The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim)

by Jason Goodwin

  He waited. Then he stood up wearily, and picked his way back to Ghika.

  “Five minutes,” he said. “I’ll give you five minutes to tell me everything. Lie to me, and the charge against you becomes murder and assault. I’ll know if you’re lying, Ghika, like I knew yesterday. Tell me the truth and I will even leave your money in its hole. Don’t waste time,” he added, because Ghika had begun to grovel, pawing his feet.

  Ghika gabbled through it all, the girls coming back from the baths, Yashim in the hall, then silence; he had not heard a thing upstairs. No one came, and no one went. He thought it odd. He went upstairs in the morning to see if the girl needed anything—he glanced anxiously at Yashim, as if he was afraid his lie would be detected—and couldn’t raise her. He’d gone inside.

  “Why?”

  “I—I just wanted to see if she was all right.”

  “Why shouldn’t she have been?”

  Ghika began to sweat. Yashim made to get up.

  “No—no, efendi. I’m not lying, it’s just, well…” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and sniffed. “I liked to look at her sometimes, efendi.”

  “Look at her? How?”

  A flicker of a grin, bashful but unmistakable, passed over Ghika’s face. “I saw her sometimes, twice, through the crack in the door. Taking her things off. She had such—”

  “All right. You hoped to see her naked. So you went in.”

  “In, and stepped on that blood.”

  Everything else was as Yashim had suspected. Once Ghika had got over the shock of finding her, he’d stolen whatever he could see lying about, reasoning that whoever had murdered her might have done the same.

  “Who did it?”

  He looked at Yashim with big eyes. “I don’t know, efendi. I honestly couldn’t say.”

  Yashim stood up, and shouldered his way through the crowd. Giancarlo was still huddled over his knees, but he was shaking as if he had a fever.

  “Who would kill Birgit?”

  “As things stand it looks like you, or one of your friends. That’s why you’re here, Giancarlo. Where have you been?”

  Giancarlo shook his head.

  “You’re thinking of protecting someone, is that it? All the way to the gallows? It’s not like that here, Giancarlo. Executions are messy.”

  Arrests, too, he thought, looking at Giancarlo’s battered face. Someone reached out from the dark and tugged at Yashim’s cloak. “Efendi! Help me!”

  Giancarlo turned his head aside.

  “Who would kill her? Do you know?” Yashim paused. “Birgit’s dead, and nothing is going to bring her back. But why should you protect her killer?”

  “I am innocent, please. Efendi!” He felt another tug on his cloak. He was acting as a magnet in that hot, stuffy cell: a figure from outside, a breath of air and hope. Yashim did not glance around.

  “I need your help, Giancarlo. For Birgit’s sake.”

  “For pity’s sake!” Another ragged voice whined at his elbow.

  Giancarlo’s lips moved, but the words were drowned by begging voices.

  “A feather?”

  Giancarlo gave a feeble nod. “La Piuma.”

  Yashim could make no sense of it. Someone shoved against him and he put out a hand to keep his balance: the floor was slick with damp. More people were drifting back from the bars to implore Yashim to listen.

  Giancarlo would tell him almost nothing—and everyone else wanted to tell him everything.

  “Come.” He grabbed Giancarlo’s arm and dragged him to his feet.

  But it was getting harder to move. Dozens of men drifted around them, thrusting their hands toward Yashim, pawing at his shoulders, twisting his cloak in their fingers. Their murmurs and entreaties became a roar, hemming them in, gathering thickly between Yashim and the gate.

  Clutching Giancarlo by the arm, Yashim pressed through the crowd and reached the gate.

  The guard saw him and rattled his stick along the bars. “Get back! Stand back!”

  But the crowd was too big, too blind, too pressing to move back. Yashim dragged Giancarlo in front of him, took hold of the bars, and braced his arms. Giancarlo stood in the little pocket Yashim had made. But the press was insistent. Yashim felt a body molding to his back. His turban slid forward. His arms shook.

  “Get back, there! Away from the bars!”

