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I’m the only one who lives here,” she said quickly.
    “Who was he?”
    “No one. What a little boy you are. Pretending to be jealous.” Shetugged a little at his belt. “Close the door. Did you see the pail? On the landing? Another leak.”
    “You should complain.”
    “Oh, to the kapici. In a building like this.”
    “To the owner. Was that him?”
    She moved closer to him. “Look at me. My eyes. So you know it’s true. I haven’t been with anyone today. You know you can smell that, when there’s somebody. On the skin. Do you smell anyone?”
    “Just perfume.”
    “That’s right. The one you like.” She stared at him again. “I haven’t been with anyone today. All right?” She put her hand on his crotch, rubbing him. “I always save today for you. You know that.” Stroking him, the lie like another hand on him, so that he was hard instantly, excited by both, unable to separate them.

    He took a dolmus taxi to Bebek this time, making conversation with the other passengers so that he’d be remembered, a foreigner who spoke some Turkish. Anna had already been fed and changed for bed, a soft nightgown she seemed not to notice. “I’ll just sit with her until she falls asleep,” he told the nurse, holding up the magazine he’d brought to read. An open-ended visit, no need to check back. Fifteen minutes later he was through the garden entrance, back on the road where Mihai was waiting.
    “Anybody around?”
    “Busy night. Egyptians are giving a party,” Mihai said, looking out the windshield toward the old khedive’s summer palace.
    “Anybody else?”
    “Hard to see. No moon.”
    Outside the village the night was black, only a few yellow windows visible through the cypresses and umbrella pines. On the Bosphorus a passing freighter’s lights reflected on the water, then were swallowed up again by the dark.
    “Let’s see if we have company,” Leon said, turning to look out back as Mihai started the car.
    But no one else pulled into the line of cars, moving quickly tonight, winter traffic, not the usual jam.
    “We’ll be early,” Leon said.
    “It’s not exact, the time. Like a train.”
    “No rain tonight anyway. I checked the reports. It’s clear all up along the coast.”
    He looked again at the black water. Where Jason had once sailed the Argo .
    “Did you see Anna? Tell her about the boat?”
    Leon nodded. “If she heard.”
    “They say hearing is the last sense to go. When you have a stroke.”
    “She didn’t have a stroke.”
    Mihai said nothing. It had been his boat, the one he and Anna had organized, also out of Constancia, as it happened. Overcrowded and listing, stuck in Istanbul for repairs, then waiting for sailing permits, two hundred people taking turns on deck. They’d run tenders out with food and water, medicine that Anna had somehow rounded up out of nonexistent supplies. Black market drugs. And still no permits, then panic, everyone seeing a repeat of the Struma , the ship sent back, then torpedoed in the Black Sea, everyone down with it. One survivor, they’d heard.
    So the decision was made, a desperate run through the Marmara, a moonless night like this one that made them hope they could slip through. Mihai’s decision. No, both; Anna’s too. Worth the risk.What could the Turks do? Tow them back to Istanbul, where they were anyway, rotting? Better to make a run for it.
    Later it was said the engines would never have made it, not at that speed, that weight. They were bound to overheat. But no one really knew how the fire had started. Some sort of explosion, probably, flames suddenly leaping up into the night. The ship had been just off Yedikule, close enough for the fire to be seen, but even so the rescue boats were late. The Bratianu had begun to break up by then, people screaming in the water, going under, later washing up, the shore littered with them, like driftwood. Anna had managed to save a few, swimmers strong enough to stay afloat, grab onto paddles,