2006 - The Janissary Tree

by Jason Goodwin

  Yashim allowed for a suitably impressed pause.

  “The cauldrons,” he suggested.

  “Yes, yes, that is what I’m thinking about. There seems to be one missing.”

  [ 15 ]

  The seraskier sat on the edge of the divan, staring down at his shiny leather riding boots.

  “Something will have to be announced,” he said finally. “Too many people know what’s happened as it is.”

  The workmen had been too scared to touch the obstruction in the drain once they knew what it was. Leaving it still concealed across the mouth of the drain, they had fled downhill to inform the caretaker of what they had found. The caretaker informed the imam, who was at that moment setting out to climb the minaret to call the morning prayer. In a hurry, not quite knowing what to do, the imam sent the caretaker to track down the morning watch: the old man could hear the sound of the prayer breaking out all over the city as he scurried through the streets.

  There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His Prophet.

  By dawn light, a group of men could be seen milling about the drain. One of them had been sick. Another, hardier, braver or more desperate than the rest for the night watch’s proffered sequins, had manipulated the grotesquely misshapen corpse out of the drain and onto the cobbles, where it was finally bundled onto a sheet, wrapped and hoisted onto a donkey cart that went slipping and swaying down the slope to the Nusretiye, the Mosque of the Victory.

  The workman who had made the discovery had already gone home, to sleep off his horrors or sluice them away in the vivid warmth of the baths. His mate, better shielded from the shock, remained to enjoy his moment with the crowd. Already his story, somewhat improved from its first rendition, was being retailed with appropriate embellishments among latecomers to the scene, and within the hour several versions of events were circling through the city. By lunchtime these stories were so finely rounded that two of them were able to actually pass each other without the slightest friction, leaving some people to believe that it had been a day of oddities in which an Egyptian sphinx had been dug up out of the foreshore while in Tophane a nest of cannibals had been surprised at their gory breakfast.

  The seraskier had intercepted the rumours considerably earlier. He heard that a man, very possibly one of his missing recruits, had been found in bizarre circumstances close to the Mosque of the Victory. He sent to the mosque for more information, and learned that the body had been put into an outhouse normally used by some of the workers on the site. He dispatched a note to Yashim, who was at that moment eating his borek in the cafe on Kara Davut Sokagi, suggesting they meet at the mosque, and rode over to see.

  Thoroughly shaken and repelled by the condition and appearance of the naked corpse, he had returned to his apartments to find Yashim—in a state of ignorance and unconcern—examining the spines of the military manuals and regulation books that filled the bookshelves opposite the divan.

  The seraskier became very angry.

  [ 16 ]

  The master of the soup-makers’ guild had been angry with Yashim, too. The fact that the stranger knew more about the missing cauldron than he did seemed to him in some degree sinister.

  “Is this some kind of a joke?” he demanded furiously, when his eyes had—rather superfluously, Yashim thought—devoured the store-room in a fruitless search for the enormous missing cauldron. After all, you could hardly conceal a cauldron the size of an ox behind a few scrolls and hand-weights. At the same time Yashim felt sorry for the master: such a thing, he was almost certain to say, had never happened before in all the history of the guild. Now it had happened on his watch: a theft.

  “I can’t believe it. I have the key.” He held the key up and stared at it, as if it might suddenly break down and confess to illicit behaviour. Then he shook it angrily. “This is highly irregular. Twenty-four years!” He glared at Yashim. “I’ve been here twenty-four years.”

  Yashim shrugged amiably.

  “Do you keep the key with you all the time?”

  “In the name of God, I sleep with my keys!” the master snapped.

  “You might update the lock.”

  The master cocked his head and leaned slowly towards Yashim.

  “You say you come from the palace,” he growled. “What is this? You are some inspector?”

  Yashim nodded slowly. This is a man, he thought, who feels easy with power. He glanced again at the master’s hands. The massive fingers were loosely curled.

