The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) (27 page)

Giancarlo nodded, and went to fetch his wallet.

When he had gone, Rafael said: “I should stay.”

“Look, we need food, whatever happens. If—if I do
the thing
”—Fabrizio added, and pulled a face—“we still need to eat. And Giancarlo will take hours if he’s let out on his own. Seeing Birgit—she’ll take care of that, won’t she? He might not come back until tomorrow.” A thought struck him. “He might never come back.”

“How can you say that!” Rafael was shocked. “It’s his cause, too.”

Fabrizio looked at him with bright dark eyes. “Is it? Is it your cause, even? Or mine? You know, Rafael, it isn’t some fiend of the Vatican we’ve got prisoner, is it? He’s Polish, like Palewski, or so he says. He calls himself a prince but he told me he’s in exile.”

Rafael spoke in a low voice: “He lives in Paris.”

“So whose side is he on? Palewski’s? I am, too.”

“What does it mean?”

“Maybe La Piuma’s cocked up.”

“I don’t think so. It was La Piuma’s warning that got us out of Rome before the police caught up.”

Fabrizio laid his hand on Rafael’s arm. “La Piuma. It was just a note. Who is La Piuma?”

“We’ve been through this, Fabrizio. La Piuma—it’s just a code name. Without the code, we’d all be vulnerable, you know that.”

“We’ve got the code. And I feel vulnerable.” He raised his chin. “That’s it, Rafael. While you’re in town, go and see Palewski yourself, and ask him about the prince. Who he is. Not directly, obviously. Just fish—see what you can find out.”

Rafael looked doubtful. “He’d smell a rat, Fabrizio. We aren’t supposed to know anything about the prince. Not that he came to Istanbul, nothing. I can’t just start a conversation about someone I’m never supposed to have heard of.”

“All right then, Doherty. The priest. He’ll know something about this fellow. See what his politics are. Anything. Check his story, if you can—Paris, all that.”

Rafael nodded. “I will.” He squeezed Fabrizio’s hand. “Good luck. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”

Giancarlo came out of the farmhouse. “Have you decided?”

“He’ll come.”

“Fine.” He hesitated then stuck out his hand, and they shook hands.
“Courage, mon colonel.”

Fabrizio opened his mouth to speak, but then changed his mind. He stood for a long time at the farmhouse door, shading his eyes as he watched them go.

59

“T
HE
pasha is not here, Yashim efendi,” said the secretary; the same secretary who had ushered him into Midhat Pasha’s office the day before. “He left a few minutes ago,” the young man volunteered. “To go to Topkapi.”

“I’ll find him there, then. I was on my way…” But at the door Yashim turned back. “Actually, we could save Midhat Pasha some trouble. There’s a young clerk from the ministry who hasn’t been in to work these past two days. The pasha had asked me to keep an eye out for him. I’m afraid I’ve just forgotten his name. Ahmet … Selim … Tchah!” He gave a rueful chuckle and tapped his forehead.

“Perhaps you mean Abdullah Ozgem? He’s been away for days. Do you have some news?”

“Ozgem, that’s it, and, well, yes. Some news, of a kind.”

The young official looked around anxiously. “Not here.” He beckoned Yashim into a side room and closed the door. “That’s not good. Tell me what happened.”

Yashim bit his lip. “I don’t know that I shouldn’t report this directly to the pasha himself,” he said hesitantly. “It’s just that—well, do you think Ozgem has much experience at this kind of thing?”

The secretary gave a noncommittal shrug. “He’s tailed people before,” he said.

“I know, but don’t you think this one’s different? Harder, maybe.”

“Because they’re foreign? I suppose that makes them less predictable. I don’t know. The woman, of course. But why, is there something wrong?”

“I think he may have come under suspicion.”

The young man pulled a dubious face. “The Italians are a fairly low priority—low risk. They haven’t done anything, as far as I know. Between you and me, we sent Ozgem to cover ourselves, in case anyone thought we were careless about the ‘great revolutionary threat’ they worry about over there.” He smiled. “Pretty routine. I suppose if he’s blown his cover, we should pull him off.”

So Ozgem had been tailing the Italians, for Midhat Pasha. Now he was dead. Birgit was dead. The Italians had disappeared. Midhat was speaking to the valide.

“Where does Ozgem live?”

“Is it important?” The young man sighed. “Very well.”

He was gone for two minutes, returning with a handwritten card.

