Free The Snake Stone by Jason Goodwin

hand. He seemed to have forgotten about Marta for the moment, so Yashim told him, instead, about Lefèvre’s mysterious arrival—and departure.
    “And the forty piastres?” Palewski arched his brows. “I don’t suppose you’ll be seeing them again, either. Really, Yashim, you should have made that scoundrel pay up.”
    Yashim sighed. “I did try.”
    “But not very hard.”
    “No. Not very hard.” How could he explain to his friend how the sight of Lefèvre’s pathetic satchel had changed everything between them? “I’ll think of it as a tax. The city is better off without a man like Lefèvre in it.”
    Palewski nodded. “I wonder what he got away with this time,” he said.
    Yashim turned his head and stared out the window. The sky was blue with a touch of heat. Wisteria leaves rustled against the window frame, and a little bird swung on a twig, grooming itself in hurried bursts. “He didn’t have anything, as far as I could tell,” he said quietly.
    Palewski snorted. “That’s what you say. I’ve half a mind to go upstairs and check on the wretched heads. He probably got the caïque to drop him off somewhere. I wonder what he came for, anyway.”
    “Mmm,” Yashim murmured. “Books, I suppose. Old manuscripts.”
    “Old books? That would hardly explain his funk. I think he must have been angling for something bigger than that, and they set the heavies on him. What’s the matter?”
    Yashim had looked around suddenly, frowning.
    “One odd thing happened while I was coming over this morning. The captain of the Ca d’Oro , I saw him outside the fish market. I thought it was him. It was just a glimpse and I lost him in the crowd.”
    “Sailing delayed?”
    “No, I looked. The Ca d’Oro has gone.”
    Palewski put his fingertips together. “Well, you know what Pera’s like these days. More Italians than an organ-grinder’s funeral. More everyone. Half of them foreign and the other half Greeks pretending to be.”
    Yashim smiled. Twenty-five years before, when Palewski first arrived to take up his post, foreigners were rare even in Pera. Nowadays the streets were full of them—sailors, tailors, storekeepers, hatters, forwarding agents, old soldiers, and even Protestant priests. Being a foreigner didn’t mean much anymore. Many of them were the dregs of every Mediterranean port, too, men whose past didn’t bear much scrutiny: they fetched up here to practice their dodges and deceptions without the slightest fear of getting caught. The Mediterranean was like a purse, and Pera the seam at the bottom where the dust and fluff collected.
    Centuries ago the Ottomans had allowed foreign ambassadors to judge and sentence their own nationals—an errant sailor, a thieving valet—in the intelligent belief that the foreigners understood one another better than they could hope to do; they didn’t want foreign miscreants clogging the wheels of Ottoman justice, either. Now that there were so many foreigners in the city the situation had grown out of hand. Many of the people claiming extraterritorial rights were scarcely foreigners at all—Greek-born Englishmen, for instance, whose papers were in order but who had never been closer to England than the Istanbul docks; Corfiotes who could claim protection from the French ambassador, without speaking a word of French; island Greeks who flew the colors of the Netherlands on ships that never sailed beyond the Adriatic. Half the native shipping in Ottoman waters was formally beyond Ottoman jurisdiction. And it was almost pointless to expect the British ambassador to sit in judgment over some Maltese cutthroat who waved his naturalization papers in the face of the Ottoman police: the British didn’t even maintain a jail in their embassy grounds.
    “I’m sure you could find a dozen Italians who look like your captain, roaming the streets here at this very minute,” Palewski was saying. “It’s either that, or the shipowners had to replace him at the last