The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) (22 page)

“Well, somewhere in between the fire and the brimstone, Father, would you mind telling them I’d appreciate a visit, too?”

“Aye, I can do that much, I suppose.” A puzzled frown appeared on the priest’s face, and he leaned in a little closer to the bed. “Tell me, Palewski, what exactly did happen to you, when you were shot? Your friend said you were at the port.”

Palewski felt suddenly very weary; he wished the priest would go. “Look, Yashim has all the details. Ask him. I’m afraid I’m not up to it. Need to rest.”

“You were alone, I take it?”

Palewski grunted. His eyes had closed. Father Doherty glanced covetously at the brandy.

“I’ll be off, then. So long. I’ll drop by again, never fear.”

Palewski made no reply. His chin dropped onto his chest, and he was snoring gently when Father Doherty tiptoed from the room.

Father Doherty did not immediately go downstairs. In a room on the floor above, he surprised Marta, who was folding sheets.

Marta gave a little cry.

“Peace, dear lady!” He gestured to the window. “I wanted to see the view from here. The view?”

Marta pursed her lips. Doherty went to the window, from where he could see the roof of the Galata Tower and, in the distance, the woods and turrets of Topkapi Palace across the Horn.

“Very nice,” he said. He tipped his hat and went off downstairs, leaving Marta puzzled and indignant.

47

T
HE
kadi
had been summoned when the body was discovered, and Yashim was still at the cemetery when he came slowly up the hill, leaning on a stick, sometimes pausing to catch his breath.

He looked at the body for a few moments, and shook his head. “Well now, cover him up. Cover him up. It would be just as well to get him down to the mosque, at least. A lot of flies at this time of the year.”

“I have sent for a sheet,” Yashim said. “The carter here will take him away.”

The old
kadi
looked at him with interest. “Are you a relative of the deceased?”

Yashim stepped forward and bent to speak in a low voice. “Yashim, from the palace. I heard what had happened and came to see.”

The
kadi
cocked his head. “The man is dead. It’s a long way to come, Yashim efendi.”

“Not if a man has been killed,
kadi
.”

The
kadi
planted his stick in the ground and leaned on it, looking up at the cliff.

“The fall was enough to break his neck,” he murmured.

Yashim followed his glance. “It’s possible,” he agreed. “But from the position of the body I think he was already dead when he fell. A man’s instinct when he loses his footing is to put out his arms to protect himself. He didn’t. There’s bruising to the neck, too.”

The
kadi
’s chin sank. “What to do, Yashim efendi?” He glanced at Yashim out of the corner of his eye. “There’s never been anything like this in all my time. A murder, you think? We don’t even know the poor man’s name, unless it is written in his jacket, perhaps.”

“I’ve looked,” Yashim said. The dead man was either a Turk or a Jew, youngish, in his late twenties at most, clean shaven, reasonably well dressed at moderate expense in the fashion popularized by the late sultan, which consisted of the frock coat, trousers, and black shoes. The shoes were good, but worn: Yashim had particularly noticed the soles, which suggested that the young man had spent a good time walking in them.

His pockets contained nothing above a few coins, some shreds of tobacco, and, folded very small and almost lost in the seam of his trouser pocket, a scrap of yellow paper with the words
coffee: 2 kebab 4
written in pencil. There was also a pencil, much sharpened, in the inside pocket of his coat; Yashim satisfied himself that it was the same sort of pencil that had been used to scribble the note. Otherwise there were no clues of any kind to the wearer’s identity.

The
kadi
sighed. “What took him to a cemetery where he had no right to be?”

Yashim nodded: it was just what he had been about to say. “Why would a believer be in a Frankish graveyard?” He paused. “We may suppose that he went there for a purpose—to meet his killer, or someone else. Or to avoid him.”

“Or to examine a grave.”

“Yes, that’s a possibility.” Yashim looked keenly at the
kadi
. He might be old and quiet, but he wasn’t missing much. “The chapel. Is it attended?”

“Only when a funeral is in progress, I believe. But we can ask, can we not?”

“I wish I could be of more service,
kadi
, but I am afraid my coming here today was chance. I thought something else might have happened, and I needed to eliminate the possibility that your man was connected in some way.”

