Chapter 10: Small Profits, Larger Ambitions

Chapter 10: Chapter 10: Small Profits, Larger Ambitions

I

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 17 January 1902

By the winter he turned twelve, the counter by the shop door had grown a second shelf, a lockable drawer, and a reputation.

The shelf held slates, which had sold better than anything else in the second half of the year. The drawer held the ledger, the cash, and a small brass bell that Zeynep had insisted on, because she said a customer should always be certain that someone was watching.

The reputation held nothing at all, and that was what troubled him.

On the Friday evening after his birthday, the two fathers read the year’s figures aloud at the supper table.

"Three hundred and sixty-one kuru? in profit," said Mustafa Efendi, laying the ledger down. "On a stock that never exceeded two hundred and forty."

"Not bad for a boy of twelve," said Mehmet, and then, because it was his habit to say the second half of a thought, "Not bad for a grocer’s son."

Fatma looked up from her sewing, and Zeynep laughed into her sleeve.

Ayaan did not laugh. He was looking at the number.

Three hundred and sixty-one kuru? was a little more than three Ottoman liras.

It was a good winter’s savings for a clerk, and nothing beside the sums he knew were possible, and he had spent the whole year telling himself that was as it should be.

A boy who made too much too fast was not a merchant. He was a story.

"What troubles you?" said Mehmet quietly, when the others had turned to the soup.

"Nothing, Baba. It is only that the counter is known now."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"I do not know yet."

Mehmet tore a piece of bread and considered it.

"Being known is the whole of the business," he said. "We have said so many times. But a name travels in two directions, my son, and the second direction does not always bring customers."

It was the first time his father had said so plainly what Ayaan had been afraid to put in words.

Within a week, he would learn exactly what he meant.

II

Constantinople, Bab?ali Street — 8 March 1902

The clerk came to the counter on a gray Saturday, in a coat that had once been black and was now the color of old tea.

He was a stooped man of fifty, with a pen behind each ear and ink worked into the creases of his fingers.

He carried a folded list in one hand, and he introduced himself as Münir Bey, a senior copyist in one of the offices near the Sublime Porte.

"I have heard," he said, "that a boy in this lane keeps nibs that do not split."

"They are steel, Bey Efendi. From Birmingham."

"I know what steel is." Münir Bey examined the nibs on the plank with a critical eye. "I have been paying three times as much for worse, at the stationers’ near the Porte, for eleven years."

He laid the list on the counter.

"My office uses five reams of paper a week, and two hundred nibs a month, and a dozen bottles of ink. It buys them from a man who delivers late and charges early. I should like to try someone else."

Ayaan read the list through twice.

It was a regular order, from a government office, paid on a fixed day each month.

It was worth, he calculated, nearly as much as the whole counter earned from the lane in the same period.

It was also exactly the sort of order that his old life had taught him to distrust.

"May I ask a question, Bey Efendi?"

"You may."

"Who signs for the payment?"

Münir Bey’s mouth twisted, with a dry and tired humor.

"You are quicker than the man at the Porte. The office pays on the first of the month, by a paper from the treasury clerk. The treasury has sometimes been three months late."

"And when it is late?"

"Then I pay the supplier from my own salary, and wait for the treasury to repay me." He shrugged. "It is understood. It is how it is done."

It was how it was done.

Ayaan thought of R?fat Efendi and the Ministry’s seasons, and of the long summer he had spent carrying receipts to Galata.

"I can supply you," he said. "On one condition."

"Name it."

"The first two months, I will deliver and be paid on delivery, in coin, by you. After that, if the treasury pays you on time, we may agree terms. If it does not, we remain at coin."

The old copyist stared.

"You would put your own stock at risk, to be sure of a regular customer?"

"I would be sure of my own stock, Bey Efendi. The treasury is a larger creditor than I wish to have."

Münir Bey was silent for a moment. Then, slowly, he began to laugh.

It was a dry, wheezing sound, long out of use.

"My boy, I have known grown men who spent thirty years at the Porte and never learned that sentence," he said. "Very well. Coin. I will bring it myself."

When he was gone, Zeynep, who had been sitting on the crate behind the counter with the daily sheet, put her pencil down and let out her breath.

"That is the biggest order we have had."

"It is."

"And you have made it smaller."

"I have made it safer." Ayaan wrote the terms at the top of a new page. "A big order from the wrong customer is a loan. A small order from the right one is a business."

"You have said that before."

"I will say it again."

She made a face at him, but she was smiling.

And across the lane, on the corner by the mosque, the bookseller’s apprentice was standing in the shadow of a doorway with his arms folded, watching them.

III

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 12 April 1902

The first sign of trouble came in the price of pencils.

