might have heard anything..." She raised her eyes helplessly to Zeittelstein's. "But I haven't any idea who they are, and I can't seem to find out."
"Dardanelles Land?" Zeittelstein's eyebrows shot up. "The mysterious Herr Fiddat?"
"I believe that was the name." Lydia sipped a tiny quantity of Monsieur Demerci's excellent champagne. "They are clients of yours, aren't they?"
"Ha ha!" Hindi trumpeted. "She's up on everything, this clever little lady."
"He," Zeittelstein said, with a puzzled expression. "Not they. As far as I've been able to ascertain, the Dardanelles Land Corporation exists only on paper. Quite typical, actually. All those corporations do is pay money to their founders. Fiddat..." He shook his head.
Lydia felt exactly as if she had-not by chance, but by sheer steadiness of eye and hand- shot an arrow clean into the gold.
She widened her eyes. "What's mysterious about him?"
"Everything. Extraordinary." He shook his head. "It was on his business that I was in Berlin. Having decided, evidently all of a clap, to install refrigeration in the Roman crypt under his palace in the market district, he must needs have it now, at once. When the valve on the ammonia pump proved to have been cracked in shipping, he would not wait, like a normal person, for an express to Berlin for a new one. No. Five thousand francs he paid-almost two hundred pounds!-for me to return to Berlin, myself, in person, the very day the valve was found to be defective, by the quickest possible route. He even paid for the lost business here in this city that it cost me."
"They are very rich, these Turks," Hindi interpolated sententiously. "Ill-got, I'll wager, some of them. Refrigeration works, you must know, my dear Frau Asher, by compression of ammonia gas, much better than the old sulfur dioxide system. Sulfur dioxide-that's a chemical compound-has the inconvenient habit of becoming corrosive and eating up the machinery which stores it. Ha ha!"
"Truly?" Lydia gave him her most radiant smile and timed precisely the turn of her head back to Zeittelstein, cutting off his further explanations with, "And was he pleased to get his valve?"
Zeittelstein shook his head. "I'm not sure, Frau Asher. This afternoon I find nothing but a heap of hysterical messages from his agent... Has your husband ever laid eyes on Herr Fiddat himself, Frau Asher?"
Lydia shook her head. "I thought there might have been some sort of proscription against Mohammedans dealing with Christians face-to-face-not ordinary Mohammedans, I mean, but that he might belong to some... some odd sect of dervishes."
"Not any dervish I've ever heard of," put in Hindi, in the act of neatly shagging hors d'oeuvres from a silver plate proffered by a servant. He grinned at Zeittelstein. "Not that you'd know anything about that, ha ha."
Zeittelstein grinned back. "Well, as far as I know, in thirteen hundred years no Mohammedan has ever had a problem dealing with a Jew." His grin faded and the dark, wise eyes grew thoughtful. "I will say this: his agent's terrified of him. I can hear it in his voice. My own suspicion-and I can't exactly say why I feel this- is that Fiddat is a leper."
"How extraordinary!" Lydia said with a wealth of implied Please go on in gesture and voice and the tilt of her head.
"Nobody that I know has seen him," Zeittelstein continued, and glanced over at Hindi for corroboration.
Hindi tapped the side of his nose. "Very mysterious chap." He turned to catch the eye of their host. Monsieur Demerci strolled obediently over, pausing now and then to smile and speak to one or another of his guests.
"Ja'far, you've never laid eyes on Herr Fiddat, have you? Or visited his palace?"
"Oh, I've visited the House of Oleanders," Zeittelstein said. "I spent the better part of ten days assembling that wretched compressor-brrr, that vault is cold! But always I am met at the door by servants and conducted down to the crypt by them... They stand and watch me while I work."
"According to Hasan Buz-the ice merchant, you understand, madame," Demerci said with a polite bow that made him look considerably less like a Turkish corsair and more like a former soldier made good, "it's the same with his men when they make deliveries. The stuff gets stacked in the corridors-half a ton at a time- and the servants pay them and dismiss them. Hasan has to pay them double. They say the house is cursed."
"Where is the house?" Lydia asked.
A servant, emerging between the heavily carved pillars that lined the