  A sudden pain made Yashim gasp, as the turnkey smashed his stick against the bars. The crowd wailed and roared. Giancarlo was braced against the gate, and Yashim was being squeezed, tighter and tighter. Quite suddenly his arms gave way and the weight of the throng drove him up against Giancarlo, who slammed into the bars.

  Yashim was suffocated. All around men screamed and gasped. At Yashim’s elbow a small man with a shaved head closed his eyes; Yashim saw his chin drop; in seconds he had slipped down under the throng, which jammed up to take his place. It was like watching a man drown.

  Yashim had been close to death before, and he knew how it came in a wave of lassitude and longing. The screams and gasps had subsided to a ringing in his ears and he no longer fought for breath. The pain in his chest, and his smashed finger, had become something else: the glow of dying embers, or an abstract physical sensation that kept him anchored to the world. Everything was growing dark.

  68

  RAFAEL walked with giddy steps through the streets, his scalp creeping.

  Whatever had happened at the flat, it was not the revolution. It was something dark, intimate and disturbed. But then it seemed to Rafael that the revolution had a tendency to darken as soon as words gave way to deeds. The blood congealing on the floor, and on the divan, and across the walls, had been splashed there by their revolutionary acts: of that, Rafael was certain.

  The others thought of him as a Jew; he knew that, and avoided thinking about it. He was not, strictly speaking, Jewish. He attended a Christian school, and went to mass until, at the age of seventeen, he lost his faith. After that, it had been a short step to revolutionary ideas.

  And yet, blood had been spilled on the ground—and Rafael, who had never seen blood before, knew that it cried for vengeance.

  He walked on. Ahead of him, a column of children filed along the road behind an elderly mullah. They were walking two by two, holding hands and chattering merrily. A trip to a mosque, Rafael thought vaguely. He dropped back, disturbed by their gentle, happy prattle until the children streamed through iron gates into the courtyard of a little mosque.

  His steps carried him past the railings, and he looked in. A dozen shaven-headed little boys, no more than seven or eight years old, all elbows and missing teeth, were making free of the small courtyard, racing around an old almond tree that had already begun to shed its leaves.

  Rafael trailed slowly past a pillar and stopped by the railings. A boy was swinging on the lowest branch of the almond tree, and the old mullah had come out of the mosque to tell him off. The boy jumped to the ground, landed in a squat, and raced away. The mullah said something and turned and went inside.

  The boy called to his friends and he began to play the mullah. He wagged his finger at them. He stroked his long beard. He felt a twinge in his back and began to hobble across the courtyard on an invisible stick, wagging his head.

  The other boys laughed.

  As quickly as the mullah had been assembled he was dissolved, and a new character took his place. Three or four boys lined up, the mullah—stick and beard and wagging finger all forgotten—gave a shout, and then they were off, pounding around the sides of the court, their little elbows pumping, heads up, feet flashing on the cobbles. They swept past Rafael watching at the railings. Once around was not enough! Again!

  Another boy joined in, and they made the tiny circuit—but who had won? The argument collapsed almost as soon as it had begun. An armlock, a push, then everyone wanted to see what another little boy was looking at on the trunk of the tree. A lizard, maybe—Rafael couldn’t see. All he could see was a knot of small heads, gravely inspecting the b
ark, voices low.

  The mullah was back. He stood at the doorway and clapped his hands. The boys pulled away reluctantly from the tree, one by one, and began to form a line.

  The little boy who had been a mullah, an athlete, and a zoologist was the last to drag himself away. As he finally went to join the others, he caught Rafael’s eye.

  Rafael smiled.

  The little boy looked at him blankly. Then he slowly pointed two fingers, steadied them on his other arm, cocked his hammer thumb, and fired a shot—pfui!—that struck Rafael through the heart.

  69

  THE turnkey hoisted the torch from its bracket and brought it close to the bars above his head. It was worse than he’d thought—every man in the cell seemed to be pressing toward him in a horrible lump of criminal flesh.

  It was the light—the glowing embers of the pain, as Yashim imagined it—that saved his life. For as the torch rose above their heads, Yashim glimpsed the outline of the massive piers, and the narrow ledge around them from which the vaults sprang.

