A Dead Man in Istanbul (7 page)

Seymour was surprised. It was a different side of Mukhtar that he was seeing: different in more ways than one. He felt, however, compelled to register a mild objection.

‘Well, yes, but perhaps in the theatre . . .?’

The terjiman shook his head.

‘Not even in the theatre. And certainly not in this theatre at this time when it is so much in the public eye.’

‘Is it in the public eye?’

‘Oh, yes. And dangerously. It stands out in so many ways compared with other theatres.’

‘Women on the stage?’

‘Yes. For one thing. Our society is changing, becoming more modern. But there are still many who do not like such things and see them as a deep affront to their religion. However, there are other things, too. You know – or perhaps you don’t know – that this theatre has taken on a political tack. It has become satirical, it makes political attacks. Well, nothing wrong with that, you may say. You are, perhaps, used to that sort of thing in Europe. But out here people are not used to it. It makes them angry. And so, for a variety of reasons, the Theatre of Desires is under attack.’

‘When you say, under attack –’

‘There is much general hostility towards it, expressed mostly in threats and abuse. But I can’t help wondering –’

He broke off.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it occurs to me that Miss Kassim would be especially vulnerable to the expression of that hostility.’

Rice-Cholmondely had agreed to take Seymour to the Fields of the Dead that afternoon and, punctually at four, they set off down the hill in the landau.

Les Petits Champs des Morts, the Fields of the Dead, were about halfway down Pera Hill. And fields of the dead they definitely were. It was a vast cemetery.

The brown, arid land stretched away on all sides, littered with white gravestones scattered all over the place and at all angles, white against brown; like almonds, thought Seymour, in a coffee-coloured mousse. White columns stood up occasionally like old teeth. Here and there cypresses bowed over the graves like the dark feathers he still sometimes saw on horses at East End funerals.

‘They come here to eat sweets,’ said Rice-Cholmondely.

‘Sweets?’

‘Of course, they shouldn’t really eat in public at all. It’s improper. But out here among the tombs, it’s . . . well, condoned. So the Istanbul ladies seize the opportunity. Of which, of course, there are few if you are an Istanbul lady.’

The tombs were often quite substantial, indeed, more like houses. They even had windows. Seymour peeped in one and got a surprise. The house was furnished. Carpets covered the walls, low divans stood on the marbled floor, brightly coloured glass lamps hung from the ceiling.

‘They obviously wanted to make sure they were going to be comfortable.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Rice-Cholmondely. ‘But, of course, this was intended not so much for them as for their families when they came to visit them. On certain festivals families foregather to remember the dead. They bring food and have a sort of picnic. It’s all very jolly.’

And jolly, too, Seymour thought, were the cages over some of the smaller graves with songbirds fluttering in them to entertain the spirit of the departed.

Jolly, yes, but . . . what was Leila doing here? Apart from eating sweets?

‘Really, of course, they’re here to meet their lovers.’

‘Here? In a cemetery?’

‘Well, of course, there are not many places in Istanbul where you
can
go if you want to meet a man alone. You have to have an excuse to go even where men might be. And what better excuse than to go to pray for the dead? Very devout, Istanbul ladies are.’

And, indeed, as they penetrated further into the vast cemetery, there
did
seem to be a lot of women.

Most of them were dressed in the usual long, shapeless black gown of the ordinary Turkish woman, with dark veils to cover the face and a dark mantle to cover the hair – hair, Rice-Cholmondely assured him, was considered dangerously provocative to youth.

Some, however, were dressed in the height of Parisian fashion, which Seymour thought likely to be even more provocative to youth. They still wore black and covered their heads with mantles and their faces with veils but the veils were somehow skimpy, often nearly transparent, and, Seymour thought, rather fetching. But how did they manage with the Turkish Delight?

Ahead of them as they walked through the graves was a particularly elegant group of pencil-thin ladies all dressed dutifully in dark and suitably veiled. But the lines of the dresses were definitely Parisian and the cut of the veil was hardly designed to conceal.

