The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) (16 page)

But Yashim shook his head. “I found him just now, in the Almanach de Gotha. I mean to find him here. In Istanbul.”

32

“W
HY
can’t we just kill him and be done?”

Rafael’s question hung in the air. It was more a plea than a question: a question addressed to their consciences.

Why couldn’t they just kill him?

They all knew why. On the docks, a few yards off, he had been—what? A pair of black trousers and a coat, with a hat on top, like something produced by an opera buffa costume department, with the label of
villain
pinned to his back.

For them, he had become the fine point of the machine of assassination they had constructed with cold attention to detail, the motive no warmer than a coiled spring in its housing, the emotion no louder than the ticking of cogs. The object of their labors was only a rivet that needed to be tapped neatly into place, firing pin to percussion cap.

But then the shot went wide and the revolutionaries were left with a machine they could not mend, as useless to them as a steam engine to a Bedouin. They hurried their intended victim away, only to discover that he was not made of rivets: he breathed, he wept, he spoke. He was thirsty, bewildered, frightened like them. And angry.

His anger confused them most.

“How dare you!”

Later: “I don’t know what you hoped to achieve by this disgraceful charade, but it would be better for you to abandon it immediately. Do you have any idea who I am?”

They did not want to hear. They marched him to the cellar of the house, where Ghika had stored their trunks, and locked him in. But first they buttoned his coat on back to front, so that he could not move his arms, and tied his shoelaces together. That was Fabrizio’s idea.

“If you make a sound, we will kill you,” Fabrizio said. Forgetting for a moment, perhaps, that they meant to kill him anyway.

Upstairs the postmortem began; except that there had been no death.

Birgit had gone to visit Natasha at Topkapi, to goggle at palace life, so they could speak freely.

“There was something wrong with the gun,” Fabrizio explained. “It misfired, I’m positive.”

“Where is the gun now?”

“You brought it back.” Fabrizio looked surprised.

“Me? I was helping to carry the man. The gun was your responsibility. Did you leave it downstairs?”

“
Cazzo!
I thought someone had it.”

They were all breathing heavily. Giancarlo broke the silence.

“Rafael, you go and fetch it.”

They squabbled about that. Giancarlo said he could not go, because he was tall and recognizable, and because he needed to think. Fabrizio had better stay, too, he had already messed up once—twice, if you counted the bad shot.

“It misfired!”

“Whatever you say.”

Rafael went. In his heart he knew the gun would be gone already, so when he arrived at the port he did not find it. He did not look very carefully: he just walked by, with a sideways glance, and saw that it was not there. Then he went back.

“You searched for it?
Cazzo!
Fabrizio—did you carry it across the road? Did you look under the trees, Rafael?”

“Of course I did.” Rafael was lying and the others suspected it. But they were all tired, and frightened and confused.

Giancarlo produced the note he had written for La Piuma while Rafael was out. “
Bird dispatched
. We must tell him something. Anything is better than silence.”

“It’s a lie.”

“For the moment. He’s as good as dead, anyway.”

Each of them had a vision of the man in the cellar, raging, buttoned up in his frock coat. “How dare you!”

Had they killed the man, shot him dead on the pavement in the sun, they would have felt no remorse, only the satisfaction of a job well done, loosening another stone in the edifice of papal tyranny. Because they had
not
killed him, they were frightened and ashamed and full of guilt. As assassins they could have exonerated themselves, or so they each told themselves, quietly, privately. As men innocent of murder they felt all the weight of their guilt and their crime pressing down on them.

The crime, a murder, was yet to be performed.

“Why can’t we just kill him and be done?”

33

“A
ND
seven! I win.”

“Fact is, Miss Day, I’m under instructions to let you, you know. It’s what we fellows call diplomacy.”

Eliza laughed. “Mr. Compston, I had no idea you sparkled as a wit.” She let him gather up the cards.

“Another game, Miss Day?”

“I don’t think so, not unless you know any new ones.”

“Oh!” Compston’s face brightened. “We had a fellow here last year, Rushford. Dreadful man, and a proven cheat, though up till then he had us playing a rather good game. At least, that is … I’m not sure I can remember the rules.”

“Oh, come on. What was it called?

Compston blushed. “D’you know, I can’t say. I—I can’t remember what we called it.”

