The Winter Thief: A Kamil Pasha Novel (Kamil Pasha Novels)

by Jenny White

  “Bekiraga Prison,” the captain said, avoiding his eye.

  “What?” Kamil was shocked. The prison was notorious for its squalid conditions and bad treatment of prisoners. He had assumed they were driving to the governor’s office or to see the vizier or some other high official. “You’re joking.”

  “I questioned it as well,” the captain explained in a low voice. “The directive is from the palace, signed by Vizier Köraslan himself. There was nothing I could do.”

  This was the vizier’s response to his humiliation, Kamil thought with rising anger. Only the vizier had the power to put a pasha in prison. But Bekiraga Prison? That was beyond the bounds.

  “Thank you for inquiring, but there must be some mistake.” He was grateful to the captain for taking the dangerous step of questioning his orders on Kamil’s behalf. He turned to get into the carriage. “Take me to the palace and we’ll straighten this out.”

  “Pasha,” the captain said.

  Alerted by a change in his tone, Kamil turned. “What is it?”

  “I was commanded by the vizier himself to bring you to the prison and nowhere else.” He hesitated. “Otherwise I am commanded to kill you.”

  Kamil felt for the young man. The very qualities Kamil admired in him had brought him to this point. “That would be assassination of a government official, are you aware of that?”

  “Yes, pasha.” The captain stepped back at attention. “Please, pasha, get into the carriage.”

  Kamil heard the note of pleading in the captain’s voice. He didn’t wish for the young man to have to make such a choice, so he put his foot back on the carriage step. “Very well,” he said as he got in. “This will be cleared up soon.” Kamil wished it were true. Justice, as he knew so well, had less to do with the evidence than with the people arrayed against you. In this case, Vahid and the vizier made a daunting combination. Who was on your side was just as important. He saw Omar on his horse, scowling, waiting to accompany the carriage. No doubt he had sent someone to inform Yorg Pasha and the minister of justice. His side was mobilizing, he thought with a rising sense of confidence as the carriage pulled away.

  They clattered over the Galata Bridge, up Jalaloglu Street through Bab-i Ali, passing the two grand dowager mosques of Istanbul, Aya Sofya, formerly a Byzantine cathedral, and Sultan Ahmet with its six delicate minarets. The carriage crossed Beyazit Square and followed the high wall of the war ministry before pulling up outside a massive stone structure surrounded by a dry moat, inside which the tops of trees moved like restless brown water.

  As soon as Kamil got out of the carriage, he was assaulted by the stench. Pulling his handkerchief from his pocket, he held it to his nose. Stinking liquid flowed from a pipe protruding from the wall into the moat. The pipe dripped, forming viscous pools in the lane. Kamil had never before visited the prison to which defendants at his court had so often been sentenced. The cesspool by the gate seemed to act as its calling card and perhaps an intimation of worse to come. Kamil put away his handkerchief and followed the captain through the gate, stepping carefully around the sludge.

  Although he thought himself modern and civilized, Kamil had learned that he was capable of harboring a hatred and desire for revenge so deep that it grew like a carbuncle into his very soul. Vahid and his deadly schemes would not stand. And if he discovered that the vizier too had acted callously, and not simply because he had been misled by Vahid, he vowed to bring him down as well.

  His thoughts thus occupied, Kamil followed the captain to the warden’s office, where the soldier handed over the arrest warrant to a sour-looking man with yellowish skin and lank hair. He wore a gray uniform and had wound a red-checked cloth around his fez. As the man bent his head over the document, Kamil wondered if he could read or whether he just was scanning it for the correct seal. The warden coughed, a wet cough that rattled in his chest, no doubt a result of working in these surroundings day in and out, Kamil thought. The man looked over the document for a long time, then glanced up at the new prisoner. Kamil caught the glint of intelligence in his eyes, or of wiliness.