‘There she is!’ cried Rice-Cholmondely.

Others had their veil hanging properly down from the mantle, concealing the eyes; Leila’s, somehow, was draped about the lower part of the face. A pair of dark, intelligent eyes looked over the top of it.

‘What is this?’ she said, looking at Seymour. ‘A new one?’

‘Seymour is just here temporarily,’ said Rice-Cholmondely.

‘But why just temporarily?’

‘He has come here to look into something.’

‘Oh, yes? And what, exactly?’

‘And then he goes home again,’ said Rice-Cholmondely firmly.

Leila laughed.

‘A secret, is it? Let me guess.’ The dark eyes studied Seymour curiously. ‘Is it something to do with Cunningham?’

Not much was secret here, thought Seymour. At least to the Istanbul ladies.

‘You knew Cunningham?’ he asked.

‘Only too well, said Leila grimly.

‘I think,’ said Seymour, after they had been walking for a while, ‘that you might be worth swimming the Straits for.’

‘Swimming . . .? Ah, that foolish story!’

‘You weren’t the one he swam it for?’

‘I won’t say I wasn’t tempted when he asked me. It was such a splendidly romantic thing to do. And I, I am very romantic.’

‘But nevertheless . . .?’

‘I did not believe him.’

‘You did not think he would actually do it?’

‘Oh, I thought he would do it, all right. It’s exactly the sort of thing that he would do.’

‘Then . . .?’

‘But I didn’t think he would be doing it for the reason he said. Cunningham was not, actually, a very romantic man. Oh, he talked a lot about romantic things. But it was usually when he was wanting to get you to do something for him. Like get into bed with him. He was actually very calculating. You always felt that really he had something else in mind. You know, you felt that when he was making love to you, all he was really wanting to do was exercise his back! A woman doesn’t like that. At least, not a romantic woman like me.’

She gave him a quick look.

‘Perhaps you do not think I am romantic?’

‘Oh, I’m sure you are.’

‘Well, I am. And certainly when I make love I am romantic. Everything in me is involved. No part hangs back. I am all there. A woman is like that. She is total. But a man . . . or, at least, Cunningham . . .’

‘And that was why you refused when he asked?’

‘Well, not entirely. For I am realistic, too. And I did not want to stand for hours on a hot bit of rock, with crabs and scorpions coming at me.’

They walked on for a little while and then Rice-Cholmondely came to a halt.

‘Leila, dear, enchanting as is your company, I think we ought to be getting back.’

‘But what is the point of going through the Fields of the Dead,’ enquired Leila, ‘if you do not go on to the Valley of the Sweet Waters?’

Rice-Cholmondely glanced at his watch.

‘It would take us another hour at least . . .’

Leila put her arm through Seymour’s.

‘I wish particularly to show Mr Seymour the Valley of the Sweet Waters,’ she said.

The Valley of the Sweet Waters of Europe lay just beyond the cemetery. Until a century ago, Leila said, its slopes had been covered by pleasure domes and pavilions and gardens full of pomegranates and peaches and apricots. There had been rills crossed by rustic bridges and shady glades where hundreds of herons built their nests. In the giant plane trees the nightingales sang unceasingly.

Or so said Leila.

There were still trees and streams and paths with bridges but today the pleasure domes were in ruins and down at the edge of the sea the palaces of the pashas had been replaced by oil tanks, docks and wharves. But still, said Leila, the people came and walked in the shade: the Muslims on Fridays and the Christians on Sundays.

‘And what they are seeing,’ said Leila, ‘is pleasure domes and pavilions.’

‘And what they are doing,’ said Rice-Cholmondely, ‘is making assignations among the trees.’

‘That,’ said Leila, ‘is a very Cunningham style of thinking.’

They came to a place where there were two bridges. Seymour and Leila went over one and Rice-Cholmondely, together with Leila’s companions, over the other, thinking they would meet on the other side of the street. In fact, the paths diverged for a while. Seymour took advantage of the separation to talk without Rice-Cholmondely hearing.

