Even, but only.
Only a literate child.
[ 59 ]
Preen poked her finger into the little black hole in the door and crooked it, feeling upwards for the slim wooden latch.
She felt it resting against the edge of her nail, and clicked it up. As the door swung open a sudden draught, laden with the unpleasantly sweet smell of rotten meat, snuffed out the candle in her hand. She gave a small cry of dismay and stepped backwards in the dark.
The swinging door struck against the side wall. At the same moment Preen felt something brush across her face, with a whirr like an insect against her skin. She jerked her head back, stumbled, and lost her footing on the top step of the darkened stairs. She fell with a crash, ricocheting off the back wall and plunging sideways down the narrow stairs.
Preen landed in a bruised tangle, her face pressed against the corridor floor. Her right arm throbbed. For a few seconds she did not move, hearing only the sound of blood pulsing in her head and the gasp of her own breath. In the darkness it sounded shockingly loud.
But then came a muffled crack behind her on the stairs, close to her feet, like the sound of someone testing their weight on a wooden step.
The sound of someone joining her in the dark.
Somebody was coming down the stairs, from her own room.
With a convulsive jerk, she pulled up her legs and somersaulted out into the corridor. As her weight fell upon her arm a jolt of pain seared upwards through her shoulder into her neck and she opened her mouth to scream.
But then the sound died on her lips.
[ 60 ]
Yashim, mounting the stairs two at a time, heard the crash of Preen falling backwards, and at the top of the stairs he grabbed the wall and swung himself round the corner into the corridor. The darkness disoriented him. He heard another movement in the passage and shouted:
“Preen!”
Without hesitation he took two steps into the dark. Only two—but they saved his life. He had got no further when he was suddenly smashed backwards with a force that seconds earlier would have catapulted him down the stairs. He felt a savage blow to his face and the breath knocked out of his lungs as he was hurled back against the wall.
Two things flashed through his mind as he retched for air. One, that he was already too late. Another, that the killer who had struck him and who was at this very moment flinging him—self down the darkened stairs, flight by flight, was not going to get away easily.
He put out a hand and gripped the banisters. The movement seemed to let air back into his chest; another brought him to his feet. For a moment he stood, heaving, and then with an oath he plunged down the stairs.
He reached the corridor on the ground floor and tore out of the entrance into the street, where he swivelled and glanced about. A black man he recognised from the morning lay sprawled in the dust, still holding two chamber pots aloft in either fist. He jerked his head and swung a pot over his shoulder. Yashim began to run.
There were still many people about, and while it was hard to see how many, or where they were until he was almost upon them, because it was very dark, something in the way people shrank back at his approach told Yashim that he was on the right track. A man runs through a crowd, he thought, and the crowd instinctively expects another, on his trail: quarry and hunter, the pursued and the pursuer, old as man himself, older than Istanbul. A picture of two snakes swallowing each other’s tails swam in his mind. He ran.
He reached the corner of the street and plunged left, guided by a sharp rage and an instinctive urge to climb, to take to the higher ground. Figures shrank away at his approach. At a corner lit by the torches of a coffee-house he caught sight of people turning their heads back to focus on him and he thought: I’m closing. But the streets were narrowing again. At a junction of three alleyways he almost paused, and almost lost his way: but then a faint something in the air, a sickly-sweet trace he had smelled before but couldn’t identify, gave him the lead he sought and, ignoring a well-lit empty alley and another he thought he recognised as a cul-de-sac, he plunged down the darkest and the meanest of them all. Whether he was trailing by instinct, or magic, or by signs he could not even pause to decipher—a faint incline, a preference for the dark over the light, an unreasoned and unexamined knowledge of the difference between a street and a dead-end which he had imbibed, as it were, from years of living in Istanbul—he did not know: had he stopped to think he would have stopped altogether, for the breath was flying to his lungs like an angry lizard: he could feel its scales upraised, its scrabbling claws.
