Something he knew was there, like a face in the crowd. Something he’d missed.
[ 53 ]
The man sat suddenly upright.
The assassin thought: he smells me. It made things more interesting. He’d been trained to infiltrate like an odour, not as a man. Now the odour clung to him.
The man sniffed.
Click.
Very slowly the man got to his feet. A knife in his hand.
Now where had that come from?
The assassin smiled. He felt for his pouch. His fingers closed on something hard.
The man with the knife stood crouching, craning his neck.
“Who’s that? What do you want?”
The assassin didn’t move.
A breeze caught the tattered curtain at the window and it flapped. The man with the knife wheeled round, then back again. He peered into the dark.
He craned his neck. Very slowly he turned his head.
He was trying to hear.
The assassin waited. Watching.
The man’s head moved through the midway point of its turn.
The assassin flicked his wrist and the cord snaked out. He plucked it back with a fierce grunt and the man with the knife was jerked off balance, scrabbling with both hands at his neck.
The assassin gave the cord another savage tug.
The man started sawing at the air, searching to cut the cord. The assassin stepped out of the shadows and pushed him down. He caught the knife-wrist and wedged his thumb between the tendons: the knife clattered to the floor as the hand spasmed open.
The assassin was astride him now. He put a hand to his belt and slid out a wooden spoon.
The man on the floor was choking.
The assassin slackened the cord for an instant. His victim gave a shuddering gasp, but it was a false respite. The assassin slipped the wooden spoon beneath the cord and began to twist it round.
[ 54 ]
A fat man, eager for sleep, felt himself rolled off the bed and hit the ground. He opened his eyes and saw a pair of women’s feet.
“All right, petal? Here’s your kit. Shove it on, love, I’m done. Go on.”
The fat man scrambled blearily into his robes. Get out, he thought. Five on the table, he’d be gone before she knew.
The woman watched him scurry through the door.
She was done for the night. Done with outside business, anyhow. No one would come now.
Upstairs would know the final customer had left. She was left with one more trick to turn, the worst.
Carrying her lamp she climbed the stairs. At the top she paused, hearing nothing.
Very slowly she pushed the door ajar. The room smelt terrible.
Silently she put in her head. She stretched out her hand, carrying the little lamp, and the shadows started to flicker round the room.
Months ago, the woman had lost her faith in God. She had begged, she had prayed, she had pleaded with Him night after night, and every dawn had brought the same answer. So she cursed him. Nothing changed. In the end, she had forgotten Him.
But what she saw now was like a revelation.
“Thank God,” she said.
[ 55 ]
Yashim went down to the water stairs at first light, still clutching the note which the kadi had written shortly after the morning prayer. By the time he was settled in the bottom of the boat, the note was limp with the exhalations of Istanbul’s morning damp, between fog and drizzle, but he didn’t need to read it again.
While the rower dragged busily at his heavy sculls and sent the caique skimming towards Seraglio Point, Yashim drew up his knees on the horsehair cushion and automatically let his weight settle on his left arm, to trim the fragile boat. A wooden spoon, the kadi had written: having seen the bag of bones and wooden spoons tipped out over his floor only yesterday, the coincidence had inspired him to inform Yashim.
Twenty minutes later, the rower turned the caique and backed it neatly against the Yedikule stairs in a flurry of backstrokes and shouts.
As soon as Yashim saw the little man sprawled face down in the mud with a wooden spoon bound tightly to the back of his neck he knew that this was not the fourth cadet. The corpse’s hands were by his ears, his knees slightly bent, and there was a curve in his back which made him look, Yashim thought, as if he were simply peering down into a hole in the mud.
Yashim rolled the corpse over and looked at its face.
The staring eyeballs. The protruding tongue.
He shook his head. The night watchman, who had been squatting close to the body for several hours, spat on the ground.
“Do you know him?”
The night watchman shrugged.
“Fings ‘appen, innit?” He glanced over at the corpse, and brightened. “Yer, good lad an’ all. Did some blokes a favour. Women, y’know, and all that.”
He scratched his head.
“Mind you, fackin’ tough.” His simple mind slipped into the reverse key. “Bit too ‘eavy, if you ask me. They didn’t like ‘im, not the women.”
Yashim sighed.
“These women. Are you saying he ran a brothel?”
“Yeah. Funny lookin’ geezer, too.”
Yashim walked away, squelching in mud up to his ankles. Up on the quay he saw the entrance to a courtyard and picked his way across a scattering of rubbish to a pump. He cranked the handle. A thin trickle of brown water dribbled from the spout.
People were stirring in the apartments around the courtyard. A shutter banged and a woman leaned out of an upstairs window.
“Hey, what you doin’?”
“I’m washing my feet,” Yashim muttered.
“I’m chuckin’ this bucket, so watch out.”
Yashim beat a hasty retreat, the mud still clinging to his feet. What a foul district this was!
