Jason Goodwin
Page 20
Feeling ridiculous, Yashim scrambled to his feet and bowed.
"Forgive me, Excellency," he said. "I lost my way. I had no idea--"
Eugenia pouted. "No idea, Monsieur Ottomane? You disappoint me. Come."
She ran her hand down between her breasts. By the jewels, Yashim thought, she is lovely: lovelier than the girls in the sultans harem. Such white skin! And her hair--black as shining ebony.
She drew one knee up and the silk sheet rode up, exposing a long, slender thigh.
She wants me, Yashim thought. And I want her. Her skin: he longed to reach out and stroke it. He longed to inhale her strange, foreign fragrance, figure her curves with his hands, touch her dark lips against his own.
Forbidden. This is the path of passion and regret.
This is where you cannot go. Not if you value your sanity.
"You don't understand," said Yashim desperately. "I'm a--a--" What was that word the English boy had used? It came back: "I'm a freelance."
Eugenia looked puzzled.
"You want me to pay?" She laughed incredulously and shook her curls. Not only her curls. "What if I don't?"
Yashim was confused. She saw the confusion on his face and held up her hands.
"Come," she said.
She put her hands flat on the bed, behind her back. Yashim groaned softly and closed his eyes.
Five minutes later, Eugenia had discovered what Yashim meant by freelance.
"Better and better," she said and threw herself back against the pillows. She raised a slender knee.
"So take me, Turk!" she gasped.
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Far away, in the first great court of the sultan's palace at Topkapi, the carriages rolled away across the cobbles and through the high gate, to disappear toward the Hippodrome and the darkness of the city. Just one fine carriage still remained, its driver motionless on the box, whip in hand, two footmen standing behind like men of stone, impervious to the light drizzle. As the wind whipped the torches hung up along the inner wall, the flare caught the glossy black shellac of the carriage door and lit up the royal arms of the Romanovs with its double-headed eagle: the symbol that so many centuries before had originated in this very city.
If all was ghostly still in the Russian ambassador's carriage, in the boudoir of the Russian ambassador's wife matters had reached a distinctly lively crisis.
With a heave of her shoulders, Eugenia let out a long, satisfied sigh.
Moments later, she was smiling lazily into Yashim's ear.
"I may be vain, but I don't suppose," she whispered, "that this is why you came?
Yashim propped himself up. His eyes were squeezed shut, as though he were in pain. Eugenia put out a hand and stroked his damp forehead. "I'm sorry," she said, simply.
Yashim blew out and opened his eyes. Taking a deep breath, he said, "The--map--in--the--vestibule. Where's it got to?"
Eugenia laughed, but when she caught the look in his eye she whipped aside and knelt on the bed.
"Are you serious?"
"I need to look at that map," he said. "Before your husband gets home."
"Him?" A look of scorn crossed her face. "He won't come in here." She bounced off the bed and retrieved her peignoir, tying the sash with an angry tug.
"He has never forgiven me for marrying him. And you have no idea how bored I am."
Yashim frowned. It was hard to believe that the prince could keep his hands off his wife for a moment. But there it was. Perhaps he, Yashim, was no better than those Westerners who imagined the sultan in a scented paradise of houris.
"I've been here six months. I never go out. I change my dress three or four times a day--for what? For who? The sentries? Once a week my husband hosts a very dull dinner."
She gathered her black curls in one hand and raised them to the back of her head. Then she let the curls fall.
"At home there's a ball every night. I see my friends. I ride out in the snow. I--oh, I don't know, I laugh, flirt, talk about literature and the arts, everything. I suppose that's why I seized on you. You were the first Turk I ever had a chance to speak to. My first Turkish lover."
Yashim lowered his eyes. Eugenia laughed again.
"I'll show you the map. It's just there."
She pointed over his shoulder. He looked around and there it was, leaning against the wall, the familiar shape of the city like an animal's snout, rootling the shores of Asia.
"I need to compare," he explained, reaching for his cloak. He took out Palewski's map, unfolded it, and crouched down by the Lorich map, smoothing Palewski's against the glass.
"I just can't imagine what you're up to, but can I help?" She laid a hand on his shoulder.
Yashim explained. "On this map, we have all the religious buildings in Istanbul as they stood about thirty years ago. The ones I'm interested in are the Karagozi tekkes--the symbol seems to be an Arabic letter B, like this."
"They're awfully difficult to make out," Eugenia said, pouting. "It's a complete forest of Arabic squiggles."
Yashim's eye swept the map. "Originally I was looking for a fire tower, but I've had to change my mind. The old map, this one of yours, shows us all the buildings that were standing in 1599. By comparing the two we should be able to work out where the oldest Karagozi tekkes were."
"You mean if something shows up on both maps, it was built before 1599."
Eugenia bit her lip.
"You'd do best to split the city into several strips, north-south, say, so that you know where you are and don't leave anything out."
"That," Yashim said, "is a very clever idea. Let's do it."
Eugenia took Palewski's map and folded it into four pleats. Then she turned the first pleat over, and they began to plot the tekkes.