Yashim walked from the Porte to the palace like a blind man, seeing nothing. His mind was spinning, crammed with thoughts and speculations that rose and fell like caïques in a storm. Pumping the secretary had been child’s play, but now he was left with causes and consequences that he struggled to pull into any kind of shape.

If the Italians had discovered they were being watched, the cemetery was a clever place to choose: it would have forced the unlucky Ozgem into the open. That suggested the Baklava Club had something to hide. Something to fear. Something that turned Ozgem’s task from routine to dangerous.

The attempt on Palewski’s life? He tried to imagine how the Italians would have reacted to the news that Palewski had been shot. They were almost allies, weren’t they, his friend without a country and these young men seeking to unite their own? Was an attack on Palewski an attack on them? Or the prelude to an attack? In Istanbul, they said, they felt free: but perhaps the freedom was qualified, after all. Perhaps for all their bravado they lived in fear of papal agents coming after them. Tense, alarmed, they discover that they are being followed. Panicked—and Yashim could well imagine the effect the discovery might have on the three of them—they kill their tail to gain time, and go underground.

So Birgit was at the baths with Natasha. Giancarlo waited for her, at the flat. He got rid of Natasha easily by setting up a tryst. And then what? Birgit refused to go into hiding? Maybe Giancarlo and Birgit agreed it wasn’t necessary: after all, she’s a Dane and a woman. She’s wasn’t involved. Maybe they needed her as a link to the outside world.

But they underestimated the ruthlessness of their opponent. Someone who had already fired on Palewski and arranged for Czartoryski to disappear. Someone who that night came to the flat and found Birgit.

Or even Birgit and Giancarlo, together? He killed Birgit. Made Giancarlo, perhaps, give up his friends.

In which case, Yashim thought grimly, the
kadi
’s men were wasting their time. The Italians wouldn’t be coming back.

Their bodies—following that of Czartoryski himself, no doubt—would have been dumped this morning. Into the Bosphorus. Into a shallow grave. Lost somewhere in the woods and waters that surrounded the city.

Yashim put out a hand and leaned for a moment against the wall, breathing heavily. It was a steep climb. Two smart young officers in kepis divided at his approach, and slipped past him on either side, still chatting.

Doherty wasn’t young and beautiful: he wasn’t charged with that sensuality, no, that search for sensual meaning, shared by the young.

Yashim worked his way through the narrow streets at the foot of Ayasofya. Doherty was there because he liked the liquor, and perhaps the attention. He’d come into Palewski’s circle quite by chance, always ingratiating, looking to make friends.

Until yesterday, when he’d outraged Palewski with some bigoted remarks. Now he was about to leave, and perhaps he didn’t care anymore. Perhaps, as Palewski said, his job was done.

Yashim went past the Fountain of Ahmet III without looking up, as he usually did, at its broad sheltering canopy and the delicate scrollwork on the marble panels.

Could the priest have killed a woman with whom he had joked and laughed that afternoon, beneath the trees?

60

“A
H,
Yashim.” Midhat Pasha blinked owlishly in the crepuscular shade of the eunuchs’ gallery. “I’ve just come from the valide. I wouldn’t go in, if I were you.”

Yashim hesitated. “You brought her bad news, my pasha?”

“Pfui. She is no fool. She understands. But yes, for the moment it’s a little rain…”

“They told me at the ministry that I would find you here, my pasha. I’ve news for you. Bad news, too, I’m afraid. Abdullah Ozgem, one of your people, was found yesterday at Taksim, dead. He’d been strangled.”

Midhat’s eyes shrank to the size of currants. “Ozgem? What—how do you know?”

“There was bruising on his neck. He was strangled and thrown over a wall.”

But perhaps that was not what Midhat Pasha’s question meant: not how the man was killed, but how he knew it was Ozgem.

“We traced him to your department. That is, the
kadi
worked it out from a scrap of paper. It’s a long story, my pasha. I’m sorry.”

Midhat took a staggered breath. “The
kadi
,” he hissed. He had his forefinger pressed into Yashim’s chest, and his face was tight. “So be it. So be it. Maybe there is no harm done.”

He dropped his hand. “I want to have a report from you. I want to know everything you are doing.”

Yashim bowed, and held it, humbly, listening to Midhat Pasha’s footsteps retreating down the passage. The gate at the end creaked, and he was gone.