The
kadi
smiled. “Very little is left to chance, my friend. Come, let us walk down the hill together. You are in a hurry to be off, but the walk will do you good and carry you where you want to go.”

Yashim blinked. “Very well.” He had a strange sensation in his ears, as if listening to the
kadi
could be the most delightful thing he had ever done. “His clothing cost him three hundred
kuru
ş
, and his shoes half as much.”

“He pushes a pen, perhaps.”

“But punishes his feet.” Yashim told the
kadi
about the excessive wear on the man’s shoes. “The shoes are polished very bright, all the same.”

The
kadi
jabbed at the ground with his stick. “Most illuminating.”

“In what way?”

“He walks a lot, and jots down his expenses for coffee and a kebab. This tells us that he is literate, of course, and suggests that he is employed while he is walking. After all, to manage his own money a small notebook would be sufficient.”

Yashim shook his head. “I don’t follow you,
kadi
efendi.”

The
kadi
laid his hand lightly on Yashim’s arm. “So. I was a teacher, long ago. Some of my students carried just such a notebook to help them calculate their expenditure through the week. It helped them work out how much allowance they had left. It was a private book, because some of their expenses were made on—shameful things.”

Yashim nodded. “So he wrote on paper, and kept a list of expenses to show his employer, rather than for himself. Who could the employer be? What sort of firm employs Turkish clerks?”

The commercial revolution that had swept Europe, creating armies of clerks to keep the ledgers, had barely touched the Ottoman Empire. Trade, like industry, was still conducted on a personal level, where deals were sealed over coffee; and Ottoman gentlemen did not, for the most part, engage in trade. That they left to Greeks, Armenians, and Jews.

“Indeed,” the
kadi
murmured. “A firm? Perhaps the biggest of them all?”

“The biggest?”

“I wonder if our friend worked for the government? Well, well, it is a possibility.”

He picked his way carefully over the rough ground, and at the road he stopped and gestured with his stick.

“So beautiful, the Bosphorus at this time of year.”

They walked slowly downhill. At the bottom the
kadi
nodded. “It requires some thought.”

“I will let you know,
kadi
, if anything occurs to me.”

The
kadi
turned to him and bowed. “That,” he said, “would be very gracious.”

Yashim bowed in return, to hide his blush. He was aware that the old
kadi
was laughing at him.

48

I
N
summer, Istanbul was very hot. In winter, it froze. Ice heaved paving stones from the earth, and the spring rains washed the earth away, to rise as dust all through the long, hot summer. Agreeable as the city was, and perfectly sited to be the navel of the world, it was unquestionably dusty, muddy, and flyblown.

Yet its inhabitants were among the cleanest people in Europe, for the filth of the city had produced a remedy. At the public baths men and women could be washed, steamed, scrubbed, rinsed, lathered, soaked, bathed, and exfoliated; their hair could be cut, their body hair removed with wax and unguents, their nails pared, their nostrils and ears washed, their skin softened with creams and oils, their muscles manipulated, their hands and feet rubbed, their temples massaged; they could be roasted on hot platforms, and chilled in cold baths; then pummeled and stroked, kneaded and splashed down, before they emerged shining for a glass of tea and a sweet cake.

The process could be performed express, or it could be—and usually was, by the women of the city—drawn out into a day of rigors and relaxations, accompanied by conversation, laughter, and sometimes dancing, performed by troupes of
köçek
.

“Ouf!” Birgit raised her head from the hot slab, and winked at Natasha, who was lying on a hammam towel beside her. “Like a sauna, but rather grander.” She rolled over onto her back and adjusted the rolled-up towel under her head. “It’s like being in a church,” she added, gazing up at the dome.

Natasha did not reply. Eventually she murmured: “In Siberia, the native people have places like this, to sweat and become clean. It is seen as a spiritual purification, led by a shaman.”

Later, it seemed less like a church; Natasha was not sure that the languorous and intense massage she received led automatically to spiritual purification, and the tea and sweets they were offered, as they reclined in the tepidarium, were anything but shamanic.

“I could spend days here,” Birgit mumbled sleepily, as she brushed the cake crumbs from her lips. She raised her leg and ran her finger up a shin that had been depilated and buffed by expert hands.

