The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) (21 page)

At long last he began to move. Very slowly he levered himself into a sitting position, one foot striking the bottle, which rolled under the bed. He groaned again, then belched. He swallowed some vomit, and clutched his chest as the bile burned. His ulcers whined.

When he finally stood up he gave a grunt and flung himself back down on the divan, his leg in the air. A piece of glass was sticking out of the sole of his foot. He took a swipe at it, grimacing with self-pity, and managed to dislodge the fragment but cut his finger. He put it in his mouth.

Ghika stumbled, trembled, groaned, and cursed as he floundered around the room, searching for water and sucking his wounded finger.

At the sight of the raki bottle he pulled a face. The bottle winked back. Ghika stiffened and pursed his lips in disapproval. There was no call for such familiarity, not with Leandros Ghika. Respectable family, the Ghikas. Owned the whole house. Lost the furniture. Father dead.

He dropped the pile of glass onto a table and picked up the bottle and set it on the table next to the glass. The other one, he remembered, had rolled under the bed.

Going down there made his head hurt. He groped for the bottle, and pulled it out.

It was not a bottle of raki. It was another shape. He stared at it stupidly for a few moments, then sniffed it. It smelled of starched coiffures and silk drapes and applewood
chibouks
. There was a little amber liquid at the bottom, too, and he drank that. It tasted of brandy. He mastered an urge to vomit, and felt slightly better.

Brandy was too expensive for Ghika. He must have stolen it, he reasoned. From the men who kept the whore upstairs, the woman who shamelessly bared herself …

He enjoyed that thought for a while. He’d stolen the brandy, found her alone in the room, alone … asleep … she’d been asleep, down on the divan the way he’d woken up just now, but naked … her rump … that’s it … buttocks … he parted her thighs and she stirred. Quick! Pressing her nape down onto the bed, he fumbled with his trousers … she was writhing now, yes … Not like those stolid lumps at the whorehouse but white and lithe and bucking—presenting her perfect rear, a little higher, that’s it … In! She was tight, and alive … He gave her little screams to scream, and then he stifled them with his hand on her neck as he pressed her down into the pillows.

He wiped his hand across his face. It was a dream. It hadn’t been like that. One of the men—someone had given him the bottle. He could vaguely remember being outside in the corridor. A noise. The men, and someone—someone else.

“Wha—wha’s going on?”

After that he couldn’t remember. But it didn’t matter. He’d liked the dream.

45

I
N
time, everything and everyone drifts through a port. The merchandise, silver, bills of trade and exchange that justify its existence. Men, of course: stevedores, dockers, lightermen, merchants, inspectors, tax collectors, and sailors of every creed and color. There are port rats and prostitutes. Altogether they bring news—gossip from the hinterland, prices from abroad, new jokes, the latest disasters.

So although the body was not discovered in the port, Balamian got to hear about it almost as soon as the
kadi
, in whose jurisdiction the man had died. It did not concern him directly, but he remembered Yashim, who had been brought to see him in the baths, and sent his man.

Yashim had left his stew to simmer and gone down to Kara Davut to find the quince man coming up the road with a basket on his back loaded with big yellow quinces, set off against sprays of bright green leaves. The man solemnly unhitched his basket and helped Yashim choose four hard quinces, each with its spray of leaf.

Back home, Yashim sliced each quince in half and cut out the cores. He pared them into slices, dropping them into the pan before they had time to brown. He ladled a little more water into the pan and set the lid on.

He put the bright leafy sprigs in a small vase, and put it on the windowsill.

He barely had time to settle on the divan and pick up the sheet of observations before there came a knock on the door. He opened it and recognized the huge man from the tavern, unsmiling.

“The boss gave me a message,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “They found a man dead, below the Frankish cemetery. Looks like he fell.” He shrugged, expansively. “The boss thought he might be yours.”

Yashim knew exactly where the man meant: the old Catholic cemetery beyond Taksim, beyond the pest hospital and the old walls of Pera, where the ground shelved steeply down to the shores of the Bosphorus.

“Thank you–and please, thank Balamian efendi for his solicitude. Is anything known about the man who fell?”