  “You could say that.” More briskly he added: “When did you last come in here?”

  The soup master drew breath through his nose, and as he exhaled Yashim wondered what he was considering: the answer to the question? Or whether to answer the question?

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “About a month ago. Maybe more. Nothing was missing.”

  “No. Who guards the place at night?”

  In Istanbul it was always people who mattered. Who you knew. The balance of favours.

  The soup master’s breath was rapid.

  “How is the guild house guarded after hours?”

  “We employ guards. I myself sleep overhead.”

  “How many guards?”

  “Oh, two, maybe three.”

  Yashim’s face remained expressionless.

  “They have keys?”

  “I told you, I sleep with the keys. They have the key to the main gate, of course—I give it to them at night and collect it back first thing in the morning.”

  “May I see it?”

  The master fished up the loop and ran his fingers through a bunch of keys. Finding the right one, he showed it to Yashim, who raised his eyebrows. It was another of the old-fashioned sort, something like a big comb of wood, with pegs of varying length for teeth.

  “You say two or three guards. Do you mean two? Or do you mean three? Which?”

  “Well, I—” the master broke off. “It depends.”

  “On what? The weather? Their mood? What I see here is a place that runs by the book, yes? No deviation from routine, no innovation, no coriander in the soup. Right?”

  The master lifted his chin.

  “But when we come to the regulation of the night watch, you don’t know how many guards are employed. Two or three? Maybe it’s five. Maybe none.”

  The master of the soup-makers’ guild lowered his head for a second. He seemed to be thinking.

  “It’s like this,” he said slowly. “There are always enough guards. Sometimes it’s two, sometimes three, just as I said. They aren’t always the same men, night after night, but I know the bunch. I trust them, always have. We go back a long way.”

  Yashim noticed something imploring in the man’s tone. He caught his eye.

  “They’re Albanians, aren’t they?”

  The master blinked. He looked steadily at Yashim. “Yes. What of it?”

  Yashim made no answer. He reached out and took the master’s hand in his, and with the other he gripped the man’s sleeve and rolled it back. The master jerked away with an oath.

  But Yashim had already seen what he had expected. A small, blue tattoo. He had not been quick enough to recognise the actual symbol, but there was only one reason why a man would carry a tattoo on his forearm.

  “We can talk,” he suggested.

  The master compressed his lips and closed his eyes.

  “All right,” he said.

  [ 17 ]

  While he waited for the seraskier’s anger to blow itself out, Yashim questioned him about the discovery of the second corpse, asking for details about the position of the drain and the condition of the body. The effort of describing the way the corpse was trussed seemed to rob the seraskier of his temper, but he kneaded the back of a chair with his fingers, making it creak. Yashim wondered if he would sit down.

  “I had thought,” the seraskier concluded bitterly, “that we might have got somewhere by now. Have we got anywhere?”

  Yashim pulled at his nose.

  “Effendi. I still do not
understand how the men went missing. Did they go out together?”

  “Yes, so I understand.”

  “Where?”

  The seraskier sighed. “That’s just it. Nobody seems to know. They came off duty at five. They went back to their dormitory and spent some time there—I know, because they overlapped with the men coming on for night duty.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Nothing much, apparently. Loafing on their bunks. Books, a game of cards, something like that. The last man out saw two of them playing cards.”

  “For money?”

  “I…I don’t know. Probably not. I hope not. These were good young men.”

  “The man who saw them playing, was he the last man to see them at all?”

  “Yes.”

  “So nobody checks on people as they leave the barracks?”

  “Well, no. The sentries are there to check people as they come in. Why should they check people going out?”

  To help a man like me in a situation like this, Yashim thought. That was one reason; he could think of others. A question of order and discipline.

  “Do the men generally go out, for whatever reason, in uniform?”

  “Five or ten years ago, it was uncommon. Now we encourage the men to wear uniform at all times. It is better for the people of Istanbul to become acquainted with the new ways, and better for the men. It improves their morale.”

