The Snake Stone

74

The boy walked fast, without turning his head. When they struck the crowds, Yashim stumbled against a porter too tired and overburdened to complain as the boy darted through a cloud of women in charshafs ambling, ample-hipped, along the waterfront.

Yashim dodged around them instead, craning his neck to keep his eyes on the boy’s shaved head. A willowy girl with a shawl across her head and face stepped between them, and for a moment he lost sight of him. But no, there he was again, his shoulders stooped against the sea of people coming down the Horn, stubbornly making his way through without a backward glance as if he were afraid a spell would break.

Yashim wondered if the boy remembered he was following him. They crossed the bazaar quarter. In front of the Patriarchate at Fener the crowd thinned. The little boy flung himself uphill, following a maze of alleys where Fener gave way to the Jewish settlement at Balat to reach the summit. There, not half a mile from Yashim’s home, and about fifty yards shy of the hilltop on the farther side, he stopped and looked around for the first time.

Yashim caught up with him, panting from the effort.

“You move fast,” he said. “I had no idea we were going so far.”

The little boy’s eyes slid from Yashim’s face to a low, whitewashed building across the street, and back again. Yashim turned his head to look. There were no windows, only an outside staircase made of stone, with a rendered balustrade, climbing from the street to a small wooden door.

The boy heaved himself up onto a low wall and sat, kicking his legs, with his chin in his hands, looking at the door. Something easy and practiced about the movement made Yashim think he had done it many times before. Finding a place to sit, swinging his legs, watching. Waiting.

Yashim glanced back at the little door, high up in the blank wall across the street.

“It’s through there, is it?”

The taut little face didn’t move.

“Stay here, then. I’ll be back in a minute.”

The boy’s glance dropped to the ground. Stay here. Is that what Xani used to say? Were those the words his father used?

Yashim glanced about. The street was empty. He crossed to the stairs and climbed up. At the top he looked around. The boy was gone.

Beyond, over the roofs, he could see where the hillside dropped to the ancient walls of the city, those great brick-banded walls that had been built by the emperors a thousand years before, and beyond them the hills of the Belgrade Forest.

The door was bolted, the hasp secured by an iron padlock.

Yashim hesitated. He glanced back to the wall where the boy had sat, and reached into his shirt.

Long ago, in another life, Grigor the archimandrite had shown him how to pick a lock. Yashim slid the bolts and the door swung open without a sound.