Lefevre 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 cafe door stood open. Lefevre 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 cafe.
Lefevre 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.”
Lefevre was silent for a few moments. “Greeks,” he growled, “are nosy bastards.”
The man chuckled. “But you, signor-you are a Frenchman, no?”
Lefevre raised his head and gave his companion a look of intense dislike. “Let’s talk,” he said.
7
In the palace at Besiktas, with its seventy-three bedrooms and forty-seven flights of stairs, the Shadow of God on Earth, Sultan Mahmut II, lay dying of tuberculosis-and cirrhosis of the liver, brought about by a lifetime’s devotion to reforming his empire along more Western, modern lines, and bad champagne chased down with spirits.
The sultan lay back on the pillows of an enormous tester bed hung with tasseled curtains, and gazed through red-rimmed eyes at the Bosphorus below his window, and the hills of Asia across the straits. He had, he dimly knew, a world at his command. The fleets of the Ottoman sultan cruised in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea; the prayers were read in his name at the Mosque in Jerusalem, in Mecca and Medina; his soldiers stood watch on the Danube by the Iron Gates, and in the mountains of Lebanon; he was lord of Egypt. He had wives, he had concubines, he had slaves at his beck and call, not to mention the pashas, the admirals, the seraskiers, voivodes, and hospodars who governed his far-flung empire in trembling or, at least, respectful obedience to his will.