by Jenny White
Feride pulled her hand away. “I find politics interesting, and I don’t like being treated as a child.”
Huseyin looked to Kamil for support. “Do I deserve this?”
“A rose with thorns, as you often put it,” Feride retorted, placing her napkin beside the plate and pushing her chair back as if preparing to leave the table. “Would you like me better if I were all soft petals?” Kamil could hear the hurt in her voice.
Huseyin reached out a restraining hand and said in a cajoling voice, “I like you the way you are, my wife, with both thorns and petals.”
“I agree with Feride,” Kamil interjected, hoping to ease the tension. “We have a well-trained army. Why send irregulars known for their brutality? They’re no better than bandits in the service of the state. If our Armenian subjects do revolt,” he warned, “it’ll be against the sultan’s heavy-handedness.”
“We don’t want the Kurdish tribes civilized,” Huseyin said, glancing at Feride, who sat stiffly but was following his words. “At least one of our knives has to remain sharp. Don’t be naïve, Kamil. The Russians have been trying for centuries to grab a piece of the empire. They took Artvin ten years ago, and now we have the border right up to our ass. These disturbances are taking place on our side of the border, in the Choruh Valley, where Armenians live. Of course the Russians are trying to extend their reach. They think we’re weak now. They think they can get another arm of the empire, and the Armenians will get a finger in return.” Huseyin speared a piece of meat and held it up. “And the British lie in wait under the table for the scraps.”
“That may be so,” Feride broke in, “but killing Armenian villagers isn’t going to make them loyal.”
“So what would make them loyal?” Huseyin growled. “Do you think there’s enough gold left in our treasury to buy them?”
“Most of them are loyal now,” Kamil pointed out.
“And if they feel respected and safe and that their children have a future,” Feride added, “then they’ll stay loyal.”
Huseyin stared at them incredulously, wineglass paused in midair. “I’m married into a family of fools.”
“Look more closely and you’ll find not foolishness, but wisdom,” Kamil, offended, told him.
Huseyin laid his hand across his heart. “I apologize.” He nodded at his glass. “Blame it on the grape or on a bad upbringing, but I have no control over my tongue. I would rather cut it out than say a bad word about my honored wife, whom I respect more than myself.” He looked into Feride’s eyes. “Am I forgiven?”
Feride lowered her eyes, then nodded briefly.
Huseyin turned again to Kamil. “Do you think the British are behind the weapons shipment?”
“It makes no sense,” Kamil observed. “If the British wanted to arm the Armenians on the Russian border, it would be much easier to send the weapons through Syria. Anyway, the British would never help the Armenians if that meant helping the Russians.”
“True enough. The British are devious, but not suicidal. The socialists, on the other hand, they’re an unpredictable lot.” Huseyin took another sip of wine.
“Socialists?” Kamil exclaimed. “Isn’t that rather far-fetched?”
“They have alliances all over Europe, so you’re not dealing with just Armenians or Greeks or Russians. You’re dealing with all of them, plus the Irish, the Americans, and Allah knows who else has swallowed their ridiculous ideas.” He held out his glass. “You should try this. It’s good. From my favorite vineyard in Ayvalik. If you like it, I’ll send you a case.”
It was a gesture of peace. Kamil allowed the servant to fill his glass and took a sip, then nodded his approval. He noticed Feride drinking deeply from her own glass and thought he saw the glint of tears in her eyes, but he didn’t know what to say. She would have to find her way in this marriage. He gave her a sympathetic smile, then turned back to Huseyin. “What’s the reaction in the palace to the weapons?”
“What do you think? Our great padishah has been convinced by his advisers that other nations have riddled us with spies like mold in a loaf of bread and that he needs a secret service to counter their influence. For now, the sultan has set up a new security force called Akrep as a branch of the secret police, but mark my words, Akrep is the first step in establishing a Teshkilati Mahsusa, a vast secret service like the one the British have.” Huseyin took another sip from his glass, letting the wine roll on his tongue before swallowing. So out of character, Kamil noted, for a man who devoured his food with wolfish abandon. “Akrep is going to ferret out these revolutionary cells, unlike the secret police who just spy on everybody and write reports. Akrep is going to go after these people, the Armenians, the Greeks, the socialists, and all their foreign collaborators.”