He walked around the corner, hoping to find a cab or a sedan chair. Every doorway seemed to have its ragged beggar or snoring drunk: some of them stared blearily at Yashim as he walked past. The bars were supposed to close at midnight, but Yashim knew that they tended to stay open for as long as anyone had money to spend, finally pushing them into the street when their purses were empty and their guts were full. He couldn’t understand the attraction. Preen had once argued with him, saying that she enjoyed the bars, their mixture of happy and sad.
“Except for drunks, you can never tell who you’ll meet, or why they’re there. Everybody has a story. I like stories,” she had said.
Too many of those stories ended like this, Yashim felt, soaking up your own vomit in a cold doorway. Or head-down in the mud, dead, like that crookbacked brothel keeper he’d just seen, maintaining the tone of the neighbourhood.
Hadn’t Preen mentioned speaking to a hunchback?
A sleazy port-rat who made her feel dirty.
Who told her about the cadets meeting the Russian up at the Yeyleyi Gardens.
Her informant.
And down in the mud, freshly dead, a crookbacked pimp.
Not the victim, by any stretch of the imagination, of a crime of passion. The blow that fell too hard. The carving knife that simply came to hand.
No. It had been a professional killing. Someone who killed with a length of cord—and a wooden spoon.
Yashim broke into a run.
[ 56 ]
Every city has districts which teeter on the fringes of respectability, which have nothing to do with their proximity to the moneyed and desirable centre. However roomy the houses, however convenient they seem, they are always tainted in some indefinable way by the incessant passage of other people: people who take their lodgings by the week, or even by the night; people who come and go, and may or not come back again, and whose purposes are too fleeting and too diffuse to be properly understood. Nobody asks. Nothing is assumed. Services are paid for in advance, and trust is at a premium. Prices are always a bit higher than elsewhere, but the clientele are happy to save themselves a walk, or know no better, being strangers.
Preen, howev
er, was something of a fixture, and paid rent accordingly. Her landlord had nothing to complain of: he barely knew of her existence, being sent out to a cafe where all day he played backgammon with other old fellows and was only asked back if his wife needed to vet a new applicant or frighten a recalcitrant lodger. Guarding her modesty, Preen’s landlady conducted most of her business by shrieking from behind a latticed screen at the foot of the stairs. There was a small window people could use to pay her: they held the money by the hole and she would snatch it up. If she needed to take a look she could press her eye against the lattice-work. Her own room behind was fairly dark.
At the moment she was watching a small black man struggling with a yoke, from which hung two swaying china pots. Paying no attention to the eyes he knew were watching him behind the screen, the man carried his burden past the door and ran bow-legged into the court outside. The landlady followed his movements with envy and irritation.
It wasn’t that the landlady wanted to haul slops to the drain every morning. It was that the little black man she had engaged to perform the task knew everything that was going on before she did.
The slop-carrier returned with his empty pots and set them down in a row beside the others to dry. He faced the lattice.
“Three gents in number five. Eight not slept in, but it smell werry bad.”
The landlady sucked in her lips and pushed them out again. Number five was let for the week, to a single gentleman. She’d have it out with him when they tried to sneak out later on. As for number eight, it wasn’t the first time she’d stayed out overnight. A bad smell was the reason she discouraged her tenants from bringing food into the premises.
If she had time, she thought, she’d go and get rid of whatever was festering in Preen’s room.
A man came in at the door. She recognised him as a friend of number eight.
She rapped on the lattice with her knuckles.
“You can save yourself the stairs,” she croaked, in what she hoped was a kindly tone. Number eight was her best tenant. “Gone out.”
Yashim squinted at the lattice.
“Gone out this morning, you mean?”
It was an unlikely idea. The slop-carrier picked up a mop and began to poke it around the corridor, grinning.
“Whatever,” the landlady replied. “She’s not there now. I can let her know you called, effendi.”
“Yes, thank you. And give her this message, will you?” He tore a leaf from a little notebook he carried, scribbled a few words and folded it. The flap in the lattice dropped down and a withered hand shot out to take the paper.
“It’s important she gets this as soon as possible,” Yashim added. “You don’t know where she’s gone?”
“I’ll see she gets it,” the landlady said firmly.
Yashim hesitated. Was there anything else he could do? He thought of going up to leave a message in her room, but it was too late for that. The crone at the lattice had the message, and the black servant had already wetted the corridor floor ahead.
He bid the lattice good-day, and went out into the street.
[ 57 ]
It was already dark when Preen got back to her boarding house. Not that she had done very much that day: the action had taken place last night, at a stag-night where alcohol had been served and Preen had agreed to take a drink herself, after the dancing. It broke one of her cardinal rules, but even cardinal rules are made to be broken, she’d thought, as one drink became two and the groom-to-be asked her agitated questions about the wedding night.
So she’d ended up staying over, sleeping late, and waking up with a hangover. The other guests had left long since, taking the groom with them: she had a faint recollection of hearing stifled laughter and groans in the early morning, before she rolled over and went back to sleep. A very fat Armenian woman, sniffing with disapproval, had made her some coffee, and she had spent the rest of the day at the baths with a towel over her head.
