Yashim did not challenge the men who met him; or the women. With his kind face, gray eyes, dark curls barely touched, at forty, by the passage of the years, Yashim was a listener; a quiet questioner; and not entirely a man. Yashim was a eunuch.
He took his coffee propped up on one elbow, and ate the corek, brushing the crumbs from his mustache.
Deciding against having a pipe with his coffee, he left a silver piastre on the tray and walked down the street toward the Grand Bazaar.
At the corner he turned and glanced back, just in time to see the cafe owner pick up the coin and bite it. Yashim sighed. Bad money was like poison in the bowels, an irritant that Istanbul could never rid itself of. He hefted his purse and heard the dry rustle of his fortune susurrate between his fingertips: this was one of those times when currency seemed to melt like sugar in the hand. But sugar was sweet. The sultan was dying, and there was bitterness in the air.
In the Street of the Booksellers, Yashim stopped outside a little shop belonging to Goulandris, who dealt in old books and curiosities; sometimes he stocked the French novels that Yashim found hard to resist.
Goulandris fixed his visitor with his one good eye and ground his teeth. Goulandris was not one of your forward, pushy Greeks; his job as a bookseller was to watch, not speak. One of his eyes was filmed with cataracts; but the other did the work of two, recording the way a customer moved, the speed with which he selected a certain book, the expression on his face as he opened it and began to read. Old books, new books, Greek books, Turkish books-and precious few of those-books in Armenian and Hebrew and even, now and then, in French: Dmitri Goulandris stocked them as and when they came to him, pell-mell. Books did not interest him. But how to price a book-that was another matter. And so, with his one good eye, he watched the signs.
But the eunuch-he was good. Very good. Goulandris saw a wellset gentleman in early middle age, his black hair faintly touched with gray beneath a small turban, wearing a soft cloak of an indeterminate color. Goulandris believed that he could penetrate any of the ruses that people used to throw him off the scent-the feigned indifference, the casual addition, the artfully contrived and wholly careless impulse. He listened to what they said. He watched the way their hands moved, and the flicker of their eyes. Only the damned eunuch remained a constant puzzle.
“Are you looking for a book?”
Yashim lifted his head from the page he was reading and looked around. For a moment he was puzzled; he had been far away with Benjamin Constant, a French writer whose single slim novella laid bare the agonies of love unfulfilled. Adjusting his gaze, Yashim found himself in the familiar cubbyhole in the Grand Bazaar, with the walls lined with books from floor to ceiling, the dim lamp and Goulandris himself, the bookseller, in a dirty gray fez, cross- legged on his stool behind a Frankish desk. Yashim smiled. He was not going to buy this book, Adolphe. He closed it softly and slid it back into its place on the shelf.
Yashim bowed, one hand to his chest. He liked this place, this little cave of books: you never knew what you might find. Goulandris, he suspected, had no idea himself: he doubted if he could do more than read and write in Greek. And today, hugger-mugger with the Frankish textbooks on ballistics, the old imperial scrolls bearing a sultan’s beautiful calligraphic tugra, the impenetrable Greek religious tracts, the smattering of French novels Yashim so enjoyed-there, bizarre as it was, a treasure that caught his eye. It had not been there last month. It might not be there the next.
Half smiling to himself, Yashim slid the book out; then he carefully reached up and took down Adolphe again. He hesitated a little over his third choice, choosing-at random-something French, all the while feeling Goulandris’s eye fixed firmly on his movements. Slightly too casually, he hoped, he slipped it to the bottom of the pile as he placed the books on the desk.
Goulandris sucked his lips. He did not haggle or offer arguments. He suggested prices. Yashim failed to suppress a flicker of disappointment as Goulandris solemnly priced the third book just a shade beyond his reach. Left with two, he put out a hand and picked up Adolphe. The bookseller glanced suspiciously from the book in Yashim’s hand to the book on the desk.
The book on the desk was fatter. It had more writing in it. But the thin book was in the eunuch’s hand.
“Twelve piastres,” Goulandris growled, placing a stubby finger on the book in front of him.
Yashim delved into his purse. He put Adolphe back on the shelf and, with a nod to the old man in his dirty fez, stepped out into the Street of the Booksellers, hugging to his chest volume 1 of Careme’s L’Art de la Cuisine Francaise au 19 me Siecle.
At the bottom of the hill he turned toward the market.
Yashim saw the fishmonger staring stonily at his scales as he weighed out a bass for an elderly matriarch. Two men were haggling over a bunch of carrots. Bad money bred suspicion, Yashim thought. And then he smiled again, thinking of George at his vegetable stall. George always had good ideas for supper. George had no truck with suspicion. George was a cussed old Greek and he would simply growl and say the money was shit.
He looked ahead. George wasn’t there.
“He’s not coming in no more, efendi,” an Armenian grocer explained. “Some kind of accident’s what I heard.”
“Accident?” Yashim thought of the vegetable seller, with his big hands.
The grocer turned his head and spat. “They come up yesterday, said George wouldn’t be here no more. One of the Constantinedes brothers to get his pitch, they says.”
Yashim frowned. The Constantinedes brothers wore identical pencil mustaches and were forever on the move behind their piles of vegetables, like dancers. Yashim had always stuck with George.
“Efendi! What can we do for you today?” One of the brothers bent forward and began to arrange a pile of eggplants with quick flicks of his wrist. “Fasulye today at last year’s price! One day only!”
Yashim began to assemble his ingredients. Constantinedes weighed out two oka of potatoes and tumbled them into Yashim’s basket, replacing the scoop on the scales with a flourish.
“Four piastres, twenty-twenty-twenty-eighty-five the potatoes-five-oh-five-and anything else, efendi?”
“What’s happened to George?”
“Beans today-yesterday’s prices!”
“They say you’re going to take over his pitch.”
“Five-oh-five, efendi.”
“An oka of zucchinis, please.”
The man picked the zucchinis into his scoop.
“I heard he had an accident. How did it happen?”
“The zucchinis.” As Constantinedes tilted the scoop over Yashim’s basket, Yashim gripped it by the edge and gently raised it level again.
“I’m a friend of his. If he’s had an accident, I may be able to help.”
Constantinedes pursed his lips thoughtfully.
“I can ask the kadi,” Yashim said, and let go of the scoop. The kadi was the official who regulated the market. The zucchinis rained down into the basket. “Keep the change.”
The man hesitated, then scooped up the two coins without looking at them and dropped them into the canvas pouch at his waist.
“Five minutes,” he said quietly.
4
Yashim stirred his coffee and waited for the grounds to settle. Constantinedes tilted the cup against his lips. “We all got a choice. We don’t want aggravation, see?”
“Yes. Is George all right?”
“Maybe. I don’t ask.”
“But you’ll take over his pitch.”
“Listen. This was between them and George. Keep us out of it. I’m talking to you because you was his friend.”
“Who are they, then?”
