2006 - The Janissary Tree

by Jason Goodwin

  “Why don’t you just come in through the windows at the back?”

  “I didn’t want to surprise you.”

  Palewski turned his back and began to mount the stairs.

  “Nothing surprises me,” he said.

  Yashim glimpsed a dark corridor, which led to the back of the Residency, and a sheet covering some furniture stacked in the hall. He followed Palewski up the stairs.

  Palewski opened a door.

  “Ah,” he said.

  Yashim followed his friend into a small, low-ceilinged room, lit by two long windows. Against the opposite wall stood an elaborate chimney piece, decorated with sheaves of carved shields and the bows and arrows of a more chivalric age; in the grate a fire glowed dully. Palewski threw on another log and kicked the fire; a few sparks shot up. The flames began to spread.

  Palewski threw himself into a massive armchair and motioned to Yashim to do the same.

  “Let’s have some tea,” he said.

  Yashim had been in this room many times before; even so, he looked about with pleasure. A mottled mirror in a gold frame hung between the louvred windows; beneath it stood Palewski’s little writing desk and the only hard chair in the room. The two armchairs, drawn up to the fire, were leaking their stuffing, but they were comfortable. Over the fireplace hung a portrait in oils of Jan Sobieski, the Polish king who lifted the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683; two other oils, one of a man in a full wig on a prancing horse, and another family scene, hung on the wall by the door, over a mahogany side-table. Palewski’s violin was perched on it. The further wall, and the alcoves by the fire-place, were ranged with books.

  Palewski reached forwards and yanked once or twice on a tapestry bell pull. A neat, Greek serving girl came to the door and Palewski ordered tea. The girl brought a tray, and set it down on the charpoy in front of the fire. Palewski rubbed his hands together.

  “English tea,” he said. “Keemun with a trace of bergamot. Milk or lemon?”

  The tea, the fire and the rich tones of the German clock on the mantelpiece soothed the Polish ambassador into a better mood. Yashim, too, felt himself relax. For a long while neither man said anything.

  “The other day you quoted something to me—an army marches on its stomach. Who said that? Napoleon?”

  Palewski nodded, and pulled a face. “Typical Napoleon. In the end his armies marched on their frozen feet.”

  Not for the first time, Yashim promised himself to probe Palewski’s attitude to Napoleon. It seemed a combination of admiration and bitterness. But instead he asked: “Does anything about the way the Janissaries named their ranks strike you as significant?”

  “Significant? They took titles from the kitchen. The colonel was called the soup cook, wasn’t he? And there were other ranks I remember—scullion, baker, pancake maker. Sergeant-majors carried a long wooden ladle as a badge of office. As for the men, to lose a regimental tureen in battle—one of the big cauldrons they used for making pilaff—was the ultimate disgrace. They had the provisioning sorted out. Why the Janissaries?”

  Yashim told him. He told him about the cauldron, about the man trussed ready to roast, the pile of bones and wooden spoons. Palewski let him speak without interruption.

  “Forgive me, Yashim, but weren’t you in Istanbul ten years ago? They call it suppression, don’t they? Laughter can be suppressed. Emotion. But we’re talking about flesh and blood. This was history. This was tradition. Suppressed? What happened to the Janissaries wasn’t even a massacre.”

  To Yashim’s surprise, Palewski was scrambling to his feet.

  “I was there, Yashim. I never told you this, because no one -not even you—would have wanted to know. It’s not the Ottoman way.” He hesitated, with a rueful smile. “Have I told you this before?”

  Yashim shook his head. Palewski raised his chin.

  “June the sixteenth, 1826. Sunny day. I was over in Stamboul on some errand or another, I forget,” he began. “And boom—the city explodes. Kettles drumming on the Etmeidan. Students in the medreses, humming like ripe cheese. Get back, I think. Down to the Golden Horn, grab a caique, tea on the lawn and wait for news.”

  “Tea?” Yashim interjected.

  “It’s a figure of speech. Rather like the lawn. But never mind: I never made it here. Golden Horn. Silence. There were the caiques, drawn up on the Pera side. I waved and capered on the landing stage, but not a miserable soul stepped forward to ferry me across. I tell you, Yashim, it made the hairs prickle on the back of my neck. I felt as if I’d been quarantined.