It was Zeynep who brought the news, on a Saturday morning, with a pencil in each hand and the fixed, careful look that she wore when she was angry and did not intend to show it.

"Hac? Nuri has cut," she said.

"Cut what?"

"Everything." She laid the two pencils on the plank. "This one is from him. This is ours. It is the same box, the same Nuremberg mark, and he is selling it for one kuru?."

Ayaan picked up the pencil and turned it over.

It was a Nuremberg pencil, yellow and hexagonal, exactly like his own, and it had cost, he knew, at least eighty para a piece at the importer’s. Hac? Nuri was selling at a price that was barely above what a retailer paid for them.

"He is not making money on it," he said.

"He does not need to. He has two shops and a bookstall, and a cellar full of books that sell at four times what they cost." Zeynep’s lip curled. "A pencil is a bait. He has done it to draw the boys."

It was a price war, and the old, cold lesson from a lecture hall in Sar?yer came back whole.

In a price war, the winner was not the better merchant. He was the one with more money to burn.

Hac? Nuri had it. Ayaan did not.

"What will you do?" said Zeynep.

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"I will keep the card as it is." He put the pencil down. "A pencil costs me eighty para, and I sell it for a kuru? and a half. If I drop to one kuru?, I make almost nothing, and he will drop again, and I will run out of money before he does."

She was quiet for a moment.

"Then he will take every boy in the lane."

"Some."

"Ayaan..."

"Let us see which ones."

It was an unnerving fortnight.

The boys at the counter thinned out, and then thinned further. On the Thursday, there were nine customers where there had been twenty, and the plank felt very bare.

Zeynep did not speak of it. She only wrote the sheet, each evening, in her small straight capitals, and left it on the barrel where he would find it.

The sheet for the second Thursday showed fourteen.

On the third, it showed twenty-three.

"They are coming back," she said, looking at it in disbelief. "Why are they coming back?"

"Ask them."

She did, because she was Zeynep.

She went out into the lane the next afternoon and stopped a boy of ten whom she knew by name, and she asked him where he had bought his pencil that week. He told her, with the open candor of the very young.

"At Hac? Nuri’s. It is cheap. But the point breaks."

"Breaks?"

"The lead. It is in pieces inside the wood. He gets them from a different box." He kicked at the cobbles. "Last Thursday he had none at all. They had all gone by noon."

She brought the answer back to the counter, and Ayaan listened with the old, quiet feeling that a theory had survived its first test.

Hac? Nuri could cut the price, but he could not hold the quality of a pencil sold at cost.

Buying more cheaply meant buying more poorly, and the cheapest crates came from a different mill.

"He has to restock more often, because his margin is gone," said Zeynep slowly. "So he buys wherever it is cheapest."

"And so the pencil that was the same as ours is no longer the same as ours."

"And the boys notice."

"The boys always notice," said Ayaan. "They are the most exacting customers in the Empire."

At the start of May, Hac? Nuri raised his price to one and a quarter kuru?.

A week later, to one and a half.

On the Sunday after that, the bookseller himself walked across the lane to the Hassan counter, a heavy man in a gray caftan with a white beard and a stick. He stood in front of the plank for some time, looking at the cards and the notebooks and the boy behind them.

"You are the son of Mehmet the grocer," he said.

"Yes, Efendi."

"You hold your price."

"I try to, Efendi."

Hac? Nuri grunted. He picked up a pencil, snapped it between his thumbs to look at the lead, and set the two halves down.

"It is a good pencil," he said, with the irritation of a man who has said something he did not intend to say. Then he turned and went back across the lane, leaning on his stick.

Zeynep let out a long breath.

"I thought he would be angry."

"He is," said Ayaan. "He is angry because he cannot find the reason to be."

IV

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 17 May 1902

The reason was found in the middle of May, in the form of a letter.

It arrived at the shop on a Saturday, carried by a boy from the Sahaflar, and it was addressed to Mehmet Hassan, grocer. Mehmet read it standing at the counter, then read it again, and then, with great care, folded it into quarters and put it in his pocket.

"The Stationers’ guild has heard that there is a counter in my shop," he said. "It asks me to attend the warden’s coffeehouse on Monday, with the boy."

"With me?" said Ayaan.

"It says, with the person whose name is in the book."

He said it without expression. But when he turned back to the shelves, Ayaan saw the muscle move at the corner of his jaw.

The guild still kept its old rolls.

In the time of Mehmed the Conqueror, every trade in Constantinople had belonged to a guild, and every guild had kept a list of who might practice it.

The empire had abolished most of those privileges in the reforms of the last century, but the lists remained, and the old men who kept them remembered every name that was missing.

A stationer, by the rolls, had to be a master. A grocer was not a stationer, and a boy of twelve was not a master, and a shop that sold both was a standing insult to somebody.

