“There’s one left. Over in Scutari, 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, but it’s changing right under our noses. Everything that was strange and magnificent about your people, Yash, everything that has kept this world turning for centuries—it’s dissolving beneath your feet because the Janissaries are gone. They were the bedrock of the empire, don’t you see? Every day, Istanbul has sights that would make your ancestors weep. 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 trie 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 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, “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 that 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 signaling 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 materializing out of thin air—and another to come,” he added. “Unless we get there first.”
“You could do that only if—what?—there was some sort of pattern. Something about each of those locations that 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.
“Ali. 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 his 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—Ali, wish I’d gone to that party—et cetera, 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 that 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 allowed Palewski at least 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 continued to recognize the Poles only 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 around. 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 excu
ses and left.
34
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YASHIM walked quickly away to the Pera quay on the Golden Horn and crossed by caique to the Istanbul side. A jogging donkey cart blocked his progress as he walked back to his lodgings. The driver looked around and raised the handle of his whip in acknowledgment, but the alleys were too narrow to let him by, and Yashim was forced to drag his feet, smoldering 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 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 gone. It was already Sunday, 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. Favor. 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.
And when the palace turned to him for help, it was his duty to oblige.
But that put him in a difficult position. He was engaged by the seraskier: the seraskier had called him in first.
A killing in the harem was bad. But what he was dealing with outside looked worse.
For the fourth cadet, time was running out.
He took a deep breath, pulled back his shoulders, and walked around the corner into his street.
35
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The dresser of the girls looked beseechingly at Yashim, then at the kislar agha, the chief black eunuch, who was spreading his considerable bulk across a chaise lounge. Neither the dresser nor Yashim had been invited to sit.
Yashim privately cursed his impetuosity. He’d been taken into the palace just when the valide sultan took her evening nap, and the kislar agha had swiftly taken control. The kislar agha never slept. When Yashim had told him what he had to say, he had sent immediately for the dresser.
That was how the system worked, Yashim knew. Everyone had his or her own ideas about the imperial harem, but essentially it was like a machine. The sultan, pumping a new recruit in the cohort of imperial concubines, was simply a major piston of an engine designed to guarantee the continuous production of Ottoman sultans. All the rest—the eunuchs, the women—were cogs.
Christians viewed the sultans harem quite differently. Reading his way through some of the valide’s favorite French novels, it had slowly dawned on Yashim that Westerners, as a rule, had an intensely romantic and imaginative picture of the harem. For them it was a honeyed fleshpot in which the most beautiful women in the world engaged spontaneously at the whim of a single man in salacious acts of love and passion, a narcotic bacchanal. As though the women had only breasts and thighs, and neither brains nor histories. Let them dream, Yashim thought. The place was a machine, but the women had their lives, their will, and their ambition. As for the hints of lasciviousness, the machine simply let them off as steam.
The dresser was a case in point. He was something like a squeezed lemon, a sour and fussy creature, black, skinny, forty-five, meticulous about detail, with all the spontaneous effervescence of a dripping tap. The dresser’s tasks ranged from preparing the gozde, or chosen girl, for a sultan’s bed to buying her underwear. His staff included hairdressers, tailors, jewelers, and a perfumer, whose own job involved, among other things, crushing and grinding scents, blending perfumes to suit the sultan’s taste, preparing soaps, oils, and aphrodisiacs, and overseeing the making of the imperial incense. If anything went wrong, the dresser was the one to take the blame: but he always had lesser functionaries he, in turn, could kick.
“A ring, Dresser,” the kislar agha was saying. “According to our friend here, the girl wore a ring. I do not know if she was wearing it when the unfortunate circumstance occurred. Perhaps you will tell us.”
The slight annular depression on the dead girl’s middle finger, which Yashim had noticed before the valide sultan had interrupted his inspection of the body, had interested him at the time. For all her finery and precious jewels, it had been the missing ring that recalled, however fractionally, her existence as a living person, with thoughts and feelings of her own. Perfectly engineered for the task she was never destined to perform—flawless, beautiful, perfectly accoutred, bathed, and perfumed—had she nonetheless prepared to approach the sultan’s bed with the tiniest trace of an imperfection, a cold, white indentation on the middle finger of her right hand: the faint imprint of a choice?
Was the ring removed at the time of her death, or even later?
The dresser glanced at Yashim, who watched him without expression, arms folded patiently across his chest. The dresser gazed upward, drumming his fingers nervously against his closed lips. Yashim had the impression that he already had the answer they wanted. He was trying to control his panic and work out the probable consequences of what he was about to say.
“Indeed. A ring. Just the one. She did wear the ring.”
The kislar agha tugged at his earlobe. He turned a bloodshot eye on Yashim, who said, “And the page of the chamber found the body. Can we talk to him?”
The page of the chamber, whose task was to lead the gozde to the sultan, was produced: he knew nothing about a ring. The kislar agha, who had been next on the scene, gave Yashim his answer only by a slight lowering of his eyelids.
“She was laid out in the bridal chamber, just as you saw her.”
“By—?”
“Among others, the dresser.”
The dresser could not remember if the ring had been missing then.
“But you might have noticed if it had been gone?” Yashim suggested.
The dresser hesitated. “Yes, yes, I suppose that would have struck me. After all, I arranged her hands. Put like that, efendi, it’s obvious that she was wearing the ring when she—Ali—she—”
“She died. Can you describe it?”
The dresser swallowed. “A silver ring. Not of account. I’ve seen it quite often. Different girls wear it, pass it around. There are a lot of small pieces like that, not very special, that belong to the women in general, as it were. They wear them for a bit, tire of them, give them away. Frankly, I consider those sort of trinkets as beneath my notice—unless they are ugly, or spoil a composition, of course.”
“And you let her wear this ring to attend the sultan?”
“I thought it more prudent that she should keep the ring than have an unsightly mark on her finger. I didn’t mention it.”
The dresser turned and twisted involuntarily from side to side.
“I did right, Chief, didn’t I? It was only a ring. It was clean, silver.”
The kislar agha fixed him with a stare. Then with a shrug and a wave of his hand, he dismissed him from the room. The dresser backed out, bowing nervously.
The kislar agha picked up a peach and bit into it. The juice ran down his chin.
“Do you think he took it?”
Yashim shook his head. “A bit of silver, why would he bother? But somebody took it. I wonder why.”
“Somebody took it,” the kislar agha repeated slowly. “So it must still be here.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
The black man leaned back and examined his hands.
“It will be f
ound,” he said.
36
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His Excellency Prince Nikolai Derentsov, Order of Czar Peter, First Class, hereditary chamberlain to the czars of all the Russias, and Russian ambassador to the Sublime Porte, watched his knuckles whiten against the edge of his desk.
He was, as he would have been the first to admit, an extraordinarily handsome man. Now in his late fifties, well over six feet, his broad shoulders exaggerated by a high-collared, cutaway coat, his neck in a starched cravat, lace at his sleeves, he looked both elegant and formidable. He wore his steel-gray hair short and his side-whiskers long. He had a fine head, cold blue eyes, and a rather small mouth.
The Derentsov family had found that life was expensive. Despite vast estates, despite access to the highest positions in the land, a century of balls, gowns, gambling, and politics in St. Petersburg had led Prince Nikolai Derentsov to the uncomfortable discovery that his debts and expenses greatly exceeded his income. His success in attracting a very beautiful young wife had been the talk of the late season—although beautiful young women are as common in Russia as anywhere else.
The Janissary Tree Page 11