He leaned into the rise in the street. Several people passed him in the opposite direction, tradesmen and apprentices on errands, two veiled women with sloshing pails of water from the pump, three schoolboys heading for the medrese, casting about for any diversion. Ahead, a simit seller with his tray balanced on his turban came over the rise.
Yashim let the man come close, then flinched.
“I don’t owe you a penny!” he exclaimed, flinging up his arm. “You’ve got the wrong man!”
With his left hand he snatched out and grabbed the bewildered simit peddler’s shirt.
The man put up his hands, instinctively.
Behind Yashim, the people strolling had stopped and turned. Not quite a crowd, but more than enough to make it hard for the stop man to see exactly what was going on.
Yashim grabbed the peddler’s hand and dragged himself back. The peddler spun, off balance. The tray tilted.
Two dogs, apparently asleep in a doorway, rose with surprising agility and dashed forward.
The buns spun from the tray.
“My simit!” the peddler cried. A dog caught a simit in midair, while the schoolboys darted at the ground.
An old man stepped out of his shop and made to catch the tray.
Twelve yards back down the street, the stop man flung his corek to the ground with an exclamation of surprise, and broke into a run.
It was no time for caution.
His quarry had disappeared.
19
At the back of the shop was a curtain, and behind the curtain a flight of wooden steps.
At the top Yashim flipped the catch on the back window, pushed the casement, and vaulted out.
It wasn’t much of a drop, because the house was built into the slope. Dodging the laundry lines, he raced along the alley. It ended in a wall. There was a water butt against the wall, and Yashim was soon over the top.
He glanced back.
The elderly shopkeeper was leaning out of his window, shaking his fist, and someone-his pursuer-was trying to get past him. The shopkeeper turned and seemed to begin arguing.
Where Yashim’s wall touched the backs of the houses on the higher street there was a latticed window, without glass. Yashim aimed a kick at the casement catch.
It broke, and as the window swung inward Yashim followed headfirst.
The three women in the room were unveiled. Their sewing froze in their laps. They stared at Yashim openmouthed as he swept through, scattering apologies.
Downstairs he found the street door bolted from inside, and a moment later he was mingling with the morning crowd making its way toward the junction.
The cab was there, drawn up beneath the steps.
Yashim sprang onto the box and fished a coin from his belt.
“If you don’t mind,” he said, dropping the money into the driver’s palm, “we can take the ferenghis home together.”
20
Akunin, the stop man, sat slumped in the corner of the cab, chewing his nails. His companion sat on the bench opposite, humming tunelessly to himself and staring at the blind drawn across the window. Whenever the cab lurched he put out his hand and steadied himself against the dry leather seat.
At the Egyptian bazaar the driver hitched his reins and brought the cab rolling to a halt.
Yashim jumped off the box and made his way to the entrance of the bazaar, where he leaned back against a pillar amid a crowd of shoppers and porters and watched the two men descend from the cab. They paid the driver and made their way to the gate to the water stairs. Yashim followed, to see them settle in silence into a caique, which shot off from the stage.
Yashim turned away to find a coffee shop where he could complete his breakfast; twenty minutes later he returned to the landing stage and took a caique himself.
“To Therapia,” he said. “The Russian residency.”
21
Prince Alexander Petrovich Galytsin was called Alexander, after the tsar; Petrovich, after his father; and Galytsin, after the family estate outside Moscow. In Istanbul, where he served as military attache to the Russian embassy, he was better known as the Fox.
He sat at his desk with his collar unbuttoned and stared unblinking at the two men who stood before him.
“You lost him,” he said quietly.
The man who had hummed hung his head and mumbled something into his beard.
“Speak up, Shishkin.”
“We-we didn’t give ourselves away, your highness.”
“Oh, wonderful.” Galytsin picked up a stiletto letter opener and balanced it between his fingers. “Now you take me for an idiot, too. Stand up.” Akunin had buckled at the knees. “I told you to take him by surprise, discreetly. You delivered the note. Three hundred yards on a dead-end street, and you lost him. And somehow you didn’t give yourselves away? Which of you took the decision to abort the mission?”
The two men stared at their feet. At last Akunin said miserably: “It was me, your highness. It’s-it’s how we were trained.”
Galytsin stared at the man. “At least you did that part right,” he said. In affairs of this kind, the crucial thing was not to disclose yourself.
“He didn’t see us, your highness. He couldn’t know who we are.”
Galytsin placed the point of the knife on his blotter and twisted it slowly. “You are dismissed, for now.”
The men bowed, touching their forelocks, and backed out of the room. Prince Galytsin’s eyes were fixed on the little hole he had bored in his blotter with the paper knife.
His secretary entered. “A Turkish gentleman, your highness. He says he is from the Porte, and wishes to speak to you.”
“What’s his name?”
“Yashim, your highness. He has no appointment.”
An expression appeared on the prince’s face that the secretary could not interpret. “Send him in.”
“With no appointment?”
Galytsin raised his eyes. The secretary disappeared.
He laid the letter opener on its leather rack and took a fresh sheet of paper from the holder.
He wrote a few words across the top of the page, and laid down his pen.
“Yashim, your highness.”
Yashim paused in the doorway. Galytsin was known to him by name, but they had never met.
“You expected me earlier, I believe.”
Galytsin looked at him curiously. “The invitation was a little clumsy. My apologies. Please, do sit down.”