  “I had a rough idea of what was brewing. I thought of some of the pashas I knew—but then, I thought, they’d have trouble enough without me tagging along. To be honest, I wasn’t sure it was wise to be barricaded into some grandee’s mansion at the moment of crisis, which we all knew was coming. Guess where I went instead.”

  Yashim creased his brow. I know just where, old friend, but I won’t spoil it. “A Greek tavern? A mosque? I don’t know.”

  “The sultan. I found him in the seraglio, at the Circumcision Kiosk—he’d just arrived from Besiktas up the Bosphorus. Various commanders with him. The Grand Mufti, too.” Palewski gave Yashim a long, hard look. “Don’t talk to me about suppression. I was there. ‘Victory or death!’ the pashas shouted. Mahmut took the Holy Standard of the Prophet in his two hands. ‘Either we win today,’ he said, ‘or Istanbul will be a ruin for cats to prowl through.’ I’ll say this for the House of Osman: it may have taken them two hundred and fifty years to make the decision, but when they made it, they meant it.

  “Students came pouring into the great court at Topkapi. They were given arms, and they carried the Holy Standard to the Sultan Ahmet Mosque—all that end of the city was ours, around the Hippodrome, Aya Sofia and the palace. The rebels were at the end of the street closer to their barracks, around the Beyazit Mosque and down by the old clothes bazaar. Old Byzantine street, and Janissary stronghold, too. That’s where the sultan’s troops attacked first. Grapeshot. Like Napoleon at the Tuileries. A whiff of grapeshot.

  “Just two cannons—but under a fellow they called Ibrahim. Infernal Ibrahim. The Janissaries ran back to the barracks and started to barricade the doors with stones—not a thought for their companions left out in the streets. Even when the artillery had surrounded them, they refused to talk about surrender. Just crowded together inside the Great Gate, apparently. The first cannonade which blew it open killed dozens of them, there and then.

  “We saw the flames, Yash. They burned the Janissaries out -some of them, anyway. It was like dismantling a straw-rick, killing the rats as they scamper out. The prisoners were sent to the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, but those who were strangled on the spot were dumped under the Janissary Tree—there were half a dozen corpses there by nightfall. The next day, the Hippodrome was a heap of bodies.

  “It’s always made me feel sick, that tree. Thinking of the men hanged in the branches, like fruit. And the Janissary corpses piled around its trunk. It must have blood in it, Yash. Blood in its roots.

  “But that’s what I saw, and I’m saying this. I’ve known pogroms and massacres. I’ve seen worse, to be frank, than what the Janissaries got in the end. Women and children—I’ve seen that. The Janissaries were men, and they deserved it in a way, poor fools, for what they’d done, and what men before them had done and been doing, time out of mind. They knew the racket they’d joined. It was killing the empire slowly, and they must have known that one day there’d be a reckoning.

  “Perhaps they didn’t expect it, coming quite like that, so utter and complete. It wasn’t ‘party’s over and leave your sabres on the counter as you file out’, was it? It was annihilation, Yash. Ten thousand dead? Burning them out of the Belgrade Forest. Winkling them out of the provincial cities. Tartar horsemen, flying across the empire to spread the news. The Auspicious Event, that’s the phrase, isn’t it? The Janissaries don’t even get a mention on their own death certificate. They’re gone, and beyond trace, too.

 
“You know, a few weeks afterwards, I saw the sultan with an executioner, in a cemetery among the cypress trees. Their ancient dead. The loyal and the brave, as well as the venal and corrupt. The executioner beheaded every gravestone with a heavy sword.”

  Yashim raised a finger.

  “There’s one left. Over in Uskudar, with the sleeve carved into the stone.”

  Palewski waved him away.