Any expansion of the secret police alarmed Kamil, much less the formation of a new security network reporting directly to the sultan.
“Akrep means scorpion. The scorpion that hides in your shoe,” Feride mused. “Or is it an acronym? Does it stand for something?”
“I have no idea.” Huseyin threw down his napkin and got up. He gave Feride a kiss on the cheek. “I’ve got to go. A meeting.”
“At this time of night?” Feride asked. Kamil saw the light go out in her eyes.
“Business is best conducted over a meal with raki, my dear wife. That way, your opponent’s brain is in his stomach and you can take advantage of him.” He patted his ample stomach. “I’ve already eaten, but that’s never been an impediment. I eat in the line of duty.”
“Take Vali, Huseyin,” Feride urged, referring to their driver. “I don’t like it when you go out drinking and use a hired carriage.”
“Wine is king and raki is queen, and a good marriage they make. Like ours.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Don’t worry, my rose.”
“When will you be home?”
“I’m not sure.” He kissed her again. “See you, brother-in-law.” Huseyin winked at Kamil and strode out of the room.
Kamil and Feride said nothing for a while, busying themselves with their coffee cups. Then Feride gave a self-conscious laugh and said, “You’ve resisted all my attempts to marry you off, dear brother. But maybe it’s better that way, to marry only when you’re tired of chasing about.”
“I don’t ‘chase about,’ Ferosh,” Kamil responded with mock indignation.
Feride wagged her head and intoned, “Everything reaches my ears.”
Kamil was glad to see a spark in her eyes. She laughed, revealing a row of pearllike teeth.
Then she surprised him by saying, “Elif needs time, brother. She looks happy enough with her art and she loves teaching. But she’s still mourning.” Feride twisted her napkin. “Her example makes me impatient with my own foolish fears.”
Kamil went to her side. He pulled his thumb across her forehead as he had done as a child to soothe her and was rewarded by a sad smile. “I’m always here, Ferosh.”
4
WHEN THE BLAST hit, the first thing Vahid looked at was the porcelain ball hanging from a chain in the middle of the ceiling. His mother continued tatting in her chair by the stove, undisturbed by the noise. He wondered if she was going deaf, although she seemed to hear what she wanted to hear. Her eyes were clouding over with cataracts, slowly blinding her. She didn’t need to see in order to wrest tiny shapes from the thread that slipped through her still-nimble fingers. Almost every surface in the small house was decorated with doilies, laces, and the embroidered cloths she had brought as part of her dowry when she married Vahid’s father. His death, like his life, had left no imprint on the house at all.
The decorative ball was useful as a quick earthquake indicator. Tonight it hung unmoving from the painted ceiling, a still fulcrum in a field of peeling stars and flowers. Not an earthquake then, but a powerful explosion somewhere in the city. He checked the time. Eight o’clock. He opened the window, letting in the smell of damp charcoal and wood fire. A foul-smelling yellow mist insinuated itself into the room. Flakes
of snow settled on his sleeve.
To the northeast, above the dark hulks of houses, the sky was abnormally bright. He heard shouts in the distance. Beneath his window, a group of men stood talking excitedly. “The bank is on fire,” he heard one of them say. Vahid marveled at the speed of gossip. The Ottoman Imperial Bank was on the other side of the Golden Horn, the inlet that divided the old city from the new. Certain that this was no ordinary fire, Vahid drew on his coat and boots.
“Are you going?” his mother asked in a reedy voice.
“Yes,” he responded curtly, thinking, as always, that it was obvious that he was going, but feeling guilty about his annoyance. He descended into the dark street.
