The Snake Stone by Jason Goodwin Read Free Book Online

worry,” he added when he saw the guard step back a pace, “you have done everything well. And everything you could.”
    They saluted each other, one hand to the chest.

14
    M ALAKIAN was standing uncertainly in front of his shop, a padlock in his hands.
    “Goulandris? Incredible. Who would want to kill him? He was a very old man.”
    “He knew very little about books.”
    “Very little? You say so, efendi. But yes, stubborn. A stubborn old Greek. It is terrible.”
    Yashim shook his head. He was reminded of another stubborn old Greek, his friend George, beaten and left for dead in the street. Like Goulandris he, too, was a trader. “What do you know about the Hetira, Malakian?”
    Malakian rubbed the edge of one of his enormous flat ears between his forefinger and thumb. “Ask a Greek, efendi. This is something Greek. I would not know.”
    “But the word means something to you.”
    Malakian frowned. “This is my shop, Yashim efendi, in the bazaar, like always. It is cheap here, yes. In Pera you will find many new shops—but Pera is expensive.”
    Yashim shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
    “I am stubborn man, like Goulandris. But I am not Greek. So.”
    “Why would the Hetira want to drive out Greeks?”
    Malakian said nothing, but he shrugged slowly.

15
    Y ASHIM stopped by the fish market on the Golden Horn. Still smarting from the Frenchman’s indifference to the dolma he had so lovingly prepared, he chose two lüfer, the bluefish that all Istanbul took as the standard for excellence. He watched the fishmonger slit their bellies and remove the entrails with a twist of his thumb.
    Yashim was proud of Istanbul—proud of its markets, the cornucopia of perfect fruits and vegetables that poured into them every day, proud of the fat-tailed sheep from Anatolia, which sometimes came skittering and bleating through the narrow streets. What other city in the world could produce fish to match the freshness or the variety offered by the Bosphorus, a finny highway running straight through the heart of Istanbul? Why, at any season of the year you could practically walk to Üsküdar on the torrent of fish that passed along the straits—
    “Don’t wash it,” he said quickly. A fish would begin to deteriorate from the moment it lost its slimy protective coat.
    “Bah, we have too little water,” the fishmonger grunted. “The supply is weak again.”
    But it flowed: that was what mattered. Sometimes, standing on Pera Hill and looking back across the Golden Horn to the familiar skyline of the city, marked by the great domes of Sinan’s mosques; or passing the jumble of buildings—mosques, houses, caravanserai, churches, covered markets, shops—which lined the Stamboul shore of the Horn, it seemed incredible to Yashim that the city should function from one day to the next and not simply explode, or tear itself apart, or at the very least subside into a confusion of bleating sheep, rotting vegetables, and men gesticulating and thundering in twenty languages, unable to progress or retreat through the overcrowded streets.
    Yet whenever Yashim looked more closely, at the level of a particular street, say, he was struck by the air of invisible good order that kept everything and everyone flowing smoothly along, like water in the pipes and aqueducts: so that when a man was murdered, and another attacked, both traders, both Greeks, they seemed inevitably to belong to some hidden economy in the city, a single channel of a commerce freighted with menace and brutality.
    Yashim delivered one of the bluefish to the nuns at the hospital.
    “Perhaps he can manage a little of this?” he asked tentatively.
    The nun smiled. “It will do him good.”
    “And perhaps—then, if he can eat, he can speak—a little?”
    She laughed with her eyes. “Very well, efendi. If he is not asleep, you may have a moment. Not more, please.”
    Yashim bowed.
    George looked worse than when he had first seen him in the filtered subaqueous