The Snake Stone

63

It was not yet completely dark when Yashim reached Balat. Dim figures brushed past him in the alleys; doors banged; a little boy carrying what Yashim recognized to be a box of paper leaned his burden wearily against a wall, then hoisted it up again and pressed on. The Jews, he thought, are coming home.

The idea caught him by surprise. From across the city, the Jewish poor were streaming home with the fading light. The boy with the paper would be at his post tomorrow, soon after sunrise, crying “Carta! Carta!” all day long the way the paper sellers did on the Grande Rue. There were, now that he considered it, so many little trades in the city from which the Jews could draw a precarious living. They shined shoes, they sold flowers, they collected scrap paper and metal; they went out young-and they came home late, plodding through their broken alleyways and dirty streets with a few piastres for the family purse. The Jews were city dwellers: they worked the streets like furrows on the earth, stumbling back to Balat as if it were their village. Yashim had seen villages more filthy and decrepit than Balat, too.

He paused to remember the way, then set off down a dispiritingly narrow, twisted alleyway as fast as he dared: he wanted to reach the moneylender’s courtyard before it was dark.

The courtyard was silent. Overhead, he could make out the dark tiers of balconies, and here and there a stray line of light to indicate a drawn shutter. He knocked softly on the door of Baradossa’s cell, and then, after a minute’s silence, he knocked more loudly.

He took a few steps back and almost tumbled on a broken tile. A shutter banged open above, and a woman’s head appeared silhouetted against the dim light.

“?Que es?”

“I’m looking for Baradossa,” Yashim called back. He had no Ladino. The head disappeared and an arm reached out to pull the shutter to.

Yashim scuffed the tile with his slipper. Nobody came. Another fragment of tile lay on the ground at the side of the door: it must have slipped from the roof of Baradossa’s lean-to porch. Yashim gave up waiting for the woman to reappear and bent down to look at the tile. He wondered why it had fallen.

He went back to the opening of the courtyard and looked up the wooden staircase leading to the balconies. The stairs creaked as he climbed. He followed the balcony to the corner, passing a couple of doors, and found himself looking down onto the little pantiled roof.

He could just make out where the broken tile had come from, about halfway up the roof where there was a gap like a wound between the tiles.

There was no light showing from the room beneath.

Yashim snaked over the balustrade, which rocked dangerously, and placed his feet on the pantiled roof.

He descended the slope cautiously, keeping his feet on the ridges. Then he squatted over the gap and quietly lifted the overlying tile. He raised the next one a little, to let it slide out, and set it down gingerly beside him. He slid his fingers into the gap and the underlying tile came away with a dry rasp. The battens were about eighteen inches apart.

High overhead a door opened and he heard a woman’s voice; it was suppressed but full of anger. A man answered brusquely, from along the balcony; the door slammed shut and the man came heavily down the staircase. On the first-floor landing he turned unsteadily. Yashim saw him put his hand on the balustrade and lean forward, as if he were peering into the dark; then he took a step backward, straightened up, and sighed. Yashim relaxed; after a few moments the man adjusted himself and lurched back to the staircase. He went down into the courtyard and out into the alley beyond.

Yashim put his weight on the battens and eased himself into the hole in the roof. At the last moment, as he was trying to hold his position, he lost his grip and slithered roughly between the battens, falling several feet onto the floor below.

He stood up, rubbing his knee. He nudged a table and his fingers crawled over it until they encountered an oil lamp. Yashim picked it up and shook it gently. On a ledge by the door he found a box of matches, but the hiss of the match igniting frightened him, as though it identified his position: he swung round with the match above his head until it burned his fingers. He put the lamp on the table, removed the mantle, and struck another match to the wick. When the blue flame began to spread he dropped the mantle back and trimmed the wick. A dim glow illuminated the room.

He expected to see a couch at the back of the room: on his first visit, in the candlelight, it had been impossible to see the farther wall. Now he could see that another room, maybe a set of rooms, lay beyond a door in the far corner. It occurred to him that Baradossa might still be there asleep, in spite of his knocking; in spite of the noise he had made coming through the roof.

The book was lying on the table, exactly where it had been before. Yashim opened it with his free hand and flicked the pages until he found what he was looking for.

Xani. 600 piastres. There were five entries below, with dates, recording the monthly receipt of forty piastres. At the bottom, in red ink: 200 French francs: Paid In Full.

Yashim raised his head and listened. He heard voices overhead, and then-incongruously-the tramp of feet on stone; sounds from the courtyard were being filtered through the hole in the roof. A man spoke, close by. Someone knocked on the door; it sounded as if they were using the head of a stick.

Yashim listened intently. There were several voices outside, in the courtyard: anyone roused to look down over the balconies from one of the overhead apartments would see the light shining through the hole he’d made in the roof. Yet he felt a great reluctance to put out the lamp.

There was another possibility. He went over to the inner door and put his ear to it. There was no sound. He turned the handle slowly, pushed back the door, and stepped inside.

Baradossa was at home.

He was sitting bolt upright on the floor, arms raised in front of him, staring at Yashim. What had been his chest was nothing but a bloody mess. Yashim had seen many corpses in his time, but what unnerved him were the teeth. They seemed to be starting from his face, as if they had grown.

The lamp slipped through Yashim’s fingers. He clutched at it. The burning mantle scorched his hand and separated from the lamp, which shattered on the ground. With a sullen whump! the oil on the floor ignited. Yashim jumped back. The old moneylender leered at him from the floor.

Yashim raced to the front door and flung the bolts.

“Yangin-var!” he roared. “Fire! Fire!”

Yashim’s natural instincts were to help douse a fire, but not this time. A group of men outside started back in astonishment as Yashim barreled past. One, more quick-witted than the rest, made a lunge for his cloak; Yashim twitched it away and pelted for the street, not attempting to look round.

He ran without stopping until he reached the Fener, his own district. His heart was pounding.

The Jew had been killed that afternoon; no later. In rigor, Baradossa’s mutilated body had slowly stiffened, raising itself from the floor on which it lay; the tendons in the arms had pulled tight. Those artificial teeth had sprung open and slipped forward in the dead man’s mouth, a horrifying chaplet of wire and bone: the grin hadn’t been meant for him.

Whoever killed him had escaped the way Yashim had gone in: through the roof, leaving the door locked from the inside.

And a book on the table.

A book that demonstrated, beyond all doubt, that Xani had had a friend. Someone who had discharged his debt in good French silver. Two hundred francs.

Yashim’s thoughts turned to a Frenchman, now dead, whose wife was asleep in Widow Matalya’s apartment.

He went in quietly through the front door, into the silent house.