Yashim raised his head, and straightened up. He did not move for some time, but gazed at the gate with unseeing eyes.

He found the valide just as the pasha had warned him: spitting with fury, and looking rather well on it. She was angry enough to have got off the divan and to be standing, majestic in spite of the stick, in the middle of the room. Anger, not artifice, had rouged her cheeks, and her eyes flashed.

“You, Yashim! Have you come to teach me diplomacy, too? No—don’t speak. If another man dares to lecture me…! That old fright! That
snake
!”

Yashim folded his hands, saying nothing.

“He advises, does he! Our better interests—tchah! Meddling old fool. What are those interests? The
better
ones?
La!
Midhat, whose only interest has been to escape the curse of his birth in some provincial dung heap, decides them now, does he?” She banged her stick on the floor. “
Sacre bleu!
The valide writes letters at the dictate of every horse-tailed pen pusher! And you, Yashim. Stop simpering and fetch me some coffee!”

Outside, Yashim found two of the valide’s handmaidens huddled together on a bench. He asked for coffee.

“You will take it to her, efendi?”

While Yashim was gone, the valide resumed her seat on the divan.

“Take this!” She thrust her writing box into Yashim’s hands. “The valide will not be needing it again.”

She put her nose in the air, but then she fiddled with her spectacles and Yashim saw that she had tears in her eyes.

“Tiens.”
She squeezed the bridge of her nose. “I sit here, Yashim, and think that I have Europe at my feet. The tsar. The emperor.”

She lowered her hand and gave Yashim a sad smile.

“I think of all the people I have corresponded with. All the great rulers. And you know who will remember me best, when I am gone? The children of La Bouboulina. You seem astonished.”

“Well, La Bouboulina was no friend of the Porte, hanum.”

It was an understatement. La Bouboulina was a wealthy Greek widow who had fitted out—and almost single-handedly managed—a Greek fighting fleet in the war of Greek independence, twenty years before. The Ottomans called her La Capitanessa, the lady captain: and feared her.

“Pouf! That was politics, Yashim. La Bouboulina was a woman of my own sort. She was a friend.”

“A friend? I had no idea.”

“No, because I never told you. You know she was born here, in Istanbul? In prison, as it happens. Her family were great revolutionaries, Yashim, seamen. They were always fighting. The father had colluded with the Russians so we put him in prison, where he died. A ridiculous waste.

“She was raised on Spetses, in the Aegean, and before she was twenty-five she had been widowed twice. Her second husband also fought us when the Russians came, and he was killed fighting Algerian pirates. If more men had shown his courage, I might not be here,” she added, thinking of her own capture by pirates many years before. “La Bouboulina showed courage equal to if not greater than his. She took over the business, and had new ships built—including a warship. Imagine!

“To punish her dead husband, the Porte decided to confiscate all La Bouboulina’s property. Some type of Midhat Pasha of the day, no doubt, intended to seize her ships, her goods, her house—everything. So there she was, a widow with many children, facing ruin. But La Bouboulina did not give up—you know what she did?

“She came to see me. She sailed one of her ships to Istanbul, and came to visit me, to beg me to help her. Oh, she was
charmante
—and funny! She had so many children, and so many ships, and she told me it was only the children who gave her any trouble. She could have been a queen—we understood each other very well. As valide, I told her not to be naughty anymore, but as a woman I understood her. And I told my son, the sultan, that he should not let one piece of her property be taken from her. And it was not.”

Yashim smiled. “I can believe that.”

“Later she was naughty. Of course. She did what she liked, and she became a great rebel. She raised a navy with her own money, and sailed about in her warship, and made a lot of trouble for the Ottomans. But she did not forget what I had done for her. When her fleet took Tripoli, and the Greeks wanted to take revenge on the garrison, there were some women of our household there, and she stepped in to rescue them. She looked after them with proper decorum and sent them back here, to Istanbul, safely.

“She spent her entire fortune fighting for independence. It ruined her—and do you know? The Greeks put her in prison. They killed her daughter’s husband. She had a son, George, who was very good-looking—I’m sure they all were, as she was—and he eloped with a beautiful girl from another big family on Spetses.” The valide frowned, and waggled her fingers. “
La famille Koutsis, c’est ça.
When the girl’s family came to complain, La Bouboulina faced them from the balcony of her house—and some coward shot her, out of the dark. Seventeen years ago. I still think about her.
Elle était très méchante
—naughty, very—but she had a big heart.”