The Sultan's Seal: A Novel (Kamil Pasha Novels)

by Jenny White

  Irritated, Kamil calls his assistant and asks him what is going on.

  “A boy claims to have a message for you and refuses to divulge it to the head secretary.”

  “All right,” Kamil sighs, “send him in here.”

  The boy is about eight years old, slim and wary as a street cat, his hair cut close to his head. He is dressed in lovingly patched trousers and a colorful knit sweater. Upon seeing Kamil, he falls to his knees and prostrates himself on the floor, his nose pressed against the blue arabesques on the carpet. Kamil sees that he is shaking. He walks over and puts his hand on the boy’s bowed back.

  “Stand up,” he says gently. “Stand up, my boy.”

  The boy cautiously lifts himself from the floor, but stands with his head lowered. Kamil sees, however, that the boy’s eyes dart around the room, noting everything.

  “What is your name?” he asks, trying to put him at ease.

  “Avi, bey.”

  “Well, then, Avi, why did you need to see me?”

  Avi looks up at Kamil. His brown eyes are enormous in his fine-boned face. Kamil thinks to himself that these are eyes that see everything, ravenous eyes. He feels a pang of longing for the omnivorous freedom of a child’s appetite for life, not yet disciplined to distinguish raw from cooked, feasting without caring whether life is served at a table or from a tray on the floor. He smiles at Avi.

  “Amalia Teyze sent me. From Middle Village. She said to tell you that she has some important information for you.” Kamil notes with approval that the boy’s words are unhurried and that he has regained his self-confidence.

  “What is the information?”

  Hands clasped behind his back, Avi continues in a singsong voice, as if he were reciting, “She said to tell you that some weeks ago the gardener for a konak at Chamyeri found a bundle of clothing by a pond in the forest. She said you would know which house. The gardener burned the clothing, but one of the maids saw him. The maid has relatives in our village. When she came to visit, she learned that Aunt Amalia was interested in such things and came and told her.”

  The boy stops, still standing ramrod straight. His eyes, however, stray curiously to the silver inkwell, pens, and open books scattered on Kamil’s desk.

  “That is, indeed, important information,” Kamil says, reaching in his waistcoat for a silver kurush. “We thank you for bringing it.”

  “I can’t take payment,” he replies. “I was doing my duty.”

  Kamil reaches over and plucks a quill pen from its holder. He holds it out to the boy.

  “For your service, please accept this pen. If you learn to use it, come back and see me.”

  The radiance of the boy’s face as he solemnly accepts the pen shoots Kamil through with a delicious pain, a mixture of regret, longing, and pleasure.

  “Thank you, Avi. You may go. Please thank your aunt.”

  He turns his back to the boy so that he should not see the emotion on his face, he—the rational administrator, representative of the all-powerful government.

  21

  The Bedestan

  “We’re lost,” I said querulously.

  Violet claimed to know her way around the Grand Bazaar, but we had twice passed the same marble fountain on the Street of Caps.

  “I know where I’m going,” Violet repeated for the fifth time.

  I stopped in the narrow street and took my bearings. Violet looked over her shoulder and, seeing that I was no longer following her, returned and waited impatiently beside me, her eyes roaming over the shop displays. She had assured Aunt Hüsnü that she knew her way through the maze of covered streets, even though Aunt Hüsnü knew as well as I did that this was untrue. As my companion, she went where I went, and I had never been to the Grand Bazaar. Aunt Hüsnü seemed as relieved as we were that she would not be required to accompany us on our expedition to purchase items for my trousseau. I had no intention of purchasing anything of the sort, but adventure beckoned. The glittering bazaar cast its spell over me as soon as I passed through its massive gates.

  We were to go to the shop of a friend of Papa’s, a goldsmith on the Avenue of Jewelers, to look at bracelets. At first we dawdled at every shop, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of slippers, bolts of cloth, carpets, hamam supplies, and precious stones, each with its own street of shops selling the same items in almost unthinkable profusion. When a shop owner spoke to us, we shied away, only to stop again at a different shop a few steps on.

