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minute.”
    “That’s unlikely—the ship’s registered in Palermo, so the owners—” Yashim paused. He had been going to say that the shipowners would be far away in Sardinia or Naples or Sicily.
    “Probably some local Greek firm,” Palewski observed placidly. “Neapolitan colors, extraterritorial rights, the whole shebang. Switched the captains over for some reason or another.”
    The thread of anxiety that had been running through Yashim’s mind ever since he caught sight of the Italian at the fish market went taut. He pressed his lips together.
    “Cheer up, Yash, it’s not your funeral.” Palewski said. “Anyway, the Greeks are born to the sea. They’ll get our unsavory friend back in one piece.”
    “The Greeks—yes,” Yashim said slowly. Lefèvre had wanted any foreign ship, any ship at all—just as long as it wasn’t Greek. But that had been in the evening, when he had seemed more dead than alive. The next day he’d been quite snappish about the whole thing. He must have been simply overtired, overwrought.
    Pilaf in bianco , Yashim mused, had been just the thing. Pilaf, and a good night’s sleep.
    “A tot of cherry brandy,” Palewski said, rising from his armchair. “Honestly, Yash, we should be celebrating that fellow’s departure, not fretting about him. What do you say?”
    “You’re right,” Yashim replied. “I’ll have just the one.”
    Which he did, forcing Palewski, as he said reproachfully, to drink for both of them.

24
    Y ASHIM walked slowly across the Hippodrome, toward the obelisk that the emperor Constantine had brought from Egypt fifteen hundred years ago. A gift to his mistress, Byzantium, Lefèvre would have said. He wondered what they meant, those hieroglyphic birds, those unwinking eyes, the hands and feet incised with unearthly precision on the gleaming stone.
    He stopped for a moment in the pencil of the obelisk’s shade, and touched its base. Trajan’s column stood fifty yards beyond, a slender bole of rugged stone, weathered and clamped with great bronze staples, carved with a Roman emperor’s Balkan triumphs, helmeted legionnaires crammed together with their short swords drawn; the stamp of horses, the abasement of chieftains and kings, the flinging of bridges across rivers, and the lament of women. The scenes were hard to decipher, too; the stone had been softer.
    Beneath it, Arab traders had pitched a wide green tent on poles. A string of mules went by, and as Yashim lowered his gaze to watch them pass, his eye was caught by the twining stalk of the Serpent Column, hollow and broken like a reed: a twist of ancient verdigris no bigger than a withered palm tree, set in a triumphal axis between the obelisk and the column.
    It had been made over two thousand years before, a miracle of craftsmanship to celebrate the miracle of Greek victory over the Persians at Plataia, with three fearsome snakes’ heads supporting a great bronze cauldron. It had stood for centuries at the oracle of Delphi, until Constantine seized it and dragged it here to beautify his new capital. The centuries since had been unkind to it. The cauldron was long gone; the heads, more recently, had disappeared.
    Yashim had known the Serpent Column for years before he first saw the bronze heads in Palewski’s wardrobe. He had imagined them to look like real snakes, with broad jaws and small, reptilian eyes, so he had been shocked by the monsters whose cruel masks he had explored by candlelight that evening. They were creatures of myth and nightmare, fanged, blank-eyed, seeking to terrorize and devour their prey. Malevolence seeped from them like blood.
    Yashim leaned over the railing, to peer down into the pit from which the Serpent Column sprang. The other columns stood on level ground. Was it because the snakes emerged from somewhere deeper, some dark, submerged region in the mind? He shuddered, with an instinctive horror of everything cultish and pagan. From above, the coiling snakes looked like a