She gave a brittle laugh. “He didn’t run from the tables, Commissario.”
There was a knock on the door. “Avanti!”
Scorlotti, Brunelli’s assistant, entered the room hesitantly. He saw the contessa and bowed.
“Something to report, Commissario.”
Brunelli took Scorlotti aside and they spoke together in low voices.
“That’s all, Scorlotti. Thank you.” When the policeman had gone, he turned again to the contessa.
“I think that’s everything for the moment.”
“For the moment?”
“Unless there’s anything else you wish to tell me now. About Barbieri, perhaps.” He paused. “Or anything-I don’t know, unusual about last night?”
Something, he thought, changed momentarily in the contessa’s expression.
He waited, patient as a cat at a mousehole.
“I–I can’t think of anything,” she admitted.
He sensed her reluctance. “It might be anything-even trivial. A remark? A guest who didn’t show up as usual?”
“No. Not quite that,” she said slowly. She put up a hand and began to twine one of her curls around her finger. “An American. He wasn’t feeling very well, I think.”
“He lost at cards?”
“No, no. He left long before-” Her eyes widened. “He left before the count.”
Brunelli was silent for a while. “And the American’s name, Contessa?”
But he knew the answer to his question already.
31
Yashim pushed the door onto a tiny cobbled courtyard. There were pots of rosemary and sage against the whitewashed walls, and a lemon tree grew in the corner, throwing shade over a table and a wooden bench. Beyond the tree was a long wooden screen with slender glazing bars painted blue, which reminded Yashim of a teahouse he had visited once, in Tashkent.
A cage hung from the tree, and in it was a little bird.
Yashim leaned his back to the door and smiled to himself. Through the glass he could see the calligrapher’s pens and brushes standing in pots on the windowsill.
He crossed the yard and knocked tentatively on the half-glazed door. Nobody came, so he leaned his arms against the glass and peered inside. Books lined the walls. There was a low carpeted divan scattered with cushions and in front of it a long table with a big oil lamp at one end. There was a block of paper on the table, with some pens and a bottle of ink. By the ink was a little wooden box. There was a door at the back of the room that was closed. It was blue, like the screen.
It looked like a working room-a tranquil studio. There was no sign of anyone working. Yashim tried the door, but it was locked.
He took a few steps back and saw the bench against the wall. He sat down.
Then the street door opened.
32
She had let her scarf drop before she caught sight of Yashim. Now she snatched it and pulled it across her face, but not before Yashim had seen the same high cheekbones and the big mouth he remembered from fifteen years before; her eyes were her mother’s, he supposed.
He stood up.
“Forgive me, hanum. I am Yashim lala — I met Yamaluk efendi at the Topkapi Palace, many years ago.”
She hesitated with the scarf. Lala was the honorific Yashim often used: guardian, uncle, it was given to a certain class of men who were not exactly men. And Meliha hanum was herself no dimpled maiden. Stouter and shorter than her father, she was a mother and a grandmother, too. But she knew the ways of the palace.
She let the scarf drop.
“You gave me a fright, Yashim lala, sitting there,” she said. “I thought you were my father.”
“I am sorry, hanum, I did not mean to intrude. When no one answered the door, I looked inside. I am afraid I was overcome by the beauty of this place.”
“It is-very tranquil.” She sounded uneasy.
“I had hoped to speak to your esteemed father,” Yashim said hurriedly. He felt awkward. “Please. I can come another time.”
Meliha hanum closed the street door and took a few steps into the courtyard. “I have not seen you before, Yashim efendi. Are you a friend of his?”
“We have met, hanum. I come as a friend.”
“Yamaluk efendi passed away a month ago.”
“My condolences, hanum. I am sorry to hear it.”
A silence gathered between them.
“The peace of God be with him. I did not mean to intrude upon your grief.” He moved past her, toward the door.
“It is no intrusion. He was an old man,” she said. “I–I could show you the room he worked in.”
There was a pride in her voice. Yashim turned.
“I would be honored,” he said simply.
“My name is Meliha,” she said. “My mother died giving birth to Matun, my little brother. He died when he was eight years old. I was fourteen.”
As she turned to unlock the door, Yashim began to understand. Yamaluk had been her father and her mother. Yet she would have had to look after him, too.
“This is the knife for the brushes. This dawat — the inkpot-is of Persian lacquer. We kept the best paper here, away from the sunlight.” So she guided him around the room, pointing out the articles of her father’s craft, touching them with her strong fingers.
A calligrapher’s fingers: she had her father’s hands.
“I’m told your father did some of his best work after he retired from Topkapi,” Yashim remarked. “As if he had rediscovered his energy.”
“It’s not for me to say,” she said quickly. “He liked it here.”
“Did you grind his pigments for him, Meliha hanum?”
She didn’t reply. Yashim bent over the paper on the table and was struck immediately by the fluid strength of line, the beautiful and painstaking coloring of the margins. He recognized the sura; it was from the Koran.
He took a breath. The ink, he thought, was still fresh.
“Is it forbidden,” he asked slowly, “for a woman to transcribe the word of God, when she does it as well as any man?”
Their eyes met.
“It is not forbidden,” she said. “But I did it for him.”
Yashim dropped his gaze. Yamaluk had trained his daughter; she had equaled him. Now Yamaluk was dead and this might be her last Koran.
He looked around in silence. Yamaluk-or his daughter-worked in patterns, too, transcribing beautifully colored geometric designs. Yashim knew that they represented the mysteries of Creation and were attempts to reveal an underlying form. The Iznik tiles he had rescued drew on the same tradition.
He stopped in front of an iridescent pattern of twelve flowers blooming at the edges of a circle.
“The Tree of Life,” Meliha said, smiling.