“That’s the message.” He stuck a finger in his ear and worked it there, glancing around the flat. His enormous feet shuffled on the rug. Yashim raised his eyebrows.

“It’s where the Franks go, don’t they, when they die? The old Genoese place. I went up myself once, as a kid.”

With that unexpected confidence, the big man gave a short bow and clumped off down the stairs.

Yashim glanced around his apartment. He checked his stew: the water was barely simmering, so he decided to leave the fire in, and let it die down of its own accord. He slipped his cloak off a peg, folded it over his arm, put on his shoes, and followed the messenger down into the street.

At the Balat stage he engaged a caïque as far as Karaköy at the mouth of the Golden Horn; experience had taught him that rowers preferred their own stretch of water. From Karaköy he took another, gliding up the Bosphorus past the Tophane arsenal, and the port, which Balamian seemed to control, until they reached a small stage west of the sultan’s palace at Be
ş
ikta
ş
.

It was well after noon, and the sun was hot on his back as he began to climb toward the Frankish cemetery. The land here was broken into a series of ridges, sometimes reinforced by masonry, and the buildings that had grown up on each broad shelf. The lane wound between them without direction. To his right the sloping ground above Dolmabache was dotted with the cypresses that always marked an Ottoman graveyard, fluting skyward like natural minarets. Many of its headstones were centuries old, veering crazily through neglect, smoothed to illegibility by years of wind and rain, some deliberately smashed in the rage that followed the destruction of the Janissaries almost sixteen years before. But the Frankish cemetery above was older still, consecrated when Pera was a Genoese colony battening on the Byzantine trade.

Yashim was sweating when he overtook a carter urging his ponderous horse up the broken road. He gestured politely, to offer Yashim a lift; but the empty cart jounced and thundered across the cobbles and Yashim found that he preferred to continue on foot.

“You’re wise!” The carter leered jovially at Yashim. “My next load’s a dead ’un.”

Yashim doubled his pace. He had hoped that Czartoryski was still alive. He had counted on the widening gap of silence after the assault to mean that the prince was, in some way, protected: more useful to his abductors alive than dead. Balamian’s news was what he had dreaded most. It was scarcely twenty-four hours since Palewski had been shot: if the intention was to cause an éclat, then to hurl the body down from the Frankish cemetery into the Ottoman one could still be counted a success.

If the aim was to frustrate liberal hopes and to embarrass the Porte, the choice of the Frankish cemetery as the place to murder the prince was, he supposed, impeccable. A dead man in a graveyard caused no comment if he reached it by tumbrel, attended by mourners, and was lowered into a hole in the ground. If he was murdered there—pushed from a cliff, or bludgeoned and left for dead—then the infraction stank to high heaven: it became a story the whole city would soon hear.

“It’s where the Franks go when they die.”

He glanced up. In the distance he could already see the little mortuary chapel of the cemetery, tactfully surmounted by a modest wooden cross, but what engaged his attention was a knot of people standing by a low wall, looking down into the Ottoman cemetery.

He hurried up to them, conscious that he cut a poor figure in his damp shirt, his turban slightly askew, his shoes dusty from the road. He looked about for the
kadi
, but perhaps he had already gone.

“Where’s the body?”

The men at the wall turned to look at him, suspiciously.

“Over there,” one man said, with a jerk of his head. But it was hard at this distance to see much at all: only a couple of men standing by a dark shape on the ground. Yashim assumed they were gravediggers.

“The
kadi
said to let no one through,” the man said. He put out an arm.

Yashim shook his head. “I’ve brought the cart,” he said, and at that moment the cart itself crested the rise. The man stood back.

“The cart’s coming,” Yashim explained, as he approached the gravediggers. Above them, the cemetery’s retaining wall rose fifteen feet, ending in a broken line of loose stones and scrub that marked the boundary of the old Frankish graveyard. Yashim looked up at it, and frowned.

The corpse lay facedown on the stones and grass in a small declivity at the foot of the wall. That he had fallen from above seemed obvious at first sight: one arm outflung, the other awkwardly pinioned beneath the trunk; a knee was bent at an unnatural angle. But what mattered most to Yashim at that moment was the fact that the dead man was dressed in European costume: leather shoes, black trousers and frock coat.