  Before the press could swallow him he made a final effort, reaching up as he felt his chest compressed. His fingers met an iron bar. The metal was rough and wet, but it afforded him a slight grip, and with a heave that almost wrenched his shoulder apart he managed to struggle an inch or so higher, above the heads of the crowd.

  Two hands on the bar, he hauled again. Something like air entered his lungs: he no longer cared if it was fetid and dank. He sucked at it greedily. His eyesight cleared. The crowd surged against his legs, pinning them to the bars, but he was climbing, slithering out of that mass of suffocating men. His chest free, he breathed again, kicked with his legs like a swimmer surfacing in the water, and burst out, clinging to the top of the bars. Two shifts of his hold brought him to the ledge.

  Now he could reach down and take Giancarlo’s arm, wrist to wrist. The angle was wrong—Giancarlo had been squeezed into a sideways position, his back to Yashim, his other arm pinioned to the bars—and Yashim could feel the tendons in his neck about to burst as he hauled against the press of the crowd. But Giancarlo had his free hand on the bars and with another lunge he inched out of the scrum.

  Fingers snaked around Yashim’s ankles, grabbing at the folds of his cloak; he hooked an arm through the bars and resisted their pull, but somebody yanked at his leg and he almost toppled, losing his grip on Giancarlo, who swayed and crashed backward onto the heads of the crowd. Yashim reached out, but it was too late. Giancarlo squirmed for a moment on the shoulders of the men, and then began to sink, headfirst, a slow drowning in a sea of people.

  Yet even as Giancarlo slithered beneath the frantic, howling heads, the crowd had begun to relax. It expanded, like a new breath. Perhaps, seeing Yashim rise by the bars, the people shoving from the back had begun to fall away: the surge weakened, the third line reeled back, the second staggered, and what was left of the first, crushed up against the bars, began to breathe.

  Giancarlo was crawling on the floor, hacking for breath; bodies lay in two heaps, trampled and suffocated in that terrible small space, and men sprawled by the gate who, Yashim saw, would be meeting a different judge.

  Yashim lowered himself slowly from the ledge. His legs shook and he could barely stand. At the far end of the corridor the turnkey was at the door, shouting for help; after a moment he went out, slamming the door behind him.

  The light went with him, and with it new sounds arose in the dark: the wail of abandoned men, groans of pain, the rasp of breath. The walls absorbed them. Yashim could imagine, along the vaults, through the corridors, around and around the twisting stairs, the sounds being gradually, blandly, inexorably retuned to the soughing and sighing of this thousand-year-old prison.

  For a long time he held the bars between his hands. Someone bumped into him: he shrank like a cat. At last he heard the tramp of feet, the key grated in the lock, and half a dozen men surged into the corridor.

  A horrid fear arose in Yashim’s mind—that the turnkey who had let him in would not come back, that his pleas would be dismissed and he would stay down here for days, months, never called out, never recognized, forgotten forever and lost to all his friends.

  His hand raced to the pocket where he had tucked the kadi’s note, and when he felt its outline and the crack of the paper, he almost sobbed with relief. A light was thrust at him, and he blinked.

  “There are five injured men, maybe more,” he said slowly. “Open this gate.”

  For a moment he was afraid that the man had not heard him. He saw the key and heard it rattle in the lock. The jailers stood in a line, protecting the door and tapping their staves in their palms.

  “Like a pack of rats.” One of them chuckled.

  Yashim swept through the gate and stabbed a finger toward the cell. “That man, there. Bring him out.”

  The jailer went inside. He took Giancarlo by the arm, and looked around at the bodies on the floor.

  “I’m taking this man into my custody, at the kadi’s direction.” Yashim waved the paper. “You will see that the cells are cleaned. The men need fresh water.” It was too much to ask for air.

  The turnkeys were too astonished to protest when Yashim pushed Giancarlo ahead of him and out the door. One of them followed with the keys, to lock them through.

