Jason Goodwin - The snake stone

Before it was six inches wide, Yashim paused and put his eye to the crack.

He was looking across an expanse of cracked and polished marble toward a vast barred window, about fifteen yards away. The light hurt his eyes. Looking up, he saw a domed ceiling. Something about the scale of the building and the dusty blackness of its walls reminded him of someplace, but for a moment he could not imagine where he was.

He pushed again. The wall, he saw, was mounted on a pivot, so that as one end swung out the other swung inward. Soon he was able to squeeze himself into the gap and use his back and legs to turn the stone, and it was then that it rushed in upon him.

They had found a way into Aya Sofia.

Not on the ground floor, and nowhere near the old high altar. The spiral stairs had been built inside one of the vast pillars that supported the great dome, and they were emerging much higher up, in the deserted gallery that stretched out beneath the quarter domes of the greatest building of the ancient world.

Faisal al-Mehmed ran his eyes along the low shelves that surrounded him in his booth outside the Great Mosque, and shook his head. So many shoes! In weather like this, everyone wanted to go into the mosque; nobody wanted to come out. But as soon as the rain stopped they would rush upon him, demanding to have their shoes again, causing confusion.

Faisal al-Mehmed abhorred confusion, in a holy precinct above all.

A movement in the crowd made him look around. A man and a woman he didn’t remember seeing before were emerging from the doorway, into the torrential rain, and already, he noticed, they were soaking wet. The woman could barely walk: the man had one arm around her, and in the other he held her hand.

Faisal ran a hand down his beard and nodded. So many people came to this mosque without a pious thought-merely, even, to shelter from the rain. Where was the piety, in using a mosque as shelter? True piety was oblivious to rain.

Faisal smiled a benediction on the couple, for in his heart he understood that they possessed Enthusiasm.

When Yashim woke it was late. The thunderstorms had cleared away as if they had never been, and a hot afternoon sun was already tracing a pattern of slanting shadows across the room.

He got up slowly, feeling light and hungry. There was a loaf of bread that was no longer fresh; he broke off a piece and chewed at it, and then in self-disgust he put the bread down and riddled the stove. He blew on the embers and fed their glow with trickles of charcoal from his fingers, listening to its dry rustle, feeling its insubstantial weight, wondering as he watched the glow spread how something so light could generate so much heat. He placed his hand flat above the stove and savored the burning heat on his palm.

He looked into his vegetable basket. In an earthenware dish, under a domed lid, lay a slab of crumbly white cheese, beyaz peynir.

He skinned two onions and chopped them roughly, then sprinkled them with salt. He sliced the tops off two tomatoes and chopped them, with peppers, garlic, and a bunch of wilted parsley. He mashed the cheese with a fork.

He split the stale loaf lengthways and rubbed the insides with a cut tomato and a garlic clove. He drizzled them with oil and set them at an angle over the heat.

He dipped the onions into a bowl of water to remove the salt, and tossed them into a bowl along with the peppers, the tomatoes, and the parsley. A drop of oil fell onto the coals with a hiss. He sprinkled the salad with the crumbled cheese and a big pinch of kirmizi biber, which he had bought after the desecration of the apartment-usually he made it himself, with a big bunch of dried chili peppers crushed in a mortar, rubbed with oil and roasted black in a heavy pan on the coals.

He poured a generous lick of olive oil over the salad, added salt, and pounded peppercorns in the mortar. Clink-clink-clink.

He stirred the salad with a spoon.

He took the toasted bread from the fire and set it on a plate. He washed his hands and mouth.

He ate cross-legged on the sofa, the sun on his left hand, thinking about the dark burrows under the city, the huge cistern like a temple, and the wavering light that had pursued him through his dreams. The light he’d seen in Amelie’s eyes.

I am doing this for Max, she’d said. Fulfilling his desires. Following his instructions as if he were still alive; as if, like Byzantium itself, he still had the power to direct and to control the actions of people in the living world.

Yashim spooned up some of the vegetables with a chunk of toasted bread. I am doing this for Max.

For Max: for the man whose grossly mutilated corpse both he and Dr. Millingen had examined days ago. A body without a face, but good teeth.

“It’s you.” Dr. Millingen leaned forward and turned up the wick; a warm, soft light spilled across the room.

Yashim placed a bag on the floor beside him. “Madame Lefevre?”

“Very weak, after her ordeal. But she is a fighter, Yashim efendi. I am sure you know that.”

He leaned forward and picked up a coin that lay dully on the leather desktop.

“A survivor? Yes. Like her husband. Your old friend Meyer.”

Dr. Millingen frowned and glanced at the door. “I have already arranged for Madame Lefevre to be repatriated,” he said, holding the coin to the light. “She leaves tomorrow, for France.”

“A French ship?”

“ L’Ulysse. She’s berthed at Tophane, on the quay.” He leaned back, bringing the coin with him. “My man will be seeing her aboard. No more accidents, Yashim efendi.”

Yashim said coldly: “Accidents? But it wasn’t my idea to send her into the cisterns, Dr. Millingen.”

The coin began to run through Dr. Millingen’s fingers.

“I suppose you know she found nothing,” Yashim said.

“So she told me.”

Yashim stepped forward and spread his hands. “The clues added up. You would have had your relics, had they been there. But they weren’t. I don’t believe they exist,” he added, shaking his head. “Lefevre was a salesman.”

Dr. Millingen considered Yashim thoughtfully.

“I agree with you,” he said at last. “And yet, as you say, the clues added up.”

“The trouble with clues-you can make them point wherever you like. A few old legends, a rare book-Lefevre only had to choose a theme, et voila! A story he knew how to sell.”

Millingen frowned. “But I told you-he got nothing from us until the relics were found.”

Yashim smiled. “On the contrary. From you he got everything he needed. Authenticity, Dr. Millingen. I believe it is called provenance. Your interest alone raised the price-for others.”

“But Madame Lefevre-she believed the story, too.”

“Did she?” Yashim thought of Amelie in the lamplight, sinking to her knees in the dark water. “I think, Dr. Millingen, that the only person who may have believed in the whole charade was you. It was you who once told me that a collector is a weak man. Do you remember? You with that coin of Malakian’s I brought-the missing coin in your collection-eager to own it, at almost any price. Maybe you couldn’t be sure of Lefevre. Why should you trust him? But in the back of your mind you hoped he might be right.”

The doctor pursed his lips, making no effort to deny it.

“So you persuaded Madame Lefevre to pick up the trail.” Yashim clasped his hands together across his chest. “I don’t know if that meant you were weak. But it made you unscrupulous.”

“Steady on,” Millingen growled.

“You could have offered her money for the relics. She needs money, I’m sure.” Yashim remembered Amelie in the water, wading from him, turning her lovely head to say that she was doing this for Max. For a dead man. “But I think you offered her something else. Something that mattered more to her even than money.”