The Snake Stone

37

Yashim laid the basket on the floor and fished out three onions and a handful of zucchinis. He pulled down the chopping board and set it on the little high table where he kept his salt, rice, and dried spices. He took a sharp knife from the box beside him and honed it on an English steel that Palewski had given him once, as a surprise. Cookery wasn’t about fire: it was about a sharp blade.

He ripped the outer skin from the onion using the blunt edge of the knife. He halved it and laid the halved pairs face down, curves touching. The knife rose and fell on its point. The board gave a momentary lurch and rocked to one side; Yashim continued chopping. He swept the slices to the edge of the board. The board rocked back again. Yashim raised one edge and swept his hand beneath it, dislodging a grain of rice.

For a few moments he stared at the tiny grain, frowning slightly. Then he glanced up and poked his finger into the spaces between the rice crock and the salt cellar and the spice jars at the back of the table. A few grains of rice stuck to his fingers. He moved the crocks and jars to one side, and found several more.

Yashim rubbed the tips of his fingers together, opened the lid of the rice crock, and looked inside. It was almost full, the little scoop buried in the grain to its hilt.

He looked around the room. Everything was in order, everything left as the widow would have left it after she’d been in to clean, the shawls folded, the clothes bags dangling on a row of hooks, the jug of water standing in the bowl.

But someone else had been in here.

Searching. Looking for something small enough to be hidden in a crock of rice.

Yashim picked up a folded shawl and spread it out across the divan beneath the window. He picked up the rice jar and tipped it forward, spilling the grain onto the shawl. Nothing but a mound of rice. He looked inside the jar. It was empty.

He put the rice back into the crock with his two hands at first, and then with the little scoop. He brushed a few grains of rice off the rim and replaced the lid.

The Frenchman, Lefevre. How long had he left him on his own? Two hours, three. So he’d woken up and wanted to make something to eat.

Lefevre didn’t cook. Didn’t know olives from sheep droppings.

I believe everything I read in books.

Yashim frowned.

He went to his bookcase and looked along the shelves. The books were in no particular order, which told him nothing. Perhaps they had been disarranged, perhaps not. He tried one or two at random, and they slid out easily.

He pushed the jars back to the wall and carried on chopping the onions.

He sluiced olive oil across the base of an earthenware dish.

He halved a lemon and squeezed its juice into the oil. He dried his hands on a cloth.

He went to the bookcase and ran his finger along the middle shelf until he found the book.

It had been a gift from the sultan’s mother, the valide. She’d received it unbound, no doubt, in a thick manila wrapper. Before she passed it on she’d had it bound in imperial green leather, with the colophon of the House of Osman, an egret’s feather, worked onto the spine in gold leaf. Title and author, stamped on the spine in gold.

GORIOT-BALZAC. It was a rare gift.

At the embassy Lefevre’s satchel had contained half a dozen books. They were the very books the terrified man had spilled out apologetically across the floor, before he died. Except for one, Yashim remembered. There had been a paperbound copy of Goriot, slightly tatty around the spine, which he hadn’t seen before.

He pulled the Balzac from the shelf and opened the leather cover.

Lefevre, at least, had found a hiding place.

You hide jewels on a woman’s neck. A man can lose himself in a crowd.

Yashim sighed: the valide’s gift was ruined beyond repair.

It takes a book to hide a book.