After twenty minutes they had covered the first quarter of the city and dismissed about a dozen tekkes as being too modern. Yashim struck them off. They were left with two possibles.
"Next strip," Eugenia said.
They worked on.
"Some people might think this was an odd way to spend time with a half-naked Russian girl in the middle of the night."
"Yes. I am sorry."
"I like it." Eugenia's eyes crackled. She hugged her knees. "All the same, you might take me back to bed quite soon."
They completed the second leaf. A possible candidate had popped up by the city walls, but this time it was the newer map that sowed the confusion, making it hard to say exactly which building had been the tekke.
"Halfway now," Yashim reminded her.
"More than," she said. "The city gets progressively thinner from here on, until it reaches SeragUo Point."
"Quite true. Go on."
About ten minutes later they identified the Stamboul Tower as a tekke.
"That's good," Yashim said. "It proves the system is working."
"Pouf! I'm glad you told me now."
The last fold of the map brought out the Galata Tower and also the old tekke in the Janissary headquarters, now buried beneath the Imperial Stables. As Eugenia had predicted, they completed their comparison more quickly, for not only did the city dwindle but much of it was covered with the palace and grounds above Seraglio Point. They found nothing there to surprise them.
"It's late," Yashim said. "I should go."
Eugenia stood up and stretched, first on one foot, then the other.
"How? Perhaps it hasn't occurred to you, but the embassy is locked at night. High walls. Vigilant guards. A mouse couldn't get in--or out. Fortunately for me, you are not a mouse."
With a flourish she slipped the sash from her waist. Her peignoir swung open and she gave a shrug of her shoulders and stepped from it.
"The pleasure is all mine," Yashim said with a smile.
"We'll see about that," she said and held out a hand.
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The master of the Soup Makers' Guild took the ends of his mustache in either hand and thoughtfully tugged on them.
He knew that the investigator from the palace had to be right: only the night watchmen could have organized the theft. But why? It had to be some foolish prank, he supposed. Maybe some sentimental ritual of their own. When he explained that one of the cauldrons had gone missing, he had expected them to look shifty and ashamed. He had expected them to confess. Confide. He had hoped they would have confidence in him.
Only they stared at him blankly, instead. Denied it all. The soup master had been disappointed.
The soup master began again. "I am not looking for punishment. Perhaps the cauldron will be returned, and perhaps we need say no more about it. But"--he raised a heavy finger--"I am troubled. The guild is one family. We have difficulties, and we sort them out. I sort them out. It is what I do, I am the head of this family. So when some outsider comes to tell me about problems I know nothing about, I am worried. And also ashamed."
He paused.
"A snooping fellow, from the palace, comes to tell me something that has happened in my own house. Ali--I'm getting through now, am I?"
He had detected a flicker of interest--but it hadn't developed.
The soup master pulled at his mustaches again. The meeting disturbed him. The men weren't exactly insolent, but they were cold. The soup master felt that he had run a risk for their sakes, giving them work when they were desperate, but there had been no answering gratitude on this occasion.
He stopped short of dismissing them, with an uneasy feeling that a wordless threat had been issued. That he should mind his own business-- as if the theft of a pot, and the subsequent denials, weren't his business entirely! But he could not simply dismiss them now. If they suffered, he might suffer. He could be accused of aiding and abetting the enemies of the Porte.
He crammed his massive hands together, kneading his fingers.
Was there no way of paying them back for their disloyalty? He thought of the eunuch.
The eunuch had some status in the palace.
The soup master wondered how he could become better acquainted with that man.
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YASHIM spent the morning visiting the three sites he had identified from the old map the night before. He hoped that something would strike him if he searched with an open mind.
A tekke did not have to be large, but a big space might provide a clue. A tekke did not, of itself, have to conform to any particular shape, yet a small dome might suggest a place of worship. So would, perhaps, a stoup for holy water, or a redundant niche, or a forgotten inscription over a doorway in a corridor--little signs that might seem insignificant in themselves, but taken together would help to point him in the right direction.
Failing that, he could always ask.
The first street he visited was only gradually recovering from the effects of a fire that had burned so fiercely that the few stone buildings had finally exploded. Some large, broken blocks still lay embedded in the ash that drifted listlessly up and down the charred-out street. Some men were poking in the ash with sticks; Yashim supposed they were householders, searching for their savings. They answered him slowly, as if their thoughts were still far away. None of them knew about a tekke.
The second place turned out to be a small, irregularly shaped square just within the city walls. It was a working-class district, with a fair number of Armenians and Greeks among the Turkish shopkeepers whose little booths were gathered along its eastern edge. The buildings were in poor repair. It was almost impossible to guess their age. In a poor district, buildings tended to be repaired and recycled beyond their normal life expectancy. Come a fire, and people built afresh in the same style as their fathers and grandfathers.
Across from the shops stood a small but sedate and clean mosque, and behind it a little whitewashed house where the imam lived. He came to the door himself, leaning on a stick, an old, very bent man with a straggling white beard and thick spectacles. He was rather deaf, and seemed confused and even irritated when Yashim asked him about the Karagozi.