  The two men stood breathing heavily. The sun was sinking over the Prince’s Islands, the first inklings of darkness creeping eastward across the Black Sea. Though it was not yet cold, Yashim shivered in the light evening breeze. Summer was over.

  70

  THE café owner swept the damp coffee grounds into a bucket, shook out his rag, and glanced again at the man huddled in the corner. It was the second time he’d been in that day, but compared with his first visit, he was almost another man. He might not have recognized him, even, except for his Frankish clothes. The café didn’t see many Franks. If all Franks were like this one, an army of them wouldn’t make him rich.

  He dropped the coffee into the copper pot and set it on the coals. He always did that, letting the grounds warm up before he poured the kettle. He poured it now and stood stirring the pot with a long spoon.

  After a while he took down a small china cup and spooned in the sugar the way the Frank wanted it, very sweet. The pot began to prickle. He raised it from the coals by its long handle and settled it back. Back and forth, back and forth. A lot of trouble for a stranger, but the café owner was a kindhearted man.

  Kindhearted enough to stand patiently by while the man mimed his desire for paper and pen. The café owner even found a boy to act as messenger. The Catholic house? In Bebek; he could ask for directions when he got there.

  The sad Frank opened his purse, and the café owner picked out the coins himself, so much for the refreshment, so much for the boy. The café owner supposed it was a matter of the heart, but perhaps it was family, when you needed a priest.

  71

  “GIANCARLO? What the devil’s happened to you? Yashim?”

  Palewski peered at them both.

  “Marta!”

  But she was already there. “I have put warm water in the room upstairs. You, follow me.”

  The young Italian! Always wasting her master’s time, bringing him drink when he should work, with that pale voluptuous woman who drank like a man and had white hair, like death. And now he’d been in a fight. She gave him a salve for his bloody lip, and helped to sponge his swollen eye, though he yelped.

  “Tsk, tsk. Perhaps next time you’ll think twice, before you tangle with Istanbullu!”

  Yashim was down first. He’d used Palewski’s cologne, but it would take a trip to the baths to eradicate the underlying smell of jail.

  “You smell like a Neapolitan tart, Yashim.”

  “Please, don’t reminisce.”

  “As you know, it’s not my style. Drink?”

  But Yashim only wanted tea.

  “I’ll have one for you, then. Cupboard on the left.”

  Yashim passed him a brandy. “You were reminisci
ng just the other day, telling Natasha about Moscow.”

  “That was different.”

  “But what was it you said? About dispatches?”

  “You won’t catch me that easily, Yashim.”

  “No, no.” Yashim shook his head wearily. “Something about betrayal.”

  “The end of the Russian campaign, when I rode with dispatches to Moscow. Staff job. Whole city in flames, you’ve heard about it. Spent half the night looking for the right man to give the letters to—until the seal broke. Wax pretty much slid off in that heat. Couldn’t help seeing that they contained details of our strengths and the amiable suggestion that the bearer be shot. One scar I don’t carry on the outside.”

  Yashim was silent, thinking.

  “I can tell it again if you like, with more brio.”

  “No. That’s all. I wonder if we’re dealing with the same thing—running someone’s head into a noose. Betrayal by letter. Well, here’s our man.”

  Giancarlo came in slowly. His fair hair was clean and both eyes were open, but he looked haggard.

  Palewski handed the young man a glass.

  Giancarlo tipped back the brandy, and closed his eyes. “Birgit,” he murmured. “I just can’t understand it. She had no enemies. Only friends. Everyone liked her.”

  “Maybe it was her friends that got her killed?” Yashim paused. “Tell me about La Piuma.”

  “La Piuma?” Giancarlo took a deep breath. “It means—the feather. It’s a code name.”

  “Code for what?”

  “La Piuma is our commander. He gives us our orders and takes care of our needs. He sent us a warning in Italy, before we could be arrested. We received a note at the apartment we used in Rome, and it was raided moments after we’d left. Later he suggested we come here, to Istanbul.”

  “You know him well?”

  “No.” Giancarlo looked surprised. “I’ve never seen him. I don’t know his real name, either. Of course not.”

  “Of course not?”