“Taratir at-turkman.”He smiled.
“And that means ‘little bonnets of the Turks.’ His wife makes them, deep-fried and I dip them in clotted cream— oh, they are really too heavenly. Here, Veniero. Won’t you try one?”
But I declined and soon made excuse to leave. I hardly had patience to bid the slave merchant a decent farewell, wanting only to escape that place.
“From the palace,” Husayn mused as soon as we were out of earshot.
“What?” I asked.
“That eunuch is from the Sultan’s palace,” he elaborated. “You can tell by the tall white hat and the fur-trimmed robes.”
“Which eunuch is this?” I asked, for there was more than one for sale in that exclusive bazaar.
“The one sitting now at Abu Isa’s table. Didn’t you see him? We walked right by him on our way out. Abu Isa’s son has brought him out a narghile and he is smoking.”
I confessed my mind had been elsewhere. I turned now to take a look and found nothing much to be impressed by. Beneath the towering white hat was a man with skin that seemed as white and pasty as unbaked bread dough set to rise by the heat of his narghile. It looked as if one careless touch could deflate him.
Of what interest is an old eunuch to me? I thought as I hurried my friend along.
XVIII
“The young lady is clearly content with her new life,” Husayn insisted to me.
“It was a show she put on so her master wouldn’t beat her.”
“Abu Isa is one of the most exclusive slave dealers in all the lands of Islam. He is not such a fool as to go about injuring his merchandise.”
Husayn had paused in our progress away from the slave market in a small public square with a fountain. The square sat awkwardly on a slope and the stones paving it were so uneven that they must have been laid in the days of the Roman emperors and had no attention since.
Besides the water-bearing slaves, sweetmeat sellers, and tumbles of rowdy boys such places attract the world over, there was also a gypsy with his bear on a chain. The animal seemed a thin, torpid creature, his pelt yellow and mangy, probably whip-driven out of his natural hibernation to this spot where he blinked at the world of men in a stupefied haze. The gypsy managed—by his own strength, not the bear’s— to get the brute to sit up. But that appeared to be the only trick they knew, and for the bear this was a signal to start licking his own lurid pink genitals in a most embarrassing manner. This attracted the shrieks and hollers of the watching boys but no gain to the gypsy’s cup.
I suspect Husayn lingered so long before the spectacle hoping it would distract me. It did nothing of the sort, only increased my agitation and impatience. When my friend finally turned to lead us elsewhere and stopped to donate the first coin of the day, I slapped back his hand.
“Please,” I said, apologizing for the roughness of my action but not for the action itself. “Don’t squander a single asper of the purse that must double in size before tomorrow.”
Husayn opened his mouth to speak, but what he meant to say I never heard. Instead I saw a little brown hand slip back around the smooth cordon of his waistband, the cut strings of my friend’s purse clutched in its knobby, thin fingers.
“Stop! Thief!” I cried.
And then I had the presence of mind to remember the Turkish word for “cutpurse” and I hollered that, too. This word stuck in my mind because Husayn had told me it was one of the worst names you could call a man. It was saved for only the nastiest of altercations, even when one’s opponent had never intended a robbery.
Cupid made fleet my heels and strong my arms. So would some lyric poet describe what happened when I saw half of Madonna Baffo’s worth—the only half we had in hand—vanishing across the dirty square. I did manage to jostle Husayn out of the way, kick the naked brown feet out from under the little thief and recover the purse not an asper lighter in less time than it takes to tell about it. But the poet would not reckon on the consequence my shout of “cutpurse” had had on a square of half-formed Turks just looking for an excuse to punish the gypsy for bringing his obscenity into their midst.
The youths had swarmed together to effectively cut off the little fellow’s escape before I ever got to him. After I returned triumphant to Husayn, they closed ranks about the cutpurse and took care of the rest of justice. So potent was the sentence that the boy’s own father—I knew they were father and son by the identical gypsy wildness in their black eyes—did not stop to help him. The man slunk from the square as fast as his chain could drag the bear, which was not very fast at all. The bear, the only creature around the fountain that had not understood my “cutpurse” cry, was much too fascinated by his sitting posture to collect his feet again.
Husayn discovered something lyrical in my actions, however, for after he’d thanked me with such Turkish profusion that it cramped his Venetian, he stood considering the purse with its frayed strings for quite some time in silence.
He smoothed the corners of his moustache down into his beard and then at last he said, “You are convinced that purchasing the young lady’s freedom is the thing worth most to you?
“The most important thing in the world.” I panted the words, not because I was still winded by the rescue—though I wouldn’t mind if that’s what he thought—but in an attempt to bridle my impatience. This short, round, domesticated Syrian could not catch the desperation of the case!
“There is a way we might—” he mused.
“Well, why for the love of Saint Mark do you hesitate?”
Saint Mark made no impression