  Kamil could think of nothing to say. “I didn’t do it” seemed a ridiculous claim, given the document in the warden’s hand. He knew that only proof of his innocence would get him out, or pull. It seemed that it would always be so. When he was studying in England, he realized it was the same there, that whom you knew was the deciding factor. A young man at the university, the eldest son of a lord, had destroyed the taproom of a pub on a drunken rampage with his friends. His father paid the owner for the damage, but the rape of the pub owner’s daughter and her subsequent death were never investigated despite a roomful of witnesses to both events.

  Kamil had been at the pub the night she was killed, sharing a pint with some fellow students. The young man came in with a group of his friends, went straight to the girl, and pulled her from behind the counter. When her father tried to come to her aid, one of the men smashed a chair over his head. Customers fled for the door. The girl shouted that they were too late, she had told the police everything.

  “Yes,” the young toff had said, “that’s what I heard.” He grabbed her by the hair and punched her in the face and chest until she lay broken and bleeding on the floor. The men left, laughing and slapping each other on the back, as the anguished father bent over his daughter’s body.

  Kamil had tried to go to the girl’s aid, but though he struggled, he made no headway against his fellow students, who overpowered him. “It’s none of your business,” they warned him. “We’re not getting involved.”

  He had never spoken to any of them again. It was almost unbearable for him to think about this experience now, the deep sense of shame and dishonor he felt at having witnessed such a crime. In a roomful of people, no one had moved a finger to help her. They knew, he supposed, what he did not, that the outcome was preordained by the lord’s power to manipulate all around him, including life and death. The others in the pub had accepted that they were nothing more than pieces on an aristocrat’s chessboard.

  Kamil had reported the incident to a bored policeman at the Cambridge station who clearly knew that the moment Kamil was out the door, the report would go into the trash. Kamil had to believe that the Ottoman system was more just than that, that the murder of an ordinary girl would not go unpunished because she was poor. Then, as now, he felt rage and a desire to seek vengeance against those he knew to be unjust. Yet here he stood in prison, wrongfully accused by a powerful man. He tried to believe that right would prevail, not because he too had powerful friends but because the system itself was just. He would be released because the evidence would show that he was not guilty. And when he was released, he would act. He was no longer a student in a foreign place, but a pasha and a magistrate, the sultan’s special prosecutor. He would never again allow someone to hold him back.

  The gendarme captain saluted, then turned. As he was leaving, he glanced worriedly over his shoulder at Kamil.

  The warden coughed so hard it bent him double. He leaned out the door and spit a gob of greenish fluid on the ground, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Welcome, pasha. Your staff will have to bring your food in from the outside, but otherwise you’ll find your room as comfortable as the best hotel.” His laugh was cut off by another fit of coughing. When he had regained his voice, he told Kamil, “Come with me. The warrant specified Number Eleven. You must have friends in high places.” He laughed again, a nasty snicker that put Kamil on his guard.

  Kamil followed him down a vaulted corridor smelling of damp, mold, and urine. They climbed a set of stairs. A sharp ammoniac reek and other foul odors Kamil couldn’t identify became stronger until he almost gagged. He pulled out his handkerchief again, setting off another bout of laughing by the warden. The next corridor was low, so they had to stoop. The warden stopped before a thick wooden door set on iron hinges. He turned the key in the lock and pushed it open. A horrible stench wafted from the room.

  “What is that?” Kamil aske
d, not moving. His head felt as though it were being torn to pieces.

  “The cesspool is right outside this window,” the warden explained, pointing to an opening high up on the wall. “Look,” he said in a conciliatory voice, “your friends were playing a trick on you, that’s clear. For a small commission, I can move you to a better cell.” He winked at Kamil. “You’ll find that anything’s possible here for a man like you.”

  Kamil grabbed the warden by the collar. “How dare you address me in that manner. How dare you ask me for a bribe. I will not forget this, you filthy son of a bitch.”

  The warden must have seen something in Kamil’s eyes that frightened him. He pulled himself from Kamil’s grasp and scuttled down the corridor. “Here,” he called over his shoulder. “I made a mistake. This is the one.”