He swerved to the wall and flung out his hand to meet it and stood for a few seconds, breathing heavily. Ahead, lights flickered and glittered red in the darkness, a string of little street shrines lit by candles glowing behind the coloured glass. He guessed where he was. And at that moment he realised, too, where he was going.
And he ran on with such a fierce, formless and glowing conviction that at the next alley he swerved suddenly to the right and almost knocked a man to the ground.
It was a glancing blow, shoulder to shoulder, but it made the man wheel; and as he wheeled, Yashim turned his head and caught sight of his face. It contained, he saw, a whole range of expressions—anger, confusion, and a spark of sudden recognition.
“The fire!” The man cried out, almost with a laugh.
Yashim waved an arm and sped on, but the man was at his back. “Effendi!”
Yashim recognised the voice. And at that very moment the alley made a sudden shallow curve and a light was burning at its far end: and right in his line of sight he caught a glimpse of what he already knew had been in his mouth all along, like the tail of a snake: a fleeting glimpse of a man who disappeared.
A voice came from behind: “I saw him! Let’s go!”
Yashim glanced sideways as the other man, fresh to the chase, loped up at his shoulder.
“Murad Eslek!” He panted. Yashim remembered the street on fire, the man black with soot who grinned and shook his hand.
Reaching an alley which offered a choice to run right or left, Yashim hesitated. He seemed to have lost his sense of direction: Eslek’s sudden appearance confused him. He was aware that he had been running for a long time. He sensed he was very close -but he felt his own anger and confusion, pounding heavy-footed down an ordinary alleyway in Istanbul. What he had taken for inspiration had suddenly resolved itself into commonplace: it had become no more than coincidence.
“The tanneries!” Yashim gasped. The scent had both eluded and directed him for what seemed like hours. He had smelled it the moment Preen’s killer made explosive contact with him at the head of the stairs. It had drawn him along the streets, sucked him instinctively into alleyways, urged him left and right and now, within sight of his prey, it enveloped him.
Doggedly, feeling the weight on his feet for the first time, Yashim trotted left at a junction of mean alleys. Even in the darkness he could see that the walls around him were not continuous. Here and there a dim glow told him that he was passing a dwelling of some sort, but for the most part he moved in darkness where the lane bled out into scrub, and goats and sheep were tethered and corralled into flimsy yards. He heard them shift, with a low tinkle of bells; once he stumbled into a gate where the lane curved. His companion had long since dropped away: his quarry was nowhere to be seen. Nowhere to be sensed.
The reek of the tanneries had blotted him out.
[ 61 ]
The first thing Yashim noticed, after the stench he was forced to suck down into his heaving chest, was the light.
It rose in eerie columns from the vats into which, across an area of several acres, the animal skins were lowered for boiling and dyeing. Against a forest of flickering torches, each vat threw out a spume of coloured vapour, red, yellow and indigo blending and slowly dissolving into the darkness of the night air. The air stank of fat, and burned hair, and worst of all the overreaching odour of dog shit used to tan the leather. A vision of hell.
A hell into which Yashim’s quarry had disappeared.
Yashim dropped to one knee and took a careful look around.
He’d heard about the tanning yard, and smelt it, too, but this was the first time he had seen it with his own eyes. A high wall enclosed a space about the size of a football field, and crammed together, almost touching at the rim, the vats lay embedded in a raised floor of clay and cement, which glinted greasily in the torchlight, and allowed the tanners to walk between them and stir their bubbling contents with a long pole. Moulded of clay, lined with tiles, each vat was about six feet across. Here and there crude derricks had been set up for hauling the heavy bundles of wet skins in and out of the dyes, and at the junction of each four vats, in a space that resembled a four-pointed star, circular iron grilles had been fixed, Yashim imagined, to feed air to the flues that ran underneath. Several of these grilles were visible from where he stood.
