Reign of the Favored Women (39 page)

Still inside the Divan, yet where we outside could see him, Sokolli Pasha stopped. He said a friendly word or two to the Agha of the Janissaries. Ferhad took them as graciously as he could, but shame and humility made him awkward. Then Sokolli Pasha left the warmth and light of the Divan and entered the drizzle in the court.

I was shocked by what I saw. For one to whom form gave so much honor, the reality beneath the Divan gave my master little or none today. His look was thin and haggard, one of exhaustion, totally beaten. Even half a day was too much when what was called “deliberation” was merely an exercise to see how many ways of countering him and flattering his enemies could be found. And for no other cause than so they could say in the off hours, “By Allah, didn’t I put Sokolli Pasha down today!” No wonder the meeting had been short.

My attention could hardly help but draw his from dark, grey thoughts to me. Life came suddenly to his eyes and to his figure as if I were a live coal and he dry kindling. His smile was not broad, but beautiful, and the hands with which he had been anxiously wringing his robe relaxed. After a moment of what he let the world know was pure delight—I had come to see him, even after our talk last night!—he remembered where he was and his duties. This did not vanquish his smile, however, but filled him with a rash feeling of generosity to the world.

Sokolli Pasha held up his hand for the procession to halt (you could almost hear the grumbling in the ranks behind him) and then made an announcement to our court: “Anyone with a petition—by the will of Allah—he should step forward now.”

He would take them all today, and give each his personal attention. He did that for me. The Islamic world knows no greater virtue than magnanimity. Forgetting the cold and damp as well as my scruples, I basked in the sunshine of his honor.

The merchants and craftsmen, too, were moved by the gesture and grew suddenly embarrassed about the pettiness and self-interest of their suits. One even tore his up on the spot and turned away, while the others hung back. Before, had they been accepted for consideration, they would have seen it as a reflection of their own greater worth. “The Grand Vizier took favor on me out of all the others,” they would brag at home, “because my presence is more forceful” or “because he knows the greatness of my establishment and had heard my name whispered in the highest courts.” Now they could make no such claim for all, from the highest to the lowest, were called forward.

So the eunuch went first: He was on his mistress’s business, after all. My master took his petition and slipped it into the coveted velvet bag, not neglecting to murmur some personal compliment to the man. To the janissary, one khadim was like the next; not so to my master. This, too, was meant as salutation to me and I took it as such. I murmured a formulaic prayer in thanks for such honor. Then the dervish, being holier than other men and only slightly less holy than women was allowed to approach.

Was there something in the way he moved? Some stiffness in the hip that said he concealed something under his clothes? Or was it only the sight of the dirty felt dervish cap and rope belt fastened with the stones of asceticism which suddenly reminded me of my friend Hajji and of the urgency of his message? Whatever it was, I sensed some few moments before anyone else in the court did (even before the master, who was much closer to the man than I) that these holy robes concealed an assassin.

“Master! Master! Beware for your life!” I called out these words as the counterfeit petition touched the Grand Vizier’s hand.

At the first sound of my voice, Sokolli turned ever so slightly in my direction, ever so slightly smiling as if my words were music to his ears. In the next instant, he knew I was in earnest and his hand went to his sword. Waving my dagger, swinging my stick, and followed by the gardener and the gatekeeper, I burst through the line of guards, as yet only dumbfounded. When he did come to life, one of the soldiers took a swipe at the gatekeeper whom in the confusion he took to be part of the attack instead of the rescue. It cost the old man an eye.

But all of these actions were like the pitiful swarmings of an ant hill flooded with water beneath the all-powerful eye and will of Allah. The dervish had pulled out a dagger from beneath his rags and plunged it to the hilt in my master’s body.

How protective are manners and robes in normal society! How easily we forget, with these thin screens between us, not only the grosser parts of one another’s nature, but even that flesh and pulse are there. The mere hang-—with hardly the flexibility for a pleat or the ruffle from a breeze—of the Grand Vizier’s rich, heavy fabrics had made him seem impervious. But the assassin’s knife cut through the brocade like gauze and the life blood spilled from Sokolli Pasha as if he were no more than one of the hundred common goats the palace butchers dispatch every day.

