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 crook-backed pimp.
Not, by any stretch of the imagination, the victim 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
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EVERY city has districts that teeter on the fringes of respectability, regardless how close they lie to the moneyed and desirable center. 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 may 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, however, 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 asked back only 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 snatched it up. If she needed to take a look, she could press her eye against the latticework. 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 bowlegged 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 recognized 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, efendi."
"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 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
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It was already dark when Preen got back to her boardinghouse. 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 the gentleman friend 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 draft 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
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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 mustaches, 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 more than 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.
"Nothing 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, 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 that 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 turned up only three references, two dealing with the Stamboul tower, which had burned 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 probably be safely tucked up in some corner of the cafe in the Kara Davut, 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.
Even, but only.
Only a literate child.
59
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PREEN poked her finger into the little black hole in the door and crooked it, feeling upward 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 draft, 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 backward 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 his 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 upward through her shoulder into her neck and she opened her mouth to scream.
But the sound died on her lips.
60
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YASHIM, mounting the stairs two at a time, heard the crash of Preen falling backward, and at the top of the stairs he grabbed the wall and swung himself around 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 farther when he was smashed backward 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. The assassin had been with Preen, and she was dead. Another, that the killer who had struck him and who was at this very moment flinging himself down the darkened stairs, flight by flight, was not going to get away easily.
He put out a hand and gripped the banister. 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 swiveled and glanced about. A black man he recognized from the morning lay sprawled in the dust, still holding two chamber pots aloft in either fist and staring at him with utter bewilderment. 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 coffeehouse 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 recognized 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 that 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 colored glass. He guessed where he
was. And at that moment he realized, 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. "Efendi!"
Yashim recognized 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 said, panting. Yashim remembered the street on fire, the man black with soot who grinned and shook his hand.
Reaching an alley that 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.
Jason Goodwin Page 15