would be something between an English music hall and a Parisian revue; he had read about such places. Many people would disapprove. Yashim, if he were honest, disapproved slightly himself. But for Preen’s sake-and the sake of all her tribe-he hoped it would work.
“I came into a little extra money,” he said, holding out Alexander Mavrogordato’s purse. “Can you use it?”
Preen turned her head away. “We despise it, Yashim. You know that.” Her arm snaked out and he dropped the purse into her hand.
“Thanks. Do you want a coffee?”
“No. But I’ve got a favor to ask.”
“You surprise me. Shall we not despise the money, after all?”
“Better not. A wealthy boy, Preen. Greek, rather good-looking.”
“Mmmm.” Preen arched a delicate eyebrow. “Sash, skirts, and hairy legs, too?”
“More like lace-ups and a stambouline, I’m afraid. And whiskey breath.”
Preen turned her head and traced a pattern idly on her scalp. “Academy boy?”
“That’s my guess.” Since Greek independence ten years before, many rich Greeks had been sending their sons to be educated in Athens. “Alexander Mavrogordato. The bankers.”
“Ah, those Mavrogordatos,” Preen said roguishly, as if there were any others. Then her expression changed. “We might need the purse, at that.”
37
Yashim laid the basket on the floor and fished out three onions and a handful of zucchinis. He pulled down the chopping board and set it on the little high table where he kept his salt, rice, and dried spices. He took a sharp knife from the box beside him and honed it on an English steel that Palewski had given him once, as a surprise. Cookery wasn’t about fire: it was about a sharp blade.
He ripped the outer skin from the onion using the blunt edge of the knife. He halved it and laid the halved pairs face down, curves touching. The knife rose and fell on its point. The board gave a momentary lurch and rocked to one side; Yashim continued chopping. He swept the slices to the edge of the board. The board rocked back again. Yashim raised one edge and swept his hand beneath it, dislodging a grain of rice.
For a few moments he stared at the tiny grain, frowning slightly. Then he glanced up and poked his finger into the spaces between the rice crock and the salt cellar and the spice jars at the back of the table. A few grains of rice stuck to his fingers. He moved the crocks and jars to one side, and found several more.
Yashim rubbed the tips of his fingers together, opened the lid of the rice crock, and looked inside. It was almost full, the little scoop buried in the grain to its hilt.
He looked around the room. Everything was in order, everything left as the widow would have left it after she’d been in to clean, the shawls folded, the clothes bags dangling on a row of hooks, the jug of water standing in the bowl.
But someone else had been in here.
Searching. Looking for something small enough to be hidden in a crock of rice.
Yashim picked up a folded shawl and spread it out across the divan beneath the window. He picked up the rice jar and tipped it forward, spilling the grain onto the shawl. Nothing but a mound of rice. He looked inside the jar. It was empty.
He put the rice back into the crock with his two hands at first, and then with the little scoop. He brushed a few grains of rice off the rim and replaced the lid.
The Frenchman, Lefevre. How long had he left him on his own? Two hours, three. So he’d woken up and wanted to make something to eat.
Lefevre didn’t cook. Didn’t know olives from sheep droppings.
I believe everything I read in books.
Yashim frowned.
He went to his bookcase and looked along the shelves. The books were in no particular order, which told him nothing. Perhaps they had been disarranged, perhaps not. He tried one or two at random, and they slid out easily.
He pushed the jars back to the wall and carried on chopping the onions.
He sluiced olive oil across the base of an earthenware dish.
He halved a lemon and squeezed its juice into the oil. He dried his hands on a cloth.
He went to the bookcase and ran his finger along the middle shelf until he found the book.
It had been a gift from the sultan’s mother, the valide. She’d received it unbound, no doubt, in a thick manila wrapper. Before she passed it on she’d had it bound in imperial green leather, with the colophon of the House of Osman, an egret’s feather, worked onto the spine in gold leaf. Title and author, stamped on the spine in gold.
GORIOT-BALZAC. It was a rare gift.
At the embassy Lefevre’s satchel had contained half a dozen books. They were the very books the terrified man had spilled out apologetically across the floor, before he died. Except for one, Yashim remembered. There had been a paperbound copy of Goriot, slightly tatty around the spine, which he hadn’t seen before.
He pulled the Balzac from the shelf and opened the leather cover.
Lefevre, at least, had found a hiding place.
You hide jewels on a woman’s neck. A man can lose himself in a crowd.
Yashim sighed: the valide’s gift was ruined beyond repair.
It takes a book to hide a book.
38
Enver Xani fitted his key into the lock and pressed the door gently. Beyond the door lay a cool, dim chamber that echoed to the sound of running water. He stepped inside, grateful to escape the heat and dust of the city, and bent down to unstrap his shoes. He laid them carefully on a stone, pushed the door shut behind him, and stood waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.
The coldness of the water still surprised him. In winter, the brothers said, it seeped into your very marrow; you spent the day wet, frozen, moving between the siphons and the cisterns of the city in fur-lined boots, your hands and hair permanently clammy, the joints of your fingers and toes swollen with the cold. It wasn’t work for old men. Which was why most of the watermen took an apprentice with them on their rounds; invariably one of their own sons.
In summer one could be grateful for the chill and the darkness, for the quiet and refreshing sound of flowing water. Outside, the dust was baked in the hot streets, stirred up by the passage of many feet, untouched by the slightest breath of wind. In here, in any one of the dozen or so siphons and cisterns dotted around the city, one could step into the cool stillness of the forests, fifteen miles off, from where the water began its long, slow descent toward a thirsty capital. It was a privilege. Enver had paid well for it.
He hung the key on a hook, the way he had been shown; it certainly would not do to drop a key into the maze of channels that swirled and eddied at his feet. In three months, he had been taught everything that an apprentice could be expected to know after years of following his father on the job: only by following the rules could he perhaps make up for the experience he lacked. For the brothers, the rules were like a religious ritual; just as this siphon room was, in its way, like a church or mosque, cool and quiet amid the heat and bustle of the city.
Enver took a stick from its place on the wall and dipped it into the broad receiving tank, measuring its depth. The water from the incoming pipe flowed gently into it at one end; on the far side, in the shadow, the water brimmed against the rim of the tank, sliding noiselessly over seven shallow scoops into the distribution basins. At the appointed hour he would stop up the outlets to basins three, five and six, open the pipe to release the flow from basin two, and pass the signal down the main bore to the next man.
