Jason Goodwin - The snake stone

By night Tophane drew in upon itself. The foundry fell silent; the views across the Bosphorus to the hills of Asia bled into darkness; the cargo ships creaked wearily at their moorings. No lamps were lit in the twisting alleyways, where sailors and brothel keepers, loafers and thieves jostled and cursed one another in the darkness; only flickering lanterns were hung in small windows, or at the low lintels of a doorway, guiding men to their taverns and drinking holes, to rum and raki and tired couplings on straw pallets and the sweet, cloying smell of the pipe.

Yashim let Preen lead the way.

It was in the third tavern they tried that a Maltese sailor, reddened with drink, abruptly explained to Preen his plans for the evening. Those plans included her. When Preen demurred, the Maltese smashed a bottle on the floor and went for her face with the jagged edge.

Yashim blocked the blow with his forearm, which earned him the attention of a party of Maltese sailors who were still apparently upset by the massacre of innocent men, women, and children on the island of Chios by Ottoman irregular troops sixteen years before.

“He hit me! The bastard!”

“Baby killer! You murderer!”

Yashim didn’t know what they were talking about.

They backed out of the door together.

Preen began to walk very fast downhill. The lane led away from the city and toward the waterfront. Before Yashim could call her back, the tavern door flew open and the Maltese party spilled out onto the lane.

They decided they would cut Yashim up for his part in a massacre at which none of them had been present. Some of them flicked knives open. They began to run downhill.

Yashim heard them coming.

He needed to get Preen ahead of the Maltese by one corner, a few seconds to hide.

He grabbed her arm.

At the first turning he glanced at the walls: in the dark they seemed smooth, not even offering a doorway. There was an alley running downhill again, a few yards farther on: they had to make that corner before the Maltese saw them. He spun Preen to the right.

“Baby killer! We’ll cut you!”

The alley dropped away; there were steps, of a kind. Preen and Yashim took them three at a time. They were close to the shore.

At the bottom of the steps Yashim bore around to the right: he had a vague idea that they could follow the shoreline and cut back up later.

“There he is! Get him!”

The Maltese were on the steps.

Preen stumbled and screamed.

Yashim caught her by the arm again and wrenched her around the corner.

The wall on their left dropped away: they were on the quay. Ahead he could see the upright poles of the landing stage, with a single caique resting between them.

If they could just make it to the boat-

A man came out from an alley to the right and walked toward the caique.

“Wait!” Yashim bellowed.

The man did not look around. He stepped into the caique. The rower put his hand to the oar.

Yashim and Preen were twenty yards off. The caique started forward with a lurch.

“Wait! Help!” Yashim shouted. “Help me!” he shouted in Greek.

He flung an arm around the mooring pole. The caique was ten feet out. The rower looked at Yashim, then back along the quay to where the Maltese had just appeared.

The man in the caique glanced around. He nodded to the rower and the caique slid back. Preen and Yashim rolled aboard.

As the caique shot forward again, the Maltese slowed. They jogged along the waterfront, shaking their fists.

“Baby killer!”

Yashim looked up to thank the man, and to apologize.

“We need to get a watchman here,” he said.

The man shrugged.

It was Alexander Mavrogordato.

“Thank you for stopping.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I was looking for some people,” Yashim said.

Mavrogordato glanced back at the quay. “You found them, it would seem.”

“They were the wrong people.” Yashim rubbed his forehead and took a breath. “You took me off the case.”

The young man shrugged. “Mother did.”

In the dark it was hard to tell if he was lying.

“Lefevre was already dead,” Yashim said. “You couldn’t have known that, could you?”

“Why should I care? A man like Lefevre.”

Yashim heard water dripping from the scull. “It was a coincidence, then?”

“You are in my caique,” the young man pointed out. “That looks like a coincidence, doesn’t it?”

“Perhaps. But then-I was looking for you, too.”

“You-you followed me?”

“No. But I heard that you came down here sometimes.”

“That’s not true. Who said so?”

“It’s true tonight, isn’t it?”

Alexander Mavrogordato did not reply. If he’d been smoking, Yashim thought, he sounded calm.

“Who owns the Ca d’Oro?”

The fragile boat rocked as it crossed the wake of a fisherman’s boat.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Is it one of your father’s boats?”

“Listen, friend.” Alexander leaned forward. “I don’t know the old man’s business. In six months I will be out of here, God willing.”

“Out of here? Why?”

“That’s my business,” Alexander retorted. “You wouldn’t understand. The Fener. The Bosphorus. The bazaar-you think it’s the world, don’t you? You all do. And just because the sultan makes a few changes here and there, you think you’re living in the most modern place on earth. Rubbish. Constantinople’s a backwater. You’d be surprised, efendi. The rest of the world-they laugh at us. Paris. Saint Petersburg. Why, in Athens they even have gas lighting in the streets! A lot of the streets. They have-politics, philosophy, everything. Concert halls. Newspapers. You can buy a newspaper and sit and read it in a cafe, and nobody looks twice. Just like the rest of Europe. People have opinions there.”

“And they read newspapers which have the same opinions?”

“Amazing, isn’t it? I’m going there, friend. I’ll be married, and-I’ll go.”

“Your wife-are you sure she’ll want to go?”

“My wife? She’ll do what I want, of course. I’ll give her fashionable clothes, and we’ll have dinners and go to the opera, and such like. We’ll be completely free. You wouldn’t understand.”

Yashim shook his head. The boy was right: if freedom meant taking your opinions out of newspapers and dressing up like everyone else, then it was certainly something he would never understand. A pleasure, perhaps, he would never be entitled to enjoy.

“Thank you for stopping,” he said. “You can drop us wherever you like.”

Alexander growled something that Yashim didn’t catch. Probably, he thought, it was better that way.

By day, from the water, Pera resembled a huge crustacean drawn from the sea. On the Stamboul side, there were minarets and trees; but over the Golden Horn, Galata Hill was gray and dry, encrusted with roofs, the windows of buildings overlapping as they dropped to the water’s edge. Patches of greenery still lingered, where weeds and creepers had reclaimed areas cleared out by the fire that had swept through the town four years before; but they would not linger long. Rents were on the rise; fortunes had to be made; new buildings were going up every day, and the Perotes had no use, it seemed, for trees or gardens.

Yashim walked slowly up the Grande Rue. If Pera was a sea creature, the Grande Rue was its spiny ridge, all the way from the top of the steps that led up from the waterfront to the great water tank that gave its name, Taksim, to the district beyond. It was the thoroughfare on which the foreign embassies were built; in the past decade it had become as cosmopolitan as Paris or Trieste. Yashim saw classical stone facades and big glass windows; shops here sold hats and gloves, liquor, patisseries, umbrellas, English boots. Everywhere he looked, new buildings were plundering the styles of vanished empires and lost civilizations-Egyptian motifs and Roman caryatids. It was rootless-for money has no roots-and it was profuse, eye-watering, ugly, and exciting, too, by turns.