  Finally, I said, “Let’s find the goldsmith’s shop. Otherwise Papa will be angry.”

  And that is when we became lost on the Street of Caps.

  “Look,” Violet pointed. “An entire street of clothing.”

  She drew me toward a shop selling brocaded vests. I purchased a vest for Violet and a bolt of cloth for myself and arranged to have them delivered to Nishantashou. Then I asked the shopkeeper for directions to the goldsmith’s shop.

  “Follow this street,” he instructed us, pointing deeper into the bazaar, “until you come to a gate. That’s the entrance to the Bedestan. Pass though it. Outside the gate on the other side,” he assured us, “you’ll find the Avenue of Jewelers.”

  Violet was already pulling me away.

  Before long, we came to a set of thick, iron-studded gates. They led inside a room as large as a building embedded right in the heart of the bazaar. I craned my neck at the high, vaulted ceiling above the narrow lanes of shops. A wooden catwalk stretched around the periphery just beneath the ceiling. Violet nudged me and pointed at a tiny shop crammed with antique silver ornaments and vases. A slim woman in Frankish dress was bowed over a tray of necklaces. The shop next door sold gold jewelry, but of a design and quality I had never seen. Similar shops stretched before us down narrow lanes beneath the dome of this strange room like a stage set in a theater. My father’s goldsmith was forgotten.

  “What is this place?” I asked the old Armenian shopkeeper wonderingly as he placed another tray of gold bracelets on the counter before me.

  “This is the oldest part of the bazaar, chère hanoum,” he explained proudly. “It’s where all the most valuable things in the bazaar are kept. It’s fireproof and at night, after the gates are locked, it’s patrolled by guards.” He pointed at the catwalk high up under the roof. “This is as safe as any bank in Europe.”

  Next door, the Frankish woman was trying to bargain with the shopkeeper, who suddenly no longer understood English. Leaving Violet to pay for the gold bracelet I had chosen, I entered the silver shop.

  “Can I help you?” I asked her.

  She turned and I was caught up in the startled gaze of her blue eyes. She seemed to see directly into my own, as if through a window. We smiled at the same time and, without another word, turned to the shopkeeper. I did not have much worldly experience, but I had good nerves, and soon the Frankish woman had her silver necklace at less than half the price the shopkeeper had at first demanded.

  “Thank you,” she said when we had stepped back into the lane. “My name is Mary Dixon.”

  22

  Crevice

  Kamil finds Halil cleaning his tools inside a shed at the back of the garden. By the flickering light of an oil lamp, Kamil sees a single low room. Halil looks up from the bench. His eyebrows are so dense and wiry that his eyes are almost invisible. The front of the room is stacked with neatly organized garden implements and tools.

  To Kamil’s question, he answers, “Yes, bey. I found some clothes. It’s true. And I burned them.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “They were women’s clothes, bey.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “Who knows what went on with those clothes? In the woods. It wasn’t fit for anyone else to wear them. So I burned them.”

  As an afterthought, Halil adds, “Why? Did someone complain they were missing?”

  “No, but it’s possible that they belonged to someone who was killed recently.”

  “Killed.” It is a statement
, not a question. With his good hand, he absentmindedly strokes the stumps of his missing fingers.

  Kamil wonders how much he knows about Mary Dixon’s murder. Surely the villagers all know.

  “Where did you find them?”

  “By the pond.”

  “Show me, please.”

  Without a word, Halil merges into the afternoon shadows outside the door and leads the way through the garden. The air is heavy with bees. They pass the pavilion and climb over the ruined wall into the loamy gloom of the forest. The pond lies behind a screen of rhododendrons.

  “There.” He points behind a group of moss-covered boulders.

  Climbing carefully over the slippery stones, Halil points to a narrow cleft. “Pushed inside.”

  Kamil slips on a patch of wet moss and catches himself on a bush, swinging nearly to his knees as the branches give way under his weight and others flail at him. He hangs there for a moment, breathing heavily, before pulling himself upright.