"Can they close us?" asked Zeynep that evening, in the hayloft above the warehouse.

"I do not think so." Ayaan was walking up and down on the dusty boards. "The law has changed. But the guild still has friends in the Prefecture, and a friend in the Prefecture can make a counter very difficult to keep."

"Then why did you not take the price war to the end?"

"Because it would not have mattered." He stopped. "Hac? Nuri was never the problem. He is only a man who sells pencils. The problem is that I am seen."

She looked at him, and her face was suddenly grave.

"By whom?"

"By everyone who had a reason not to look before." He sat down on a hay bale. "A child with a shop is amusing. A child whose shop takes the best customers of an old guild is a danger. It is the same child, and it is the same shop, and only the attention has changed."

"What will you say on Monday?"

Ayaan thought about it.

He thought of the old rule he had made in a cradle, the one about pace.

He thought of Mustafa’s voice at the corner of the lane.

I am not telling you to be soft. I am telling you to be known.

"The truth," he said at last. "As much of it as they can hear."

The warden’s coffeehouse stood in a courtyard near the old booksellers’ market, with a fig tree in the middle and benches under the branches.

It was crowded with old men.

They sat in rows, with their fezzes and their long pipes, and when Mehmet and Ayaan came through the gate they fell silent, one after another, in a ripple that ran along the benches.

The warden was waiting at the far end, under the tree.

He was a lean, white-haired man named Tevfik Efendi, with a hooked nose and spectacles on a cord.

He did not rise, but looked at Mehmet, and then at Ayaan, and said, mildly, "Is this the proprietor?"

"This is my son, Efendi," said Mehmet. "It is his book."

"And your name is on the sign."

"It is."

"Then perhaps you will explain, Mehmet Efendi, why a grocer is selling nibs in a street that has a stationers’ guild."

Ayaan stepped forward.

His father did not stop him. It was a thing that Mehmet had learned in the last year, to let a silence stand and see who filled it.

"Efendi," said Ayaan, "I have brought the ledger."

"I did not ask for it."

"No. But you may find it more useful than my explanation."

He held out the gray book in both hands.

It was an act of foolish courage, and he knew it. A twelve-year-old did not hand a guild warden the accounts of a business that the guild had not licensed.

But it was the one thing in the world that he was sure would speak for him.

Tevfik Efendi took the book. He opened it, and lowered his spectacles onto his nose, and began to read.

He read for a long time.

The old men on the benches shifted and coughed and murmured, and a boy came with coffee, and the warden did not look up. His finger moved down the columns of a year and a half of small, honest figures.

He turned to the margin, and stopped.

"Given. Not paid," he read aloud, slowly. "One packet of tea, to a widow. Written by Z."

Nobody spoke.

"There is a column here," said the warden at last, "for gifts."

"Yes, Efendi."

"I have kept the rolls of this guild for thirty-one years. I have never seen a stationer who wrote down what he gave away." He closed the book and held it for a moment against his chest. "Hac? Nuri tells me you undersell the quarter."

"I do not undersell anyone, Efendi. My prices are on a card above the counter, and I have not changed them since April of last year. If Hac? Nuri’s price is lower, it is because he chose to lower it."

"He says you take his boys."

"I take the boys who come to me."

A faint movement went through the benches. Somewhere, an old man chuckled, and was hushed.

Tevfik Efendi regarded him for a long time.

"There is a difficulty," he said finally. "The rolls say a stationer must have a master, and a stationer’s shop must hold no goods that belong to another trade. You are twelve. You have no master in this guild. And your father is a grocer."

"Yes, Efendi."

"So by the rolls, you do not exist."

"I am sorry for it, Efendi." Ayaan swallowed. "But I think the rolls are older than the schools."

It was a dangerous thing to say, and for a heartbeat he wished he could pull it back.

Then the warden smiled.

It was a small, dry, unexpected thing, which changed the whole shape of his face.

"I think they are," said Tevfik Efendi. "And I think that a guild which cannot admit a boy it cannot beat is a poor kind of guild."

He turned to the old men on the benches.

"Gentlemen. This counter has stood for a year. Its prices are open. Its weights are fair. It sells no books, which are ours, and no more than its own account of paper, which is the lane’s. I propose that the guild accept the grocer Mehmet Hassan as a member of the trade, with a counter, under his name."

"On what terms?" said a voice.

"The usual dues, which are forty kuru? a year. And one other condition, which I think the boy will not find hard." The warden looked at Ayaan over his spectacles. "You will sell no books."

"I do not want to sell books, Efendi."

"Good. I would hate to lose an apprentice to a competitor so soon."

The old men laughed, then, all along the benches, and the coffee came round.

