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at times like this he knew exactly why she was valide, and
no one else. He held her gaze.
    "Perhaps."
She gave a pretty little shrug. "I want to tell you about my jewels. Ugly, very
useful--and worth a fortune."
    He
wondered if she needed money, but she had read his thoughts. "One never knows,"
she said, tapping him on the arm. "Things are never quite as one expects."
    He
bowed slightly to acknowledge the truth of her remark. In his life, it was
true. In hers? Without question: and with an unexpectedness that was fantastic.
    Fifty
years before, a young woman had boarded a French packet en route from the West
Indies to Marseille. Raised on the Caribbean island of Martinique, she was
being sent to Paris to complete her education and find a suitable husband.
    She
never arrived. In the eastern Atlantic her ship was taken by a North African
xebec, and the beautiful young woman became the prisoner of Algerian corsairs. The
corsairs presented her to the dey of Algiers, who marveled at her exotic beauty
and her white, white skin. The dey knew she was far too valuable to be
retained. So he sent her on, to Istanbul.
    But
that was only half the story, the half that was merely unusual. Over the
centuries, other Christian captives had made their way into a sultan's bed. Not
many; some. But the whim of destiny is powerful and inscrutable. On Martinique,
young Aimee had been almost inseparable from another French Creole girl called
Rose Tascher de la Pagerie. A year after Aimee set out on her fateful voyage to
France, young Rose had followed. Same route: a luckier ship. Reaching Paris,
she had weathered revolution, imprisonment, hunger, and the desires of
ambitious men to become the lover, the wife, and finally the empress of
Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France. Aimee, the friend of Rose's youth, had
vanished to the world as the valide sultan. Rose was Empress Josephine.
    One never knows.
    She
reached up and gave him a chaste kiss. At the door she turned.
    "Find
my jewels, Yashim. Find them soon--or I swear I'll never lend you another novel
as long as I live!"
    11
    ****************
    In
the rain, in the night, even a city of two million souls can be quiet and
deserted. It was the dead hour between the evening and the night prayers. A
rat, its wet fur glistening, scrambled out of an overflowing drain and began to
scuttle along the foot of a building, looking for shelter. The rising water
pursued it almost imperceptibly.
    Slowly
the puddle rose, from one cobble to the next, probing the joints for a means of
escape. When it found one, it began to trickle through, blindly but unerringly
seeking its path downhill. From time to time it stopped, pooled, and started
over, insistently seeking its own way to the Bosphorus, lining the banks of its
own clear trail with mud, twigs, hairs, crumbs. It spread across a lateral
street but pooled again on the other side where a flight of stone steps ran
down to the Mosque of the Victory, just newly completed on the shore.
    The
rain, continuing to fall, continued to back up against the drain. At the hour
of the morning star, the janitor of the mosque sent two workmen to trace the
torrent that was threatening to seep into the cement floors and spoil the
carpets. They hitched their woolen cloaks over their heads with their elbows
against the rain, and started up the steps.
    About
two hundred yards uphill, they found a section of road that had turned into a
pond and cautiously probed the muddy water with their rods.
    Eventually
they located the drain and started work trying to unblock it: first with the
rods and later, standing up to their chins in the freezing, filthy water, with
their hands and feet. The obstruction was a soft package of some sort, so
tightly bound with cords that neither man, slipping footfirst into the icy murk
for a few seconds at a time, could get a proper purchase on it. At last,
shortly before daybreak, they managed to guide a rod between the package and
the wall of the drain, and lever