  He goes over the ground carefully, sweeping aside the leaves, but too much time has passed for there to be any sign of a struggle. Beneath a top layer of crisp brown leaves is a slick wet mulch of debris from previous years. He kneels beside the boulders and peers into the crevice. Deep inside the rock there is something light. He reaches in gingerly, but emerges only with scraped, muddy fingers. He takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeve. This time, he forces his entire arm into the cleft. His fingers touch cloth. He snags it with the tips of his fingers and carefully pulls it out. It is a woman’s blouse. He scours the area systematically and discovers inside a hole, at shoulder height in the trunk of a tree, a pair of women’s lace-up shoes. Put there by someone who knows this forest well, he thinks. If the clothing is Mary Dixon’s, it would be a concrete link between her death and Chamyeri. Another link is Mary’s pendant. It fits into Hannah’s box, and Hannah was killed here. Mary and Hannah, linked by the sultan’s seal and a scrap of verse.

  The shores of the pond are preternaturally still, except for a clearly etched ripple at the far end of the metallic water where it is fed by a spring. Kamil imagines Hannah Simmons floating in the black water, her clothes billowing about her. He looks at the slippery moss and layers of dank leaves with distaste.

  His arms and face scraped and his trousers covered in mud, he returns to the city with the blouse and shoes wrapped in an oilcloth.

  MICHEL CAREFULLY CLEANS the mud from the shoes and places them on the shelf in Kamil’s office next to the folded blouse and the items found in the sea hamam. Kamil stands for a few moments before the neatly displayed items as before a shrine. He is reminded that most things we choose to care about are fleeting. To dispel the melancholy that had begun to settle on him, he turns to Michel and suggests, “Shall we go to the coffeehouse? I think we’ve earned a rest.”

  “I have a better idea,” Michel counters. “Let me take you to a very special eating house I know. Their Albanian liver is delicious. And the owner’s daughter is too,” he adds, laughing.

  23

  The Modernists

  Some days after Papa and I fought over Amin Efendi’s marriage proposal, he invited his political friends to a soiree at our house. Aunt Hüsnü and I were to appear in Western dress and greet the guests, entertain them at dinner, and then withdraw, leaving them to discuss politics. I had listened to them before. On the evenings when Papa had guests, I moved quietly through the dark corridors and took up a position in a chair in the next room where I could hear their discussions. Servants are invisible even in the light, so Violet found reason to hover in the halls and warned me if anyone approached my hiding place. This rarely happened, though, since the men did not feel free to move through my father’s house, lest they trespass into the private realm in which women dwelled. We were only appropriate when on display. Otherwise, we were dangerous and forbidden fruit.

  The men arrived, along with their wives. The women, stiff and uncomfortable in their unaccustomed corsets, adjusted the pearlseeded and embroidered veils that framed their open faces. They were dressed in the latest Paris fashion. The women’s eyes were lowered, whether from modesty or embarrassment was hard to gauge. They flocked toward Aunt Hüsnü and me, away from the men, and greeted us effusively, as if we had rescued them from a shipwreck.

  Amin Efendi politely greeted all the women together, but his eyes locked onto mine. I was embarrassed and looked away, hoping no one had noticed. I could not imagine him as my husband. I could not imagine a husband in any case. I thought of my cousin Hamza. I thought of Papa’s exasperated voice behind closed doors. That was all I knew of men and husbands.

  We walked in two flocks, men and women, to the parlor. The women clustered together on one side of the room. The men broke into twos and threes and thus took up more space, but did not move beyond the sofas, an unacknowledged boundary.

  I heard the doors to the room creak on their hinges, and I heard the men’s voices in the room falter, then increase in volume. I turned to see Hamza standing inside the door. At first I didn’t recognize him. It had been seven years since the day he gave me the sea glass and went away, leaving me alone at Chamyeri. I had heard he was in Europe. His features were sharper, as if drawn by a knife. The thick curls I remembered were slicked back against the sides of his head. Permanent lines creased the space between his eyebrows, giving him a seriousness that I found intimidating. He looked leaner and more vital, like a spirited horse whose every small movement is a barely contained shorthand of great power.