It was only afterward, walking home through the lanes with his father, that Ayaan saw the thing that he had missed.

"Baba. He called me an apprentice."

"I noticed."

"He means to take me into the guild when I am older."

"I think he means to keep an eye on you," said Mehmet, with his tired, rueful smile. "It is the same thing, from the other side."

V

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 26 June 1902

On the last Thursday in June, a man came to the counter who did not buy anything.

It was after the mektep had let out and the lane was thick with boys.

The stranger stood to one side in a plain gray coat and a plain brown fez, with his hands in his sleeves, and he was not old. He was not young either.

He watched for the better part of an hour.

Zeynep had gone to her father’s warehouse. Ayaan was alone behind the plank, and he sold a dozen nibs and a notebook and a half-twist of ink powder, and each time he lifted his eyes the stranger was still there.

At last the man stepped forward.

"A pencil, please."

"One and a half kuru?, Efendi."

The stranger counted it out, with great precision, and took the pencil and turned it in his fingers. He had mild, pleasant eyes and a soft, even voice.

"I am told it was your own idea," he said, "to put the prices on a card."

"Yes, Efendi."

"A clever thing. Where did you learn it?"

"From watching my father, Efendi. He does not like to be asked what he is owed."

"And the stock? Who pays for it?"

"The counter, Efendi. It buys the next week’s goods with the last week’s profit."

"And the first week?"

"My savings. From errands, and from the tea we sold, when I was six."

The stranger smiled at this, gently.

"You are a very fortunate boy," he said. "Most children of the quarter have no such savings. Nor such friends."

"Friends, Efendi?"

"The importer’s daughter, I hear. And the old copyist at the Porte. And now the warden of the Stationers." He dropped the pencil into his sleeve. "It is remarkable, in so short a time. I only wondered who might have advised you."

It was said with great kindness.

It was the voice of the women in the room on the day he was born, he thought, saying the safe thing before anyone could say the other.

It was the grammar of fear, and it asked a question that was not a question.

He understood, with a coldness that went down his spine, exactly what this man was.

"My father, Efendi," he said. "And Mustafa Efendi, who is our neighbor. And Haf?z Kemal at the mosque, who has taught me my letters."

"Haf?z Kemal." The stranger repeated the name pleasantly, and Ayaan knew that it had been written down, in a place where a boy could not see it. "A good man. A very good man. And you, I think, are a very good boy."

He bowed slightly, and turned, and walked away up the lane.

Ayaan stood motionless behind the plank, with the brass bell silent over his head.

That evening, when the shutters were closed, he told his mother.

He did not plan to. She had come down to the shop with a lamp, to call him in for supper, and she found him sitting alone on the floor among the lentil sacks, looking at nothing.

She set the lamp on the counter and sat beside him.

"Who was he?" she said.

"You saw?"

"I see most things." Fatma folded her hands. "He came to the door twice in the last week and bought nothing. I thought he was a creditor of someone’s. But he does not walk like a man who is owed money."

"He asked about my friends. He asked who advised me."

She was silent for a long time.

"Then you must be quiet, for a while," she said at last.

"I am quiet, Anne."

"You are very good at it. Too good." She turned to look at him in the lamplight. "I mean that you must be quiet in a different way. You must do your business and be seen to do it, and be seen to do it no better than a clever grocer’s son should."

"Slower, you mean."

"Smaller. For now." Her voice was very even. "A man who grows too fast is looked at. A man who grows steadily is only observed. There is a difference, and you have lived long enough in this city to know it."

He heard the phrase long enough and did not ask what she meant.

"Baba told me that being known is the whole of the business," he said instead.

"And so it is. But known to the right people, and in the right measure." She took his hand. "Mustafa Efendi is known. He has three warehouses and a Frankish coat. And you will notice that nobody comes to ask him who advised him."

"Because he is rich enough."

"Because he is large enough that it would be inconvenient." Fatma squeezed his fingers. "There is a time in the life of every merchant when he is too big to be nobody and too small to be safe. It is the most dangerous time. I should like you to cross it as quickly as you can, and as quietly."

He sat very still.

It was the truest thing he had heard in a year, and it had come from a woman who could not read a ledger, in the dark of a shop that smelled of lentils.

"How?" he said.

"I do not know. That is your trade, not mine." She kissed the top of his head. "But I think the answer is in your book, my little lion. Look for it."

She took the lamp and went upstairs.

Ayaan sat in the dark for a while longer. Then he lit a candle stub, and took down the ledger, and opened it to the first page of the third year.

He wrote at the top, in his round clear hand, the one rule he would carry through the next ten.

Small profits, steadily. Larger ambitions, quietly.

He read it twice, and added a line below.

When the profit is too large to be small, find a larger house to stand in.