At the corner he turned and glanced back, just in time to see the cafe owner pick up the coin and bite it. Yashim sighed. Bad money was like poison in the bowels, an irritant that Istanbul could never rid itself of. He hefted his purse and heard the dry rustle of his fortune susurrate between his fingertips: this was one of those times when currency seemed to melt like sugar in the hand. But sugar was sweet. The sultan was dying, and there was bitterness in the air.

In the Street of the Booksellers, Yashim stopped outside a little shop belonging to Goulandris, who dealt in old books and curiosities; sometimes he stocked the French novels that Yashim found hard to resist.

Goulandris fixed his visitor with his one good eye and ground his teeth. Goulandris was not one of your forward, pushy Greeks; his job as a bookseller was to watch, not speak. One of his eyes was filmed with cataracts; but the other did the work of two, recording the way a customer moved, the speed with which he selected a certain book, the expression on his face as he opened it and began to read. Old books, new books, Greek books, Turkish books-and precious few of those-books in Armenian and Hebrew and even, now and then, in French: Dmitri Goulandris stocked them as and when they came to him, pell-mell. Books did not interest him. But how to price a book-that was another matter. And so, with his one good eye, he watched the signs.

But the eunuch-he was good. Very good. Goulandris saw a wellset gentleman in early middle age, his black hair faintly touched with gray beneath a small turban, wearing a soft cloak of an indeterminate color. Goulandris believed that he could penetrate any of the ruses that people used to throw him off the scent-the feigned indifference, the casual addition, the artfully contrived and wholly careless impulse. He listened to what they said. He watched the way their hands moved, and the flicker of their eyes. Only the damned eunuch remained a constant puzzle.