  “There’s always one left. And maybe dozens. It doesn’t mean anything. The Ottoman empire endures. It endures because everything has changed. And everything has changed because the Janissaries are gone. They were the bedrock of the empire, don’t you see? They were all that stood in the way of—what? The sultan riding on a European saddle. The army drilling like Napoleonic soldiers. Christians opening liquor shops in Pera, men in fezzes instead of turbans, all that. And more: the Janissaries were thieving, overweening, narrow-minded bastards, but they were poets, and artisans of skill, too, some of them. And all of them had culture of a kind. Something that was bigger than them, bigger than their greed and faults.

  “Do I regret them? No. But I mourn them, Yashim. Alone in this city I mourn them, because they were the soul of this empire, for good and ill. With them, the Ottomans were unique. Proud, strange and—in a way—free. The Janissaries reminded them of who they were, and what they wished to be. Without them? Very normal now, I’m afraid. Too normal: even the memory of the Janissaries is blotted out. And the empire can’t jig along with this normality, I think, for very long. It’s too thin, too brittle, without memory. Being able to remember—that’s what makes a people. It’s the case for us Poles, too,” he added, suddenly morose.

  He swept into an armchair and was silent, brooding with a hand across his eyes. Yashim took a sip of his tea, found it cool and drained the cup.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

  Palewski slowly raised his head.

  “Bother me, Yashim. Bother as much as you want. I’m only the ambassador, what do I know about anything?”

  Yashim felt himself humbled. He had a boyish urge to get up and go away. “I wondered about the bones,” he said, “because they were so clean. How many days have they had—six? How do you strip the bones of a man clean in such a short time?”

  “Well,” Palewski murmured, feeling rather queasy. “You boil him.”

  “Mmm. And whole, too—in a huge pot. There isn’t a mark of a knife on the bones.”

  Palewski poured more tea. He noticed that his hand was trembling.

  “Think of the smell,” Yashim was saying. “Someone would be sure to have noticed.”

  “Yashim, my friend,” Palewski protested. “Are there any aspects of this mystery which don’t involve cookery? I feel we may have to suspend our Thursday evenings until this is all over. I’m not sure I’m up to it.”

  Yashim seemed not to have heard.

  “The way the bodies appear, it’s almost as if they’re signalling their reach—first at the new stables above Aksaray, then way over the Golden Horn in Galata, near the Mosque of the Victory. Finally, today, we get one at the very gates of the Bazaar. Corpses materialising out of thin air—and another to come,” he added. “Unless we get there first.”

  “You could only do that if—what?—there were some sort of pattern. Something about each of those locations which suits the murderer, however far apart they are. Delivering corpses all around the city, and even to Galata, has to be more difficult than just letting them bob up in the Bosphorus.”

  Yashim looked up and nodded. “But for some reason the killers think the added difficulty is worthwhile.”

  “A pattern, Yashim. You need to get hold of a decent map and plot the points.”

  “A decent map,” Yashim repeated flatly. It was many years since anyone had attempted to make a good map of Istanbul.

  Palewski knew that as well as he did.

  “All right, what else do you have?”

  “One Sufic verse. May or may not be relevant. One uniformed Russian,” Yashim replied.

  “Ah. A Russian. Now that I can help you with.”

  Yashim told him what Preen had discovered about the decorated fifth man.

  “Order of Vasilyi, I shouldn’t wonder. Only awarded for battlefield experience, but it’s not immensely high grade. You wouldn’t wear it if you could get something grander.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means that your boy is probably a good soldier, but not a grandee. Fourth rank aristocracy, or lower. Could be a career soldier.”

  “In Istanbul?”

  “Attached to the embassy. There’s no other explanation. I’ll find him for you right now.”

  Palewski unwound himself from his armchair and dug about in a low shelf. He dragged several copies of Le Moniteur, the Ottoman court gazette, back to his seat and began flicking through the pages.

  “It’ll be in here—who’s come, who’s left, who’s presented their credentials at court. Look, new boy at the British embassy, American charge d’affaires upscaled to consular rank, Persian emissary plenipotentiary received, blah blah. Next one. New Russian trade agent, wrong line of country, departure of French consul—ah, wish I’d gone to that party—etcetera, no. Next. Here you are. N. P. Potemkin, junior attache to the assistant attache of military affairs presents his credentials to the viziers of the court. Pretty lowly. Not full accreditation. I mean, he never got to see the sultan.”