"We are all Orthodox Muslims here," he kept saying in a reedy voice. "Eh? I can't understand you. Aren't you a Muslim? Well, then. I don't see what--we are all good Muslims here."
He banged his stick twice, and when Yashim finally got away he continued to stand there on his threshold, leaning on his stick and following him through his thick spectacles until he had rounded the corner.
From the shopkeepers he learned that a market took place in the square every other day. But as for any Sufi tekke, abandoned or otherwise, they only shrugged. A group of old men, sitting out under a tall cypress growing close to the base of the old wall, discussed the matter among themselves, but their conversation soon moved on to memories of other places, and one of them began a long story about a Mevlevi dervish he'd once met in Ruse, where he had been born almost a century ago. Yashim slipped away while the men were still talking.
By late morning he had reached the third, and last, of the possibilities suggested by Eugenia's map, a tight knot of small alleys in the west of the city where it had been impossible to pinpoint, with any degree of accuracy, either the street or building the tekke had appeared to occupy.
Yashim wandered around, defining a kind of circuit that he spent more than an hour exploring. But these narrow streets, as always, yielded little: it was impossible to guess what was going on behind the high blind facades, let alone imagine what might have taken place there fifteen or a hundred years before. It was only at the last minute, when Yashim was ready to give up, that he accosted a ferrety man with a waxed mustache who was stepping out of a porte cochere, carrying a string bag.
The man jumped when Yashim spoke.
"Who do you want?" he snapped.
"It's a tekke," Yashim began--and as he said it he was struck by an idea. "I'm looking for a Sufi tekke, I'm not sure whose."
The man looked him up and down.
"Doesn't it make a difference?" He seemed genuinely surprised. "They aren't all the same, you know."
"Of course, I understand," Yashim said peaceably. "In this case, I'm looking for a particular old tekke... I'm an architect," he added wildly.
He had spent the morning asking people if they remembered a Karagozi tekke. He had supposed that a redundant tekke could become anything from a shop to a tearoom. It hadn't occurred to him until now that the most likely fate for an abandoned tekke was to be adopted by another sect. A Karagozi tekke would become someone else's.
"An old tekke." The man swung his nose left and right. "There's a Nasrani tekke in the next street. They've only been there ten years or so, but the building's very old, if that's what you mean."
The Karagozi were banned ten years ago.
"That," said Yashim, smiling, "is exactly what I mean."
The man offered to show him to the place. As they walked along, he said, "What do you make of all these murders, then?"
It was Yashim's turn to jump. A street dog got up from a doorway and barked at them.
"Murders?"
"The cadets, you must have heard. Everyone's talking about them."
"Oh, yes. What do you think?"
"I only think--what everyone says. It's something big, isn't it? Something about to happen." He put his hand into the air as if feeling it with his pursed fingers. "I keep rats."
"Rats."
"Do you like animals? I used to keep birds. I loved it when the light fell on their cages in the winter. I kept them hanging, outside the window. The birds would always sing in the sunlight. In the end I let them go. But rats, they're clever, and they don't mind a cage. Plus I let them out, to run. You can see them stop and think about things.
"I've got three. They've been acting strangely these last few days. Don't want to come out of their cages. I take them out, of course, but they only want to hide somewhere. If it was just one, I could understand. I get times when I don't want to see people, too, just
want to stay at home and play with my pets. But all three, just the same. I think they feel it, too."
Yashim, who had never liked rats, asked, "What is it? What do they feel?"
The man shook his head. "I don't know what. People muttering, all closed up. Like I said, something's happening and we don't know what. Here you are, the tekke."
Yashim looked around in surprise. He had passed the low, windowless box earlier. It looked like a warehouse or a storeroom.
"Are you sure?"
The man nodded briskly. "There might be no one there, but they seem to be around in the evenings. Good luck." He waved the string bag. "Got to pick up some food for the rats," he explained.
Yashim gave him a weak smile.
Then he knocked hard on the double doors.
84
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"Yes, Karagozi." The man continued to smile gently.
So this is it, Yashim thought. At the same time he looked about him with sudden curiosity. Was it here, then, that the Janissaries had indulged in their bacchanalian rites? Bibbing, and women, and mystic poetry! Or something more prosaic, like a chamber of commerce, where business deals were fixed up and the soldiers who had become traders and artisans talked about the state of the market and what they could squeeze from it.
There was nothing superficially sacred about the place. As it stood, it could easily have been the warehouse that Yashim had originally mistaken it for, a plain, whitewashed chamber lit by high windows, with an oak table running down the middle and benches on either side. A banqueting hall, say. The walls were freshly whitened, but they seemed to have been painted once, to judge by the cloudy images he could still make out behind the lime.
"The walls were decorated?"
The tekke master inclined his head. "Very beautifully done."
"But--what, sacrilegious?"
"To our minds, yes. The Karagozi were not afraid to make representations of what God has created. Perhaps they were able to do this with a pure heart. Yet those who believe as I do would have found them a distraction. I cannot say that this is why we had them painted over, though. It was more driven by a concern to return to the old purity of the tekke."