The Snake Stone

27

Istanbul was not an early-rising city; only the devout, stirred by their muezzins, noticed the dawn as it began to creep from the mountains behind Uskudar. Dr. Millingen, who was about to be summoned by the French embassy, was asleep, breathing heavily and dreaming of Athens. Nearby, in the Polish residency, Stanislaw Palewski snored among his pillows, dressed in a voluminous old dressing gown. Along the Bosphorus the sultan slept, his cheek flattened against the breast of a Circassian odalisque; she was stolidly resisting the temptation to fall asleep because, if she had a single fault, it was in snoring with her mouth open. Up the Golden Horn, Madame Mavrogordato was also awake, making an effort to interpret her husband’s night fidgets. Yashim slept silently, half dressed, covered in an old cloak. Malakian was asleep; George the costermonger drifting somewhere between the two states.

Auguste Boyer, charge d’affaires at the French embassy, was awake, dressed, and leaning from a ground-floor window into the courtyard, wiping a trail of vomit off his chin with a lace-edged handkerchief. The vomit was thin and smelled of bile and coffee. He retched again; his stomach turned over, and a silver thread of drool sank from his lips onto the dry cobbles below the window.

“Put back the sheet,” he said faintly. There was a sound of the sheet being drawn up, and Boyer turned with the handkerchief to his mouth. “Send for Dr. Millingen. And you may bring-bring the bag to my office.”

Keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the door and the handkerchief in place, he staggered from the room. The middle-aged orderly glanced down once at the bloodstained sheet, watching the stains become shiny again from contact with the dead man’s wounds, then bent down stiffly and picked up the leather bag. That Boyer was only a kid, he was thinking. He should have been there with the emperor, at Waterloo. La Gloire! Not glory, no. But an acquaintance with the dead.

He closed the door, crossed himself with a reflex movement, and went to find the footman.