  Yashim smiled. Palewski’s own reception by the sultan had been the high point of his otherwise stillborn diplomatic career. As well as making a story which Palewski told in the driest way possible.

  By a quirk of history, the Polish ambassador was maintained in Istanbul at the sultan’s expense. It was a throwback to the days when the Ottomans were too grand to submit to the ordinary laws of European diplomacy, and would not allow any king or emperor to claim to be the sultan’s equal. An ambassador, they reasoned, was a kind of plaintiff at the fount of world justice rather than a grandee vested with diplomatic immunity, and as such they had always insisted on paying his bills. Other nations had successfully challenged this conception of what an embassy was about; the Poles, latterly, could not afford to. Since 1830 their country had ceased to exist when the last parcel, around Cracow, was gobbled up by Austria.

  The stipend the Polish ambassador received didn’t seem to cover the cost of maintaining the embassy itself, Yashim had observed, but it at least allowed Palewski to live in reasonable comfort. “We talk of Christian justice,” Palewski would explain, “but the only justice that Poland has ever received is at the hands of its old Muslim enemy. You Ottomans! You understand justice better than anyone in the world!” Palewski would be careful not to complain that the stipend he received had not changed for the last two hundred years. And Yashim would never say what both of them knew: that the Ottomans only continued to recognise the Poles to irritate the Russians.

  “So it seems,” Yashim mused, “that junior attache Potemkin springs into a coach with four of the brightest New Guard cadets—and they’re never seen alive again.”

  Palewski’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Meet a Russian—disappear—it’s a common phenomenon. It happens all the time in Poland.”

  “But why would they meet a Russian official in the first place? We’re practically at war with Russia. If not today, then yesterday and probably tomorrow.”

  Palewski put up his hands in a gesture of ignorance.

  “How can we know? They were selling secrets? They all met at the Gardens, by chance, and decided to make a night of it?”

  “No one meets anyone at the Gardens by chance,” Yashim reminded him. “As for selling secrets, I get the impression that it’s us who need their secrets, not the other way round. What could the cadets be selling—old French trigonometry tables? Details of cannon they probably copied off Russian designs in the first place? The name of their hatter?”

  Palewski scowled and thrust out his lips.

  �
��I think that’s enough tea,” he said thoughtfully. “The penetration of arcane mysteries requires something stronger.”

  But Yashim knew the consequences of following Palewski’s well-meaning advice. So he made his excuses, and left.

  [ 34 ]

  Yashim walked quickly away to the Pera quay on the Golden Horn, and crossed by caique to the Istanbul side. His friend was right: it looked as though another body, the fourth, was going to wind up on his plate tomorrow night. And that was just the beginning of his difficulties.

  A jogging donkey-cart blocked his progress as he walked back to his lodgings. The driver looked round and raised the handle of his whip in acknowledgement, but the alleys were too narrow to let him by, and Yashim was forced to drag his feet, smouldering with impatience. At last the cart turned into his own alley, and at that moment Yashim saw a man loitering, about halfway down. His outfit of scarlet and white indicated that he served as a page of the interior service of the palace. He was looking up the other way, and Yashim slipped back into the alley he’d come from.

  He leaned against the wall and considered his position. The seraskier had given him ten days: ten days before the great Review that would show the sultan at the head of an efficient, modern army that could match anything the empire’s enemies could put into the field against it. Four days had already gone, and time seemed to be running out: there was the question of the upcoming murder, Palewski’s well-founded observation that he needed to get his hands on a good map, and the problem of the Russian attache, Potemkin. But there was the strangling at the palace, too, and the valide’s lightly couched threat that he had better find her jewels if he ever wanted another French novel. Well, he did want another: but Yashim wasn’t naive. Novels were the least of it. Favour. Protection. A powerful friend. He might need that any day.

  He wasn’t ungrateful, either. The palace had discovered—and then allowed him to exercise—his particular talents, the same way that for hundreds of years the palace had selected and trained its functionaries to exploit their natural gifts.