Shithead
, as he had just remembered.

“Well! It must have had a name, Mr. Compston. Rummy? Or racing demon? What was it?”

“Yes, George. What was it?” Fizerley unfolded from the billiard table, where he had been practicing his cueing. “You must remember. You and Fusspot played it all winter. Head-something, wasn’t it? A funny name.”

“Gentleman to see Mr. Compston.” The footman spoke from the door. Compston leaped to his feet, overturning the flimsy card table.

“Absolutely!”

When he was gone, Eliza turned to her cousin. “Why won’t he remember the name? Do you?”

“Yes, Eliza, but wild horses won’t drag it from me. Keep trying George.”

George had stepped into the vestibule.

“Yashim efendi! What a relief!”

Over the years, a friendship of sorts had sprung up between Yashim and the young Englishman. Yashim knew Compston as a good-natured ass; Compston, in turn, saw Yashim as a jack-in-the-box, popping up when least expected. Both, to some extent, had moderated their first impressions. Yashim had been surprised to discover that Compston spoke fluent Russian, while Compston had learned to rely not only on Yashim’s cleverness, but on his kindness, too.

“Someone took a cab here from the port this afternoon. A gentleman with a lady, I understand.”

Compston looked slightly wary. “Oh yes?”

Yashim had been wondering whether he should let word of the attack on Palewski spread. Now he decided to keep it quiet.

“Do you know who they might have been?”

Compston had a vivid recollection of the cab, and the way he had pinched it from under the nose of the man who’d hired it to wait. But surely Yashim efendi had more important things to do than track down cab snatchers? “That is—it was me. I was with Miss Day. Fizerley’s cousin, um. She was awfully tired, and hot.”

“You? But it was waiting for someone else, wasn’t it?”

Compston remembered Miss Day stamping her pretty foot. “I felt it was, ah, an emergency. A sort of life-and-death matter, so to speak.”

“I want to know if you saw, or heard, anything odd, while you were there. Anyone hanging about, for instance. Another cab, perhaps? Maybe someone you wouldn’t have expected to see, down at the port.”

Compston could think of nothing. “No other cab, that’s for sure. We were darned lucky to persuade that one—take it, I mean.”

“Is this Miss Day?” said Yashim, looking over Compston’s shoulder.

“Yes, indeed. Miss Elizabeth Day. Yashim efendi, an old friend. Yashim is asking about the cab we took this afternoon.”

Eliza returned Yashim’s bow with a curtsy. “I had no idea our plain doings were of such interest, Mr. Yashim efendi. However, if it’s the condition of the horse you’re concerned with, I can assure you that I have seldom beheld worse. And I’ve seen the horses on Grafton Street. Quite shocking.”

But Yashim was not interested in the state of the horse.

“I couldn’t be expected to know what was or was not out of the ordinary, having only just arrived in the city,” Eliza pointed out. “However, I admit I am unused to—
scrutiny
.”

“Being looked at? I am sorry, I’m afraid that for many people in Istanbul a Frankish woman is still a rare sight.”

“But not for a—what do you call ’em?—a Frank, I’ll be bound.”

Yashim frowned in puzzlement. “A Frank?”

“A young man, Mr. Yashim efendi. I caught sight of him as I was feeling the nose bag. Chaff, it was all chaff! But it was just as well that Mr. Compston said the right thing to the driver. As indeed you did, Mr. Compston. I was ready to dissolve.”

Yashim found her words hard to follow. “My apologies, mademoiselle. You mentioned scrutiny.”

A little crimson rose to Eliza’s cheeks. “I noticed a young man peering out from the alley across the street, and he was
looking
.”

“Looking? At you?”

“Not just. I’m afraid I’m making far too much of it, now. It wasn’t important. I feel silly, mentioning it. He was just there, looking. And then, well, he wasn’t.”

“Oh no,” Compston murmured. “Not silly, at all.”

“What was he looking at, Miss Day?”

“Oh, just me and the carriage, and Mr. Compston, I suppose. He was young, about Mr. Compston’s age.” She tilted her chin. Her ringlets bounced. “A bit taller, possibly. I couldn’t tell you if he was dark or fair. But does it matter, anyway?”

“Was it perhaps his cab you were taking?”

Eliza looked perplexed. “His cab?”