“Yashim is meeting us at four,” Natasha reminded her.

“Hmm? It’s six. He said six.”

Natasha closed her eyes. She reached behind to pull her damp hair to one side, and settled her head on the firm little pillow. “Four o’clock, Birgit. You must have forgotten.”

“What’s the time now?” Birgit asked, after a long pause.

Natasha was even longer replying. “It’s Wednesday,” she said finally, and they giggled.

49

“T
HE
two Frankish ladies? But they are gone, efendi, this hour or more.” The fat old lady glanced involuntarily at the till: they had been lavish with their tips, the Frankish girls.

“Gone? How did they go into the street?” Yashim asked, surprised.

The old lady raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Murad! Murad! There you are,” she added, as a man stepped into the little domed office by the hammam entrance. “The Frankish women. You saw them home?”

Yashim’s lips tightened. “Where to?”

Murad scratched his head. “Not far. Ghika’s place.”

“But they were supposed to meet me here.”

The old lady said: “Perhaps they got tired of waiting?”

“So—Ghika’s place. Where’s that?”

It took Yashim less than ten minutes to reach the house, but his anxiety dissolved in an instant when he saw Natasha on the stairs. She was descending slowly, one gloved hand trailing against the wall, the other clutching her skirt to keep her from tripping: the last rays of a dying sun suffused her hair with an almost unearthly light.

She raised a finger to her lips.

“Shhh! Birgit’s asleep—with Giancarlo!”

Yashim tried to give her a disapproving look, but failed. “The valide would have had my head if anything had happened to you,” he said.

“Are you scolding me? I’m sorry.” She lowered her eyes. Then she glanced up again, and laughed.

“Are we going back to the palace?”

Yashim smiled. “I see you’ve grown accustomed to Ottoman life. Is it such a chore?”

Natasha blew out her cheeks. She looked radiant, Yashim noticed: as though the baths had sloughed away a layer of Siberian frost. Her skin shone.

“No, not a chore, exactly,” she said slowly, her eyes dancing with amusement. “But it is how the valide warned me it might be, a little. Talking to the ladies, well. They only want to discuss the latest fashion—and I’m not a very fashionable person. I think they’re disappointed in me.”

An idea seemed to strike her. “It’s rather like being at the baths, isn’t it? All those women, trying to be beautiful? At least there everyone goes naked—there’s nothing to pretend, and everyone is the better for it.” She told Yashim about an enormously fat woman who wasn’t obviously beautiful. “But she was magnificent, Yashim, jowls and all. I thought, when I’m old and fat, I want to be like her.”

“It doesn’t seem very likely,” Yashim murmured.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Natasha continued gaily, sliding her hand under his arm. “Fat or thin, or gray, or bent—I’d be myself, wouldn’t I? But at the palace it’s worse somehow. Sad. Not the valide—she does exactly as she pleases, and she’s magnificent, too. But the others live to please, I suppose—and there’s no one to please, except her.”

“And she’s not easily pleased,” Yashim pointed out.

They stepped out into the street.

“No. She doesn’t much care. But everyone else wants me to tell them how the ladies dress in Saint Petersburg these days.” She shrugged. “How many petticoats? Does a skirt spring from the waist—and is it true that sleeves are being worn long this year? They are always fingering my hair here”—she pulled at the dark strands that framed her cheeks, and grimaced—“and questioning my bonnets. The only thing they really approve of is my shawl—and not because they think it’s pretty. They have much lovelier ones. Just because they think it’s more
à la mode
these days.”

She gave an exasperated sigh. “So that’s what I think when you ask if I want to go back to the palace. Not a chore, of course not. But not the Arabian nights.” She gave him a sly look from under her lashes. “You know, I feel astonishingly clean. My skin feels clean and bright after all that scrubbing and pounding. It gives me—energy.”

She said it with a fierce little twist, and Yashim had to laugh—partly to still the little hollow that had just flickered in his chest. Natasha looked beautiful—and he had thought her plain!—with those lively, intelligent dark eyes framed by the two perfect arcs of her eyebrows, her lips dark and full, and her high Russian cheekbones scattered merrily with the lightest of freckles. And she had spoken of her skin …