The Snake Stone Read Free Page A

and several dark clots where blood had dried around his wounds.
    “He has taken a little soup,” the nun whispered. “That is good. He will not speak for many days.”
    Yashim could hardly argue with her. Whoever had attacked his friend had done a thorough job. Their identity would remain a mystery, he thought, until George recovered enough to speak. The Hetira. What did it mean?
    While the nun led him out through the tiny courtyard, Yashim told her what he knew about his friend. He left her with a purse of silver and the address of the café on Kara Davut where he could be found when George regained consciousness.
    Only after the door had closed behind him did he think to warn her of the need for discretion, if not secrecy. But it was too late, and probably didn’t matter. For George, after all, the damage was already done.

6
    M AXIMILIEN Lefèvre stepped lightly from the caïque and made his way up the narrow cobbled street, carefully avoiding the open gutter, which ran crookedly downhill in the middle of the road. Here and there his path was barred by a tangle of nets and creels, set out to mend; then he would vault over the gutter and carry on up the other side, sometimes stooping to pass beneath the jettied upper floors of the wooden houses, which tilted at crazy angles, as if they were being slowly dragged down by the weight of the washing lines strung between them. Old women dressed from head to toe in black sat out on their steps, their laps full of broken nets; they regarded him curiously as he passed by.
    Ortaköy was one of a dozen or so Greek villages strung out along the Bosphorus between Pera and the summer houses of the European diplomats. They had been there two thousand years ago, and more—when Agamemnon had assembled fleets, as Homer sang. Greeks from the Bosphorus had manned the ships that sailed against Xerxes, four centuries before Christ; they had ferried Alexander the Great across to Asia, when he took his helots on their legendary campaigns in the East. An Ottoman pasha, Lefèvre recalled, had explained that God gave the land to the Turks—and to the Greeks He left the sea. How could it have been otherwise? Four hundred years after the Turkish Conquest, the Greeks still drew a living from the sea and the straits. They had been sailing these waters while the Turks were still shepherding flocks across the deserts of Asia.
    The thought made Lefèvre frown.
    Foreigners seldom visited the Greek villages, in spite of their reputation for good fish; before long, Lefèvre found himself with a tail of curious small boys, who shouted after him and pushed and shoved one another while their grandmothers looked on. Some of the smaller boys imagined that Lefèvre was a Turk, and all of them guessed that he was rich, so when Lefèvre stopped and turned around they drew together, half curious and half afraid. They saw him pull a coin from his pocket and offer it with a smile to the smallest boy among them. The boy hung back, somebody bolder snatched the coin, and pandemonium erupted as the whole pack of children turned as one to chase after him down the street.
    Lefèvre took a turn onto an unpaved lane. Swarms of tiny flies rose from stagnant puddles as he approached; he swept them from his face and kept his mouth shut.
    The café door stood open. Lefèvre made his way rapidly to the back and took a seat on a small veranda that overlooked the pantiled roofs and the Bosphorus below. After a while another man joined him from the interior of the café.
    Lefèvre stared down at his hands. “I don’t like meeting here,” he said quietly in Greek.
    The other man passed his hand across his mustache. “This is a good place, signor. We are not likely to be disturbed.”
    Lefèvre was silent for a few moments. “Greeks,” he growled, “are nosy bastards.”
    The man chuckled. “But you, signor—you are a Frenchman, no?”
    Lefèvre raised his head and gave his companion a look of intense dislike. “Let’s