Yashim settled himself on the divan facing the street, beneath the projecting upper windows. He slipped his feet under his robe, and with that gesture he became, in a sense, invisible.

It was partly the way Yashim still dressed. It was several years since the sultan had begun to encourage his subjects to adopt Western dress; the results were mixed. Many men had swapped their turbans for the scarlet fez, and their loose robes for trousers and the stambouline, a curiously high-necked, swallow-tailed jacket, but few of them wore European lace-up boots. Some of Yashim’s neighbors on the divan resembled black beetles, in bare feet; all elbows and pointy knees. In a long cloak, somewhere between deep red and brown, and a saffron-colored robe, Yashim might have been a ruck in the carpet that covered the divan; only his turban was dazzlingly white.

But Yashim’s invisibility was also a quality in the man-if man was the proper word. There was a stillness about him: a steadiness in the gaze of his gray eyes, a soft fluidity to his movements, or an easiness of gesture that seemed to deflect attention rather than attract it. People saw him-but they did not quite notice him, either; and it was this absence of hard edges, this peculiar withdrawal of challenge or threat, that comprised his essential talent and made him, even in nineteenth-century Istanbul, unique.

Yashim did not challenge the men who met him; or the women. With his kind face, gray eyes, dark curls barely touched, at forty, by the passage of the years, Yashim was a listener; a quiet questioner; and not entirely a man. Yashim was a eunuch.

He took his coffee propped up on one elbow, and ate the corek, brushing the crumbs from his mustache.

Deciding against having a pipe with his coffee, he left a silver piastre on the tray and walked down the street toward the Grand Bazaar.