  “And useful for you, too, to check on how they behave.”

  The seraskier cracked a rare, dry smile.

  “That too.”

  “Would they visit a brothel? Did they have girls? I’m sorry, effendi, but I have to ask.”

  “These men were officers! What are you saying? The men, yes, the ordinary men see women in the streets. I know about that. But these were officers. Of good family.”

  Yashim shrugged.

  “And there are good brothels, too, by all accounts. It doesn’t seem very likely that these four went and sat out the whole evening in a well-lit cafe, in their uniforms. That’s no way to go missing, is it? Instead, somewhere along the line, sometime in the course of their evening, their paths had to cross the path of their abductor. Their murderer. Somewhere—what? Murky, out of the light. In a boat, maybe. On a dark path. Or in some place shady—a brothel, a gambling saloon.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “May I have your permission to interview the officers who shared their dormitory?”

  The seraskier blew the wind between his teeth and stared down at the floor. Yashim had been here before. People wanted solutions, but they always hoped they could reach them without creating a fuss. The seraskier wanted to make a public announcement but was not, it seemed, quite ready to risk offending or alarming anyone. The forces of the padishah, he would aver, are working ceaselessly and with complete confidence to bring the perpetrators of this evil deed to light—and he wouldn’t mean a word he said.

  “Effendi, either we must try to find out what happened, or there is no point in my proceeding with this case.”

  “Very well. I will write you a chit.”

  “A chit. Will that be enough, do you think? To talk, perhaps. In the murky place: will a chit hold out?”

  The seraskier looked straight into Yashim’s grey eyes.

  “I’ll support you,” he said wearily.

  [ 18 ]

  Yashim arrived early at the little restaurant beneath Galata Point and chose a quiet alcove which overlooked the channel of the Bosphorus. The Bosphorus had made Istanbul what it was: the junction of Europe and Asia, the pathway from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, the great entrepot of world trade from ancient times to the present day. From where he sat he could watch the waterway he loved so much, the narrow sheet of gun-metal which reflected back the shape of the city it had built.

  The water was as ever thick with shipping. A mountain of white sail rose above the deck of an Ottoman frigate which was tacking up the straits. A shoal of fishing smacks, broad-beamed and single- masted, held out under an easterly wind for the Sea of Marmara. A customs boat swept past on its long red oars like a scurrying water-beetle. There were ferries, and skiffs, and overladen barges; lateen-rigged cutters from the Black Sea coast, house-boats moored by the crowded entrance to the Golden Horn. Across the jostling waterway, Yashim could just make out tiskiidar on the opposite shore, the beginning of Asia.

  The Greeks had called Uskiidar Chalcedon, the city of the blind. In founding the city, the colonists had ignored the perfect natural setting across the water, where centuries later Constantine was to turn the small town of Byzantium into a great imperial city which bore his name. For a thousand years Constantinople was the capital of the Roman empire in the east, until that empire had shrunk to a sliver of land around the city. Ever since the Conquest in 1453, the city had been the capital of the Turkish Ottoman empire. It was still officially called Constantinople, though most ordinary Turks referred to it as Istanbul. It remained the biggest city in the world.

  Fifteen hundred years of grandeur. Fifteen hundred years of power. Fifteen centuries of corruption, coups and compromises. A city of mosques, churches, synagogues; of markets and empo-ria; of tradesmen, soldiers, beggars. The city to beat all cities, overcrowded and greedy.

  Perhaps, Yashim sometimes reflected, the Chalcedonians hadn’t been so blind, after all.

  He had half-expected the Albanian to stay away, but when he looked up there he was, massive and grim, hitching his cloak. Yashim gestured to the divan and he sat down.

  “Ali Pasha of Janina,” said the soup master. “The name means something to you?”

  Ali Pasha was the warlord who by guile and cruelty had built up a semi-independent state in the mountains of Albania and northern Greece. It was fourteen years since Yashim had seen his head displayed on a pillar at the gates of the seraglio.

