread his hands. “The clues added up. You would have had your relics, had they been there. But they weren’t. I don’t believe they exist,” he added, shaking his head. “Lefèvre was a salesman.”

  Dr. Millingen considered Yashim thoughtfully.

  “I agree with you,” he said at last. “And yet, as you say, the clues added up.”

  “The trouble with clues—you can make them point wherever you like. A few old legends, a rare book—Lefèvre only had to choose a theme, et voilà! A story he knew how to sell.”

  Millingen frowned. “But I told you—he got nothing from us until the relics were found.”

  Yashim smiled. “On the contrary. From you he got everything he needed. Authenticity, Dr. Millingen. I believe it is called provenance. Your interest alone raised the price—for others.”

  “But Madame Lefèvre—she believed the story, too.”

  “Did she?” Yashim thought of Amélie in the lamplight, sinking to her knees in the dark water. “I think, Dr. Millingen, that the only person who may have believed in the whole charade was you. It was you who once told me that a collector is a weak man. Do you remember? You with that coin of Malakian’s I brought—the missing coin in your collection—eager to own it, at almost any price. Maybe you couldn’t be sure of Lefèvre. Why should you trust him? But in the back of your mind you hoped he might be right.”

  The doctor pursed his lips, making no effort to deny it.

  “So you persuaded Madame Lefèvre to pick up the trail.” Yashim clasped his hands together across his chest. “I don’t know if that meant you were weak. But it made you unscrupulous.”

  “Steady on,” Millingen growled.

  “You could have offered her money for the relics. She needs money, I’m sure.” Yashim remembered Amélie in the water, wading from him, turning her lovely head to say that she was doing this for Max. For a dead man. “But I think you offered her something else. Something that mattered more to her even than money.”

  The fingers turning the coin fell still. “I wonder what you’re going to tell me, Yashim efendi. I’m very interested to know.”

  “I don’t think Amélie ever really believed in the relics herself. And I don’t think you did, either. But you wanted to be sure, Dr. Millingen, didn’t you? So you devised a trade, risking one life for another. That’s your business, isn’t it? Life.”

  Millingen didn’t move. Yashim cocked his head and said: “You promised her Maximilien Lefèvre.”

  122

  MILLINGEN placed the coin on the desk with a loud click.

  Their eyes met.

  “Lefèvre is dead,” Millingen said. He was watching Yashim now, trying to gauge the effect of his words.

  Yashim nodded slowly. “It wouldn’t be the first time, would it? Lefèvre, dead.”


  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Come on, Dr. Millingen.” Yashim frowned impatiently. “It’s a question of identity, that’s all. He told me that himself.”

  “He told you—what?” Millingen’s tone was scornful.

  “Byzantium. Constantinople. Istanbul. They’re all real names. All real places. Lefèvre was fascinated by them, too: three identities, woven into one—just like the snakes in the column, on the Hippodrome. They are all the same place, of course. Just as Meyer and Lefèvre are the same man.”

  Millingen made a gesture of impatience. “I don’t go in for metaphysics, efendi. I’m a doctor—and I know a dead man when I see one, too.”

  “That body, in the embassy,” Yashim said mildly, “was certainly dead. It just wasn’t who we thought. It wasn’t Lefèvre at all.” He cocked his head. “Who was it, Dr. Millingen? I’m very curious. Was it a corpse you procured for the occasion? Or just a hapless bag-carrier, in the wrong place, at the wrong time?”

  Millingen began to tap his finger on the coin.

  “Well, it’s not the most important thing now,” Yashim said peaceably. “You were happy to let the world believe that Lefèvre was dead.” He looked up and smiled. “You thought the Mavrogordatos would be satisfied, I suppose. Is that what he hoped, too?”

  Millingen bent his head and frowned at a corner of his desk, but he did not open his mouth.

  “But he couldn’t count on your help, could he? Not after Missilonghi. So he did the trade: his life for the relics. The last, lost treasure of Byzantium, spirited away by a priest at the altar as the Ottomans invaded the Great Church. A chalice and plate—if they still existed. And the collector in you couldn’t turn him down.”