Martin, tall and aggressively British, from the black silk tassel on his
red fez to the battered puttees and brown boots that had once come out
of Bond Street, stood watching the Isis outlined against the opposite
walls of the Yildiz Kiosk.
Few pleasure-craft call at Constantinople.
"If you had not, as usual, been so damned late"--he turned with a
gesture of raw impatience to the heavy-faced Osmanli at his side--"I
could have pointed them out to you on Galata Bridge. As it is, they have
returned to the yacht."
"May Heaven never again thwart your wish with delay, Martin Effendi."
The Turk spoke placidly, his oily voice soft as a benediction, "I was
delayed by pigs, and sons of pigs! Your annoyance is my desolating
sorrow, yet"--he waved his hand with a bland gesture--"I am but the
servant of His Majesty, the Sultan--whom Allah preserve--and the
official is frequently detained."
"What is done, is done. Bismillah--no matter!" The Englishman curbed
his annoyance and spoke as one resigned. "What now remains is this: We
must see them, and you must learn to recognize them. You understand?"
The other bowed in unperturbed assent.
"All Europeans," he suggested, "dine at the Pera Palace Hotel--it is the
Mecca of their hunger."
To the white man's voice returned the ring of asperity. "And at the Pera
Palace, we shall not only see, but be seen. Likewise unless we have a
care in this enterprise, we shall not only eat, but be eaten. A man may
stare at whom he chooses on Galata Bridge."
"When I dine in a public place"--the Osmanli smiled cunningly from the
depths of small pig-like eyes--"I shield myself behind a screen. Thus
may I observe unobserved."
The sun had set, but the yellow after-glow still lingered in the sky
behind Stamboul as the two men stood looking toward Galata Bridge, where
their quarry had escaped them, and across the Golden Horn.
A pyramid of domes, flanked by a pair of slender minarets, daintily
proclaimed the Mosque Yeni-Djami against the fading amber. On Galata
Bridge itself, the day-long tide of medleyed life was thinning. Where
there had been an eddying current of turbans and tarbooshes,
bespeaking all the tribes and styles which foregather at the meeting
place of two Continents and two seas, there were now only the belated
few.
To the jaded imagination of Martin Effendi and his companion, Abdul
Said Bey, the falling of night over the quadruple city, smothering
more than a million souls under a single blanket of blackness, made no
appeal. They were watching a yacht.