The Snake Stone

68

Yashim found Amelie Lefevre on his divan with a book in her hands.

She jumped up when he came in.

“Monsieur Yashim!”

“Madame!”

They both stared at each other. Then both began at once:

“I was curious-”

“I didn’t expect-”

Amelie was the first to recover.

“I felt lonely, Yashim efendi. The door was unlocked, and I found some books. French books.”

She held up a slim volume. He took it and read the title on the spine. De Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

“I’ve never read it,” she said.

“It’s unlucky,” Yashim replied.

“You believe that?”

Yashim slipped the book back into the shelves. “I read it once. I liked it very much.” He pushed against the spine with his thumb. “Six, seven people died.”

“And now?”

“Three men have died,” he said. “One was a bookseller. One was a moneylender. Your husband was the third.”

Amelie flinched. “My husband,” she echoed. She drew her arms over her knees and rocked back and forth on the divan. “Tell me. Tell me who the others are.”

Yashim sat down beside her, trailing his arms between his knees.

“There was a bookseller,” he began. He told her about Goulandris.

“So who killed him?”

He let his head hang.

“I thought-for a moment-it might have been your husband.”

Amelie stood up. “Max?”

“Please. Monsieur Lefevre paid for information. The man he paid has disappeared. I think he’s dead. He owed money to a moneylender. Your husband paid him off: two hundred francs.”

“You know so much,” Amelie said. She sounded bitter.

“The moneylender I found last night,” Yashim pressed on. “After you came.”

“So Max paid for information. What of that?”

“The moneylender was dead.”

Amelie went to the stove and leaned over it. She turned. “I don’t understand. Max-this bookseller, the moneylender. You didn’t like him? My husband.”

Yashim blinked in surprise.

“He wrote to me about you,” she said. “He thought that you were his friend.”

“I thought-I thought that we were alike. In certain ways.”

“You!” She snorted. “Max was many things, yes. But he was a man.”

Yashim thought: she is alone, her husband dead. He gestured to the divan and she sat down where she had sat that first night, when they were friends.

“I am sorry, monsieur. Please forgive me.”

“I am making coffee,” Yashim said. “Will you have some?”

She nodded, and Yashim turned gratefully to the stove.

“A man came here,” she said. “He opened the door.”

“Yes? Who?” Yashim measured the coffee into the copper pot.

Amelie bit her lip. “I don’t know. He just sort of-stared.”

“Did he say anything?”

“I tried French-then a little Greek. But he just backed away.”

“How was he dressed?”

Amelie pursed her lips. “He looked like a bandit, really. He opened the door with a knife.”

Yashim felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck.

“A knife?”

Amelie laced her hands under her chin. “Forgive me. You and Max-you are alike, I think. He likes to find things out.” She paused, then corrected herself. “He liked to, I mean.”

“Yes.” He dug the pot into the coals. “I only wish I knew what he’d been looking for.”

He turned and looked at her. It was a question. Their eyes met; she shook her head and shrugged.

They must have been a strange couple, Yashim thought. She seemed so-fresh, with a face that told him everything he wanted to know. How had Lefevre found her? In their country, Yashim knew, people took their pick. What made her choose Lefevre, then, with all his secrets? The assignations. The hints. And the hidden life, too: this Amelie. She was the most surprising secret of them all.

“Your husband didn’t tell you why he had come?”

“To meet some people he knew.” She looked uncomfortable.

“People?” He had been under an impression that Lefevre worked alone.

“Some Greeks, I think. We were working on Samnos.” She hesitated. “You see, we had the money my father left me when he died. At least I thought it was so-but Max, he was unlucky on the Bourse, and of course, even a small archaeological dig can be expensive. So there was a problem for us. Max hoped he could find some people here, in Istanbul. To help.”

The coffee bubbled. Yashim lifted the pot by its long handle and let the grounds subside. He poured two cups.

“He saw Mavrogordato, the banker,” he said. Amelie said nothing. Yashim brought the coffee to the divan, passed her the cup, and took a seat. Lefevre had raised some money; he just hadn’t taken it back to Samnos. Then something frightened him, and he tried to reach France.

It would seem he’d been prepared to abandon his wife.

Yashim frowned. Was it possible to believe that of Lefevre? But if not, what else did he have planned when he stepped into the caique, in the dark?

That was always the starting place to which Yashim returned again and again: the walk through the deserted streets, the lights of the caiques glimmering on the Golden Horn, and the upraised hand, Lefevre’s farewell. A brave departure: so he had come to believe. But with Lefevre nothing was truly certain.

“How long were you married, madame?”

“Five years.” She pushed back her curls; her ear looked small and delicate, like a tender white fern. “I wanted to be an archaeologist, too.”

Yashim saw it clearly: a clever young woman, a reader, a scholar-why not? Men of her own age would shrink from her, she wouldn’t encourage them. And then Lefevre arrived: older, established, and talking of archaeology and Troy and the things she read; believing them, too. Believing what he read in books.

For her-the life she wanted. For him, a loyal assistant. With an inheritance, even. Perhaps, Yashim thought, Amelie knew how to read a book better than a man’s character.

“I’d always been fascinated by the ancient world. Max brought the Greeks back to life.”

“The ancient Greeks, yes.” He thought of the Serpent Column, the three snakes intertwined in what-victory? “And he was interested in the later Greeks, too-the Byzantine Greeks.”

Amelie pulled a face. “We used to argue about that. He said the Byzantines were degenerates. He called them-Asiatics.”

Yashim smiled. “A word can’t hurt. What did you think?”

“I said they were a spiritual people. You only have to study their mosaics, their icons, to appreciate that. Max wouldn’t agree, though. He said he’d had too many Greek friends to have any illusions about the Byzantines. The same people, he said. It made him sick to hear them talk, sometimes.”

“He understood Greek, did he? Modern Greek?”

“Oh yes. He spent years in Greece, in the twenties. That’s what turned him into an archaeologist.”

Greece in the twenties: the revolutionary years. It was extraordinary, Yashim reflected, how many Franks had been drawn to that country. Millingen-and that English poet Palewski had mentioned, and now Lefevre. Dreaming of the ancient Greeks, Millingen had said. Were all of them disillusioned, then? Discovering instead a race of-what, childish Asiatics?

What did these people expect? A race of Socratics? The ancient Greeks had killed Socrates themselves, hadn’t they? Why should the modern Greeks be any better, or any worse? Or better or worse than other men? Everyone was new: every man, every woman, came innocent into this world.

Yashim was an Ottoman. The Ottomans had always understood that men acted for good or ill not because they were Greek, or Serb, or peasants from Anatolia, but because they chose a path for themselves, selected the tools they wanted on their journey through life. Sometimes the choice was limited. But many a great pasha-many a grand vizier-stroking his beard in the Divan as he formulated some great policy of the state, had sprung from the humblest origins. Greeks, Bulgars, Serbs-you gave the right man good tools and he would make them work for him.

To love Greece-and hate the Greeks: only a Frank, Yashim thought, could make such a ridiculous blunder.

He thought of the man with the knife.

“What will you do now?” he had to ask.

“I will help you find the men who killed my husband,” she said. Exactly as he had expected.

Just as he’d feared.

“I have to go to the palace,” he explained. “Don’t go out.”