Yashim dabbed vaguely at the skin that had formed on the miyane. The fire was almost cold; he felt no urge to start again. He wasn’t really very hungry.
He looked around for a bit of bread or a biscuit, but of course the place was bare.
He climbed onto the sofa and sat with his knees drawn up, looking out of the window across the rooftops.
Miyane! It was what you made when a guest showed up unexpectedly: a thicker mix, of course. You turned some pasta into it and ate it cut up into chunks.
Madame Lefevre had been, of all things, wholly unexpected.
She had struck him as beautiful: he who walked permitted and unaffected through the sultan’s harem, among dozens of women selected from every corner of the empire for their loveliness alone. Lefevre had not been the man he would have imagined for her; he had seemed too cagy and underhanded in his manner. Whereas his wife-but there, he hardly knew what to think.
More than her beauty had affected him, of course. She had talked to him like a friend. They had even laughed together, as if they had known each other already a long time.
She had made him laugh.
He had been too intoxicated to say what he knew had to be said. Too cowardly to break the spell.
The widow had a kind heart. She would answer for the moment, but tomorrow he would have to see Madame Lefevre to her own people-the embassy again. He winced at the idea.
Mavrogordato. What had he learned from Mavrogordato?
Only that a Frenchman, in a European suit, could raise the kind of loan from a respectable banker that an Albanian in the same city struggled to raise from a loan shark. Two hundred francs!
Yashim stopped dragging at his hair.
Two hundred francs, as far as Yashim knew, was about six hundred piastres.