Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

You mean you can find the Master of Constantinople's hideouts, she thought, a moment later watching his splendid brown shoulders disappear into the crowd at Razumovsky's approach. Still, she thought, turning with shaky gratitude to her rescuer, she hadn't done so badly. On her first visit to the Grand Bazaar, she had been able, at quite short notice, to sell an almost total stranger a complete load of goods.

As they began to move away, the shopkeeper, who until this time had remained sewing slippers in a corner, got to his feet and padded over to her, and without a word affixed to her collar a cheap brass safety pin on which was strung a blue glass bead, painted with an eye. Then he smiled and bowed, and explained something to Razumovsky at great length.

"For the Evil Eye," the prince said as he led Lydia away.

The street of the brass vendors contained, in addition to innumerable tiny shops where old men tapped and fashioned everything from plates and boxes to enormous long- spouted teapots and life-sized deer, four sellers of fig paste, a man dispensing lemonade from a huge earthenware jug on a handcart, a vendor of sesame candy, and a regiment of beggars.

There was no storyteller.

"Helm Musefir?" the keeper of the largest shop on the row said in response to Razumovsky's question. He was a little man with a beard the color of iron down to his middle, who had not abandoned the old-fashioned clothing with the coming of the reforms. His pantaloons were resplendent in volume and hue, his sashes fringed in tarnishing silver, his slippers purple morocco and curled extravagantly at the toe. His turban was green, pinned with an enormous clasp of shining brass like an advertisement above his brown, good-natured face, and as he spoke he fingered a loop of prayer beads in his hand. "Since Monday he is gone. My wife's cousin has a friend who lives in the room above him; he says he has not been to his rooms, neither he nor Izahk, the Armenian boy who takes care of him and runs his errands."

"Was there a reason for this?" the prince asked. When the brass seller hesitated, Razumovsky gestured to Lydia and explained in the French in which most of the vendors seemed fluent, "This good madame is seeking news that the hakawati shair might have had for her and would deeply value any word as to Musefir's whereabouts."

"Ah." The shopkeeper bowed slightly at the emphasis Razumovsky placed on the word value. "In truth, I do not know. Will the good lady be so kind as to accept..." He held out to her a brass dish of Turkish Delight, pale green in a snowy dust of sugar. "My wife's cousin's friend is also a friend of the landlord's sister, and she says that the hakawati shair was not in debt, nor in arrears of rent. Likewise the boy Izahk's uncle, who frequents the same coffeehouse as my brother-in-law, would have mentioned had the old man been ill. So I do not know."

Of course, thought Lydia, wiping powdered sugar from her fingers as His Highness walked her back through the teeming aisles of the bazaar, no one had seen or noticed James himself. James was like that. But it did not escape her that if James had arrived in Constantinople Saturday evening, he could easily have sought out the hakawati shair Helm Musefir on Sunday-the last day upon which the old storyteller himself was seen.

After the bewildering stinks and colors of the Grand Bazaar, tea at the Hotel Bristol was like stepping through a door and finding oneself suddenly in the south of France. For Lydia this effect was heightened by the fact that, in spite of the Bristol's excellent view of the Golden Horn, she could not see the old city. For her, the world ended a yard past Herr Hindi's broad shoulders in a light- filled sea of obscurity through which white-coated waiters swam, their silver dishes flashing like strange treasure in the late afternoon sun. Women wearing stylish pale-hued frocks chatted with well-tailored gentlemen in French and German over Ceylon tea and creme brulee. A small orchestra played Mendelssohn. Three children in knee pants and starchy white dresses consumed water ices under the benevolent glare of a tightly laced woman in black bombazine.

It was restful beyond words.

At the foot of the hill on which Pera stood, Lydia knew, Armenians cleared up charred beams and broken glass from the harsh retribution against their protests. Men like Razumovsky and Karolyi shifted and jockeyed for position in the background, selling guns to the Turks or the Greeks or the Arabs in preparation for a war that everyone knew was coming, and telling themselves it was all to maintain the peace. In every house in the old city, women lived in ugly little rooms like the harem, behind lattices that forbade not only the eyes of men but the sun itself, and no one raised a voice for them.

And beneath the surface moved darker shadows yet.

"Maybe it's just my being a newcomer here that makes me feel as though I've dropped into another time as well as another world." Lydia blinked brown eyes against the golden light and took a sip of her tea, dainty fingers half covered with mitts of ecru lace. "Sometimes it seems to me it's the small things, not the big ones, that make a country change from ancient to modern, the way the Ottoman Empire is doing. Like buying stoves and furnaces instead of heating their houses with braziers..." After three days in the house on Rue Abydos, Lydia knew all about braziers. "I expect you still have people paying you with handfuls of gold."

Hindi chuckled richly. "Ha ha, precisely so, Frau Asher. One finds the strangest things here in the mysterious Orient! You know, the other day I was called in to consult with a wealthy man who wanted to donate plumbing fixtures to the hospital attached to the mosque of the Sultan Mehmed..."

The ensuing story occupied fifteen minutes and had nothing whatsoever to do with furnaces, odd financial avenues, or possible wars among the city's Undead, but nevertheless Lydia found it intriguing for its contrast between the new and the old. Once she discounted her host's rather heavy-handed attempts at humor and his propensity for telling her what, as a European lady, she should and shouldn't do, she did not find it difficult to listen to Herr Hindi on his favorite subject, perhaps because her own interests had always tended to the technical. He was, at least, a businessman with contacts in one of the strangest and most varied cities in the world, and not a twenty-two-year-old aristocrat whose world began with cub hunting in November and ended at the conclusion of the grouse shoots.

With a minimum of prompting, Hindi quite happily told her about his clients, the sometimes peculiar methods of payment found in an empire whose ruler had vetoed the building of an electrical dynamo because the word sounded too much like "dynamite" and might give encouragement to anarchists... and, of course, a great deal about the differences in burning time between soft and hard coal and the sorts of steam furnaces available from American manufacturers as opposed to those in Berlin.

"Ah, it's a strange city, Frau Asher, a strange city!" He shook a plump, reproving finger at her. "And not one for a lady to be traveling about in alone! I hope you're not one of those lady suffragettes we hear so much of, wanting to wear pants and smoke cigarettes and make us poor men stay home and mind the babies, ha ha!"

Lydia, who would far sooner have trusted any child with James than her friend Josetta or, God forbid, herself, simply out of regard for the poor infant's comfort, refrained from saying so. Instead she angled the conversation neatly back to Herr Hindi's adventures-in which he was far more interested anyway. In time, and with genuine interest, she asked, "So there are some clients who won't appear at all? Who refuse to deal with the infidel even for the sake of their own comfort?"