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and in the alley itself there was hardly a sound to be heard.
    A crowd of silent men blocked his view.
    “Palace,” he murmured. The men stood aside automatically, barely sparing him a glance. He stepped forward, one hand raised, and received a salute from a pale man in the red uniform of a market guard.
    “Palace,” Yashim repeated tersely. “A man dead?”
    “That’s right, efendi.” The guard swallowed. “We’re still trying to find the kadi.”
    “Can you tell me what happened?”
    “The door was shut, efendi. That’s all. It might have been shut all night, and it looked like it was locked. I mean, the bar was across, and everything.”
    “You noticed that on the night watch?”
    The guard stirred nervously. “Well, efendi, not exactly. I—I don’t recall. It was just this morning, about half an hour ago, that we see the bar still up, and the padlock—it was only hanging there. You don’t see that much in the dark, efendi.”
    “But by daylight—you thought it looked strange?”
    “All the traders had come in already. Talak—that’s my companion—he says we ought to take a look. I knocked on the door with my stick then. Sounds a bit stupid, doesn’t it? What with the door half locked on the outside.”
    “No, but I understand,” Yashim said. He’d seen it before, the way that sudden death made a nonsense of the things people did and said. Murder, above all, overturned the natural order of God’s creation: it was only to be expected that unreason and absurdity should crackle in its wake. “Nobody came—and you opened the door?”
    The guard nodded. “It was dark. We had put out the lanterns, and I didn’t see anything to worry about, not at first. I touched something with my foot, and when I bent down I saw it was some scroll. It was stuck to the floor. Then I felt that my boots were also sticking to the floor. I looked behind the desk, and—” He shuddered. “Goulandris.”
    “The bookseller? Show me.”
    The guard looked doubtful. He glanced at the crowd. “I must stay outside,” he explained. “When Talak brings the kadi…” He trailed off.
    “I won’t be long,” Yashim said. He stepped past the guard and pushed the green door to Goulandris’s cubbyhole. Inside it was stuffy and dark, with a metallic smell. He moved away from the door to give himself light, and glanced quickly around. He knew this room. Goulandris had dealt in many kinds of books—works in classical and modern Greek, Jewish religious books, imperial scrolls—but the old man could have been selling apples or slippers for all he knew about books. He priced his stock, as far as Yashim could tell, by reading the expression in his clients’ faces, a gruff and shrewd old dealer.
    Bending forward to look behind the Frankish desk, Yashim saw that Goulandris had priced his last book.
    He was wedged in between the desk and a stool, pressed up against the wall, his thin arms raised above his head, wrist to wrist, his head jammed against his bended knees. There was an astonishing amount of tacky dark blood staining the floor, as the guard had first noticed, but the nape of his neck gleamed almost white in the dim light. Yashim felt the man’s arms: they were quite cold. He took hold of the gray hair on Goulandris’s scalp with a tremor of reluctance, and tugged back his head; as it slipped between his arms they shifted stiffly forward, checked by the rigor of death. Yashim peered down and grunted; then he fastidiously drew out a handkerchief, swirled it into a ball, and dabbed at the man’s throat. He tried not to look into his one glittering eye.
    The handkerchief came up clean.
    But there was a lot of blood on the floor.
    Yashim stood still for a moment. The light failed, and there was a man at the door. “The kadi is on his way, efendi.”
    “That’s good. This—is his province. He will know what measures need to be taken.”
    “But you, efendi—”
    “No, my friend. I’m going to the palace. Don’t