The assassin gave a wild shout of triumph, but there was some foreign accent on his Turkish so his battle cry did not carry far or bear much weight. I left it to others to constrain him: His deed was suicidal; he did not even attempt to escape. I pushed by him to ease my master’s crumple to the ground.

Although too weak to pull it from the scabbard, his right hand still convulsed about the hilt of his own sword. But when I took his left in mine, he let the weapon go in order to grasp my hand in both of his. He smiled at me—like a lover, I thought, when his love had been fulfilled and spent. And though others around will testify his last word was a pious “Allah,” I, who was closer, heard my own name, “Abdullah.”

I saw him shrink as the life went from him and that which had been truly great dissipated into other realms. Then I was grateful for the forms of religion that diverted the wildness of my grief into a quiet recitation of the Koran’s first Sura. I said it, trying to match the very tones Sokolli had used the night before when he had prayed for what he had now received: a martyr’s end.

Never have I appreciated more the haste with which mortal remains are disposed of in Islam. Sokolli’s body was never brought back into our house. Only professional wailers were, so death remained a pure and abstract thing, full of glory and myth to the inmates. I stayed with the body, however, from the Second Court to the graveyard, heedless of impurity. Also, because this transfer happened so quickly, I was able to keep my detached blur of confusion and disbelief. There was never time for horror and revulsion to seize a stranglehold upon my soul.

In spite of the haste, the word—like all news in the city—spread faster than runners could have carried it. By the time the body was washed and ready to leave the mosque, the processional way was thronged with mourners. Every man sought to take his five or six steps beneath the bier and pressed out of his way others who came between him and the honor. I, too, worked my way to touch the wooden slats, the scrap of white linen showing through. Again and again I attained the relic, though I never felt it have any weight—miraculously, though the miracle is probably explained by the numbers sharing the burden.

The narcotic effect of all this reverence carried me right to the interment. In the cemetery, all the other stones, with the decomposition and sink of soil beneath them, seemed to tilt at angles in obeisance towards the newly turned earth. I had more the impression of rites of pilgrimage at some holy shrine than those of eternal parting.

It was not until the next day in the First Court of the palace again that the myth faded and the reality of grief and lust for vengeance overcame me. I found myself suddenly face-to-face with the assassin.

His punishment had been swift and summary, and now his detached head sat in a little niche at just the height it would have been had it still been supported by a body. This display was meant as a lesson in the awesome justice of the Porte to any others who contemplated similar deeds. It was clearly a lesson in why rapid burial was called for if any sanctity was to remain in the memory of a man. Already the face was sagging with corruption and was clearly well on its way to becoming of the same consistency and revulsion as dog’s feces in the swelter of a summer’s day.

I had not studied the man closely before. Now I saw—beneath the blood and dirt that bruised his face but turned his dirt-grey cap a royal shade—a face of average appearance. The executioner’s blade had neatly cut through a tendency he had to double chins, leaving only a fantasy sight of blackening blood and butcher-shop muscle exposed. He had average black brows, an average mustache, a nose only slightly larger and rounder than the mean. The best distinguishing feature I could see, then, was a round, pudgy chin protruding from a beard only four or five days old (grown as a disguise, perhaps?) pierced dead center by a dimple. His lips, rotting in a bizarre sneer (it wasn’t difficult to see what shape they must have had when plans of murder were hissed) exposed one black gap where an incisor was missing.

Who was this man and what were his motives. He must have known his deed was suicide, still it had been worth that price to him. What terrible grudge did he bear my master? A grudge born of ignorance, for surely Sokolli Pasha never knowingly caused it. That rag of a cap still declared him a dervish. But was he indeed? Was that merely a disguise (the few day’s beard another clue) that had been adopted with the knowledge that few would suspect or hinder him in such dress?