She’d stopped for a pastry on the way home, but the hangover had taken away her appetite and she only nibbled at the corner before she asked the vendor to wrap it. It was in her bag now, but really she only wanted to go upstairs and sleep. She pushed the door, and her landlady rapped immediately on the lattice.
“Message for you,” she screeched. The flap dropped, and Preen saw her hand shoot out clutching a folded note.
“Thanks,” she said. “May I have a light?”
“Urgent, he called it. It was that gentleman of yours who came by the other day. Nicely spoken. Here you are.”
She means Yashim, Preen thought as she took the candlestick. As usual, the candle was only a stub: the landlady was careful with things like that. She wondered if she should turn around and try to find Yashim right away: she certainly wasn’t going to be able to read the note, but she didn’t want the landlady to know that.
Perhaps, if she hadn’t been standing at the foot of the stairs with the candle, she would have gone to look for Yashim. Or if the landlady hadn’t added, in what passed for a confidential undertone, that she’d be grateful if everyone would remember not to take food upstairs—the smell in her room had disturbed the help.
Preen climbed the stairs slowly. At this time of year there was a perpetual draught in the old house and the stubby candle needed shielding. On the second floor she turned left down a low corridor past two doors, both shut and silent within, to reach the tiny, crooked flight of stairs that led to her own door. Gradually she mounted, following the sharp twist she never liked because it somehow put her at odds with the rest of the house, shutting her in. She glanced up and saw the door. In the narrow stairwell the shadows flickered like a troop of wild monkeys.
She stopped and sniffed. There was a smell, just as the landlady had said. For the first time she wondered what it might be. Perhaps a rat had died under the floorboards. She shuddered, and put out her finger.
And that was something else she didn’t like about those stairs, about that door: having to reach into the dark hole to finger the latch on the inside.
It was like sticking her finger into a dark mouth.
[ 58 ]
Yashim had returned to the Imperial Archives after leaving his message with Preen’s landlady. In daylight, with a weak winter sun filtering through the high windows, the place looked more ordinary, the atmosphere flatter. There was another reason for the change, too. Several archivists were in attendance, but Ibou the Sudanese boy was not among them. The Library Angel, Yashim thought.
The head archivist was a mournful fellow with drooping moustaches, not a eunuch but a superannuated graduate of the palace school.
“The divan is in session,” he explained gloomily. “Come back this afternoon.”
But Yashim did not want to come back that afternoon. “This is urgent,” he said.
The archivist stared at him with sad eyes. He looked infinitely put-upon, but Yashim suspected he was merely lazy.
“Help me now. You can break off if any orders come from the viziers’ council.”
The archivist nodded slowly, blowing out his cheeks.
“Put your request in writing. We’ll see what we can do.”
Yashim leaned his elbows on the reading desk and chewed at a pencil. Eventually he wrote:
“Istanbul fire-towers. Location details.” And then as an afterthought he added: “Summaries of renovation/maintenance costs 1650-1750,” as being more likely to turn up what he wanted to know.
The archivist acknowledged the paper slip with a brief grunt but made no effort to read it. It lay on his desk for over twenty minutes while he thumbed through a quarto volume of figures and Yashim paced to and fro by the entrance. Eventually he picked it up, glanced at it, and rang a bell.
His subordinates moved in imitation of their master’s ponderous ennui, shaking their heads and glancing up at Yashim now and then as if they suspected he had come merely to try their patience. At long last one of them disappeared into the stacks. He was gone about an hour.
“Nothin
g specific on location. There are two volumes of accounts, which refer to the fire-service in general. They straddle your stated time-frame. Do you want to see them?”
Yashim mastered an urge to pull the man’s nose.
“Yes, please,” he said evenly.
The archivist shuffled off. He came back with two surprisingly small books, smaller than Yashim’s own hand and bound in blue cloth. The older book, which roughly speaking covered a period from the beginning of the seventeenth century to 1670, was quite badly worn, and the signatures which bound the pages together were so badly rotted that pages slipped from position in clumps, threatening to slide out of the covers altogether.
The archivist frowned.
“I’m not sure we can allow you to examine this one,” he began.
Yashim exploded.
“I haven’t waited all morning to be told I’m incapable of keeping a few pages of a book in order. I’m going to look at the book here, on the bench. Not fan it about, or shake it, or chuck it in the air.”
Yet the books proved to be a disappointment. After half an hour Yashim had only turned up three references, two dealing with the Stamboul Tower, which had burnt down twice, and the other referring only in the vaguest way to the fire-towers, without numbering or naming them. Entries had been made in the books by many hands, which made the business of deciphering some of the older entries in particular both exacting and frustrating.
It was while he was trying to make out an entry written in particularly antiquated script that Yashim suddenly thought of his message to Preen. He had written it clearly enough, and if she followed his advice she would be probably be safely tucked up in some corner of the cafe in Belol Oglu, waiting for him and challenging the men to stare. That thought made him smile, but the smile died suddenly.
He had written Preen a warning, making his instructions clear. Stifling the poetics of the written word, exaggerating the loops of his script, he’d written a few lines that anyone could read, even a child.
2006 - The Janissary Tree Page 15