Of the assassin there was no sign, but Yashim knew that he was there, somewhere, hidden behind the lip of one of the vats, perhaps, or standing motionless against the shadowed walls. Yashim knew almost nothing about the killer, except that he could operate in the dark: it was in the dark that he had launched himself against him, in darkness he had killed Preen, in the night he had stolen in to garrotte the hunchback. The dark, Yashim thought, is this man’s friend.
He scanned the tannery again. It was surrounded by high walls: only at the farther end of the tannery across the dancing glow of colour could he see other darkened doorways. He did not think the killer had found time to reach them.
Yashim shifted focus to look at the vats closest to him. The colours in the steam were less vivid, perhaps because of the way the light caught them; it was only further out, as the pillars of steam overlapped, that they showed a rainbow iridescence. Some of the nearer vats appeared to be empty.
Yashim edged closer on bended legs, holding up the skirt of his cloak. He stepped out onto the clay. It was surprisingly slippery, beaded with droplets of steam and fat, and he moved cautiously, planting his feet with elaborate care. He could feel the heat from the vats but, yes, there were empty vats among them. They were drained, he now saw, by means of a wooden bung attached to a chain which ran up the inside of each vat and was secured by a metal loop at the rim. He had a vision of the killer dropping down into one of them: like the soldier lying dead in the cauldron at the stables, long ago.
He reached into his cloak and unsheathed the little dagger at his belt. For a moment its blade glinted fiercely in the weird light, and then dulled as the vapour which filled the air condensed on the cold metal. He held it out, the handle beneath his thumb and nestling into his curled fingers, using it like a pointer.
He put one foot on top of the grating, feeling a rush of hot air up his leg; he tried it with his weight and felt the grating rock, with an almost imperceptible metallic sound. He pushed again, a little harder. Again the same slight yielding to pressure, but this time the metal grille gave a distinct knock against the frame.
Yashim stepped back and crouched down to inspect the grating. It was about twenty inches in diameter, set with rounded iron bars about two inches apart. He raised his head, considering. There had been so little time to hide. Crouched in one of the empty vats, the killer would be caught like a bear in a pit: it would be only a matter of time before Yashim found him, and then…
He put out his hand and pushed the far side of the grating, watching it rock very slightly away from him. It was not properly bedded at one side, and by rocking it to and fro he worked out the pivotal point. Yashim ran his fingers along the edge and gave a grunt as his fingers closed on a small twist of cloth no bigger than a fingernail that protruded from the joint.
He stood up and stepped back, carefully, to take a flaming torch from a bracket in the wall. Once more he scanned the tannery, but nothing moved. By the grating he knelt down and thrust the torch against the grille.
Tunnels. These grilles had to be more than air-vents: they must also act as access-points to a network of tunnels for the tanners to feed the fires that boiled the water in the vats. The killer could have dropped down here into the tunnels: in his haste, though, a corner of his sleeve must have caught in the join as he replaced the grille overhead.
It has already been said that Yashim was reasonably brave: but that was only when he stopped to think.
Without a moment’s reflection, he heaved up the grille and swung his legs into the pipe. The next moment he was crouched at its base, about five feet below, peering in astonishment at what was revealed in the flickering light of his torch.
[ 62 ]
The assassin hung for a moment on all fours, to catch his breath. Strong: yes, he was very strong. But the running was for a younger man, perhaps; a man in training. He had not trained that way for ten years.
Move, he told himself. Crawl away from under the grating. For the first time in forty-eight hours he felt tired. Jinxed.
The mission had failed. He had waited for hours in that room, focusing on the door. Once or twice he had tried the latch, to see how long it took for the door to swing open. Darkness had come: his element.
He had heard her coming. He saw the light approach, watched with satisfaction as a finger snaked in to flick the latch. His hand coiled around the weight at the end of the twine.
And then, in the darkness, it had all gone wrong. The dancer stepped back, not forwards. The weight sliced through the empty air, and then the crashing. It would have been possible to go on—but someone had come.