I questioned the nearby guards, but in their haste to send the assassin to hell, little attempt had been made to identify him. An obvious nickname,
Delilo
, the madman, was all they’d taken from him for identification. Tills was one dervish, fortunately, whose death would not make a martyr among the people whether heaven would do so or not. All suggestion, based on what I had heard at the time of the murder, that the man did not speak Turkish as his native language, was a surprise to the fellow I interrogated.

That was all I had to go on as I stood in the court before that head and let its corruption first kindle and then inflame revenue in my heart. Revenge! Against whom? The man was already dead and had made lit tie attempt to save himself from it. But I had such an impression that he had not worked alone, that others, besides my friend Hajji had known about the plot and they had said nothing. Or, more likely, they had known and openly encouraged, promising him the immortality he had bestowed upon my master.

I swore I would, Allah willing, find these people, and I sealed the oath by spitting into the felon’s eye. The spittle slipped down one cheek like a slimy tear, leaving a clean trail in the grime. It halted in the mustache and the flies, startled for a moment from their feast, settled down to business once again, which made the mustache seem to twitch as if still alive and the pride and joy of its wearer.

* * *

My best lead was my friend Hajji. He had at least known enough about the matter to come and give warning. But one quick trip home had been enough to ascertain that he had vanished as soon as his purpose was acquitted. The gardener’s boy—very distraught, of course, by both the death of the master and the grievous wounding of his father—was able only to say that he had gone for refreshment for the old dervish and returned to find he’d disappeared. And the boy did not have kind words to say about holy men and their madnesses in general at that moment, so I knew it was useless to ask further there.

But I did ask nearly everywhere else in the city. I asked the donkey boy delivering goods to our door. He admitted to being a novice to a local holy man. I pressed him further, wondering what sort of doctrine he might be learning. His animal shook a cloud of dust and flies from her flank and her master copied her, shrugging carelessly. He was unable to answer even the most basic questions of theology.

“What is it then that your most reverend teacher is good for?” I asked with frustration.

“If I do not pay him his sack of beans and salt once a month,” the poor boy confessed, “he grows angry, and his anger is terrible indeed. He can cause all my family to fall ill with a wink of his eye. He has done it before; it’s true. If I am careful to pay him, he may deign to visit us on holy days or at a birth or a wedding. Then he may leave an amulet tied in the window to keep away evil and all our business, Allah willing, may then be blessed.”

Such leads I pursued no further. The assassin had been unprincipled, no doubt, but in a much more earnest, intelligent and ambitious way than this petty local charlatan. I took much greater heed of the rumors of begging dervishes who appeared suddenly and inexplicably on any street corner. “Such a blessed saint!” I would be told. “His mind Allah has already gathered to Him to sit in Paradise and gaze perpetually at the archetypal Holy Koran. It is only his grosser parts left here below.”

So I would go and find the fellow, but my skepticism never allowed me to discover more than a blathering idiot or maniac. I, like so many, others, answered his call: “For the love of Allah! For the love of Allah!” with a small coin and so kept him from being a burden to his family. But I, unlike others, never imagined there was anything either divinely clairvoyant or demonically murderous about this lack of wit.

A visit to every
tekke
in the neighborhood, city, region (my scope expanded as hope dwindled) seemed the next best plan. But Rome has not half so many cloisters as Constantinople has tekkes. The place is absolutely honeycombed with these holy establishments. Although a local mosque may support a brotherhood beneath its eaves, the two are not necessarily and always partners. One would need the perspective of Allah to look down on the rooftops of the town and pick out a tekke from your average house. Indeed, as the sheikh’s family often lives on the upper floor, even the All-Seeing One would have to be able to sense holiness through the everyday clutter of drying figs and laundry.

For the poor mortal making his way through the streets, one door slinking with alley cats and mounds of rubbish was too much like the next. And when such camouflage was linked with vows of secrecy among the members, the search was hopeless.