An Evil Eye

26

As the caique turned up against the sluggish current, Palewski leaned back on the hard cushions and stared at the footings of the new bridge.

For centuries, people had talked about throwing a bridge across the Golden Horn. On the Stamboul side lay the bazaars, the palaces, and the temples of faith; on the Pera side lived the foreign community, now a mixed bag of Italians and Levantines, who operated so many of the commercial enterprises of the empire. The great Byzantine emperor Justinian, who gave his city the incomparable Ayasofya, was supposed, by some, to have strung a chain of boats across the waterway. If he had done so, only the idea of the chain had survived: medieval Constantinople had protected itself from attack on the seaward side by hauling a massive chain, whose links weighed fifty pounds apiece, across the mouth of the Horn. In 1453, when the city fell to the Ottoman Turks, Mehmet II had dragged his ships over land to get around it.

Fifty years later, the renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci had submitted a design for a bridge shaped like a curving bow, or a crescent; the sketch was put on file and forgotten. Three centuries passed. Then the late sultan-proponent of change everywhere in the empire-entrusted the project to his favorite, the Kapudan pasha Fevzi Ahmet, commander of the fleet. A man who had a reputation for getting things done.

Palewski sighed. Where the great plane tree that shaded the shoreline on the Pera side had stood, the ground looked dusty and hard-baked. The pasha’s bridge would be as ugly and practical as any of the new buildings that had disfigured the old city in the past twenty years-the commercial houses of Pera, the blank barracks of the New Troop on Uskudar, the sultan’s hideous new palace at Besiktas. Worst of all, he thought, it would dissolve the ancient distinction between Stamboul, with its palaces and domes and bazaars, and modern, commercial Pera across the Horn.

It was growing dark when the caique dropped him at the Balat stage. Palewski tipped the oarsman and made his way unhurriedly through the steep streets before stopping at a sunken doorway picked out in bands of red and white stone. The widow Matalya opened the door and Palewski removed his hat.

“Gone out, efendi,” the old lady remarked. “Messengers back and forth, and I don’t know what. Would you like to wait?”

Palewski agreed, and went on up to Yashim’s apartment carrying his old portmanteau, stuffed with a shawl. Wrapped in the shawl was an excellent brandy-1821-which the French ambassador had once given him, though Palewski had forgotten why. He sat on the divan while the familiar outlines of the flat bled into darkness; just before it became too dark to see, he stood up and fumbled with the lamp. In Yashim’s kitchen various plates and bowls were covered with muslins. The brazier was barely warm: he poked his finger into the coals, then wiped the soot off absently on his coattails. At last he found a piece of bread and a painted glass, and settled down to read Yashim’s latest Balzac.

At the beginning of chapter three he eased off his shoes and drew his feet up onto the divan.