‘Why did you say that you knew Cunningham only too well?’

Leila was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘He involved me in something which at first I thought was full of wonderful possibilities for me. But then, actually, it turned out to be rather nasty.

‘There was a Prince he was friendly with. They had met in Europe when Cunningham was serving at an Embassy there, in Berlin, I think, and became very friendly. And then when Cunningham came out here, and the Prince returned, they picked up the friendship again. At first it was a question of the Prince showing Cunningham round, but soon it was the other way. The Princes don’t know much about Turkey, or even about Istanbul, they’re very isolated, and Cunningham soon knew quite a lot. He had a gift for immersing himself in a country, was always very interested – genuinely interested, he wasn’t just pretending – in its culture. So soon it was he who was showing the Prince round. He introduced him to things – mosques he had never seen, theatres. People, too.’

‘Women?’

‘Yes.’

‘You?’

‘Yes. At first I was very flattered. A Prince, after all. The highest I’d got before were pashas and Embassy people. This opened up a new world for me. Or so I thought. He seemed to like me. A lot. He was always coming round to my place. Almost every day. And he seemed very nice. He was courteous, you know, and considerate. Not like most men out here. And he was royal, too! I couldn’t get over that. To be royal and yet to be so considerate.

‘He’d been to school in England, you know, and perhaps to university there. He seemed very British; indeed, more British than the British. Rather like those men at the Embassy, correct, polite, always very polite, indeed, charming, but somehow stiff. And gradually I realized he was like the British in another way, too, in that this stiffness came from a kind of emotional over-control. His feelings were there but buttoned up inside him. And then sometimes they would burst out and then, somehow, it was rather nasty.

‘One day they burst out with me and I was really quite frightened. I thought he might, well, do something to me. And after that I never felt truly confident with him. I was glad when he suddenly seemed to lose interest in me.

‘But the strange thing was that somehow it seemed to have started with Cunningham. One day he seemed to wake up and suddenly hate him. And yet they had been so close! They did everything together. Not just that. You had the feeling that Selim wouldn’t do it, or couldn’t do it, unless Cunningham did it first. I sort of felt that if Cunningham hadn’t been my lover first, then Selim wouldn’t, or couldn’t have been. It was very strange.

‘And then, after having been so close to him, having been like that, he suddenly turned against him. And it was over me! It was as if he had suddenly become jealous.’

‘Of Cunningham?’

‘Yes. With respect to me. Although there was no need to be, heaven knows. Cunningham didn’t care a fig for me. But Selim seemed suddenly to think he did and he didn’t like it and it all came exploding out.’

‘Perhaps he was jealous of you, not of Cunningham. You say they were very close. Where they lovers?’

‘I don’t think so. It’s sometimes hard to tell in Turkey – young men put their arms around each other, that sort of thing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean . . . But I don’t think Cunningham was that way inclined, not strongly, anyway. Selim? Well, perhaps. He was always so buttoned-up that it was hard to make him out. I thought at the time that perhaps it was because he was royal. You know, he was used to being the centre of attention and maybe thought I was distracting Cunningham’s attention from him. Anyway, he was very nasty to me.

‘And I didn’t thank Cunningham for getting me into it. And when I thought about it, I thought that he had done it deliberately. You know, had some game of his own and was just using me as a pawn in it. I didn’t like that. It seemed so calculating. I am, as I told you, very romantic. I like men to love me for myself, even if it’s only for a moment. And Cunningham was not very romantic at all. Even if he did want to swim the Dardanelles like Leander.’

Chapter Seven

Mystery at the Embassy the next morning: Mohammed, the porter-boatman, was not in his usual cubby-hole.

‘Damn the fellow!’ said Ponsonby, fretting. ‘I wanted him to take something for me. Where the hell is he?’

Further investigation cast no light. The Chief Dragoman’s aid was enlisted.

