The book on the desk was fatter. It had more writing in it. But the thin book was in the eunuch’s hand.

“Twelve piastres,” Goulandris growled, placing a stubby finger on the book in front of him.

Yashim delved into his purse. He put Adolphe back on the shelf and, with a nod to the old man in his dirty fez, stepped out into the Street of the Booksellers, hugging to his chest volume 1 of Careme’s L’Art de la Cuisine Francaise au 19 me Siecle.

At the bottom of the hill he turned toward the market.

Yashim saw the fishmonger staring stonily at his scales as he weighed out a bass for an elderly matriarch. Two men were haggling over a bunch of carrots. Bad money bred suspicion, Yashim thought. And then he smiled again, thinking of George at his vegetable stall. George always had good ideas for supper. George had no truck with suspicion. George was a cussed old Greek and he would simply growl and say the money was shit.

He looked ahead. George wasn’t there.

“He’s not coming in no more, efendi,” an Armenian grocer explained. “Some kind of accident’s what I heard.”

“Accident?” Yashim thought of the vegetable seller, with his big hands.

The grocer turned his head and spat. “They come up yesterday, said George wouldn’t be here no more. One of the Constantinedes brothers to get his pitch, they says.”

Yashim frowned. The Constantinedes brothers wore identical pencil mustaches and were forever on the move behind their piles of vegetables, like dancers. Yashim had always stuck with George.

“Efendi! What can we do for you today?” One of the brothers bent forward and began to arrange a pile of eggplants with quick flicks of his wrist. “Fasulye today at last year’s price! One day only!”