“I’m afraid the cabbie was waiting for someone, Miss Day,” Compston murmured. “But dash it, Yashim, what’s all this about? Tall Franks, popping their heads out of alleys to admire Miss Day, what? Could happen any day of the week!”

Clumsy as it was, Eliza’s expression showed recognition of the compliment. “I didn’t think of that,” she replied, more seriously. “I don’t think, now, he
was
waiting for the cab. He was just, there, you know. Looking out. Do you play cards?”

But Yashim did not play cards; not that evening, at any rate.

“How odd,” Eliza said musingly, when he had gone. “I didn’t know you’d stolen the cab. Did you do it for me?”

“Needs must when the devil drives,” returned Compston, gruffly. “And the very devil
was
driving, don’t you know. One eye. Horns, probably.”

Eliza smiled. “And what was the name of the game you played last year?”

“The French might call it
tête de merde
,” Compston said.

Miss Day tucked her arm through his. “Thank you, Mr. Compston. You do have the makings of a very fine diplomat. My own cousin wouldn’t tell me, and I think it odious bad manners for a man not to tell. Don’t you?”

34

C
OMPSTON,
Fizerley, and his cousin Eliza were already in bed when Yashim arrived at the theater farther down the Grande Rue.

The lights, he saw, were doused. Earlier in the evening the torches would have blazed in their sockets, to attract the attention of passersby in a city that was generally unlit at night. The torches had been Yashim’s idea. In most parts of Istanbul they would have been a hazard but Pera, the European quarter, had been rebuilt in stone and brick since the last great fire swept out the old wooden buildings.

Preen had been quick to see the benefit. “Incredible, Yashim. So simple—and so successful! A little fire attracts the men like dogs in camp.”

He knocked, and Mina let him in. Like Preen, Mina had started her career as a
köçek
, one of the young boys whose feminine and suggestive dances had taken her to weddings, parties, and other, more intimate gatherings along the Bosphorus. The
köçek
belonged to a long tradition of ladyboy entertainers, whose origins were uncertain; perhaps Egyptian, and possibly familiar to the Byzantines, too.

Preen was no longer in her first youth, and it was Yashim who had encouraged her to establish the theater. It was not respectable, but it was secure.

“Hello, darling.” Preen lay on a divan, drinking tea. “I’m afraid the pashas have all gone home.”

“Pashas?”

“As if. Two snoring Russians, from a ship. What’s your trouble?”

Yashim took a place on the divan.

“Tea? Mina.”

Mina brought him a glass of mint tea, and Yashim sipped it gratefully. Preen watched him for a few moments.

“You can go, Mina. Leave the lamp on the stairs.”

Mina closed her books, in which she had being doing the evening’s accounts, and yawned.

“Big silence, and a big problem,” Preen said when they had heard Mina close the front door. “Yours, I hope. I am not interested in the despise and fall of the Ottoman Empire.”

Yashim smiled. When Palewski had suggested she perform Byzantine tableaux for philhellenistic tourists, Preen said the old stuff was too dull. Palewski had patted his ten-volume set of Edward Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
and challenged her to find a dull paragraph.

He’d been forced to give in. “I think you have to read it through,” he’d protested. “What you need is Suetonius.”

Preen took her tableaux from sources more calculated to interest sailors and porters: tragic murders, suggestive abductions, harem quarrels.

“Something of both,” Yashim said, at last. “Palewski was shot in the street, at Tophane.”

“You are saying it like that because he is all right?”

“He’s hurt, but the wounds aren’t serious, Alhamdulillah.”

“You frightened me, Yashim.” She gave his arm a push. “So tell me.”

He left out nothing, not even the fact that Palewski had been meeting someone very important. “The prince has disappeared.”

“The prince?”

“Very secret, Preen. No tableaux.”

“Of course, darling. It’s not all business. Where do we find him?”

“Remember the time you trawled the port taverns for me? The Janissary time?”

“Hmm. I was younger, Yashim.”

“You don’t look any older.”

“You want to ask if anyone heard shots?”

“Heard a shot. Saw something.” He thought of Miss Eliza Day, and her mysterious Frankish admirer. Tall, like Palewski, but young. He remembered her blush. A handsome man? Perhaps. Not that she could remember … perhaps she had been constrained by Compston’s presence. A tall, handsome young man.