The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) by Jason Goodwin Page B

this—put the lid on again, and lay it in the pan.”
    They stood side by side, working the rice into the peppers. When they were all done, Yashim poured some more stock over them and covered them with a plate.
    “Now they can lie quiet,” he said. “And we can go out again.”
    He led her downstairs, and out onto the street. At Kara Davut he shepherded her to the café. “I’ll show you how we drink coffee in Istanbul,” he said. “I think you should try it sweet.”
    When the coffee came, black and thick and small and strong enough almost to stand without a cup, she tried it gingerly.
    “Just sip it,” he warned her. “And then—like this.”
    He drank the coffee, set the saucer on top, flipped it, and laid it on the table.
    “Why?”
    “Because you can read your fortune in the shapes the grounds make in the cup. The bottom of the cup is the past, and the sides tell the future. What’s left on the saucer—that tells you about your home. Let me see.”
    A shadow fell across the table and a man clamped his hand over Natasha’s cup. She pulled back in alarm: he was a wild-looking fellow, with long mustaches and ill-kempt gray hair tied back with a dirty ribbon; the nails of his hand were chipped and rimmed with black.
    “I will read the cup for the Frankish lady,” he said.
    Yashim and Natasha exchanged glances. “Very well,” Yashim said. Sufi or beggar, it was polite to let him go on.
    The man squatted down by the table, and when he drew the coffee cup and saucer toward him Yashim noticed he put a coin on the cup—perhaps to encourage them to pay him afterward, perhaps to avert bad omens.
    He turned the cup over and peered into it silently. He looked so serious and intent that Natasha suppressed a smile. “What does it say?”
    “The lady has no family?”
    “She has a father.”
    “Hmm. But not here. She has come a long way by sea.”
    Yashim gave Natasha an amused glance.
    “There is something here she very much wants.” The fortune-teller shook his head slowly. “Different paths may lead to her goal, but it will not be easy for her to decide which one to take. The quickest route is not the best. It is unsafe. Dangerous. But the other route is slow and seems hard, so she will be tempted. I am afraid when she realizes, it will be too late.”
    Yashim frowned, but translated faithfully what the fortune-teller said. “How is she to recognize the path of danger?”
    “Because a man will offer it to her, but—” The man frowned, and cocked his head. “He is a man and not a man. I don’t understand it.” He leaned sideways and laid a hand on Yashim’s arm. “I see death, efendi. Death and punishment,” he added, looking at him with yellow eyes.
    “A woman’s death. I do not like this reading,” the fortune-teller said, replacing the cup. “I had not expected such a fortune.” He made a gesture with the flat of his hand, and stood up.
    Natasha looked anxious. “But what’s he saying?”
    The man had left the table.
    “He rambled, Natasha—many of these men are charlatans, beggars really. I am sorry.”
    “You think so? Why did he leave us with a coin?”
    Yashim followed her pointing finger, and there, on the table between them, was a copper asper.
    “Hey!” Yashim was half on his feet but the man was already gone.
    Natasha looked pale. “He said something, didn’t he? About my father?”
    Yashim shook some money from his purse. “Come on, we’ll get the other things we need, and then go back. I’ll show you how we make an Ottoman picnic, without the elephants.”
    At the cheesemonger’s stall they stopped for a block of salty white beyaz peynir , made of pure sheep’s milk, and a block of stringy dil peyniri .
    They crossed the street to an old man with curved mustaches, whose wife’s pickles were widely considered to be the best in the market.
    “ Dil peyniri is good to eat with your fingers. It’s mild, and you pull it into strings and wrap the strings around a green