But that was only the beginning. You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that everyone would see the folly of the foreigners? But no: the Egyptians tried to be more like them. They’d seen how the French had gone about, behaving like the masters in the dominion of the sultan. They put it down to the trousers, to the special guns the French had left behind, to the way the French soldiers had marched and wheeled, fighting like a single body in the desert, even while they were dropping like flies.
New ways. New stuff which came out of little books. People always scribbling and scribbling, sticking their noses into books until their eyes went red with the effort. Pretending to understand the French gibberish.
Napoleon. He’d killed the French king, hadn’t he? Invaded the Domain of Peace. Thrown sand in the eyes of his own men and all the world. Why else could no one see what was going on? And these jewels—were we to sell ourselves for baubles?
Valuable as they are.
It was a pity that the girl had seen. That killing had been an unexpected duty, and dangerous. Perhaps an over- reaction. She might have seen nothing, understood nothing. Other things on her mind. A secret smile of triumph and expectation on her pretty face. Nothing like the bewilderment with which she fought for breath, seeing whose hands lay around her neck. The hands which had taken the jewels.
Ah, well, there were the others. In here it paid to act swiftly, without remorse.
A ball of spit landed on the lapis and began to trail slowly down the upright of the letter N.
[ 23 ]
Preen felt the ouzo scorch the back of her throat and then plummet like something alive into the pit of her empty stomach. She set the glass back on the low table, and selected another.
“To the sisters!”
A round of little glasses swayed in the air, chinked, and were tossed back by five raven-haired, slightly raddled- looking girls. One of them hiccupped, then yawned and stretched like a cat.
“Time’s up,” she said. “Beauty sleep.”
The others cackled. It had been a good evening. The men, silent while the kocek danced, had showed their appreciation in time-honoured fashion by slipping coins beneath the seams of their costume as they danced close. You couldn’t always tell, but the house had looked clean and the gentlemen sober. Some reunion, she never found out exactly what.
She liked her gentlemen sober, but after a performance she didn’t mind getting a little drunk herself. They’d asked the carriage to drop them off at the top of the street which led down to the waterfront, and teetered away into the dark until they reached the door of a tavern they knew. It was Greek, of course, and full of sailors. That in itself was no bad thing, Preen thought with a ghost of a smile, for as it happened there were two of them throwing surreptitious glances at them now and then, two young, rather handsome boys she didn’t know. Only fishermen from the islands, but still…
Two other girls decided to leave, but Preen thought she’d prefer to stay. Just her and Mina, together. Another drink, maybe.
She was having her second when the sailors made their move. They were from Lemnos, as she’d guessed, and they had shifted a big catch at the morning market, a little tight themselves on their last night in town and with money to spend. After a few minutes, Preen noticed the man’s sunburnt hand moving towards her leg. Go on! she smiled.
But out of the corner of her eye she saw a small, slightly hunchbacked man with a pockmarked face enter the tavern. Yorg was one of the port pimps, one of the weaselly crowd who accosted newly arrived seamen and offered them cheap lodgings, a visit to their sister or, if it seemed safe, a free drink at their place. Yorg’s place, of course, was a brothel where haggard girls from the countryside turned trick after trick, night after night, until they were either let loose on the streets or bumped off and dumped into the Bosphorus. They were part of the human detritus that floated around the docks and the men who sailed from them; their life expectancy was short.
Preen shuddered. Very gently she brushed away the hand which had just settled on her thigh, put a finger to the sailor’s lips and slipped past him, with a flash of an elegant waist. He’d hold, she thought. Right now, she had a little job to do.
A girl doesn’t like to break her promises.
[ 24 ]
There’s a section of Istanbul, right up under the city walls at the head of the Golden Horn, which has never been fully built up. Perhaps the ground is too steep for building on, perhaps in the days of the Byzantines it was forbidden to build so close to the palace of the Caesars; so it had lingered on into the beginning of the nineteenth century as a sort of ragged wilderness, planted with rocks and scrubby trees.