Yashim squatted down beside the corpse.

“Does anyone know who he is?”

The sexton shrugged. “Maybe a Frank.”

Maybe, Yashim thought. But also, possibly, a Turk.

Whoever he was, Yashim was certain that he was not looking at the body of Prince Adam Czartoryski.

It was also plain to Yashim that the man was already dead when he fell.

46

D
OHERTY,
the Irish priest, brought Palewski a vial of holy water.

“What am I supposed to do with it? Drink it?” Palewski asked testily. He was in a bad mood, and quite enjoying it. Birgit’s failure to rush over, full of concern and warmth, was a legitimate cause of annoyance, of course; but he took a bad mood to be a sign of convalescence, too, and that cheered him. His wounds were still sore, but the leeches had done their work; Dr. Millingen had declared that the danger was, for the most part, over.

“We’ll have you up and about in a few days,” he’d said cheerfully, in the bedside manner he reserved for foreign diplomats; Palewski resented him for it. “With a few honorable scars.”

“All my scars are honorable.”

“Of course, I meant…”

“You won’t find any on my back.”

“No, no. Don’t excite yourself—the dressings…”

Doherty chuckled, and suggested the holy water might be sprinkled over his wounds, a proposition that Palewski treated with marked aversion.

“Blessed it may be, Father, but I’d rather not douse my wounds in water you’ve lifted from some dank font. Why, the stuff’s alive! Meanwhile,” he added, pointing a finger at a dark bottle on the bedside table, “this is suitable for external and internal use.”

Doherty uncorked the bottle and sniffed. “Brandy-like, it is. Still, as a friend, perhaps I ought to taste it, to be on the safe side.”

He had the brandy in a glass before Palewski could think of a reply.

“Ah. A grand marque, if I’m not mistaken. One of the French houses, am I right?”

“Doherty, you may be a priest but I think you’re an ass.” Palewski put his hands on the mattress and shifted his position, grimacing. “Here. It’s for my pain.”

“Of course it is. I came to tell you, now, that my work in this city of infidels is almost done. I leave for Rome at the end of the week, and not, in my opinion, a moment too soon. This is no place for Christians, Palewski.”

“So you’ll be taking more than half the population of Istanbul with you?”

“Schismatics, my old friend. Half Turk, the lot of ’em. I’d gladly lead them to Rome if they’d admit their errors and put themselves under the protection of the Vicar of Christ. But they are all frogs in pots, Palewski—and I fear you are, too.”

“Frogs? What are you talking about?”

“Come, come. You know the story of the frog that was boiled alive? They heated the water slowly and he could just about bear it, a little hotter, a little hotter, until it was too hot for him, after all. And by then, he was dead. You’ve been here a long time, and I daresay you don’t notice the signs. Why, you’re lying there shot and you call it a decent place for a Christian?” He shook his head. “They’d have me by the heels if they got half a chance, I know it.”

“Who? The Orthodox?”

“The Mahommetans,” Doherty said darkly. “It starts with looks, and then it goes onto jostling, and jeering, and it’ll be stoning and burning before there’s an end on it, you mark my words.”

“Have you been jostled and jeered at, then?”

“I have. I’ve walked these very streets and been spat on, insulted and reviled. There’s an evil spirit in ’em, Palewski, and it’s gathering strength, when a man of the cloth can’t walk down a public street and escape the dark looks of that pagan race of idolators and blasphemers.”

“I don’t suppose many Mahommetans would know a Catholic priest from a tattooed Chinaman. You’re simply an object of surprise.”

“It’s the fires of eternal damnation that’ll be the surprise for them, Palewski. They don’t know it. Can’t see it. You’d best keep your eyes open, too, my friend, after I’m gone.”

Palewski allowed a pause to develop. “Well, we shall be sorry to lose you,” he said finally, without obvious conviction. He had thought the priest engaging company; he had not expected this fanatic. Anyway, he wanted Birgit. “I expect you’ll be seeing the Italians before you go?”

Father Doherty jostled his empty glass onto the bedside table, among the books and bottles. “No doubt. And I’ll be telling them the same as I’ve told you. They can’t go on playing games with their souls forever in this life.”