The Snake Stone

43

“Thank you for stopping.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I was looking for some people,” Yashim said.

Mavrogordato glanced back at the quay. “You found them, it would seem.”

“They were the wrong people.” Yashim rubbed his forehead and took a breath. “You took me off the case.”

The young man shrugged. “Mother did.”

In the dark it was hard to tell if he was lying.

“Lefevre was already dead,” Yashim said. “You couldn’t have known that, could you?”

“Why should I care? A man like Lefevre.”

Yashim heard water dripping from the scull. “It was a coincidence, then?”

“You are in my caique,” the young man pointed out. “That looks like a coincidence, doesn’t it?”

“Perhaps. But then-I was looking for you, too.”

“You-you followed me?”

“No. But I heard that you came down here sometimes.”

“That’s not true. Who said so?”

“It’s true tonight, isn’t it?”

Alexander Mavrogordato did not reply. If he’d been smoking, Yashim thought, he sounded calm.

“Who owns the Ca d’Oro?”

The fragile boat rocked as it crossed the wake of a fisherman’s boat.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Is it one of your father’s boats?”

“Listen, friend.” Alexander leaned forward. “I don’t know the old man’s business. In six months I will be out of here, God willing.”

“Out of here? Why?”

“That’s my business,” Alexander retorted. “You wouldn’t understand. The Fener. The Bosphorus. The bazaar-you think it’s the world, don’t you? You all do. And just because the sultan makes a few changes here and there, you think you’re living in the most modern place on earth. Rubbish. Constantinople’s a backwater. You’d be surprised, efendi. The rest of the world-they laugh at us. Paris. Saint Petersburg. Why, in Athens they even have gas lighting in the streets! A lot of the streets. They have-politics, philosophy, everything. Concert halls. Newspapers. You can buy a newspaper and sit and read it in a cafe, and nobody looks twice. Just like the rest of Europe. People have opinions there.”

“And they read newspapers which have the same opinions?”

“Amazing, isn’t it? I’m going there, friend. I’ll be married, and-I’ll go.”

“Your wife-are you sure she’ll want to go?”

“My wife? She’ll do what I want, of course. I’ll give her fashionable clothes, and we’ll have dinners and go to the opera, and such like. We’ll be completely free. You wouldn’t understand.”

Yashim shook his head. The boy was right: if freedom meant taking your opinions out of newspapers and dressing up like everyone else, then it was certainly something he would never understand. A pleasure, perhaps, he would never be entitled to enjoy.

“Thank you for stopping,” he said. “You can drop us wherever you like.”

Alexander growled something that Yashim didn’t catch. Probably, he thought, it was better that way.