  He was looking at me, then turned his face to greet my father, who had walked up to him. Hamza leaned down to kiss Papa’s hand in the traditional manner of honoring one’s elders, but Papa pulled his hand away and reached it out to be shaken. I assumed Papa did not allow Hamza to kiss his hand because he had accepted him as an equal. But I caught sight of Papa’s face as he snatched his hand away, and afterward I was not so sure. There are many reasons not to allow someone to honor you.

  Papa pulled him briskly to the men’s side of the room. Hamza shook hands all around, although I noticed a distinct lack of enthusiasm in the men’s brief nods of acknowledgment. Then Hamza turned and strode behind the couches and extended his arms to me. We leaned toward one another and kissed on both cheeks. We were, after all, cousins and childhood friends. His touch sent my pulse racing. The room was entirely still.

  “How are you, Jaanan Hanoum?”

  I was flustered by all the attention and curtsied as I had been taught. Aunt Hüsnü moved between us and directed Hamza toward the men waiting on the other side of the room. Heads began to move toward one another, a flutter of sound like birds taking wing. Defeating my effort to focus elsewhere, my eyes fled again and again to his face across the room.

  PAPA WAS A modernist, but he was also a loyalist and the men expended great heat excoriating the Young Ottomans that they believed were undermining the empire with their talk of a parliament.

  “The empire is being threatened and all men should speak with one voice. Otherwise our enemies will perceive our division as weakness and take advantage of it.”

  The men clustered near the French doors open to the twilight garden. I could hear their conversation clearly through the chime and tinkle of women’s voices around me. Hamza sat nearest the garden, his face in darkness.

  “It’s one thing to be modern,” my father expounded, “but it’s quite another to be a traitor to your sultan.” Several men cast pointed looks at Hamza.

  “These journals spread vicious propaganda. All this talk of liberty and democracy promotes the separatist movements in the provinces and plays into the hands of the Europeans. The journals must be closed down and the radicals arrested.”

  There was a general mutter of assent. Several men shifted uncomfortably in their chairs.

  A distinguished, gray-bearded man turned toward my father. His broad chest was spanned by loops of gold braid and a sash gleaming with medals. Although he spoke slowly, weighting each phrase with the gravity of silence, no one
interrupted.

  “I agree. It’s quite possible to be civilized without aping the Europeans in everything they do. We don’t need a parliament. We have mechanisms that have worked perfectly well for five hundred years. Our experienced officials can do a much better job of running the government than a group of hotheaded young men uneducated in the principles of just rule. Who is to ensure that they promote the interests of the government and don’t misuse their power to support this group or that, undermining the unity of our glorious empire? Do we not already have an enlightened system that allows everyone in the empire, whether Muslim or minority, to thrive?” He extended his hand expansively. “Look around you. The sultan’s banker is an Armenian and his advisor on foreign affairs is a Greek. His physician is a Jew. Indeed, there is almost no work for us poor Muslims except in the army and behind a desk!”

  This occasioned laughter among the men and even some titters from the women.

  “Anyway, there is no such thing as a European civilization.” My father picked up the thread. “Europe is nothing more than a region, home to a lot of squabbling nations that can’t even agree among themselves. European civilization is a myth foisted upon us by those seeking to destroy our way of life and undermine our government. These radicals are working at the behest of the European powers, who would like nothing more than to divide us among ourselves and see the empire carved up into pieces that they can easily swallow.”

  Hamza spoke up. “The empire is weak because we’ve allowed the Europeans to buy us. We’re in debt and whatever taxes we can flay from the backs of our poor peasants goes only to pay the interest. It’s not ideas that threaten the empire. Only ideas can save it.”

  “There’s nothing civilized about your ideas,” a man countered heatedly. “They’re a threat to public morality.”

  “Yes, that is so.” A murmur of approval rose from the company.