  Kamil followed him, coughing into his handkerchief. The warden held open the door of another cell, and Kamil stepped over the threshold.

  61

  GABRIEL ARRIVED IN THE PORT of Trabzon and, as Simon had predicted, was unable to find porters who would take the supplies he wished to purchase into the mountains. What few roads there were, incredulous locals told him, were snowed in, and where he wanted to go there were no roads at all, only tracks. It cost him two precious gold liras to find a guide willing to take him and a hostler willing to sell him a horse and two mules. The guide was a bear of a man whose face was nearly hidden behind a bristling black beard, mustache, and thick eyebrows. His clothes were greasy and he stank. He grunted at Gabriel’s instructions and took the coins, turning up a few hours later with the animals and supplies.

  Gabriel decided to leave his trunk and extra supplies locked in a stone shed he purchased behind the guesthouse where he was lodging, and he paid the owner to keep an eye on it. The gold was hidden in the trunk beneath a false bottom. Despite Gabriel’s fear that it would be discovered by some nosy townsman, he thought the gold safer there than strapped onto a mule with this disreputable guide and unknown dangers on the road. He would return for it as soon as he could.

  They set off before dawn. Gabriel was excited about finally going to live at the commune, although he regretted that he didn’t have more weapons and supplies to present to his comrades. In the spring, when the roads were open, he would purchase what they needed with the gold. By then Yorg Pasha would have found Vera and she would have arrived in Trabzon. They would pass through these mountains together.

  The morning mist cleared, revealing layer upon layer of ascending ranges. The horses picked their way through the snow as the guide sounded the path before them with a six-foot wand to check for hidden fissures. They lost one of the mules when it stepped off the path and broke through a crust of ice hiding a deep streambed. At night, Gabriel and his guide put up in village houses that often consisted of only two rooms, one for the family and the other for their animals. Despite his being plagued by fleas, Gabriel’s spirits remained high. Except for occasional instructions in a thick local dialect that Gabriel found hard to follow, the guide didn’t speak to him at all. The journey from the coast took them fifteen days. Of the trip, Gabriel remembered the silence, broken only by the sound of distant avalanches and the glare of snow against a changing sky.

  On his approach to the commune, Gabriel found a ghastly sight. The fields around the monastery were littered with dismembered corpses. When they arrived at the gate, the guide took the rest of his payment without dismounting, turned his horse, and disappeared back into the untracked expanse of the mountains. The gate was open. There was no sound, and Gabriel had the panicked thought that all his comrades were dead. He walked through the courtyard and pushed open the door to the building. It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. He was in a cavernous hall, a smoking fire at one end casting neither light nor heat. The windows were plugged with blocks of what appeared to be straw mixed with mud. Far above, he could make out a tiled roof. The commune’s two dozen inhabitants, hollow-eyed and emaciated, sat or lay listlessly on straw pallets, barely taking note of Gabriel’s arrival.

  One man hurried toward him. Gabriel recognized Victor Byman, the medical student from New York. His distinctive head was round as a melon and seemed set directly onto his shoulders. When he got closer, Gabriel saw that his face was gray and sagged with exhaustion.

  Victor broke into a grin when he recognized Gabriel. “The angel Gabriel come to save us,” he quipped as the men embraced. When Gabriel stepped back, he saw tears in the man’s eyes.

  “What’s happened?” Gabriel asked. “Why are there so many unburied bodies?”

  Of fifty comrades who had made their way from far corners of the world to New Concord over the past eight months, Victor explained, only twenty-six had survived. “The ground was too frozen to dig, so we stacked the bodies outside the walls, first in a shed, then, when there were too many, buried under the snow. But the wolves dug down and dragged the bodies out and spread the remains across the fields, and we don’t have the strength to stop them.”

