The young sultan laid his bony hand on the papers on his desk.

“Bellini painted a portrait of the Conqueror,” he said.

Yashim blinked. A portrait? Mehmet the Conqueror had been only twenty-one years old when he plucked the Red Apple of Constantinople from the Christians in 1453. An Islamic hero, who became heir to the Byzantine Roman empire of the east. Master of the Orthodox Christian world, he made his empire stretch from the shores of the Black Sea to the crusted ridges of the Balkans, appointing Christian patriarchs with their staff of office, bringing the chief rabbi to the city destined, as all men said, to be the navel of the world.

And he had summoned an Italian painter to his court.

“The portrait, my padishah-it still exists?”

The sultan cocked his chin and stared steadily at Yashim. “I don’t know,” he said quietly.

There was a silence in the great room. As it lengthened, Yashim felt a shiver pass up his spine and ruffle the hairs on the back of his neck. Millions of people lived out their lives in the shadow of the padishah. From the deserts of Arabia to the desolate borders of the Russian steppe, touched or untouched by his commands, paying the taxes he levied, soldiering in the armies that he raised, dreaming-some of them-of a gilded monarch by the sea. Yashim had seen their paintings of the Bosphorus in Balkan manor houses and Crimean palaces; he had seen old men weep by river and mountain when the old sultan passed away.

He had spent ten minutes in the company of a youth who blushed like a girl, and dabbed his nose, and confessed to something he didn’t know. The padishah.

It was the padishah who spoke. “The painting, like the frescoes, disappeared after Mehmet’s death. It is said that my pious ancestor had them sold in the bazaar. With that in mind, what Muslim would seek to buy what the sultan himself had pronounced forbidden?”