Jason Goodwin - The snake stone

“We have long memories, though. Ideas outlive us.”

“What are you saying?” Grigor growled.

“Byzantine treasure, Grigor. The relics. I know where they are.”

The archimandrite glanced out of the window. “You, too?”

“Would you pay me for them?”

Grigor was silent for a while. “What I would or would not pay is beyond discussion,” he said at last. “It would be for the Patriarch to decide.”

“What did the Patriarch decide-the last time?”

“The last time?”

“Lefevre.”

“Ah. Monsieur Lefevre,” Grigor echoed, placing his hands flat on the table. “Doesn’t that answer your question?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I think,” Grigor said, rising, “that I will forget we ever spoke. Do you really know where the relics are?”

“I’m not even sure that they exist.”

“Believe it or not, I’m glad you said that, Yashim. For old times’ sake.”

Yashim walked slowly back to his apartment, mulling over Grigor’s words. If Grigor believed the relics did exist himself…But that was not what Grigor had said.

He turned at the market, to start uphill.

“Yashim efendi!”

Yashim stooped to the gradient.

“Yashim efendi! I knows what they takes from you-and this is not ears! What for you’s deaf today?”

He raised his head and turned around. George was standing in front of his stall, hands on his hips.

“So! You eats in lokanta this days? You forgets what is food? Little kebab, little dolma makes like shit!”

George had made a remarkable recovery, Yashim noticed.

“You sees a ghost, Yashim efendi?” George bellowed, thumping his chest. “Yes, I am a thin man now. But this stall-she is like womans! Happy womans, to see George again. So she-she is veeerrrry fat!”

Yashim strode up to George’s stall. “What happened?” he asked, gesturing to the great piles of eggplants, the cucumbers and tomatoes spilling out of baskets, a pyramid of lemons.

“Eh,” George sighed, absently scratching an armpit as he surveyed his stock. “Is mostly shit, efendi. My garden,” he added apologetically, cocking his head at a basket of outsize cucumbers curved like thin green sickles. “Today, I gives away everything for nothing.”

Yashim nodded. In the week George had been in hospital the vegetables on his plot would have run riot.

“But”-and George’s voice became hoarse with conspiracy-“I finds one beautiful thing.”

He dug around in the back of his stall and came out bearing two small white eggplants in the palm of one massive hand, a thread of miniature tomatoes in the other.

“Is very little, you see? No water.”

Yashim nodded. “These are so pretty I could eat them raw.”

George looked at him with a flash of concern. “You eats these raw,” he said, jiggling the eggplants in his hand, “you is sick at the stomach.” He shoved the vegetables into Yashim’s hands. “No lokanta, efendi. Slowly, slowly, we gets better again. You. My garden. And me, too.”

Yashim took the gift. On his way up the hill he thought: George left his garden for a week, and now he is back.

The sound of the muezzins caught him halfway up the hill. The sun was fading in the west behind him; ahead, darkness had already fallen.

Across the Horn, Yashim considered, the French ambassador would soon be writing his report.

At his door, at the top of the stairs, he paused and listened.

There was no sound: no rustle of pages being turned, no sigh. No Amelie.

Yashim pushed the door cautiously, gently, and peered into the gloom. Everything was in its place.

He went in slowly and fumbled for the lamp; and when it was lit he sat for a long time on the edge of the sofa with only his shadow for company.

Amelie had gone, leaving nothing behind. Only a sense of her absence.

After a while Yashim leaned forward, his eye drawn to his shelves.

Something else, he noticed, had changed. The Gyllius, too, was gone.

Auguste Boyer, charge d’affaires to the ambassador, had not been sleeping well. Drifting off to sleep, he would remember with a start of shame his own appearance at the courtyard window, drooling onto the cobbles: the ambassador could easily have seen him. Asleep, he dreamed of faceless men and wild dogs.

Yashim’s arrival shortly after Boyer had dressed, and before he had drunk his bowl of coffee, collided unhappily in the attache’s mind with the memory of Lefevre’s bloodless corpse.

“The ambassador cannot possibly be disturbed,” he said vehemently.

“He’s asleep?”

“Certainly not,” Boyer retorted. “Already he is settling various affairs, in discussion with embassy staff.” Like the chef, he thought: there was a luncheon planned. Provided, of course, the ambassador was awake. Boyer’s tummy began to rumble; he pulled out a small handkerchief and coughed.

“Do you happen to know if the ambassador has completed his report into the death of the unfortunate Monsieur Lefevre?”

Boyer regarded the eunuch with some distaste. “I have no idea,” he said.

Yashim still entertained a small hope of delay. “And the testimony of Madame Lefevre? Did that prove useful?”

Boyer looked at him blankly. “Madame Lefevre?”

“Amelie Lefevre. His wife,” Yashim explained. “She came here the evening before last.”

Auguste Boyer thought of his bowl of coffee, growing cold.

“Of Monsieur Lefevre,” he said, drawing himself up, “the embassy is aware. But as for Madame-no, monsieur, I am afraid that you are utterly mistaken.”

Yashim rocked slowly on his heels.

“Madame Lefevre came here to the embassy. She had been in Samnos, and she needed help to get home. To France.”

Boyer seized on Yashim’s change of tack. The ambassador’s report was beyond his jurisdiction, but this was easy.

“You are quite mistaken. This Madame Lefevre, whoever she may be, has not been seen at the embassy,” he said crisply, mentally connecting himself with his coffee and a warm croissant. “Good day, monsieur.”

He turned on his heel and strode off across the hall, leaving Yashim staring after him, a puzzled frown on his face.

Either the little diplomat was lying-or Amelie had gone somewhere else, after all. She had disappeared into the great city as suddenly as she had come, taking her little bag and a head full of dangerous new ideas. Determined, she had said, to find out who had killed her husband.

Yashim’s frown deepened. Ideas were dangerous, certainly; but men could be deadly.

Amelie Lefevre shivered as the door swung shut behind her.

She set her lantern on a low shelf, opened the glass pane, and lit the wick with a trembling hand. The air was very cold.

She held the lantern over her head, gathered up the hem of her skirts with her free hand, and began to slowly descend the spiral of water basins leading down to the mouth of the tunnel.

At the bottom she stepped into the shallow water. Drops of condensation on the lantern threw whirling freckles of light deep into the tunnel, skimming across the rough brick walls to vanish suddenly in the black wings of her own shadow on the roof.

She reached into her pocket and took out a small ball of white wax and a reel of black cotton thread. She softened the wax against the lantern and used it to fasten an end of thread to the opening of the tunnel, an inch or so above the waterline. She stood up and tucked up her skirts. Loosely holding the cotton reel in the crook of her fingers, she entered the tunnel, paying out the thread behind her.

At the first fork she veered to the right, without hesitation, but about five yards in she stopped to listen. The water sluiced softly around her feet. Instinctively she glanced back: the pressing darkness took her by surprise, and she swung the lantern nervously over her shoulder. A drip from the roof landed on the tip of her nose, and she jerked back.