‘Damn the fellow!’ said the Chief Dragoman. ‘Where he got to? Disappear up own ass, like Indian Rope Trick?’

The building was scoured but Mohammed did not appear to be in it. Nor, it gradually emerged, had he been in it the previous day. At least, no one had seen him.

‘Perhaps he’s ill?’ said Ponsonby.

‘Perhaps he drown,’ said the Chief Dragoman hopefully. ‘Swim across like Cunningham Effendi. Glug-glug.’

‘Someone ought to check,’ said Ponsonby.

That someone was clearly the Chief Dragoman. Equally clearly, he had no intention of descending into the town himself. Some minion had to be sent. Enquiry suggested that the most appropriate minion was Ibrahim, the landau driver, perhaps on one of his errands into the city. He, after all, was the man who knew the family. Or, at least, he knew Mohammed’s wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin, which in Istanbul amounted to much the same thing. Ibrahim was therefore instructed to look Mohammed up.

He came back perturbed.

‘Effendi,’ he said to Ponsonby, ‘I don’t like this business.’

‘Did you find him?’

‘Oh, yes, Effendi.’

‘Ill, is he?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Ibrahim mysteriously.

Mohammed, it seemed, was frightened to go out.

‘Frightened!’ said Ponsonby. ‘What’s he frightened of?’

‘The Fleshmakers,’ said Ibrahim unwillingly.

‘For Christ’s sake!’ said Ponsonby. ‘You go back and tell him –’

But Ibrahim, it transpired, wasn’t at all anxious to tell him anything. In fact, he wasn’t willing even to go to his house. Ibrahim, it soon became clear, was as frightened as Mohammed was.

‘Damn it!’ said Ponsonby. ‘We can’t have this!’

He decided he would go down to see Mohammed himself. That meant Ibrahim had to drive him. Ibrahim pleaded sickness; malaria, he thought, or dysentery, or – perhaps desperately – typhoid fever.

‘You can take us down to the bridge,’ said Ponsonby, ‘and we’ll walk from there. We’ll risk the typhoid fever.’

Seymour had asked to go with him.

Ibrahim took them down to the Galata Bridge and gave directions to the street where Mohammed lived. It was in one of the poorer parts of the city and as they drew closer they became aware of an all-pervading smell, a sort of rancid fetidness.

‘The tanneries,’ said Ponsonby.

It was a whole district and carts piled high with skins and fleeces were coming and going continuously. In the big drying and tanning barns, steamy with heat and thick with flies, men were working stripped to the waist, their arms and torsos mottled with blood.

About them were stacked skins in mounds up to thirty feet high and the ground was littered with little pieces of flesh. Everywhere there were heaps of discarded fleece. The heaps, oddly, were beautifully coloured, delicately tinged with copper and bronze by the processing. The sky was dark overhead with hawks circling, and every now and then one would dart down, pounce on some meat and then fly away again. And everywhere there were dogs scavenging, tearing at the meat and snarling at interlopers, human or canine.

It was an awful place and they hurried through it and into the little streets beyond. The stench was just as great and the flies just as many. They settled on the faces of the children playing in the road and the children did not bother to wipe them away.

Ponsonby frowned.

‘I would have thought he could have done better than this,’ he said. ‘We pay higher wages than most people.’

One reason, perhaps, why Mohammed couldn’t live better became apparent when they reached his house. It was full of children. They spilled out into the road, a narrow alleyway strewn with rotting vegetables and smelling like the tanneries.

The door was open and there was a woman inside. She wasn’t wearing a veil and when she saw them she tried to shut the door on them. Ponsonby wedged his foot in the door and stopped it from closing.

‘Mohammed,’ he called out. ‘It’s Ponsonby Effendi!’

After a long moment, a quavery voice responded from inside.

‘It’s all right, Mohammed. It’s Ponsonby Effendi. No one is going to harm you.’

There was an exchange of words between the man inside and the woman, and then the woman allowed them in. There seemed to be just one room. It was very dark but when his eyes grew accustomed, Seymour could see that a man was in a corner, lying on a mattress.

