He reached out for the slender green bottle at his elbow and rolled it gratefully around his forehead. The residency cellars were very deep, and very old, and impervious to the temperatures outside. He sighed and put the bottle down again.
A flying beetle whizzed past his nose and flung itself with a ping! at the glass mantle of the oil lamp. Palewski reached forward and in one swift motion caught the insect in his hand. He moved the book from his lap, leaned out the window, and hurled the beetle into the night air.
As he did so, he noticed two figures slip between the iron gates below and approach the front door.
“We aren’t buying anything tonight, thank you!” he shouted down to them.
“It’s me, Yashim! May we come in?”
“You? Well then, yes. Come in! I mean-wait. I’ll have to unlock the doors first,” he added, a little more loudly.
Yashim grinned in the dark. He knew perfectly well that the Polish residency was scarcely ever locked; there was no point, as Palewski often remarked. The old-fashioned mansion had declined over the years, so that a child might have climbed in through the slipping sashes, or popped the bolts on the garden door. But it was sensible to keep up appearances.
Palewski shot the bolts on the front door, and in the lamplight Kadri saw a man of about fifty-five, with curling gray hair and a loose cravat. Very tall, he was wearing a plum-colored waistcoat with unmatched buttons, long trousers, and a pair of worn velvet slippers.
“Come in, by all means,” he said, “and bring your friend. Is it late? I rather think Marta must have gone to bed.”
Yashim stepped into the hall, and Kadri closed the door behind them. Yashim made introductions.
“Capital! Splendid! Are you hungry? Well, never mind. It wouldn’t do to go hungry.” He glanced at Kadri. “I was always hungry at that age. There’ll be cheese and things in the pantry. You go on upstairs, Yash, and take your young friend with you.”
With that he turned and went off down a corridor, leaving his visitors in total darkness.
Yashim chuckled. “I know the way. Mind the stairs-best keep to the side, the carpet can be a bit loose.”
They groped their way up the stairs and reached the drawing room, where their eyes grew sufficiently accustomed to make out the low shapes of the armchairs and the fainter oblongs of the open windows.
Kadri sniffed the air. “It smells different,” he said. “I like it, though.”
It smelled, Yashim thought, of beeswax and old books. “I like it, too,” he announced to the dark.
They heard Palewski coming upstairs, and finally the lamp came into the room.
“Sorry to leave you in the dark. I forgot.” He put the lamp on a sideboard and lowered a tray down beside it, laden with a wedge of white cheese and a bowl of olives.
“Best I could do,” he added, waving Kadri toward the tray. “Someone must be raiding the pantry in the night.” He paused. “Me, I suppose. Help yourselves.”
He picked up a spill from the mantelpiece and lit it at the oil lamp. Soon the room glowed in the light of several lamps and a few candles strategically placed in front of the mottled pier glasses that stood between the windows.
Kadri’s eyes were round with interest as the unfamiliar room sprang into view, moving from the violin on the sideboard to the fireplace armchairs and the shelves that lined the farther wall.
“I’m afraid the books are a bit of a muddle,” Palewski explained. “Trying out a new arrangement. Found a curious treatise on Roman law, never seen it before. Moldy stuff, well past its best. Turns out my father wrote it. Do sit down.”
He gestured to the armchairs. Yashim took the one he liked, with the stuffing coming out of the seat; Kadri, slightly bemused, settled for the arm of the other.
“I didn’t know the palace boys were allowed out,” Palewski remarked cheerfully.
Kadri’s head sank. “No. It is forbidden.”
Palewski glanced over at Yashim, who gave an almost imperceptible shrug.
“Kadri has just run away, for a while,” he said.
Palewski nodded, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Do have some more cheese, Kadri. As for you, Yashim, let me find you a glass.”
“What is that?” Kadri pointed to the green bottle that Palewski had just picked up.
“Glad you asked. Late vintage Riesling.” He poured some into a stemmed glass and handed it to Yashim. “Not the usual stuff, Yashim. Piesporter-southern bank of the Moselle,” he added, leaning an elbow on the mantelpiece and holding his own glass up to the light. “Spatlese-noble rot, Kadri. Bishop of Fulda, I recall. Von Bibra. Heinrich? Helmuth? Plums, figs, late summer, all that sort of thing. I ran into a whole case of the stuff at Macarios’s, God knows how. He thought it was some sort of German beer.”
Kadri looked surprised. “It is alcohol?”
Palewski raised an eyebrow. “Slate and sunshine, Kadri. It’s late summer in the mountains-green mountains, where it rains early in the year.” He drew Kadri’s attention to a colorless bottle standing on the sideboard. “That, young man, is alcohol.”
“It is forbidden,” the boy said, primly.
“It is certainly forbidden to boys,” Palewski agreed. “Like running away from school.”
Kadri smiled shyly, and lowered his eyes.
“Kadri didn’t exactly run,” Yashim pointed out. “He jumped.”
Kadri’s eyes flickered toward Yashim.
“He got out through a window. The window,” Yashim added, “was thirty feet above the ground.”
“Ah. The old knotted sheet routine,” Palewski murmured, approvingly.
“No sheets were missing.”
“A ledge.”
“No ledge.”
Palewski cast his eyes at the ceiling. “Wings?”
Yashim shrugged. “Sometimes the impossible is the only possibility.”
Kadri looked away and bit his lip; he lifted his chin slightly, instincts of pride and reserve warring in his expression.
“I couldn’t work it out,” Yashim said, “until I caught you, in the tree.”
The boy looked around and smiled.
“Your tutor said you could run. He didn’t tell me you can jump as well. It’s a talent, Kadri.”
“But not one recognized by the school, perhaps,” Palewski interjected.
Kadri scratched his burred head. “Before Hamdi Bey took me I lived in the mountains, efendim. On my own, I mean. There was an earthquake when I was in the fields. My family was at home. My uncle wanted to take me in, but he-that is, we-” He swallowed. “He was a hard man. I survived in the mountains. I didn’t want to be caught.”
“Good for you,” Palewski said.
“There were stones, and columns, and rocks.” Kadri shrugged. “I lived like a goat.”
“But thirty feet…”
Kadri grinned. “It’s not so far across the gap to the other side.”
“But still ten feet, at least. And the lane between the refectory and the mosque is even wider, I imagine.”
“I can run and jump,” the boy repeated. “It’s mostly about knowing how to land, I think.”
“And from the mosque?”
“I used the minaret, Yashim efendi. It’s small, like a tree. I swung around it, onto the wall, and off the wall onto the rooftop beyond. I didn’t even break a tile.”
“Scuttling across the rooftops? What fun!” Palewski raised his glass in salute. “And how, if I may ask, did you two find each other?”
Yashim laughed. “Kadri found my sandwich.”
Palewski raised an eyebrow, and Yashim explained.
“I just put myself in the right place,” he added finally. “The palace school takes you up and up, and away from the world. It’s like climbing beyond the tree line.”
