Palewski raised an eyebrow and sucked the end of his thumb. “For hundreds of years,” he said, “Istanbul’s people lived in peace together. That started to change after ’21,” he said thoughtfully.
“The rioting against the Greeks.”
“Riot. Massacre. Whatever, Yashim. Hanging the Patriarch.”
“Driving out the old Phanariot dynasties.”
Palewski frowned. “More than that, Yashim. Fear and mistrust. They hanged the Patriarch from the gate of his own church; then they got the Jews to cut his body down. They say the Jews cut it up to feed to the dogs. I doubt it, frankly. But that isn’t what matters. The Turks were afraid. They turned on the Greeks. The Greeks were afraid. Now they hate the Jews. Everything changed.”
Yashim nodded.
“Then the Janissary business five years afterward,” Palewski added. “End of a tradition.”
“It didn’t take long for the new men to appear, did it?” Yashim leaned forward. “Mavrogordato. Did he arrive here before, or after, the Janissary affair?”
Palewski picked up a napkin. “Before, I’d swear. He was in Istanbul by ’24, at the latest.”
“Mavrogordato couldn’t have known Meyer, then?”
Palewski considered the question. “Meyer was at Missilonghi in 1826, but Mavrogordato was here in Istanbul, getting rich and keeping his head down.”
“Hmmm. When Lefevre—Meyer—visited Mavrogordato the other day, he got an unsecured loan. Why not? French, archaeologist, very respectable. But whatever Lefevre told the banker, it upset Madame. It made her— curious. She called me in, remember?”
“You said she was confused.”
Yashim nodded. “Mavrogordato had never seen Meyer. Madame hadn’t seen Lefevre. She only had her husband’s account of their meeting—and his description of the man who came asking for money.”
“And?”
Yashim glanced out of the window. “She began to suspect.”
Palewski had picked up his eclair, but he set it down again. “Suspect? You mean—that Lefevre was a phony?”
“Lefevre said something that made Mavrogordato give him money. And Madame to wonder who Lefevre really was.”
“Go on.”
“She wondered if he might be Dr. Meyer.”
“Madame Mavrogordato? She knew Meyer?”
“Mavrogordato, you see, wasn’t at Missilonghi.” Yashim drained his cup. “She was.”
“And met Meyer?”
The door to the street opened with a jangle of bells, and a man with shiny whiskers and a black cane came in: it was just like Paris.
“Better than that,” Yashim said. “She married him.”
Palewski groaned and buried his face in his hands.
Yashim looked through the big glass window. Farther up the street, the door of Millingen’s house opened and closed again, and a man in the livery of a servant ran lightly down the steps with a basket in his hand. The crowd was very dense, and the servant lifted the basket and set it on his shoulder.
“Compston told me that Meyer seduced a Greek woman at Missilonghi,” Yashim explained. “Lord Byron made him marry her.”
Yashim followed the bobbing basket through the crowd: the man was going to the market.
Palewski shook his head. “That may be true. But it doesn’t mean that she was the woman we know as Madame Mavrogordato.” He frowned. “She couldn’t be—her son, Alexander, must be at least twenty years old.”
“If he is her son.”
“No—but! Yashim, you told me yourself, Alexander’s the spitting image of her.”
“She’s his aunt. Monsieur Mavrogordato is her brother.”
“Brother?”
Yashim stirred the envelope with a finger. “I got Compston to do a little research for me. He dug up the name of Meyer’s wife, and guess what?”
“It was Mavrogordato?”
“Christina Mavrogordato. She’s living with her brother and his son.”
Palewski sat hunched over his eclair. After a few moments he raised his head.
“But why?”
“I think what happened was this. Meyer escaped Missilonghi—and abandoned her. Somehow she survived the massacre and made her way to Istanbul, where her brother was already doing very well. He was a widower—he had a child, Alexander, living in Chios. Alexander needed a mother.”
