The Snake Stone

104

Yashim crossed the street, mounted the steps, and rapped smartly on the knocker to Dr. Millingen’s house. When nobody answered, he launched himself into the crowd. Twenty yards down the street he entered a bakery. He walked past the counter with a nod to the baker, past the loaves, through the kitchens, and out of the shop at the back, into a small yard surrounded by a low wall. Yashim heaved himself up onto it and jumped lightly down the other side, just managing to avoid crushing a clump of horseradish growing in Dr. Millingen’s tiny physic garden.

From a door in the far wall a cinder path led directly through the garden to the back door. Yashim moved closer to the house. The windows on the ground floor were barred, the back door locked with a patent American mechanism, but there was a coal hopper at the end of the house, which suggested possibilities. Yashim went to work on the padlock, and after a few minutes he saw it click open. He lifted the doors and lowered himself into the chute.

Some loose coal was pressed up against a sliding panel at the bottom of the chute. Yashim lifted the larger lumps aside, working his fingers into the grit to find the lower edge of the panel. It slid upward with a sound of falling coal.

Yashim paused, listening, then squeezed feetfirst through the opening. Once through, he stood brushing the dust from his cloak while his eyes adjusted to the darkness. There were some steps, and a door on a catch, but the door was not close-fitting. In a moment Yashim had slipped his knife between the door and the jamb and was stealing out into the corridor.

Millingen’s study lay just across the hall. Yashim whipped in, leaving the door open, and looked around. The green-and-gold-striped wallpaper hung with sporting prints, the mantelpiece with an ornamented clock over an English grate, the big walnut desk with its black leather top, and a set of shelves set into an alcove, full of books: neat, methodical, and prosperous.

He tried the drawers of the desk. Notepaper, sealing wax, a box of steel nibs. In a lower drawer, some papers. Yashim riffled through them. They were written in English, in an illegible scrawl. He closed the drawer and went over to the bookshelves.

The lower shelves contained a series of leather-bound boxes, which at first glance resembled books. Yashim squatted down. For the most part the boxes contained more papers: accounts, copies of the doctor’s bills, notes about patients written in English, and in the same difficult hand. But one also contained a series of letters, written in Greek, between Millingen and a certain Dr. Stephanitzes in Athens.

Yashim was about to lift the box to the desk when a sound from the corridor-light footsteps, perhaps, and a peculiar swishing noise-made him freeze. He was about to turn around when he heard the door click and the sound of a key turning in the lock.

He sprang for the handle. At the last moment he decided against rattling the handle and knocked on the wooden panel, instead: if the servant had returned, he might think the doctor had absentmindedly left the door ajar. But no one came. Yashim knocked again, much louder.

There were no sounds of retreating footsteps; he had certainly not heard the front door open or close. He pressed his ear to the panel. For a moment he had a sense that somebody was standing on the other side of the door.

He looked around the room. The window was hung with muslin curtains, against the street, and barred like the windows at the back of the house. He looked at the empty grate and sighed. Everything that made this room in Pera solid and English made it also a perfect prison.

He crouched down, with a faint hope that he might be able to retrieve the key from the keyhole on the other side. But the key was no longer in the lock.

Whoever had locked the door had done so deliberately, knowing that Yashim was inside.

The idea made Yashim frown. He went back and squatted down by the bookshelves, from where Millingen’s desk almost hid him from the door. To see him, someone would have had to lean in at the door. They would have had to approach along the corridor very quietly-as if they already knew he was there.

In which case, someone must have seen him going in. Not Millingen: he had gone out. But the servant-could he have doubled back while Yashim was coming through the coal chute?

But then-why wait so long to lock the door?

Yashim bit his lip. He lifted the box of papers onto the desk and bent over it.

He’d come to do a job, and now, it seemed, he was being afforded the leisure to complete it.