He followed the commotion down the hill toward the Eminönü pier. A pall of white smoke rose from the opposite shore. He pushed his way through the crowd across the Galata Bridge. In Karaköy Square, men with flares ran about, shouting. As he approached the bank, torches were no longer necessary. The fire was at a wooden taverna across from the bank. The blaze was enormous. Both floors must have been crowded with diners, he thought. Vahid never frequented this taverna, popular with bankers and bureaucrats from the Sublime Porte, the center of government just across the Golden Horn.
The fire brigade pumped water from a tank into the flames. When the fire died down sufficiently, men dashed inside and began to pull out bodies. Those still alive were laid on a covered cart. The air stank of charred flesh. Vahid pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and held it over his mouth. He surmised the victims were rich men making deals or entertaining their mistresses. Many of the corpses were naked—their clothes had burned off—mouths cooked open, blackened hands curled in supplication. Snowflakes settled on them, melting immediately. The cart carrying the wounded began to groan up the steep hill.
The street echoed with shouts and coughs, the moans of the wounded, the murmur of the crowd. A woman screamed, “My daughter, my daughter,” bucking against the bystanders who held her back from the burning building.
A burly, broad-shouldered man whom Vahid assumed to be the police chief was shouting at his men, “Keep the hell out of there, you idiots. It’s going to collapse and crush your stupid skulls. Where the hell is Rejep?”
Sure enough, there was a loud creaking and the taverna lurched as the second floor crashed down upon the first. The chief ran into the rubble, hauling and kicking planks out of his way, and pulled out one of his men. There was a cheer from the bystanders.
As he approached, Vahid noted with surprise that part of the stone facade of the bank also had collapsed. The explosion must have been there, with the fire spreading across the lane to the wooden taverna.
An explosion at the bank was sure to unsettle Sultan Abdul hamid. It was an attack on the financial center of the empire. As he surveyed the scene, Vahid began to see the destruction before him as a rare opportunity. As head of Akrep he commanded hundreds of agents and spies who would track down these criminals. Before long, they’d be hanging on a meat hook in Bekiraga Prison. Perhaps they were revolutionaries with bigger designs on the empire than a simple robbery. He could make sure they confessed to such a plot before they died. When Sultan Abdulhamid saw that Vahid had saved the empire, he was certain the padishah would appoint him chief of the Teshkilati Mahsusa, the enormous secret service that was now only in the planning stages.
As head of the Teshkilati Mahsusa, Vahid would command thousands, not hundreds, of men. They would infiltrate towns and cities all over Europe, not only the Ottoman Empire. He would have direct access to the sultan, instead of having to work through the vizier. The vast networks and resources would make him feared by even the highest-ranking men in the empire. There were those who didn’t believe him worthy of such an exalted position, men who would rejoice if he failed. But Vahid knew in his heart there was no one more capable than he, and he would prove it, possibly now with the help of this remarkable twist of fate.
The snow had let up, and he could see the corpses at the side of the road. At a distance they all looked alike, oozing black and red, mouths open in interrupted screams, claws instead of hands. The police were wrapping each body in a sheet. One man stopped to retch into the gutter.
Vahid walked over to examine the bodies more closely. The patrons of this taverna had been powerful men, but in death they were indistinguishable from those they had commanded.
He recognized her hair. Waist-length golden curls that turned in on themselves like a nautilus. He had never seen another woman with such hair. It had miraculously escaped the flames and unfurled across the pavement. He knelt and reached out to stroke it, avoiding looking at her body. When his hand touched the curls, his fingers stiffened, and for a moment he was unable to breathe, as if his own hands and lungs had been immolated in the fire. With great effort, he turned and inspected her face. It was Rhea. What an hour before had been a delicate face with an engaging smile and alabaster skin had become the bloated black and red mask before him. He remained motionless for a long while, then retrieved a silver hairpin set with rubies from her hair. When two policemen came to move the body, he stood and stepped away.
What was the woman he loved, the woman he was going to marry, doing at a taverna? Overcome by rage at the thought that she had been with another man, he squeezed his hand around the hairpin in his pocket, lacerating his palm. He would find this person and do to him what the man had done to Rhea.