Ponsonby went across and squatted down beside him.

‘What is it, Mohammed?’ he said, with surprising kindness.

They began to talk in Arabic, which Seymour could only occasionally follow.

At first Mohammed seemed barely able to speak, but gradually his story emerged. What Seymour didn’t gather then, Ponsonby explained to him later.

Two nights before, said Mohammed, as he was making his way home, he had been suddenly seized by some men. One, or perhaps it was two, had held his arms and another had grasped him by the hair and pulled his head back. They had held a knife to his throat and asked him if he was a faithful servant of God and the Sultan. He had, of course, gasped that he was.

‘Why, then, do you aid the infidel and the Sultan’s enemies?’ they had asked.

‘I but stand at the door,’ Mohammed had protested.

‘You do more than that,’ they had said, and referred to his rowing the boat across for Cunningham. Mohammed had not known what to say except that the Effendi had bidden it and he was but a poor man, etc.

‘You are an enemy of the Sultan and you must die,’ the man had said.

Racking his brain in his extremity, Mohammed recalled that some years before his father had done someone in the Sultan’s household a service, and he pleaded for this to be taken into account. The men had seemed for the moment taken aback.

‘From this you see that I am loyal,’ Mohammed had said, pressing home his advantage. ‘If I have done wrong, I am but foolish.’

The men had conferred.

‘Are you sure that it was Bebek that this service was done for?’ they had said threateningly.

‘As sure as I am that your knife is at my throat,’ Mohammed had said.

‘It was his father that did the service, not him,’ one of the men had said.

‘Yet, for his father’s sake, Bebek would surely not wish that we kill him,’ someone else had said.

They had conferred some more and then had released him.

‘For your father’s sake we will let you go,’ they said. ‘For his loyalty not yours. Learn from him.’

‘I will,’ Mohammed had promised, no doubt with fervency. ‘Oh, I will!’

‘Have nothing to do with the infidels! Shun their filthy ways! Lead an upright life!’

‘Oh, I will, I will!’

‘Tell no man what has happened to you. And this above all: tell no man what happened to you on that other day, the day the mad Effendi was shot.’

Mohammed had muttered that the terjiman and the kaimakam had already asked him questions.

They had seemed to accept that.

‘It may be, though,’ they had said, ‘that they will come again and ask you more questions. And that others will come, too. Say no more. No matter what they ask. Neither about what happened before, nor about what happened after. Nothing! Do you understand that?’

‘It would have been better to have killed him,’ one of the men had said.

‘Bebek would not have liked it. This is a better way to buy his silence,’ said the man who seemed to be their leader, ‘provided that he understands. You understand, do you?’ he had said, turning to Mohammed.

‘As God is my witness –’

‘He is your witness. And if you break your word, He will know, and so will we. Remember, not a word: neither about the before nor about the after. Be dumb, or else there is for you the long silence.’

Then they had left him. Mohammed had managed to stagger home before collapsing. Since then he had lain on his bed thinking. He liked his job at the Embassy, he told Ponsonby, and he needed the money it had brought in. But, as he said, he also liked his life, and feared that he would lose it if he did not do as the man had said.

‘Take no heed of them,’ Ponsonby said. ‘They are but bandits. You can stay in the Embassy till all is forgotten.’

But Mohammed said that the men were not but bandits. They had not sought to rob him. And they had spoken of the Sultan, and bidden Mohammed to lead an upright life. ‘It may be,’ he said, ‘that they are just men and true servants of the Sultan.’

‘How can they be just men and true servants of the Sultan when they seize you and threaten you and, if what you say is true, would even kill you?’

‘Just but severe,’ Mohammed insisted.

It was then that he ventured to name what had so frightened Ibrahim when he had pronounced it to him earlier.

‘People speak of the Fleshmakers,’ he said.

When they got back to the Embassy Ponsonby went straight in to report to the Ambassador: and about half an hour later he came out and asked Seymour to join them.

