“The note was in Italian?”
“Venetian, ustadh,” she teased with pretended formality.
I didn’t need to ask whose hand. “What did she say?”
“Only two words. Tomorrow. And afternoon.”
“That was all it said?”
My lady nodded. “I fear I have much to learn in your language. I cannot fathom sense from just two words.”
“No better than I,” I said.
That was all the attention my lady chose to give to the matter, turning now to the ever-new delight of her daughter once she had placed the information in my hands.
So I was left alone to mull the message over. My mind raced. Close in the Kira’s bosom, then, these two words were making their way out of the harem and to—where? I couldn’t unravel that end of it, so I retreated to the other end again.
Only one hand could have written those words. I might have seen the feathery hand myself and recognized it as the same that had scribbled “Si” in the stateroom aboard my dearly departed uncle’s galley so long ago. Or from a love note I’d intercepted even before that on a fateful winter’s night in Venice. Yes, only one writer, but there were thousands of possible recipients in Constantinople alone. And what, exactly, did those words mean?
Assuming no clandestine meeting could take place in the harem, the next afternoon I wandered on the off chance into the suq where the Kira and her husband had their shop.
II
The corbeled roof of Constantinople’s Great Bazaar palled the shops with gloom. Every merchant gave his most dazzling wares place of pride beneath his open grille. Here the goods astonished the alley’s steep inchne between one bulging corner and the murk of the next. But in that light and in such quantities, gold and brass were revealed as yellow, cheap, and tarnished things compared to natural air and illumination.
And when I spied Safiye’s eunuch Ghazanfer walking down the same street at the same time with my same pretended nonchalance, I knew it could not be coincidence. I dove into the shop next door to the Jews’ and waited for him to pass.
“Yes, please?” The shopkeeper came forward to greet me with a bow.
“Uh—” I stammered clumsily, unsure of how to respond.
In that moment, I happened to look up on the man’s wall and see a highly polished brass vase. It was set at such an angle that, reflected in it, I could see a good fifty paces up the street in the other direction. And whom should I see, slowly, coincidentally, making his way down the street, around the belly of the vase, but Andrea Barbarigo, the young Venetian attaché.
“This I simply must hear!” I exclaimed aloud and then turned instantly to the shopkeeper. “Has your shop a loft upstairs?”
“Yes,” the man replied, but almost with a question. I didn’t want to see any of his brass lavers or fine, encrusted goblets?
“Does it communicate with the shop next door?”
A slight smile came to his thin lips. I was not the first who had ever asked him that, but I had no time to demand particulars. “Yes,” he said, smiling. “There used to be a door, actually, but—”
“Five ghrush to use that room for the next hour.”
“My usual price is twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five!” I exclaimed. “That’s robbery!”
“It is a very good room,” he insisted quietly, and laid a finger across his lips to indicate that discretion went into the bargain.
“I’ll give you fifteen.”
“This way, ustadh/’he said, and led me instantly upstairs.
The room was tiny, windowless, and cramped with dusty stock. There was hardly space for a man to sit. The arched doorway of which the shopkeeper had spoken was, like many such openings in the maze of old Constantinople, no more than chest high. It had been remodeled over centuries and finally boarded up, but more solidly at first than now. A difference in color told me that some boards had been recently removed. This led me to discover a cleverly camouflaged chink through which I had a perfect view of Ghazanfer and the Kira, who had just brought him a narghile to smoke.
I looked back at my host in amazement. His smile told me—if anything, for it was very tight-lipped—to recall that Italians were not the only ones who knew what a source of information Moshe and his wife were.
I handed the merchant his money, thinking I’d gotten the better of the deal. The man smiled, bowed, and left the room. Presently he returned with two glasses of sherbet and a cushion for me to sit on. He was so attentive that the scene that followed might have been played in public in the Divan, and I might have been legally, comfortably in attendance throughout.
Ghazanfer’s name means bold lion, as odd a name for a eunuch as my Abdullah was. Our mistresses usually favor such atrocities as Hyacinth or—as my lady had wanted ‘til I talked her out of it that first day of our acquaintance—Lulu.
Ghazanfer’s size was due to fat rather than muscle. Still, he was as strong as an ox, a monster of a man grotesquely scarred by some history I did not know. His hands looked as if every finger had been tortured and crushed, though he could still crack walnuts between them. His broken nose (and maybe the cheekbones had gone in the same disaster), straggly hair, and sallow skin gave him a decidedly Mongolian appearance and recalled to mind some cruel aberration of the lithe, swift riders of the steppes. Because of the operation, Ghazanfer was as beardless as a girl, which not only added to his appearance as one from the Asian steppe, but was startling whenever one came upon him in a group of men.
Yet I knew he was not Mongolian. His hair under that tall white turban was lion-tawny, his eyes blue with hard chips of green.