As Vahid walked away from the scene, lost in thought, a man approached him. “Sir,” the Akrep agent said discreetly, “there’s been a new development.”
5
VERA TOOK OFF her sodden coat and hung it over a chair, then dried her hair with a dirty underskirt. She opened the iron stove. Chunks of coal lay on top of kindling, ready for her to light. Silently thanking Gabriel, she wondered if he would come home tonight. She heard a commotion in the street. She peered out the grimy window, noting a strange brightness to the air, but could see nothing through the storm. After a few minutes, the sounds receded. Who knew what strange things happened at night in a city like this? Better to stay close to the fire and wait for Gabriel. She sat down next to the stove and examined her wool gown for signs of wear, fingering the embroidered sleeve that betrayed her family’s wealth.
She smoked a cigarette and threw the stub on the floor. Bored and hungry, she went to the cupboard and took out the remains of last night’s meal. If only Apollo had come to Istanbul with them as planned, she would have had company now. Her dear friend Apollo Grigorian, whose words poured like brilliant water over his listeners, soothing and inspiring them. He gave the revolution a charmed life, as if it had already happened in their minds and there was no longer any need to fret. Most of all, Vera remembered that he had held her hand when she felt homesick, and had healed her without saying a word. She knew that Apollo’s absence weighed on Gabriel, who had counted on his help for the project he was carrying out in Istanbul. With a stab of anxiety, she wondered whether something had befallen her friend, but then scolded herself. Messages were lost and carts overturned. She knew that Apollo would pick up the spilled apples and move on.
Vera wrapped herself in a quilt and sat back down beside the stove. She would go home to Moscow, she decided. Gabriel didn’t want her here, and she was a failure at being a socialist, a revolutionary, a wife, and, she added for good measure, a daughter. She smoked another cigarette and threw the butt into the stove, then lay down on the quilt. She kept the lamp turned low in case Gabriel should return. She thought about the beaded velvet gown her parents had given her last Christmas. She could almost feel the softness of it on her fingertips. Her baby sister, Tatiana, would be wearing it now. She remembered the weight of Tatiana’s heavy black hair in her hands as she plaited it and the smell of geraniums wintering on the windowsill.
She was asleep when Gabriel slipped through the door and shut it quickly behind him. Gabriel Arti was a tall man with slightly rounded shoulders and a pleasant, undistinguished face with a mustache and clipped beard. He pulled off
his wool cap, releasing a shock of sandy hair, and tickled her cheek with it until she woke.
“Where were you this afternoon?” he asked, dropping his coat in the corner.
“I went to see that publisher.”
“God damn it.” Gabriel squatted down beside her, extending his hands to the fire. They were scraped and bleeding. “I told you not to go.”
She got up and went to a ceramic jar in the corner of the room. “Let me heat some water to wash your hands.” She dipped a copper bowl in the water and set it to heat on top of the stove.
“Well, did he agree? Was the fact that you put us in danger balanced by the publication of some tract that only five people will ever read?”
“I wasn’t followed,” she insisted. “It was snowing. Why are you being like this?”
“What difference would snow make, except to make it impossible for you to see whoever was following you?”
“That’s unfair. I have a mission too, and you have no right to keep me locked up here.” She lit another cigarette. “Where were you? You never tell me where you go. Why do I have to report to you?” She threw the cigarette to the floor.
Someone spoke in the street, a snatch of sound, then stopped suddenly. Gabriel rose to his feet so quickly he knocked the water from the stove. He put out the lamp and peered cautiously out the window. “Get your coat on.”
“Why? I told you no one followed me.”
Gabriel grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “We have to leave right now,” he said through gritted teeth. “Now. Now.”
She threw on her coat and grabbed the small leather satchel that contained their money, travel papers, and the manuscript.
“Are we coming back? What about the suitcase?”
“No.” He took the satchel from her hand and pushed her toward the door.
She pulled away from him and in the dim light of the stove began to throw her few things into the suitcase. He pulled it out of her hands and flung it across the room.