  “The Lion,” Mustafa rumbled. “We called him that. I soldiered in his army—it was my country. But Ali Pasha was foxy, too. He gave us peace. I wanted war. In 18061 went to the Danube. That is where I joined the corps.”

  “The Janissaries?”

  The soup master nodded.

  “As a cook. I was already a cook, even then. To fight—it’s not so much for a man. For an Albanian, it’s nothing. Ask a Greek. But cooking?” He grunted with satisfaction.

  Yashim clasped his hands and blew into them.

  “I am a man of tradition,” the soup master continued. “For me, the Janissaries were the tradition. This empire—they built it, didn’t they? And it is hard for an outsider to understand. The Janissary regiment was like a family.”

  Yashim pulled a sceptical face. “Every regiment says that.”

  The soup master shot him a scornful look. “They say that because they are afraid, and must fight together. That is nothing. There were men in the corps I loved because they could handle a falcon, or make poetry, better than anyone in the world before or since. Believe me. There was a brave fighter who trembled like a leaf before each battle, but fought for ten. We looked after each other, and we loved each other—yes, they loved me because I could make them food anywhere, the same way we loved the cobbler who would see us shod even when he had nothing but bark and pine needles to work with. We were more than family. We had a world, within a world. We had our own food, our own justice, our own manner of religion. Yes, yes, our own manner. There are various ways to serve God and Mohammed. To join a mosque is one way, the way of the majority. But we Janissaries were mostly Karagozi.”

  “You’re saying that to be a Janissary was to follow a form of Sufism.”

  “Of course. That and all the other rituals of being a Janissary. The traditions.”

  The traditions. In 1806 the sultan, Selim, had begun to train up a parallel army to the Janissaries. In that respect it had been a forerunner of Mahmut’s New Guard. But Selim, unlike Mahmut, had had little time to organise: the result was that when the Janissaries rebelled against their sultan, they crushed him, and destroyed his reformed army. The rebel Janissar
ies had been led by Bayraktar Mustafa Pasha, commander on the Danube.

  “So you were there,” Yashim suggested, “when Selim was forced off the throne, in favour of his brother Mustafa.”

  “Sultan Mustafa!” The Albanian ground out the title with scorn, and spat. “Girded with Osman’s sword, maybe, but mad like a dog. After two years the people were thinking how to get Selim back. Bayraktar had changed his mind as well, like all the rest of us. We were in Istanbul, at the old barracks, and for a night we prayed for guidance, talking with the Karagozi dervishes.”

  “They told you what to do?”

  “We stormed the Topkapi Palace next day. Bayraktar ran through the gates, crying for Selim.”

  “At which point,” Yashim recalled, “Mustafa ordered Selim to be strangled. Along with his little cousin—just in case.”

  The soup master bowed his head.

  “So it was. Sultan Mustafa wanted to be the last of the House of Osman. Had he been the last, I think he would have survived. Whatever else we might have been, we Janissaries were loyal to the House. But God willed otherwise. Even though Selim was killed, the little cousin escaped alive.”

  Thanks to his quick-thinking mother, Yashim reflected. At the crucial moment, with Mustafa’s men scouring the palace with their bowstrings, the crafty Frenchwoman he now knew as the Valide Sultan had hidden her boy beneath a pile of dirty laundry. Mahmut became sultan by the grace of a heap of old linen.

  “You were there?”

  “I was in the palace when they brought the boy to Bayraktar Pasha. I saw the look on Sultan Mustafa’s face: if he had seemed mad before, then—” The soup master shrugged. “The chief Mufti had no choice but to issue a fetwa deposing him. And Mahmut became sultan.”

  “For myself, I was tired of this kind of soldiering. Rebellion, fighting in the palace, the murder of Selim.” He gestured with his arm: “Back and forth, here, there. I’d had enough.”