conference, and apparently someone helped him.' Perhaps the police were listening in at this very moment. Who knew what they would make of all this anyway?
"'Be very careful, Professor.' Turgut sounded worried. 'I do not have any wise advice for you, but I shall have some news soon, maybe even before you return to Istanbul. I am glad you called tonight. Mr. Aksoy and I have found a new document, one neither one of us has ever seen before. He found it in the archive of Mehmed. This document was written by a monk of the Eastern Orthodox Church in 1477, and it must be translated.'
"There was static on the line again, and I had to shout. 'Did you say 1477? What language is it in?'
"'I cannot hear you, dear boy!' Turgut bellowed, far away. 'There was a rainstorm here. I will call you tomorrow night.' A Babel of voices - I couldn't tell whether they were Hungarian or Turkish - broke in on us and swallowed his next words. More clicking followed, and then the line went dead. I hung up slowly, wondering if I should call back, but the clerk was already taking the phone from me with a worried expression and adding up my bill on a scrap of paper. I paid glumly and stood there for a moment, not liking to go up to my bare new room, to which I'd been allowed to take only my shaving instruments and a clean shirt. My spirits were sinking rapidly - it had already been a very long day, after all, and the clock in the lobby said nearly eleven.
"They would have sunk lower still if a taxi hadn't pulled up at that moment. Helen got out and paid the driver, then came through the great door. She hadn't noticed me by the desk yet, and her face was grave and reticent, with the melancholy intensity I'd sometimes noticed in it. She had wrapped herself in a shawl of downy black-and-red wool that I had never seen before, perhaps a gift from her aunt. It muted the harsh lines of her suit and shoulders and made her skin glow white and luminous even under the crude lighting of the lobby. She looked like a princess, and I stared unabashedly at her for a moment before she saw me. It was not only her beauty, thrown into relief by the soft wool and the regal angle of her chin, that kept me riveted. I was remembering again, with an uneasy quiver inside, the portrait in Turgut's room - the proud head, the long straight nose, the great dark eyes with their heavy, hooded lids above and below. Perhaps I was just very tired, I told myself, and when Helen saw me and smiled, the image vanished again from my inner sight."
Part Two Chapter 43
If I hadn't shaken Barley awake, or if he had been alone, he would have passed in slumber across the border into Spain, I think, to be rudely awakened by the Spanish customs officers. As it was, he stumbled onto the platform at Perpignan half asleep, so that I was the one who asked the way to the bus station. The blue-coated conductor frowned, as if he thought we should be at home in the nursery by this hour, but he was kind enough to find our orphaned bags behind the station counter. Where were we going? I told him we wanted a bus to Les Bains, and he shook his head. For that we would have to wait till morning - didn't I know it was almost midnight? There was a clean hotel up the street where I and my - "Brother," I supplied quickly - could find a room. The conductor looked us over, observing my darkness and extreme youth, I supposed, and Barley's lanky blondness, but he only made a clicking sound with his tongue and walked on.
"The next morning dawned even fairer and more beautiful than the one before, and when I met Helen in the hotel dining room for breakfast, my forebodings of the previous night were already a distant dream. Sun came through the dusty windows and lit the white tablecloths and heavy coffee cups. Helen was making some notes in a little notebook at the table. 'Good morning,' she said affably as I sat down and poured myself coffee. 'Are you ready to meet my mother?'
"'I haven't thought about anything else since we reached Budapest,' I confessed. 'How