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other tried to save her. They panicked and pulled each other under. It’s absurd that women are kept ignorant of even the most basic survival skills.”
    “Jaanan Hanoum pulled the maid out,” Michel continues, “but she lost her sight. She must have hit her head on a rock. Jaanan Hanoum is on her way to relatives in Paris, left early yesterday morning. Planning to study, apparently.”
    Kamil thinks about this, flipping his beads around his hand. “I wonder if either of them knew Mary Dixon.”
    “Coincidence?” suggests Michel.
    “I have no faith in coincidences,” Kamil mutters.
    “If they heard the news in Chamyeri about the Englishwoman’s death, maybe it was just one tragedy too many for the young woman.”
    “Maybe. But I still would have liked to speak with her. Who is left up there at Chamyeri now?”
    “Just her uncle Ismail Hodja, his chauffeur, the gardener, and some daily staff.”
    “I can’t imagine any of them having tea with an English governess, much less drugging and killing her.” Kamil shakes his head. “What else is near Chamyeri?”
    Michel stands and paces the room, thinking. The folds of his robe tangle his muscular legs like tethers on a horse. He stops suddenly.
    “I wonder.”
    “What?”
    “The sea hamam. It’s below Emirgan, just north of Chamyeri.”
    “Ah, yes, I’ve heard of it,” Kamil muses. “It’s built on a jetty over the water so people can swim in private.”
    “More like wading in a cage rather than swimming. The Emirgan one is for women.”
    “I misjudged our women’s progressiveness. What made you think of the sea hamam, of all things?”
    “It’s a perfect place to meet if you want complete privacy. It’s closed at night, but it wouldn’t be hard to get in. In fact, it probably hasn’t been used since last year. It usually doesn’t open until midsummer. Other than a few villas and fishing settlements, there aren’t a lot of other possibilities. No one in the villas claims to remember an Englishwoman.”
    Michel opens the door to the judicial antechamber, letting in a din of voices. He and Kamil push through the tide of plaintiffs, petitioners, clerks, and their assistants and emerge from the squat stone courthouse onto the busy Grande Rue de Pera. A horse-drawn tram clangs along the boulevard, carrying matrons from the new northern suburbs into town for shopping. As they wait for their driver to bring the carriage, Kamil surveys the early morning bustle of Istanbul’s most modern quarter. Apprentices balance nested copper tins of hot food and trays of steaming tea, hurrying toward customers waiting in shops and hotels. Carts rattle as vendors pull their wares along the cobbled street. Advertisements for their services, or for mulberries, green plums, carpets, or scrap metal, issue from practiced throats. Shop windows display the latest products.
    This tumult, Kamil knows, is surrounded by the tranquillity of old Constantinople, the name many residents still use for their city, its Byzantine roots as capital of the eastern Roman Empire still everywhere in evidence. At one end of Pera is a pleasant cemetery beneath a vast canopy of cypresses where people stroll and picnic on the raised tombs. Embassies set in lush gardens line the boulevard. To the west, Pera overlooks the waters of the Golden Horn, which takes its name from the reflected fires of the setting sun. To the east, the land falls off precipitously to reveal the Bosphorus and the wide triangle of water where the strait and inlet merge to push into the Sea of Marmara. Cascading down the hillsides are canyons of stone apartment buildings and old wooden houses strung together by alleys meandering around the remains of Byzantine and Genoese walls, towers, and archways. Where the inclines are too steep, roads become wide stairways.
    Kamil and Michel head north in an open phaeton, bundled against the wind. It is a long, dusty trip winding through the hills above the Bosphorus, but their driver