  Victor led him to a stool by the fire and introduced the young Irishwoman sitting beside him as Alicia. Her face was mottled with freckles and her matted hair was the color of dry straw, but her blue eyes were clear as chips of ice. Alicia’s hands were red and chapped, her dress tattered, but of good wool and embroidered at the sleeves. Gabriel wondered what had brought a girl of a good house all the way from Ireland to eastern Anatolia.

  Victor brought them water and apologized that they couldn’t offer more to a tired traveler. Gabriel told him about the supplies he had brought, although greatly reduced by the loss of one mule and its load.

  Alicia got up hastily. “We thank you, sir,” she told Gabriel, looking around the dark hall. “We are sorely in need. They’ve had little to eat these past days.” She strode away, and Gabriel saw her speak to two men. They followed her into the courtyard, where his animals were tied up. After a few moments she returned.

  Cradling his cup of water, Victor told Gabriel what had happened to the commune. The year had gone well enough. They put on a roof and harvested one crop; the hunting and fishing were good. New comrades arrived, bringing tools and supplies. Then their comrade Klaus Wedel died. Gabriel remembered him as a Swiss wool merchant, an avid skier who had come late to the movement.

  “I thought it was pneumonia.” Victor paused to take a sip of water. “That was in late autumn, when the ground was still soft enough to dig a grave.”

  The crackling of the fire was punctuated by coughs from the pallets. These makeshift nests of quilts, blankets, and straw were laid close together along an inner wall.

  “My ma and pa and every blessed one of my siblings died of the pneumonia last winter.” Alicia broke into the silence, her voice strangely dispassionate. “It took a mere two weeks to erase all their lifetimes.”

  “I’m sorry, Alicia.” Victor leaned forward and pressed her hand with his own. “After Klaus, there were more,” he went on. “We quarantined them, but this place is too small. It looked like pneumonia, but I’m not sure. Some had intestinal bleeding, so it could have been cholera, or even influenza. But it was faster than anything I’ve ever seen. You cough a bit, like something’s stuck in your throat, you get a nosebleed, and next morning you’re dead.” Victor’s hands, Gabriel noticed in the firelight, were clean and manicured, in contrast with his Shetland sweater and trousers, their colors camouflaged by dark stains. Gabriel wondered if the stains were blood.

  Victor was examining his hands now, as if he were thinking the same thing. “There haven’t been any cases in two weeks, so I hope it’s over, but we need food. The weaker they are, the more susceptible they become. One more outbreak and we might as well give up.”

  “We have some ammunition left,” Alicia said. “Ten cartridges.”

  “Alicia is the best marksman we have,” Victor announced. “The source of all the game in our pot. Never wastes a bullet.”

  Gabriel saw his admiring look at Alicia, and her face lowered, a barely repressed smile on her
lips. He thought of Vera. What would she think of him for abandoning her? He allowed himself to wonder for the first time whether she was still alive. He closed his eyes and willed the pain in his gut to subside.

  “Something hurt?” Victor asked him with a concerned look. “Life, comrade.” Gabriel forced a smile.

  THE NEXT morning, Gabriel and Alicia donned snowshoes that a Norwegian comrade, now buried beneath the snow, had brought with him.

  “But you can’t shoot.” Victor pointed to Gabriel’s bandaged right hand. “You’d be more helpful giving a morale talk to the comrades. Their heads are as starved as their bellies.”

  “Alicia can’t go by herself,” Gabriel insisted.

  “I do all the time.” Rifle slung across her shoulder, she was already swinging her feet, attached to the webbed snowshoes, across the field like a duck, heading for the forest.

  “Alicia,” Gabriel called out. “Stop. What if you’re hurt? And how will you get the carcass back?”

  “I’ll go.” Victor held out his hands for the snowshoes. “You’re right, she might bag a deer instead of a hare.”

  Over several hours, Gabriel heard occasional shots ricochet through the mountains. He was stacking wood when he heard a shot that didn’t sound like the others. It had a quicker report, like a snarl instead of the boom of the shotguns. He stared at the woods, then took up a rifle and stomped awkwardly though the knee-deep snow toward the line of pines, following the broad track of snowshoes.