The Old Man looked at him over the top of his spectacles.

‘Well, Seymour,’ he said, ‘what, as a policeman, would you say?’

‘I would say that someone was trying to frighten witnesses.’

‘And why would they do that?’

Seymour hesitated. ‘They obviously think the witnesses can tell us something.’

‘It is hard to think what,’ said Ponsonby. ‘I mean . . . Mohammed! What more could he have to tell?’

‘I know. Nevertheless, they are obviously worried that there
is
something.’

‘Even if, as I gather, he didn’t see the actual shooting.’

‘They seemed to me to emphasize the before and after. I shall have to look at those again.’

‘Please do so . . . And, if you could, before Lady Cunningham gets here!’

‘Meanwhile, what are we going to do about Mohammed?’ asked Ponsonby. ‘I told him he could stay in the Embassy.’

‘Well, he certainly could.’

‘And his eight children?’

The Ambassador winced.

‘I suppose, at a pinch –’

‘I am not sure he would want to,’ said Seymour. ‘He might feel it was less dangerous simply to stay at home. He would be doing what they asked.’

‘We could go on paying him, I suppose. A sort of sick leave allowance.’

‘If we did that,’ said Ponsonby, ‘I wouldn’t like it to be generally known. Otherwise we’ll have all the staff wanting to stay at home and be paid one.’

‘But if it was just Mohammed, that could be managed, couldn’t it?’

‘I suppose it could. Would you like me to see to it, sir?’

‘Please.’ The Ambassador thought. ‘It’s a little like giving in, though, isn’t it?’

‘It’s only for a time. Until Seymour completes his investigations.’

‘Hmm, yes,’ said the Ambassador doubtfully.

‘There is one thing,’ said Seymour, ‘that I think we ought to pursue. This man Bebek.’

‘Hmm,’ said the Ambassador, even more doubtfully.

‘Bebek is a senior official at the court,’ said Ponsonby.

‘His name was actually mentioned.’

‘Yes, but . . . they didn’t actually say that he had had anything to do with the attack. Just that he wouldn’t like it if things were carried too far.’

‘It might be worth talking to him.’

‘Well, yes, but it might also be counter-productive,’ said Ponsonby.

‘Delicate,’ said the Ambassador. ‘It’s always delicate with the court.’

‘And what would you ask him? Why they mentioned his name? Because Mohammed had mentioned it first, he would say. In connection with his father! Would you get anywhere?’

‘Nevertheless –’

‘If there was anything else,’ said the Old Man, ‘that pointed to him –’

‘But there isn’t!’ said Ponsonby.

‘Hmm.’

There was a little pause.

‘I think we should proceed with caution,’ said the Ambassador.

‘Of course, sir, I respect your judgement,’ said Seymour.

‘Hmm,’ said the Ambassador. Doubtfully.

He turned to Ponsonby.

‘If there was some other way of doing it!’ he said. ‘More . . . indirectly.’

‘Difficult for us to do it,’ agreed Ponsonby. ‘As an Embassy. Would raise all sorts of questions.’

‘And if Mr Seymour . . .’

‘Part of the Embassy, sir, from their point of view.’

‘Hmm.’

Pause.

‘Someone else, then?’

‘But who, sir?’

‘This fellow, Mukhtar, perhaps?’

Seymour didn’t know much about international relations but he could see plenty of questions about this one.

‘Well, that
is
a possibility, sir,’ said Ponsonby.

‘Seymour seems to get on with him. Perhaps he could . . .’

‘Informally,’ said Ponsonby.

‘These things are often better handled informally.’

‘It is, after all, an attack on Embassy staff.’

‘Got to do something,’ said the Ambassador. ‘Lady C. . . .’

‘But must keep it in proportion. Not too little. But not too big.’

‘An informal word . . .’

‘Just so, sir. These things are really quite . . .’

‘Delicate,’ said the Ambassador.

Hmm.