"It is not enough. I must know more. And for another thing, it will help you to await the return of the two I have out watching these Franks in Pera. They have not found much, but they can tell you something of what the Franks do and how they spend their time. So make yourselves comfortable. You shall eat heartily, and this evening Kara will dance in the courtyard as she promised you. That is worth waiting for, Giorgi. If I were a young fellow, I would rather do that than lurk the corners of Pera. Heh-heh!"
He stepped aside, and waved us permission to go; and we walked through the courtyard to the crumbling wall which rimmed the Bosphorus at one point, its base a rubble-heap, its battlements in fragments, its platform overgrown with weeds. From its top we could look down on the margin of beach, loaded with bowlders, and the ruins of what had been a jetty enclosing a little harbor for the Imperial pleasure galleys.
"It would not be difficult to climb up here," I said idly, pointing to the gaps between the stones, and the sloping piles of bowlders. "Does he suspect us, Nikka?"
"No, that is only his Gypsy caution. He thinks we are too good to be true. He needed what we seem to be—and behold, we arrive! He has waited long. He feels he can wait a little longer."
"I'm afraid he may wait a little too long for us," I answered.
"There's a chance," Nikka admitted after a moment's reflection. "But we've got to risk it. In the meantime you must let me do all the talking. I'll tell everybody you are a sulky devil, a killer whose deeds haunt him. They'll leave you alone. Gypsies respect temperamental criminals. But come along, we mustn't stay by ourselves. We'll be suspected of considering ourselves too highly or else having something to conceal. We can't afford any suspicions or even a dislike."
So we strolled over to the young men's quarters, and while I wrapped myself in a gloomy atmosphere that I considered was typical of a temperamental killer, Nikka swapped anecdotes of crime with the others who drifted in and out. I looked for Kara, but she was nowhere in view. After Nikka had once established my character, the Gypsies gave me a wide berth, and I had nothing to do but smoke and appear murderous. And I must say I got sick of the part. I was the first man up when Mother Kathene swung the stew-pot out of the chimney and old Zitzi and Lilli began to distribute tin plates and cups in an irregular circle on the floor. It was poor food, but plenty, and anyway, it broke the monotony of being an abandoned criminal.
With the passing of the twilight the young men moved to the courtyard. In the middle of the open space was a black smirch on the paving, and here they built a fire of driftwood collected from the beach under the wall. It was a tribute to the immemorial habits of their race. Even here in the crowded city they must close the day with a discussion of its events around a tribal blaze, exactly as they would have done upon the road, exactly as thousands of other Gypsy tribes were doing at that very moment on the slopes of the Caucasus, in the recesses of the Kilo Dagh, in the pine forests of the Carpathians, on the alien flanks of the Appalachians far across the sea.
A buzz of talk arose. The primitive Gypsy fiddles and guitars began to twang softly. Nikka was the center of a gossiping group. Men and women from the opposite side of the court joined the circle. Young girls, with the lithe grace of the Gypsy, as unselfconscious as animals, sifted through the ranks of the bachelors. Beran Tokalji, himself, a cigarette drooping sardonically from the corner of his mouth, stalked out and sat down with Nikka.
In the changing shadows beyond the range of the firelight children dodged and played unhindered by their elders. High overhead the stars shone like fireflies under a purple vault. And from the spreading mass of Stamboul echoed a gentle hum, the hum of a giant hive, a myriad voices talking, singing, praying, laughing, shouting, cursing, screaming. None of the discordant night noises of the West. No whistle-blasts, no shrieking of flat wheels on tortured rails, no honking of motor-horns, no clamor of machinery. Only the drone of the hive.