If there’s any risk of being discovered, abort.
The assassin began to move again, silently, creeping away from the grating down the sluice. Forget the failure, he thought. Hide. Go to earth.
The movement consoled him. His breathing softened. Rest now. No one would follow him down here, and later he could rectify his mistake. Sleep now.
Sleep among the altars.
Each altar topped by a glowing brazier.
The air was fetid and warm.
The air was full of sleep.
The assassin squirmed through a low arch and found a clear space on the warm brick. He also found a day-old loaf of bread on the ledge of a brazier and stuffed a piece of it into his mouth. He took the stopper from an earthenware bottle and drank a long draught of warm water.
At last he stretched out on the warm bricks, clasping his hands behind his head.
And then, looking up at the curving belly of the vats, the assassin screamed.
[ 63 ]
Yashim saw he had been wrong about the spaces that lay below the vats. From what he could make out, a succession of air-wells all dropped to a huge and very low chamber, raised on shallow brick vaults. Between the vaults, at regular intervals, wide braziers were set on stacks of bricks to heat the tiled cauldrons overhead: in the dim and smoky light the cauldrons were suspended like the teats of a monstrous she-devil.
His eyes ran from the wooden bungs which hung like nipples to the brickwork that composed the floor on which he now crouched. In a way he had been right. He had expected a maze of tunnels, but what he found was the impress of a maze, as if the floor of the tannery had been scored by a huge wheel: as if the tunnels he had imagined had been abandoned when they were only a few inches high. They were thick with coloured grease.
He shuffled forwards, the torch in one hand, the knife in the other. He felt the grease pile up beneath his toes: looking down, he saw it gathered in a slick ridge at his feet. Looking ahead, he saw that the grease was actually moving sluggishly towards him. Someone had already sloshed it aside, in a faint but unmistakable track, and it was quietly oozing back, revealing its direction as it rolled.
Struck by an idea, he inched back to the air-vent and stood up. He put the torch on the ground above his head and gripped the edge of the grating, hauling himself back into the not-so-fresh air.
For the next five minutes, Yashim crept this way and that around the vats. He went to the far end of the tannery and removed the grating, thrustin
g his torch down the pipe. He watched the oozing grease for a few moments.
He went towards the centre of the tannery and fiddled with a rope attached to one of the derricks used for raising and lowering bundles of skins into the vats.
When he was ready, he put a hand on one of the chains that stretched out of the vats and yanked on it.
Then he dived for another, and another, pulling with all his might.
And somewhere in the distance, as if from underground, he heard a scream.
[ 64 ]
The assassin saw the first bung disappear.
Ten years before, he had watched a wall collapse on top of him, and counted that moment an eternity.
Now, for an eternity, he made no sound.
For an eternity he scrambled for an explanation.
And he rolled aside only when the bung was replaced by a black tube of scalding fat and water which exploded onto the brick.
It ricocheted onto his back, the hot fat clinging like needles.
And he screamed.
Spouts of heavy boiling dye erupted all around him. The culvert he lay in was suddenly filled with swirling liquid. In terror he ploughed his hands into the scalding torrent and fought his way to an opening. He reached up, placed his scalded hands on the grating, and heaved.
And as he dragged himself up out of the vent he scarcely noticed the coiled rope that cinched very tight against his burning ankles.
[ 65 ]
Yashim lunged on the counterweight and had the satisfaction of seeing the assassin swept from his feet. But as the slipknot ran up against the pulley, the arm of the derrick swung heavily towards him and the rope went slack. Yashim lunged further backwards to regain his hold but at that moment the rope bearing the assassin’s weight kicked between his hands, almost knocking him off his feet: the rope sped through his palms and he found himself suddenly scrabbling against the sweaty slope. He kicked with both feet: his left leg slithered off the edge and his foot touched boiling water. He jerked it back with a gasp, and went down on his side.
2006 - The Janissary Tree Page 16